God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy Read online

  Drunk driving was probably easiest to change in terms of attitudes because it’s hard to defend the notion of someone getting drunk, driving a vehicle, and killing an innocent person. Too many of us have personally known someone who was killed by a drunk driver, and there’s precious little sympathy for such a reckless and selfish behavior. But the point remains: Law enforcement starting cracking down on this offense not to force a change in cultural norms, but in response to one. In fact, many still think the law needs to catch up to the public’s desire for even stiffer punishment.

  First Lady Michelle Obama launched the “Let’s Move” initiative in 2009 to combat childhood obesity. Granted, some hardened libertarians were highly critical of Mrs. Obama for her efforts, but I frankly appreciated that as a mother and a personal practitioner of good health, she sought to lead a charge against what really is a scourge among the nation’s children. Pretending that childhood obesity is not a major issue is blinding oneself, not only to the obvious health risks but also to the financial repercussions of providing care to a generation of sick, overweight kids.

  These are issues I dealt with firsthand as a governor. Doctors at Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock told me that fifteen years earlier, there was no such thing as type 2 diabetes in preteens. Diabetes was classified as either “juvenile” or “adult-onset” because these two different forms affected those in the respective age groups. Then, as many children went from being overweight to obese, something ominous happened. The age at which people were being diagnosed with “adult” diabetes dropped so stunningly that the terms had to be changed completely. They’re now called type 1 and type 2 diabetes, to avoid any implication of an age-related diagnosis.

  To illustrate the impact of preteens developing an adult disease, I’ll quote my dear friend and the man I appointed as director of the State Health Department, the late Dr. Fay Boozman, who told me: “A child diagnosed with type 2 diabetes as a preteen will have vision problems by the time he’s twenty, have a heart attack before he’s thirty, be in renal failure by the time he’s forty, and will never live to see a fiftieth birthday.” Public health experts have said that, barring major changes or significant medical advances, today’s generation of overweight, sedentary kids will be the first in the nation’s history not expected to live as long as their parents and grandparents.

  And today, according to the CDC’s 2014 National Diabetes Statistics Report, nearly 10 percent of the U.S. population has type 2 diabetes. That’s over 29 million people. So let’s not be disingenuous and say there isn’t a problem. There is one.

  At the same time, let’s remember that government can’t act independently to force change. Government works best as a clean-up batter, not a lead-off batter. It’s not the engine; more like the caboose. (Otherwise, it’s the cart before the horse, the tail wagging the dog, and now I’m out of metaphors.) This is why Michelle Obama’s well-intentioned micromanaging of school cafeteria menus has given us the most well-nourished trash cans ever to grace American schools! Government can’t force kids to eat their spinach.

  It’s also clear that government isn’t rational or science-based about issues, but purely political. For example, the same people who want to ban tobacco want to legalize marijuana. Get that? If you do, then explain it to me, because I sure don’t. When Colorado and Washington State became the first states to legalize “recreational pot,” the rationale was that no one would be the worse off for it. So what, they said, if some mellowed-out stoners wanted to live in a purple haze? And just think: All those potheads with the munchies might give a big boost to the snack food industry. (We already know that pot is a gateway drug; it creates junk-food junkies!)

  At the same time, there’s a move toward banning even e-cigarettes, electronic cigarettes that emit vapor instead of tobacco smoke. Granted, not being a smoker, I don’t understand nicotine cravings so intense that they cause people to go around sucking on what looks like a ballpoint pen but is actually a battery-operated device. It gives them a nicotine buzz and releases vapor that some claim contains carcinogens, but which some studies have shown are no different from outdoor air or human breath. (Frankly, I’ve smelled some human breath that was toxic, but I digress!)

  We should certainly look at whether the vapor from an e-cigarette truly is harmful to those nearby, but why would any state ban e-cigarettes and legalize pot, which we know has carcinogenic chemicals? For this and many reasons, I’m sure people will someday look back on the early twenty-first century, scratch their heads, and wonder, “What were they thinking?”

  And if the government were really interested in our health, why would they push to give a twelve-year-old girl the right to buy birth control pills without her parents’ knowledge—let alone their permission (when a school nurse can be fired for giving the same girl an aspirin without her parents’ permission)—or push for her to be able to secretly have an abortion? The “advocates” who think a preteen girl is adult enough to have an abortion, but child enough to stay on her parents’ health insurance until she’s twenty-six, confuse me.

  When Big Government liberals from the ivory towers of the Ivy League demand that government not “come between a woman and her doctor” regarding abortion, but then put the government between everyone and their doctor with Obamacare, doesn’t that seem a bit nuts to everyone with an IQ above plant life?

  So here we have it—a government that wants to control salt, sugar, soda, smokes, trans fats, and much more in the name of “protecting” us, but not to protect a perfectly innocent unborn child from being dismembered in its mother’s womb? If the government wants to “save lives,” let it start with saving babies. There is surely some science in that.

  6

  “Can You Hear Me Now?” (THE NSA CAN)

  IN MAY 2014, my wife and I went to China to celebrate our fortieth wedding anniversary. Neither of us had visited before, so we decided to see for ourselves this booming economy and emerging world power. My second morning there, I awoke to a couple of attention-grabbing headlines on the front page of China Daily, the leading English-language newspaper of Beijing. The first story was accompanied by a photo of Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s President, Xi Jinping, both smiling as they announced the signing of a record forty-nine agreements between the two nations. The other big story was China’s outrage over having some of its military leaders indicted in the United States on charges of cyber theft.

  My first thought was “takes one to know one!” The United States had rightfully expressed its objections to any government hacking into the computers of our nation’s private sector companies or government agencies. But there was a certain irony to it all, given that for the past two years America had been embroiled in a home-cooked controversy over whether our government violated the constitutional rights of its own citizens by capturing their phone calls and e-mails under the all-inclusive banner of “anti-terrorism.”

  I jokingly told an audience that I had lost my iPhone and really panicked, given all the information that was stored on it. But, hey, it all turned out fine! I just called the NSA (National Security Agency) and asked them where my phone was and they told me. They even restored all my e-mails and phone calls. The audience roared with laughter, but their appreciation was a solemn reminder that for something to be funny, it has to be somewhat believable or, at least, plausible. In the case of the government knowing exactly where my phone was and what was on it, that story was entirely believable. Ouch!

  Edward Snowden, by all appearances a young, low-level tech nerd working for a private contractor and doing work for the U.S. government in Hawaii, somehow accessed a treasure trove of information on just how much data the government collects on its citizens and what it’s capable of doing with it. Through Glenn Greenwald, an American journalist working for a British newspaper, he started leaking explosive bits of information on the extent to which U.S. government agencies collected data on our own citizens with no specific warrant or probable cause that a crime
of any kind—much less terrorism—was being committed. Over the next two years, Snowden dribbled out more and more information, creating a severe headache for the Obama administration and for the intelligence community at large.

  Snowden has been labeled everything from a traitor to a hero, but the truth probably lies somewhere in between. He’s certainly not a hero, for instead of acting out of conviction and conscience and facing the consequences because he believed what he was doing was right, he took off running and eventually accepted asylum in Russia—hardly the mark of a true patriot. But to completely demonize his methods or his motives without thinking objectively about what he revealed to American citizens about the activities of our own government would minimize the shock of finding out that “Big Brother” really is watching us.

  Verizon Communications built an ad campaign around a guy trying to get a good cell phone signal, repeatedly saying, “Can you hear me now?” The ad was effective because every person who’d ever used a cell phone had experienced walking a few paces in all directions and holding the device in all sorts of ways while asking, “Can you hear me now?” With all the advances in technology we’ve seen, most of us are singularly exasperated by the inability to get a clear signal on our cell phones to make a simple call. It truly appears that the more advanced our technology gets, the lousier the cell signals get. So the Verizon campaign struck a cultural nerve. Proves my earlier point: For something to be funny, it has to be believable.

  Prior to the Snowden information-avalanche regarding our spying activities, most of us didn’t think the range of government snooping to catch terrorists included capturing our phone calls to the local pizza joint to place an order for pepperoni with extra cheese or to our great-aunt’s house to say “Happy birthday!” The “looking for the needle in the haystack” excuse was muddled when we saw that our own government, instead of focusing on the needle, had amassed a haystack the size of Idaho. They did this intentionally, so we have to ask: What was the real intent?

  During my trip to China, I was constantly frustrated by the Chinese government’s censorship of the Internet, blocking Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and numerous Web sites that I usually took for granted as sources of news and opinion. When such Web sites did load, it often took longer than an AOL dial-up on a pre-Internet, dinosaur version of a PC from the late eighties. I had forgotten what it was like to hit a key to launch a command and go get a cup of coffee while it processed. While I waited, I realized how fortunate we are in America to have access to super-high-speed connections and open access. And then … and then … I remembered that our own government keeps toying and tinkering with the notion of more “regulation” (translation: control) over the Internet, and I shuddered to think that in addition to monitoring my every cyber move, my own government might just decide to commandeer it as well.

  When I hear otherwise thinking people say, “Well, if that keeps me safe from terrorists, I’m willing to give up some of my freedoms,” I wonder if they really understand what they’re saying. If the ultimate goal of a terrorist is to intimidate a people into changing their behavior, giving up basic rights, and allowing tighter and tighter control, it would appear the terrorists are indeed winning—and they don’t even have to launch a thousand suicide bombers on American streets. They can get us to do it to ourselves. Just get Americans completely comfortable with the government knowing everything we do and when we do it and how we do it and, while they’re at it, maybe why we do it. Did our Founders really sacrifice their very existence to create a police state? Did our fathers and grandfathers fight enemies across the globe so we could be turned into the same kind of society they sought to stop? Do we want to become a nation whose government monitors us, records us, tracks us, and catalogs us?

  Just for the record (which we know they’re keeping)—No!

  Under the Obama administration, government control of “free press” went to warp speed, but most of the establishment and traditional media organizations were so focused on defending President Obama that they seemed not to notice or complain.

  On May 13, 2013, the Associated Press disclosed that twenty of their reporters had had their phone records subpoenaed by the Department of Justice. I can only imagine the outcry had George W. Bush’s team been caught subpoenaing the phone records of the Associated Press in a fishing expedition to discover the source of AP news stories! There would have been calls for an independent prosecutor, criminal charges, and, for good measure, a guillotine set up in front of the U.S. Capitol, just in case. To provide themselves some cover, Obama’s Department of Justice (DOJ), led by Eric Holder, the most blatantly and blindly partisan hack at the DOJ since John Mitchell under President Nixon, didn’t issue the subpoena to the AP itself, but rather to the AP’s phone provider. Same goal, same focus, same snooping for the information, but too cute by half in attempting to sneak it through the third-party private company that provided the AP with phone service.

  Gary Pruitt, who was CEO of the Associated Press at the time, whimpered a bit and complained, “These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a roadmap to AP’s newsgathering operations and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations the government has no conceivable right to know” [AP Web site, May 13, 2013].

  Pruitt spoke to the National Press Club on June 19, 2013, and decried the “bigness” of a government that goes after reporters who are trying to do their constitutionally protected duty to keep on eye on the people’s business. He pointed out the chilling effect of having it known that talking to a reporter in confidence might not prevent a snooping government from tapping into the conversation. Said Pruitt, “Some longtime trusted sources have become nervous and anxious about talking with us—even on stories unrelated to national security. In some cases, government employees we once checked in with regularly will no longer speak to us by phone. Others are reluctant to meet in person. And I can tell you that this chilling effect on newsgathering is not just limited to AP. Journalists from other news organizations have personally told me that it has intimidated both official and nonofficial sources from speaking to them as well.”

  Well said, Mr. Pruitt. But after that, the AP pretty much shut up and went right back to their normal duties of lapdogging for the Obama administration, largely ignoring other abuses of the press by the “Big Brothers” in the Obama White House. In the tradition of Sergeant Schultz from the sixties television series Hogan’s Heroes, they “say nothing!” when it comes to other outrageous violations, such as the phone hacking of Fox News reporter and my colleague James Rosen, who worked at the D.C. bureau.

  When the Justice Department suspected that a State Department security adviser had leaked secrets to Rosen about North Korea, they tracked Rosen’s phone calls and his comings and goings at the State Department and even got a search warrant for his private e-mails by naming him as a “criminal co-conspirator.” Rosen was, incredibly, described as a “flight risk.” Through all of this, he was never even informed that he was under suspicion.

  Even liberal news outlets and columnists were rightly outraged over the treatment given to Rosen. Clearly, it was not a love for Fox News that helped them discover their voice, but the fear that it could easily happen to them. An editorial in The New York Times opined, “With the decision to label a Fox News television reporter a possible ‘co-conspirator’ in a criminal investigation of a news leak, the Obama administration has moved beyond protecting government secrets to threatening fundamental freedoms of the press to gather news.”

  Dana Milbank, liberal writer at The Washington Post wrote, “The Rosen affair is as flagrant an assault on civil liberties as anything done by George W. Bush’s administration, and it uses technology to silence critics in a way Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of. To treat a reporter as a criminal for doing his job—seeking out information the government doesn’t want made public—deprives American
s of the First Amendment freedom on which all other constitutional rights are based.”

  Here, here! I raise my glass of sweet tea to the fine minds at the Times and The Washington Post for having noses capable of smelling a skunk! This outrageous abuse of power should have resulted in the entire D.C. press corps launching a wolf pack–style attack against Obama’s furtive little rodents. Sadly, that faint glimmer of journalistic integrity was visible only for a few fleeting moments. The media’s outrage quickly faded away, like a lightning bug in a fog bank. As in any abusive codependent relationship, the mainstream media love Obama so much, they just can’t stay mad at him, no matter what he does to them.

  But Americans remotely concerned about the First Amendment need not worry their little heads about it, because in late May 2013, President Obama asked the Justice Department to “get to the bottom of it.” In response, Attorney General Eric Holder did what any other completely objective and honorable public servant would do: He launched a thorough investigation of himself and found himself to be (surprise) completely blameless. For President Obama and Eric Holder, “getting to the bottom” of something has come to mean burying it at the bottom of the ocean and never letting it see the light of day. “The most transparent administration in history” isn’t, according to its own estimation, answerable to us at all. So while the government thinks it’s within their power to look through your e-mails, monitor your phone calls, and consider you a criminal for exercising your First Amendment rights, they don’t want you asking any questions about what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, or how they’re going about it.