The Online Opinion Outpost features opinions and commentary on the latest hot topics from national news sources. As much as you love hearing from The Universe, we thought you might like to hear from journalists around the nation.
Climate change
Here are five reasons voters don’t believe what the White House says on climate change:
1. Overreach. The White House doesn’t just want it both ways, it wants it every way. Increasingly, when there is a topical weather event, we hear it is caused by global warming. But non-events are dismissed as meaningless.
2. Hypocrisy. Voters are on to the fact that the global warming crusaders want us to pay more and live with less — but, of course, the rules don’t apply to the politicians who want everybody else to sacrifice.
3. The global warming cause fits too nicely with the president’s left-wing political agenda. The prescriptions for dealing with climate change are the same policy objectives the left has promoted for other reasons for at least the past 25 years.
4. A lack of faith in foreign cooperation. Absent any verifiable, enforceable global warming treaty, any unilateral moves by the United States would be pointless.
5. This administration lacks credibility. Voters don’t believe what the White House says on this issue in part because it has not been credible on so many other important issues.
As I’ve said before, voters aren’t stupid. They know when they are not being leveled with. And all the bluster, intimidation and angry frothing won’t make their doubts go away or make the Obama administration any more believable.
Monica Lewinsky
Sexual affairs are happening all over the world at this very moment — with politicians, world leaders, famous actors and people you know personally. Yes, affairs and other indiscretions are disgusting and immoral, but you can hardly be surprised anymore when you hear about them. After all, you don’t publicly execute people for these everyday offenses between two consenting adults, and yet that’s basically what the world did to Lewinsky.
Last year, President Clinton was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama. In 2014, perhaps the world will give Monica Lewinsky the freedom she finally deserves.
She writes that it’s time to “stop tiptoeing around my past — and other people’s futures. I am determined to have a different ending to my story. I’ve decided, finally, to stick my head above the parapet so that I can take back my narrative and give purpose to my past.”
By telling her story, she’s doing exactly that. It takes remarkable courage to confront your humiliating mistakes and painful past and still hold your head high.
It’s in our failures that we often find our strength. Good for you Monica Lewinsky, you found your strength.
In her new meditation in Vanity Fair, Monica mashes Hawthorne and Coleridge, proclaiming that she’s ready to rip off her “scarlet-A albatross,” “reimagine” her identity and reclaim her narrative.
At long last, she says, she wants to “burn the beret and bury the blue dress” and get unstuck from “the horrible image” of an intern who messed around with the president in the pantry off the Oval Office, spilled the details to the wrong girlfriend and sparked a crazy impeachment scandal.
I wish her luck. Though she’s striking yet another come-hither pose in the magazine, there’s something poignant about a 40-year-old frozen like a fly in amber for something reckless she did in her 20s, while the unbreakable Clintons bulldoze ahead.
You’d think that the book “Monica’s Story,” the HBO documentary, Barbara Walters’s interview and the 1998 Vanity Fair spread would be enough about the most covered affair in history.
But she must feel that her reticence over the last 10 years of “self-searching and therapy” has led the public to hunger for her thoughts on the eve of Hillary’s book rollout in June and at a moment when President Obama is struggling to pull focus back from the Clintons, whose past and future are more dominant than Obama’s present. Monica is in danger of exploiting her own exploitation as she dishes about a couple whose erotic lives are of waning interest to the country.
