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No, the Liberty incident was not Israeli treachery

For elements of the anti-Israel right, it’s a time when everything old is becoming new again. So, a half-century-old theory that the Jewish state deliberately attacked the USS Liberty during the Six-Day War has renewed currency. Conspiratorial-minded influencers hostile to Israel like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have promoted the notion, and it was a topic of discussion at the recent TPUSA conference. The fact is that the devastating Israeli attack on the Liberty, killing 34 and wounding 171, was a woeful case of mistaken identification. The series of faulty ...

Spending an evening navigating the dark streets of San Francisco

We were at my brother’s residence in San Mateo County, just south of San Francisco — watching the college football playoffs — when my sister, who lives in San Francisco’s Richmond District, where I was planning on spending the night, texted us to let us know that the power was out in her neighborhood. Using our cellphones to do some quick research, we soon discovered that the power had gone down in most of the western half of San Francisco— including at the Presidio, which sits on the southern side of the Golden Gate Bridge, in the Richmond District, which sits south of the ...

Let their be light as we celebrate holiday season

“Let there be light,” said the voice opening scripture eons before he cried out, pushed out of his mother’s womb. The light bringer brought light into the world in the middle of the dark of night and on the day he died, in the middle of the day, the world went dark. The light left, but returned in glory. Former Sen. Ben Sasse and I have exchanged texts over the last few months about me heading his way to grab a beer. Sadly, now, he is announcing he has terminal pancreatic cancer. In his message on social media announcing the diagnosis, the father, husband and man of deep faith, ...

The time has come for us to kill property taxes

The American dream of home ownership — the foundational building block of familial wealth — has been central to our culture for generations, but it’s slowly being killed off when it becomes clear that this dream has a catch: You never really own your home. Who does? Well first, the bank, but even if you achieve the increasingly impossible dream of paying off your home, you still don’t own it. And who does? The government. Every year, millions of homeowners are reminded of this uncomfortable truth when their tax bill arrives in the mail, but because, like most taxes, ...

Remember: Political power is fleeting and will be eroded over time

With only three years left in his presidency, Donald J. Trump does not want to be forgotten, not ever. Like an emperor of olden days or a 20th-century tyrant, he is engraving his name on both old and new monuments wherever he can. At the beginning of December, he had his name carved on the headquarters of the United States Institute of Peace to render it the Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace. Clearly, the current administration has no sense of the absurd. Overall, Trump’s record as a man of peace is far from stellar. He promised to bring an end to the ...

We Must Celebrate Christmas By Taking It Seriously

We all know that God works in mysterious ways. Recently, I was deeply moved at a theatrical production of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” This is the famous and popular tale of the transformation and redemption of Ebenezer Scrooge from a rasping, grasping old miser into a lovable, generous old man who, late in life, becomes determined to make amends for all his extreme selfishness and his public denunciations of charity. After tossing and turning in bed on Christmas Eve night, during which he has dreams showing self-imposed loneliness in his youth and present-day ...