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The Curious World of the New York Times

Few editorial boards can ascend their high horse quite like the New York Times, and so as we close out the year and cast a retrospective eye, glimpsing 2007 from the cultural and intellectual elites at the Gray Lady, only makes sense.

After you've slogged your way through their litany of alleged abuses and illegalities perpetrated by the Bush Administration, one observation will become latently apparent, and that is America hasn't been attacked on its own soil since 9/11.  That's clear because if it had, the Times would have no political authority, much less credibility, to argue that the Bush Administration has

...squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.

Indeed, it's ironic but noteworthy that President Bush's strategy of pre-emption is what's permitted us to collectively--and naively--forget the savagery we sustained on 9/11 and which animates the Times' hair-trigger liberal impulses by accusing him of "shocking abuses...made in the name of fighting terror."

Peering beneath the special disdain the Times has for this president we see evidence of the left's habit of downgrading the evil of radical Islam from the manifest threat it is to a kind of irritation or annoyance.  It's therefore staggering to see these ivory-towered elites level the charge that the Bush Administration

...forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.

It may seem quaint or not worthy of comment, but the existence of "ideals" is predicated on the existence of "lives."  As President Lincoln's temporary suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War and President Roosevelt's abridgment of civil rights during World War Two illustrate, in order to safeguard the latter compromises in the former must be occasionally instituted. 

That stated, the Times and their acolytes in the media should be challenged to produce evidence that the rights of any law-abiding citizen of the United States have been damaged, because throughout all of this hand-wringing and self-generated angst, no credible evidence has been forthcoming.

That leads us to the unavoidable conclusion that the Times' primary agenda is political, not substantive, which, to use their parlance, doesn't constitute news.  Their reflexive conclusion, of course, is that

We can only hope that this time, unlike in 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably.

Another irony is that in the post-modern world the Times inhabits, 'wisdom' is a fungible virtue, which means it's subject to abuse.  So, when judges erroneously divine a 'right of privacy' in the Constitution leading to the slaughter of 47 million innocents in the womb, in their rarefied world, that's a clear case of wisdom in action--right?

Obama as the "New Democrat"

If you've been following the press surrounding Senator Barack Obama's campaign you know he's running as a charismatic, fresh face committed to charting a new path to a national consensus.  Whether it's health care, our economy, public school system, or national security, the reason we can't achieve progress is that we lack his sense of deft innovation and ability to unite us.

Yet when you hear his policy recommendations they have the ring of traditional liberalism versus the ostensibly reinvigorating feel of Bill Clinton's "New Democrat" platform.  Granted, the majority of the former president's plans were discarded once they met the intransigent political realities all candidates have to face, but to the extent he achieved progress it was as a result of moving towards the center.  There is no indication that Obama has any intention of trying to convince the hard left of the virtues of compromise.

Inherent in the goals of modern liberalism is the politician's implicit obligation to concur with its premise, which is that 'the system' isn't fair, that failure or the inability to advance economically is never the individual's fault, and that we're all equally deserving of the world's resources. 

Delivering on that obligation requires Obama and his fellow Democratic candidates to both endorse our capitalist system--because it does work--and argue that its inevitable inequities are exclusively attributable to systemic racial or gender bias.  It also places them in the awkward position of arguing that people whose talent and work ethic are vastly disparate should equally participate in the system's output, read financial.

Concerning the vexing problems of health care and Social Security, the implied mandate for Democrats such as Obama is that, for the former, our free market system is incapable of sorting out the primary problem, which is exploding costs, and for the latter, that we can cover all Baby Boomers without any sacrifices or compromises.

However, in the spirit of political candor, many Republicans have caved to the culturally induced need to please the electorate by promising a more robust government response to our perceived ills.  Indeed, talking about individual responsibility, self-reliance, and sacrifice aren't politically fashionable.  As Thomas Edison once quipped, "The reason so many people avoid opportunity is that it comes in overalls and looks like work."

Presidential Politics & the Redefinition of Happiness

A less than subtle undercurrent in contemporary culture is that happiness, which was historically the product of personal ties with family and friends, has incrementally come under the auspices of the government.  Indeed, in bygone years, whether it's your job or your house, if you weren't satisfied, you implicitly understood your options, and recourse to the government wasn't among them.  Today, we're encouraged to consider extraneous causes for our unhappiness, to blame convenient, if nebulous things like 'the system,' race, or gender, and that line of reasoning always leads to a government solution, more often than not, compliments of the left.

The presidential election perfectly illustrates how life's challenges have been reconfigured to render plausible the notion that government ought to resolve our every ill.  From John Edwards' purposely divisive assertion that there are "two Americas," to the alleged truism that we have a health care crisis, to the fiction that man is responsible for slight increase in global temperatures, the length of government's reach is apparently limitless.

When combined with the feminists' scheme to drain the testosterone from the American male, you have a recipe for an anemic electorate that whines at the first sign of trouble, be it unhappiness at work or mounting credit card debt.  But if we hire out the solution to everything from replacing the garbage disposal to solving our frustration at stagnant wages, we are effectively blunting our initiative and inhibiting our ability to meet life's basic challenges.

The truth is that happiness itself has become politicized and redefined as something greater than the sum of life's personal satisfaction--a loving spouse, children, a challenging but rewarding job, and the ability to look inward for the solutions to problems that inevitably befall every one of us.  Indeed, it's been conceptually recast as how best to expand our respective market share of government largess, and, as such, is in absolute contrast to our Founding Fathers vision for this Republic.

As evidence of the disparity between individual happiness and how our politicians characterize it, look at three polls, the first is the National Opinion Research Center's General Social Survey, which reported that 86 percent of Americans are satisfied with their jobs; the second, a Harris Poll that found that nearly two-thirds expect their lives to improve in the next five years, while only 7 percent expect it to worsen; finally, the Pew Global Attitudes survey from 2007 concluded that Americans have one of the highest rates of personal satisfaction in the world.

Therefore, in the spirit of returning to a time when we looked to ourselves, our families and friends, to meet life's challenges, and as a way to protect ourselves against the unwarranted intrusion of government in our lives, the next time you hear one of the presidential candidates--from either party--tell you how miserable you are and that he (or she) alone can help, smile inwardly, say a prayer, and realize that you alone are responsible for your happiness.

Merry Christmas

In our age where a post-modern culture has achieved a potent following of religious-like adherents, we're often instructed to eschew so-called antiquated conceptualizations of Christianity which led us to believe that our notions of right and wrong--or good and evil--comported with that of God's.

The argument proceeds along predictably political lines which features a combination of anti-autocracy, anti-paternalism, with more than a tincture of agnosticism concerning absolutes, in particular whether good and evil are timeless, objective realities, or merely convenient conventions meticulously designed to serve our political goals.

The product is an intellectually contorted edifice that doesn't look as though it could weather the first barrage of objections from a high school debating team, much less the  stern counter-arguments of a flinty Catholic theologian such as G.K. Chesterton.

Beyond that, it's a morally barren landscape where situational ethics reigns supreme and values are deemed malleable and subject to all manners of abuse to justify short-term, self-serving ends.

We indulge those observations on this holy day because confronting the intellectual and moral foes of one's generation is a sine qua non of existence.  And, lest we naively conclude that ours is a uniquely benighted generation, we've only to glance back to the pre- and post-World War II years when the analog embraced the likes of Joseph Stalin, Franco, and Mussoulini. 

So, it's with an strong and abiding optimism that regardless of our challenges, as individuals and as members of the greatest nation in history, there is ultimately far more that unites than divides us.

A joyous, blessed, and merry Christmas to you and yours.

 

The Democrats' New Union Movement

For many years after their inception, the American labor union had a moral credibility because the natural evolutionary forces in the American workplace profoundly favored management and their abuses were real and damaging.  However, in recent decades, unions have become little more than mechanisms for income extortion, which itself is a natural outcome of unchecked power.  As such, their membership has dropped precipitously and their political clout has been commensurately reduced.

Enter Paul Krugman writing in today's New York Times, whose curious predicate is that,

It’s often assumed that the U.S. labor movement died a natural death, that it was made obsolete by globalization and technological change. But what really happened is that beginning in the 1970s, corporate America, which had previously had a largely cooperative relationship with unions, in effect declared war on organized labor.

Calling the heavy muscle that unions used against corporations a "largely cooperative relationship" is akin to calling the Mafia an organization prone to using mild force.  The result, as we know, has been wage and benefit costs that make the American corporation--car manufacturers, in particular--uncompetitive.

It's therefore astounding that Krugman is shocked that Wal-Mart, whose intact consumer base is preponderantly Democratic, uses its own political power to fend off unions, to keep prices competitive and its stock on the rise.  Indeed, it's the quintessence of irony that he calls the giant retailer's efforts "hardball tactics," when, in fact, the unions authored the text book on that subject.

The self-serving, fiscal feather-bedding strategy of the modern union is also indifferent to the results of its strong-arming corporations, which is the extra layers of expense that have driven American corporations to out-sourcing.  What the Krugmans of the world fail to understand is that the capitalist instinct is always more expedient and efficacious than the myopic motivation to expand workers' wages and benefits, and, as such, it will always find ways to reduce expenses.

It's those downstream, secondary impacts that latently and adversely impact the economy and result in corporate down-sizing, right-sizing, strategic mergers and acquisitions, and, yes, ultimately, a reduction in historically lush benefit schemes, that  Krugman and his liberal foot soldiers excoriate as 'greedy corporate behavior.'

By rewriting the rules of engagement with corporate management through what amounts to legal extortion, unions have become targets of unfavorable press because people correctly understand that an assembly-line worker at a General Motors plant or a United Airlines baggage handler, making upwards of $60,000 a year plus benefits, seems out of touch with reality.

No one would begrudge workers fair compensation for a day's work, but when avarice trumps reason the market place will make corrections, and that's precisely what's happened.

The Political Abuse of Economics

As observers of our political process know, the issues of income, wealth, and the economy have become blurred, and those with poorly veiled agendas tirelessly work to exploit the confusion.  We link to a lengthy article in the business section of today's New York Times because it so precisely, if inadvertently, underscores the deft way in which the exploitation is carried out, all in the guise of transparent reporting.

The author uses the life profiles of presidential candidates Mitt Romney and John Edwards--both financially successful men--to compare and contrast the differences in how Republicans and Democrats view income and wealth.  He then weds those conclusions with their respective policy recommendations, which could have been predicted at the outset.

However, what interests us is the way in which our cultural understanding of 'wealth and inequality' is woven into the broader subject of the economy.  In this regard, the author's own words are our best guide:

Even if neither man gets his party’s nomination, the argument over wealth and inequality is likely to play a big role in next year’s campaign.  Polls show that the economy is now the top concern of many voters.

Success through hard work and sacrifice has always been held in high esteem in America, but since the advent of lottery-sized incomes and bonuses, liberals and their brethren in the media have fomented the primordial economic angst that's an apparent concomitant to modern life, by arguing that success of that magnitude is 'obscene,' which is promptly translated into 'unfair.'  Thanks to the their adroit ability to prey on our baser human instincts--i.e., the politics of economic envy--many feel as though the case is credible and that the 'rich' ought to give them more of their income.

But drilling into our original subject, we begin by questioning how the left justifies intertwining 'the economy' with 'wealth and inequality.'  Indeed, the economy is that aggregate of financial markets, retail, consumers, production, and monetary policy, all of which are subjected to regulation and taxation.  Wealth is the product of income that's been pressed into successful service in the market place, and inequality is the inherent result of a free market economy.  The truth is that through God-given talent, some are far more capable of generating high incomes and astutely investing the fruits of their labor--is that something to lament or celebrate?

Moreover, since the past twenty-five years has demonstrated that low regulation and taxation maximizes income for the greatest number of people over time, it's a logical conclusion that when the left argues for a more progressive tax structure they're doing so for purely political reasons.  That's particularly true in light of the fact that the top 5 percent of income earners currently pay 56 percent of federal income taxes; the other revealing statistic is that the bottom 50 percent of income earners pays just 4.6 percent of federal taxes.

However, by weaving the politically charged notion of wealth into the economy, the left sets the redistributionist stage, and as the drama unfolds and they introduce the incendiary variable called 'inequality,' it's just too much for mere mortals to withstand.  To wit, 'inequality' is in the same emotional genus as 'judgment,' and either of them will land you in cultural jail should you have the temerity to question their moral legitimacy.

Unless it's understood in the historical context of our Founding Fathers' view of government, politicians are prone to abuse taxation for their own craven purposes.  It's that kind of abuse that our mainstream media indulges in the name of fairness, and beyond the fact that it's myopic economic thinking, it creates civic animosity, and is therefore hostile to the common good.

 

Huckabee's Star

Despite his cloying sense of humor and apparent need to use annoyingly clever one-liners, Huckabee found resonance in the Iowa electorate, and, to some degree, nationally, because he appeals to people's political imagination.  It's that Clintonesque teaser that encourages us to imagine "a better nation, a better world," which can happen if only we supported them.

It preys on our collective angst that has gathered among the media-induced sense that something is awry with America, that the war isn't going well, that the economy is on the precipice of a recession, and that the subprime blues will haunt us for years to come.

These are merely symptoms that reflect a candidate's success in aggregating and coalescing fears and anxieties and forms a kind of political hysteria that plays perfectly into Huckabee's hands, and, to some degree, the other candidates, on both sides of the aisle.

However, in the end it's not predicated on real causation save that of our own self-generated willingness to listen.  In truth, although there are no easy answers to life's problems, we can be confident in the fundamentals:  We enjoy unprecedented freedoms, economic mobility is real, opportunity is only limited by our relative willingness to work hard and sacrifice for a better future, and the rule of law provides that quiet confidence that justice ultimately prevails, regardless of how flawed the process may be.

The lower our expectations in presidential contests the better.  We should want a president who is a strong advocate for free markets, low regulation and taxes, free trade, supports legal immigration, supports the goal of a color-blind society, would appoint constitutional constructionists to the bench, and is an unapologetic champion of a robust national defense.

The rest isn't the proper role of the federal government, unless the nascent impulse among Republicans to ignore the 10th Amendment encourages you to look to the feds for a national solution to local problems--and that just doesn't work.

So, Huckabee's star will slowly descend as his propensity for protectionism, regulation, support for taxation as opposed to reigning in spending, and profound naivete on foreign affairs, become better known.

Beneath the Left's Love of Government

Fissures and fault lines in political parties are attractive targets for our editorial cognoscenti, and one of our favorite writers in that regard is E.J. Dionne, who's piece in today's Washington Post, argues that Republicans face an internecine with potentially devastating implications.

He quotes a May 2005 study by the Pew Research Center, which indicated the growing presence of a group of "pro-government conservatives":

The report described them as "broadly religious and socially conservative, but they deviate from the party line in their backing for government involvement in a wide range of policy areas, such as government regulation and more generous assistance to the poor."

Although there does seem to be a tectonic movement to the center as the electorate expresses a nascent 'fringe fatigue,' the argument that we're witnessing the genesis of a conservative bloc begging for higher regulation seems deluded.  As for providing more generous assistance for the poor, conservatives, unlike their liberal counterparts, have been strong advocates of charity to the poor, but not through the wasteful conduit of government, which, as the Great Society so effortlessly demonstrated, produces a plethora of unintended downstream consequences.

It's that distinction that is lost on most liberals who believe that their unique version of noblesse oblige is best translated into robust programs that redistribute income, because underlying that motivation is a profound distrust in the common man.  Specifically, they are convinced that if the government doesn't lighten our wallets we won't give of our own free will; it's a cynical and unflattering view of human nature, but it's consistent with the left's instinctive reliance on government as the best guarantor of happiness.

Dionne concludes with a highly illustrative comment concerning this group of pro-government conservatives:

The faithful are restive, tired of being used, and no longer willing to do the bidding of a crowd that subordinates Main Street's values to Wall Street's interests [emphasis added].

The transparent implication is that conservatives favor policies that ignore the middle class in favor of pandering to big business for self-serving reasons.  However, this argument only achieves credibility if you believe that income earners are frozen in a Dickensian world where economic mobility is an oxymoron.  As described in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, the Treasury Department's recent study of income mobility unequivocally demonstrates that people in the lower income quintiles do, in fact, move into the upper quintiles, and in relatively short order.

From there we segue to the fact that 65 percent of Americans own stock mutual funds and are enjoying the benefits of investing, and Net Disposable Income is up as is productivity, and inflation is in check.  All of that leads to the irrefutable conclusion that the middle class is economically vibrant, which means they are the proteges of the lower-upper-class, if you will, and, with hard work and sacrifice, one day proud members of the upper class.

That, of course, is something the Dionne's of the world would lament because their arguments for income redistribution, high regulation, and taxing the 'rich' fail to find political traction if middle class income earners are achieving success on their own.

Not unlike the liberals chanting for defeat in Iraq, they disdain economic success because it deprives them of a 'natural' voting bloc.

Richard Holebrooke & the 'Art' of Diplomacy

The latest revelation from Mike Huckabee is that, not unlike Barack Obama, he wants to talk with our enemy and attack our friends.  The former is Iran, the latter, Pakistan.  We briskly segue to Senator Clinton, the master of nuance, who voted in favor of the Iraq invasion before she excoriated President Bush for doing so.

We begin our glimpse into this boldly revisionist world with a piece by Richard Holbrooke in the Huffington Post.  Although threat assessments are inherently fluid,  there are broad assumptions one can make about certain regimes, and one of them is Iran.  It's curious that Huckabee, Obama, and Clinton are apparently working off the same geopolitical blueprint for Iran, one that shares a complete absence of its recent history.

For a dose of reality, we turn to an interview on Hugh Hewitt's radio show yesterday with Michael Ruben, Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.  He brings the context and history necessary to understand that Iran is a master of duplicity and dishonesty.

As a prelude to our riposte to Holbrooke, diplomacy, in its historical context, is a crucial facet of foreign policy, but its limitations are more lethal than its presumed potency is helpful.  Not unlike liberals who enjoy a broad hegemony in journalism and the media generally, the State Department is a magnet for the rarefied thinkers who are convinced that inveterate international problems are susceptible to their special aptitude to deal with refractory regimes.

Let's recall that George Kennan, the architect of American's policy during the early years of the Cold War, was subsequently--and naively--convinced that the U.S. could negotiate with Moscow.  We might opine that he looked into the Soviet Union's soul and saw goodness.  In 1949, when Dean Acheson was appointed Secretary of State to shore up America's approach to Moscow under the Truman Adminstration, Kennan was effectively marginalized and history has correctly judged him harshly for his unrepentant dovish views of the Soviets.

Holbrooke is cut from the exact same cloth in that he fervently believes in interminable talks with belligerents without so much as a threat of military action:

I have consistently opposed the use of force against Iran, as has Hillary. Well before the NIE, I stated publicly and repeatedly that nothing we knew supported a war against Iran.  The NIE only reinforced my position. Senator Clinton also opposes any military action against Iran and said so long before the NIE, and took to the Senate floor last February to oppose the Bush administration's saber rattling.

In a perverse twist of logic, the Holebrooke that vilified the intelligence that provided a partial justification for our invasion of Iraq, is now lionizing the National Intelligence Estimate that concluded that Iran ceased its ambition to obtain a nuclear weapon in 2003.

Beyond that, declaring one's opposition to military action against a nation that has been hostile to the U.S. for decades is dangerous.  Further, the use of the phrase "saber rattling" is typically used to dismissively characterize tough-mindedness as posturing that may inadvertently lead to hostilities.  It's part of the diplomat's predisposition to appease rather than anger that results in their thinking through strategic negotiations from the opponent's perspective, to condition their own country's tactics to accommodate those of the opposition.

Since that approach doesn't work in business there's no reason to believe it would work against the likes of Iran's Ahmadinejad.  But that won't stop Huckabee, Clinton, and Obama, much less their putative cheerleader, Holebrooke.

The Will to Power

We've all heard Lord Acton's maxim that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely, but in the context of contemporary politics the debate concerning the proper role of power conveniently ignores such admonitions. 

We link to a piece in Salon by Walter Shapiro that's intended to profile the top three Democratic candidates, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards, but unwittingly serves as a stark reminder that power can not only corrupt but can obfuscate the truth.

By that we mean that the overheated Democratic candidates are moving into a mode of quiet desperation as they see the race tightening and search for ways to distinguish themselves from one another.  Therefore, we see Clinton talking incessantly about change, Obama assuring his audiences he will tell the American people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear, and Edwards telling them he will wrest power from corporations rather than negotiate with them.

But whether it's Clinton's nebulous banalities or Obama's smug nostrums or Edwards quixotic panaceas, they all share two common themes:  First, they are convinced that America is on the wrong track, from our economy and schools to our environmental and foreign policies and only they can resolve our ills; and, second, their every recommendation involves higher taxes, more regulation, and a commensurate reduction in individual freedom.

It's equally disturbing that they all talk about uniting the country around shared values and goals, to effectively eliminate the polarizing red-state, blue-state dichotomy that's presumably so divisive.  Yet their notion of bipartisanship is predicated on Republicans caving on every issue and their experience since the 2006 elections apparently hasn't convinced them that in an evenly divided country power-sharing means compromise.

It's also been said that in order to achieve power you have to relinquish it and therein lies the real problem.  Indeed, it's the politician who appears to be in concert with the will of the people who is seen as someone with strong leadership skills, someone with conviction.  Recall Ronald Reagan's stern rejection of Soviet leader Gorbachev proposals at Reykjavik which caused an international diplomatic furor among the elites but which was intuitively understood by average Americans as the right decision for our nation's security interests.

That takes both leadership and vision, something that seems conspicuous by its absence in these candidates.  Instead, they seem to be offering recycled policies that foment class warfare, champion group versus individual rights, and, crucially, expand the power of government. 

It's all reflective of a distrust of the common man, which is also at the root of their instinct to redistribute income.  Confiscatory charity in the form of taxation for an ostensibly good cause is an oxymoron that is hostile to our civic health, but one the liberals justify because they don't trust people to help those in need unless compelled to do so.

It's a cynical view of human nature, one they couple with an arrogant assumption that their uniquely selective list of good causes is, in fact, objective and free of political bias.  So whether it's global warming, sex education, public funding for the arts, or their loathing of the military, they begin with the craven conclusion that their positions can't be challenged.

It's power in its worst incarnation and makes the monarchies and autocracies of prior centuries look positively benign and beneficent by comparison.

'Religion' for the Secularists

History, it is said, is written by the victors, and although the long-standing war between religion and the state is far from over, many on the secular left have already drafted the articles of surrender for the theists' signature.  For the latest exquisitely prescriptive analysis we turn to James Carroll, writing in today's Boston Globe. 

He begins with a caustic criticism of Mitt Romney's recent speech regarding his faith in the context of politics, then links it with this fashionable rendering of America's founding:

The politics of human rights, like the idea of individual freedom, were born not in religion but in the Enlightenment struggle against it. When Thomas Jefferson located "inalienable rights" in an endowment from the Creator, he was decidedly speaking from outside the mainstream of any denominational faith. Jefferson's point was not to affirm God, but to deny King George.

Although the Enlightenment was, indeed, sparked by the abuses of Kings, Queens, and other monarchical rulers, its core ideas of the sanctity of the individual can be traced to a variety of Biblical passages and Scripture.  They also appear throughout the writings of the saints, from St. Augustine to St. Anselm to St. Theresa.  Further, a cursory review of the Catechism of the Catholic Church reveals a plethora of dogma in defense of the sovereignty of the individual, in opposition to any attempts by the secular world to impose its will.

Next Carroll questions which Founders were, in fact, men of faith, arguing, in effect, that they reflected a patchwork of beliefs, and concluding that,

In truth, the power of faith in American politics has waxed and waned. There is no consistent tradition to be upheld or to be betrayed.

Such sweeping assertions must ultimately be consigned to the genus of platitudes because they so utterly fail both the test of historical intuition and any reference to fact.  Indeed, so imbued has America's history been with Judeo-Christian traditions and values that one can hardly point to a major document, text, or literary work that is not in some manner deeply influenced by it. 

To wit, from our Bill of Rights, to Melville's Moby Dick to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address to the speeches of the Rev. Martin Luther King, the values, rights, and aspirations that we Americans hold dear, are replete with religious motifs and shadowings.

Next Carroll juxtaposes the modern European civic sensibility, which shuns "narrow notions of nationalism, mitigating state sovereignty, and, above all, replacing ancient hatreds with partnerships," with America "where the most overtly religious people in the country support the death penalty, the government's hair-trigger readiness for war, and the gospel of national sovereignty that has made the United States an impediment to the United Nations."

Take a breath, or a drink, your choice.  The left's religion--and, yes, they do have one--is a preconfigured Rorschach test that defines truth by concurrently fabricated values with a shelf-life based on expedience, and which is relegated to obsolescence once its political viability has extinguished.

Against that background Carroll's reasoning achieves that rare blend of acerbic disdain for absolutes and naive endorsement of the wholly improbable notion that pure secularism can lead to a kind of civic perfection.  Indeed, "ancient hatreds" for the liberal are the exclusive result of religious fervor; they're not founded on seething ethnic animosities, totalitarian designs, or goals of economic hegemony. 

It takes him a while, but Carroll finally gets around to the American Catholic bishops, who last year had the temerity to tell their faithful that slaughtering innocent unborn humans is contrary to Church dogma and can result in eternal damnation. 

Quaint, and, as the left would argue, anachronistic, notions such as "eternal damnation" are oppressive and at odds with their unique rendering of human freedom, which is nothing more than cultural anarchy--a goal they're pursuing with a fervor at once ignorant and blind.

The Virtues of Gridlock Redux

The much maligned phenomenon in Washington called gridlock is actually an exemplary member of a cherished political pedigree because it's symptomatic of precisely how a constitutional Republic such as our should act when the impulse to legislate is sparked.  We examine a piece by one of our favorite liberal editorial writers, E.J. Dionne, in today's Washington Post. 

He begins with a heartfelt lamentation concerning the legislative realities of Congress, which is that the minority party has tremendous power in determining whether or not a bill reaches the president's desk.  Republicans had four plus decades to master the art of exploiting procedural rules to inhibit the chances of legislation hostile to their agenda becoming law, so it shouldn't surprise Dionne that since they've found themselves in the minority again, those skills have been pressed into service.

But our disagreement with the likes of Dionne is more profound.  To wit, he abuses the much vaunted 'pay-as-you-go' philosophy--which is appealing on its face because it argues that Congress should cut expenditures in programs when it increases funding for other programs--by arguing that when Congress cuts taxes, such as it's efforts to amend the Alternative Minimum Tax, it must raise taxes elsewhere:

Democrats want to protect those taxpayers, but also keep their pay-as-you-go promise to offset new spending or tax cuts with tax increases or program cuts elsewhere. They would finance AMT relief with $50 billion in new taxes on the very wealthiest Americans or corporations [Editorial note:  which don't pay taxes]. The Republicans say no, just pass the AMT fix.

Despite the fact that Republicans have recently become agnostic on the virtues of reduced spending, they will never be able to match the Democrats' verve for spending like inebriated mariners.  Indeed, rather than resolving the AMT problem and looking for ways to achieve efficiencies in the Leviathan known as our federal bureaucracy, they are guided by the kind of business instincts that lead myopic corporations to the gallows.

Dionne finishes with a recommendation to Senate Majority Leader Reid and House Speaker Pelosi:

They could start with the best ideas from their presidential candidates in areas such as health care, education, cures for the ailing economy and poverty-reduction.

We needn't be plasma physicists to see in that litany the left's seductive allure of panaceas for problems that range from the nonexistent to those best left to the market place, rather than the blunt edge of government intervention. 

Dionne also remains faithful to the hard left's socialist instincts by using the phrase "ailing economy," which is yet further evidence that facts never stand in the way of politics.  To wit, the average unemployment rate in the celebrated Clinton years was 5.2 percent; it's average in the Bush years has been 4.6 percent.  Productivity is up, as is Net Disposable Income, and inflation has been kept on ice at about 2.7 percent.  Yet Dionne calls this economy "ailing," for transparently political reasons.

That's why we raise our glass to the political anodyne known as gridlock, because it checks the left's insidious and sleepless predilection to raise taxes, increase regulation, and reduce our freedoms.

Camille Paglia and the Culture Wars

We link, with more than a modicum of ambivalence, to Camille Paglia's piece in Salon, not because she fails to allure the intellectually inquisitive, but because her meandering polemics often, if perhaps inadvertently, end in cul de sacs.  Indeed, her argumentation is the logical equivalent of James Joyce's Ulysses, which moves circuitously along trajectory with no evident design, making discrete points in intellectually bullet-point fashion.

We'll pluck one particularly apt paragraph from her concatenation of free associated insights.  It's apropos of Mitt Romney's recent speech, which, she concedes, made several legitimate points concerning the Founding Fathers' view of religion.  Then, she delves into one of her pet preoccupations, the provenance of 'secular humanism' and its future:

But what does Romney mean by the ongoing threat of a new "religion of secularism"?  The latter term needs amplification and qualification. In my lecture on religion and the arts in America earlier this year at Colorado College, I argued that secular humanism has failed, that the avant-garde is dead, and that liberals must start acknowledging the impoverished culture that my 1960s generation has left to the young.  Atheism alone is a rotting corpse.  I substitute art and nature for God -- the grandeur of man and the vast mystery of the universe.

This is an intellectually sheepish variant of the humanities professors who feign ignorance concerning the implications of the left's post-modern vision for the West.  If Paglia isn't aware of the threat of the 'religion of secularism' in America, how can she assert that "secular humanism has failed"?  Indeed, what was its goal to begin with?

The latest from the culture wars seems to suggest that the graying Baby Boomers who celebrated a kind of adolescent iconoclasm in the 60s have belatedly arrived at the conclusion that secularism alone is akin to living in an intellectual black hole--nothing can escape its inward pull and it emits no light whatsoever.

It's that glimmer of insight that leads Paglia to aver that she substitutes "art and nature for God," the equivalent of throwing good intellectual money after bad,  because the history of Western art is nothing if not the history of Christianity--even, or especially, the hyper-modern anti-Christian 'artists.'  That stated, since Christianity is a revealed religion, we can't expect those indifferent to the nature of that discovery, whether due to the absence of faith or the willful disdain of religion generally (viz., Christopher Hitchens), to subjugate their out-sized egos in the hope of achieving a more than fleeting understanding of God.

But since she calls for an "amplification and qualification" of the alleged threat of the religion of secularism, we're glad to oblige.  A threat is only manifest when something of value is at stake, and since the much vaunted 60s, the traditional values that informed this Republic since its inception have, indeed, been under assault. 

Imagine the response if you asked someone in the mid-fifties whether he thought that in the year 2007 we would be debating whether or not an adolescent girl should be allowed to have an abortion without parental notification, or whether illegal immigrants should be provided a "path to citizenship," whether two parents are better than one, or whether sin or evil exists? 

The list of traditions that the left has pilloried is nearly endless, and, Paglia's assertions to the contrary notwithstanding, the liberals have effectively codified them into a sufficiently cohesive form as to at least resemble the structure of a religion.  Moreover, they are passing them on to the next generation through our public school system and the other faithful conduits of culture, from Hollywood to our institutions of 'higher learning.'

And, the likes of Paglia calls that a failure?  Let's pray we never have to see what victory might look like.

The Electorate & the Presidency

Ever since the 2006 GOP Congressional losses, evidence seems to be mounting that the edges of the American electorate are lonely places.  Indeed, the move to the center is accompanied by a nascent consensus that neither extreme has the corner on the political market.  We would categorically disagree, arguing that the virtues of conservative governance have demonstrated their long-term efficacy, and that its only against the backdrop of our post-modern cultural anarchy that they seem 'extreme.'

It's in that context that the candidacy of Rudy Giuliani seems to achieve its highest level of electoral credibility.  Although, as Jonathan Kaufman writes in today's Wall Street Journal, Mr. Giuliani is struggling in recent polls, it's only because of the surge of Gov. Mike Huckabee, a non-starter maverick whose zenith is already in the rear-view mirror.  Once the ashes of his candidacy fall gently to earth, America's Mayor will assume his position as the logical choice for those seeking both authenticity and general election appeal.

Those who saw him on Sunday's Meet The Press can attest to his verbal dexterity as he ran polemical circles around Tim Russert.  In truth, it's less the fact that he was able to answer Russert's every question with substantive responses than how genuine and candid he appeared throughout. 

Americans are fatigued by candidates who posture, calculate, and parse their every phrase, which, unfortunately, is how Mitt Romney often comes off.  We applaud the fact that he's converted to the right side of the political ledger and his platform neatly comports with the conservative agenda, but we're not yet convinced there's a real person there.

Coupled with the fact that most of the South would be hostile territory for Romney, it opens the door for Giuliani.  Even states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, would be in play for him, which is simply not the case for Romney.  Moreover, when it comes to locking horns with the likes of Clinton or Obama, Giuliani has the steeliness and fiery riposte necessary to keep them off balance. 

Our talk radio airwaves continue to be dominated by those who characterize the president as the repository American morality, which is a quaint but flawed assertion.  The most important factor in determining the best qualified candidate is not a checklist of the candidates' moral attributes (or shortcomings), but rather their candor, truthfulness, and judgment.

In brief, we're not electing a moral exemplar, but rather someone who recognizes the threats our nation faces, and, in particular, who understands that the government that governs least governs best.  At this moment, Giuliani best fits that description.

Our Subprime Malaise: Government Isn't the Answer

Beyond the fact that government solutions to complex problems are both cumbersome and untimely, they also contain a myriad latent civic viruses which  infect every cranny of our nation and create both perverse incentives and unhealthy byproducts. 

The subprime debacle is a paragon in this regard because it was spawned by over-zealous politicians--not the marketplace--due to what might generously be called their dim understanding of economics.  Home ownership has always been the hallmark of the American dream because it reflected years of sacrifice and hard work.  Whether it was the steel worker in Pennsylvania or the sales manager in Illinois, entrance into the middle class meant something, and its most prominent feature was a modest house one could call home.  The equity that obtained over the years translated into a vital component of one's retirement because paying off that mortgage meant living in relative financial ease.

All of that has been depreciated by politicians determined to dumb down our civic standards and the real estate market was their coup de grace.  By recalibrating the qualifying credit thresholds, people who were historically deemed unacceptable risks were, by the stroke of a pen, suddenly credit worthy.  The problem is that none of the other indices were changed--they still had suboptimal jobs and income which meant the politicians were providing substantive rewards for phantom efforts.  That also meant the regulatory mechanics and marketplace realities would bring their usual level of mercilessness when the mortgage defaults began to grow.

In a dramatically predictable response, President Bush directed his Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, to provide relief in the form of an abatement of consequences, which, once again, distorts marketplace realities and therefore, behavior.  That it's merely a matter of magnitude is abundantly obvious:  A day doesn't pass that millions of Americans don't suffer some kind of adverse consequence for ill-advised or misinformed decisions, but because they're spread across the entire marketplace, they remain the misfortunes of the anonymous, which is where they belong.

However, when a problem becomes politically conspicuous, in particular if there is political advantage to taking action, we can be assured that our politicians will step into the breach.  The disappointing part about this is that the infection has taken hold of erstwhile flinty politicians in the ranks of Republicans.  Rather than correcting the regulatory infrastructure that caused the problem we're witnessing the unsightly spectacle of Washington politicians stumbling over each other to rescue people from their own imprudent choices.

All that does is skew marketplace incentives and disincentives while failing to provide institutional inhibitions for future would-be 'victims,' not to mention increasing expenses to the industry.

Unless we evolve to the point in our civic development where people are treated as adults instead of adolescents we'll never rid ourselves of an overbearing government with more 'solutions' than common sense.

Apologizing for the 'Sins' of the Religious

Precursors, whether in disease or cultural movements, are often difficult to divine.  The nascent war between the religious and secular elements in American society is one such phenomenon, although its nature varies considerably depending upon the observer.

We'll look at once such observer, the insightful David Brooks, writing in today's New York Times.  Using Mitt Romney's speech, which attempted to defuse the growing antipathies of Republican social conservatives regarding his Mormon religion, Brooks contrasts historical conceptualizations of religion in America--which were conditioned by a consensual understanding that God exists and that our various religions were merely human constructs--with our contemporary cultural internecine, which is pitting theist against atheist.  And, he is convinced, the result is civic divisiveness:

The first casualty is the national community. Romney described a community yesterday.  Observant Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Jews and Muslims are inside that community.  The nonobservant are not.  There was not even a perfunctory sentence showing respect for the nonreligious.

However, the precursor noted above is also a cultural genetic marker of sorts, because the differences between today's religious and secularists has never been so conspicuous nor so volatile.  Historically, the nonobservant seamlessly lived their lives among the observant, and the latter exhibited a kind of benign indifference to them because their differences were tacit and nonconsequential. 

As noteworthy, nonbelievers were--and remain--a relatively small percent of Americas population.  In decades past that also was of no consequence, but in today's Looking Glass world, anything tagged with the word 'minority' enjoys disproportionate civic status, which means the 85 percent of believers are obliged to pay homage to the 15 percent of nonbelievers.

Brooks also criticizes Romney for blurring the distinctions between the two:

In rallying the armies of faith against their supposed enemies, Romney waved away any theological distinctions among them with the brush of his hand.  In this calculus, the faithful become a tribe, marked by ethnic pride, a shared sense of victimization and all the other markers of identity politics.

This is at once facile and specious because no one, least of all a Mormon, believes that religious beliefs are homogeneous.  However virtually all theists are comforted by the fact that regardless of how differently they may interpret God, their shared belief in the Almighty is one of the most profound influences in their lives, one that forms a powerful bond among people from every walk of life.  That's not the cultural equivalent of "ethnic pride" or the stamp of "identity politics," and, as such is no cause for apology.

That Romney avoided the demands our God places upon us, which curtail our "passions, appetites, and sinfulness," merely reflects a culturally induced reticence to judge, something for which, under the circumstances, he can be excused.

Romney's speech was not only successful at the political level, it was a guilelessly adroit appeal to our better natures, one that obliquely brings a sense of quiet cohesion, just when we all need it most.

The Politics of Intelligence & the Will to Win

The moral equivalence of all nations has been a perverse hallmark of modern liberalism.  Whether it's Castro's Cuba or Venezuela's Chavez, the left's love affair with belligerents has a long pedigree dating all the way back to Stalin.  In that vein, we offer Robert Scheer's piece in today's Huffington Post as evidence that old habits do, in fact, die hard.

After framing the issue in a predictably biased manner, and without even a passing reference to the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), Scheer draws his reflexive Pavlovian conclusion, that

...the fanatical leader of a theocracy seems to have a higher regard for truth than does the president of the world's greatest experiment in representative democracy.

Overlooking the fact that America is not a democracy, the juxtaposition of our nation with that of a rogue regime that tortures and murders its own citizens, has absolutely no freedom of the press or of religious expression, much less the rule of law, is compelling evidence that the ignorant hard-edge of liberalism remains its most salient cultural feature.

However, the broader issue is the shameless way in which the left has latched on to an intelligence report with a fervor that belies their habitual condemnation of our intelligence agencies.  Indeed, their proclivity to miss the fundamental message is inevitable given their base instinct to pursue a purely political agenda.  To wit, a key NIE assertion, made on page 7 of the report, states:

We assess with moderate confidence that convincing the Iranian leadership to forgo the eventual development of nuclear weapons will be difficult given the linkage many within the leadership probably see between nuclear weapons development and Iran’s key national security and foreign policy objectives, and given Iran’s considerable effort from at least the late 1980s to 2003 to develop such weapons.  In our judgment, only an Iranian political decision to abandon a nuclear weapons objective would plausibly keep Iran from eventually producing nuclear weapons—and such a decision is inherently reversible.

Indee, the arguments that the likes of Scheer craft seem predicated in the patently false notion that Iran is no less hostile to U.S. national security than, say, Sweden.  This is a bellicose regime that has sworn to wipe Israel off the map, calls America the great Satan, and which has murdered our soldiers in Iraq.  Does any of this matter to Mr. Scheer, or is this only about excoriating President Bush?

Given their pattern of introspective loathing, the left's disdain of America is only tempered when a Democratic president is in the White House.  That explains why eight years of Bill Clinton's studied indifference to the series of attacks by radical Islamists under his watch have been erased from the left's hard drive.

If we, as Americans, want to neutralize Iran and safeguard our security interests, it would be immensely helpful if all citizens would recognize what's at stake, and, in particular, that no president wishes to take the nation to war.  However, standing idly by as we did for decades as the threat of radical Islamism grew, has hardly been a winning strategy either.

The Left's Abuse of the American Worker

For those unfamiliar with it, The American Prospect is an unapologetic liberal mouthpiece for whom the glass of life is always half-empty.  Paul Waldman maintains their inveterate view that our economy in general, and employment specifically, are under the Draconian control of Republicans. 

Indeed, in the piece we link to above, Mr. Waldman leaps out of the starting blocks with a litany of alleged problems for the "American worker," from lower real wages to reductions in union membership, from the price of health care to the scourge of outsourcing.  As is typically the case when liberals mount arguments predicated on the woes of the downtrodden worker they are apt to emit more heat than light, and this case is no exception.

There are far too many false assumptions, distortions, and specious arguments for us to tackle in this venue, but we would begin with the overarching counter-argument that for the left Americans are owed a job, and a good job at that.  Coupled with the canard that workers are permanently mired in dead-end jobs without any hope of advancement, and you have a recipe for the kind of Soviet-style rhetoric that animates the modern Democratic sensibility.

Calling General Electric titan Jack Welch a "corporate barbarian of the first order" certainly whips the masses into a collective leftist frenzy, but it has neither polemical utility nor does it illuminate the economic realities that drive corporate profitability and salary increases for employees.  But, let's not forget, that's not Waldman's goal.  No, his aim is to effectively recast overall success as abject failure in order to tap into the virtually unlimited well of political good will--read, power--for those who view the contemporary American workplace in the same context as the early 20th century garment sweatshops.

An excerpt from his closing paragraph perfectly characterizes the skewed world in which the atavistic liberal lives:

The Republicans certainly know the kind of workplace they admire.  It's one in which power -- not values, principles, or fairness, but raw power -- determines how people are treated.  They find deeply troubling anything that constrains employers from exploiting their workers to whatever degree they see fit.

For a dose of reality, we turn to a recently published editorial in the Wall Street Journal, which quotes from a study by the Treasury Department on income mobility in America.  Among other things, it debunks the myth that workers are fettered to low paying, menial jobs with no hope of moving up through the ranks.

But another, more fundamental criticism of the Waldmans of the world is the craven way in which they traduce our capitalist system and the related system of economics on which its based for their socialist goals.  Freedom, education, opportunity, wedded with sacrifice and hard work--all of which are in abundance for those willing to do the heavy lifting--aren't enough for the liberals.

That's because it doesn't create the class warfare that is the precursor of political power which they exploit in conjunction with the legions of politicians standing ready to do their bidding at every level of government.  That it smacks of rank opportunism and a reordering of basic economic incentives is of no concern for the liberal because the acquisition and retention of power is their only goal.

'Low Confidence' in the NIE

Intelligence gathering was dealt its first blow when the Church Commission in the early 70s eviscerated the CIA's human intelligence capabilities.  Despite the fact that our technological capabilities have since expanded exponentially, the human element in counter-intelligence is crucial to rendering credible conclusions regarding our adversaries and that has been essentially non-existent.

The newly released National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that concludes "with high confidence" that Iran halted its nuclear program in the fall of 2003 may well be true, but it is diametrically opposed to its conclusions in May of 2005.  The nine-page report is predictably sketchy with respect to specifics, so we can only speculate about how these conclusions were reached.

'Confidence,' as we all learned after the CIA incorrectly concluded that Iraq had an active WMD program, is largely a subjective phenomenon, and the insular thinking that is endemic to our intelligence agencies breeds a dangerous kind of tacit 'group-think' that can lead to unwarranted conclusions.

So, thoughtful people justifiably wonder whether the report of 2005 or 2007 is accurate?  If the 2007 NIE is accurate, the pressure the U.S. has been exerting on Iran may well be inhibiting Ahmadinejad from pursuing a nuclear weapons program.  But given his bellicose rhetoric, and his assertions that Iran is a sovereign nation that has the right to nuclear arms, and, in particular, in light of the fact that the pressure in question has been so anemic, the confidence level of that conclusion must be quite low.

The more plausible explanation is that in the absence of human intelligence, the 'confidence index' that our intelligence agencies use has been the unwitting target of bracket-creep.  That is, as our ability to penetrate such opaque and impenetrable entities as al-Qaeda has declined due to our reliance on high-tech intelligence, the authors who process the conclusions have become prone to extrapolate beyond the certitude of the data. 

If you're curious about the history of the CIA you would find Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, an informative glimpse into an agency that in recent decades has become rife with political bias and has delivered virtually no credible intelligence in as many years.

So, as you peruse the NIE and read the related analysis, you may well conclude that vigorous diplomacy and sanctions are the most reliable way to deal with Iran.  The problem is that the former is only effective when dealing with a nominally honest nation, and the latter has a checkered history of success in dealing with overtly hostile nations.

Neither has any chance of success unless a credible military threat is on the table, and in this age of skittishness towards the military option, such threats just aren't made in polite company.

The Mainstream Media's War Against Information

As have most Americans, perhaps you've noticed the reduction in the number of headline stories concerning the war in Iraq.  Blogger Jeffrey Feldman, writing for the Huffington Post, certainly has noticed and he's not pleased about it.  What's curious is his characterization of the supposed Iraq war black-out by the mainstream media:

America's big media must do better than this.  They must report Iraq and report it well even in the holiday season--especially in the holiday season.

No more media blackout on Iraq.

For the dwindling number of Americans who believe that coverage of the war was anything other than a blackout, Mr. Feldman's stern admonition might be shocking news.  Who does he think has been accurately reporting on the war, CNN?  The New York Times?  Indeed, the blackout has been as coordinated as though it were under the auspices of the Politburo, which is why so many Americans have turned to alternative news sources.

What's surprising is that a blogger--a presumed member of the next generation of information sources--is scolding the MSM for its alleged dereliction of duty when that began at the outset of the war.  Those who keep their eyes trained below the radar are well-versed on the historical problems and the progress in Iraq, despite the steady drone from the defeatists ensconced in MSM news rooms and editorial board rooms where a tacit form of stove-pipe thinking is cynically nurtured.

And, just in case you weren't aware of it, according to Mr. Feldman, the war in Iraq is a "foreign policy debacle destroying America's military and frustrating all of America...".  It's alarming when the left expresses a concern for our military since the majority of their time is spent dismantling or vilifying it.  Were the modern liberal to have control over it, our military would be eviscerated well beyond President Clinton's handiwork, in part because for them, Islamic terrorism is a law enforcement issue, one that demands with "aggressive diplomacy," as Senators Clinton and Obama believe.

So, the mainstream media has gone from running non-stop stories highlighting car bombings, homocide bombers, and religious internecines to a deafening silence.  All that's changed is that our military is achieving unprecedented progress in regions of Iraq that were written off as hopeless--and that, for the liberal defeatists, isn't newsworthy because it runs counter to their political goal of portraying the war as a failure.

When Rep. Jack Murtha momentarily went off message last week and said that we're winning in Iraq he stunned his left wing brethren because candor is the first casualty of their war against the truth.  Of course, he quickly corrected himself the following day, but it was an object lesson in the fine art of liberal political discourse: 

Negativity and defeatism win the day, when we're struggling and, in particular, when we're winning.