Gene Healy

How Barack Obama killed comedy

A lot of folks are upset about comedienne Wanda Sykes’ attack on Rush Limbaugh at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. She called Rush a “traitor” and said, “I hope his kidneys fail.” Limbaugh aside, though, there were deeper problems with Sykes’ routine: It was the work of a courtier comic — embarrassingly sycophantic and unfunny. Sykes began her routine by gushing to the president, “You’re so likable,” and spent most of her time savaging President Barack Obama’s critics. For her grand finale, she took on people who complained that the president did not adopt a rescue dog: “Look, the man has...

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Obama’s 100-Day power grab

Unless you’ve been smart enough to avoid the news entirely for the last few weeks, you know that tomorrow marks President Obama’s first 100 days in office. But you may not know that the “100 days” phrase didn’t start with FDR, but with Napoleon. William Safire’s Political Dictionary tells us that it originally marked the period between the little dictator’s escape from Elba and rampage across Europe before his final defeat at Waterloo. So perhaps the question to ask about presidents’ first 100 days is, how much damage has our new Emperor done? In Obama’s case, the answer is, a lot. He’s made a running start toward...

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Of Course It Was Torture

On Thursday, the Obama administration released previously classified memos detailing interrogation techniques used against enemy prisoners. In the memos, Bush administration lawyers assured the CIA that waterboarding detainees and keeping them awake for a week or more was perfectly legal. Bush partisans insist that such methods aren’t torture, and that Obama has done grave harm to national security by revealing them. They're wrong on both counts. Conservative legal analyst David Rivkin, one of Bush’s most reliable defenders, insists that "any fair-minded observer" would conclude that the documents prove that "the Bush administration did not torture." But...

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Beware the cult of Obama

You’ve met them. They may be friends of yours, or family members. You may even be one of them (in which case you’ll hate this column). I’m referring to those who’ve heard the Call of Obama. Tucker Carlson compares it to a dog whistle: Inaudible to most, but irresistible to those who can hear it. Obama "walks into a room and you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere," George Clooney gushed to Charlie Rose. "I’ll collect paper cups off the ground to make [Obama’s] pathway clear,” Halle Berry recently told the Philadelphia Daily News, “I’ll do whatever he says.” (Does Michelle know about this?) Hollywood...

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Change and hope on drug policy?

Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Obama Justice Department would end federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries. That's a welcome change from the Bush administration’s policy, which violated constitutional principle and common decency. Bush claimed to respect federalism, but his Justice Department repeatedly brought the heavy hand of the law down on desperately sick people who, with the approval of their state governments, used marijuana to ease their pain. Calling off the raids was the right thing to do, and—for a liberal president vulnerable to the charge of being "soft on drugs"—a politically courageous move (“the...

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In defense of distrust in government

President Barack Obama declared in his inaugural address that “our patchwork heritage is a strength” because people of all backgrounds and creeds had come together to make America great. But there was one group, Obama suggested, that wasn’t quite welcome in the American family: the “cynics,” those miserable killjoys who dare to “question the scale of [the federal government’s] ambitions.” There, Obama echoed his 2008 opponent, John McCain, who has repeatedly warned that there’s a specter haunting our country, in the form of a “pervasive public cynicism” toward government. “Cynicism” is a scare word,...

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