THE SUMTER ITEM N.G. Osteen 1843-1936 The Watchman and Southron
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2016 H.G. Osteen 1870-1955 Founder, The Item
H.D. Osteen 1904-1987 The Item
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Margaret W. Osteen 1908-1996 The Item Hubert D. Osteen Jr. Chairman & Editor-in-Chief Graham Osteen Co-President Kyle Osteen Co-President Jack Osteen Editor and Publisher Larry Miller CEO Rick Carpenter Managing Editor
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COMMENTARY
Our brave new feminists ‘Buy me stuff !’ they cry.
I
f you were an inquisitive space alien who decided to drift down to visit America in 2016 — as a tour guide, I probably wouldn’t recommend this year in particular, as people are kind of crabby, and good-natured hijinks are at a general low, but that’s another story — you could be forgiven for thinking that women simply can’t do a thing for themselves. You could be forgiven, that Heather is, if your Wilhelm only human contacts were today’s leading “feminists.” Take Tuesday’s news regarding the nomination of Tom Price, a pro-life congressman from Georgia, as the incoming Trump administration’s secretary of health and human services. To hear feminists tell it, if Price gets confirmed, we lady folk might as well call it a day, don sackcloth and ashes, and wail while we wait for the fearsome and inevitable arrival of the tsunami of patriarchal oppression. “Trump Health Czar Tom Price is a Nightmare for Women,” declared Erin Gloria Ryan on Tuesday in the Daily Beast. “Price helming HHS is a nightmare scenario for advocates of reproductive choice,” she continued, “and a dream for those with a nostalgia for the time before Roe v. Wade, if not Griswold v. Connecticut.” Yikes. This Price guy sounds pretty retrograde! Did he announce an improbable plan to singlehandedly overturn Roe v. Wade, thereby banning abortion, even though he’s not on the Supreme Court? Has he unleashed a scheme to outlaw contraceptives, even though Griswold already declared that unconstitutional? Has he proposed a forced nationwide return to modest poodle skirts and drive-ins and people who exclaim things like “Gee, Linda, I sure don’t trust the punch at this sock hop!” in a completely un-ironic fashion? Well, no. Get ready, America, and prepare to be shocked: Tom Price doesn’t think you should be forced to pay for everyone else’s abortion and contraceptives. Price, as McClatchy news service reported on Wednesday, “would be able to repeal one of President Barack Obama’s most controversial initiatives: free birth control for women under the Affordable Care Act.” Because of this — and likely because her organization received a whopping $500 million in tax dollars last year, which would be a real bummer to lose — Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards served as one of the first to sound an alarm at the news. “Tom Price poses a grave threat to women’s health in this country,” she announced. “Price would take women back decades.” Actually, Price would likely take women back seven years, to the notorious hell-scape of 2009, when people actually had to shell out around $10 a month for birth control. Also, in 2009 — gird your loins, for
this way horror lurks — you couldn’t just waltz into your doctor’s office and demand a $500 IUD for “free.” (The IUD is never “free,” of course. Other people pay for it, or you pay for it in quieter, more indirect ways. Amazingly, for much of the political Left, this lesson never seems to sink in.) Let’s set aside, at least for now, the Left’s many fears about the socially moderate Trump’s supposedly incoming reign of hardcore social-conservative terror. Let’s look at the real subtext beneath the panic. It’s the sad truth that feminism, once a plucky movement with worthy elements dedicated to fighting structural inequities faced by women, has collapsed into an often-sulky shambles with one overarching, consistent demand: “I’m helpless! Pay for my stuff !” “Every little girl dreams of one day growing up and falling in love,” writes Ryan in the Daily Beast, “and one day, when a squeamish insurance executive decides it’s time to stop paying for healthcare that enables women to have non-procreative sex, getting accidentally pregnant.” Ryan’s being sarcastic, of course, but she reveals much more than intended. It’s strange: Her imaginary “little girl,” all grown up, seems to have no individual agency. Things — like, say, getting “accidentally pregnant” — just happen to her! How could she possibly have prevented this unfortunate, mysterious development without the money and approval of a squeamish insurance executive? If you read many such panicked feminist think pieces, in fact, it would seem fair to assume that women are essentially wandering, slightly confused uteruses with zero personal control. Doesn’t seem feminist or empowered at all, does it? Is there a chance that Planned Parenthood, that holy of holies for movement feminists, could lose federal funding under a President Trump? Perhaps. Personally, I’ll believe it when I see it. Here’s the real question: If Planned Parenthood did lose funding, and the nation disintegrated into a nightmarish dystopia straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale — this second part wouldn’t happen, of course, but let’s entertain the fantasy for now — what would feminists do? They’d impress me, for one, if they rolled up their sleeves, got to work, and raised the money themselves. If Planned Parenthood is the marvelous and necessary charitable organization they say it is, this shouldn’t be a problem, right? Last time I checked, alas, feminists weren’t making these plans. In outlets ranging from Time to the Daily Beast to New York magazine to Vogue, they were urging their sisters as a tip-top priority — wait for it, for I’m not making this up — to rush out and get a “free,” government-funded IUD while they still could. Apparently, that’s what modern empowerment is all about. Heather Wilhelm is a National Review columnist and a senior contributor to the Federalist.
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After a mere 25 years, the triumph of the West is over
W
ASHINGTON — Twenty-five years ago — December 1991 — communism died, the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union disappeared. It was the largest breakup of an empire in modern history and not a shot was fired. It was an event of biblical proportions that my generation thought it would never live to see. As Wordsworth famously rhapsodized (about the French Revolution), “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/ But to be young was very heaven!” That dawn marked the ultimate triumph of the liberal democratic idea. It promised an era of Western dominance led by a pre-eminent America, the world’s last remaining superpower. And so it was for a decade as the community of democracies expanded, first into Eastern Europe and former Soviet colonies. The U.S. was so dominant that when, on Dec. 31, 1999, it gave up one of the most prized geostrategic assets on the globe — the Panama Canal — no one even noticed. That era is over. The autocracies are back and rising; democracy is on the defensive; the U.S. is in retreat. Look no further than Aleppo. A Western-backed resistance to a local tyrant — he backed by a resurgent Russia, an expanding Iran and an array of proxy Shiite militias — is on the brink of annihilation. Russia drops bombs; America issues statements. What better symbol for the end of that heady liberal-democratic historical moment. The West is turning inward and going home, leaving the field to the rising authoritarians — Russia, China and Iran. In France, the conservative party’s newly nominated presidential contender is fashionably conservative and populist and soft on Vladimir Putin. As are several of the newer
COMMENTARY Eastern Europe democracies — Hungary, Bulgaria, even Poland — themselves showing Charles Krauthammer authoritarian tendencies. And even as Europe tires of the sanctions imposed on Russia for its rape of Ukraine, President Obama’s much touted “isolation” of Russia has ignominiously dissolved, as our secretary of state repeatedly goes cap in hand to Russia to beg for mercy in Syria. The European Union, the largest democratic club on earth, could itself soon break up as Brexit-like movements spread through the continent. At the same time, its members dash with unseemly haste to reopen economic ties with a tyrannical and aggressive Iran. As for China, the other great challenger to the postCold War order, the administration’s “pivot” has turned into an abject failure. The Philippines has openly defected to the Chinese side. Malaysia then followed. And the rest of our Asian allies are beginning to hedge their bets. When the president of China addressed the Pacific Rim countries in Peru last month, he suggested that China was prepared to pick up the pieces of the TransPacific Partnership, now abandoned by both political parties in the United States. The West’s retreat began with Obama, who reacted to (perceived) post-9/11 overreach by abandoning Iraq, offering appeasement (“reset”) to Russia and accommodating Iran. In 2009, he refused even rhetorical support to the popular revolt against the rule of the ayatollahs.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR PTSD NOT MAJOR FACTOR IN SHOOTINGS According to a recent letter to the editor, “PTSD may play role in some police shootings.” So might criminal behavior of the suspect. According to the FBI Uniform Crime Report in 2015 (the latest complete figures) police arrested 10.5 million people, that number does not include those who were issued traffic tickets or with whom police had contact but no arrests were made. That same year there were 1210 people killed by police either directly or accidentally. Considering the number of violent offenders and the variety of crimes they commit each year I find the number of deaths
Donald Trump wants to continue the pull back, though for entirely different reasons. Obama ordered retreat because he’s always felt the U.S. was not good enough for the world, too flawed to have earned the moral right to be the world hegemon. Trump would follow suit, disdaining allies and avoiding conflict, because the world is not good enough for us — undeserving, ungrateful, parasitic foreigners living safely under our protection and off our sacrifices. Time to look after our own American interests. Trump’s is not a new argument. As the Cold War was ending in 1990, Jeane Kirkpatrick, the quintessential neoconservative, argued that we should now become “a normal country in a normal time.” It was time to give up the 20th-century burden of maintaining world order and of making superhuman exertions on behalf of universal values. Two generations of fighting fascism and communism were quite enough. Had we not earned a restful retirement? At the time, I argued that we had earned it indeed, but a cruel history would not allow us to enjoy it. Repose presupposes a fantasy world in which stability is self-sustaining without the United States. It is not. We would incur not respite but chaos. A quarter-century later, we face the same temptation, but this time under more challenging circumstances. Worldwide jihadism has been added to the fight, and we enjoy nothing like the dominance we exercised over conventional adversaries during our 1990s holiday from history. We may choose repose, but we won’t get it. Charles Krauthammer’s email address is letters@ charleskrauthammer.com. © 2016, The Washington Post Writers Group
of suspects to be astonishingly low. I think it shows how often the police are willing to put their life on the line to protect the public and take in violent offenders alive. While PTSD is a very real condition and might be a factor in a few cases per year I do not think it plays a major role. Police officers already must undergo psychiatric evaluation when hired and after violent incidents where they are forced to use their service weapon in the line of duty. I think the real question is what drives people to think they have a right to attack a police officer and force them to use deadly force to defend themselves? Put blame where it belongs, with the person who broke the law to start with. JOHN GAYDOS Wedgefield