Townhall Review | Commentaries

Flash back a few decades and divorce was a big deal … a very big deal. Pass through the next few decades and society renegotiated divorce and made it a matter of routine. But conservatives must see this for what it is … a subversion of society itself. No civilization can survive the breakdown of its most basic unit, which is marriage as the lifelong union of a man and a woman.
 
Even with divorce now seen as routine, a marital breakdown can still make news. Just days ago, Canadians were jolted by the news that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his wife Sophie are separating. Mrs. Trudeau has moved out of the official residence, and the couple’s three children will spend most of the time with their father. 
 
Trudeau’s father was also Prime Minister. He was similarly liberal and also divorced. Trudeau has written of his own pain in the divorce of his parents. This is a tragedy for all, and especially for their children. Civilization itself is a casualty. 

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This is Carol Platt Liebau for Townhall.com.

Donald Trump has been indicted for the third time, for what he said and did between the 2020 election and January 6th.

There’s plenty about Trump’s conduct to criticize. But for people who claim to care so deeply about our democracy, the Biden administration, the special prosecutor and the New York DA are inflicting serious damage on it.

For any country’s justice system to survive, people must believe in its fairness. The Trump prosecutions are destroying that. The New York and January 6 cases depend on legally shaky, novel applications of the law. In the documents case, only Trump is being prosecuted for activity that other officials allegedly engaged in without penalty.

A special counsel was named only after Trump announced his presidential run. Indictments came in only after he took a commanding lead in the primary.

This has the look of banana republic stuff, and it’s heartbreaking for America.
 

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Last week, a joint Russian-Chinese naval force approached the Alaskan coast in what can only be seen as a highly provocative taunt and test of US sovereignty and resolve.  It must be seen also as intimidation.  Why wouldn’t they? There may have never been a time of a greater absence of leadership and strength of America than just now, under the Biden administration.  

We have let China push us around and surveil us over our own territory, as we ignore their buildup of a base in our hemisphere, ninety miles off the coast of Florida.

During the Cold War, we worked with China to check the Soviet Union.  And we did it with strong leadership here.  Then, it was two against one on our side.  Today, with the Sino-Russian alliance, it’s a clear two against one, but now against us, and with a deep vacuum of American leadership.  We don’t often make national security a priority in our presidential elections.  We absolutely must do so in 2024.

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What in the world is going on in Israel? Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest serving leader, led the nation’s parliament, the Knesset, to pass a law instructing Israel’s Supreme Court to stop ruling on policies and appointments based upon whether the court sees them as “reasonable.”
 
There’s a long story here, and one big point is the fact that Israel does not have, and has never had, a written constitution. And that’s a big problem. The other big point is that liberal forces in Israel, opposed to Netanyahu and his conservative governing coalition, have looked to the more liberal court to limit what the government can do. The high court had declared itself the power to decide if government policies and even appointments by the prime minister are “reasonable.” 
 
Reasonable? Reasonable according to whom or to what? The Israeli court has turned itself into the great liberal dream, in which an elite decides what is “reasonable” for the entire nation. What’s happening in Israel is important, and not just for Israel. 

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Robert Bowers, the murderous mass shooter who carried out the most- deadly antisemitic attack in American history, was formally sentenced to death by a federal judge in Pittsburgh last Thursday. This came just a day after the jury unanimously recommended that Bowers, who methodically planned and murderously carried out his attack on Jewish worshippers, should die for his crimes. 
 
The death penalty is an issue of deepest moral gravity. If even one of the jurors had decided that even one of the 115 “mitigating factors” on even one of the eleven murders applied, Bowers would have been sentenced to eleven consecutive terms of life in prison without parole. But the jury was presented with solid evidence, and Bowers has never shown the slightest remorse or regret for the mass murder he committed. 
 
Premeditated murder demands the gravest of all punishments. The judge and the jury were right. The penalty is just. This kind of horrible crime is an attack upon the very idea of civilization. 

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August 1, 2023 will long be remembered as a dark day for America. 

That’s when Special Counsel Jack Smith unsealed his latest indictment against former President Trump. It’s a miscarriage of justice—again.

The wind has been unleashed and a whirlwind will be reaped. 

The former president is essentially being indicted for free speech. He’s being indicted for objecting to the way that the 2020 election was carried out—for maneuvering to keep a job that he believed was his.  

It really shouldn’t matter if you love Trump, or if you hate Trump—or if you land anywhere in between.  

I've always disagreed with the former president on this—and I’ve said as much, including to Trump himself. But that is not what the indictment is about.

You’re allowed to throw Hail Marys in American politics. And Trump’s ask of Vice President Pence to put aside the ballots, was such a Hail Mary. I’m glad it was incomplete, because it wasn’t constitutional. Remember: Al Gore in 2000 and the rhetoric from numerous members of Congress in the wake of 2016 supporting Hillary, and they did the same thing in 2004 about Al Gore. 

This is simply an attempt to criminalize American politics—and it’s a precedent that we cannot un-set.

It was a very sad day for America. 

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Most media bias is in what is not reported.  This is why it is so difficult to have conversations about basic facts and events—Americans who receive their news from our elite media outlets are simply ill-informed.

The New York Times’ motto is “All the News that’s Fit to Print.” The Washington Post’s: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”  When a close business associate of Hunter Biden’s testified to Congress this week, revealing a passel of lies Joe Biden has been maintaining about his son’s business and its connections to him, the Washington Post published nothing on it.  The New York Times had nothing on its website, but a brief story on page 15.

The Journalists’ Creed, posted at the National Press Club, states: “Suppressions of the news, for any consideration other than the welfare of society, is indefensible.” 
 
Journalists from our elite outlets clearly don’t believe it anymore.

Democracy does, indeed, die in darkness.

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U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika was right to blow the whistle on this cushy plea deal proposed for Hunter Biden by U.S. attorney David Weiss.

On rare occasions, the federal judge charged with reviewing a plea agreement will reject the terms of the agreement. In a number of such cases, the disparity between the guidelines for sentencing and the agreed punishment is so great that it catalyzes the judges review. The terms must pass this judicial sniff test.

Hunter Biden’s doozy of a plea deal over tax and gun charges was ripe for rejection.

Simply put: That deal stunk. And the judge said, “Huh, I don’t know about this.”

What we’ve learned from the hearing raises a host of additional questions.

Bargaining away even token jail time on the tax charges goes beyond lenience into outright unfairness, as does putting the gun charge out of the judge’s review if she accepts the proposal. Signing off on this odoriferous deal would have undercut the very promise of equal justice that sentencing guidelines were created to safeguard.

I’m hoping Judge Noreika presses back hard as the hearing continues. 

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We hear a lot about the science deniers today….
 
But: Who are the real science deniers?
 
Well, unfortunately, in 21st-century post-Roe America, there are people who deny the basic scientific reality that the entity in the womb is an unborn human being.
 
But the message from science is clear and unequivocal:
 
The fetus in the womb is a human baby. 
 
And philosophically, morally, that human being should be treated equal because that unborn human being is our equal.
 
It seems obvious, yet abortion advocates contort logic and their own conscience to deny the evidence.
 
It’s not an overreach of government to protect the natural right to life of every human being, born and unborn.
 
The science tells us this. Our own minds and hearts tell us this.
 
To believe otherwise is to deny science and our own humanity.

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The CEO of the business media company, Fortune, just said it's time for businesses to stop talking about ESG—environmental, social and governance—i.e. politicized investment. 

No, he didn’t say companies should stop doing it, only that they should stop calling it that. 

But why? 

If you meet someone and find out that every decade or so he has changed his name, you might want to know why. Politicized capital keeps changing its name: socially responsible investment (SRI), corporate social responsibility (CSR) and most recently, ESG. Ideas which bear good fruit, don't have to keep shedding their skin and changing their names. 

By whatever name, the imposition of political positions on companies using other people’s money is a bad idea. There’s an old adage that by the time a company is on the front page of Fortune, it’s time to sell the stock. 

Well, Fortune has been front-paging ESG quite a lot in the past year, once again signaling it’s time to drop a bad idea. 

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