Time for the GOP Women
By Kathleen Parker
As the Republican Party continues its pilgrimage through the desert, its leaders may be missing the oasis for the vale of tears.
The answer to the party's woes isn't a revamped Web site (GOP.com) offering -- wowser! -- really cool social networking platforms.
The answer won't be found in the sudden realization that 83 percent of young people 18 to 24 have an online profile -- or other late-breaking revelations that merely reinforce the perception of the GOP as woefully behind the curve.
The answer is . . . drum roll, please . . . women.
If the GOP is really serious about expanding the party, it's time for the men to hush and let the pros take over. As the saying goes: If you need something done, hire a busy woman. Or, as the White House Project puts it: "Add women, change everything."
In the past few months, several conservative women have emerged as candidates and critics to challenge the notion that the GOP is the party of men. They're also putting to rest any thought that Sarah Palin is the female face of the party.
The McCain campaign had the right idea; it just picked the wrong woman. Among the newer comers are two mega-businesswomen and two famous daughters, representing younger generations with divergent ideas. Although these aren't the only Republican women rising, they offer a glimpse at what could become a surge of hormonal correction on the conservative side.
First up in this new league of their own are two celebrity entrepreneurs. Meg Whitman, former chief executive of eBay, is running for governor of California. And Carly Fiorina, former Hewlett-Packard chief executive, plans to challenge California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer. Neither woman has any political experience beyond advising and stumping for Sen. John McCain during his last presidential run, but that would seem a bonus to an incumbent-weary nation.
Fiorina, the first woman to run a Fortune 20 company, has lost some of her early luster with Republican voters, according to a recent Field Poll. And Democrats have criticized her as "one of the 20 worst CEOs in the country," a bold charge from the party that propelled a community organizer with zero executive experience to the White House.
Fiorina's lower numbers are probably a reflection of her reduced visibility recently while undergoing breast cancer treatment. By contrast, her Republican opponent has been stumping to the tune of more than 160 political events since last November. A close adviser says Fiorina, who is "definitely running," is on the mend and expects to be locked and loaded in a couple of weeks.
Billionaire Whitman is running a tight race against two opponents for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, spending much of her own money along the way. If she wins -- and then defeats Democrat Jerry Brown (big ifs) -- she would become one of only four female Republican governors.
This deficit in high office is both a taint on the GOP and a reflection of the broader assumption that Republicans are monolithically against women's rights. Specifically, the party's pro-life platform alienates pro-choice women, as well as moderates, who otherwise might find common cause with conservative principles.
Women such as pro-choice Whitman and "personally" pro-life Fiorina could help change that impression, while also raising other issues women care about. Fiorina caused a slight ripple in the Republican zeitgeist during McCain's campaign when she criticized insurance companies for covering Viagra and not birth control.
Meanwhile, another Meg (McCain) and Liz Cheney, daughter of the former vice president, have emerged as strong voices in a party with too few sopranos.
It isn't quite fair to group McCain with Cheney, given their respective one a 24-year-old celebrity blogger whose fame is (thus far) inherited and the other, Cheney, 43, a former deputy assistant secretary of state. But both are relatively fresh voices with instant name recognition. And each appeals to a different, perhaps untapped, demographic.
Cheney, recently dubbed a "red-state rock star," just launched a new Web site,  http://KeepAmericaSafe.com, where she and others plan to critique foreign policy issues. And the socially liberal McCain, though she may not please the party elders, appeals to younger voters who otherwise wouldn't consider lifting the flap on the old man's tent. Four women: a pro-life hawk; a pro-choice, pro-gay rights libertarian; two entrepreneurs, one pro-choice and one pro-life. This doesn't sound like your daddy's Republican Party, but it could be your daughter's -- if the men wise up.
Bowing to "World Opinion"
Thomas Sowell
In the string of amazing decisions made during the first year of the Obama administration, nothing seems more like sheer insanity than the decision to try foreign terrorists, who have committed acts of war against the United States, in federal court, as if they were American citizens accused of crimes.
Terrorists are not even entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention, much less the Constitution of the United States. Terrorists have never observed, nor even claimed to have observed, the Geneva Convention, nor are they among those covered by it.
But over and above the utter inconsistency of what is being done is the utter recklessness it represents. The last time an attack on the World Trade Center was treated as a matter of domestic criminal justice was after a bomb was exploded there in 1993. Under the rules of American criminal law, the prosecution had to turn over all sorts of information to the defense-- information that told the Al Qaeda international terrorist network what we knew about them and how we knew it.
This was nothing more and nothing less than giving away military secrets to an enemy in wartime-- something for which people have been executed, as they should have been. Secrecy in warfare is a matter of life and death. Lives were risked and lost during World War II to prevent Nazi Germany from discovering that Britain had broken its supposedly unbreakable Enigma code and could read their military plans that were being radioed in that code.
"Loose lips sink ships" was the World War II motto in the United States. But loose lips are mandated under the rules of criminal prosecutions.
Tragically, this administration seems hell-bent to avoid seeing acts of terrorism against the United States as acts of war. The very phrase "war on terrorism" is avoided, as if that will stop the terrorists' war on us.
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The mindset of the left behind such thinking was spelled out in an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle, which said that "Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the professed mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, will be tried the right way-- the American way, in a federal courtroom where the world will see both his guilt and the nation's adherence to the rule of law."
This is not the rule of law but the application of laws to situations for which they were not designed.
How many Americans may pay with their lives for the intelligence secrets and methods that can forced to be disclosed to Al Qaeda was not mentioned. Nor was there mention of how many foreign nations and individuals whose cooperation with us in the war on terror have been involved in countering Al Qaeda-- nor how many foreign nations and individuals will have to think twice now, before cooperating with us again, when their role can be revealed in court to our enemies, who can exact revenge on them.
Behind this decision and others is the notion that we have to demonstrate our good faith to other nations, sometimes called "world opinion." Just who are these saintly nations whose favor we must curry, at the risk of American lives and the national security of the United States?
Internationally, the law of the jungle ultimately prevails, despite pious talk about "the international community" and "world opinion," or the pompous and corrupt farce of the United Nations. Yet this is the gallery to which Barack Obama has been playing, both before and after becoming President of the United States.
In the wake of the obscenity of a trial of terrorists in federal court for an act of war-- and the worldwide propaganda platform it will give them-- it may seem to be a small thing that President Obama has been photographed yet again bowing deeply to a foreign ruler. But how large or small an act is depends on its actual consequences, not on whether the politically correct intelligentsia think it is no big deal.
As a private citizen, Barack Obama has a right to make as big a jackass of himself as he wants to. But, as President of the United States, his actions not only denigrate a nation that other nations rely on for survival, but raise questions about how reliable our judgment and resolve are-- which in turn raises questions about whether those nations will consider themselves better off to make the best deal they can with our enemies.
Who Are You Calling "Extremist"?
Michelle Malkin
Here is one of the loudest messages of the 2009 off-off-year elections: Conservatives in America will no longer let their opponents define them as outside of the mainstream. They will not submit to Democrats. Or to the media. Or to Beltway Republican capitulationists. They will not "rebrand." They will not sit down. They will not shut up.
Just this past weekend, Democratic Rep. Jim Moran attacked the Republican candidates for governor and attorney general in his state of Virginia as the "Taliban ticket."
New York Times columnist Frank Rich decried the right's "Jacobins" and "Stalinists" who he said joined a "putsch" by supporting Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman instead of ACORN-embracing, Big Labor-promoting, pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, tax-and-spend Republican Dede Scozzafava in New York's 23rd congressional special election.
And senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett told ABC's "This Week" that the grassroots conservative-vs.-GOP leadership battle over NY-23 showed that the Republican Party leadership was "becoming more and more extreme, and more and more marginalized."
Let's talk "extreme."
Jarrett is the White House official who bragged openly about recruiting disgraced Marxist rabble-rouser Van Jones for the green jobs czar post. She lavished praise on his public career and said she had followed him "for as long as he's been active out in Oakland." In Oakland, Jones was working to dismantle California's juvenile justice system, pitting minorities against police officers and crusading to free death row cop-killer Mumia abu Jamal.
Who are you calling "extreme"?
Jarrett's White House colleague Patrick Gaspard, Obama's political director who intervened in the race to convince Scozzafava to endorse the Democratic candidate Bill Owens after she dropped out, was a top organizer at the militant Local 1199 chapter of the Service Employees International Union and an activist/organizer for the New Party and the Working Families Party -- both ACORN/Democratic Socialists of America front groups.
Who are you calling "extreme"?
"It's rather telling," Jarrett sniffed, "when the Republican Party forces out a moderate Republican, and it says, I think, a great deal about where the Republican Party leadership is right now." It's rather telling that the White House persists with this pointless marginalization strategy as Gallup polls show conservatives continuing to outnumber moderates and liberals across America.
As I pointed out in my Oct. 16 column, there was never anything moderate about Scozzafava. There was no fiscal conservatism to balance her social radicalism. It wasn't merely that she was "pro-choice." She was also a proud recipient of a pro-abortion award named after eugenicist Margaret Sanger.
It wasn't merely that she favored higher government spending. It was also that she supported the stimulus, which every single House Republican in office opposed, on top of her support for the union-expanding card-check bill, on top of her ambiguous statements on the energy tax-imposing cap-and-trade bill.
Newt Gingrich, who foolishly stood with Scozzafava until she threw herself under the bus over the weekend, piously invoked Reagan and condemned the extreme "purism" of unruly conservatives who wouldn't keep quiet about Scozzafava's radical-left agenda.
But conservatives are not demanding "purity." They are simply abiding by Reagan's own wise counsel in 1975: "A political party cannot be all things to all people. It must represent certain fundamental beliefs which must not be compromised to political expediency, or simply to swell its numbers."
The Republican National Committee and National Republican Congressional Committee threw upward of $900,000 down the toilet for a candidate whose core views and political alliances undermined conservatism's fundamental beliefs in limited government from Day One. It was a reckless expenditure of the GOP base's hard-earned money and a bitter tuition bill for a teachable moment on the perils of political expediency.
The days when immoderate political operatives and feckless Beltway opportunists could define "moderation" by their own warped yardsticks without pushback are over.
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