‘Deathtrap': Suicidal refuge for the GOP

Later this week, "Deathtrap" opens at the Flat Rock Playhouse, the State Theatre of North Carolina. The Shadow and I will be there, and so should all Republicans.

Written by Ira Levin, "Deathtrap" opened at the Music Box Theatre on Broadway in 1978. It still holds the record for the longest running comedy-thriller on Broadway and was nominated for a Tony Award for best play. The preface to the script describes "Deathtrap" as "something so evil that it infects all who touch it."

Thus, it contains a lesson that the GOP needs desperately to learn. Whether it can learn that lesson is as unclear as the twisting and tantalizing plot of "Deathtrap."

The fundamental question is whether the GOP can avert suicide. Astonishingly, the answer appears to be no, and the Grand Old Party is rapidly running out of time and maneuvering room. Just a month or so ago, Bob Dole said the GOP ought to hang a "Closed For Repairs" sign on the party's headquarters. Dole spoke the truth. Let's take a look.

In the 1940s and '50s, as America's "Arsenal of Democracy" flexed its industrial might, blacks streamed out of the states of the Old Confederacy to find jobs in the cities of the North and East. The Democrats welcomed them, while the Republicans ignored them. The result was inevitable. The descendants of slaves, freed by the nation's first Republican president, became a monolithic voting bloc for the Democratic Party. Now that voting behavior is in their DNA.

It comes at a terribly high price for the GOP. In the 2012 presidential election, the GOP lost the crucial battleground state of Ohio because of massive African-American turnout in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), something the Republicans never saw coming. No Republican has ever won the White House without carrying Ohio, and 2012 was no exception.

But the African-American vote pales in significance contrasted to what's at play now — the Hispanic vote. Can the GOP double down in self-destructive stupidity? Sure looks like it!

Let's start with the big picture. In the 1980 presidential election, whites made up 88 percent of those who voted. That percentage has been dropping steadily ever since. In 2012, it was down to 72 percent, and in 2016 it's projected to be 70 percent. The face of America is changing, literally and rapidly.

Hispanics accounted for more than half (56 percent) of the nation's growth in the past decade. In fact, racial and ethnic minorities accounted for 92 percent of all of the nation's population growth in the most recent census. In 2012, for the first time, more whites died than were born. In 2012, the median age for whites was 42. But for African-Americans it was 32, and it was 28 for Hispanics.

In 1900, the nation's population was 80 million. Today it's approaching 320 million. Do you know how much of that 240 million person growth was the result of immigration? The answer is fully half — 120 million. We are and will remain a nation of immigrants. Attempting to deny the relevance and political power of those forces takes stupidity, ignorance and racial prejudice to suicidal proportions.

In 2012, President Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney among Hispanics by a margin of 71 percent to 27 percent. Given the explosive growth of the Hispanic population, margins like that foretell the death of the Republican Party.

Steve Schmidt, John McCain's capable campaign manager in 2008, recently told The New York Times concerning the battle in Congress over immigration reform, "(House Republicans) are totally insulated from public opinion on this because of redistricting." The respected Cook Political Report currently rates only nine of the House's 435 districts as pure tossups. Only 40 of the House's 232 Republicans represent districts that are more than 20 percent Hispanic.

Thus the reality is that the vast majority of House Republicans have no vested interest in reaching out to Hispanic voters. That's a message not lost on Hispanics, and it's a message the Democrats and their allies in the media exploit every day.

To make matters worse, a recent Pew Research poll shows that by a 54 percent to 40 percent margin, Republicans want their party leaders to be more conservative. At the same time, another Pew poll shows a majority of Americans think the GOP is too extreme. And a third such poll of Republicans showed that their first-place vote for leader of the Republican Party was "nobody."

A chilling example of how the GOP is consuming itself can be found right here in North Carolina. Freshman House Republican Robert Pittenger, an evangelical conservative who has repeatedly denounced Obamacare, is under assault from tea party constituents in his Charlotte suburban district. Why? Because he won't agree to shut down the government over the futile effort to repeal Obamacare.

Doctrinal zealotry like this can be summed up in a single word — madness.

Over in the Senate, the newest darling of the tea party, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has called his more moderate GOP critics the "surrender caucus." In another generation Ted Cruz will be gone. Texas will be blue. Try amassing a majority of presidential electoral votes for a Republican without Texas! You can't.

When a political party willingly thrusts its head into an orifice devoid of oxygen and light, coherent thought ceases and vision fades to black. Think of it as a self-inflicted deathtrap, one the GOP will have marched into the old-fashioned way — by earning it.

The Shadow's back stage at the Flat Rock Playhouse, but Goldman can be reached at:  EmailMe

Barack Obama: Whiner in chief

One of my best teachers in eighth and ninth grades was Walter A. Hoskins, who taught social studies. During the spring of 1951, we spent considerable time discussing President Harry Truman's firing of Gen. Douglas MacArthur as the commander of United Nations forces in the Korean War. MacArthur rejected civilian control of the armed forces.

The political price Truman paid was immense. By the summer of 1951, Truman's popularity had plummeted to 23 percent, a record that still stands. He did not seek re-election in 1952. But history has shown that he was one of the nation's best presidents.

Truman did the right thing regardless of the political consequences. That's a quality in short supply in the White House today. Let's take a look.

Within months of being elected to the U.S. Senate from Illinois in November 2004, Barack Obama delivered the commencement address at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. Galesburg, some 200 miles west of Chicago and the birthplace of Carl Sandburg, was an important stop on the Underground Railroad in the mid-19th century, and it was the site of the fifth Lincoln-Douglas debate in 1858.

Those who heard Obama's speech did not have any reason to think that only a year and a half later he would deliver a speech in Springfield, Ill., announcing his candidacy for president of the United States. And even fewer would have believed that in 2009 Obama would take the oath of office as the nation's 44th president.

Sen. Obama told the graduating seniors at Knox College that day, "The true test of the American ideal is whether ... we allow ourselves to be shaped by events and history, or whether we act to shape them." He told them they would face new challenges by saying, "You see it when you drive by the old Maytag plant around lunchtime and no one walks out anymore."

He asked those in the audience to dream, to imagine what could be done to give every American a fighting chance in the 21st century. He held out the promise of affordable college education for everyone who wanted to go. He promised new jobs based upon job retraining and lifelong education. He promised a pension that stayed with you always. And he said, "Ten or twenty years down the road, that old Maytag plant could reopen it doors as an ethanol refinery ... ."

A couple of weeks ago, just over eight years after delivering that commencement address, President Obama returned to Knox College to speak again. He began his speech with a reference to the Maytag plant that had relocated to Mexico. He announced that America was poised to reverse the forces that had so long battered the middle class. But then he said we're not there yet.

Referring back to his 2005 speech, he condemned a "winner-take-all economy" where a few do better while most languish. And then he said, "Unfortunately, over the past couple of years, in particular ... Washington has made things worse." Over the past six months, he said gridlock had gotten worse in Washington, something he did not think was possible.

Putting a point on it, he stated that "with this endless parade of distractions and political posturing and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball." And he concluded by saying the only thing he cared about "is how to use every minute of the remaining 1,276 days of my term to make this country work for working Americans again."

As my wife's grandmother would have said, "Lord-a-mercy." Obama lashes out at Washington's failure, apparently believing we don't know that he is Washington. More than that, this is the man who won the White House by promising all of us "change we could believe in."

It takes real chutzpah to stand before the American people and assume we're not smart enough to figure out that he hasn't been able to deliver on his fundamental promises.

The president's speech was divisive, partisan and churlish. It was as political as any speech he gave on the campaign trail last fall. It was laced with class warfare rhetoric, and it absolved him and his administration of any responsibility for the paralysis that has gripped Washington since he took office.

If you read between the lines, it's clear that the whiner in chief knows he's failed. At Bloomberg.com, Megan McArdle reported that "the speech seemed like a confession that the president knows he can't do much. The deep problems afflicting America — social and economic breakdown in inner cities and rural areas; rising economic insecurity; widening gulfs between ideologies, regions and socioeconomic classes — are simply far beyond the president's reach."

Writing in the Telegraph, Nile Gardiner said, "President Obama spoke the language of decline ... . America deserves better than the failed statism that has bankrupted cities like Detroit, and threatens to do the same to the rest of the country."

The brutal truth now on display is that Obama is a failed president. He didn't stop long enough in the Senate in Springfield or on Capitol Hill to acquire the experience necessary to lead a complex and deeply divided government . Some of us knew that in 2007-08. Now it's on display for anyone with a working brain.

Don't let the door hit you on the way out of the White House, Mr. President.

The Shadow and I heard President Truman speak at Memorial Auditorium in Gary, Ind., on Oct. 25, 1948. We can tell you that Barack Obama's no Harry Truman. Goldman can be reached at:  EmailMe

Put the military in the dock with Hasan

On Tuesday, the trial of Army Maj. NidalHasan begins in earnest. Hasan has been charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder in the shooting at the Army's Fort Hood military base near Killeen, Texas, on Nov. 5, 2009.

Early in the afternoon of that day, Hasan allegedly entered Fort Hood's Soldier Readiness Processing Center, where he worked, sat briefly at a table with his head bowed, then stood up and shouted, "Allahuakbar" (God is great), and opened fire. Prosecutors say he was armed with an FN Five-seven pistol, a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Hasan was shot four times and is now a paraplegic.

The Defense Department and federal law enforcement agencies have deemed it to be an act of workplace violence, not an act of terrorism, even though the National Counterterrorism Center immediately labeled it as a terrorist attack.

In November 2011, survivors of the shooting and family members of those who were killed filed suit against the government for negligence in preventing the shootings and in an effort to force the government to classify the shooting as terrorism. Absent such a reclassification, the victims of the attack are not eligible for the Purple Heart.

Hasan is an American citizen and a Muslim whose parents came to America from Palestine. He joined the Army in college and graduated from Virginia Tech University in 1995. In 2003, he received his medical degree from the federal government's Uniformed University of the Health Sciences. He was trained in psychiatry at Walter Reed Army Hospital.

During residency training, he gave a lecture titled, "The Koranic World View as it Relates to Muslims in the United States Military." His lecture was not related to health or medicine, and it was jarring to many who heard it.

Hasan was known to express extremist views, which were brought to the attention of his superiors in the military and to the FBI. His behavior, his views respecting Islamic extremism and his email exchanges with Anwar al-Awlaki, an imam and former senior leader of al-Qaida, were known to officials of the military and the FBI.

Al-Awlaki, an American citizen, was killed Sept. 30, 2011, in Yemen while riding in a vehicle that was struck by Hellfire missiles that had been launched from a Predator drone based out of a secret CIA facility in Saudi Arabia by the Joint Special Operations Command. The strike had been authorized by President Barack Obama.

But instead of being discharged, Hasan was promoted from captain to major in 2009, and in July he was transferred to Fort Hood. Four months later, the massacre occurred.

Hasan is an Islamic extremist who should have been drummed out of the Army. He should not have been promoted, and he should not have been transferred to Fort Hood. Instead, driven by political correctness, the military airmailed Hasan to Fort Hood. Think of it as a cowardly, out-of-sight, out-of-mind move! The military should be charged as an accomplice to murder.

Understanding why and how the military acted as it did is found in the Report of the Senate Homeland Security Committee's investigation into this preventable tragedy. The March 2011 Report, authored by then-Chairman Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and ranking minority member Susan Collins, R-Maine, is titled, "A Ticking Time Bomb — Counterterrorism Lessons from the U.S. Government's Failure to Prevent the Fort Hood Attack."

Here are highlights of the report:

Witnesses reported that Hasan expressed support in open class presentations for the principles of violent Islamic extremism. His officer evaluation reports were uniformly positive and described his exploration of violent Islamic extremism as praiseworthy. The Senate Report concluded that "an individual who embraces violent Islamic extremist ideology clearly is unfit to serve in the U.S. Military."

Hasan reportedly told several of his classmates in residency training that his religion took precedence over the U.S. Constitution that he had sworn to support as a U.S. Military officer.

In summary, he made off-topic presentations on violent Islamic extremism rather than medical subjects; he justified suicide bombings twice in class presentations; he stated that some of the actions of Osama bin Laden were justified; and he stated three times in writing that Muslim-Americans in the military could be prone to fratricide.

But Hasan was never disciplined, never referred to counterintelligence officials and never discharged. The Senate Report states, "One of the officers who report Hasan to superiors opined that Hasan was permitted to remain in service because of political correctness."

That same officer added "that he believed that concern about political discrimination complaints stopped some individuals from challenging Hasan."

The Senate Report also indicates that Hasan received evaluations that flatly misstated his actual performance. They described him as a star officer, recommended him for promotion to major and stated that his "work on violent Islamic extremism would assist U.S. counterterrorism efforts."

In conclusion, the Senate Report states, "The officers who kept Hasan in the military and moved him steadily along knew full well of his problematic behavior. As the officer who assigned Hasan to Fort Hood admitted to an officer at Fort Hood, ‘You're getting our worst.' "

The only way to serve justice in this case is to haul the military into the dock with Hasan and convict all of them of murder.

The Shadow's on his way to the trial, but Goldman can be reached at:  EmailMe

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