Sowell: Random thoughts, from extremists to Rubio’s readiness

State Department official Marie Harf said, “We cannot win this war by killing them” but instead we need to get to the “root causes” of jihads by providing “job opportunities.” We tried getting at the “root causes” of crime back in the 1960s — and crime rates skyrocketed. We stopped the Nazis in World War II by killing them instead of setting up a jobs program in Germany.

The old advertising slogan, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” may or may not have been true. But surely the West should know by now that what happens in the Middle East does not stay in the Middle East. Throwing Israel to the wolves and signing agreements with Iran will not buy “peace in our time” and allow us to further shrink the military and expand the welfare state.

Tenure trouble

Academics often defend tenure, despite its many negative consequences, on grounds that it allows academic freedom for independent minds. Yet there are few places in America with more taboos and intellectual intolerance than academic campuses. The young are indoctrinated with demographic “diversity” that contrasts with a squelching of diversity of ideas on social issues.

It is remarkable how the Internal Revenue Service has been “losing” e-mails that congressional investigators want to see and how “global warming” researchers have been “losing” the raw data on which their dire predictions have been based. In the social sciences, people just frankly refuse to allow their raw data to be seen by critics of such sacred-cow policies as affirmative action.

The radical feminist movement, so ready to go ballistic at any little remark that can be twisted to mean something offensive to women, has been strangely silent while ISIS has been raping women and even little girls and selling them as sex slaves. Is the silence of the radical feminists just political expediency or moral bankruptcy? Or both?

Secretary of State John Kerry says that there is less violence than usual in the world right now. Meanwhile, James Clapper says the opposite. Since Clapper is director of national intelligence, maybe Kerry should have the title of director of national stupidity.

We should never again put a first-term senator in the White House. But, of the three Republican first-term senators who are prospective candidates for the 2016 nomination for president, Marco Rubio is one of the very few politicians of either party to publicly admit that he was wrong on a major issue — immigration. He may well be ready for the White House in 2020.