Please note that effective immediately I'll be posting exclusively at Townhall. I've been posting here and at Townhall for quite some time, and in an effort to streamline the process I've decided to eliminate this site. You can find my commentaries at:
http://clearcommentary.blogtownhall.com/
Thanks for your continued interest.
The expansion of government and its insidious intrusion into our lives takes many forms. But the most incrementally seductive is the nanny state that seeks to mold behavior, from our so-called 'public health' initiatives to variable-type road signs. The former cloak the left's political agenda in the garb of improved health, but since their policy nets are so wide and finely meshed they capture everything from smoking to 'affordable' housing. And, those obnoxious highway signs warn us about the inclement weather that we're currently driving through, so we're left none the wiser.
But, beyond the fatuousness of their messages, covert and overt, such programs ensure that we're kept on a trajectory of incremental infantalization. The corollary is the encroachment on our freedoms which happens so slowly we occasionally find ourselves unwittingly embracing the apparent good will implied in much of these initiatives.
Here in Colorado Springs, a week doesn't pass without some elected official complaining about budget shortfalls due to reduced tax collections. And, although that might lead otherwise intelligent public officials to diligently pursue targeted reductions in spending, that kind of scrupulous self-examination always seems to escape them. Just this week, as Governor Bill Ritter (D) and the Democrat-controlled state legislature bemoaned the impending deficits, Sen. Moe Keller, (D-Wheat Ridge), chairman of the Joint Budget Committee, dismissed the notion that further spending cuts would be easy. “Colorado doesn’t have fat in its budget, so the cuts we make down the road are going to hurt,” she said.
Fiscal pain, as the current crop of leaders in Washington have aptly demonstrated, is a relative term. The problem is that most elected officials, at the local and national level, don't have adequate reserves of common sense to recognize fiscal fat when they see it. They examine budget cuts in political terms, which taps their 'flight or fight' gene, and since they're terrified of taking a principled stand, at the first sign of political danger they instinctively head for the tall grass, like the gazelle eluding the cheetah.
In nearby Teller County, the state department of transportation is installing those mammoth variable-type road signs. Despite our state's financial woes, these are cropping up everywhere and they must cost a couple hundred grand each. The majority of time they are blank, communicating nothing whatsoever, but on occasion they tell us to be careful of bikes because today is 'ride your bicycle to work day,' or telling us to "Click it or ticket," another nanny state warning to save us from ourselves.
Moreover, trickle-down stupidity is emanating from Washington, as President Obama intends to eliminate risk from our lives. The Consumer Protection Agency isn't nearly expensive or massive enough so he's going to mint another layer of bureaucracy to protect us from predatory credit card companies and mortgages, as if common sense can be codified like a virtue.
The functionally obtuse, like evildoers, will always be with us, but in Obama's world, paying for mistakes is hostile to the common good. His goal, which amounts to a civic exemption from personal responsibility, is a form of pre-emptive cultural penance, because when you eliminate the consequences for imprudent behavior you also remove the potential for lessons learned.
In the metastasizing area of 'public health,' the savage fitness programs hatched at the county level are a kind of nagging parent, telling us to exercise or stop smoking, lest the ill effects of a life of indolence or nicotine addiction puts us in an early grave. With its myopic goal of decimating two thousand years of learning, the liberal polity also jettisoned the quaint lessons imparted by a life of duty, obligation, and, yes, discipline. Now, many health insurance plans include a personal trainer to lose weight--they call it 'prevention'--and, despite the fact that one in six fails the program, it marches on moronic denial of reality.
Politics can't abide a vacuum, which is why liberalism is so successful. Our apparent incapacity to face life's challenges alone left us at the mercy of the left's agenda of replacing personal responsibility with government programs. And, as the sainted Ronald Reagan astutely observed, the only thing on earth that enjoys immortality, is a government program.
A good test of political traction is when the opposition tries to re-frame the issue. With health care, President Obama and his liberal foot soldiers such as Mitchell Bard, writing in today's Huffington Post, play the obtuse card, which they do with more grace than intelligence.
Bard mixes churlish rhetoric with a premise that forms his counter-argument for Republicans (and, centrist Democrats, which he is forced to include in his diatribe) who are making credible arguments against the so-called 'public option.' He makes the following assertion, which would be laughable were it not so thoroughly specious:
...when you argue for a public option, with people being given the chance to keep what they have (with private insurers) or opt for a new public option (especially for those who don't currently have any insurance) that would compete with the private companies, then the Republicans say that the private insurers would be driven out of business because they can't compete with the public plan. But if the government-run plan would be so bad, why would the private insurers lose to it?
This argument posits an inverted learning curve which amounts to an insult to the common man. Indeed, the problem of competing with the government's 'public option' has nothing to do with a de facto dual on the battle field of health care insurance, but rather the fact that when it's funded by effectively limitless deficit spending, the feds can set artificially low prices to strangle private carriers into submission.
You might recall that the anti-trust laws were written to mitigate the influence of inadvertent or overt market dominance by economic powerhouses that gobbled up small companies or merged with other giants, and which translates into hegemonic pricing. Bard and his arch leftists shrug their shoulders and look surprised when this patently uncompetitive aspect of the public option is raised, but since there's no cogent rejoinder it, it perfectly illustrates their true motivations.
It's not about the most optimal way to provide health care services--because a truly competitive model is the most effective way--but rather, it underscores the left's concurrent disdain for capitalism and their infatuation with power. Indeed, liberals have a deep distrust of markets because, they correctly assert, they are aren't perfect; but, rather than understanding that they do perfectly dovetail with human nature--read incentives and disincentives--and, as such they produce the best outcome for the most number of people, they prefer the universal mediocrity of government-run systems.
Bard and his legion of liberals routinely assert that "the American health care system is not working," which is a curious assertion since fully 80 percent indicate they're satisfied with their current plan. What we have is an expense problem, and as they would learn in an off-the-shelf high school economics class, you reduce expense by increasing the marginal cost to the consumer.
That means you provide each American with a refundable tax credit, you allow health insurance plans to market across state lines, and consumers purchase the plan that's right for themselves and their family and allocate their resources accordingly. If you price the tax credit appropriately, they'll be obliged to pay for a larger percent of services with discretionary income, but the marginal cost will be suppressed by cross-state competition. Several independent studies have shown that when you increase the per unit cost of service, utilization is inhibited but there's no measurable adverse effect in clinical outcomes. Coupled with tort reform, which would reduce the incentive physicians understandably have for over-utilization of expensive testing, and you're on track to control costs.
But, rather than supporting a plan that expands choice and reduces costs, the left is touting the new CBS/New York Times poll (which Bard quotes), which found that 72 percent of respondents supported a government-sponsored insurance plan. But, as with most polls, they don't tell the entire story: it's always a question of the cost and relative quality, and other polls show that when timely access to specialists and testing is compromised, and when life-style exclusions are imposed (no knee replacements for the overweight, which is the case in Great Britain), respondents' support drops significantly.
We all enjoy choosing a DSL carrier for our home computers, vetting car manufacturers to find just the right one for our budgets, and even reading cereal boxes to pick one that appeals to our individual tastes. Why would we willingly allow the government to design, price, and implement a one-size-fits-all health insurance plan?
Slowly, almost tectonically, the intellectual ice age that froze the elitist left's thinking concerning the relative merits of the U.S. led invasion of Iraq, is finally showing signs of a thaw. One to today's archetypes of liberal thought, Thomas Friedman, made the following assertion in a recent New York Times op-ed concerning the astonishing events unfolding in Iran:
...for real politics to happen you need space...the fact is, in ousting Saddam in Iraq in 2003 and mobilizing the U.N. to push Syria out of Lebanon in 2005, he opened space for real democratic politics that had not existed in Iraq or Lebanon for decades.
Although he injects the typical liberal stretch, arguing that "Mr. Obama's soft power has defused a lot of that [the Iranian anti-Americanism]", the clear implication is that our incipient success in Iraq provided a linear legitimacy for revolt in Iran.
Expert opinion concerning the potential for regime change in Iran varies widely, but the fact that it's even being discussed is obvious evidence of the success of the Bush Doctrine. For those such as Friedman, and his less restrained cohorts on the left, who have been faithfully agnostic on the idea of Iraq being the beta site for a fledgling form of democracy in the Middle East, his statement borders on intellectual heresy.
The left's caustic dismissal of former President Bush's belief in the universality of democratic principles would be shocking were they not so utterly arrogant, xenophobic, and cynical. That their motivations were purely political was transparently obvious, but it also made one wonder whether there was any war--or conflict, to use their sanitized term--they would support. This, of course, in light of the paradoxical fact that it was Democrat presidents who either started or continued every major war in the 20th century. That, in turn, raises the legitimate question of why they felt that toppling Saddam Hussein and permitting 25 million souls to have a taste of freedom was antithetical to American values.
Now that the oppressed Iranians are revolting against both Ahmadinejad as well as the real titans of totalitarianism in Iran, the mullahs, even inveterate liberals such as Friedman have slapped themselves on the forehead and connected the dots to Iraq. But for Republicans, Iraq was always the conditional precursor for the potential liberation of Middle Eastern nations, although Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia were seen as the more likely candidates. It was only the liberals, whose blinkered reading of history--in particular, American history--fails to yield a constructive lesson for dealing with the latest iteration of tyranny, be it Iran or North Korea.
Driving the point home, you may have made the useful comparison between President Obama's speech in Cairo and his remarks concerning the brutality evolving in Iran: in Egypt he felt no compunction in inserting himself into the inner-workings of Israel--the only democratic nation in the Middle East--and effectively criticizing its leaders, but in his comments concerning Iran--a tyrannical state--he said we can't dictate how its leaders choose to govern, that it's up to the people.
Moreover, it's staggering to ponder his statement that we'll have to wait until the Iranian government completes its investigation into potential election irregularities; as Frank Gaffney recently observed on Hugh Hewitt's radio show, that's akin to Stalin looking into the problem of starvation in Ukraine.
Although it's unlikely that the mullahs will be overthrown, it's incontestable that the specter of freedom in Iraq that got its spark from American ideals--and might--is looming large in the collective psyche of the revolting Iranians. Were Obama the post-political transnationalist he professes to be, he would take a hard line with the mullahs and support the suffering citizens of Iran. But, it turns out he's as intellectually conventional--read politically predictable--as any DC liberal.
We probably shouldn't call it a sea change, but it did cause more than a ripple across the otherwise uniformly liberal surface of the LA Times when it issued a warning in today's editorial that spending under President Obama may be getting out of hand. As you peruse it you'll see it's hardly a call for fiscal austerity and sacrifice, but anytime the likes of the Times calls Obama's version of "pay-go" "practically worthless," it should catch our eye.
Almost unique among all other professional callings, politics is one in which satisfying the pre-requisites should disqualify you from obtaining office. Beyond having built up a lengthy political resume with the goal of progressively higher office--read more power--one of the more unflattering characteristics it requires is an out-sized ego. 'Political calculation,' which is, of course, something of a redundancy, encourages the most cynical and craven motivations, and the result is a Congress that moves in a kind of perverse unison, blindly voting for more and more spending.
Anyone who studies Congressional spending habits--an admittedly masochistic practice--knows that "pay-go" is nothing more than a political fig leaf for tax increases. As the Times editorial notes "A true pay-go rule might help curb the worst instincts of lawmakers," but as it's typically enshrined, it merely provides an end-around for extracting higher taxes: To wit, Obama's favored "pay-go" program exempts 40 percent of the budget that is discretionary spending, which is why when pay-go was law between 1991 and 2002, Congress still increased the budget deficit by $700 billion, since the law is written with exceptions such that Congress--and the president--can easily find ways to ignore it.
Critics have suggested everything from a line-item presidential veto to a Constitutional amendment that requires a balanced budget, but those are either unconstitutional or unworkable. Moreover, they smack of the kind of rules we institute for adolescents to keep them from unwittingly harming themselves due to the pathological stupidity endemic to that age group. We would like to think that some version of common sense would suddenly overtake Washington, but as history demonstrates, a lightning strike on a clear day is far more likely.
Part of the problem, it goes without saying, is us. We've clearly raised stupidity to a kind of virtue in that as our average weight increased our knowledge of economics and history decreased. The result is that as Obama lobbied earlier this year for so-called stimulus spending at levels that stagger the imagination, many, perhaps most Americans nodded their heads in bovine-like agreement. Now, with health care 'reform' apparently just around the corner, they're once again heading for the fiscal precipice, lemming-like.
For those of us who find rewards in sacrifice, who see the civic symmetry of a restrained government, and who are convinced that risk was meant to be a part of life in America, it's thoroughly dispiriting to live through all of this. That this appears to be the narrow edge of a wedge malignly designed to willfully weaken this great Republic, pains us is ways that no words can express.
All of us recall our early tenure in a new employment position, the struggles that ensued as we grappled with the myriad duties while delicately negotiating our way through political mine fields. If the department we inherited was in disarray we found ourselves shaking our heads and casting a cold eye on our predecessor, while telling our supervisors about the mess he left.
But, if we're completely honest, we also recall that with the passage of time, we became progressively reticent to invoke the ghost of our predecessors because we intuitively--and correctly--sensed it would irritate our bosses. They understandably have little sympathy for our plight because we were being paid to do a job, so all they wanted was results.
If you've been paying attention to the narrative of Bush blaming emanating from the White House since President Obama's inauguration, you probably sense that it's wearing thin among the electorate. But when David Axelrod, Obama's senior adviser, protests that the newly minted administration isn't in fact, blaming Bush, that they're only cautioning the public that the profound nature of the problems will require time, that too has the ring of the querulous employee who still doesn't appreciate the nature of his charge.
But sinceresults are the measure of success, we might ask why unemployment is inching far higher than Obama said it would if Congress approved his so-called stimulus package. Politicians, for the untutored, have a remarkable knack for moving the goal posts down-field. Their deft, if conveniently self-serving reply is that the recession is deeper than first believed.
We can segue to foreign policy and discuss the curiously anti-American apology tour Obama began during the campaign and mysteriously continued since his election. Laced throughout his speeches and press conferences was a latently smug assertion that his administration would bring a deeply divergent approach to the problems we face, with renewed and more artful efforts in diplomacy, effectively supplanting eight years of impotence with unprecedented progress.
Therefore, we should look for Iran to acquiesce to Obama's insistence for a dialog without pre-conditions, and thence proceed to dismantle its nearly completed nuclear program. Kim Jong Il, the recalcitrant tyrant of Pyongyang, will cave to U.S. led sanctions, and blithely cease its nuclear testing and allow U.N. inspectors to resume their verification program. Afghanistan and Pakistan, the new theater of regional instability, will succumb to Obama's strategic genius, with the Taliban abandoning its designs for absolute dominance.
What's becoming apparent, even at this early stage in his presidency, is that Obama's Ivy League acumen is no match for the problems America faces. Pure intelligence, as so many leaders in history have demonstrated, some unwittingly, is a poor proxy for success in civic matters or victory on the battlefield.
It's because Obama seems so utterly behind the comprehension curve, focused as he instinctively is on himself, that conservatives should regroup, co-opt Independents and like-minded conservative Democrats, and make this man a one-term president.
Our understanding of leadership inevitably takes us down the road which intersects with character, principles, and values. Each American president had a public persona and agenda that reflected some mix of these vital elements, each of which differed in degrees that distinguished their presidencies, as well as highlighted their triumphs and failures.
During the campaign and since his election, we were told that one of the fundamental strengths of Barack Obama is his post-political, transpartisan approach to governing, which would translate into successes, domestically and in foreign affairs. For two views of that we turn first to Eugene Robinson, writing in today's Washington Post.
For Robinson, we can distill leadership down to certain key components, beginning with Obama's personal narrative and the way his unique ancestral influences have contributed to his universal appeal. Coupled with another vital facet of the ideal leader--humility--which, in Robinson's view, was absent in the prior president and which led to America acting in ways "contrary to our ideals," and you have the complete 21st century leader.
What's intriguing about Robinson's analysis is the studied absence of the principles that won two world wars and the Cold War last century, that overcame the blight of slavery and led to a strong and unwavering insistence upon civil rights for all. Rather, he focuses, rather narrowly, on Obama's adroit, new age view of the world, a place which obligates America to apologize for itself, to meekly assume her place among dozens of other nations, which also demands a revision of history as sweeping as Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust.
There's also an ignorant irony in Robinson's implied argument that Obama set a new tone in his Cairo speech by stating that America is not at war with Islam. There are too many instances to quote, but this was a theme former President Bush maintained throughout his tenure, and it's the height of hypocrisy that liberals such as Robinson are so ideologically incandescent concerning the Obama-phenomenon that he doesn't have the--yes, humility--to admit the truth.
Another paradoxical truth is how the left lionizes emotion over substance. Robinson becomes teary-eyed when recounting the audience member in Cairo who shouted "We love you!" at Obama, comparing it with obvious disdain with the shoe-throwing spectacle during President Bush's news conference in Iraq. So, we have Obama who, as a senator, authored legislation that mandated the removal of all American combat forces by March of 2008, just when the surge was having a positive impact, who, to this day, minimizes the fact that a butcher is no longer installed as chief tyrant of 25 million people, who erroneously called Afghanistan a war of necessity, and who stunned our moral sensibilities by comparing the slaughter of 6 million Jews to the injustices the Palestinians have suffered for the past 60 years. And, this is the man Robinson touts as a Messiah?
For a bracing antidote, let's have a look at this piece by Patrick Buchanan. Although there are many issues where he and I would diverge, sometimes dramatically, in general Buchanan's reading of history, which he deftly applies to current challenges, is at once credible and thoughtful.
I'll let his piece speak for itself, but, since we're on the subject of truths, it's irrefutably true that no American president has ever prevailed in a regional or global conflict with a foreign policy that effectively denigrates his own nation. There's a time and place for apologies and national self-criticism, but they shouldn't be woven into a national narrative thematically expressed in speeches on foreign soil.
Especially in a time when America's civic resolve is frayed its national security is challenged.
It's a peculiarity of contemporary culture that government spending has achieved a kind of civic cache. It's probably due to a combination of factors, beginning with a nascent ignorance of how and why this Republic was founded, and including the tacit denial that discipline is one of the prerequisites for a life of virtue.
Writing in today's Denver Post, David Harsanyi extols that and other endangered virtues by touting the low-tax and fiscal restraint that has made Colorado the envy of a spendthrift nation. Culture is the mechanism that provides plausibility to public policy, and when a large fiscal footprint for government is viewed as prudent--which is surely the case today--we can be assured capitalism and free enterprise will suffer. Witness the debacle evolving in California, the only place in America that can make inebriated mariners look positively frugal.
But, it's not limited to the poor souls on the west coast. Nationwide, the license to expand government seems limitless, and, as the Congressional Budget Office noted this week, the 2009 deficit will likely crest $1.8 trillion, a fourfold increase. The debate between fiscal stimulus and monetary policy to redress our ailing economy would be a healthy one, but our elected officials have conveniently ducked the question.
Since inaction is a kind of kryptonite for politicians, they've all excelled at hogging the stage to outspend their colleagues. Underlying the premise of their fiscal effervescence is an implied understanding that the electorate is incapable of the sacrifice and work necessary to weather an economic downturn. Those who made imprudent decisions with respect to volatile mortgages, along with businesses from AIG to General Motors, are being 'rescued' from their stupidity, which will only ensure it will resurface again, none the wiser from the experience.
Here in Colorado, one of the last vestiges of civic restraint and discipline, our legislators are showing signs of succumbing to the national addiction to spending. As reported in yesterday's Colorado Springs Gazette, Democrat Governor Bill Ritter just signed a bill that eliminated a 1991 law that imposed a "6 percent annual growth limit on appropriations to the state's general fund and mandated that money in excess of the 6 percent be automatically diverted to two separate pots of money, the transportation and capital construction funds."
State Sen. John Morse, a Colorado Springs Democrat, touted the legislation, asserting it "simply provides greater flexibility so the state can make wiser investments with existing resources." [emphasis added]. Well, in case you haven't noticed, the Democrats have redacted the word "tax" from our national lexicon and replaced it with "investment." Mr. Morse, being an astute student (read politician), is merely parroting President Obama, who is so obviously enamored of government spending. And, of course "flexibility" is just code for a license to exploit, which is yet another transparently obtuse attempt to frustrate the will of voters.
Of course, it would be more challenging for Democrats locally and nationally to achieve their statist aims if voters didn't telegraph conflicting messages by electing them. The next two elections are litmus tests that will either impede or abet the Democrats' (and their invertebrate cousins across the aisle) propensity to expand the role of government in our lives.
Let's not stand idly by as they decimate what's left of this great Republic.
It's a curiosity of liberals that in the arena of morality, truth and absolutes are in the eye of the beholder, but in politics they alone have a direct conduit to the truth. For an example almost guaranteed to cause heartburn, let's have a look at Arrianna Huffington's piece on Dick Cheney, which again demonstrates that the former vice president's truth tour is hitting a nerve with the hard left.
Despite the fact that even President Obama has conceded our successes in Iraq, putting twenty-five million souls on a slow track to a fledgling form of democracy, Huffington continues gnawing on the bone about pre-war intelligence and Iraq-9/11 connections. With respect to the former issue, we should remind her that page 84 of the July 7, 2004 report by the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, titled “Report of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Pre-War Intelligence Assessments on Iraq,” references a June 1999 report, which concluded: “All of the assessments in these [Intelligence] Community papers on Iraq’s nuclear program were consistent in assessing that: Iraq continued low-level clandestine theoretical research and training of personnel, and was attempting to procure dual-use technologies and materials that could be used to reconstitute its nuclear program…if Iraq acquired fissile material it could have a crude nuclear weapon within a year.”
Having used chemical weapons on his own people, and given his wholesale lack of compliance with the U.N. Resolutions, literally every intelligence agencyin the world believed that Hussein constituted a credible threat to his neighbors and to the civilized world. Why is this so difficult for Huffington and her liberal brethren to admit? Because it's a stark concession that their appeasement gene once again blinded them to the truth.
With respect to connections between Iraq/Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda/9/11, we turn to the most credible source available, Stephen F. Hayes' The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America. His work is well researched and provides incontestable evidence of links between Iraq and al Qaeda, which really should surprise no one. In order to make their arguments nominally plausible, critics are obliged to trot out the argument that Hussein was a secularist and had no interest in al Qaeda's goal of hegemonic Sharia law.
For those willing to look, history provides numerous examples of paradoxical alliances based on the momentary alignment of strategic interests of two otherwise adversarial forces. The practice of medism in ancient Greece involved wayward Greeks siding with the Persian Empire and it played an adverse role in key battles such as Marathon. In modern times, we're reminded of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, which may seem shocking at first glance. However, when you realize it was Hitler's attempt to avoid a two-front war--which is what led to Germany's defeat in WWI--it made perfect strategic sense.
Huffington concludes her misinformed paean to political cynicism with a reference to glass houses, noting "that people with a paper trail that proves they ignored the looming threat of al-Qaeda, sanctioned torture, and used lies and manipulated intelligence to get us into a war, shouldn't be so fast to throw stones either."
Well, of course, no one sanctioned torture, and, as I've argued here, there's no evidence that anyone lied to get us into Iraq, but with respect to ignoring "the looming threat of al-Qaeda," she must be referring to former President Clinton's studied avoidance of the threat that developed under his very eyes, abetted, of course, by his insistence on maintaining the bifurcation of intelligence between the FBI and CIA.
Talk about 'glass houses.'
As adults, we all know the power of infatuation. We can recall swooning over someone of the opposite sex in high school or college, and how overpowering the emotions can be. But when it comes do doing our jobs we have an intuitive understanding that infatuation has no legitimate role, that, in fact, it can cause serious problems.
Unless, of course, you're a member of the mainstream media charged with covering President Obama. As Robert J. Samuelson reports in today's Washington Post, media coverage of Obama has ranged from merely fawning to blind infatuation, with a summary indifference to any pretense of maintaining journalistic standards. Of course, Samuelson's observations and the data he provides in support of them merely confirm what most Americans are already convinced is the case: Not only are reporters in Obama's thrall, their visceral attraction has compromised their integrity (or, more candidly, further compromised their integrity).
Samuelson also explores the linear relationship between uncritical coverage and approval ratings, which effectively means the media is complicit in distorting Obama's relatively high job approval ratings. This kind of shameful self-promotion and indifference to professional honesty would be headline news were it not for the fact that these mainstream media mavens also have absolutely no humility, or insight.
Imagine for a moment that a Republican president moved to aggressively decimate federal spending, proposed eliminating entire departments, including the Internal Revenue Service, slashing the federal budget by twenty-five percent. Every newspaper and news program nationwide would report that doomsday was around the corner and bleeding-hearts in news rooms nationwide would sound like town criers in Pompeii.
Yet here's Obama, launching the highest level of federal spending in American history, creating deficits for decades to come, and now, proposing to put us on a track to nationalize health care, and all you hear from the media is the sounds of silence. Pick up any newspaper or watch any evening news show and it's as though the content was faithfully copied off the White House web site or lifted from the Democratic National Committee's talking points.
Reinforcing the perception we all have of them is the fact that they're oblivious to the problem. Indeed, the studied indifference they bring to their work would earn anyone in a normal job a one-way ticket out the door. For a more lively take on how the press treats the Obama monarchy, have a look at James Lewis' column in the American Thinker, who notes that "Stalin himself couldn't have wished for a more slobbering press corps."
Of course, we can thank God for the Internet, but the consensual infatuation of the press corps is truly a national embarrassment, and, it does a great disservice to the voters who the media also scorns by its willful refusal to do its job.
An enduring, if annoying article of liberal faith is that since average Americans are, by definition, behind the elitists' cultural curve, they're inherently in need of correction. The latest instruction is being administered by President Obama and his leftist pals in Congress and their foot soldiers in the media, and the subject, in case you're the type to not pay attention class, is empathy.
I could choose any of dozens of news reports or editorials which are all part of the national curricula, but Gloria Borger, a "senior political analyst for CNN" has an illustrative piece at CNNPolitics.com, so we'll use that for our counter-culture lesson. Well before Obama chose Sonia Sotomayor as his nominee, I wrote that he would target a "stealth" candidate, someone culturally difficult to pigeonhole, a person politically immune from rigorous scrutiny.
The litmus test for such a candidate is that she (it had to be a 'she') would be so impervious to criticism that Republicans would be fighting among themselves, some seduced by the tacit argument that empathy and judicial impartiality aren't, in fact, mutually exclusive. Well, of course they're not, but the question is whether a substantive reliance on "life experiences" versus a fidelity to law is what our Founders contemplated and what is enshrined in our Constitution?
In light of the cloud of civic confusion that hovers over America, Obama's choice was tactfully ingenious because it had the intended result of confounding Republicans and delighting Democrats. Having successfully seeded identity politics into our cultural loam, the left now sits back and smirks, confident that we all implicitly avow the veracity of race and ethnicity as reflective of values and principles. Add to that noxious mix the notion that gender makes the jurist, and you have just the right formula for a left-of-center legal temperament.
So, we have the practical Republicans among us cautioning conservatives not to lose sight of 2012, that our strategy in dealing with Sotomayor must be conditioned with an adroit understanding of the nuanced moderate or Independent voter, lest we cede electoral real estate to the Democrats. In truth, for far too long many on the right have unwittingly adopted the left's duplicitous recommendation that bipartisanship requires them to accept disparately deep political concessions. And, with their army of media flooding the zone and quick to characterize principled opposition as mean and uncaring, it's no wonder their arguments have achieved cultural traction.
A telling, early response by many liberal commentators and legal analysts was their pre-emptive shock that any Republican would see political advantage in challenging this nominee. You see, it doesn't occur to these masterful political tacticians that we might just be opposing her on principle. Indeed, that we sincerely believe that judicial activism--use empathy, or the euphemism of your choice--is anathema to our judicial system, is entirely lost on them.
The problem is that many Republicans are myopically subscribing to the same myth, fearful that a principled opposition to a candidate who is on record as asserting that a Caucasian male is innately less wise than a Latina female--i.e., herself--is ill-advised, that we should tone it down a bit.
Succinctly stated, although we should always be respectful and never harsh or shrill, principles shouldn't be conditioned by political expedience.
One of the fascinating developments since President Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is the contrast between the deluge of conservative writers who are highlighting her astonishingly liberal record and the deafening silence from the mainstream media. They and their leftist brethren in Congress are too busy celebrating the inevitability of Sotomayor's ascendancy to the highest court, riding the cultural coattails enshrined in judicial activism which has finally achieved its lifelong goal--an unfettered license to create law based on personal preferences.
Although it's not been widely published in the media, anyone perusing the center-right blogosphere couldn't have missed Sotomayor's racist comment that "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion (as a judge) than a white male who hasn't lived that life." Upon questioning by the Senate Judiciary Committee she'll doubtless find a deft way to deflect or minimize that starkly hostile comment, but it provides us average folks a window into the left's curious universe, a place where values and principles are presupposed based on skin color and ethnicity.
Conservative writers such as George Will have reflected on the torrent of front-page invective that would have obtained had a Samuel Alito stated the converse--that "I would hope that a white male with the richness of this traditional American values would reach a better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn't had that life." But the deeper paradox is that otherwise intelligent people such as Sotomayor sincerely believe that judicial decisions should often be predicated on one's life experiences versus the Constitution.
One of the key questions she must answer, therefore, is whether she truly believes that people's identity can be divined by their skin color or ethnicity? And, have we run so far afield that a member of one ethnicity is deemed incapable of rendering a fair legal judgment concerning a member of another ethnicity?
The transparently craven motivation of this president is abundantly evident by this choice because were this individual neither a female nor an American of Hispanic ancestry, her rather unremarkable legal career would never qualify her for the highest court in America.
As I've argued in numerous posts, culture is the civic engine of any society, which informs its character and plots its trajectory as a nation. Its strength and resilience depends upon a vigilant adherence to a set of principles, one immune from the sway of fashion and the allure of values codified by relativism. Tragically, Obama and millions like him in America today are convinced that the most superficial human traits--that is, pigment and ancestry--supersede the values and ideas we hold dear.
The president will likely have two more opportunities to put his stamp on the Supreme Court. If this nomination is prelude to the next two, we can expect a grim resurgence of judicial activism which can only inhibit the guarantee of equality under the law.
Memorial Day is a holiday that is becoming culturally perplexing for many Americans. We instinctively know that thousands have given their lives and been wounded in service to their country, and when we try to imagine their heroism in horrific places, from the Battle of Trenton to Appomattox to Bataan, our throats swell and we become mute with profound respect. Although the passage of time has blurred the contemporaneously contentious nature of wars America has fought, it's clear that today's engagements don't enjoy the same level of civic support.
Beyond the fact that time has provided a more candid reckoning of past wars--which is to say a more unequivocal justification of them--another compelling reason for that disparity is how we view the nature of good and evil, coupled with a collective reticence to sacrifice our blood and treasure. In 1992, Francis Fukuyama published a seminal work titled "The End of History and the Last Man," which made the argument that human beings had reached the end of their ideological evolution, and that liberal democracy was its inevitable incarnation. That view, of course, was met strong counter-arguments in the ensuing years, which have seen the rise of radical Islam as well as Russia's recidivist impulses towards autocracy, mirroring that of China.
Unfortunately, the unfinished nature of our human narrative has been painfully punctuated with these realities at the precise moment when the historical consensus regarding good and evil is fraying. The fashionable introspection posited by the left, the kind that holds America to far higher standards than any other nation, conjures the argument for the moral equivalence among all nations. That leads us to the foreign policy corollary, which is the perennial argument regarding the presumed justification of U.S. interventions, whether they use 'soft' or 'hard' power, to either encourage democratic principles or topple manifestly hostile despots.
In this context the efficacy of military intervention is also being seriously questioned. One of the central tenants of President Obama's ascendancy is the alleged potency of diplomacy as a vital precursor to any threat of military action. It's truly not a matter of a nascent isolationism sweeping the land than it is the tacit conviction that the military option is wholly unsuited to the complexities America faces, from North Korea to Iran, which is to say, a forced conclusion is less convincing than one underwritten by persuasion and patience.
Although history belies the practical application of such arguments, they ought not be dismissed out of hand. Rather, it's what underlies them that is cause for concern. Implicit in Obama's approach to foreign policy is a summary rejection of the doctrine employed by every previous president, which is a parsing of geopolitical problems based on their relative intransigence. On one end we have China and Russia, ostensible if inconstant allies whose sketchy adherence to democratic principle are truly concerning; at the other end we have belligerent and unpredictable regimes such as North Korea and Iran.
The Obama doctrine's premise is that there's an effectively untried way to positively influence all of these relationships, one that employs incentives and disincentives based on an algorithm known only to him. This fundamental revision of common sense, one that presupposes the existence of an entirely new set of diplomatic tools, and one curiously undiscovered for the past two thousand years, is at once intriguing and deeply concerning. Among other peculiarities, it suggests that such patently evil men as Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are, in fact, acting rationally, defending their unique sense of justice against a world hostile and indifferent to its beliefs, as opposed to flouting international conventions and the will of the civilized world.
It's a fascinating, if somewhat academic argument, that is, one that can take us just so far. Because, among other reasons, it stipulates that the behavioral paradigm in these regimes is amenable to reasonable intercourse, if we could just break its abstruse code. That argument simply can't stand the test of history: If we examine regional conflicts that evolved into war, from Thermopylae to the Punic Wars to the Hundred Years War, and the two world wars last century, the theme is consistent. They each involve some combination of revanchist motivations and designs of economic or geographic hegemony.
We can dress them up in the vogue parlance of contemporary diplomatic parlor games, but the fundamentals are timeless and they apply no less persuasively with Iran than they did to Rome and Carthage in the Punic Wars. The difference is the Obamaesque propensity to a dangerous intellectual hubris that downgrades evil to the status of a misdemeanor while naively supposing a reasonableness on the part of tyrants, one that's conspicuous by its absence.
Therefore, as we celebrate the valor and heroism of those whose sacrifice provided the foundations of the freedoms we too often take for granted, let's not forget that evil is, in fact, timeless, and, although candid discussions with our adversaries are an important component of American foreign policy, in the end, the only language despots understand is the kind written in blood--their own.
See today's Colorado Springs Gazette where my letter to the editor appears (scroll down to "Left Ignores Facts in Debate"). As you'll see it focuses on two issues: the first is the resilience of the liberals' revisionist instincts with respect to pre-Iraq war intelligence; the second, House Speaker Pelosi's pathetic prevarications concerning notification by the CIA of the enhanced interrogation techniques that had been implemented.
Now that Iraq is becoming a relatively stable nation, with the promise of being the first legitimate democracy in the Middle East (apart, of course, from Israel), the left remains intellectually mired in its fantasy land where conservatives misled a naive nation into war. It will be fascinating to watch as their story is serially revised to include progressively candid admissions of success, which, for the common folk, is already impossible to ignore.
President Obama is leading that initiative with his occasional concessions made in unguarded moments, noting that the much maligned surge has worked. It's kind of difficult not to admit it since he's using the exact same strategy in Afghanistan.
The Pelosi matter is a real delight and conservatives pray her speakership continues right up to the 2010 mid-term elections, with Congressional hearings sprinkled here and there to keep the issue front and center. Political chameleons, who try to finesse their way out of every self-made contradiction, are an unsightly lot, and she's a textbook example.
Civic dissension and argument is a vital part of life in America, and, when the terms of engagement are reasonably equitable and people act in good faith, regardless of the outcome, both sides can take solace in the fact that it's only in totalitarian states where debates are summarily settled.
However, if we didn't have enough supporting evidence before President Obama's speech at Notre Dame, his remarks there made it unambiguously clear that the debate over abortion not being waged on a level playing field. To listen to his speech, its lofty rhetoric about finding common ground notwithstanding, one might be inclined to conclude that a fetus isn't, in fact, a separate human being. Indeed, it's the casual manner in which liberals such as Obama characterize the abortion decision, as though it's merely one of many on a narrow moral continuum, ranging from the annoying to the disconcerting, but never reaching the threshold of the morally noxious.
With the liberals' habitual defense of every creature in the animal kingdom, from the dolphin to the snail darter, not to mention their defense death row inmates, one might think their apparently limitless ethical reservoir would extend to an innocent unborn human--think again. The reason the abortion debate is so contentious, Obama said, is that Americans hold no values more dear than "life" and "choice."
We could proffer the argument about school choice as our first exhibit, but that would only further muddy the already murky liberal waters. Rather, let's examine how we got to the point where 1.2 million innocent lives are snuffed each year. Recall that back in the 1950s the incidence of pre-marital sex, abortion, and single parenthood was profoundly lower. Enter the 60s with its myopic iconoclasm and insistence that God, love, and matrimony were quaint--read expendable--virtues that oppressed free expression and women's rights.
The marriage contract was annulled and sexuality was severed from procreation within relationships blessed by God, and the result was the incidence of single parenthood and abortion skyrocketed. At that point a Supreme Court antagonistic to any semblance of Constitutional literacy crafted a right of privacy out of thin air, which provided a legal, if not moral license to slaughter the unborn.
The cruel and wholly disingenuous way in which liberals characterize this debate reflects an astonishing level of dishonesty and self-delusion: They originally argued that a fetus wasn't a separate human being; then, with the advent of ultrasound, they conceded--duh!--it was, but that it was still the mother's "right" to murder it. Obama has taken the argument to unprecedented amoral heights with his votes in the Illinois senate against legislation that would have proscribed "live birth abortion."
Only those immune to the darker side of human nature should read about that savage proceduree, those who don't wince when viewing those gray photographs of emaciated bodies in Auschwitz piled high like cord wood. But for most of us who are moved to visceral revulsion, suffice it to say it's a practice we would never, ever perform on a dog.
So, as Obama calls for a calm ecumenicalism in search of common ground, let's not forget that with the passing of every hour, another 137 innocent unborn humans are killed--all for the sake of "choice."
My recent post on Christie Brinkley's exposition on nuclear nonproliferation struck a nerve with a writer whose moniker is "Balance and Security," and who submitted a caustic comment. Although this individual provides some informative historical context and a few curt rejoinders and admonitions, he fails to address the core contention of my post: To wit: In our age, which is witnessing a growing cohort of nuclearized belligerents, a call for universal disarmament is quixotic, because only the world's civilized nations would consider it.
Indeed, even if we stipulate that all 187 member nations of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) agreed to comply, what compliance leverage would that provide for rogue nations such as North Korea and Iran, not to mention a volatile one such as Pakistan? The left's implied reliance on such agreements has produced checkered results at best, because there's only one language despots understand and that's the kind backed with the threat of military action.
Perhaps most convoluted is his statement concerning American values versus power:
The assymetrical (sic) foe is fear driven provincialism that thinks that people are different in the rest of the world and cannot live with the thought that we might actually be able to overcome threats with our core American values of rule of law backed by a strong military not the law of power and a mocking of international law.
The first challenge is parsing that sentence, but once it's digested the complaint seems to be that conservatives instinctively resort to the "law of power" and that they mock international law. Actually, although we were deeply concerned with the balance of power and threat of regional hegemony by tyrants during the wars of the 20th century, it was ultimately American sovereignty and national security concerns that motivated our involvement.
The same principles ought to obtain with respect to our decisions to back the NPT, which is to ask what, exactly, is the U.S. interest. That's not to say we can't strive for world peace, only that we must have a defined course of action predicated on the recognition of the danger of nuclear disarmament by the world's civilized nations, which would leave only rogue nations with nukes.
The writer also excoriates the Bush Administration for its alleged violation of treaties, without offering a scintilla of evidence. Is the charge related to our invasion of Iraq? If so, does he forget that it was Democratic presidents who initiated or continued every major war in the last century? And, was it a violation of international law when President Clinton ordered the attacks in the Balkans without U.N. approval?
This individual's assertions to the contrary notwithstanding, international law is largely a fiction, written and enforced by such moral exemplars as the United Nations. In that regard it has no leverage and no functional authority, which means barbaric nations such as North Korea routinely flout it. The same process is unfolding in Iran, so I would close by asking the likes of this writer how exactly the NPT would force Ahmadinejad to shut down its enrichment program?
He may "like Ms. Brinkley's love the (sic) land of the free and brave!", but in the end our Republic is free because of the brave--not because of international treaties.
A scene in the film classic The Grand Illusion is shot in a bistro and includes a sign that reads, "Alcohol kills slowly, but who's in a hurry." We might use that quip as a metaphor for the incremental manner in which the grotesque expansion of the federal government in the past half a century has insidiously worked its way into every corner of our lives.
It's not merely the arrogant assumption that government can make wiser decisions, or that it's an expensive quid pro quo that only grows over time, but rather, that it slowly hollows out a place in our collective civic core and leaches the lifeblood of our Republic--freedom. In an unprecedented report issued earlier this year by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, professors William P. Ruger and Jason Sorens provide a state-by-state analysis titled Freedom in the 50 States: An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom.
The except below from the Executive Summary explains the scope and content of their report:
This study improves on prior attempts to score economic freedom for American states in three primary ways: (1) in includes measures of social and personal freedoms such as peaceable citizens' rights to education their own children, own and carry firearms, and be free from unreasonable search and seizure; (2) in includes far more variables, even on economic policies alone, than prior studies, and there are no missing data on any variable; and (3) it uses new, more accurate measurements of key variables, particularly state fiscal policies.
For many, this might seem like a quaint look at a problem of minimal magnitude. But that view only has validity when glimpsed through the prism of modern culture, where rights and obligations have been slowly eroded by a lifeless bureaucracy at every level of government. It's our tectonic adaptation to these encroachments that is arguably the most hostile aspect of their hegemonic designs, because, with the passing of each year our recollection of civic life sans a Leviathan government presence becomes more vague. That renders the deepening penetration of government into our lives ever more plausible, and we become progressively more susceptible to larger doses.
Delving more deeply into this vile development we find something even more profound: When decisions are pre-emptively made for us, from the lack of choice in K-12 education to the stranglehold taxation has on us, our choices are not only restricted, but our failure factor is restricted. Indeed, beyond power acquisition and retention, the left's dream of mortal happiness at the hands of government focuses on the elimination of risk and the redaction of consequences.
Those, in turn, blunt motivation and inhibit our ability to learn by failure. In contemporary civic parlance, no one should be allowed to fail and no one should be held accountable for mistakes. Yet, that pounding in your chest when make a significant mistake is a kind of life marker, a moment indelibly stained with a lesson we'll carry which provides a vital, self-correcting mechanism. It also creates the kind of resolve and resilience so crucial to charting a trajectory of professional success and personal happiness.
So, as you review the report, don't merely think about the discrete implications of the loss of freedom, but rather, how it leads to a more cossetted civilization, one where challenges are handicapped and adverse outcomes mitigated. It's that creeping sense that we're ignorantly creating a civic and cultural landscape less robust than the last, where collectivism predicated on a liberal agenda has replaced individualism and accountability, that is most disturbing.
The early indications of the Obama administration, as well as our invertebrate Congress, provides convincing evidence that freedom is slowly moving from endangerment to obsolescence.
We can stipulate that moral leadership has its place in domestic and international politics, but when it comes to dealing with the world's belligerents it can't stand alone, which is what President Obama seems to be telegraphing.
In an editorial in the Huffington Post concerning nuclear non-proliferation, Christie Brinkley (yes, that Christie) makes a compelling, if unwitting, case for her nomination as the modern day Jane Fonda for her deft ability to utterly misread contemporary geopolitics. Other than global warming, there's probably no less grave an issue facing the United States than the need for nuclear disarmament. However, from WWII to Stalin to Vietnam, right up to radical Islam, the left has been on the wrong side of history every time, so why should this be any different?
Brinkley quotes Obama, whose speech in Prague last month included the utterly fatuous line that "moral leadership is more powerful than any weapon," yet another example of how lofty rhetoric plays well to the somnolent masses. She goes on to note supporting evidence from the world's moral exemplar, the United Nations, which she said "made an unequivocal undertaking to obtain the total elimination of nuclear weapons."
The left's myopic endorsement of parchment as a proxy for a strong national security policy has been demonstrated to be dangerous many times over the past several decades. The problem, of course, is that it's predicated on the wholly mistaken belief that the nations of the world observe the same set of rules as the U.S., which means they're reliable and credible players. Any nation willing to agree to nuclear disarmament is, by definition, one we would want to maintain its stockpile.
Note that Brinkley's assertion concerning the Russian president's agreement to pursue a nuclear free world did not begin with his nation taking the lead by unilaterally disarming. Indeed, why doesn't she take her message on the road, with the first stop being Pyongyang, and then drop in on the folks in Pakistan, and thence to Tehran to convince Ahmadinejad to cease his enrichment program?
The liberals' fictional abstractions concerning the lethality of our world would be stunning were they not so patently absurd. We're deep in a war with an asymmetrical foe that has declared its goal to decimate America and the West, one which makes absolutely no distinction between combatants and civilians, and the Brinkleys among us want to focus on eliminating nuclear weapons?
I'll leave you with an astonishing quote from Brinkley, one which could have been made by Mr. Obama himself, which should convince you that, under his stewardship, America is on a fast track towards global emasculation:
Does anyone think their country should rule the world and make everyone live like them? Does anyone think that the rules of the sand box where we learned to share can be tossed aside when it comes to international relations?
May God help us.
It's been observed that wisdom, along with political perspective, improves with time. Perhaps that's why former vice president Dick Cheney has been on a kind of post-election campaign trail, making the case that his former boss excelled at keeping America safe, that Colin Powell might as well leave the Republican Party, and that President Obama's policies are increasing the risk of another attack.
News reports of Cheney's interview yesterday on Face the Nation are making headlines nationally, as well they should. An article in yesterday's NY Daily News outlines the interview, which clarifies that the remedy to Republican Party problems doesn't lie in capitulating to moderates. In an age of effusive post-partisanship, that's not a culturally popular line to take because it presupposes--correctly--that the differences between the parties are real, not merely a matter of political cosmetics.
Cheney made a number of bold assertions, but key among them were issues related to national security. In the Obama view, former President Bush circumvented laws and compromised American integrity in the eyes of our allies, all quite needlessly. From the enhanced interrogation techniques to Gitmo to warrantless wiretaps, Bush undermined our Constitutional precepts which did nothing to maintain America's security.
As I've argued in past posts, great regimes weren't historically overrun by barbarians, they decayed from within. When a nation's leaders fail to recognize--or minimize--the seriousness of threats, they misguidedly rewrite the rules of engagement, allowing their foes to exploit newly exposed vulnerabilities. If it's the result of miscalculation, their actions can be excused, however, when it's a willful dismissal of the facts, as in the case of Obama and the liberals, it's an indictment of historic proportions.
Indeed, it takes a Herculean kind of ignorance to overlook the dozens of attacks on American interests in the past three decades, but sanitizing history is precisely what liberals across the globe seem to be doing. Approximately three percent of Muslims are radical, which means there are about 1.3 million jihadists standing ready to attack America and other Western nations. Among many other conservatives, Mr. Cheney understands that merely because we've not been attacked for the past eight years doesn't mean these savages have lost their appetite to decimate America.
Yet when Obama and his Congressional liberals argue that water-boarding is torture and that nothing significant came of its use, that warrantless wiretaps provided no actionable intelligence and compromised civil rights, they're effectively opening the front gate to those barbarians. Great Britain is rewriting its laws to accommodate Sharia law, putting it on a par with its own civic code. The result, which will likely begin to migrate to our shores, is that the radicals will be leveraging Britain's laws against their own people.
By attacking the Bush era tools that were used to inhibit the risk of another attack, the left is playing a highly dangerous game of political gamesmanship, one in which American lives are at stake. In speeches in the early 1930s, Adolf Hitler laid out in grave detail precisely what he planned to do, and then, in front of a stunned international community, proceeded to follow through. Over a decade ago, Osama bin Laden mirrored Hitler by providing a detailed blueprint for his grand scheme to achieve global domination, and has been diligently working towards that goal ever since.
Given Obama's arrogant dismissal of his predecessor's record, there is real reason to be concerned that his administration will unwittingly lay the groundwork for another catastrophic attack on American soil. Cheney obviously recognizes this as a vulnerability--unfortunately, Obama and his liberal brethren do not.
By now, we've all heard the quip by P.J. O'Rourke about health care: If you think it's expensive now, wait till it's 'free.' Well, we're all about to learn exactly how expensive it's going to be, because President Obama and his over-reaching allies in Congress are about to put us on a fast-track to nationalize one-sixth of our economy.
For a view from the socialist left, we turn to the Huffington Post, which at once vilifies our current free-market system and glorifies--read misrepresents--Obamacare. As you'll see, they toss accusations, claims, and percentages around like the ACLU when its going after a creche scene at city hall, trying to convince the skeptics and assure the committed that although the IRS answers thirty percent of callers' questions incorrectly and Medicare continues to use an impenetrably arcane system to reimburse physicians, the government is primed and ready to provide you and your family with cutting-edge health care services--at a lower cost than you're now paying.
There are too many distortions and outright falsehoods in the Huff's expose to counter, but let's look at some of the more egregious. Principle one is that health care is part of our economic system. Well, so is the auto industry, and since Obama is looking to run that, it makes sense to toss heatlh care into the mix; and, let's add the real estate market as well. But, seriously, when the authors write that "Obama correctly sees the economy as an integrated system...", we have to scratch our heads: what exactly does that mean? That it justifies nationalizing health care?
Principle two is that health care is a moral issue. In case you haven't picked up on the left's exquisitely selective ability to divine morality in all the wrong places, it might surprise you that they believe slaughtering an innocent unborn human is not a moral issue, but health care is. Empathy, you see, is in the eyes of the post-modernist beholder.
Principle four asserts that the president's plan fits our principles and represents true patriotism. Does anyone have an oxygen tank handy? Which principles are they referring to, the ones in the Federalist Papers that describe individual freedom, or the ones in the liberal manifesto? As for patriotism, that's yet another prop that liberals trot out at the strangest times. You won't hear it mentioned in discussions about our military (unless the cameras are rolling), and you'll never hear any of them say how patriotic it makes them feel to wear a flag lapel pin, because it's just so anti-upper West side, so hostile to their Georgetown cocktail circuit sensibilities.
Another outright lie is principle five, which says HMOs stand between you and and the care you get; well, no. You purchase a plan for a price that reflects a defined menu of benefits, and every HMO is required to provide a basic set of services, which, it shouldn't surprise you, are only accessible if they're medically necessary; then you or your broker compare them and make an informed decision based on your individual needs--now there's a 'choice' the left abhors. Number six is the same canard--you're a victim of a ruthless bureaucracy--pabulum for the intellectually effete.
If you believe number seven--that the administrative costs would be about 3 percent under the Obama plan--we might ask how anyone knows this when they can't even track the billions we've spent on economic stimulus?
There's more, but since patience is a virtue I'm still working on, I have to let my blood pressure drop a bit. Since I've logged two and a half decades in the health care business, both on the payer and physician side, I'm not insensitive to the fact that there are glaring problems. However, they revolve around cost, something the feds are clearly incapable of addressing, without, that is, their favorite fiscal cudgel--price controls.
Anyone who's read this far deserves a break, so we'll save the market-based remedies for another day. But it's only in our principle-free culture, where victimhood and entitlement are the twin pillars of our civic virtues, that Obama has such a rosy chance of pushing this behemoth through Congress and down the throats of the American people. Calling it a travesty provides it with a generosity of spirit wholly undeserved.
When the premise of an argument is mischaracterized, either deceitfully or ignorantly, its conclusions are inherently suspect. An annoying theme of moderate Republicans is that conservatives cherish freedom and individualism to their detriment. David Brooks, the scrupulously moderate Republican, makes that case in a recent New York Times editorial, using the motif of Western movies as his backdrop.
He short-circuits his argument with the broad conclusion that Western directors such as John Ford didn't really celebrate rugged individualism, but rather, civic order. Brooks continues down the rabbit hole with his observation that,
Today, if Republicans had learned the right lessons from the Westerns, or at least John Ford Westerns, they would not be the party of untrammeled freedom and maximum individual choice. They would once again be the party of community and civic order.
He goes on to describe how people build "orderly neighborhoods, and how those neighborhoods bind a nation." That takes him to the threats to achieving those goals, and, predictably, they land smack dab on the Obama administration's agenda: energy costs, health care, public and private debt (mysteriously, he forgot education). Brooks then lectures us that the party is out of touch with the "concrete relationships of neighborhood life."
Speaking about being out of touch, it's astonishing to read arguments that willfully overlook the fundamental principles at the core of conservatism: First, that it's not government's job to mastermind the civic structure and fabric of our Republic, and second, that community flows from the natural relationships that develop as a result of people pursuing their individual interests, from work to worship, not the ersatz liberal construct that seeks to spawn 'community' through expansion of government intrusion, using tools such as mandated recycling to public health initiatives.
Indeed, it's much less a matter of individual freedom than it is conservatism's wholesale dismissal of the liberal notion that it's government's rightful role to provide cradle-to-grave services, in a manner which just happens to mirror the left's values. It would apparently shock such urban moderates as Brooks--who truly has more in common with Democrats than he does with traditional Republicans--that Republicans are becoming angry as they see Obama and his liberal pals in Congress plotting to nationalize everything from energy to health care.
He closes his piece by juxtaposing his view of the liberal and conservative approaches to civic order, noting that the former "engineer order" and the latter allows "government to set the rules, but mostly empowers the complex web of institutions in which the market is embedded." We can only pray that the conservative agenda isn't limited to that second quote, because as vital as markets are, it's what conservatives demand the government doesn't do that is just as important--don't maintain its ideological monopoly in education, don't nationalize health care, don't create a regulatory energy edifice which will drive up costs, and don't appease our enemies.
These are challenging arguments to make in an age that seems so culturally inclined to accept the Faustian bargain of higher taxes and regulation in exchange for an alleged guarantee of a higher quality of life, of universal happiness. What Obama et al seem to completely miss is that Americans have historically found happiness by living their lives according to their own values and principles, not by an engineered civic code undergirded by a liberal orthodoxy.
In brief, all we want of the government is a modicum of market regulation, then just deliver the mail and guard the borders. Happiness is a personal concern, and we're quite capable of pursuing it on our own.
It's an article of liberal faith that race and gender are dispositive of values and principles, which is one reason so many Americans voted for an American of mixed African descent, a charismatic neophyte, who also happened to be a hard leftist. We're about to repeat that exercise as President Obama begins the process of vetting candidates to replace Supreme Court justice David Souter.
If you breeze through the lists of likely candidates they're invariably a racial minority, a female, but, most assuredly, they're well left of center and they subscribe to the activist approach to jurisprudence. In an informal discussion over the weekend with some attorney friends, a political mix from across the spectrum, the only area of agreement was that Mr. Obama will choose a stealth activist, someone who subscribes to the so-called "living" Constitution theory.
As you can guess, that line of reasoning uses a version of post-modernist legal theory to argue that the Founding Fathers' conceptualization of law is inherently archaic, mired in 18th century intellectual conventions and ideas. America in the 21st century, so they argue, is not merely different in degree but in jurisprudential genus, which is to say we've evolved to the point where a 'privacy right' can be divined in the Constitution to sanction the murder of the innocent unborn.
As Mark Levin persuasively argued in his book, Men in Black: How the Supreme court is Destroying America, judicial activism has undermined the vision of our Founding Fathers and eroded our Constitution's separation of powers construct, which is so vital to justice and the rule of law. So, when we hear Obama assure us there will be no litmus test for nominees we must suppress a chuckle because his blinkered endorsement of race and gender as indicative of values is wholly transparent.
The balkanazation of America in the past several decades demonstrates how the left conceptualizes our Republic, which is a nation with a multiplicity of visions, a rainbow of values, each of which is informed by a unique rendering of our Constitution. That leads to the wholesale justification for either ruling out or exploiting racial or gender variables, based on their ability to realize a desired outcome.
That's how we came to be saddled with racial quotas, which has seen such perverse outcomes as the son of a black orthopedic surgeon winning a scholarship over the son of a white bricklayer. The list is as lengthy as it is hostile to the common good as it makes presumptions of aptitude based on race, something the Rev. Martin Luther King fought against his entire life.
Add to this mix the internationalization of American law, which will surely be highlighted in the confirmation hearings, and you have the fundamentals in place to ensure the slow decay of our nation's sovereign authority, something no other nation would tolerate.
With the potential for choosing a total of three members of the court, Obama's imprint will likely have a powerful impact on the cases it hears for decades to come. That the left's arrogance is unbounded is unambiguous, which is why they're over-reaching so early in the game, both economically, and, in this instance, in fundamentally realigning the court to ensure its ability to legislate from the bench. It's a stunning abrogation of our Constitution, but one they justify for the tandem goals of power retention and transforming America into a socialist state.
The loss of Senator Arlen Specter to the Democrats has already triggered angst and soul-searching among various Republicans, notably Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine. Her piece in today's New York Times is emblematic of the challenges the Republican Party faces, but not in ways she describes.
Her premise is that had the party moderated itself and been more politically ecumenical, moderates such as Specter wouldn't feel compelled to leave. She tellingly quotes Ronald Reagan, who said:
We should emphasize the things that unite us and make these the only ‘litmus test’ of what constitutes a Republican: our belief in restraining government spending, pro-growth policies, tax reduction, sound national defense, and maximum individual liberty. As to the other issues that draw on the deep springs of morality and emotion, let us decide that we can disagree among ourselves as Republicans and tolerate the disagreement.
We can certainly agree that Reagan's list of core Republican principles constitute the bulwark of our shared beliefs, however the problem we must confront is the impact of profound changes in our culture in the past few decades. In an age of relative cultural homogeneity, when Americans shared a tacit acceptance of what constituted right and wrong, the moral outliers were less extreme, and therefore, less concerning.
For example, thirty years ago it would shock people to hear that the newly elected president supports legislation allowing a teenager to have an abortion without notifying her parents, as well as the 'morning after' pill for seventeen year olds. We can add to that the liberal agenda which is faithfully taught in our public school system as well as our colleges and universities, from a disdain of Western thought to their unreflective celebration of all things heterodoxical.
Therefore, for moral agnostics, limiting the party platform to fiscal, monetary, and foreign policy, makes perfect sense. But, for those who are deeply concerned about the pandemic of cultural and moral anarchy, who see America slowly morphing into a version of Sweden, where abortion and assisted suicide are common and where guns are anathema, these issues are paramount.
It's against that backdrop that Specter's defection must be viewed. Indeed, whether it's fiscal or social policy, today's moderate is yesterday's liberal, since they either subscribe or acquiesce to Keynesian spending and are therefore mute in the face of unprecedented federal spending; and, in social policy they subscribe to the secular agenda which is studiously indifferent to the moral implications of the hard left's policies, the very policies that have led to the breakdown of traditional values, from defining marriage as between a man and a woman to endorsing the teaching of the new three 'R's, racism, reproduction, and recycling.
Snowe concludes by asserting that "we should view an expansion of diversity within the party as a triumph that will broaden our appeal. That is the political road map we must follow to victory." However, in politics, the definition of victory is largely in the eye of the beholder: Is it victory or a dereliction of duty to support President Obama's fiscal policy which will double the national debt in four years? Well, Snowe and Specter were two so-called moderates who supported the president, which makes one wonder how she can lionize Reagan's vision of "restraining government spending, pro-growth policies, tax reduction."
As I've argued in past posts, the reason there's a growing gulf between Republicans and conservatives is that many of the former seem intent on parroting Democrats' belief in larger government, unchecked spending, and a wholesale indifference to traditional values. Historically, being a champion of traditional Republican principles implied an adherence to traditional moral values, but today those people are often vilified as 'conservatives.'
That's why bona fide Republicans such as Sens. Mitch McConnell and Tom Colburn, and Reps. Mike Pence and Eric Cantor, are convinced that the party must reflect traditional Republican values, not today's watered down version which are effectively indistinguishable from Democrats.
When truth fails to achieve the political traction we seek, some of us resort to hyperbole and distortion. Such is the case with Jimmy Carter's piece in today's New York Times concerning the so-called assault weapons ban.
Carter's specious polemic uses the same threadbare liberal line that begins with his love of hunting, that he himself owns guns, but quickly descends in to the marsh, with his blunt segue:
But none of us wants to own an assault weapon, because we have no desire to kill policemen or go to a school or workplace to see how many victims we can accumulate before we are finally shot or take our own lives.
Well, no one is forcing Mr. Carter to own an assault weapon, but I can assure him that everyone I know who owns a high capacity .223 rifle shares his sentiment about not wanting to "kill policemen," etc. However, they do enjoy shooting at the range and in the rural outdoors and their choice of weapons is no one's business, least of all a former president whose understanding of the 2nd Amendment is on a par with his veneer-thin understanding of our economy.
We turn now to the dishonest, and, at times ignorant mischaracterization of weapons the left includes in their list of "assault" weapons. There are certainly many rifles that look as though they might be carried by a member of our Special Forces, when, in fact, the SF would have nothing to do with them, since, among other shortcomings, they're not automatics. That stated, they are, in fact, deadly weapons that can cause serious carnage, but only in the hands of a murderer.
And, therein lies the real crux of the matter: There is a wealth of statistics produced in the past decade that demonstrates that stricter gun control laws provide little, if any, measurable improvement in public safety. In fact, the inverse is true: As John Lott showed in his book, "More Guns, Less Crime," in the two year period following a state's approval of concealed carry permits, violent crime was reduced an average of 8 percent.
Moreover, statistics from the federal government demonstrate that the ten-year "assault weapons" ban did not substantively improve our safety. It's because of those statistics, not Carter's cynical assertion that Congress and President Bush caved to pressure from the National Rifle Association, that the ban wasn't renewed.
Carter continues with another transparent canard:
Heavily influenced and supported by the firearms industry, N.R.A. leaders have misled many gullible people into believing that our weapons are going to be taken away from us, and that homeowners will be deprived of the right to protect ourselves and our families.
President Obama is on record as supporting a lengthy list of gun control laws, from federal registration of handguns to mandating that all ammunition be traceable to the owner, which will profoundly undermine law-abiding citizens 2nd Amendment rights and effectively reduce the rate of ownership, which is his real goal.
What Obama, Carter, and their cohort of urban elites fail to understand is that criminals will always be able to obtain guns, and, that when you inhibit law-abiding citizens from owning guns, the crime rate spikes. A bumper sticker captures it all:
Criminals prefer unarmed victims.
From its warm embrace of Joseph Stalin to its abiding respect for Fidel Castro, the left in America has always been enamored of despots and tyrants. Given what the likes of Sean Penn is saying about Hugo Chavez, most recently in today's Huffington Post, it's clear the genetic blueprint that informs their political thinking has remained essentially unchanged in sixty years.
After the predictable litany of searing criticism against Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich, Penn offers the following astonishing statement:
I know President Chavez well. Whether or not one agrees with all his policies, what is certain true of Chavez is that he is a warm and friendly man with a robust sense of humor...
Historians will tell you that Hitler could be charming and that Castro's candor is disarming, but along with Chavez, they're on a short-list of men who lead by threats, intimidation, and murder. Their absolute indifference to due process and the rule of law is shocking to our collective understanding of civilized governance. Yet Penn and his liberal pals lionize them as paragons of decency, and President Obama fails to see the glaring contradiction between his recent decision to expose Department of Justice lawyers to potential legal action and his outreach efforts with despots.
Demonstrating that extremism is a limitless instinct, Penn asserts that "The Cheneys, down to the O'Reillys and Hannitys and Limbaughs, effectively hate the principles upon which were were founded." One has to wonder whether Penn has read the Federalist Papers, in particular Federalist 10, which best captures the core principles of our Republic, because, on a daily basis the men he cites above articulate those very principles, and to that list I would add Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Prager, and Michael Medved.
So far off the civic chart has the modern liberal drifted that it would be nearly impossible for a Jefferson, Hamilton, or Adams to recognize their contorted and abused approach to public policy. From the moral equivalence arguments they advance to justify tolerance of despots such as Castro, to their emasculation of our military, to their coddling of criminals, to their willfulness in characterizing terrorism as a matter for the criminal justice system, and, yes, to their dream of confiscating guns from law-abiding citizens, it's just staggering that the Penns of the world believe conservative commentators are the ones who "hate the principles upon which were were founded."
But, we should remember they're convinced they're the moral exemplars of the world, and if they say they are, well, that's all the proof they need.
Update, 4/21/09: Marc A. Thiessen's piece in today's Washington Post unambiguously proves that the enhanced interrogation techniques President Obama said have not made us safer, have, in fact, thrwated al-Qaeda plans to attack America.
In a transparently cynical political move, as Thiessen notes, "The Obama administration released pages of unredacted classified information on the techniques used to question captured terrorist leaders but pulled out its black marker when it came to the details of what those interrogations achieved." Perhaps this is Obama's notion of the post-partisanship he campaigned on last year.
The Obama administration is rapidly becoming a story-board for the adage that the arrogant and ignorant are bound to repeat history. Beyond his "can't we be friends" approach to dealing with the likes of Ahmadinejad, Castro, and Chavez, his latest folly was the release of legal memorandums related to the Bush administration's interpretation of torture and its practical application.
The attempt to define the outer edges of legally acceptable methods of extracting information from enemy combatants was a process integral to the former administration's understanding of its charge in protecting the nation from further attacks after 9/11. In virtually any other era in our nation's history that effort would have easily satisfied the legal and civic requirements of reasonableness. However, in our era, where exquisitely refined sensibilities have supplanted common sense and where one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter, palm-slapping such a suspect is tantamount to a chargeable offense, which means waterboarding is a heinous action redolent of Stalin and Saddam.
Writing in The Swamp, the Chicago Tribune's Washington Bureau outlet, Mark Silva reports on former CIA director Michael Hayden's articulate and cogent argument that the release of the memos makes "America less safe," which he made in an interview on Fox News Sunday.
What's difficult to understand is the left's supremely naive characterization of the interrogation methods used by the CIA. Waterboarding, which is used in the Air Force officer's flight training program, is a bloodless, painless process that's extremely effective in retrieving vital information concerning national security. Part of that naivete, as asserted by Sen. John McCain, is that unless we treat enemy combatants in strict accordance with our rules of criminal justice, our enemies won't reciprocate when our soldiers or Marines are captured.
You might recall that special kind of humane treatment in action in Fallujah when barbarians burned and then strung up the charred bodies of several American soldiers. Why do such critics seem impervious to the fact that savages who will behead perfectly innocent men such as Daniel Pearl and Nicholas Berg would treat captured soldiers in precisely the same way?
The second facet of Obama's astonishing act of stupidity is that it compromises the potency of interrogations in an a priori fashion. As Hayden noted: "At the tactical level, what we have described for our enemies in the midst of a war are the outer limits that any American would ever go to in terms of interrogating an Al Qaeda terrorist. That's very valuable information." But, of course, many on the left don't believe we're in a war, which is why Obama has proscribed the use of the phrases "war on terror" and "enemy combatant."
It's as though public relations for this neophyte executive are more important than results, which means it's all about style and spin, not bringing a deft and credible understanding of your enemy to bear on the problems we face. That's why he's embracing Castro, a despot worth about $1.5 billion who's starving his people and who's jailed hundreds of political dissidents without due process. In Obama's view, treating barbarians like allies will bring them into the fold of civilized nations.
As the most superficial review of history persuasively demonstrates, we've been down this road before. The only difference between Attila the Hun and Ahmadinejad is the clothing, but it's apparently going to take the development of a nuclear weapon to prove that to Mr. Obama.
One of the questions that serious commentators on both sides of the aisle are asking in the wake of the tea parties is whether they'll resonate with a broader spectrum of the electorate. There's probably a bit of overreach on both sides, with conservatives believing moderates and Independents are just as fed up with the obscene spending as they are, and liberals confident that those same people see the need for President Obama's fiscal 'investments.'
But until a movement achieves coalescence it can appear scattered and diffuse and that's the way liberals hope it stays. One sure way to keep that trajectory alive is to vilify its members and in that regard Arianna Huffington has perfect pitch, serving up her usual blend of hyperbole and distortion. If you try to digest her litany of sarcasm and disdain for all things conservative you'll miss the sub-text message, which is that liberalism under Obama has reached new pinnacle of superiority.
Conservatives, in this glimpse through the looking glass are all reactionaries who exploit political opportunities for craven motivations. That certainly plays well for readers of her blog who look to her for smug reassurances that liberalism under Obama will thrive, but the truth is something rather different. At the core of Obama's special brand of liberalism is an unprecedented shift from free markets to government sponsored services. We can talk about how government spending as a portion of GDP will grow from its 40-year average rate of 20 percent to 28 percent, and that in ten years the interest on the debt will $900 billion, but for most people those are abstract notions no easier to grasp than inter-stellar space.
But there is a concept that most of can get our arms around and that is the quality and character of the lives we lead, which is to say the degree to which we're living life on our own terms. When we cede control of our money to government in return for the promise of financial security and comfort, two inevitable results accrue:
First, whether it's health care or our investments, we delegate power over our decisions to a bureaucracy that's truly indifferent to our unique wishes and desires. It's like having a government-sponsored living will with advance directives for the kinds of decisions that are common and integral to adulthood, not for issues related to life and death.
Second, each time the government encroaches on decisions that are rightfully ours to make it recalibrates the thresholds and trigger points that define an acceptable level of intrusion such that our guard is lowered and we're progressively less likely to protest. If you use a kind of time-lapse photography to condense intrusions over many years it would be truly shocking, but since the liberals use a slow-drip process it's kind of like we're on tranquilizers--we just don't notice it.
It's difficult to understand what liberals see in a Western European style of government that's so attractive to them. Is it easier, or kinder, or more 'civilized,' or do they perceive it as more predictable and less stressful? It's obviously a quid pro quo they're entirely happy to accept, but when you consider the Faustian deal in the stark light of day it's remarkable they're willing to give up so much in return for a one-size-fits-all style of living.
And, why is the goal of living a stress-free life such a strong motivator? It seems we're constantly told to avoid stress and tension, that it leads to heart attacks and hypertension. Well, it's also the natural by-product of challenges at work, of meeting our obligations to our families, not to mention living up to the standards our religion demands. Are we truly at the point where we want to spin off life's challenges in return the bland reassurances of a government that plays a major role in our lives?
I pray that most Americans have the common sense to eschew the left's siren song of a world where our choices are scripted by government, a monochromatic world devoid of stress and challenges, where we're taxed into civic submission.
The great American Tea Party is underway nationwide as protesters of all political stripes gather in over 300 cities to protest the blasphemous way the Obama administration and congress is spending the Republic into a state of interminable debt. At the current rate, in 2019 the largest single annual federal expenditure will be a $900 billion interest payment on the national debt.
Yet, as Andrew Cline notes in his analysis of this egregious usurpation of power in The American Spectator, an astonishing 48 percent of Americans said their taxes were "about right." Cline's piece is worth reading as it provides a brief and digestible history of taxation in America. For instance, it will shock some readers to learn that in 1802, under President Jefferson, all direct taxation was abolished. Moreover, the War of 1812 was financed and paid off by 1817.
It's a fascinating lesson because the reason so many sheep--uh, tax payers--are so willing to be fleeced is that their understanding of our history might be generously characterized as inadequate. Indeed, Obama and his liberal pals in congress are threading the fear and ignorance needle, using the former as a cudgel to beat tax payers into pre-emptive submission and exploiting the latter by arguing it's a wholly plausible response to our economic woes.
Here in the Colorado Springs region, several towns are host to protests and the early indications are that they're being well attended. Since this is a conservative area, the citizens are especially angry about the kind of spending in Washington that's making drunken sailors look like fiscal church mice.
Within the broad spectrum of Americans who are apparently game to pay more in taxes is a group, a rather large group, who are touting it below the radar as the back door to socialism. They're the urban elites in D.C., New York, Chicago, and L.A., as well as many other enclaves of would-be Western Europeans, who have an inbred fear of free markets and who, once emasculated, are drones programmed to acquiesce to higher taxes, regulations, and a commensurate reduction in freedom.
The reason the monstrous level of taxation required to service Obama's massive spending is not causing more of a revolt is that our public school system has successfully produced a meta-curriculum designed to justify an intrusive--and expensive--role for government in our lives. Imagine, for instance, the shock of the average American in the early 19th century were he to learn that in 2009 citizens would be dunned upwards of 40 percent of their income in total taxes.
It's difficult to guess where all of this will lead, but the truth is that Americans have been historically antagnoistic to taxes, in part because they correctly believe government is not equipped to deliver services beyond defending the nation and delivering the mail. But, they also understand that an integral part of the American experience is succeeding on one's own, that failure case hardens us against future missteps, and that when government promises to smooth out life's bumps it also removes the challenges--which arrogantly blunts motivation.
So, as Americans protest from sea to shining sea, let's hope their efforts are just the beginning of a great awakening, one which insists that despite our economic trials, flushing trillions of dollars into the system, expanding the liberals' pet projects, starting new leftist programs, and consigning our children and grand-children with an onerous debt, is at once cynical and ignorant--not to mention unconstitutional.
One of the few immediate benefits of President Obama's recent international therapy session is that it provides an early benchmark against which we can easily measure the futility of dealing with the world's despots. One of the glaring implications of Mr. Obama's various speeches in Europe and elsewhere is that America has learned her lesson and will take a docile backseat to the world's powerhouse nations, those which sat idly during the genocidal conflagration in Bosnia in the 90s and who now express a fashionable, if lethal, indifference to a nuclearized Iran.
Writing in the National Review, Rich Lowry ably acquits the premise that, its stylish protestations notwithstanding, the world needs American might, in particular its ability to project power--the liberals' least favorite phrase in the English language. As he observes, the incident of piracy off the Somalian coast is a microcosmic example of how indispensable the U.S. military is in an age of regional anarchy and nascent nuclear threats.
The vapid response to North Korea's missile launch by the United Nations perfectly reflects the anemic potency of the world's presumed power brokers. Indeed, America's unique capacity for global reach is crucial in our age where authority and power are vilified as anachronistic relics rendered superfluous by our post-modern consensus that evil is a fiction crafted by those with imperialist instincts. Yet there appears to be a tacit, if not putative, universal agreement, that we can delay confronting Iran's nuclear program and that Kim Jong Il can be again cajoled with heating oil concessions.
In a stunning declaration of naivete, Obama is proposing that we cut military spending, in particular missile defense. Moreover, if he agrees that a counter-insurgency in Afghanistan is the best way to prevail, why isn't he calling for more soldiers and Marines? His rapidly acquired spending addiction seems peculiarly limited to propping up the liberal agenda, which has always been antagonistic to the military.
His broader response to the piracy conundrum will be another test of Obama's will, not to mention his understanding of the threats we face, in particular because there are no easy answers. Critically, any meaningful action of the kind that will immediately reduce future threats must involve strong and focused leadership, the kind that recalls Reagan staring down Gorbachev in Reykjavik, which caused universal condemnation. As history has subsequently demonstrated, Reagan's resolve ultimately led to the dissolution of the Soviet empire.
It's difficult to imagine Obama mustering that kind of strength against the likes of the pirates in Somalia, much less North Korea or Iran. He seems quite susceptible to the conventional notion that the antagonists we face today can be dealt with by diplomacy alone. In truth, the only authority belligerents respect is the kind that's backed with the threat of certain violence--a lesson he'll be forced to learn, one way or another.
One of Easter's enduring paradoxes is our universal hope--and prayer--that Christ's death and resurrection will translate into personal salvation. When we read in John 20: 1-9 that Jesus' tomb is empty, that only the burial cloths were found, we struggle to grasp the astonishing implications, as the prophesies from the Old Testament and subsequent Scriptural readings begin to fall into a symmetrical relief. As the word spread over the centuries and the truths of Christ's teachings were realized, the message of His saving sacrifice inspired artists and composers worldwide.
One of the most endearing hymns that came to poignant terms with the awe-inspiring notion of personal salvation is "How Great Thou Art." (This is a link to the audio. You can start the music, then toggle back to the lyrics below.)
This rendition is by the great Irish tenor, Ronan Tynan. The third verse is a stark reminder of His supreme sacrifice and how it can deepen our faith as we struggle to meet the challenges on our spiritual pilgrimage.
I. O Lord my God, When I in awesome wonder,
Consider all the works Thy Hands have made;
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
II. When through the woods, and forest glades I wander,
And hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees.
When I look down, from lofty mountain grandeur
And see the brook, and feel the gentle breeze.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
III. And when I think, that God, His Son not sparing;
Sent Him to die, I scarce can take it in;
That on the Cross, my burden gladly bearing,
He bled and died to take away my sin.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
IV. When Christ shall come, with shout of acclamation,
And take me home, what joy shall fill my heart.
Then I shall bow, in humble adoration,
And then proclaim: "My God, how great Thou art!"
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
Holy Saturday feels like the longest, emptiest day in the year. No Mass, no Presence in the church, no priest, no people. And, yet "something strange is happening," begins an ancient Christian homily. "God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear."
Today we follow the victorious Christ to the realms of the dead. Byzantine icons picture the wounded Warrior King standing astride his weapon, the cross, at the entrance to the underworld. He leans down and extends his hand to the foremost figure in the crowd, surging toward him. It is Adam.
He says: "Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead...I am your God, who for your sake have become your son. I did not create you to be held prisoner in hell. Rise up, work of my hands, for you were created in my image...Rise, let us leave this place. One after another he leads the just out."
Today we follow Christ the Victor in the darkness of pure faith. We believe it was for our sake that he died. He has paid for our ransom. We hope for everything from him. Close to his Mother, today, we wait.
Mother Mary Thomas Noble, O.P.
It's time for a bit of comic relief and this time it comes courtesy of Alec Baldwin, one of many actors who has repeatedly demonstrated the truism that talent is, in fact, limited to one's avocation. Writing in today's Huffingtonpost, Baldwin is the left's cheerleader-in-residence for the intellectually flaccid New York Times, a paper that's been earning its way onto the endangered publication list for many years.
One of the hallmarks of intellectual incestuousness is the inability to peer over one's horizon and Baldwin's infatuation with the Times fits the definition perfectly. Haughty, acerbic, and preternaturally indifferent to journalistic standards that demand a bright line between reporting and editorials, the Times is the left's bible, something to help them suffer through another day in America where vestiges of capitalism and free enterprise still prevail.
In a stunningly generous concession, Baldwin asserts:
I still think people should read a newspaper every day and that children should be taught the importance of doing so in school. Television news can be good. It just isn't as good as the New York Times.
First, he fails to tell us exactly why we should read a newspaper every day, much less why children should be taught to do so in school. Perhaps it's because an average of 89 percent of newspaper editors vote Democrat in any election, which is the left's proverbial fifth column. But can you imagine a more pedestrian observation than to note that the Times is better than television news?
He mentions an article about disputed workmen's compensation compensation cases as the apparent hallmark of sound journalism, with the implication that the injured downtrodden are being denied their rights under the law. You can tell Baldwin has never run a company or met a payroll because he's obviously never dealt with frivolous WC claims, which drain corporate funds, and add to overhead and lost productivity.
However, in the past decade the ugly truth about newspapers, and network television news, became common knowledge, and that is their exquisitely refined ability to select news that presents conservatism in a poor light while praising liberalism. Indeed, the fidelity they demonstrate to leftist policies, not to mention the lionization of the cultural anarchy they've created, is apparently obvious to everyone but themselves. Recall Walter Conkrite's nightly peroration, "And that's the way it is...", which was the thin veil of objectivity that's long since been lifted.
Other than liberals, people who read the Times or watch network news intuitively understand that they could be ingesting the Democrats' talking points. That's why Internet news sources have exploded in recent years, something that Baldwin fails to mention. It's not merely because they're easy to access, they provide an intensely wide variety of news and information and their bias is effectively disclosed at the outset. In contrast, reading the Times is an exercise in liberal hedonism, but if it's an echo chamber you seek, it's a veritable Shangri-La.
Perhaps you saw the protester's banner outside the G-20 Summit that read "Capitalism is Immoral." Writing at Townhall.com, Austin Hill explores this assertion and makes a reasonable foray into the argument's inner paradoxes, such as asking what the protester's alternative might be? The obvious answer is that draconian government regulation and controls to redistribute income more aggressively would mitigate capitalism's inherent unfairness.
However, by embracing that argument, Mr. Hill overlooks a more fundamental one: Why is it that people who are convinced they have the moral right to slaughter innocents in the womb also believe their are default moral arbiter in economics? Indeed, this is the same crowd--nay, mob--who would abrogate our 2nd Amendment rights, ensuring that only criminals are armed, who embrace illegal aliens who are draining our public coffers, and who would emasculate our military while inviting radical Islamists in through the front gate.
But, as we descend into the inner-workings of their argument, the first point is radically clear: Regardless of the fact that America has the world's second highest corporate income tax, and that its personal income tax rates are already painfully progressive, it doesn't "give back" to the fiscally unwashed masses in sufficient amounts as to render it 'moral.' Therefore, despite the fact that the top 1 percent of income earners pay 39 percent of all federal income taxes and that the top 5 percent pays 58 percent (and, that the bottom 50 percent pays 4.3 percent), the unalloyed liberals feel it's still not 'fair.'
Beyond the fact that this demonstrates it's not, in fact, about fairness, it proves that such arguments have a limitless elasticity and inexhaustible capacity to soldier on, the abundance of evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. It's also a testimony to our public education system, our jaundiced media, and our 'higher' education system, that work in refined harmony to ensure the next generation is thoroughly inculcated with the notion that capitalism is all about greed, not opportunity, that there are winners and losers--which, of course there are and ought to be--and that the latter are permanently mired in failure.
The truth, of course, is a rather more mundane matter. The 'fairness' the left lionizes is really only a matter of a nominally level playing ground, which is to say, bi-lateral contracts, freely negotiated. That begins with the employment contract: Neither the employer nor the employee is forced to accept the contract and neither is obliged to maintain it against his will. It also covers the marketplace: If you want to drive the extra miles to Wal-Mart to save up to thirty percent on groceries, it's your call; the same goes for negotiating with the flinty used car salesman--you can play hardball, but if you don't have the skills or nerve, you'll likely pay sticker price.
The reason all of this is to distasteful to liberals is twofold: First, it places the onus entirely on you, regardless of your innate intelligence, aptitude, or saviness; and, second, by definition, if you fail, it's your fault, which nullifies the left's lengthy (and self-serving) list of excuses, from 'the system,' to one of its many '-isms,' all of which whittle away at the real truth, which is that each of us is ultimately responsible for our own success or failure.
Integrally related is the fact that one episode of failure doesn't mean we're out of the game, rather, it means we might well have learned something to better prepare us for the next challenge. But, in the left's 'zero-sum' game, failure is at once final and humiliating.
There is, in fact, nothing whatsoever 'immoral' in capitalism, which is the system that has lifted more people and nations out of poverty than any other. Because, it not only encourages innovation and risk-taking, it requires us to include accountability in the equation, and, when we're accountable, we tend to play by the rules. That is conspicuously lacking in the left's endorsement of the government as the economic arbiter. Moreover, self-interested behavior becomes an oxymoron when we're obliged to live in a statist nation.
A political theme prevalent in President Obama's remarks abroad this week is that America has learned its lesson. It doesn't require a sub-text analysis in the vein of policy deconstruction to see where this is heading. Given his thin political resume and colorful associations over the years, the central question that prescient observers asked during and after the campaign was whether the world generally, and Western Europe specifically, would become more like America or vice versa.
Some skeptics, and almost all cynics had answered that question long before his inauguration, but after listening to his speeches this week it's only intellectual troglodytes who deny where this trajectory is leading.
Obama's pattern of self-effacing remarks about America not only betrays a deep and unthoughtful ignorance of our Republic but also about the office he holds. For reasons that remain inexplicable, modern post-Kennedy Democrat presidents seem politically engineered to confuse their incumbency with the office. It's as though in their eyes the political clock ceased to exist prior to their inauguration which led them into summarily misguided thinking concerning America's standing in the world.
More inclined to apologize for America's missteps and foibles than to champion her unalloyed values and principles--those that twice saved the world from despotism last century--they might well have coined a variation of the Stockholm Syndrome, effectively agreeing with our critics. That lead each of them into a feckless foreign policy: from Johnson's astonishingly obtuse prosecution of the Vietnam war to Carter's ingeniously flawed policy in Iran and many other places, to Clinton's thoroughly misinformed Agreed Framework with North Korea and his studied blindness to the threat of radical Islam, the record is stained with a pattern of ineptitude and naivete that's simply stunning.
Now we're entering yet another chapter of Democratic governance and the early indications are clear: domestically, America will soon approximate a mirror image of the worst Western Europe has to offer, with massive federal spending (and taxation) which hobbles productivity and transfers interminable debt to our children; in foreign affairs, the quaint notion of American exceptionalism has been vilified and supplanted by Obama's insistence that America is merely one of twenty in the G20, an equal that knows its place and pledges to cease throwing its weight around.
This may play in our confessional age, where lugubrious disclosures about past sins are on a par with mortal sainthood, but when the sitcom stops and policy implementation begins, the tension will mount. Indeed, whether it's the Afghanistan-Pakistan quandary or the Iranian conundrum or the North Korea Rubik cube, Mr. Obama's fashionable subjugation of America on the world stage will have to give way to the need for real leadership, the kind that history demonstrates is so conspicuously lacking among our friends across the foam.
It's at that juncture that Obama will be confronted with the grim limitations of statecraft, of the oxymoronic notion of a defense underwritten by State Department fiat. The most prominent feature of that genus of foreign policy is the willful and churlish indifference of Western Europe to the threat of radical Islam generally and Iran specifically. By welcoming the enemy through their front gates, a la their nascent civic laws and judicial decisions that provide disparate rights for Muslims, they've signaled their incapacity to ever agree to a regimen of harsh sanctions against Iran, which is the only viable first step to retard its impending acquisition of nuclear weapons.
Without the support of Great Britain, France, and Germany, Obama will find center stage a very lonely place, reciting the lines of his predecessor and intimately understanding firsthand the profound challenges of degrading our enemies' nefarious capabilities. Indeed, he'll find that the veneer of collegiality he forged this week won't be sufficient as the arch self-interest of those nations supersedes the global preoccupations that are unique to the United States--the only nation truly to able to prevail against the civilized world's foes.
But that requires a measure of cooperation and assistance from nations with a vested interest, which Mr. Obama will find conspicuously lacking.
One of the culturally corrosive by-products of modern liberalism is its cynical belief that charity can be mandated by funneling tax payer money through the government. It begins with the unflattering conviction that people are innately uncharitable, that unless it's codified through law, Americans won't give of their own free will. That, of course, is a lie in service to the political goal of expanding the government's power by injecting it with a distinctly political agenda, something liberals have been working at for decades.
We turn to James Bovard, writing in The American Conservative, who makes a compelling case for dismantling the expansive volunteer programs that have grown, Hydra-like, over the years. The problem, as he observes, is that although Democrats tend to be in the vanguard of confiscatory charity, Republicans have either acquiesced or elbowed their way to the podium to garner support back home for re-election.
What's lacking in this perverse paradigm is any hint of understanding that regardless of how laudable such programs might be, the government has no right picking the tax payers' pockets for what are clearly political objectives. We can stipulate that Habitat for Humanity and a host of other programs do provide socially ameliorating services, but beyond the quaint questions of constitutionality, the practical reality is that the government casts nets that are nearly limitless, and their catch brings in the likes of ACORN along with the more politically benign programs.
Mandated charity is indicative of the left's dream of a tacit consensus regarding the proper role of government, which is uniquely tooled to champion its liberal agenda. But when something is demanded by government fiat, regardless of how ostensibly worthy its cause, the spark that gives meaning to the act is snuffed. As Bovard notes in his conclusion:
A New York Times editorial on March 24 hailed the GIVE Act for providing “a chance to constructively harness the idealism of thousands of Americans eager to contribute time and energy to solving the nation’s problems.” But the GIVE Act is idealistic only if one believes that citizens should take their values—and their “moral opportunities”—from their rulers. Indeed, underling the liberals' motivation for conscripting the nation into volunteering is an abiding cynicism concerning the presumptive self-interestedness of the common man. In their view, pursuing one's economic interests is fundamentally at odds with the broader concern we have for the less fortunate among us. The exemplary instinct to care for others, according to the left's code of conduct, can only be bred by recourse to a kind of genetic engineering, in strict fidelity to government--read, liberal--dictums. They peddle this in conjunction with the uniformly liberal curriculum imposed by our public school system, which is why so many children and adults as well, are convinced of the evils of 'global warming' and believe that President Obama's political ecumenicalism will win the day with Iran, North Korea, and every other vile belligerent across the globe. It's also why it's so difficult for conservatism to get a fair hearing in our cultural court, where the judge is appointed by the same liberals who've bought and paid for the jury.
An image of the Obama administration is starting to take shape, and its contours seem to resemble the fecklessness so perfectly embodied by Jimmy Carter. We begin with the stark contrast between what Mr. Obama says and his actions. He has severely criticized the previous administration for its spendthrift policies, creating deficits in place of a large surplus, and protracting a war in the Middle East.
Now this freshly minted president, without so much as a moment of prior executive experience, is proposing to spend at a level that would mandate $800 billion interest payments on the debt every year, for years to come. He's adding troops to Afghanistan and will continue the CIA drone attacks in Pakistan, while irritating Iranian leaders with a PR video they immediately dismissed, and, he seems to be sputtering in his attempts to keep Kim Jong Il in a box.
Liberals in congress and across the blogosphere are irate (Robert Kuttner/Huffingtonpost) and attacking their own in ways that again recall Carter's curious attempts to deal with a rapidly deteriorating economy and problems abroad. The confidence that Obama exuded during the campaign has been replaced by a recurrent annoyance at his own party leaders who seem intent upon questioning his every move, concerned, as well they should be, that spending more in a couple months than the nation spent in its first two hundred-plus years, should give us pause.
What's so stunning is that Obama argues that health care, energy policy, and education also can't wait--we must lump them into this massive spending because, as his chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel said, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Given his poorly rehearsed performance in dealing with the complexities of the banking and housing meltdown, what can we expect from him in these critical areas?
Americans are, by nature and history, a tolerant lot, and they like to give new presidents time to find their leadership footing. But evidence that their patience is fraying has become apparent and Obama's teleprompter glibness and personal charm are beginning to wear thin, as is his insistence that he alone knows what's best for our ailing economy. Indeed, when the Huffingtonpost.com mounts substantive counterarguments to liberal economist Paul Krugman, who has argued against retaining the financial instrument known as securitization, we have a crisis of liberal thinking.
Yesterday, on Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace interviewed Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a conservative who noted that Canada doesn't allow securitized mortgages, which among other complexities are sold and resold with almost no understanding of their true worth. Moreover, he stated Canada will pull out of the current economic slump rather smartly, without the kind of deficit spending Mr. Obama is demanding.
All of this must be particularly vexing to the liberal establishment in America, convinced as it was that controlling the White House and congress would be the Holy Grail of politics. Well, let's not gloat because if Obama and his Democratic brethren in congress fail, America fails, and few of us want that. However, we also don't want to live in a socialist or quasi-socialist state, so it's incumbent upon conservatives to highlight the supreme folly of Obama's budget, his so-called rescue attempts, as well as his naive approach to dealing with the likes of Iran.
With assistance from liberals, who are incandescent with anger over Obama's faithful allegiance to the Bush approach here and abroad, perhaps a return to a more modest proposal may emanate from the White House. It's unlikely, but it's all we can hope for.
A telltale sign of political naivete in foreign affairs is when a president believes he's implementing an unprecedented approach to inherited problems when, in fact, it's the same tired script, just re-written, this time with embarrassing enthusiam. Such is the case with President Obama, whose recent video message to Iran epitomized the Harvard University approach to a problem that has vexed presidents for nearly three decades.
For two views of Mr. Obama's initiative, and its chances for even marginal success, we turn first to David Blair, writing in the UKTelegraph. His take, predictable by any historical measure, is that by appealing to Iran's youth and touting Iran's rich cultural legacy, the intransigent leadership will be flummoxed as to how they should respond. The argument is that former President Bush made their job easy because his approach was so unambiguously anti-Iran that it produced a "visceral anti-Americanism" in response.
With elections looming in Iran, Blair believes Obama will be restrained with respect to sanctions, which will presumably deprive Ahmadinejad of the opportunity to "parade his outrage." Yet another point that leads Blair to a sunny optimism is a line from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader in response to Obama's message: "If America changes its behaviour, we will change ours."
Since a studied ambiguity is the centerpiece of any intelligent foreign policy, it's obvious the Ayatollah has the upper hand in this initial skirmish. His implied quid pro quo is precisely what the State Department types find so enticing and leads them to believe, to paraphrase Chamberlain, that peace is at hand. It's monstrously misguided in the best of circumstances, but in dealing with a belligerent that has sworn to destroy Israel and calls America the Great Satan, it elevates the obtuse to Mensa-like heights.
Pulling ourselves back from the brink of the lemmings-leap, we turn to Mort Zukerman, writing in the New York Daily News. Among many other historical lessons, he notes that "Every U.S. administration since 1979--yes, including the last one--has reached out to the Iranians", and the response has been the same--a "clenched fist." For reasons as beguiling as particle physics, many on the left are convinced they can script a belligerent's responses to their expressions of good will, that there's a universal language of decency, if only they can decode it.
Unlike Blair's breezy characterization of Iranian leaders as men of eminent reason, Zukerman has both feet on the rhetorical ground:
The clock is ticking inexorably, a race against time that Iran is winning, getting nearer every day presenting the world with an Iranian bomb as a fait accompli.
He talks like a man who understands the icy world of international relations where diplomatic machinations are the only language nations share, and where craven self-interest is the only motivator. In that context, harsh sanctions is the only meaningful precursor to the credible threat of military action, an inevitability that Mr. Obama will have to recognize, now or later.
Although the economy is consuming Obama's immediate attention, we must confront the more latent--but nonetheless real, and grim--possibility of an Iran with a nuclear weapon, which would instantly transform the politics of the Middle East, in a way that would dwarf our concerns about GDP or unemployment. If, as Obama has asserted, a nuclearized Iran is "unacceptable," perhaps he should start acting that way.
Indeed, given the fact that most experts put their acquisition time-line at about twelve months, one might think Mr. Obama would sound a more urgent tone in his lofty video message. He should realize that this is not a dress rehearsal--there won't be a second change to get this right.
If you feel there's little to cheer about in President Obama's proposed budget--which would guarantee deficits for many years and grow the percent of GDP consumed by government--then take a moment to consider the real agenda that's developing on the horizon. For a glimpse of liberalism's limitless appetite, we turn to E.J. Dionne, who doesn't want trillion dollar deficits to dampen your political lust for "health care reform, energy conservation, and the expansion of educational opportunities."
Dionne argues that "There is certainly no way government can walk away from its responsibilities on education," and most Americans would agree with him. That responsibility might begin by offering inner city parents the same choice Mr. Obama and his elites have to send their children to the nation's best schools. That's call 'school choice' and it works everywhere it's been tried. But, for Dionne and his lefties, improving graduation rates and test scores has nothing to do with confronting failing schools, but rather, super-sizing the already bloated public school funding that's led to a monopoly, and the rank indifference it breeds.
His bland assertion that government must "reform health care" makes us guess what he might have in mind. Since there's millions in the stimulus package to prepare the nation for this initiative, one can only guess Obama means to fundamentally change how our health care is delivered, and it's doubtful the market place will have any say in the matter. Indeed, if there's a discernible theme in Obama's Leviathan spending plan it's that we can expect to be overwhelmed by money, but every dollar has liberal strings attached.
It's all about molding behavior, one person at a time. In the energy arena it means taxing carbon-based fuels and declaring carbon dioxide a toxic chemical, this despite the fact that at least 90 percent of greenhouse warming from CO2 is from water vapor. As Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com writes in his new book, "Green Hell":
There is no scientific evidence indicating that carbon dioxide, much less man-made carbon dioxide emissions, control or even measurably impact global climate. This is true whether you look at data going back 650,000 years, data from the twentieth century, or even data from the past ten years. Alarmist predictions of climatic doom are based exclusively on hypothetical mathematical models that have never been validated against the real world.
The fact that 31,000 scientists refused to sign the United Nation's so-called consensus on global warming, and only 2,000 did, might tell you something about the integrity of the left's goal to push us into alternative fuels that could hobble our economy for decades.
Our Founding Fathers designed our government with the deliberate intent of ensuring that the passage of legislation and implementation of laws would require a series of tests, including a vast array of checks and balances. The bicameral system, with staggered terms of service, with the House being the body closest to the people and requiring two Senators per state regardless of geographic size or population, was the surest way to ensure that only reasonable bills would ever see the light of day.
However, when the majority of our elected officials seem to be minted from the same peculiar political alloy, one determined to raise stupidity to a virtue, where do we turn for common sense?
It's been said that what humans fear most is a maze with a series of false centers. Well, Washington is the political equivalent, and Obama seems intent upon creating an endless universe of false centers, all fully funded.
With the passage of time, anomolies, whether biological or political, inevitably surface. Such is the case with the stunning revelation that I'm in agreement with Arianna Huffintgon, whose post concerning the AIG bonus debacle charges the Obama administration with hypocrisy and cynicism.
As you've doubtless learned, officials at Treasury supposedly insisted on a modification of a provision allegedly inserted into the stimulus bill by Sen. Chris Dodd (with co-author Sen. Ron Whden) that would have prohibited bonuses at companies receiving tax payer funds. Now, Dodd is being accused of game-playing with the language and is fighting withi TS Geithner. But however this turns out, as Huffington correctly asserts, it creates a credible trail to someone in Obama's administration.
In a rare disagreement with Charles Krauthammer, who argues that the bonuses reflect a pittance, a tempest in a teapot, I see it as yet further evidence that political considerations routinely trump not only common sense, but the common good. Huffington quotes Sen. Wyden, who lamented:
It is the ultimate indictment of what Washington has become. It's a place where, again and again, the public interest is deep-sixed behind closed doors and without any fingerprints. From children in poverty to the challenges in the Middle East, ours is a trouble world. But America has always been a place where the virtues of decency and good will brought out the best in its citizens. Although every generation has examples of unethical, cynical, or illicit behavior by elected officials, when the values that underlie our political system become tainted by craven self-interest, when judgment is corrupted by a thorough-going disregard for moral precepts, we've effectively entered a new age informed by incipient anarachy. What does this say about Mr. Obama, who, along with Geithner, certainly must have known about these bonuses? There is clearly some kind of inadvertent disconnect between Obama's overwrought, socialism-lite agenda and his ability to perpetuate his rapidly fading image of post-political bipartisanship. Moreover, the expiration date for his convenient line--"we inherited this crisis"--has already passed, or as they say at used car dealerships, once you're off the lot, all noises, pings, and knocks are yours. The Congressional Budget Office now says the Obama-generated deficits will be $2.3 trillion higher than his crack economists predicted. All of this is slowly seeping into the public's political conscience, and the drip, drip, drip--that familiar sound of leaking political capital--will become progressively more difficult for this neophyte executive to confront. Already, many moderate Democrats are wondering aloud what happened to their opportunity to advance the agenda of fiscal restraint, to reach across the aisle to like-minded Republicans who share their concern that we're drowning our children in red ink while awakening the giant known as inflation. With the predictable exception of those on the hard left, Americans are already asking themselves, is Obama guilty of false competence or poor judgment? Perhaps it's both, with a tincture of arrogance.
It's both wise and healthy to periodically gauge one's intellectual adversaries, and a review of the collective outrage from the left in the wake of former vice president Dick Cheney's interview on CNN, proves that it's also instructive. One can argue whether it's smart this early in President Obama's tenure to criticize him, but beyond the substantive arguments for or against warrantless wiretaps or 'alternative' interrogation techniques, it's the hyperactive response by liberals that makes it enjoyable political theater.
Note the tenor of the quotes in the CNN article, in particular, Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Penn.), who argues that the Bush administration's policies undercut "what is actually the source of America's greatness--our principles," and, hewing closely to the victimology of war, states that "The cost of this war [Iraq] is something that I strong believe has far, far hurt us."
So, the Sestaks of the world deliberately--read, willfully--overlook the fact that 26 million Iraqis now have the chance, for the first time in many decades, to establish a rudimentary form of democracy in their nation, which was so brutally savaged. Moreover, with Iran close to realizing its dream of a nuclear device, wouldn't the Middle East be a far more complicated, that is, dangerous, place were Saddam Hussein still threatening his neighbors?
Furthermore, Sestak and his ilk ignore the fact that you couldn't find a living soul in late September 2001 who believed the U.S. wouldn't suffer another terrorist attack on its soil, yet in the ensuing eight years, it never happened.
When it comes to the history and operational evolution of warrantless wiretaps, you'll find few on the left who have done the heavy lifting. I covered this extensively in a January post titled A Defense of the NSA's Warrantless Wiretap Program, and although it's far from exhaustive, it's more than you'll garner from most major news sources, in print or on-line. But the left seems much less concerned about advancing the most effective strategy to safeguard America than amassing political capital to advance its electoral goals.
The issue of enemy combatants--a term the Obama administration has indicated it will no longer use--is another topic the left has failed to come to terms with. As I argued in my January post on the subject, titled The Gitmo Conundrum, merely signaling your desire to close the prison, something we can agree would be ideal, is hardly tantamount to realizing the goal. Mr. Obama seems to be on the early edge of the learning curve where vexing problems, from the Middle East to Gitmo, are much easier to summarily resolve when campaigning than when governing.
To complete our tour we'll turn to the breezy leftist commentary writer, Joan Walsh, whose piece in Salon.com, begins with a Cheney broadside, shocked that he had the temerity to "pounce on a new administration so quickly." Perhaps she forgets the unflattering way in which former President Clinton, from the outset routinely excoriated the Bush administration, but such details might confuse the matter.
What's truly at issue is that when liberals mount arguments against conservatives, they--and the media--characterize it as 'thoughtful criticism' or 'evolved thinking.' But, when we reverse the field, to quote White House press secretary Gibbs, it's the "Republican cabal," or, as Walsh calls them the "GOP hatchet men." She and many other arch liberals are so deeply invested in their self-perpetuating hatred of Cheney and Bush that they want them charged with war crimes.
As is always the case, history will sort all of this out, since wisdom seems to expand exponentially with the passage of time, which provides the perspective we need to reach candid, rather than politicized conclusions. In the meantime, regardless of how vehemently the left tries to discredit the Bush administration, most Americans are thankful they've been kept safe the past eight years, and, that Iraq is a fledgling bastion of democracy.
Those who follow the contorted evolution of our cultural development know that one of the many by-products of the modern age is the endangered status of personal responsibility. Indeed, our collective infatuation with victimhood leads many among us to conclusions that would be laughable were they not so hostile to the common good. From the social-psychologizing of criminal behavior, which convinces many that the real victims of crime are the perpetrators, to the more generalized but nonetheless vexing tendency to provide an itemization of excuses for personal foibles, ours is a culture in wholesale denial of traditional notions of individual accountability.
Having just completed a trial that stemmed from a casualty claim against our corporation, I can now personally attest to the remarkable elasticity of the human tendency to rationalize improvident behavior. Some years ago, a client of ours allegedly tripped on a weather mat placed outside our office and suffered injuries which resulted in expensive medical treatment. Just before the two-year statute of limitations was to expire, our corporation was notified of her lawsuit. After two more years of legal wrangling, this week it finally went to trial.
As the corporate representative, I was involved in every step of the process, both during the pre-trial phase and the court proceedings. What would have struck the average person most is how it was allowed to get to court in the first place. The most salient fact in the case is that the hallway outside our office where the mat was placed was, according to our lease, unambiguously under the contractual control of our landlord, not our company. Moreover, the plaintiff had a history of personal injury lawsuits as a result of 'slip and fall' incidents. But, in the highly evolved labyrinth of the modern legal sensibility, the judge ruled that there was a dispute concerning the facts, a determination wrought from thin air. So, to trial we went.
Anyone who has been through something like this understands how a disconcerting sense of implied guilt quickly develops at the hands of a skilled plaintiff's attorney. Without so much as a scintilla of evidence, he was able to craft a line of questioning that reversed the guilt or innocence equation such that I was in the awkward position of trying to acquit myself (and my corporation) from a position of presumed guilt--it's the "Have you stopped beating your wife" syndrome.
The jury selection process confirmed what I knew about the Colorado Springs area, which is that it might be one of the last bastions where individual responsibility thrives, something of an anachronistic relic of an era now consigned to the cultural history books. Upon questioning of the juror candidates by the attorneys it was obvious that few had any respect for personal injury lawsuits.
However, during the trial it was impossible to judge how the jury was responding to witness testimony, so as it concluded, the attorneys representing the corporation were quite guarded about the outcome. But, after only deliberating half an hour we were notified they had reached a verdict, which, our lead attorney informed me typically meant we would either be completely exonerated or found completely guilty. Fortunately, it was the former.
But, as always, I tried to solve the conundrum that lurked beneath the surface, which is why people today seem so entitled to recompense for injuries that are demonstrably the result of their own behavior? Along with so many other virtues that have been cavalierly discarded in the last fifty years, the one called personal honesty, which demands that we candidly reconcile our accounting of the facts with those of the real world, has been abused beyond recognition.
The result is that we've long since passed the threshold where ethical integrity reflexively forces people to admit guilt, or, at least their complicity in events that have adversely impacted them. Rather, they sheepishly agree with the internal voices of intellectual hubris that insist upon their innocence, which are faithfully echoed by a culture unmoored from its moral footings. In this case, it was a brace of personal injury attorneys, trained in the art of deflecting responsibility, thoroughly convinced as they are, that their client has every legal--and apparently moral--right to exploit the system for her own gain, the truth be damned.
How about a respite from the rigors of national politics? Although the subject of homelessness may not compete with the economic debacle our nation faces, it's one that provides a moral window into our collective soul.
As you've read over the years, not all people who live on the streets are there due to economic circumstances. Some of them are there by choice and they prefer to live that way. This doesn't address that group, but rather those who, for a variety of reasons, are unable to support themselves or their families, or who suffer from some kind of mental illness which prevents them from making sound decisions.
As is the case nationally, here in Colorado Springs a discussion periodically rises to the civic surface concerning what to do with "these people." Although such community conversations typically include the programs that various charities sponsor to assist those in need, they also highlight the concerns of retailers who have an understandable economic interest in not having the streets inundated by "street people."
However, the manner in which the conversation is conducted, including the way people define the problem and the those involved, is a revealing exercise that tells us much about ourselves as a society.
I wrote a letter to the editor in response to an article in the Gazette, our local paper, that was published today. Scroll down to "Give help, not criticism."
If you glance below the headlines of our major newspapers as well as the mainstream media's news programs, you can't help but notice the tsunami of discontent that's sweeping the country. Although the original cause is our economic crisis, its proximate cause is President Obama's response to it, which, as the moderate economist Robert Samuelson writes in Newsweek, amounts to willful dishonesty.
You might recall how effervescent the Democrats were when Obama crashed onto the national political scene. This was a transformational politician, one who will lift us from our complacency and create bipartisanship for the greater good of America. Although it was lofty rhetoric, the kind that captures the hearts of both idealists and the naive, many Americans saw through Obama's words and focused instead on his record and stated agenda--something the media meticulously avoided.
Although Samuelson provides a bevy of information concerning the various ways in which Obama is being deceitful, two stand out prominently.
If Obama were "responsible," he would conduct a candid conversation about the role of government. Who deserves support and why? How big can government grow before higher taxes and deficits harm economic growth?
But you'll never hear him raise that issue because it would stimulate the real discussion we should be having and that is how government spending has never improved the economy. Indeed, the higher the percent of GDP consumed by government spending, the poorer our economy performs.
More fundamentally, with the exception of wartime, Americans have tended to be cautious about a major role for government because they correctly understand that, on balance, government does few things well. Moreover, when it takes on an out-sized presence in our lives, we must feed it with more of our hard-earned cash and it typically leads to a reduction in individual freedoms.
Samuelson's second crucial point deals with national security:
National security has long been government's first job. In his budget, defense spending drops from 20 percent of the total in 2008 to 14 percent in 2016, the smallest share since the 1930s. The decline presumes a much safer world.
We should all be concerned about Obama's implicit judgment that the world will be a much safer place. We needn't itemize the threats, but they would certainly include an incendiary Pakistan, Iran, North Korea, and global terrorism from radical Islamists, not to mention an unstable Afghanistan. How exactly does this translate into a six percent reduction in defense spending?
Samuelson finishes his piece by noting what's been obvious to all but liberals and their foot soldiers in the media:
During the campaign, Obama said he would change Washington's petty partisanship; he also advocated a highly partisan agenda. Both claims could not be true. The media barely noticed; the same obliviousness persists.
Being the moderate he is, he generously asserts that the media "barely noticed" the disparity between Obama's political Hallmark cards and his actual agenda; a more candid characterization is that the media has been and is guilty of a dereliction of its duties. It's only because the Internet provides millions of Americans with a measure of truth that we're starting to see a groundswell of opposition, and it's by no means just from Republicans.
Obama hasn't even reached his hundredth day and he's already laid the groundwork for protracting our economic recovery as well as installing a vast set of new federal obligations which will haunt the nation for decades.
It certainly is 'change,' but it's the kind that's hazardous to our civic and economic health.
As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in his seminal work Democracy in America, modern versions of ancient regime change are different in both genus and character. Historically, nations and city-states appeared on the horizon, found their economic footing, defended their borders, and if they were measured in their acquisition of land, maintained their power until a greater one confronted them.
It was typically a bloody affair, featuring a series of battles over several years, such as the Persians and the Greeks, first at Marathon, then Thermopylae, or, later, the Peloponessian Wars, and later still, the Punic Wars. In modern times, as de Tocqueville noted, the demise of great regimes will result from the improvident imposition of statist bureaucracies, which, over many years, impose an insidious regimen that features centralized power with a myriad tentacles that work their way into every aspect of our lives.
Its goal is the slow strangulation of freedom and accountability, and the commensurate dependence on government, to replace the capitalist oxygen in our free market system with a noxious mix of government fumes. Writing in the Times of London, Tim Reid outlines the political contours of President Obama's gambit, which, for the attentive, have become apparent over the past several weeks. As he astutely states:
Its goal is not just to rescue the economy. It is to crush conservatism, end the age of anti-tax, anti-regulation policies that have been the guiding philosophies of US governance for a generation, and usher in a fresh “epoch”, as his aides call it, of New Deal-Great Society wealth redistribution and central intervention that were repudiated by Ronald Reagan 30 years ago.
Beneath that dark vision is a deep and cynical disdain for our system of free markets and the feckless endorsement of socialism, first in principle, then, in practice. Obama's exploitation of our flawed health care system is merely one of several proxies that he's pressing into service for a greater cause. Indeed, there's no evidence whatsoever that our health care system is a primary cause of our economic distress, yet he stood before reporters yesterday and stated that every thirty seconds a family goes into foreclosure as a result of health care problems. Fact checkers quickly disputed his numbers, after which a White House aid had to sheepishly admit he was using obsolete data.
For those not in the thrall of Obama-mania, his two-track agenda is conspicuously apparent. The goal is to nationalize as many facets of our society as possible, to make Americans permanently dependent upon government, according to the liberal code.
As our financial markets continue to slide, erasing more wealth and retirement funds for more Americans, many on the left deny that President Obama's rescue plan is to blame. They argue that his predecessor is the culprit and that Obama and congressional Democrats are merely trying to correct the underlying problems. But their every action belies that fact because nothing is being done to address the banking industry's systemic problems, much less the investment industry's corrupt system which allowed billions of equity to disappear overnight.
Liberals can reassure the lemmings among us that the Dow, NASDAQ, and the S&P 500 will recover, but those indices are the most reliable indicator of faith in the future we know, and they're on a downward trajectory that's killing baby-boomers and retirees alike.
Watch closely in the next few months as Obama continues to push for expanded justifications for government intervention, making permanent hundreds of new programs and running up trillions in deficits. It's all part of his grand scheme to remake America in the hideous image of the failed socialist regimes of Eastern Europe, where the government makes all our decisions, from cradle to grave.
De Tocqueville was right--in modern times, great nations will die slowly, bled to death by a government with hegemonic designs. Obama's presidency is just chapter one.
It's easy to understand why the hard left loathes Rush Limbaugh: He's an unapologetic conservative who performs a daily ritual of eviscerating liberal pieties to the applause of about twenty million listeners. For the tongue-tied lefties whose radio shows have become the subject of ridicule nationwide for their superb inability to retain an audience, Limbaugh is a galling reflection of their pitiful inability to reach the America outside the bell jar of their nativist liberal thinking.
For a convincing example, we turn to our billboard of reliably liberal ranting, the Huffington Post, and this time it's Bob Cesca who delivers the vitriol. Bringing the usual blend of colorful caricature and insipid prose to the challenge, he makes up in incandescent rhetoric what he lacks in substance. He ties every Republican, from Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele to Rep. Mike Pence, former senator Rick Santorum, and former House member Tom Delay, to Limbaugh, branding them with the left's version of the scarlet letter, the "dittohead."
In the mix of this miasma, he provides the predictably incomplete quote by Limbaugh--that he wants President Obama to fail. Of course, for those lettered in reading comprehension, it's clear that the full quote asserted that if Obama's goal is to impose socialism on America, he hoped he would fail--rather a different characterization, n'est-ce pas? But, details, not unlike truth in debate, is yet another casualty of the modern liberal sensibility, and Cesca doesn't fail to live up to the full measure of leftist palaver.
Among other charges that suffer from a lack of evidence, Cesca calls Limbaugh a racist, while lampooning his Oxycontin addiction, and dragging out every ad hominen attack to pack his column with hyperbole and sneering sarcasm, all to compensate for his conspicuous lack of substance.
In truth, although some Republicans aren't comfortable with Mr. Limbaugh's brand of conservatism and on-air caustic attacks on liberalism, the reason he resonates with millions of listeners is the very reason liberal radio has been such an abject failure: Limbaugh's politics are predicated on a respect for our Constitution, on the vision of American exceptionalism championed by our Founding Fathers, and on the virtues of fiscal restraint and individual responsibility--all of which the left mocks, dismisses, and satirizes as stuffy, authoritarian, and obsolete.
Of course, in the heat of the national debate Rush can become overwrought, but it's not because he hates liberals, it's because he sees the slow degradation of America's traditional values and its impact on the Republic far more clearly than most of us, and it horrifies him.
It's because Limbaugh is so successful in chronicling liberalism's flaws and foibles that the left--including Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff--feel compelled to engage him in political battle. But, they don't have a microphone for three hours a day with a legion of faithful American listeners and cable network news shows that cover the daily skirmishes, where Mr. Limbaugh so ably decimates his enemies.
So, we're glad to step back and watch Cesca and his lefties excoriate Rush, as it's the kind of comedy we've come to expect from a party whose threadbare ideas--from income redistribution and an anemic military to support for the slaughter of innocent unborns and disarming law-abiding citizens to make them better targets for criminals--are tirelessly recycled in a desperate attempt to purchase political power.
It's quite a show.
Moderates, not unlike independents, seem to exist below the political radar, taking their modest sustenance wherever they can find it, while claiming that extremists on both sides are to blame for the lack of progress in addressing the critical issues facing the nation. Besides the luxury of remaining unscathed by avoiding political warfare, moderates and independents enjoy the benefit of providing lectures to the rest of us concerning the virtues of restraint and tolerance.
David Brooks, the well known moderate who writes for the New York Times, makes a credible case for the most palatable kind of moderation, the kind that's clearly right-of-center. Indeed, although he lumps "moderate liberals" in with his ilk, the former are a rare breed indeed. As you work your way through his editorial, you become progressively convinced of the sober-mindedness of his thinking. Brooks favors "investments in education and energy innovation," and "health care reform that expands coverage while reducing costs." He also laments the fact that the Obama administration has raised "the cost of charitable giving. It punishes civic activism and expands state intervention."
Those and his pledge to "block the excesses of unchecked liberalism" reflect valiant virtues in this battle for the identity and soul of America. In a very pragmatic sense, they reflect principles that are less moderate and more traditional in their pedigree. Indeed, he mentions the "Hamiltonian tradition that believes in limited but energetic government," apparently unmindful of the fact that conservatives in the vein of Buckley et al do see a vital, but limited role for government.
Moderates, especially those who understand the need for efficient and effective government, would find allies in conservatives who endorse those values but who have become political cynics under recent presidential and Congressional Republican leadership. Add to their miseries the newly minted President Obama and his legion of liberals in congress and you have a recipe for utter despair among conservatives.
But Mr. Brooks errs when he implies that America in recent years has failed to provide equally for the "small minority," because one of the hidden victories of the Bush years is that the tax burden on lower-income earners was substantially reduced. Moreover, an irony missed by most is that the burdens he insists should be "shared broadly" were actually shouldered by the so-called rich. The top 1 percent of income earners pay 38 percent of all federal income taxes; the top 5 percent pay 55 percent, while the bottom 50 percent pay just 4.6 percent. If he wants to "broaden" that obligation, I'm sure many in the top 5 percent would gladly oblige.
What's perhaps most surprising is that Brooks seems genuinely shocked that President Obama isn't governing as a moderate. If you examine his rhetoric during the campaign you'll find a wealth of lofty, post-partisanship sentiment, but everything he uttered in terms of policy was hard to the left.
Brooks finishes his paean to moderation with recommendations his foot soldiers must make to correct Obama's "uber-partisan budget." But to call it an uphill climb is a generous gloss because the pent up demand of liberalism, fueled by an arch-liberal media, is creating a blind conflagration of indiscriminate spending, and there's simply no evidence of an end in sight. That's because no one in the Obama administration seems to understand that you can't drown a recession in cash--it's never worked and it never will.
So, although moderates can join conservatives in calling for fiscal sanity, we must not forget the military adage tested numerous times on the battlefield: Implement the best strategy, but plan for the worse outcome.
The evolution of a president's thinking on the key issues he confronts is a fascinating to track. Today, President Obama announced that combat missions in Iraq will end by August 2010. Although there's political potency in drawing a time-line for withdrawal, given the strategic myopia associated with it we shouldn't be surprised when the same president who believes deficit spending is the best hope to end a recession, does so.
If you paid close attention during the campaign, you'll recall that Obama's positions on Iraq changed based upon political expedience, which is to say evolving circumstances. An ABC News article from July of 2008 captures the tectonic nature of Obama's thinking, and, when juxtaposed to today's announcement, dovetails perfectly with a man thoroughly in the grasp of uncertainty about his thinking.
Delving further into his agile repositioning process, we find that in 2005, he called for a phased withdrawal of our troops, in 2006 he argued for a timetable to remove our troops, a political solution within Iraq, and aggressive diplomacy with all of Iraq's neighbors, and, in January 2007, he introduced legislation in the Senate to remove all of our combat troops from Iraq by March 2008. Military analysts and political commentators alike have marveled at Obama's talent for providing serial strategies, each of which seems candid and principled, but when considered in summary reflect a less than serious approach to a very serious matter.
Beyond his ungenerous inability to admit that former President Bush's surge was responsible for creating the possibility of a withdrawal, had the U.S. acted on his wholly irresponsible recommendation to leave Iraq in March 2008, it would have created civil war and bloodshed on a massive scale. Moreover, it would have emboldened Iran, which would have exploited the civil confusion and pandemonium to its advantage.
None of that happened because Bush stood his ground against the likes of Senator Harry Reid who routinely called Iraq a failure, as well as a host of other liberals who acted as though their political cowardice and intellectual dishonesty were badges of honor.
The reason political historians rarely weigh in on presidents until many years have passed is that the absence of perspective and the sway of the masses overwhelm any attempt to achieve a measure of objectivity. But, with the passage of time, perhaps on the same trajectory as Iraq's move towards a constitutional democracy, history will correctly affirm that Mr. Bush's steadfastness is what permitted Obama to cavalierly issue a date certain for withdrawal, as naive as that surely is.
Whether it's spending future generation's money or excoriating his predecessor while exploiting his successes, this is clearly a president for whom political humility is a stranger.
One of the curious hallmarks of modern liberalism is its fervent belief that common sense can be legislated and subsequently minted into a kind of civic virtue through regulation. An apt example is Arianna Huffington's piece decrying the next self-inflicted crisis, that of credit card debt.
Although every American has compassion for those who seem impervious to appreciating the dangers of life's many pitfalls, there is an important distinction between disasters and crises that befall the innocent and those that are the result of a studied self-interest combined with an abiding belief in the proverbial 'free lunch.'
In service to a transparent political agenda, Huffington deftly conflates the financial travails of Americans who are suffering due to layoffs and who resort to credit cards for essentials, with the vastly larger cohort who carry shocking amounts of such debt. Indeed, reports indicate the average credit card balance is about $12,000. But, blaming the card companies for handicapping their risk with higher interest rates for those with spotty credit is just another example of a conveniently misplaced accusation.
But liberals seem to excuse or overlook the fact that we all instinctively act to minimize our exposure to risk, whether it's avoiding unhealthful habits such as smoking or ensuring our homes are adequately insured, while at the same time indicting a corporation for doing the equivalent. Indeed, in Huffington's world, offering credit cards at a higher rate for those with poor credit ratings is a form of abuse.
Implicit in her rant is the wholly misinformed notion that credit cards are the only recourse for those in financial need, due either to unemployment or underemployment, and, second, that it's a problem ripe for government intervention. Ironically, Huffington maligns the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 because it raised the bar for declaring bankruptcy. It's apparently an affront to her that lawmakers wanted to legislate a measure of self-sufficiency and thrift by suggesting that reflexively invoking the bankruptcy courts might not be in the long-term interest of the individual, much less society in general.
She goes on to talk about the proposed legislation sponsored Senator Chris Dodd and Rep. Carolyn Maloney, which, once again, would legislate a set if civic immunities against stupidity, pushing fiscal prudence and discipline--which were an integral part of our civic fabric in decades past--from its current status of merely being endangered, into extinction.
The infantilized society that Huffington and her ilk are striving to create is not the one our Founding Fathers envisioned, nor is it conducive to individual responsibility and accountability, two more traits that seemed to have been forced into cultural obsolescence.
Beyond the obvious arguments for and against the nationalization of our banking system is the deeper question of implicit trust: To wit, on balance, do you feel the government is more trustworthy than private corporations when it comes to operating our banking system? A corollary is whether you feel government is more proficient and reliable than private corporations in operating large, complex business systems?
Making the case that government can't be trusted is Gerald P. O'Driscoll, Jr., writing in today's Wall Street Journal. He outlines the central concerns with nationalization, but the most sweeping and credible charge is that the process would be rife with politics, not unlike the so-called 'stimulus' package. We can ask such questions, as Mr. O'Driscoll does, such as whether a government-owned bank would act with fiscal prudence and follow sound business practices, which is highly dubious.
But, more fundamentally, there is simply no reason to believe that politicians and bureaucrats can be trusted to remain dispassionate about this because both sides of the aisle, but, in particular, the Democrats, have a rich history of exploiting such problems to their political advantage.
Arguing in favor of nationalization is Raymond J. Learsy, in a piece in today's Huffington Post. Ironically, he uses the notion of trust to support his argument for nationalization, that regardless of the billions already pumped into the banking system, consumers have lost trust, because of a lack of transparency:
Neither we, nor the government fully understand what the banks are doing with the funds showered upon them by the TARP agency. Most damaging is the almost universal lack of confidence in the competence and integrity of these tone-deaf managements who have clearly gotten us into this mess.
Well, have we forgotten that it was the government who wrote the rules for acceptance of the funds the first time around? If transparency and operational credibility are lacking it's because the same group of government bureaucrats who wants to nationalize the banks were dozing at the helm when billions were showered on them the first time around. So, speaking of trust, why should the average tax payer have faith in them given their checkered past?
As for Learsy's argument that we can't infuse more capital into banks "without control over the sad sacks who got us into this mess is lunacy," we would be guilty of intellectual dishonesty if we denied that the group of "sad sacks" must include certain members of Congress, many of whom are elbowing one another to the microphone to argue for nationalization.
Somehow, we're supposed to sleep soundly knowing that Learsy's band of bureaucrats will exercise cutting edge business acumen while those who do it for a living won't. However, keeping the banking system private doesn't mean allowing the executives an unregulated operating hand in decision making. Let the bureaucrats do what they do best, which is to draft Draconian regulations that Congress will hopefully retool to allow banks to maximize profits without risking reserves.
But, Learsy is correct that trust is the issue on which all of this rests: Do we trust those in government, from Congress, which sat idly by as this storm developed to the bureaucrats at our regulatory agencies, who seem to awaken from their civil service slumber just in time to overlook another impending crisis?
Or do we trust those in the industry who, with a measure of meaningful regulation, can right their own fiscal ship with far more confidence and credibility?
The confidence of one's ideas is reflected in a variety of ways. The most profound is the willingness to allow the free market to determine the success or failure of media outlets and venues, be it network or cable news, newspapers, or the radio waves. Making the case for the free expression of ideas is Rush Limbaugh, writing in today's Wall Street Journal.
The left's motivation for stridently demanding the reinstitution of the so-called Fairness Doctrine is found, in part, in the history of liberal talk radio, which has been an unambiguous failure. Since no liberal commentator has been able to sustain a large audience on the AM dial, liberals mistakenly conclude it's just because conservatives are monopolizing the frequencies. Political introspection is as healthy an exercise as it is rare, which is why the left overlooks the more fundamental reason for their failure--the shows that have been featured over the years are at once bland and sulfurous examples of hard-edged liberalism that simply fail to entertain.
The reason millions of Americans listen to Messrs. Limbaugh, Hannity, Hewitt, Prager, Medved et al, is because these hosts engage their audiences, they challenge sacrosanct ideas, and they do so with intelligence and verve. Threre's also something they don't do, which so many on the left, be they in radio or in writing, commonly do--conservative radio hosts don't scold and they don't condescend. Rather, they're wry, intellectually nimble, and they mount arguments based on credible evidence and an abiding sense of decency.
But there's another reason that conservative radio has been such an unqualified success, and that is it's one of the few places where traditional--read, mainstream--Americans can hear the glib pieties of the left challenged, and, indeed, decimated. It's also because modern liberals seem to live in an intellectual bell jar, insulated from regular folks who spend their days working and taking care of their families, hoping--and, yes, praying--for a better life for their kids.
The haughty smugness of the modern liberal provides talk show hosts such as Limbaugh with a nearly limitless reservoir of topics, from 'global warming,' which Al Gore said was a bigger threat than radical Islam to the horrors of guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens to the paradox that liberals will spend millions and march in the streets to protect endangered species but do nothing to protect the innocent unborn. Add to that list their infatuation with dictators, from Castro to Chavez, and in prior decades, Stalin, and you have the perfect recipe for a party so thoroughly confused about morals and absolutes, that it draws millions to their radios to listen to articulate hosts eviscerate them--day after day.
So, as the liberals mount their attack on free speech, let's not let them deny the real reason for their desire to provide "equal time" to liberals on the airwaves: They lack the confidence in their ideas that the Truman Democrats had, and, in moments of political clarity and candor, they know in their hearts that the average American inhabits a rather different universe, the one then-candidate Obama ridiculed when he talked about bitter people turning to guns and religion.
