May 1, 2015 4 min read

Excerpts from recent editorials in newspapers in the United States as compiled by the Associated Press:

In 2011, a U.N.-approved assault ousted Libya’s longtime dictator, Moammar Gadhafi, but that assault’s consequences only now are being fully understood.

As despicable as he was, Gadhafi’s leadership brought something akin to stability to Libya. That’s gone, and the effects of today’s disarray are felt far from Tripoli because so many Libyans have chosen to risk their lives to reach a better place to live.

In their minds, like the minds of many other frightened Africans (as well as Syrians and Afghans), that better place is Europe.

But the often-treacherous Mediterranean Sea stands between them and safety, and even if they do reach their chosen destination, they may face overt hostility.

So illegal immigration has become a major issue in several European countries, just as it has been for years here in the United States.

In this country, the election season is heating up. Since immigration issues are certain to be part of the national debate, it should be helpful to keep an eye on Europe.

Perhaps the scariest thing about humans is their profound discomfort with ambiguity, and their concomitant desire to know things for sure, to have all the answers, and to demand that others believe exactly as they do.

Ideology, it seems, is reasserting itself in a world that less than a generation ago appeared headed toward pluralism, tolerance and pragmatism, all bolstered by an unprecedented flow of free information that promised to render extremism obsolete.

Too bad it hasn’t worked out that way. Unpacking his 40-year career as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, John Burns recently concluded: “What those years bred in me, more than anything else, was an abiding revulsion for ideology, in all its guises.”

Burns worked in some of the world’s ugliest places, among them Soviet Russia, Mao’s China, Afghanistan under the Taliban and South Africa under apartheid. But even in the Britain and America to which he has now retired, Burns detects a frightening partisan rigidity. “It can be depressing beyond words,” he wrote, “to hear the loyalists of a given political creed – whether left or right – adopt the unyielding certainties common in totalitarian states.”

We agree. Screeds portraying government as a manifest evil are especially damaging because they taint even the most sensible government solutions. With national campaigns approaching, our fervent hope is voters have grown weary of the threadbare recitations common to both parties and will instead demand pragmatic, creative and courageous approaches that bypass the tiresome interest groups.

We yearn for an agenda that matches the nation’s and the state’s actual problems: Creating a wider prosperity; building an infrastructure that works; forging a coherent, sophisticated foreign policy; fostering a truly effective system for education and training; reforming the corrupt financing of campaigns, and devising serious policies on climate and energy. We long for solutions based on hard evidence, not ideological correctness.

Should the man who tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981 – and who fired the bullet that eventually killed Reagan’s press secretary, Jim Brady – be released? A federal court hearing began April 22 in Washington, D.C., to decide the fate of John W. Hinckley Jr., now 59. The court already granted Hinckley 17 days a month with his mother in her gated community overlooking a golf course in Virginia.

Yet, as prosecutors note, Hinckley is not just any citizen. He is the attempted assassin of a president. He shot four people, wounding one critically. Regardless of what his doctors think or the conditions the prosecutor seeks, is he one mental snap away from a return of dangerous psychosis and aggression? Or, is his notoriety unfairly impeding his ability to return to a semi-normal life as allowed under his not guilty by reason of insanity verdict, now that experts attest the psychosis that drove his actions in 1981 receded?