No, As a Matter of Fact, I'm NOT Sorry

This Boomer Isn't Going to Apologize
By STEPHEN MOORE

Last weekend I attended my niece's high-school graduation from an upscale prep school in Washington, D.C. These are supposed to be events filled with joy, optimism and anticipation of great achievements. But nearly all the kids who stepped to the podium dutifully moaned about how terrified they are of America's future -- yes, even though Barack Obama, whom they all worship and adore, has brought "change they can believe in." A federal judge gave the commencement address and proceeded to denounce the sorry state of the nation that will be handed off to them. The enemy, he said, is the collective narcissism of their parents' generation -- my generation. The judge said that we baby boomers have bequeathed to the "echo boomers," "millennials," or whatever they are to be called, a legacy of "greed, global warming, and growing income inequality."

And everyone of all age groups seemed to nod in agreement. One affluent 40-something woman with lots of jewelry told me she can barely look her teenagers in the eyes, so overcome is she with shame over the miseries we have bestowed upon our children.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that graduation ceremonies have become collective airings of guilt and grief. It's now chic for boomers to apologize for their generation's crimes. It's the only thing conservatives and liberals seem to agree on. Mitch Daniels, the Republican governor of Indiana, told Butler University grads that our generation is "just plain selfish." At Grinnell College in Iowa, author Thomas Friedman compared boomers to "hungry locusts . . . eating through just about everything." Film maker Ken Burns told this year's Boston College grads that those born between 1946 and 1960 have "squandered the legacy handed to them by the generation from World War II."

I could go on, but you get the point. We partied like it was 1999, paid for it with Ponzi schemes and left the mess for our kids and grandkids to clean up. We're sorry -- so sorry.

Well, I'm not. I have two teenagers and an 8-year-old, and I can say firsthand that if boomer parents have anything for which to be sorry it's for rearing a generation of pampered kids who've been chauffeured around to soccer leagues since they were 6. This is a generation that has come to regard rising affluence as a basic human right, because that is all it has ever known -- until now. Today's high-school and college students think of iPods, designer cellphones and $599 lap tops as entitlements. They think their future should be as mapped out as unambiguously as the GPS system in their cars.

CBS News reported recently that echo boomers spend $170 billion a year -- more than most nations' GDPs -- and nearly every penny of that comes from the wallets of the very parents they now resent. My parents' generation lived in fear of getting polio; many boomers lived in fear of getting sent to the Vietnam War; this generation's notion of hardship is TiVo breaking down.

How bad can the legacy of the baby boomers really be? Let's see: We're the generation that spawned Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Google, ATMs and Gatorade. We defeated the evils of communism and delivered the world from the brink of global thermonuclear war. Now youngsters are telling pollsters that they think socialism may be better than capitalism after all. Do they expect us to apologize for winning the Cold War next?

College students gripe about the price of tuition, and it does cost way too much. But who do these 22-year-old scholars think has been footing the bill for their courses in transgender studies and Che Guevara? The echo boomers complain, rightly, that we have left them holding the federal government's $8 trillion national IOU. But try to cut government aid to colleges or raise tuitions and they act as if they have been forced to actually work for a living.

Yes, the members of this generation will inherit a lot of debts, but a much bigger storehouse of wealth will be theirs in the coming years. When I graduated from college in 1982, the net worth of America -- all our nation's assets minus all our liabilities -- was $16 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve. Today, even after the meltdown in housing and stocks, the net worth of the country is $45 trillion -- a doubling after inflation. The boomers' children and their children will inherit more wealth and assets than any other in the history of the planet -- that is, unless Mr. Obama taxes it all away. So how about a little gratitude from these trust-fund babies for our multitrillion-dollar going-away gifts?

My generation is accused of being environmental criminals -- of having polluted the water and air and ruined the climate. But no generation in history has done more to clean the environment than mine. Since 1970 pollutants in the air and water have fallen sharply. Since 1960, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh have cut in half the number of days with unsafe levels of smog. The number of Americans who get sick or die from contaminants in our drinking water has plunged for 50 years straight.

Whenever kids ask me why we didn't do more to combat global warming, I explain that when I was young the "scientific consensus" warned of global cooling. Today's teenagers drive around in cars more than any previous generation. My kids have never once handed back the car keys because of some moral problem with their carbon footprint -- and I think they are fairly typical.

The most absurd complaint of all is that the health-care system has been ruined by our generation. Oh, really? Thanks to massive medical progress in the past 30 years, the chances of dying from heart disease and many types of cancer have been cut in half. We found effective treatments for AIDS within a decade. Life expectancy has risen and infant mortality fallen. That doesn't sound so "selfish" to me.

Yes, we are in a deep economic crisis today -- but it's no worse than what we boomers faced in the late 1970s after years of hyperinflation, sky-high tax rates and runaway government spending. We cursed our parents, too. But then we grew up and produced a big leap forward in health, wealth and scientific progress. Let's see what this next generation of over-educated ingrates can do.

Mr. Moore is senior economics writer for The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.

A New Approach to Terrorism

Now that our Hero, Obama, has been occupying the Oval Office for six months, we're definitely seeing a new tone in American foreign policy.

The thuggish Bush administration couldn't overcome its cowboy mentality and dealt with terrorists like this:


and this:

















But under Obama, we're enlightened and have a new approach to terrorism. I'm sure this new approach will go a long way to healing those hurt feelings and ensure we won't ever be attacked again.

Here's some terrorists recently released by Obama.

Who says Democrats are soft on national defense?

Chairman Zero "Enlightens" Us

Here's a video of Obama without his teleprompter showing just how clueless he is. After drooling and dribbling for three minutes, he hasn't said anything. This is painful to watch when you realize this buffoon is responsible for leading our country. (And, of course you didn't see this video on CBS, CNN, MSNBC, etc.)

Ann Rocks Too

Welcome back, Carter
Ann Coulter

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Posted: June 10, 2009
6:18 pm Eastern

Well, I'm glad that's over! Now that our silver-tongued president has gone to Cairo to soothe Muslims' hurt feelings, they love us again! Muslims in Pakistan expressed their appreciation for President Barack Obama's speech by bombing a fancy hotel in Peshawar this week.

Operating on the liberal premise that what Arabs really respect is weakness, Obama listed, incorrectly, Muslims' historical contributions to mankind, such as algebra (actually that was the ancient Babylonians), the compass (that was the Chinese), pens (the Chinese again) and medical discoveries (huh?).

But why be picky? All these inventions came in mighty handy on Sept. 11, 2001! Thanks, Muslims!

Obama bravely told the Cairo audience that 9/11 was a very nasty thing for Muslims to do to us, but on the other hand, they are victims of colonization.

Except we didn't colonize them. The French and the British did. So why are Arabs flying planes into our buildings and not the Arc de Triomphe? (And gosh, haven't the Arabs done a lot with the Middle East since the French and the British left!)

In another sharks-to-kittens comparison, Obama said, "Now let me be clear, issues of women's equality are by no means simply an issue for Islam." No, he said, "the struggle for women's equality continues in many aspects of American life."

So on one hand, 12-year-old girls are stoned to death for the crime of being raped in Muslim countries. But on the other hand, we still don't have enough female firefighters here in America.

Delusionally, Obama bragged about his multicultural worldview, saying, "I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal." In Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan and other Muslim countries, women "choose" to cover their heads on pain of losing them.

Obama rolled out the crucial liberal talking point against America's invasion of Iraq, saying Iraq was a "war of convenience," while Afghanistan was a "war of necessity." Liberals cling to this nonsense doggerel as a shield against their hypocrisy on Iraq. Either both wars were wars of necessity or both wars were wars of choice.

Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan – nor any country – attacked us on 9/11. Both Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as many other Muslim countries, were sheltering those associated with the terrorists who did attack us on 9/11 – and who hoped to attack us again.

The truth is, all wars are wars of choice, including the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, both World Wars, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the Gulf War, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. OK, maybe the war on teen obesity is a war of convenience, but that's the only one I can think of.

The modern Democrat Party chooses – really chooses, not like Saudi women "choosing" to wear hijabs – to fight no wars. But the Democrats couldn't say that immediately after 9/11, so they pretended to support the war in Afghanistan and then had to spend the next seven and a half years trying to come up with a distinction between Afghanistan and Iraq.

Maybe next they can tell us why fighting Hitler – who never invaded the U.S. and had no plans to do so – was a "necessity" in a way that fighting Saddam wasn't. (Obama on Hitler: "Nazi ideology sought to subjugate, humiliate and exterminate. It perpetrated murder on a massive scale." Whereas Saddam Hussein was just messing with the Kuwaitis, Kurds and Shiites.)

Meanwhile, Muslims throughout the Middle East are yearning for their own Saddam Husseins to be taken out by U.S. invaders so they can be liberated, too. (Then we'll see how many women – outside of an American college campus – "choose" to wear hijabs.) The war-of-choice/war-of-necessity point must be as mystifying to a Muslim audience as a discussion of gay marriage.

Arabs aren't afraid of us; they're afraid of Iran. But our aspiring Jimmy Carter had no tough words for Iran. To the contrary, in Cairo, Obama endorsed Iran's quest for nuclear "power," while attacking – brace yourself – America for helping remove Iranian loon Mohammad Mossadegh.

The CIA's taking out Mossadegh was probably the greatest thing that agency ever did. This was back in 1953, before it became a collection of lawyers and paper-pushers.

Mossadegh was as crazy as a March hare (which is really saying something when your competition is Moammar Gadhafi, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Saddam Hussein). He gave interviews lying in bed in pink pajamas. He wept, he fainted, and he set his nation on a path of permanent impoverishment by "nationalizing" the oil wells, where they sat idle after the British companies that knew how to operate them pulled out.

But he was earthy and hated the British, so left-wing academics adored Mossadegh. The New York Times compared him to Thomas Jefferson.

True, Mossadegh had been "elected" by the Iranian parliament – but only in the chaos following the assassination of the sitting prime minister.

In short order, the shah dismissed this clown, but Mossadegh refused to step down, so the CIA forcibly removed him and allowed the shah's choice to assume the office. This "coup," as liberal academics term it, was approved by liberals' favorite Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, and supported by such ponderous liberal blowhards as John Foster Dulles.

For Obama to be apologizing for one of the CIA's greatest accomplishments isn't just crazy, it's Ramsey Clark crazy.

Obama also said that it was unfair that "some countries have weapons that others do not" and proclaimed that "any nation – including Iran – should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power if it complies with its responsibilities under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty."

Wait – how about us? If a fanatical holocaust denier with messianic delusions can have nuclear power, can't the U.S. at least build one nuclear power plant every 30 years?

I'm sure Iran's compliance will be policed as well as North Korea's was. Clinton struck a much-heralded "peace deal" with North Korea in 1994, giving them $4 billion to construct nuclear facilities and 500,000 tons of fuel oil in return for a promise that they wouldn't build nuclear weapons. The ink wasn't dry before the North Koreans began feverishly building nukes.

But back to Iran, what precisely do Iranians need nuclear power for, again? They're not exactly a manufacturing powerhouse. Iran is a primitive nation in the middle of a desert that happens to sit on top of a large percentage of the world's oil and gas reserves. That's not enough oil and gas to run household fans?

Obama's "I'm OK, You're OK" speech would be hilarious, if it weren't so terrifying.

Rush Rocks