In the aftermath of Monday’s horrific events at the Boston Marathon, only one thing is certain — for the next week or so, our television screens will be filled with a creature known as the “terrorism expert.”

But what exactly is a “terrorism expert” and what qualifies one to be one? Operational knowledge of an AK-47? Intimate familiarity with the Damascus bazaar? Fluency in Arabic? (But that would be profiling, wouldn’t it?)

CNN has its own in-house terrorism expert in Peter Bergen, aka their “national security analyst.” Mr. Bergen popped up on Jake Tapper’s The Lead only a couple of hours after the Boston events with the following exchange (bolds from Newsbusters):

[4:19 p.m. EDT]

 JAKE TAPPER: Peter, does this — obviously we don’t want to speculate. We don’t know what this was. But is there reason for people who deal in counter-terrorism to think that this is an act of terrorism? Or suspect it strongly, at least?

PETER BERGEN: Sure. Although I’m reminded of Oklahoma City which was a bombing, which was initially treated as a gas explosion. So first reports are often erroneous. But the fact that there were two explosions — two bombings — one of the things I’d be looking at is once the device, if it is a device, is found, what kind of explosives were used? For instance, if it was hydrogen peroxide, this is a signature of al-Qaeda. If it was more conventional explosives, which are much harder to get a hold of now, that might be some other kind of right-wing extremists. We’ve seen a number of failed bombing attempts by al-Qaeda using bombs, (Unintelligible) and for instance, the Manhattan subway in 2009, Faisal Shahzad in 2010, the attempt to bring down Northwest Flight 253 over Detroit in 2009. But we’ve also seen other extremist groups, right-wing groups, for instance, trying to attack the Martin Luther King parade in Oregon in 2010.

(…)

[4:59] TAPPER: And Peter, what are you waiting to hear for — hear about in these coming hours?

BERGEN: I think the actual — the constituency inside the bomb will make a big difference about how we identify the person who did this. Or the persons who did this. Because if it’s hydrogen peroxide, that puts (Unintelligible). If it’s something else –

TAPPER: Could be a different –

BERGEN: — could be a right-wing extremist group. Or some other group.

Excuse me for playing my screenwriter card, but it seems to me the subtext here is that Bergen wants the perpetrators to be “right-wing extremists.”

Nothing amazing there. In all honesty, when I hear of events like this I hope it is the work of Islamic terrorists, not some whacked-out character like Timothy McVeigh. That’s because in the end I suspect there are far more Ramzi Yousefs in the world than there are Tim McVeighs, and that the Ramzis are ultimately a far bigger threat. (The statistics bear me out.) But that’s my bias. Sadly, we all play sides in these things, even when we’re pretending we’re not, but most of us have the good sense (and good manners) not to be so obvious about it as Bergren. After all, at this point we don’t know what happened. And people have died while others have been maimed for life. That’s where our concentration should be.

Libertarians and conservatives who complain they have little to see in the cinema and theatre that even remotely expresses their views – and when they do, it’s almost always pretty amateurish stuff – have cause to rejoice in Allen Barton’s Years to the Day, currently in a limited run at the Beverly Hills Playhouse.

But the play — a dialogue between two longtime friends, one liberal, one conservative/libertarian — is far more than a political tract. It is a meditation on midlife in most of its important aspects — relationships, family, sexuality, technology, politics, health, and (naturally) death.

The structure of the play — two friends, graduates of an “elite university,” meeting for coffee for the first time in four years and then going after each other, often quite wittily, for eighty minutes, as one hidden secret after another pours out — owes much to David Mamet and Edward Albee. But — dare I say it — I found Barton’s work in many ways more engaging than that of the more famous playwrights, perhaps because those revelations related more to my life. They had a decidedly contemporary edge.

I won’t reveal what they were because they are the fun of the play — and you should see it while you can. Especially if you are a conservative or libertarian, this will be like finding an oasis in the Sahara of the American theatre. But bring your liberal friends too. They may see a very different play from you here — and it will be sure to generate a lot “interesting” conversation afterwards. (When is the last time that happened?)

I assure you the production is up to snuff, well-directed by Joe Polis with fine performances by Michael Yavnieli and Jeff LeBeau. Barton himself, as many of you know, hosted the “Front Page” show for PJTV. He is also a theatre director, acting teacher, and concert pianist. (I know — one of those accomplished people. What can we do?)

Tickets are available here. If you are anywhere near Southern California, go.

Conor Friedersdorf has written an excellent article in the Atlantic on the extraordinary case of 72-year-old abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell titled, “Why Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s Trial Should Be a Front-Page Story.”

For those who have missed it — and given Friedersdorf’s title apparently many have — Gosnell is a doctor who regularly performed late-term abortions that verged on, or really crossed the line into, infanticide in a veritable grand guignol of a mad abortionist meets Krafft-Ebing.

You can read the gruesome details in Friedersdof’s column, but here’s a taste:

Charged with seven counts of first-degree murder, Dr. Gosnell is now standing trial in a Philadelphia courtroom. An NBC affiliate’s coverage includes testimony as grisly as you’d expect. “An unlicensed medical school graduate delivered graphic testimony about the chaos at a Philadelphia clinic where he helped perform late-term abortions,” the channel reports. “Stephen Massof described how he snipped the spinal cords of babies, calling it, ‘literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body.’ He testified that at times, when women were given medicine to speed up their deliveries, ‘it would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place.’”

Yes, there are photos, if you care to look at them.  I don’t.

Friedersdorf gets to the crux of his article at the end when he asks why our normally scandal-hungry mainstream media has not covered this repellent but obviously newsworthy story.  He suggests it may have something to do with the fact that Dr. Gosnell is African American and was, allegedly, discriminatory toward his patients of color, treating them even worse than his Caucasian patients (a distinction without a difference, perhaps, in this case, since everyone was treated some degree of horrifically).  He also mentions that several government agencies are possibly culpable here, having not exercised proper oversight over a medical clinic perpetrating flagrant butchery under the most unsanitary conditions for decades.

These explanations may have had some minor validity, I don’t know, but Friedersdorf touches only briefly on what I am almost certain is the real reason this story is being given short shrift.

The trial of Dr. Gosnell is a potential time bomb exploding in the conventional liberal narrative on abortion itself.  This is about the A-word.

No feeling human being can read this story or watch it on TV without being confronted with the obvious conclusion — like it or not — that abortion is murder.

It may be murder with extenuating circumstances (rape, survival of the mother, etc.) but it is murder nonetheless.  Dr. Gosnell — monster though he is — has accidentally shoved that uncomfortable truth in our faces.

Alan Dershowitz can be a frustrating man, but when he is good, he is very, very good.

I witnessed his courage personally a few years back when I was part of delegation with him at the Durban II Conference in Geneva. Dershowitz was a one-man resistance band then, protesting the speech of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at that UN-sponsored festival of anti-Semitism. (Well, he did have a few of us in support, but Dersh definitely led the way.)

I will skip past some of his iffier moments of Obama-induced backsliding to the present day when the Harvard professor has again stepped forward, this time to protest the decision of Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law to give its annual “International Advocate for Peace” award to U.S. President Jimmy Carter.

Dershowitz told The Algemeiner in an interview: “I can’t imagine a worse person to honor for conflict resolution. Here’s a man who has engendered conflict wherever he goes. He has encouraged terrorism by Hamas and Hezbollah. He was partly responsible for Yasser Arafat turning down the Clinton-Barak peace offer.”

“He is significantly responsible for the second Intifada,” Dershowitz went on. “If he had told Yasser Arafat to accept that deal we might be celebrating Palestinian statehood today. He just prefers terrorists to Israelis.”

Okay, Dersh, how do you really feel?

Of course, I agree with him in this instance. Jimmuh, quite frankly, gives me the creeps — and not just because he didn’t have a clue how to handle the economy and botched the Iranian hostage crisis (sorry, Ben Affleck), but because of something deeper and more repellent. Carter, since leaving office, has behaved like a self-satisfied and self-regarding racist prig.

A dispute and a certain amount of backpedaling is going on regarding who is responsible for his award from a Jewish university. I don’t know much of the ins and outs of this, but Lori Lowenthal Marcus at The Jewish Press has some fascinating details.

Note: Stock photo may not be entirely accurate reflection of current jury assemblage.

I am typing this in a juror assembly room at the Los Angeles Superior Court where I am awaiting a jury assignment. For a workaholic like me, no time is good for jury service, but I have no choice, having postponed so many times.

It is also the day it was announced that our country has its lowest labor participation rate since 1979. In benighted California the situation is undoubtedly worse. Some are reporting the real unemployment rate is 23 percent. Here in the Golden State it might be pushing thirty, if anybody really knows.

Looking around the juror assembly room I wonder how many of these people are employed. What do they do?  A few, the more middle class, while away the time on their iPads and Kindles, but most look grim, sitting there doing nothing, eyes straight ahead hour after hour, waiting for their names to be called.

The postponement line is shorter than i have ever seen it.  Why postpone when you have nothing else to do? And jurors here are paid fifteen dollars a day plus thirty-four cents a mile transportation reimbursement.  These days that’s a good job.  If David Stockman is to be believed — and I’m not one to doubt him — that’s where we’re all headed.

In Los Anqeles’ civic buildings everything looks tatty and run-down, not quite Cuba but on the way.  New facilities are almost always constructed of some unaesthetic material like melmac to resist the weather and graffiti.  The lights are all still fluorescent, net yet the yet more unappealing green kind, but they’re coming, I imagine.

No subject has convinced me more that modern liberalism is the most primitive religious faith on the planet (possibly excepting Wahhabism) than man-made global warming, aka climate change.

So it was with some amusement that I read the other day that that most august of publications The Economist was having second thoughts:

IT MAY come as a surprise to a walrus wondering where all the Arctic’s summer sea ice has gone. It could be news to a Staten Islander still coming to terms with what he lost to Hurricane Sandy. But some scientists are arguing that man-made climate change is not quite so bad a threat as it appeared to be a few years ago. They point to various reasons for thinking that the planet’s “climate sensitivity”—the amount of warming that can be expected for a doubling in the carbon-dioxide level—may not be as high as was previously thought. The most obvious reason is that, despite a marked warming over the course of the 20th century, temperatures have not really risen over the past ten years.”

The publication elucidates in an extended article from the same edition:

OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”

Am I wrong or was the whole theory of anthropogenic global warming based on a correlation between greenhouse-gas emissions and rising temperatures?  Oh, well, maybe Al Gore will explain it to me.  (I’m sure his knowledge base has improved since his unfortunate ‘D’ in college geology. After all, he’s a “climate sensitive” guy.)

I especially hope he will since those pesky Russians are predicting something far worse — a new Ice Age:

Russian scientist Dr Habibullo Abdussamatov, of the St Petersburg Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory, painted the Doomsday scenario saying the recent inclement weather [in Europe] simply proved we were heading towards a frozen planet. 

Dr Abdussamatov believes Earth was on an “unavoidable advance towards a deep temperature drop”. The last big freeze, known as the Little Ice Age, was between 1650 and 1850.

Uh-oh.  Maybe Time and Newsweek were right all along when they made similar predictions back in the seventies. Maybe this photoshop wasn’t even photoshopped.

I’m an expert on marriage.  I’ve done it three times!

Sounds like a bad Borscht Belt joke, doesn’t it? But it’s true.

Fortunately my third marriage has lasted approaching twenty years now and looks to be a keeper.  I fervently hope it is. (And if Sheryl is reading this — which she probably is — I hope she feels the same way.)

But I am, in my own way, an expert in marriage. We all are. And we’re all idiots about it too.

In the modern Western world, marriage is something most of us enter into in a state of near besotted limerence only to wake up one morning and find another human being there.

Then the noble struggle begins.  And when I say noble, I mean it. Committing to another human being and raising a family is the most ennobling and meaningful activity any of us – except perhaps those few curing cancer and such like – undertake in life.

Trouble is — fewer and fewer of us are doing it.  The statistics are everywhere. I’ll give just a few: According to a Pew poll from January 2011, 39% of Americans think marriage obsolete. (Up from 28% in the 1990s.) Forty-one percent of babies are born out of wedlock. (That’s up 18% since the 1980s.) Barely half of U. S. adults are married — the lowest percentage ever.  And so on.

Pretty sad, isn’t it, for a variety of reasons I think are almost too obvious to enumerate. But if there ever were a radical change in our culture, this is it.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party seems riven these days over the issue of same-sex marriage. The debate is everywhere. Karl Rove weighed in, predicting that a 2016 Republican presidential candidate might even support gay marriage.  Who knows?  I drive around L.A., listening to my friends Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager on the radio, inveighing against the dangers of homosexuals tying the knot.

But they are all missing the forest for the proverbial trees.

America’s problem isn’t gay marriage; it’s marriage.

Conservatives should be grateful to gays.  These days they seem to be the only ones who want to uphold the institution.

Well, some of them anyway.  And that’s part of the point. Those gays and lesbians who want to get married are largely domestic types who seek to participate in a traditional lifestyle that conservatives normally admire and advocate.

I have seen it up close and personal, as they say.  My oldest son from my first marriage is gay. (Ironically, he came out to me years ago as a Yale student, just like Rob Portman’s son.) For nearly twenty years he has lived in a relationship with his partner that appears as committed as any heterosexual relationship I know.  They now have two four-year-old twin daughters who are quite adorable and healthy. My son might blanch to read it, but it’s as bourgeois as could be.

It may come as a shock to readers that I rather liked Barack Obama’s speech to an audience of Israeli students at the Israel Convention Center in Jerusalem Thursday.

In a talk that lasted nearly an hour (I read it here), the president touched many familiar bases, praising Israeli democracy, technology, and entrepreneurship, and even paying homage to Zionism in a way that few expect of him. He also repeated, as he does often now, that Israeli security is paramount to the U.S. (We shall see on that one.)

But the overwhelming message of the speech, its theme, was an importuning of young Israelis to make sacrifices for peace.  Those sacrifices were, not surprisingly, unspecified, other than the usual shibboleths about settlement building being unhelpful.  Nevertheless, according to The Algemeiner, the speech was enthusiastically received.

There was only one problem: it was delivered to the wrong audience.

Israeli students are almost all ready to make some sort of compromise for peace. Indeed if peace were really a prospect, I would bet most of them would be fairly weeping for joy.

The trouble is — they don’t have anyone to make peace with. On the Palestinian side, nobody is home. To paraphrase and extend Gertrude Stein, there is less than there, there.  Hamas is a collection of religious sociopaths and the Palestinian Authority is composed of corrupt cowards who were unwilling to negotiate even after the supposedly bellicose Netanyahu suspended settlement building a couple of years ago.

Still, the Israeli students had to listen to this graph from Obama:

But the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and justice must also be recognized. Put yourself in their shoes — look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own, and lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements of her parents every single day. It is not just when settler violence against Palestinians goes unpunished.  It is not right to prevent Palestinians from farming their lands; to restrict a student’s ability to move around the West Bank; or to displace Palestinian families from their home. Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer. Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land.

That “walk a mile in their shoes” talk is more than a little condescending.   Most young Israelis I would wager have plenty of empathy for the Palestinians. The problem is the other way around.  Few Palestinians have demonstrated much empathy of any sort toward Israelis. (Watch their television shows.)

Now part of this of course is that Israelis are the Goliaths of the moment (though only of the moment). And few have sympathy for Goliath, even for a Goliath surrounded by hundreds of millions of enemies occupying lands hundreds of times greater than his.  And another part is shame and envy. Israel is a rapidly advancing modern state, and the Arab world in general has been a retrograde shambles for generations, successful (and then superficially) only in regions blessed with natural resources.

On our way to downtown Los Angeles Saturday night for the annual Churchill Dinner of the Claremont Institute at the venerable Biltmore Hotel, my wife Sheryl and I took the Hollywood Freeway, a route we had taken uncountable times before.

Only something was different.  Small encampments of homeless had been set up on the edge of the freeway.  We were used to them under freeway bridges, but these were more elaborate, makeshift tents and blankets positioned on slopes along the freeway, so that, we speculated, they were in full view of the constant passing traffic.  That way the violence frequently visited on the homeless by themselves and by others would at least partly be discouraged.

I was reminded of Victor Hanson’s poignant descriptions of the California Central Valley and also of when I lived in Southern Spain and would see impoverished gypsy encampments along the roads to Grenada and Seville.  But that was decades ago and that part of Spain, Andalucia, was desperately poor then, struggling to play catch up with the rest of Europe. It did — for a while anyway.

The Hollywood Freeway was not so simple.  This was a parade of the haves and have-nots, Mercedes and Lexuses, streaming past the tattered homeless:  Obama’s America.

The president has a solution to this problem, even as it gets worse.  Tax those folks in the Mercedes. Only that’s been tried a thousand times, most notably in the Great Depression, and it never worked. For someone so versed in Frankfurt School “critical theory,” the president has a convenient way of forgetting history.

He prefers, as we know, the pursuit of “fairness,” but in so doing he has seemed to make things less fair.  The stock market is up at the same time as the number of those who have dropped out of the labor force reached a jaw-dropping 89 million in January.   I wouldn’t be surprised to find gypsy encampments along all the freeways soon. African-Americans, as we also all know, have been hurt worst of all.

And yet Obama’s adversaries are accused of racism. La vie à l’envers, life upside down, as the French say.

When, over a decade ago now, I first veered away from the liberal-progressive orthodoxy, I lived in dread (okay, that’s too strong a word — maybe trepidation) that I would be branded a “conservative.”

Who wanted to be that?  I was a bona fide Child of the Sixties — a rebel as in The Crystals’ “He’s a Rebel.” (“He’s a rebel and he’ll never ever be any good/He’s a rebel ‘cause he never does what he should.”)

To be a conservative was to be square.  Never mind liberals were even squarer in their own paleo-sclerotic traditionalism. (Have you ever met people more lockstep than liberals?) Conservatives were the squares of squares — the uptight white guys with bowties who forever passed the joint without trying it. That certainly wasn’t me.

But sure enough, shortly after I started blogging in 2003, I was branded with the “c-word.” I didn’t know what to make of it and was, frankly, more than a little uncomfortable.

Not long after I was branded with the “l-word,” libertarian, and exhaled. Libertarians were the cool guys, conservatives who could pick up girls at parties, as some wags had it. Better to be that, even if I was a little overage for the parties.

This tendency continues perhaps ever more strongly with the new generation. Last month my ninth-grade daughter attended a conference for the Junior State of America. Almost none of the high school students, she told me, caucused with the Republicans. A throng went to the libertarians.

Still, I can’t totally identify as a libertarian, since I find some of their more extreme views silly. (Someone does have to pay for the interstate highway system.  And Islamic jihadists are quite serious about a world caliphate.  Declaring ourselves the purest of free marketers and rolling up the gangplank will not deter them in the slightest. In fact, it will only encourage them.)

All this is the long way around to saying that the problems creating the current dissension at CPAC stem in part from the word “conservative” itself.  It seems mired in the past — even when it is not. As much as anything else, in an odd way, it’s a semantic difficulty.

Young people particularly (and even some older folks like myself) like to see themselves as oriented toward the future.  Clinton was no fool when he chose “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” as his theme song, corny as it may now seem.  The truth is yesterday is gone.

Liberals, as we all know, rebranded themselves with some success as progressives — a word that was, ironically, itself once discredited. The wheel goes round on these things.