Ross Mackenzie
Tribune Media

Questions. For instance....

• Whatever happened to “global warming”?

• Does the loud roar of outrage toward Israel regarding the Gaza flotilla incident suggest this administration and developed democracies that likewise should know better find it easier to summon anger at our friends than at our enemies?

...Such as Iran?

• Indeed, does the Obama administration know who our enemies are — given that (a) a war formerly known as “The Long War” and “The War on Terror” has been PC’d into various “overseas contingency operations,” (b) Attorney General Eric Holder can’t bring himself to acknowledge “radical Islam” motivated the radicalized Fort Hood shooter, and (c) the president’s top counter-terrorism adviser (John Brennan) refuses to “describe our enemy as ‘jihadists’ or 'Islamists’”?

• In moving to lift “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” and to deploy women on combat submarines, is the administration sacrificing military readiness at the altar of dubious social policy?

• What would the reaction of academics, mainline mediaists et al. have been if the Bush administration had sought to shake down disfavored candidates with offers of federal posts to lure them out of political races?

• (Oh, and where would they be on the Deepwater Horizon oil well explosion if it had happened on the presidential watch of Katrina-plagued George W. Bush?)

• Remember Miss USA 2009 first runner-up Carrie Prejean, who was stripped of her Miss California USA crown following her disapproval of same-gender marriage – in answer to a pageant question? Who will remember that in this year’s contest Miss Oklahoma, Morgan Elizabeth Woolard, responded – in answer to a pageant question – that it was “perfectly fine” with her for Arizona to enact its own laws to address illegal immigration, and that she too came in ... first runner-up?

• Now that Helen Thomas has properly departed her post as dowager White House correspondent for her idiot views about Israelis, will she join such luminaries as Barbara Walters and the late Betty Friedan in the left’s pantheon of pulchritude?

• What’s not to like in this comment by Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, perhaps the hottest Republican prospect to run against Obama in 2012? “What we’ve seen in the past year, what I call shock-and-awe statism, has put the American experiment at risk. For the first time in my life, the country faces survival-level issues.”

• And what’s to like in this comment by Dr. Donald Berwick, the nominee to head the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services – and ultimately ObamaCare? – regarding Britain’s dismal National Health Service? “Any health care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized, and humane must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent health care is by definition redistributional. Britain, you chose well.”

• Are those who ripped Bush II for vacationing at his Crawford (Texas) ranch, equally ripping Obama for being the first recent wartime president to miss the Memorial Day wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery so he could return to his Chicago house – in the words of the Associated Press – to “sleep in his own bed for the first time in more than a year?”

• As numbers plunge for such redoubts of the printed word as magazines and newspapers in this digital and Internet world, can books be far behind?

• Could it be that the difficulties boys are encountering in schools can be at least partly explained by educational establishment favoritism – in this feminist hour – toward girls?

Ross Mackenzie may be contacted at rmackenzie@tribune.com.