Good morning. It’s Friday, Feb. 23.
The annual Conservative Political Action Conference is in full swing just outside Washington in a development called National Harbor. CPAC has often been compared to the “bar scene” in Star Wars, but that’s politically pejorative and species-ist, not to mention a cliché, so I would never allude to it, even obliquely.
Tomorrow, of course, is the date of South Carolina’s 2024 Republican presidential primary. The polls show Nikki Haley trailing badly in a place where she previously reigned supreme as a popular governor and the unquestioned leader of the state’s dominant Republican Party. Unless the aforementioned polls are whack, those days are about to end. Haley insists she will press ahead regardless, but we shall see.
As far as today’s quotation, it comes from a brave war correspondent who died in the line of duty eight years ago this week.
First, though, I’d direct you to RCP’s front page, which contains the latest poll averages, political news and video, and aggregated opinion pieces ranging across the ideological spectrum. We also offer the usual complement of original material from our stable of columnists and contributors. Recent highlights include the following:
Mike Pence Launches $20 Million Effort To Defend Conservative Principles. Phil Wegmann gets an exclusive look at the former vice president’s plans to revive and redefine the core values of his party.
How To Understand Trump’s Jeremiad Against NATO Freeloaders. Charles Lipson addresses the question of many here and abroad: Did he really mean it?
Trump-Navalny Comparison: Insightful or Unhinged? J. Peder Zane draws a comparison between the former president and Putin’s now-deceased political nemesis, and examines the uncanny similarities.
The Shot That Will Be Heard Round the Halls of Congress. Gerrick Wilkins asserts that term limits are a threat only to politicians using their power for personal gain.
The True Ideology of Washington Is Hypocrisy. Greg Orman exposes the true threat to democracy as the president’s party works to undermine the GOP’s nomination process.
Murder of a Saint — Navalny’s Death Has a Silver Lining. Mark Dixon lauds freedom’s most recent martyr in the death of the famed Russian dissident.
States Must Act Now To Save Rural Lives From Fentanyl Crisis. Former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp makes the case for immediate action in the war against fatal synthetic opioids.
Biden’s Approval Rating Poses Dilemma for Dems. Mort Kondrake warns that the president’s feeble image and current polling slump spell disaster for his party and his legacy.
Under Biden’s Lawfaring Eco-Politic, “Sue and Settle” Is Back. In RealClearInvestigations, James Varney reports on advocacy groups suing like-minded governments to gain settlements that amount to an end run around democracy.
Time for States and Congress To Protect Parental Rights. At RealClearPolicy, James Gilmore urges government to provide families with the much-needed tools to support healthy social media usage.
“Let Them Eat Cake” and Be Satisfied with Public School. At RealClearEducation, Ellie Krasne-Cohen writes that America isn’t the only country whose education establishment fights school choice while sending their own kids to cushy private institutions.
Will 2024 Be the Year To Challenge ESG Investing? At RealClearEnergy, Craig Shirley contends that it’s time for companies to examine their “socially responsible” policies through a lens of reality.
Is There a Doctor in the House? At RealClearHealth, Grace-Marie Turner predicts that in Congress, increasingly the answer will be “No.”
An Unusually Positive Bipartisan Win for Taxpayers. At RealClearMarkets, Andrew Wilford highlights a rare success story in a deeply divided Congress.
Memory: The Lost Skill. At RealClearReligion, Andrew Fowler observes that a society that fails to teach how to remember will become untethered from each other and from God.
Small, Poor Societies Have Very High Life Satisfaction. At RealClearScience, Ross Pomeroy examines research showing that once peoples’ basic needs — housing, food, safety — are met, joy can be found in the people and places around us.
The U.S. Must Stand by and for the Kurds. At RealClearWorld, Gregg Roman maintains that unlike with our recent abandonment of Afghanistan, we must prove that we are a trustworthy friend of the beleaguered non-Arab minority in Syria and Iraq.
On this date in 1945, the U.S. Marines raised the American flag atop Mt. Suribachi on the island on Iwo Jima. Captured on film by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, the image became an instant classic that helped buck up a war-weary nation. It is still an iconic symbol of the war in the Pacific — and of the United States Marine Corps itself.
The provenance of that photo, and the details of the men pictured in it, has long been the source of scrutiny, but the sacrifice it depicted is indisputable. Of the 9,000 U.S. Marines in the initial landing force, 550 were killed and another 1,800 wounded on the first day of fighting. In the face of such carnage, the Marines knew their progress would be measured in yards.
On the fourth day, the 28th Marine Regiment approached the foot of Suribachi. As the highest point on the island, the volcanic mountain was strategically crucial. Using flamethrowers, snipers, grenades, and other explosives, the Americans systematically rooted the Japanese defenders out of their caves and pillboxes — though not all of them.
The fighting would rage for another 31 days, at a cost of 6,800 American lives, including three of the Marines pictured in the February 23, 1945, flag-raising photograph. The flag-raising was first recorded by Marine photographer Sgt. Louis R. Lowery. As he descended the mountain, Lowery informed Joe Rosenthal of the AP and two Marine photographers what he’d captured on film. The trio continued to the summit where they were fortunate to see a second flag-raising ceremony with a larger and more photogenic flag. It was this picture that was viewed by the American public (including President Roosevelt) and which won Rosenthal a Pulitzer Prize.
But Pulitzers and other awards are not why journalists bravely tread into war zones armed only with cameras, tape recorders, and their pens and notebooks. They do it, as intrepid American war correspondent Marie Colvin said, because the world needs to know about war, especially when civilians are the targets.
Colvin went to Yale intending to become an anthropologist. Then she happened to take a seminar with John Hersey, the famous American journalist who wrote a short classic about the fighting on another Pacific island, “Into the Valley: Marines at Guadalcanal.” She got hooked on reporting from such places herself and spent most of her professional life as an iterant war correspondent in the world’s harshest war zones.
Stationed in London, working for the Sunday Times, Colvin’s beat was wherever she could document the frightful price that war exacted on the innocent. At a 2010 London conference dedicated to journalists killed while on such assignments, she explained it this way: “Craters. Burned houses. Mutilated bodies. Women weeping for children and husbands. Men for their wives, mothers, children. Our mission is to report these horrors of war with accuracy and without prejudice.”
Doing so came with a price. Twelve years ago this week, Colvin and her wingman, photographer Paul Conroy, snuck into Syria to document the slaughter in the city of Homs. She cut quite a figure with her distinctive black eyepatch, her reputation for wearing La Perla lingerie underneath her khakis and flak jacket, and her otherworldly physical bravery.
It was her last battle.
Afterward, some said that Colvin shouldn’t have been in Syria at all. She wore the eyepatch because she’d lost an eye to a grenade in Sri Lanka a decade earlier, which impacted her balance, and she was recovering from recent back surgery. In addition, she had been diagnosed with a severe case of PTSD, which she self-medicated with alcohol.
Yet, there she was, in the city of Homs where civilians were dying by the hundreds as Syrian army forces shelled one civilian neighborhood after another. Her last dispatch came in the form of an interview over a satellite phone with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. Colvin told him about the death of a baby boy.
The sat line wasn’t secure and the Syrian government forces apparently tracked and targeted the house where Colvin and a handful of other journalists were hiding. When their bunker was hit directly, Paul Conroy was seriously injured. Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik were killed.
Afterwards, some of Colvin’s friends and colleagues angrily wondered why her editors had sent her there at all. This was imprecise: It would have been all but impossible to keep her away. To Marie Colvin that was the wrong question, anyway. She parried it hours before she died with one of her own. In an email to her assistant in London, she asked, “Why is the world not here?”
And that is our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon
Washington Bureau chief, RealClearPolitics
@CarlCannon (Twitter)
ccannon@realclearpolitics.com
