Mike Adams
Monday, August 31, 2009
Everyone wants heaven on Earth. It would be nice if people simply lent their abilities to society in accordance with the needs of others. Nicer still if people satisfied their needs mindful of others’ ability to accommodate them. But things simply don’t work out that way. Human nature won’t allow it.
For many years I’ve used my classroom to teach students about more than just our system of justice, law and order. I’ve used it to teach important life lessons which, if properly understood and applied, will spare my students no small measure of discomfort in life. This semester I decided to teach them a lesson about human nature.
I wanted to create a little utopia for the 99 students taking my three classes. So I kept the rules very simple and explained why we must have them and how they work to the benefit of our little community.
First, I explained the need to arrive in class on time. I appealed to reason and explained how tardiness reflects poorly upon them. But I kept the emphasis on the collective. I explained that no one person has a right to barge into class and work his way past the podium and down the row to his seat – all the while tripping over book bags and catching his breath while the class focused its attention on his lateness, not the lecture.
And I made it very easy for everyone to follow the rule. I placed a couple of desks in the hall outside the class and told students they could sit there if they arrived late. There would be no need to barge in the classroom late. The door would remain open so the late student could hear the lecture and take notes. Any lingering questions could be answered after class.
Next, I explained the need to come to class without any electronic devices that make strange noises. I appealed to reason and explained that a student looks very foolish when his cell phone goes off in class. But I kept the emphasis on the collective. I explained that ringing cell phones disrupt the concentration of professors and students alike. The disruptions have become such a regular occurrence that the learning environment has suffered appreciably.
And I made it easy for students to follow the rule – even those who sincerely believe they cannot live without a cell phone. The rule states that I must never see or hear a cell phone during the lecture. But those addicted to their cell phones – and, hence, unable to leave them home - could simply shut them off and hide them in their backpacks. I would never know the difference.
After explaining the rules I decided to do something I have never done in my 17 years as a college professor. I decided that, if everyone in the class could follow the two aforementioned rules, the entire class would receive “A” grades. There would be no need for any papers or examinations if they kept the rules all semester. I was creating a real utopia for the students. But it was also a kind of paradise for me since I would not have to grade tests or papers for a whole semester.
Just a few minutes after I had finished explaining the rules – approximately 57 minutes after the two o’clock class began - a student came walking into the lecture late. Naturally, I asked him what he was doing. He said he was there for the three o’clock class. I told him there was no three o’clock class – and that the next one began at 3:30. He argued with me briefly but finally relented and allowed me to continue teaching. I decided that - since it was the first day - this first transgression would not count. I wasn’t yet sure whether he was my student. Later, I found out he was.
So I decided to start anew the next week. But, unfortunately - just thirty minutes into my first lecture of the week – I heard a strange noise coming from a student’s book bag. He grabbed it, opened it up and began frantically searching for the ringing cell phone. He managed to turn the device off just before the eleventh ring. While several of the other students were scowling at him he sat through the rest of the lecture red-faced and embarrassed.
And so that ended our little experiment with utopia. And with it my chances of a semester free from grading papers and exams. It was all because one person could not follow a simple rule. He simply valued his own convenience over the welfare of the collective.
The outcome of this ill-fated experiment comes as no surprise to Christians and Jews. Both know the third chapter of the Bible teaches that even two people cannot follow one rule in exchange for a lifetime in utopia. How could 99 follow two rules for the promise of one pleasant semester?
For those who worship Karl Marx the implications are pretty obvious. The formula for a three hundred million person utopia cannot be found in a 1000 page rule book. We’ll just have to look for answers in Cuba. Or some place where the humans aren’t so self-absorbed.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Understanding Donald Rumsfeld
It will be quite some time before history delivers its final verdict.
By Jamie M. Fly
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Despite continued disagreements on the left and the right about the legacy of George W. Bush, there is one Bush-administration official who still unites political observers: Donald Rumsfeld.
On the left, Democratic members of Congress and activists vilified Rumsfeld for his handling of the war in Iraq, Guantanamo, and the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib; on the right, commentators called for Rumsfeld’s resignation less than seven months into his tenure because of his perceived inability to manage the Pentagon.
By the time President Bush essentially fired Rumsfeld after Republicans suffered sharp losses in the November 2006 elections, a USA Today/Gallup poll showed that Rumsfeld had a 57 percent unfavorable rating. During the 2008 presidential campaign, even Sen. John McCain took to calling Rumsfeld “one of the worst secretaries of defense in history.”
However, for a significant portion of his time in office, Rumsfeld was quite popular. Viewership ratings of Rumsfeld’s wartime press conferences during Operation Enduring Freedom, at which he displayed acerbic wit while parrying with a hostile press corps, for a time rivaled those of cable-news shows such as Hardball with Chris Matthews and Fox and Friends.
Washington Post reporter Bradley Graham chronicles the full span of Rumsfeld’s remarkable career in a surprisingly balanced and fair new biography, By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld. Graham does an excellent job of tracing the man’s meteoric rise in Washington, relaying insights from friends and associates about the famed Rumsfeld management style, which some call one of his biggest faults.
It is easy to forget that Rumsfeld had always been somewhat of a wunderkind. Elected to Congress at the age of 30, he went on to serve as a senior White House aide to President Nixon, U.S. ambassador to NATO, chief of staff to President Ford, and the youngest-ever secretary of defense. After leaving the Ford administration, he became a successful CEO and envoy or adviser to several presidents before returning to government in 2001 as the oldest-ever secretary of defense.
Throughout his career, Rumsfeld was often described as a micromanager, slow to make decisions, and at times harsh with subordinates. But it was a management style his superiors appreciated; they consistently promoted him in the political and corporate worlds. In his various positions in government and the private sector, he showed an uncanny ability to manage large organizations and difficult operations.
During his second stint in the Pentagon, perhaps the largest bureaucracy on earth, Rumsfeld papered the building with his infamous “snowflakes” — short memos dispatched to subordinates raising questions, expressing opinions, and giving guidance. “I want to run this department from my outbox, not my inbox,” he often told his senior staff. Some derided the snowflakes as distracting to their recipients, but as the low-level recipient of several snowflakes (I served as a political appointee in the Pentagon bureaucracy under Rumsfeld from 2005 to 2006), I can attest that they were a useful way for the secretary to convey his views on a myriad of issues to Pentagon officials he was unlikely to interact with on a regular basis.
Graham is perhaps most critical when describing Rumsfeld’s interactions with subordinates. The book is full of accounts from generals and civilians whom Rumsfeld brutally dissected in meetings. Graham quotes Doug Feith’s comment in his memoirs that Rumsfeld “bruised people and made personal enemies, who were eager to strike back at him and try to discredit his work.” But the narrative sheds little light on why Rumsfeld felt the need to handle himself in such a manner.
On the issue that caused Rumsfeld’s downfall — Iraq — By His Own Rules does not break much new ground, but it does provide useful context. The book makes clear that Rumsfeld’s supposed lack of planning for the postwar period needs to be viewed through the prism of his longtime interests in cutting costs and keeping American military deployments to a minimum. Rumsfeld had no interest in maintaining a significant troop presence in Iraq after Baghdad fell, and even less interest in establishing a flourishing democracy in the heart of the Middle East.
What is amazing is that the U.S. government as a whole did not resolve its contradictory opinions prior to the invasion. It is doubtful that Rumsfeld hid his views from his interagency counterparts.
As Bob Woodward’s work and the memoirs of George Tenet also suggest, a serious breakdown in the interagency process marked the prewar period. This was in part the fault of then–national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, whose emphasis on taking only consensus views to the president wasted much of the principals’ time and meant that problems tended to fester when there was no consensus.
But regardless of the genesis of the post-invasion debacle, it was Rumsfeld’s unwillingness to consider a change in strategy that led to his downfall. Rumsfeld’s commanders on the ground aided in this unwillingness, consistently advising him that additional forces were not required — a useful reminder that even in the era of the much-exalted Generals Petraeus, Odierno, and McChrystal, commanders are just as fallible as their civilian leaders.
The fallacies surrounding Rumsfeld’s persona have distracted many from accurately weighing the man’s shortcomings and appreciating his virtues; it will be quite some time before history delivers its final verdict on Donald Rumsfeld. But by looking beyond the hype, Graham has made a significant contribution to the first draft.
By Jamie M. Fly
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Despite continued disagreements on the left and the right about the legacy of George W. Bush, there is one Bush-administration official who still unites political observers: Donald Rumsfeld.
On the left, Democratic members of Congress and activists vilified Rumsfeld for his handling of the war in Iraq, Guantanamo, and the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib; on the right, commentators called for Rumsfeld’s resignation less than seven months into his tenure because of his perceived inability to manage the Pentagon.
By the time President Bush essentially fired Rumsfeld after Republicans suffered sharp losses in the November 2006 elections, a USA Today/Gallup poll showed that Rumsfeld had a 57 percent unfavorable rating. During the 2008 presidential campaign, even Sen. John McCain took to calling Rumsfeld “one of the worst secretaries of defense in history.”
However, for a significant portion of his time in office, Rumsfeld was quite popular. Viewership ratings of Rumsfeld’s wartime press conferences during Operation Enduring Freedom, at which he displayed acerbic wit while parrying with a hostile press corps, for a time rivaled those of cable-news shows such as Hardball with Chris Matthews and Fox and Friends.
Washington Post reporter Bradley Graham chronicles the full span of Rumsfeld’s remarkable career in a surprisingly balanced and fair new biography, By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld. Graham does an excellent job of tracing the man’s meteoric rise in Washington, relaying insights from friends and associates about the famed Rumsfeld management style, which some call one of his biggest faults.
It is easy to forget that Rumsfeld had always been somewhat of a wunderkind. Elected to Congress at the age of 30, he went on to serve as a senior White House aide to President Nixon, U.S. ambassador to NATO, chief of staff to President Ford, and the youngest-ever secretary of defense. After leaving the Ford administration, he became a successful CEO and envoy or adviser to several presidents before returning to government in 2001 as the oldest-ever secretary of defense.
Throughout his career, Rumsfeld was often described as a micromanager, slow to make decisions, and at times harsh with subordinates. But it was a management style his superiors appreciated; they consistently promoted him in the political and corporate worlds. In his various positions in government and the private sector, he showed an uncanny ability to manage large organizations and difficult operations.
During his second stint in the Pentagon, perhaps the largest bureaucracy on earth, Rumsfeld papered the building with his infamous “snowflakes” — short memos dispatched to subordinates raising questions, expressing opinions, and giving guidance. “I want to run this department from my outbox, not my inbox,” he often told his senior staff. Some derided the snowflakes as distracting to their recipients, but as the low-level recipient of several snowflakes (I served as a political appointee in the Pentagon bureaucracy under Rumsfeld from 2005 to 2006), I can attest that they were a useful way for the secretary to convey his views on a myriad of issues to Pentagon officials he was unlikely to interact with on a regular basis.
Graham is perhaps most critical when describing Rumsfeld’s interactions with subordinates. The book is full of accounts from generals and civilians whom Rumsfeld brutally dissected in meetings. Graham quotes Doug Feith’s comment in his memoirs that Rumsfeld “bruised people and made personal enemies, who were eager to strike back at him and try to discredit his work.” But the narrative sheds little light on why Rumsfeld felt the need to handle himself in such a manner.
On the issue that caused Rumsfeld’s downfall — Iraq — By His Own Rules does not break much new ground, but it does provide useful context. The book makes clear that Rumsfeld’s supposed lack of planning for the postwar period needs to be viewed through the prism of his longtime interests in cutting costs and keeping American military deployments to a minimum. Rumsfeld had no interest in maintaining a significant troop presence in Iraq after Baghdad fell, and even less interest in establishing a flourishing democracy in the heart of the Middle East.
What is amazing is that the U.S. government as a whole did not resolve its contradictory opinions prior to the invasion. It is doubtful that Rumsfeld hid his views from his interagency counterparts.
As Bob Woodward’s work and the memoirs of George Tenet also suggest, a serious breakdown in the interagency process marked the prewar period. This was in part the fault of then–national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, whose emphasis on taking only consensus views to the president wasted much of the principals’ time and meant that problems tended to fester when there was no consensus.
But regardless of the genesis of the post-invasion debacle, it was Rumsfeld’s unwillingness to consider a change in strategy that led to his downfall. Rumsfeld’s commanders on the ground aided in this unwillingness, consistently advising him that additional forces were not required — a useful reminder that even in the era of the much-exalted Generals Petraeus, Odierno, and McChrystal, commanders are just as fallible as their civilian leaders.
The fallacies surrounding Rumsfeld’s persona have distracted many from accurately weighing the man’s shortcomings and appreciating his virtues; it will be quite some time before history delivers its final verdict on Donald Rumsfeld. But by looking beyond the hype, Graham has made a significant contribution to the first draft.
A Cash for Clunkers Program for the Air Force
Jim Martin
Monday, August 31, 2009
When the White House and Congress wanted to take old cars off the road and replace them with newer models, they passed "Cash for Clunkers."
However, when it comes to the clunkers in America's military aircraft, things are quite a bit different. For more than a decade, Congress has wrangled with how to replace our aging fleet of aerial refueling tankers. The planes that provide much-needed in-flight fuel to military aircraft have been in circulation since 1957. Yet, despite the desperate need for an upgrade, political gamesmanship has delayed the Air Force from trading them in.
While they are not the supersonic fighter planes glamorized in movies, the Air Force simply could not do its job without these tankers.
Like the efficient new sedan that was supposed to replace the old clunker, the goal of upgrading the tanker should be to replace aging equipment and obsolete technology with a better, more efficient design, at a reasonable cost and timeframe. Unfortunately, neither goal is currently being met.
In a move that has since been overturned by the General Accountability Office, the Air Force procurement office announced last year that it would award the contract to build the new tanker fleet to a European firm EADS, working with American-based Northrop Grumman, that had never built a tanker, instead of American-based Boeing. This decision ignored input from "warfighters" on the actual core mission of the tanker, and according to the GAO, changed the requirements for the bids in mid-process while keeping Boeing in the dark about these changes.
GAO upheld a Boeing protest of the contract award last summer. In the midst of a presidential election year, the bidding process was set back yet another year with the Pentagon setting a deadline of Oct. 1 for a new, "final" decision.
Already well behind schedule, the Air Force needs to salvage the situation by deciding on selection criteria based on the best advice of our warfighters, not politicians. Then, they need to select the most capable company to build the most capable aircraft.
Simply put, Boeing has been building America's aerial refueling tankers since 1957 and can start building our new tanker without further delays. EADS and its American partners will need to build and equip a factory then hire and train a work force before it can actually start building a tanker - a process that will take several additional years.
Most warfighters believe that the Boeing tanker is also better suited to the core mission. Its Boeing 767 airframe is smaller and lighter than the oversized EADS Airbus 330 tanker, making it more maneuverable in the air and allowing it to take off and land in up to 20 percent more airfields worldwide. Fewer usable airfields would increase the time our military aircraft would need to remain in the air waiting to be refueled, potentially jeopardizing both mission objectives and pilot safety. However, if the Air Force ends up rebidding the tanker contract with cargo capacity as an additional criterion, Boeing has put forth its 777. The 777 can not only fulfill that role, but is so much lighter and has such a greater range than the Airbus 330 that it virtually renders the Airbus 330 obsolete.
And as a former Marine, I can tell you that close air support is something every soldier counts on. So, getting a fleet of tankers that is most capable of being in the right place at the right time is the warfighters' bottom line. The Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker has been serving our nation for more than 50 years - the last being purchased by the Air Force in 1965. If it were a car, President Barack Obama and Congress would be tripping over themselves to get it off the road and replaced with the very best solution the auto industry has to offer.
The same urgency and prudence should be afforded the refueling tanker.
Monday, August 31, 2009
When the White House and Congress wanted to take old cars off the road and replace them with newer models, they passed "Cash for Clunkers."
However, when it comes to the clunkers in America's military aircraft, things are quite a bit different. For more than a decade, Congress has wrangled with how to replace our aging fleet of aerial refueling tankers. The planes that provide much-needed in-flight fuel to military aircraft have been in circulation since 1957. Yet, despite the desperate need for an upgrade, political gamesmanship has delayed the Air Force from trading them in.
While they are not the supersonic fighter planes glamorized in movies, the Air Force simply could not do its job without these tankers.
Like the efficient new sedan that was supposed to replace the old clunker, the goal of upgrading the tanker should be to replace aging equipment and obsolete technology with a better, more efficient design, at a reasonable cost and timeframe. Unfortunately, neither goal is currently being met.
In a move that has since been overturned by the General Accountability Office, the Air Force procurement office announced last year that it would award the contract to build the new tanker fleet to a European firm EADS, working with American-based Northrop Grumman, that had never built a tanker, instead of American-based Boeing. This decision ignored input from "warfighters" on the actual core mission of the tanker, and according to the GAO, changed the requirements for the bids in mid-process while keeping Boeing in the dark about these changes.
GAO upheld a Boeing protest of the contract award last summer. In the midst of a presidential election year, the bidding process was set back yet another year with the Pentagon setting a deadline of Oct. 1 for a new, "final" decision.
Already well behind schedule, the Air Force needs to salvage the situation by deciding on selection criteria based on the best advice of our warfighters, not politicians. Then, they need to select the most capable company to build the most capable aircraft.
Simply put, Boeing has been building America's aerial refueling tankers since 1957 and can start building our new tanker without further delays. EADS and its American partners will need to build and equip a factory then hire and train a work force before it can actually start building a tanker - a process that will take several additional years.
Most warfighters believe that the Boeing tanker is also better suited to the core mission. Its Boeing 767 airframe is smaller and lighter than the oversized EADS Airbus 330 tanker, making it more maneuverable in the air and allowing it to take off and land in up to 20 percent more airfields worldwide. Fewer usable airfields would increase the time our military aircraft would need to remain in the air waiting to be refueled, potentially jeopardizing both mission objectives and pilot safety. However, if the Air Force ends up rebidding the tanker contract with cargo capacity as an additional criterion, Boeing has put forth its 777. The 777 can not only fulfill that role, but is so much lighter and has such a greater range than the Airbus 330 that it virtually renders the Airbus 330 obsolete.
And as a former Marine, I can tell you that close air support is something every soldier counts on. So, getting a fleet of tankers that is most capable of being in the right place at the right time is the warfighters' bottom line. The Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker has been serving our nation for more than 50 years - the last being purchased by the Air Force in 1965. If it were a car, President Barack Obama and Congress would be tripping over themselves to get it off the road and replaced with the very best solution the auto industry has to offer.
The same urgency and prudence should be afforded the refueling tanker.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
President Obama Should Pardon CIA Interrogators
Debra J. Saunders
Sunday, August 30, 2009
When he served as deputy attorney general, now Attorney General Eric Holder gave a "neutral leaning positive" recommendation that led to President Bill Clinton's pardoning of gazillionaire fugitive Marc Rich, who was on the lam in Switzerland hiding from federal charges of fraud, evading more than $48 million in taxes, racketeering and trading oil with Iran in violation of a U.S. embargo.
Holder also had a role in the 1999 Clinton pardons of 16 Puerto Rico independence terrorists -- members of the bomb-happy FALN or the splinter group Los Macheteros -- who had been convicted on such charges as bank robbery, possession of explosives and participating in a seditious conspiracy -- even though none of the 16 had applied for clemency. As the Los Angeles Times reported, two of the 16 refused to accept the pardon -- as it required them to renounce violence -- while another later was killed in a shootout with federal agents.
During his confirmation hearing in January, Holder refused to explain why the Clinton Department of Justice changed its earlier position against the 16 commutations -- citing President Clinton's claim of executive privilege.
So you'll forgive me if I don't buy into the argument that, as a simple lawman, Holder had no choice but to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate alleged abuses during CIA interrogations of high-value detainees.
The Clinton Justice Department didn't even make the 16 terrorists disclose pertinent information about the crimes they committed, just as they tied no strings around Rich. Yet 10 years later, Holder's Justice Department won't give a break to CIA officials desperate to stop another terrorist attack.
Holder's decision would be understandable if the CIA engaged in a pattern of brazen lawlessness and bloodlust that could be stopped only by DOJ intervention.
To the contrary, the CIA waterboarded all of three high-level detainees -- then stopped in March 2003 -- when Bush White House lawyers determined the technique to be legal.
Moreover, it was a CIA official who, learning that some agents and contractors may have abused detainees, began an investigation in November 2002 that resulted in an agency request for an inspector general probe in January 2003. Hence the 2004 report newly released by the Obama administration.
The agency's behavior isn't that of a coverup, but quite the opposite. A contractor was prosecuted in 2007. John L. Helgerson, the former CIA inspector general who issued the 2004 report, told the New York Times that he "personally" would not prosecute the other cases.
The Helgerson report and other documents revealed that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gave up crucial information about planned terrorist attacks as a result of the CIA's detention and interrogation program. There's no way to prove that the enhanced interrogation techniques -- also known as "torture" -- led to those disclosures, but they may have saved lives by thwarting plans for attacks on London's Heathrow airport, to fly planes into tall buildings in California and even a plan to weaponize anthrax. The Washington Post notes that there is no proof that the attacks were "imminent." OK, but they were in the works.
Now the reward for those who stuck out their necks to uncover these plots is the very thing that they feared -- that their names may end up in a World Court "most wanted" list. As one operative told the IG, "Ten years from now, we're going to be sorry we're doing this ... (but) it has to be done."
As a candidate for the White House, President Obama left the door open for prosecuting alleged intelligence abuses, but straddled the controversy by noting that, if elected, he would not want to see his tenure consumed with what might be perceived "as a partisan witch hunt."
Sorry, but there is no escaping that perception now.
And it doesn't help when his own attorney general was able to support the pardon of unrepentant (but left-leaning) offenders, but he can't stop hounding professionals whose biggest fear was that they might fail to prevent another large-scale terrorist attack.
I don't know why Obama bothered to keep the Bush rendition policy in play -- there can't be many operatives who would be willing to so much as raise their voices during interrogations after Holder played the special-prosecutor card.
Hey, all operatives have to do is read a newspaper to know that inside the Beltway in 2009, there is more outrage that agents might have threatened to kill Khalid Sheikh Mohammad's kids to prevent a terrorist attack than at KSM for claiming to have beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
Likewise, the public seems more exercised at the kill-KSM's-kids threat than at today's preferred (but necessary) method of fighting al-Qaida: lobbing missiles that sometimes kill innocent people.
If Obama truly wants to move "forward," as his aides contend, he has the means -- as Holder well knows. Obama could use the presidential pardon to immunize CIA interrogators from the threat of criminal prosecution and end the constant flogging of serial investigations.
It's true, the CIA interrogators may lack the political connections enjoyed by Rich and the FALN guys. But maybe this once, Holder can overlook that.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
When he served as deputy attorney general, now Attorney General Eric Holder gave a "neutral leaning positive" recommendation that led to President Bill Clinton's pardoning of gazillionaire fugitive Marc Rich, who was on the lam in Switzerland hiding from federal charges of fraud, evading more than $48 million in taxes, racketeering and trading oil with Iran in violation of a U.S. embargo.
Holder also had a role in the 1999 Clinton pardons of 16 Puerto Rico independence terrorists -- members of the bomb-happy FALN or the splinter group Los Macheteros -- who had been convicted on such charges as bank robbery, possession of explosives and participating in a seditious conspiracy -- even though none of the 16 had applied for clemency. As the Los Angeles Times reported, two of the 16 refused to accept the pardon -- as it required them to renounce violence -- while another later was killed in a shootout with federal agents.
During his confirmation hearing in January, Holder refused to explain why the Clinton Department of Justice changed its earlier position against the 16 commutations -- citing President Clinton's claim of executive privilege.
So you'll forgive me if I don't buy into the argument that, as a simple lawman, Holder had no choice but to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate alleged abuses during CIA interrogations of high-value detainees.
The Clinton Justice Department didn't even make the 16 terrorists disclose pertinent information about the crimes they committed, just as they tied no strings around Rich. Yet 10 years later, Holder's Justice Department won't give a break to CIA officials desperate to stop another terrorist attack.
Holder's decision would be understandable if the CIA engaged in a pattern of brazen lawlessness and bloodlust that could be stopped only by DOJ intervention.
To the contrary, the CIA waterboarded all of three high-level detainees -- then stopped in March 2003 -- when Bush White House lawyers determined the technique to be legal.
Moreover, it was a CIA official who, learning that some agents and contractors may have abused detainees, began an investigation in November 2002 that resulted in an agency request for an inspector general probe in January 2003. Hence the 2004 report newly released by the Obama administration.
The agency's behavior isn't that of a coverup, but quite the opposite. A contractor was prosecuted in 2007. John L. Helgerson, the former CIA inspector general who issued the 2004 report, told the New York Times that he "personally" would not prosecute the other cases.
The Helgerson report and other documents revealed that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gave up crucial information about planned terrorist attacks as a result of the CIA's detention and interrogation program. There's no way to prove that the enhanced interrogation techniques -- also known as "torture" -- led to those disclosures, but they may have saved lives by thwarting plans for attacks on London's Heathrow airport, to fly planes into tall buildings in California and even a plan to weaponize anthrax. The Washington Post notes that there is no proof that the attacks were "imminent." OK, but they were in the works.
Now the reward for those who stuck out their necks to uncover these plots is the very thing that they feared -- that their names may end up in a World Court "most wanted" list. As one operative told the IG, "Ten years from now, we're going to be sorry we're doing this ... (but) it has to be done."
As a candidate for the White House, President Obama left the door open for prosecuting alleged intelligence abuses, but straddled the controversy by noting that, if elected, he would not want to see his tenure consumed with what might be perceived "as a partisan witch hunt."
Sorry, but there is no escaping that perception now.
And it doesn't help when his own attorney general was able to support the pardon of unrepentant (but left-leaning) offenders, but he can't stop hounding professionals whose biggest fear was that they might fail to prevent another large-scale terrorist attack.
I don't know why Obama bothered to keep the Bush rendition policy in play -- there can't be many operatives who would be willing to so much as raise their voices during interrogations after Holder played the special-prosecutor card.
Hey, all operatives have to do is read a newspaper to know that inside the Beltway in 2009, there is more outrage that agents might have threatened to kill Khalid Sheikh Mohammad's kids to prevent a terrorist attack than at KSM for claiming to have beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
Likewise, the public seems more exercised at the kill-KSM's-kids threat than at today's preferred (but necessary) method of fighting al-Qaida: lobbing missiles that sometimes kill innocent people.
If Obama truly wants to move "forward," as his aides contend, he has the means -- as Holder well knows. Obama could use the presidential pardon to immunize CIA interrogators from the threat of criminal prosecution and end the constant flogging of serial investigations.
It's true, the CIA interrogators may lack the political connections enjoyed by Rich and the FALN guys. But maybe this once, Holder can overlook that.
The Real Myth of Health Care
Joseph C. Phillips
Friday, August 28, 2009
One of the more pernicious myths surrounding the debate over health care is the oft repeated claim that conservatives do not want reform. Nonsense! What we do not want is the warm bucket of snake oil currently being sold to the American people by this administration. Conservatives have long argued for the need to reduce mandated benefits, reduce the reliance on third-party payers and get rid of public policies that hinder entrepreneurship and innovation. This is the kind of reform conservatives want – the right kind of reform.
Because the number of Americans that are actually denied medical care is zero, the administration has chosen to cite the fact that 47 million Americans lack medical insurance (another myth) as the reason for its urgency in passing a huge bill that congressmen can’t be bothered to read. Just yesterday the administration and its army of sales people began to talk about health insurance reform; this after years of hearing about the need to reform healthcare. Ahh! The power of focus groups. Now we need single-payer universal healthcare to bring down costs (prices) and to protect the sick from “discrimination” at the hands of evil insurance companies.
So the cause of our national distress is the private health insurance industry, which no doubt explains why A) Obama has made back room deals with the insurance and pharmaceutical industries and B) why the bill making its way through the House of Representatives devotes exactly 6 of its more than 1000 pages to insurance reform.
Conservatives of course have long pointed to the over-reliance on insurance companies and other third party payers as one of the major causes of the increase in healthcare costs. It is worth remembering that the largest insurer in the nation is the federal government through Medicare and Medicaid. And how’s that working out?
A recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that about half of the increase in health expenditures nationwide since 1965 was caused by the creation of Medicare and Medicaid. Why? One reason is that under the government programs prices are not the result of contracts between providers and patients. Instead, prices are set between providers and the U.S. Government. In practice, this means the U.S. government says what's covered and what the price is (regardless of the actual cost), and providers and patients have no choice in the matter.
Worse, since patients do not negotiate price, they don't care what the price is and have no incentive to seek out a provider with a lower one. On the other hand, they have every incentive to take health risks they couldn't otherwise afford and use services they might not otherwise be willing to pay for. There is a similar incentive for providers to charge for things covered by Medicare and Medicaid and do those things as rapidly as possible, whether or not that is what the art of medicine indicates would be the best treatment. So price – the most effective way to allocate scarce resources - isn't determined by negotiation but rather by politics, (as has already been demonstrated by Obama’s back room deals) which invariably leads to shortages and rationing.
And what of the huge cost savings that Obama promises will magically appear under reform with the same perverse incentives?
According to the National Center for Policy Analysis, “Medicare's total unfunded liability is more than five times larger than that of Social Security.” In fact, the new Medicare prescription drug benefit enacted in 2006 (Part D) has proven to be twice as much as the original congressional budget office estimates and alone adds some $17 trillion to the projected Medicare shortfall - an amount greater than all of Social Security's unfunded obligations.” The liability for Medicaid is off the charts because unlike Medicare Medicaid has no “trust fund” but is paid for by the states with matching grants from the fed. I can’t speak for you, but I am overflowing with confidence that a government takeover of healthcare is just the ticket to solve our fiscal problems.
The reform the new left is attempting to force upon us is the wrong kind of reform. It will not bring down costs, it will not improve the overall health of Americans and it will not encourage innovation and entrepreneurship. What it will do is dramatically increase the number of Americans dependant upon government for their medical care and their livelihoods. That may be a good way to build a political base, but it ain’t reform.
Friday, August 28, 2009
One of the more pernicious myths surrounding the debate over health care is the oft repeated claim that conservatives do not want reform. Nonsense! What we do not want is the warm bucket of snake oil currently being sold to the American people by this administration. Conservatives have long argued for the need to reduce mandated benefits, reduce the reliance on third-party payers and get rid of public policies that hinder entrepreneurship and innovation. This is the kind of reform conservatives want – the right kind of reform.
Because the number of Americans that are actually denied medical care is zero, the administration has chosen to cite the fact that 47 million Americans lack medical insurance (another myth) as the reason for its urgency in passing a huge bill that congressmen can’t be bothered to read. Just yesterday the administration and its army of sales people began to talk about health insurance reform; this after years of hearing about the need to reform healthcare. Ahh! The power of focus groups. Now we need single-payer universal healthcare to bring down costs (prices) and to protect the sick from “discrimination” at the hands of evil insurance companies.
So the cause of our national distress is the private health insurance industry, which no doubt explains why A) Obama has made back room deals with the insurance and pharmaceutical industries and B) why the bill making its way through the House of Representatives devotes exactly 6 of its more than 1000 pages to insurance reform.
Conservatives of course have long pointed to the over-reliance on insurance companies and other third party payers as one of the major causes of the increase in healthcare costs. It is worth remembering that the largest insurer in the nation is the federal government through Medicare and Medicaid. And how’s that working out?
A recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that about half of the increase in health expenditures nationwide since 1965 was caused by the creation of Medicare and Medicaid. Why? One reason is that under the government programs prices are not the result of contracts between providers and patients. Instead, prices are set between providers and the U.S. Government. In practice, this means the U.S. government says what's covered and what the price is (regardless of the actual cost), and providers and patients have no choice in the matter.
Worse, since patients do not negotiate price, they don't care what the price is and have no incentive to seek out a provider with a lower one. On the other hand, they have every incentive to take health risks they couldn't otherwise afford and use services they might not otherwise be willing to pay for. There is a similar incentive for providers to charge for things covered by Medicare and Medicaid and do those things as rapidly as possible, whether or not that is what the art of medicine indicates would be the best treatment. So price – the most effective way to allocate scarce resources - isn't determined by negotiation but rather by politics, (as has already been demonstrated by Obama’s back room deals) which invariably leads to shortages and rationing.
And what of the huge cost savings that Obama promises will magically appear under reform with the same perverse incentives?
According to the National Center for Policy Analysis, “Medicare's total unfunded liability is more than five times larger than that of Social Security.” In fact, the new Medicare prescription drug benefit enacted in 2006 (Part D) has proven to be twice as much as the original congressional budget office estimates and alone adds some $17 trillion to the projected Medicare shortfall - an amount greater than all of Social Security's unfunded obligations.” The liability for Medicaid is off the charts because unlike Medicare Medicaid has no “trust fund” but is paid for by the states with matching grants from the fed. I can’t speak for you, but I am overflowing with confidence that a government takeover of healthcare is just the ticket to solve our fiscal problems.
The reform the new left is attempting to force upon us is the wrong kind of reform. It will not bring down costs, it will not improve the overall health of Americans and it will not encourage innovation and entrepreneurship. What it will do is dramatically increase the number of Americans dependant upon government for their medical care and their livelihoods. That may be a good way to build a political base, but it ain’t reform.
Remembering the Darker Side of Teddy Kennedy
Mona Charen
Friday, August 28, 2009
The death of Sen. Edward Kennedy, we are being told, should strengthen our resolve to act in a bipartisan fashion. Many of the tributes, from former presidents and Republican colleagues, have stressed the late senator's willingness to find "common ground." Well, since ancient Rome we've been exhorted not to speak ill of the dead. But neither should we completely disfigure the truth.
Before offering some less than hagiographic reflections on the late Sen. Edward Kennedy (may he rest in peace), one pleasant memory: About a decade ago, I was late for a party in northwest Washington D.C. -- a neighborhood not known for abundant parking spaces. After circling the block several times, I spied a cramped space and determined that somehow I was going to fit my minivan into it. Just then, a large man approached walking two Portuguese Water Dogs. He stopped, saw my predicament, and proceeded to guide me into the space with lots of laughter, encouragement, and a little bit of teasing. I knew (obviously) that my Good Samaritan was the senior senator from Massachusetts. I have no reason to think he recognized me.
So I have personal experience of Teddy Kennedy's charm and affability. The many stories of his personal kindnesses to others (including those with whom he disagreed politically) speak well of him -- to a point. But Kennedy was a politician who too often permitted his own sense of righteousness to overwhelm the large reservoir of decency that he is reported to have possessed. He could trample on conservatives with, it seems, hardly a pang of conscience. He may have been the "great liberal lion" of the U.S. Senate, but some of us cannot forget that his tactics were often low and dishonorable.
Former President George W. Bush was characteristically gracious about Kennedy ("a great man") in his comments since his death, but Kennedy went after Bush utterly without scruple. Consider Kennedy's shrill attacks on President Bush's decision to invade Iraq. In 2002, Sen. Kennedy himself had said, "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein's regime is a serious danger, that he is a tyrant, and that his pursuit of lethal weapons of mass destruction cannot be tolerated. He must be disarmed." But just a year later, Kennedy was saying, "This was made up in Texas, announced in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud." In 2004, Kennedy said, "Before the war, week after week after week we were told lie after lie after lie after lie . . . the president's war is revealed as mindless, needless, senseless, reckless."
Kennedy did not -- perhaps could not -- accept that the Bush administration had made a good faith decision to use military force (as his brother did in the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam). Instead, he contributed to conspiracy theories about Bush's true motives. Echoing the most inflamed leftist websites, Kennedy alleged that "the President and his senior aides began the march to war in Iraq in the earliest days of the administration, long before the terrorists struck this nation on 9/11."
When the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison came to light, disgust and abhorrence were expressed pretty universally and certainly bipartisanly. But Kennedy, unable to resist a cheap political shot, actually compared the U.S. to Saddam Hussein, saying, "Shamefully, we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management -- U.S. management."
Sen. Kennedy's rhetorical ruthlessness was perhaps most famously displayed within minutes of the nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. The world now knows that Bob Bork is one of the most intelligent, witty, reasonable, and civilized men in America. But at the time, few knew anything about him. Kennedy rushed to the Senate floor to introduce a grotesque bogeyman: "Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is -- and is often the only -- protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy."
Judge Bork recounted later that when he met privately with the senator, Kennedy mumbled, "Nothing personal." When you have calumniated a man before the entire world, you cannot claim that it isn't personal.
One hopes that the Kennedy family will find comfort in the days ahead. But I cannot join those who uphold Teddy Kennedy as a model public servant, far less as an exemplar of any sort of bipartisanship.
Friday, August 28, 2009
The death of Sen. Edward Kennedy, we are being told, should strengthen our resolve to act in a bipartisan fashion. Many of the tributes, from former presidents and Republican colleagues, have stressed the late senator's willingness to find "common ground." Well, since ancient Rome we've been exhorted not to speak ill of the dead. But neither should we completely disfigure the truth.
Before offering some less than hagiographic reflections on the late Sen. Edward Kennedy (may he rest in peace), one pleasant memory: About a decade ago, I was late for a party in northwest Washington D.C. -- a neighborhood not known for abundant parking spaces. After circling the block several times, I spied a cramped space and determined that somehow I was going to fit my minivan into it. Just then, a large man approached walking two Portuguese Water Dogs. He stopped, saw my predicament, and proceeded to guide me into the space with lots of laughter, encouragement, and a little bit of teasing. I knew (obviously) that my Good Samaritan was the senior senator from Massachusetts. I have no reason to think he recognized me.
So I have personal experience of Teddy Kennedy's charm and affability. The many stories of his personal kindnesses to others (including those with whom he disagreed politically) speak well of him -- to a point. But Kennedy was a politician who too often permitted his own sense of righteousness to overwhelm the large reservoir of decency that he is reported to have possessed. He could trample on conservatives with, it seems, hardly a pang of conscience. He may have been the "great liberal lion" of the U.S. Senate, but some of us cannot forget that his tactics were often low and dishonorable.
Former President George W. Bush was characteristically gracious about Kennedy ("a great man") in his comments since his death, but Kennedy went after Bush utterly without scruple. Consider Kennedy's shrill attacks on President Bush's decision to invade Iraq. In 2002, Sen. Kennedy himself had said, "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein's regime is a serious danger, that he is a tyrant, and that his pursuit of lethal weapons of mass destruction cannot be tolerated. He must be disarmed." But just a year later, Kennedy was saying, "This was made up in Texas, announced in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud." In 2004, Kennedy said, "Before the war, week after week after week we were told lie after lie after lie after lie . . . the president's war is revealed as mindless, needless, senseless, reckless."
Kennedy did not -- perhaps could not -- accept that the Bush administration had made a good faith decision to use military force (as his brother did in the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam). Instead, he contributed to conspiracy theories about Bush's true motives. Echoing the most inflamed leftist websites, Kennedy alleged that "the President and his senior aides began the march to war in Iraq in the earliest days of the administration, long before the terrorists struck this nation on 9/11."
When the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison came to light, disgust and abhorrence were expressed pretty universally and certainly bipartisanly. But Kennedy, unable to resist a cheap political shot, actually compared the U.S. to Saddam Hussein, saying, "Shamefully, we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management -- U.S. management."
Sen. Kennedy's rhetorical ruthlessness was perhaps most famously displayed within minutes of the nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. The world now knows that Bob Bork is one of the most intelligent, witty, reasonable, and civilized men in America. But at the time, few knew anything about him. Kennedy rushed to the Senate floor to introduce a grotesque bogeyman: "Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is -- and is often the only -- protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy."
Judge Bork recounted later that when he met privately with the senator, Kennedy mumbled, "Nothing personal." When you have calumniated a man before the entire world, you cannot claim that it isn't personal.
One hopes that the Kennedy family will find comfort in the days ahead. But I cannot join those who uphold Teddy Kennedy as a model public servant, far less as an exemplar of any sort of bipartisanship.
Airbrushing out Mary Jo Kopechne
Only a Kennedy could get away with it.
By Mark Steyn
Saturday, August 29, 2009
We are enjoined not to speak ill of the dead. But, when an entire nation — or, at any rate, its “mainstream” media culture — declines to speak the truth about the dead, we are certainly entitled to speak ill of such false eulogists. In its coverage of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s passing, America’s TV networks are creepily reminiscent of those plays Sam Shepard used to write about some dysfunctional inbred hardscrabble Appalachian household where there’s a baby buried in the backyard but everyone agreed years ago never to mention it.
In this case, the unmentionable corpse is Mary Jo Kopechne, 1940–1969. If you have to bring up the, ah, circumstances of that year of decease, keep it general, keep it vague. As Kennedy flack Ted Sorensen put it in Time magazine: “Both a plane crash in Massachusetts in 1964 and the ugly automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 almost cost him his life.”
That’s the way to do it! An “accident,” “ugly” in some unspecified way, just happened to happen — and only to him, nobody else. Ted’s the star, and there’s no room to namecheck the bit players. What befell him was . . . a thing, a place. As Joan Vennochi wrote in the Boston Globe: “Like all figures in history — and like those in the Bible, for that matter — Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse.”
Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than “betrayed” him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let’s face it, he doesn’t have Ted’s tremendous legislative legacy, does he? Perhaps it’s kinder simply to airbrush out of the record the name of the unfortunate complicating factor on the receiving end of that moment of “tremendous moral collapse.” When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it’s usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddy’s biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy’s “achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne.”
You can’t make an omelette without breaking chicks, right? I don’t know how many lives the senator changed — he certainly changed Mary Jo’s — but you’re struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy’s Oldsmobile? If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been okay to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not? At the Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo “would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history . . . Who knows — maybe she’d feel it was worth it.” What true-believing liberal lass wouldn’t be honored to be dispatched by that death panel?
We are all flawed, and most of us are weak, and in hellish moments, at a split-second’s notice, confronting the choice that will define us ever after, many of us will fail the test. Perhaps Mary Jo could have been saved; perhaps she would have died anyway. What is true is that Edward Kennedy made her death a certainty. When a man (if you’ll forgive the expression) confronts the truth of what he has done, what does honor require? Six years before Chappaquiddick, in the wake of Britain’s comparatively very minor “Profumo scandal,” the eponymous John Profumo, Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for War, resigned from the House of Commons and the Queen’s Privy Council, and disappeared amid the tenements of the East End to do good works washing dishes and helping with children’s playgroups, in anonymity, for the last 40 years of his life. With the exception of one newspaper article to mark the centenary of his charitable mission, he never uttered another word in public again.
Ted Kennedy went a different route. He got kitted out with a neck brace and went on TV and announced the invention of the “Kennedy curse,” a concept that yoked him to his murdered brothers as a fellow victim — and not, as Mary Jo perhaps realized in those final hours, the perpetrator. He dared us to call his bluff, and, when we didn’t, he made all of us complicit in what he’d done. We are all prey to human frailty, but few of us get to inflict ours on an entire nation.
His defenders would argue that he redeemed himself with his “progressive” agenda, up to and including health-care “reform.” It was an odd kind of “redemption”: In a cooing paean to the senator on a cringe-makingly obsequious edition of NPR’s Diane Rehm Show, Edward Klein of Newsweek fondly recalled that one of Ted’s “favorite topics of humor was, indeed, Chappaquiddick itself. He would ask people, ‘Have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?’”
Terrific! Who was that lady I saw you with last night?
Beats me!
Why did the Last Lion cross the road?
To sleep it off!
What do you call 200 Kennedy sycophants at the bottom of a Chappaquiddick pond? A great start, but bad news for NPR guest-bookers! “He was a guy’s guy,” chortled Edward Klein. Which is one way of putting it.
When a man is capable of what Ted Kennedy did that night in 1969 and in the weeks afterwards, what else is he capable of? An NPR listener said the senator’s passing marked “the end of civility in the U.S. Congress.” Yes, indeed. Who among us does not mourn the lost “civility” of the 1987 Supreme Court hearings? Considering the nomination of Judge Bork, Ted Kennedy rose on the Senate floor and announced that “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution . . . ”
Whoa! “Liberals” (in the debased contemporary American sense of the term) would have reason to find Borkian jurisprudence uncongenial, but to suggest the judge and former solicitor-general favored re-segregation of lunch counters is a slander not merely vile but so preposterous that, like his explanation for Chappaquiddick, only a Kennedy could get away with it. If you had to identify a single speech that marked “the end of civility” in American politics, that’s a shoo-in.
If a towering giant cares so much about humanity in general, why get hung up on his carelessness with humans in particular? For Kennedy’s comrades, the cost was worth it. For the rest of us, it was a high price to pay. And, for Ted himself, who knows? He buried three brothers, and as many nephews, and as the years took their toll, it looked sometimes as if the only Kennedy son to grow old had had to grow old for all of them. Did he truly believe, as surely as Melissa Lafsky and Co., that his indispensability to the republic trumped all else? That Camelot — that “fleeting wisp of glory,” that “one brief shining moment” — must run forever, even if “How to Handle a Woman” gets dropped from the score. The senator’s actions in the hours and days after emerging from that pond tell us something ugly about Kennedy the man. That he got away with it tells us something ugly about American public life.
By Mark Steyn
Saturday, August 29, 2009
We are enjoined not to speak ill of the dead. But, when an entire nation — or, at any rate, its “mainstream” media culture — declines to speak the truth about the dead, we are certainly entitled to speak ill of such false eulogists. In its coverage of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s passing, America’s TV networks are creepily reminiscent of those plays Sam Shepard used to write about some dysfunctional inbred hardscrabble Appalachian household where there’s a baby buried in the backyard but everyone agreed years ago never to mention it.
In this case, the unmentionable corpse is Mary Jo Kopechne, 1940–1969. If you have to bring up the, ah, circumstances of that year of decease, keep it general, keep it vague. As Kennedy flack Ted Sorensen put it in Time magazine: “Both a plane crash in Massachusetts in 1964 and the ugly automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 almost cost him his life.”
That’s the way to do it! An “accident,” “ugly” in some unspecified way, just happened to happen — and only to him, nobody else. Ted’s the star, and there’s no room to namecheck the bit players. What befell him was . . . a thing, a place. As Joan Vennochi wrote in the Boston Globe: “Like all figures in history — and like those in the Bible, for that matter — Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse.”
Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than “betrayed” him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let’s face it, he doesn’t have Ted’s tremendous legislative legacy, does he? Perhaps it’s kinder simply to airbrush out of the record the name of the unfortunate complicating factor on the receiving end of that moment of “tremendous moral collapse.” When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it’s usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddy’s biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy’s “achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne.”
You can’t make an omelette without breaking chicks, right? I don’t know how many lives the senator changed — he certainly changed Mary Jo’s — but you’re struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy’s Oldsmobile? If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been okay to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not? At the Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo “would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history . . . Who knows — maybe she’d feel it was worth it.” What true-believing liberal lass wouldn’t be honored to be dispatched by that death panel?
We are all flawed, and most of us are weak, and in hellish moments, at a split-second’s notice, confronting the choice that will define us ever after, many of us will fail the test. Perhaps Mary Jo could have been saved; perhaps she would have died anyway. What is true is that Edward Kennedy made her death a certainty. When a man (if you’ll forgive the expression) confronts the truth of what he has done, what does honor require? Six years before Chappaquiddick, in the wake of Britain’s comparatively very minor “Profumo scandal,” the eponymous John Profumo, Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for War, resigned from the House of Commons and the Queen’s Privy Council, and disappeared amid the tenements of the East End to do good works washing dishes and helping with children’s playgroups, in anonymity, for the last 40 years of his life. With the exception of one newspaper article to mark the centenary of his charitable mission, he never uttered another word in public again.
Ted Kennedy went a different route. He got kitted out with a neck brace and went on TV and announced the invention of the “Kennedy curse,” a concept that yoked him to his murdered brothers as a fellow victim — and not, as Mary Jo perhaps realized in those final hours, the perpetrator. He dared us to call his bluff, and, when we didn’t, he made all of us complicit in what he’d done. We are all prey to human frailty, but few of us get to inflict ours on an entire nation.
His defenders would argue that he redeemed himself with his “progressive” agenda, up to and including health-care “reform.” It was an odd kind of “redemption”: In a cooing paean to the senator on a cringe-makingly obsequious edition of NPR’s Diane Rehm Show, Edward Klein of Newsweek fondly recalled that one of Ted’s “favorite topics of humor was, indeed, Chappaquiddick itself. He would ask people, ‘Have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?’”
Terrific! Who was that lady I saw you with last night?
Beats me!
Why did the Last Lion cross the road?
To sleep it off!
What do you call 200 Kennedy sycophants at the bottom of a Chappaquiddick pond? A great start, but bad news for NPR guest-bookers! “He was a guy’s guy,” chortled Edward Klein. Which is one way of putting it.
When a man is capable of what Ted Kennedy did that night in 1969 and in the weeks afterwards, what else is he capable of? An NPR listener said the senator’s passing marked “the end of civility in the U.S. Congress.” Yes, indeed. Who among us does not mourn the lost “civility” of the 1987 Supreme Court hearings? Considering the nomination of Judge Bork, Ted Kennedy rose on the Senate floor and announced that “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution . . . ”
Whoa! “Liberals” (in the debased contemporary American sense of the term) would have reason to find Borkian jurisprudence uncongenial, but to suggest the judge and former solicitor-general favored re-segregation of lunch counters is a slander not merely vile but so preposterous that, like his explanation for Chappaquiddick, only a Kennedy could get away with it. If you had to identify a single speech that marked “the end of civility” in American politics, that’s a shoo-in.
If a towering giant cares so much about humanity in general, why get hung up on his carelessness with humans in particular? For Kennedy’s comrades, the cost was worth it. For the rest of us, it was a high price to pay. And, for Ted himself, who knows? He buried three brothers, and as many nephews, and as the years took their toll, it looked sometimes as if the only Kennedy son to grow old had had to grow old for all of them. Did he truly believe, as surely as Melissa Lafsky and Co., that his indispensability to the republic trumped all else? That Camelot — that “fleeting wisp of glory,” that “one brief shining moment” — must run forever, even if “How to Handle a Woman” gets dropped from the score. The senator’s actions in the hours and days after emerging from that pond tell us something ugly about Kennedy the man. That he got away with it tells us something ugly about American public life.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Kennedy, Unsentimentally
National Review Online
Thursday, August 27, 2009
He may have sometimes seemed like a gin-soaked anachronism from The Beautiful and Damned who somehow wandered into 21st-century America, but Edward M. Kennedy is a permanent rebuke to F. Scott Fitzgerald and his assertion that there are no second acts in American lives. Kennedy’s life was a string of second acts: Expelled from Harvard for academic dishonesty, he was readmitted to the good graces of the Ivy League under a gentlemen’s agreement; politically marginalized after leaving Mary Jo Kopechne to die of asphyxiation in his sinking Oldsmobile, he was readmitted to the good graces of the Democratic party under a gentlemen’s agreement of a different sort; frustrated in his desire to follow his brother to the White House, he reinterpreted his relegation to the legislature as a heroic political stand. Senator Kennedy proved to be a political immortal, and no scandal, hypocrisy, or failure of vision could threaten his career. Indeed, even mortality has not ended his influence, and Democrats already are positioning themselves to use his passing as a platform to further one of the worst of his initiatives, a government takeover of the health-care industry.
As a member of the modern American aristocracy, Senator Kennedy believed that he had a mandate to use his power to do good for the least well-off among us, and that cast of mind is, at its core, admirable. Among the better achievements of his life, Kennedy lent moral support to important civil-rights and voting-rights legislation. Unhappily, he mistook power for wisdom, and he very often left things worse than he had found them. He meddled in Northern Ireland to no good end, contributed mightily to the politicization of the federal courts, sought to regulate and restrict political speech, appeased the Soviets, contributed to the American defeat in Vietnam, and attempted to apply the Vietnam template to Iraq. A child of privilege, he worked energetically to deny school-choice scholarships to poor black children in Washington, D.C. His ideas on taxes, immigration, and social welfare were reliably counterproductive.
On the issue of health care, long dear to him, Senator Kennedy was a serial fumbler, and much of the maddening modern American health-care bureaucracy, with its welter of HMOs, PPOs, and tangled intersections of the public and the private, has its origins in Kennedy’s legislative imagination. In a much-noted 2001 presentation, Senator Kennedy denounced HMOs as condemning unfortunates “to second-rate care from the doctor who happens to be on the plan’s list.” Unmentioned was the fact that the modern HMO regime was brought into existence by Senator Kennedy, who shaped the 1973 legislation that created it.
Senator Kennedy was famed for the power of his oratory. Another way of saying that is to note that he was a gifted artist whose medium was slander, and he found his canvases in Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. Powerful a speaker as he was, it is not clear that Senator Kennedy’s rhetoric was powerful enough to sway the hardest hearts, including his own. Consider this: “Wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain right which must be recognized — the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old.” A beautiful sentiment, beautifully expressed — and callously ignored when the political winds changed and he felt himself compelled to denounce the “back-alley abortions” that would be necessitated in “Robert Bork’s America.” Like many of the most powerful Democrats — Jesse Jackson and Al Gore come to mind — Senator Kennedy left behind his pro-life convictions when they became a political burden. This is an especially painful failing in Kennedy, whose family has traded on its Catholicism so profitably.
He was a man of intense personal charisma, and he needed all of it. After a Good Friday drinking bout with the Kennedy boys ended in rape accusations against his nephew, William Kennedy Smith, the man who fancied himself the liberal conscience of the Senate found himself described in the formerly friendly pages of Time magazine as a “Palm Beach boozer, lout, and tabloid grotesque.” He seems to have found a rock in his late-life marriage to his second wife, Victoria. Senator Kennedy promised to reform himself and acknowledged that, “I am painfully aware that the criticism directed at me in recent months involves far more than disagreements with my positions. . . . I recognize my own shortcomings, and the faults in the conduct of my private life. I realize that I alone am responsible for them, and I am the one who must confront them.”
His brother, President Kennedy, became a national icon because his untimely death invited the question of what he might have been. Senator Kennedy, much longer lived, also invites the question of what he might have been. Driven to do good, he could not, because he was hostage to his own defects, personal and ideological. His best impulses deserve to survive him; his worst ideas and legislative agenda do not. RIP Edward M. Kennedy, 1932–2009: May he encounter the divine mercy that both the greatest and the least of us will require at the end.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
He may have sometimes seemed like a gin-soaked anachronism from The Beautiful and Damned who somehow wandered into 21st-century America, but Edward M. Kennedy is a permanent rebuke to F. Scott Fitzgerald and his assertion that there are no second acts in American lives. Kennedy’s life was a string of second acts: Expelled from Harvard for academic dishonesty, he was readmitted to the good graces of the Ivy League under a gentlemen’s agreement; politically marginalized after leaving Mary Jo Kopechne to die of asphyxiation in his sinking Oldsmobile, he was readmitted to the good graces of the Democratic party under a gentlemen’s agreement of a different sort; frustrated in his desire to follow his brother to the White House, he reinterpreted his relegation to the legislature as a heroic political stand. Senator Kennedy proved to be a political immortal, and no scandal, hypocrisy, or failure of vision could threaten his career. Indeed, even mortality has not ended his influence, and Democrats already are positioning themselves to use his passing as a platform to further one of the worst of his initiatives, a government takeover of the health-care industry.
As a member of the modern American aristocracy, Senator Kennedy believed that he had a mandate to use his power to do good for the least well-off among us, and that cast of mind is, at its core, admirable. Among the better achievements of his life, Kennedy lent moral support to important civil-rights and voting-rights legislation. Unhappily, he mistook power for wisdom, and he very often left things worse than he had found them. He meddled in Northern Ireland to no good end, contributed mightily to the politicization of the federal courts, sought to regulate and restrict political speech, appeased the Soviets, contributed to the American defeat in Vietnam, and attempted to apply the Vietnam template to Iraq. A child of privilege, he worked energetically to deny school-choice scholarships to poor black children in Washington, D.C. His ideas on taxes, immigration, and social welfare were reliably counterproductive.
On the issue of health care, long dear to him, Senator Kennedy was a serial fumbler, and much of the maddening modern American health-care bureaucracy, with its welter of HMOs, PPOs, and tangled intersections of the public and the private, has its origins in Kennedy’s legislative imagination. In a much-noted 2001 presentation, Senator Kennedy denounced HMOs as condemning unfortunates “to second-rate care from the doctor who happens to be on the plan’s list.” Unmentioned was the fact that the modern HMO regime was brought into existence by Senator Kennedy, who shaped the 1973 legislation that created it.
Senator Kennedy was famed for the power of his oratory. Another way of saying that is to note that he was a gifted artist whose medium was slander, and he found his canvases in Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. Powerful a speaker as he was, it is not clear that Senator Kennedy’s rhetoric was powerful enough to sway the hardest hearts, including his own. Consider this: “Wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain right which must be recognized — the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old.” A beautiful sentiment, beautifully expressed — and callously ignored when the political winds changed and he felt himself compelled to denounce the “back-alley abortions” that would be necessitated in “Robert Bork’s America.” Like many of the most powerful Democrats — Jesse Jackson and Al Gore come to mind — Senator Kennedy left behind his pro-life convictions when they became a political burden. This is an especially painful failing in Kennedy, whose family has traded on its Catholicism so profitably.
He was a man of intense personal charisma, and he needed all of it. After a Good Friday drinking bout with the Kennedy boys ended in rape accusations against his nephew, William Kennedy Smith, the man who fancied himself the liberal conscience of the Senate found himself described in the formerly friendly pages of Time magazine as a “Palm Beach boozer, lout, and tabloid grotesque.” He seems to have found a rock in his late-life marriage to his second wife, Victoria. Senator Kennedy promised to reform himself and acknowledged that, “I am painfully aware that the criticism directed at me in recent months involves far more than disagreements with my positions. . . . I recognize my own shortcomings, and the faults in the conduct of my private life. I realize that I alone am responsible for them, and I am the one who must confront them.”
His brother, President Kennedy, became a national icon because his untimely death invited the question of what he might have been. Senator Kennedy, much longer lived, also invites the question of what he might have been. Driven to do good, he could not, because he was hostage to his own defects, personal and ideological. His best impulses deserve to survive him; his worst ideas and legislative agenda do not. RIP Edward M. Kennedy, 1932–2009: May he encounter the divine mercy that both the greatest and the least of us will require at the end.
War — What War?
We have public confusion about both wars: Iraq and Afghanistan.
By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, August 27, 2009
The anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan headed this week to Martha’s Vineyard, where President Obama is vacationing. Once again she is protesting our two wars abroad.
But Sheehan is a media has-been. ABC’s Charlie Gibson used to cover her anti-Bush rallies in Crawford, Tex. Now he says, with a sigh, of her recent anti-Obama efforts, “Enough already.”
The war in Iraq is scarcely in the news any longer, despite the fact that 141,000 American soldiers are still protecting the fragile Iraqi democracy, and 114, as of this writing, have been lost this year in that effort.
But after the success of the surge, there are far fewer American fatalities each month — eight in July, five in August. Former anti-war candidate Barack Obama is now also President and Commander-in-Chief Obama — with Democratic majorities in the Congress.
Public opinion and media attention about Iraq were always based largely on two factors that transcended whether Americans felt the removal of Saddam Hussein was wise and necessary — or misguided and wrong.
First was the perception of costs to benefits. In May 2003, after a quick, successful American invasion, a Gallup poll revealed that 79 percent of the public supported the war — despite our not finding weapons of mass destruction. But by December 2008 — more than 4,000 American fatalities later and at the end of the Bush presidency — only 34 percent, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll, still felt the war had been worth the effort.
Second was how the changing public mood affected politics. In October 2002, the Republican-controlled House and Senate, with plenty of Democratic support, voted overwhelmingly to authorize the Iraq War.
Congress cited 23 reasons why we should remove Saddam. The majority of these authorizations had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction.
Yet as the subsequent occupation became messy and costly, prior Democratic support evaporated. In the presidential campaigns of 2004 and 2008, running against what was now George Bush’s war was seen as wise Democratic politics.
From all that, we can draw more conclusions about the present media silence and absence of public protests over the Iraq War. As long as Barack Obama is commander-in-chief, and as long as casualties in Iraq are down, there will be no large public protests nor much news about our sizable Iraq presence. The cost and the attendant politics — not why we went there — always determined how the Iraq War was covered.
Afghanistan is more complicated. So far this year — for the first time since our 2001 removal of the Taliban from power — more Americans have been killed there (172) than in Iraq (114). The Obama administration recently sent more troops into Afghanistan to reach our highest level yet at 32,000.
Yet so far there have been none of the public protests that we used to see in connection with Iraq. Why?
Over the last few years, we have become used to the idea that Afghanistan was “quiet.” Indeed fewer were killed there in most years than in some of the bloodiest single months in Iraq.
Democrats also ran on the notion of Afghanistan as the “good war.” It was the direct payback for the Taliban’s involvement with Osama bin Laden. It garnered United Nations support. And it had been neglected by Iraq-obsessed, neocon George Bush.
Many anti-war candidates also thought the “good” Afghan war was largely over, while the “bad” Iraq one was hopeless — already “lost” — in the words of the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid (D., Nev.).
In addition, Afghanistan — landlocked, backward, with a harsh climate and little natural wealth — was always the harder challenge for fostering constitutional government. Iraq has ports, a central location, oil riches, flat and open terrain, and an educated populace.
So now we have public confusion about both wars. George Bush’s “wrong” war is largely won and Iraq’s democracy fairly stable. But the good war in Afghanistan is becoming Barack Obama’s and heating up — more American troops, more American casualties, and little political stability.
If the past is any guide to media and public reaction, some predictions seem warranted. Obama will enjoy far more patience, since the anti-war Left and a liberal media will go easier on a kindred president.
Yet if casualties peak, the American people will sour on Afghanistan as they did on Iraq. Then even Obama, I think unfairly, will be blamed in the media for a war that Americans used to think — as in the case once of Iraq — was necessary and just.
And even reluctant Charlie Gibson might have to return to covering Cindy Sheehan’s latest pursuit of a beleaguered American president.
By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, August 27, 2009
The anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan headed this week to Martha’s Vineyard, where President Obama is vacationing. Once again she is protesting our two wars abroad.
But Sheehan is a media has-been. ABC’s Charlie Gibson used to cover her anti-Bush rallies in Crawford, Tex. Now he says, with a sigh, of her recent anti-Obama efforts, “Enough already.”
The war in Iraq is scarcely in the news any longer, despite the fact that 141,000 American soldiers are still protecting the fragile Iraqi democracy, and 114, as of this writing, have been lost this year in that effort.
But after the success of the surge, there are far fewer American fatalities each month — eight in July, five in August. Former anti-war candidate Barack Obama is now also President and Commander-in-Chief Obama — with Democratic majorities in the Congress.
Public opinion and media attention about Iraq were always based largely on two factors that transcended whether Americans felt the removal of Saddam Hussein was wise and necessary — or misguided and wrong.
First was the perception of costs to benefits. In May 2003, after a quick, successful American invasion, a Gallup poll revealed that 79 percent of the public supported the war — despite our not finding weapons of mass destruction. But by December 2008 — more than 4,000 American fatalities later and at the end of the Bush presidency — only 34 percent, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll, still felt the war had been worth the effort.
Second was how the changing public mood affected politics. In October 2002, the Republican-controlled House and Senate, with plenty of Democratic support, voted overwhelmingly to authorize the Iraq War.
Congress cited 23 reasons why we should remove Saddam. The majority of these authorizations had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction.
Yet as the subsequent occupation became messy and costly, prior Democratic support evaporated. In the presidential campaigns of 2004 and 2008, running against what was now George Bush’s war was seen as wise Democratic politics.
From all that, we can draw more conclusions about the present media silence and absence of public protests over the Iraq War. As long as Barack Obama is commander-in-chief, and as long as casualties in Iraq are down, there will be no large public protests nor much news about our sizable Iraq presence. The cost and the attendant politics — not why we went there — always determined how the Iraq War was covered.
Afghanistan is more complicated. So far this year — for the first time since our 2001 removal of the Taliban from power — more Americans have been killed there (172) than in Iraq (114). The Obama administration recently sent more troops into Afghanistan to reach our highest level yet at 32,000.
Yet so far there have been none of the public protests that we used to see in connection with Iraq. Why?
Over the last few years, we have become used to the idea that Afghanistan was “quiet.” Indeed fewer were killed there in most years than in some of the bloodiest single months in Iraq.
Democrats also ran on the notion of Afghanistan as the “good war.” It was the direct payback for the Taliban’s involvement with Osama bin Laden. It garnered United Nations support. And it had been neglected by Iraq-obsessed, neocon George Bush.
Many anti-war candidates also thought the “good” Afghan war was largely over, while the “bad” Iraq one was hopeless — already “lost” — in the words of the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid (D., Nev.).
In addition, Afghanistan — landlocked, backward, with a harsh climate and little natural wealth — was always the harder challenge for fostering constitutional government. Iraq has ports, a central location, oil riches, flat and open terrain, and an educated populace.
So now we have public confusion about both wars. George Bush’s “wrong” war is largely won and Iraq’s democracy fairly stable. But the good war in Afghanistan is becoming Barack Obama’s and heating up — more American troops, more American casualties, and little political stability.
If the past is any guide to media and public reaction, some predictions seem warranted. Obama will enjoy far more patience, since the anti-war Left and a liberal media will go easier on a kindred president.
Yet if casualties peak, the American people will sour on Afghanistan as they did on Iraq. Then even Obama, I think unfairly, will be blamed in the media for a war that Americans used to think — as in the case once of Iraq — was necessary and just.
And even reluctant Charlie Gibson might have to return to covering Cindy Sheehan’s latest pursuit of a beleaguered American president.
The Soviet Standard Returns
Hillary Clinton mouths an old Communist bromide.
By Elliott Abrams
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
At the height of the Cold War, when Ronald Reagan was president, the Soviets and their allies and satellites did not shirk human-rights debates with the West. They had their arguments ready. When American officials denounced the lack of freedom of speech or press or religion, or the absence of free elections, they did not whimper. Their replies went something like this: “It’s important to look at human rights more broadly than it has been defined. Human rights are also the right to a good job and shelter over your head and a chance to send your kids to school and get health care when your wife is pregnant. It’s a much broader agenda. Too often it has gotten narrowed to our detriment.”
No one would be surprised to hear that such words were spoken by Mikhail Suslov, the long-time ideological chief of the Communist party of the Soviet Union, or by Khrushchev or Brezhnev, or by Castro or Ceaucescu, or by any other chieftain from the “socialist countries.” But that quote actually comes from Secretary of State Clinton, in an interview this month with the Wall Street Journal. It is an astonishing revival of the old Soviet line, now taken up by an American official.
Why is Mrs. Clinton repeating these old Soviet bromides? In all probability she has little idea what she is doing; she might even fire a few underlings if she found out whose old lines are being put in her mouth (one sure hopes so!). She is probably ignorant of the long effort the West undertook to undermine such positions. Back in the 1980s, when I served in the Reagan State Department, we spent a good deal of time countering such nonsense. For one thing, even taken on its own terms, the argument was ridiculous: The “socialist camp” did a wretched job of providing “social goods” such as jobs and housing and medical care. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the poor living conditions in the East became even more evident, and the Russian situation remains catastrophic to this day.
But of course we did not take their argument on its own terms. We told the Communist officials that those arguments were offensive and baseless. No country is too poor to be free, as India was proving even back then, but many are too poor to provide adequate jobs, housing, hospitals, and the like. The purpose of extending the definition of human rights beyond the essential political rights was clear: It was the basis for two theories they liked to propound solemnly. The first was that the countries in question would perhaps someday develop all the human rights, from jobs to schools to freedom of speech to free elections, but this would take a very long time as they were poor, developing countries. The second was that the really important human rights were not the freedoms the West kept talking about, but the “social rights” guaranteed (well, on paper anyway) in the Socialist Bloc. So, they would say, you have your definition and we have ours; who’s to say who is right?
To hear such arguments from beautifully dressed commissars and KGB agents was infuriating enough, but at least in those days the U.S. government ridiculed and attacked them as excuses for tyranny. Now we hear the same line from our own secretary of state.
Nor is she alone: Dictators as well have taken to reviving the old Soviet line. Just before his visit to Washington, Egypt’s President Mubarak did an interview with Charlie Rose, who raised the issue of human rights (tepidly, it must be said). Mubarak was ready for him, having apparently opened the old Soviet textbooks Egypt used to have before Sadat broke with Russia. “Look, please,” Mubarak replied. “Your concept of human rights is a merely political one. Human rights are not only political. You have social rights. You have the right to education. You have the right to health. You have the right to a job. There are many other rights. And we are doing well on these fronts. But what we are not [is] absolutely perfect, and nobody’s perfect. . . . It is not merely a political concept. It is social, it is health, and it is amalgamated as one.”
That’s as pure a rendition of the standard line as one could ever have heard from Bucharest or Budapest in the old days. The use of similar language by our top diplomat must be a shocking message to freedom fighters around the globe. It is another signal of the abandonment of the cause of human rights by the Obama administration. And it’s a new stage: Not only are human rights being ignored by the State Department and the National Security Council, but now the very basis — ideological and intellectual — of America’s support for human rights is being undermined.
In case Mrs. Clinton has fallen for the line that promoting human rights is a George Bush–Ronald Reagan right-wing conspiracy, a few words from John F. Kennedy’s inaugural may be in order. When Kennedy asserted that we were “unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world,” he quickly added that we would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
Not a “good job,” not “shelter,” and not “health care when your wife is pregnant.” Democrats used to be for liberty too.
By Elliott Abrams
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
At the height of the Cold War, when Ronald Reagan was president, the Soviets and their allies and satellites did not shirk human-rights debates with the West. They had their arguments ready. When American officials denounced the lack of freedom of speech or press or religion, or the absence of free elections, they did not whimper. Their replies went something like this: “It’s important to look at human rights more broadly than it has been defined. Human rights are also the right to a good job and shelter over your head and a chance to send your kids to school and get health care when your wife is pregnant. It’s a much broader agenda. Too often it has gotten narrowed to our detriment.”
No one would be surprised to hear that such words were spoken by Mikhail Suslov, the long-time ideological chief of the Communist party of the Soviet Union, or by Khrushchev or Brezhnev, or by Castro or Ceaucescu, or by any other chieftain from the “socialist countries.” But that quote actually comes from Secretary of State Clinton, in an interview this month with the Wall Street Journal. It is an astonishing revival of the old Soviet line, now taken up by an American official.
Why is Mrs. Clinton repeating these old Soviet bromides? In all probability she has little idea what she is doing; she might even fire a few underlings if she found out whose old lines are being put in her mouth (one sure hopes so!). She is probably ignorant of the long effort the West undertook to undermine such positions. Back in the 1980s, when I served in the Reagan State Department, we spent a good deal of time countering such nonsense. For one thing, even taken on its own terms, the argument was ridiculous: The “socialist camp” did a wretched job of providing “social goods” such as jobs and housing and medical care. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the poor living conditions in the East became even more evident, and the Russian situation remains catastrophic to this day.
But of course we did not take their argument on its own terms. We told the Communist officials that those arguments were offensive and baseless. No country is too poor to be free, as India was proving even back then, but many are too poor to provide adequate jobs, housing, hospitals, and the like. The purpose of extending the definition of human rights beyond the essential political rights was clear: It was the basis for two theories they liked to propound solemnly. The first was that the countries in question would perhaps someday develop all the human rights, from jobs to schools to freedom of speech to free elections, but this would take a very long time as they were poor, developing countries. The second was that the really important human rights were not the freedoms the West kept talking about, but the “social rights” guaranteed (well, on paper anyway) in the Socialist Bloc. So, they would say, you have your definition and we have ours; who’s to say who is right?
To hear such arguments from beautifully dressed commissars and KGB agents was infuriating enough, but at least in those days the U.S. government ridiculed and attacked them as excuses for tyranny. Now we hear the same line from our own secretary of state.
Nor is she alone: Dictators as well have taken to reviving the old Soviet line. Just before his visit to Washington, Egypt’s President Mubarak did an interview with Charlie Rose, who raised the issue of human rights (tepidly, it must be said). Mubarak was ready for him, having apparently opened the old Soviet textbooks Egypt used to have before Sadat broke with Russia. “Look, please,” Mubarak replied. “Your concept of human rights is a merely political one. Human rights are not only political. You have social rights. You have the right to education. You have the right to health. You have the right to a job. There are many other rights. And we are doing well on these fronts. But what we are not [is] absolutely perfect, and nobody’s perfect. . . . It is not merely a political concept. It is social, it is health, and it is amalgamated as one.”
That’s as pure a rendition of the standard line as one could ever have heard from Bucharest or Budapest in the old days. The use of similar language by our top diplomat must be a shocking message to freedom fighters around the globe. It is another signal of the abandonment of the cause of human rights by the Obama administration. And it’s a new stage: Not only are human rights being ignored by the State Department and the National Security Council, but now the very basis — ideological and intellectual — of America’s support for human rights is being undermined.
In case Mrs. Clinton has fallen for the line that promoting human rights is a George Bush–Ronald Reagan right-wing conspiracy, a few words from John F. Kennedy’s inaugural may be in order. When Kennedy asserted that we were “unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world,” he quickly added that we would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
Not a “good job,” not “shelter,” and not “health care when your wife is pregnant.” Democrats used to be for liberty too.
Obama and ‘Redistributive Change’
Forget the recession and the “uninsured.” Obama has bigger fish to fry.
By Victor Davis Hanson
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
The first seven months of the Obama administration seemingly make no sense. Why squander public approval by running up astronomical deficits in a time of pre-existing staggering national debt?
Why polarize opponents after promising bipartisan transcendence?
Why create vast new programs when the efficacy of big government is already seen as dubious?
But that is exactly the wrong way to look at these first seven months of Obamist policy-making.
Take increased federal spending and the growing government absorption of GDP. Given the resiliency of the U.S. economy, it would have been easy to ride out the recession. In that case we would still have had to deal with a burgeoning and unsustainable annual federal deficit that would have approached $1 trillion.
Instead, Obama may nearly double that amount of annual indebtedness with more federal stimuli and bailouts, newly envisioned cap-and-trade legislation, and a variety of fresh entitlements. Was that fiscally irresponsible? Yes, of course.
But I think the key was not so much the spending excess or new entitlements. The point instead was the consequence of the resulting deficits, which will require radically new taxation for generations. If on April 15 the federal and state governments, local entities, the Social Security system, and the new health-care programs can claim 70 percent of the income of the top 5 percent of taxpayers, then that is considered a public good — every bit as valuable as funding new programs, and one worth risking insolvency.
Individual compensation is now seen as arbitrary and, by extension, inherently unfair. A high income is now rationalized as having less to do with market-driven needs, acquired skills, a higher level of education, innate intelligence, inheritance, hard work, or accepting risk. Rather income is seen more as luck-driven, cruelly capricious, unfair — even immoral, in that some are rewarded arbitrarily on the basis of race, class, and gender advantages, others for their overweening greed and ambition, and still more for their quasi-criminality.
“Patriotic” federal healers must then step in to “spread the wealth.” Through redistributive tax rates, they can “treat” the illness that the private sector has caused. After all, there is no intrinsic reason why an auto fabricator makes $60 in hourly wages and benefits, while a young investment banker finagles $500.
Or, in the president’s own language, the government must equalize the circumstances of the “waitress” with those of the “lucky.” It is thus a fitting and proper role of the new federal government to rectify imbalances of compensation — at least for those outside the anointed Guardian class. In a 2001 interview Obama in fact outlined the desirable political circumstances that would lead government to enforce equality of results when he elaborated on what he called an “actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change.”
Still, why would intelligent politicians try to ram through, in mere weeks, a thousand pages of health-care gibberish — its details outsourced to far-left elements in the Congress (and their staffers) — that few in the cabinet had ever read or even knew much about?
Once again, I don’t think health care per se was ever really the issue. When pressed, no one in the administration seemed to know whether illegal aliens were covered. Few cared why young people do not divert some of their entertainment expenditures to a modest investment in private catastrophic coverage.
Warnings that Canadians already have their health care rationed, wait in long lines, and are denied timely and critical procedures also did not seem to matter. And no attention was paid to statistics suggesting that, if we exclude homicides and auto accidents, Americans live as long on average as anyone in the industrial world, and have better chances of surviving longer with heart disease and cancer. That the average American did not wish to radically alter his existing plan, and that he understood that the uninsured really did have access to health care, albeit in a wasteful manner at the emergency room, was likewise of no concern.
The issue again was larger, and involved a vast reinterpretation of how America receives health care. Whether more or fewer Americans would get better or worse access and cheaper or more expensive care, or whether the government can or cannot afford such new entitlements, oddly seemed largely secondary to the crux of the debate.
Instead, the notion that the state will assume control, in Canada-like fashion, and level the health-care playing field was the real concern. “They” (the few) will now have the same care as “we” (the many). Whether the result is worse or better for everyone involved is extraneous, since sameness is the overarching principle.
We can discern this same mandated egalitarianism beneath many of the administration’s recent policy initiatives. Obama is not a pragmatist, as he insisted, nor even a liberal, as charged.
Rather, he is a statist. The president believes that a select group of affluent, highly educated technocrats — cosmopolitan, noble-minded, and properly progressive — supported by a phalanx of whiz-kids fresh out of blue-chip universities with little or no experience in the marketplace, can direct our lives far better than we can ourselves. By “better” I do not mean in a fashion that, measured by disinterested criteria, makes us necessarily wealthier, happier, more productive, or freer.
Instead, “better” means “fairer,” or more “equal.” We may “make” different amounts of money, but we will end up with more or less similar net incomes. We may know friendly doctors, be aware of the latest procedures, and have the capital to buy blue-chip health insurance, but no matter. Now we will all alike queue up with our government-issued insurance cards to wait our turn at the ubiquitous corner clinic.
None of this equality-of-results thinking is new.
When radical leaders over the last 2,500 years have sought to enforce equality of results, their prescriptions were usually predictable: redistribution of property; cancellation of debts; incentives to bring out the vote and increase political participation among the poor; stigmatizing of the wealthy, whether through the extreme measure of ostracism or the more mundane forced liturgies; use of the court system to even the playing field by targeting the more prominent citizens; radical growth in government and government employment; the use of state employees as defenders of the egalitarian faith; bread-and-circus entitlements; inflation of the currency and greater national debt to lessen the power of accumulated capital; and radical sloganeering about reactionary enemies of the new state.
The modern versions of much of the above already seem to be guiding the Obama administration — evident each time we hear of another proposal to make it easier to renounce personal debt; federal action to curtail property or water rights; efforts to make voter registration and vote casting easier; radically higher taxes on the top 5 percent; takeover of private business; expansion of the federal government and an increase in government employees; or massive inflationary borrowing. The current class-warfare “them/us” rhetoric was predictable.
Usually such ideologies do not take hold in America, given its tradition of liberty, frontier self-reliance, and emphasis on personal freedom rather than mandated fraternity and egalitarianism. At times, however, the stars line up, when a national catastrophe, like war or depression, coincides with the appearance of an unusually gifted, highly polished, and eloquent populist. But the anointed one must be savvy enough to run first as a centrist in order later to govern as a statist.
Given the September 2008 financial meltdown, the unhappiness over the war, the ongoing recession, and Barack Obama’s postracial claims and singular hope-and-change rhetoric, we found ourselves in just such a situation. For one of the rare times in American history, statism could take hold, and the country could be pushed far to the left.
That goal is the touchstone that explains the seemingly inexplicable — and explains also why, when Obama is losing independents, conservative Democrats, and moderate Republicans, his anxious base nevertheless keeps pushing him to become even more partisan, more left-wing, angrier, and more in a hurry to rush things through. They understand the unpopularity of the agenda and the brief shelf life of the president’s charm. One term may be enough to establish lasting institutional change.
Obama and his supporters at times are quite candid about such a radical spread-the-wealth agenda, voiced best by Rahm Emanuel — “You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid” — or more casually by Obama himself — “My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody. I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”
So we move at breakneck speed in order not to miss this rare opportunity when the radical leadership of the Congress and the White House for a brief moment clinch the reins of power. By the time a shell-shocked public wakes up and realizes that the prescribed chemotherapy is far worse than the existing illness, it should be too late to revive the old-style American patient.
By Victor Davis Hanson
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
The first seven months of the Obama administration seemingly make no sense. Why squander public approval by running up astronomical deficits in a time of pre-existing staggering national debt?
Why polarize opponents after promising bipartisan transcendence?
Why create vast new programs when the efficacy of big government is already seen as dubious?
But that is exactly the wrong way to look at these first seven months of Obamist policy-making.
Take increased federal spending and the growing government absorption of GDP. Given the resiliency of the U.S. economy, it would have been easy to ride out the recession. In that case we would still have had to deal with a burgeoning and unsustainable annual federal deficit that would have approached $1 trillion.
Instead, Obama may nearly double that amount of annual indebtedness with more federal stimuli and bailouts, newly envisioned cap-and-trade legislation, and a variety of fresh entitlements. Was that fiscally irresponsible? Yes, of course.
But I think the key was not so much the spending excess or new entitlements. The point instead was the consequence of the resulting deficits, which will require radically new taxation for generations. If on April 15 the federal and state governments, local entities, the Social Security system, and the new health-care programs can claim 70 percent of the income of the top 5 percent of taxpayers, then that is considered a public good — every bit as valuable as funding new programs, and one worth risking insolvency.
Individual compensation is now seen as arbitrary and, by extension, inherently unfair. A high income is now rationalized as having less to do with market-driven needs, acquired skills, a higher level of education, innate intelligence, inheritance, hard work, or accepting risk. Rather income is seen more as luck-driven, cruelly capricious, unfair — even immoral, in that some are rewarded arbitrarily on the basis of race, class, and gender advantages, others for their overweening greed and ambition, and still more for their quasi-criminality.
“Patriotic” federal healers must then step in to “spread the wealth.” Through redistributive tax rates, they can “treat” the illness that the private sector has caused. After all, there is no intrinsic reason why an auto fabricator makes $60 in hourly wages and benefits, while a young investment banker finagles $500.
Or, in the president’s own language, the government must equalize the circumstances of the “waitress” with those of the “lucky.” It is thus a fitting and proper role of the new federal government to rectify imbalances of compensation — at least for those outside the anointed Guardian class. In a 2001 interview Obama in fact outlined the desirable political circumstances that would lead government to enforce equality of results when he elaborated on what he called an “actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change.”
Still, why would intelligent politicians try to ram through, in mere weeks, a thousand pages of health-care gibberish — its details outsourced to far-left elements in the Congress (and their staffers) — that few in the cabinet had ever read or even knew much about?
Once again, I don’t think health care per se was ever really the issue. When pressed, no one in the administration seemed to know whether illegal aliens were covered. Few cared why young people do not divert some of their entertainment expenditures to a modest investment in private catastrophic coverage.
Warnings that Canadians already have their health care rationed, wait in long lines, and are denied timely and critical procedures also did not seem to matter. And no attention was paid to statistics suggesting that, if we exclude homicides and auto accidents, Americans live as long on average as anyone in the industrial world, and have better chances of surviving longer with heart disease and cancer. That the average American did not wish to radically alter his existing plan, and that he understood that the uninsured really did have access to health care, albeit in a wasteful manner at the emergency room, was likewise of no concern.
The issue again was larger, and involved a vast reinterpretation of how America receives health care. Whether more or fewer Americans would get better or worse access and cheaper or more expensive care, or whether the government can or cannot afford such new entitlements, oddly seemed largely secondary to the crux of the debate.
Instead, the notion that the state will assume control, in Canada-like fashion, and level the health-care playing field was the real concern. “They” (the few) will now have the same care as “we” (the many). Whether the result is worse or better for everyone involved is extraneous, since sameness is the overarching principle.
We can discern this same mandated egalitarianism beneath many of the administration’s recent policy initiatives. Obama is not a pragmatist, as he insisted, nor even a liberal, as charged.
Rather, he is a statist. The president believes that a select group of affluent, highly educated technocrats — cosmopolitan, noble-minded, and properly progressive — supported by a phalanx of whiz-kids fresh out of blue-chip universities with little or no experience in the marketplace, can direct our lives far better than we can ourselves. By “better” I do not mean in a fashion that, measured by disinterested criteria, makes us necessarily wealthier, happier, more productive, or freer.
Instead, “better” means “fairer,” or more “equal.” We may “make” different amounts of money, but we will end up with more or less similar net incomes. We may know friendly doctors, be aware of the latest procedures, and have the capital to buy blue-chip health insurance, but no matter. Now we will all alike queue up with our government-issued insurance cards to wait our turn at the ubiquitous corner clinic.
None of this equality-of-results thinking is new.
When radical leaders over the last 2,500 years have sought to enforce equality of results, their prescriptions were usually predictable: redistribution of property; cancellation of debts; incentives to bring out the vote and increase political participation among the poor; stigmatizing of the wealthy, whether through the extreme measure of ostracism or the more mundane forced liturgies; use of the court system to even the playing field by targeting the more prominent citizens; radical growth in government and government employment; the use of state employees as defenders of the egalitarian faith; bread-and-circus entitlements; inflation of the currency and greater national debt to lessen the power of accumulated capital; and radical sloganeering about reactionary enemies of the new state.
The modern versions of much of the above already seem to be guiding the Obama administration — evident each time we hear of another proposal to make it easier to renounce personal debt; federal action to curtail property or water rights; efforts to make voter registration and vote casting easier; radically higher taxes on the top 5 percent; takeover of private business; expansion of the federal government and an increase in government employees; or massive inflationary borrowing. The current class-warfare “them/us” rhetoric was predictable.
Usually such ideologies do not take hold in America, given its tradition of liberty, frontier self-reliance, and emphasis on personal freedom rather than mandated fraternity and egalitarianism. At times, however, the stars line up, when a national catastrophe, like war or depression, coincides with the appearance of an unusually gifted, highly polished, and eloquent populist. But the anointed one must be savvy enough to run first as a centrist in order later to govern as a statist.
Given the September 2008 financial meltdown, the unhappiness over the war, the ongoing recession, and Barack Obama’s postracial claims and singular hope-and-change rhetoric, we found ourselves in just such a situation. For one of the rare times in American history, statism could take hold, and the country could be pushed far to the left.
That goal is the touchstone that explains the seemingly inexplicable — and explains also why, when Obama is losing independents, conservative Democrats, and moderate Republicans, his anxious base nevertheless keeps pushing him to become even more partisan, more left-wing, angrier, and more in a hurry to rush things through. They understand the unpopularity of the agenda and the brief shelf life of the president’s charm. One term may be enough to establish lasting institutional change.
Obama and his supporters at times are quite candid about such a radical spread-the-wealth agenda, voiced best by Rahm Emanuel — “You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid” — or more casually by Obama himself — “My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody. I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”
So we move at breakneck speed in order not to miss this rare opportunity when the radical leadership of the Congress and the White House for a brief moment clinch the reins of power. By the time a shell-shocked public wakes up and realizes that the prescribed chemotherapy is far worse than the existing illness, it should be too late to revive the old-style American patient.
Technical Problems
The C.A.A. is once again experiencing connectivity issues. Posts will resume once the issues get worked out. Keep an eye out for an update tonight.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
National Suicide
Cal Thomas
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Remember when the deficit was so bad that Democrats said we (or more accurately the Republicans) were placing a terrible burden on our grandchildren?
That was several trillion dollars ago. Democrats now appear perfectly fine with extending the growing deficit and national debt to their great-grandchildren. Perhaps politicians think they will never be held accountable three generations from now because they won't be around to explain to those not yet born why they refused to stop our financial hemorrhaging.
The Obama administration forecast a 10-year budget deficit projection of more than $7.1 trillion, but when confronted with figures from the pesky and bipartisan Congressional Budget Office, the administration was forced this week to raise that projection to approximately $9 trillion. That's $9,000,000,000,000 dollars. For most of us who think a $1,000 deposit in our checking accounts is a large amount and a $1,000 credit card balance is too much, $9 trillion is a figure that is almost beyond comprehension. It is certainly beyond defensible. To borrow a phrase used in another context by the House leadership, it is un-American.
The philosophy of government under both parties can be boiled down to two acronyms: ATM and ASM -- always take more and always spend more.
Who is clamoring for more laws to be passed, more programs to be started and more money to be spent? Let's find him and lock him up for our financial security.
One answer is to be found in a new book by investigative reporter, educator and columnist Martin Gross. Gross summarizes in an easy to read and understandable style how and why government has failed its citizens. The book, to be released Sept. 1, is called "National Suicide: How Washington is Destroying the American Dream from A to Z." In addition to listing some of the more outrageous pork projects that are now well-known to anyone who has been paying attention ($107,000 to study the sex life of the Japanese quail; $150,000 to study the Hatfield-McCoy feud are just two examples on a long list), Gross touches on even bigger and equally outrageous expenditures.
The Alternative Minimum Tax, which he says is "based on an accounting lie," will cost taxpayers $1 trillion over the next 10 years. America, he writes, spends $700 billion a year on various welfare programs, amounting to $65,000 for each poor family of four, yet we still have the poor with us. Both political parties, Gross charges, secretly encourage illegal immigration (the Democrats for votes, the Republicans for cheap labor) and then reward the immigrants' children with automatic U.S. citizenship.
Gross has discovered 1,000 duplicate programs that waste billions. The Bush administration's signature education issue, "No Child Left Behind," has left behind a lot of misspent money: $24 billion per year, according to Gross, even as primary and secondary education "continue to spiral downward."
Medicare and Medicaid waste $150 billion a year dealing with doctor and hospital fraud; $45 billion a year is wasted on "improper" payments and even more on "unnecessary agencies." The Des Moines Federal Home Loan Bank funded research, Gross writes, that found 1,399 government programs handling disappearing rural areas.
If you haven't vented enough this summer at your local town hall meeting, this book will keep your blood pressure up and your motivation to do something about overspending high into the next election. Publisher's Weekly wrote in its review: "A fiery A-Z compendium of government greed, chicanery, and plain incompetence. Gross enjoys a good rant, but his criticism are sound and well-supported."
Gross does more than just list government's sins. He offers a solution on "How to Better Govern America." If ever there was a must-read for people who are sick of the way government operates, this is it.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Remember when the deficit was so bad that Democrats said we (or more accurately the Republicans) were placing a terrible burden on our grandchildren?
That was several trillion dollars ago. Democrats now appear perfectly fine with extending the growing deficit and national debt to their great-grandchildren. Perhaps politicians think they will never be held accountable three generations from now because they won't be around to explain to those not yet born why they refused to stop our financial hemorrhaging.
The Obama administration forecast a 10-year budget deficit projection of more than $7.1 trillion, but when confronted with figures from the pesky and bipartisan Congressional Budget Office, the administration was forced this week to raise that projection to approximately $9 trillion. That's $9,000,000,000,000 dollars. For most of us who think a $1,000 deposit in our checking accounts is a large amount and a $1,000 credit card balance is too much, $9 trillion is a figure that is almost beyond comprehension. It is certainly beyond defensible. To borrow a phrase used in another context by the House leadership, it is un-American.
The philosophy of government under both parties can be boiled down to two acronyms: ATM and ASM -- always take more and always spend more.
Who is clamoring for more laws to be passed, more programs to be started and more money to be spent? Let's find him and lock him up for our financial security.
One answer is to be found in a new book by investigative reporter, educator and columnist Martin Gross. Gross summarizes in an easy to read and understandable style how and why government has failed its citizens. The book, to be released Sept. 1, is called "National Suicide: How Washington is Destroying the American Dream from A to Z." In addition to listing some of the more outrageous pork projects that are now well-known to anyone who has been paying attention ($107,000 to study the sex life of the Japanese quail; $150,000 to study the Hatfield-McCoy feud are just two examples on a long list), Gross touches on even bigger and equally outrageous expenditures.
The Alternative Minimum Tax, which he says is "based on an accounting lie," will cost taxpayers $1 trillion over the next 10 years. America, he writes, spends $700 billion a year on various welfare programs, amounting to $65,000 for each poor family of four, yet we still have the poor with us. Both political parties, Gross charges, secretly encourage illegal immigration (the Democrats for votes, the Republicans for cheap labor) and then reward the immigrants' children with automatic U.S. citizenship.
Gross has discovered 1,000 duplicate programs that waste billions. The Bush administration's signature education issue, "No Child Left Behind," has left behind a lot of misspent money: $24 billion per year, according to Gross, even as primary and secondary education "continue to spiral downward."
Medicare and Medicaid waste $150 billion a year dealing with doctor and hospital fraud; $45 billion a year is wasted on "improper" payments and even more on "unnecessary agencies." The Des Moines Federal Home Loan Bank funded research, Gross writes, that found 1,399 government programs handling disappearing rural areas.
If you haven't vented enough this summer at your local town hall meeting, this book will keep your blood pressure up and your motivation to do something about overspending high into the next election. Publisher's Weekly wrote in its review: "A fiery A-Z compendium of government greed, chicanery, and plain incompetence. Gross enjoys a good rant, but his criticism are sound and well-supported."
Gross does more than just list government's sins. He offers a solution on "How to Better Govern America." If ever there was a must-read for people who are sick of the way government operates, this is it.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Radical Feminism in the Classroom
Ashley Herzog
Monday, August 24, 2009
Feminist proponents of “comprehensive sexuality education” like to portray themselves as advocates of science, bravely battling religious conservatives who preach bigotry and gender stereotypes to schoolchildren.
Don’t be fooled. If you have a child in school, you should read “You’re Teaching My Child What?” by Dr. Miriam Grossman. Rather than learning just the facts, students are schooled in gender politics and feminist ideology—an ideology that is highly dogmatic and scientifically unsupported.
Planned Parenthood, for example, wants to teach your kids that “All people are ‘gendered beings’ by virtue of the fact that we are socialized into a heavily gendered culture.” In other words, differences between boys and girls are the result of socialization, not biology. The feminist sex-ed web site Scarleteen claims that “gender is a man-made set of concepts and ideas…What our mind is like—the way we think, what we think about, what we like, what skills we have—really is not, so far as data has shown us so far—about gender or biological sex, period.”
To make a long story short: they’re lying. There’s a mountain of scientific evidence showing that biological sex does indeed influence “the way we think”—evidence that Grossman presents in her book.
For example, when researchers in Japan examined the drawings of 252 kindergarteners, “They found significant differences between the drawings of girls and boys. Among them: boys drew a moving object twenty times more than girls. Girls included a flower or butterfly seven times more than boys…Overall, girls decidedly preferred pink and flesh colors. Boys used two colors more than girls: grey and blue.”
That’s because girls are socialized to like flowers and pink, the feminists will respond.
Not true. As Grossman writes, “To control for [socialization], the researchers analyzed the drawings of a third group—eight girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), a genetic disorder in which the fetal brain was flooded with high levels of male hormones. CAH girls drew cars and buses, not butterflies. And the cars were blue, not pink.” Girls whose brains had been flooded with male hormones in the womb also showed a preference for male playmates and toys typically associated with boys.
Even monkeys—who are presumably oblivious to “man-made” gender roles—display sex differences early in life.
“Juvenile male monkeys, both rhesus and vervet, prefer playing with balls and vehicles,” Grossman writes. “Female monkeys like dolls and pots.” For good measure, Grossman includes a picture of a female monkey cradling a baby doll.
Recently, feminist bloggers praised a lesbian couple in Sweden who are attempting to raise a genderless child, calling the child “Pop” and keeping his or her biological sex a secret.
“Do me a favor…all of you people who are thinking about having kids in the future? Think about raising your kids this way,” a writer for Feministe advised. “The world would be a better place for it.”
However, if feminists looked at scientific research, they might conclude that these parents are doing their child an enormous disservice. Consider the case of Bruce Reimer, who was castrated in a medical accident when he was eight months old. Psychologists—steeped in radical 1960s ideology—assured Reimer’s parents that gender was socially constructed, and he could be raised successfully as a girl.
Reimer, who eventually committed suicide, recounted his life of misery in the book “As Nature Made Him.”
“Far from accepting the gender reassignment, he fought against it tooth and nail from the very beginning,” Grossman writes, “refusing to play with dolls, preferring wrestling over cooking, and even urinating standing up whenever possible.”
When finally told he had been born a boy, Reimer said he was relieved: “Suddenly it all made sense why I felt the way I did.” Coming from someone who knows, gender isn’t as fluid and changeable as feminists want it to be.
In fact, teaching schoolchildren that gender differences have no biological basis is the anti-scientific position—one based in faith and social dogma. As Grossman explains, the more we learn about endocrinology, neurology, and embryonic development, the clearer it becomes that many gender differences are set in the womb.
For males, “the boy-brain trajectory is set at eight weeks. Not eight weeks after birth, eight weeks after conception—seven months before the pink or blue blanket,” she writes. “A fetus has a boy brain or a girl brain when it is the size of a kidney bean.”
Still, in 2009, the progressive sex-ed group Advocates for Youth instructs students that gender is “culturally assigned.”
The next time you hear sex educators reciting canards about “science, not values” and “teaching kids the facts,” remember that this is what they mean.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Feminist proponents of “comprehensive sexuality education” like to portray themselves as advocates of science, bravely battling religious conservatives who preach bigotry and gender stereotypes to schoolchildren.
Don’t be fooled. If you have a child in school, you should read “You’re Teaching My Child What?” by Dr. Miriam Grossman. Rather than learning just the facts, students are schooled in gender politics and feminist ideology—an ideology that is highly dogmatic and scientifically unsupported.
Planned Parenthood, for example, wants to teach your kids that “All people are ‘gendered beings’ by virtue of the fact that we are socialized into a heavily gendered culture.” In other words, differences between boys and girls are the result of socialization, not biology. The feminist sex-ed web site Scarleteen claims that “gender is a man-made set of concepts and ideas…What our mind is like—the way we think, what we think about, what we like, what skills we have—really is not, so far as data has shown us so far—about gender or biological sex, period.”
To make a long story short: they’re lying. There’s a mountain of scientific evidence showing that biological sex does indeed influence “the way we think”—evidence that Grossman presents in her book.
For example, when researchers in Japan examined the drawings of 252 kindergarteners, “They found significant differences between the drawings of girls and boys. Among them: boys drew a moving object twenty times more than girls. Girls included a flower or butterfly seven times more than boys…Overall, girls decidedly preferred pink and flesh colors. Boys used two colors more than girls: grey and blue.”
That’s because girls are socialized to like flowers and pink, the feminists will respond.
Not true. As Grossman writes, “To control for [socialization], the researchers analyzed the drawings of a third group—eight girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), a genetic disorder in which the fetal brain was flooded with high levels of male hormones. CAH girls drew cars and buses, not butterflies. And the cars were blue, not pink.” Girls whose brains had been flooded with male hormones in the womb also showed a preference for male playmates and toys typically associated with boys.
Even monkeys—who are presumably oblivious to “man-made” gender roles—display sex differences early in life.
“Juvenile male monkeys, both rhesus and vervet, prefer playing with balls and vehicles,” Grossman writes. “Female monkeys like dolls and pots.” For good measure, Grossman includes a picture of a female monkey cradling a baby doll.
Recently, feminist bloggers praised a lesbian couple in Sweden who are attempting to raise a genderless child, calling the child “Pop” and keeping his or her biological sex a secret.
“Do me a favor…all of you people who are thinking about having kids in the future? Think about raising your kids this way,” a writer for Feministe advised. “The world would be a better place for it.”
However, if feminists looked at scientific research, they might conclude that these parents are doing their child an enormous disservice. Consider the case of Bruce Reimer, who was castrated in a medical accident when he was eight months old. Psychologists—steeped in radical 1960s ideology—assured Reimer’s parents that gender was socially constructed, and he could be raised successfully as a girl.
Reimer, who eventually committed suicide, recounted his life of misery in the book “As Nature Made Him.”
“Far from accepting the gender reassignment, he fought against it tooth and nail from the very beginning,” Grossman writes, “refusing to play with dolls, preferring wrestling over cooking, and even urinating standing up whenever possible.”
When finally told he had been born a boy, Reimer said he was relieved: “Suddenly it all made sense why I felt the way I did.” Coming from someone who knows, gender isn’t as fluid and changeable as feminists want it to be.
In fact, teaching schoolchildren that gender differences have no biological basis is the anti-scientific position—one based in faith and social dogma. As Grossman explains, the more we learn about endocrinology, neurology, and embryonic development, the clearer it becomes that many gender differences are set in the womb.
For males, “the boy-brain trajectory is set at eight weeks. Not eight weeks after birth, eight weeks after conception—seven months before the pink or blue blanket,” she writes. “A fetus has a boy brain or a girl brain when it is the size of a kidney bean.”
Still, in 2009, the progressive sex-ed group Advocates for Youth instructs students that gender is “culturally assigned.”
The next time you hear sex educators reciting canards about “science, not values” and “teaching kids the facts,” remember that this is what they mean.
Health Care Struggle is About Freedom
Star Parker
Monday, August 24, 2009
President Obama took his case for what he now calls "health insurance reform" to the faith community. He made his pitch in a phone call, also broadcast over the Internet, to clergy who called in and logged on from around the nation.
In his remarks, the President ticked off points of contention that dissenters have with his proposals -- "government takeover of healthcare...government funding of abortion...death panels" -- and dismissed these concerns as "fabrications." In one swipe, Mr. Obama reduced his opposition to liars.
And why, according to the President, are dissenters supposedly making all this stuff up? Because, he told his audience, they want to "discourage people from meeting...a core ethical and moral obligation...that we look out for one another...that I am my brother's keeper..."
So those whose fight for individual freedom are immoral and our moral champions are those who want to extend the heavy hand of government.
Forgive me if sermons about morality are a little hard to swallow from a man who supports partial birth abortion, who just announced his intent to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act.
And who really wants to obstruct moral behavior?
About 100,000 Americans participate in private, voluntary Christian communities that take care of their own healthcare independently of government and insurance companies. They are called health-care sharing ministries.
These communities assess members "shares", based on family size, which are paid monthly, in addition to annual dues.
Those in the community who need care submit their claims to a central office, which sends members monthly bulletins informing them whose care their monthly payment will be covering.
No government. No insurance companies. It's health care with a true human face, operating in freedom, where those paying know who they are paying for and for what.
In addition to sending funds to cover costs, they send notes and pray for the sick person whose costs they are covering.
You wouldn't think that communities that embody the very essence of personal responsibility and Christian love would need lobbyists for their protection. But they do.
If Barack Obama has his way, they'll be out of business.
Part of the thousand page health care bill mandates that individuals buy insurance and that companies provide it, or pay a fine. These government mandates to buy and provide insurance would make health-care sharing ministries, where communities of individuals contribute their personal funds to take care of each other, unviable.
These ministries share contributed funds of around $80 million dollars annually to take care of each other, driven only by guidelines of biblical principles to "Bear one another's burden, and thus fulfill the law of Christ."
It's crazy that Christian Americans have to lobby to be free in their own country.
Health-care sharing ministries is one particularly beautiful example of how faithful Americans take care of themselves when allowed to be free. But there are many others.
In thousands of homeless shelters around the country, charitable Americans provide complete health care for the homeless. There are 5000 crisis pregnancy centers, financed privately by charitable Americans that provide free care for pregnant women.
Many creative ideas have been put forth on how American health care delivery can be dramatically improved if markets are allowed to work. John Mackey, chairman of Whole Foods, listed eight in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.
In another Wall Street Journal column, a University of Chicago Business School professor explained how forward purchases of insurance could deal with the problem of pre-existing conditions.
But, Barack Obama and congressional Democrats have slammed the door on all this. They only want to hear about more government. Not less.
The problem isn't that dissenting Americans are immoral. It's that Democrat leadership has a problem with individual freedom.
Monday, August 24, 2009
President Obama took his case for what he now calls "health insurance reform" to the faith community. He made his pitch in a phone call, also broadcast over the Internet, to clergy who called in and logged on from around the nation.
In his remarks, the President ticked off points of contention that dissenters have with his proposals -- "government takeover of healthcare...government funding of abortion...death panels" -- and dismissed these concerns as "fabrications." In one swipe, Mr. Obama reduced his opposition to liars.
And why, according to the President, are dissenters supposedly making all this stuff up? Because, he told his audience, they want to "discourage people from meeting...a core ethical and moral obligation...that we look out for one another...that I am my brother's keeper..."
So those whose fight for individual freedom are immoral and our moral champions are those who want to extend the heavy hand of government.
Forgive me if sermons about morality are a little hard to swallow from a man who supports partial birth abortion, who just announced his intent to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act.
And who really wants to obstruct moral behavior?
About 100,000 Americans participate in private, voluntary Christian communities that take care of their own healthcare independently of government and insurance companies. They are called health-care sharing ministries.
These communities assess members "shares", based on family size, which are paid monthly, in addition to annual dues.
Those in the community who need care submit their claims to a central office, which sends members monthly bulletins informing them whose care their monthly payment will be covering.
No government. No insurance companies. It's health care with a true human face, operating in freedom, where those paying know who they are paying for and for what.
In addition to sending funds to cover costs, they send notes and pray for the sick person whose costs they are covering.
You wouldn't think that communities that embody the very essence of personal responsibility and Christian love would need lobbyists for their protection. But they do.
If Barack Obama has his way, they'll be out of business.
Part of the thousand page health care bill mandates that individuals buy insurance and that companies provide it, or pay a fine. These government mandates to buy and provide insurance would make health-care sharing ministries, where communities of individuals contribute their personal funds to take care of each other, unviable.
These ministries share contributed funds of around $80 million dollars annually to take care of each other, driven only by guidelines of biblical principles to "Bear one another's burden, and thus fulfill the law of Christ."
It's crazy that Christian Americans have to lobby to be free in their own country.
Health-care sharing ministries is one particularly beautiful example of how faithful Americans take care of themselves when allowed to be free. But there are many others.
In thousands of homeless shelters around the country, charitable Americans provide complete health care for the homeless. There are 5000 crisis pregnancy centers, financed privately by charitable Americans that provide free care for pregnant women.
Many creative ideas have been put forth on how American health care delivery can be dramatically improved if markets are allowed to work. John Mackey, chairman of Whole Foods, listed eight in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.
In another Wall Street Journal column, a University of Chicago Business School professor explained how forward purchases of insurance could deal with the problem of pre-existing conditions.
But, Barack Obama and congressional Democrats have slammed the door on all this. They only want to hear about more government. Not less.
The problem isn't that dissenting Americans are immoral. It's that Democrat leadership has a problem with individual freedom.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
The Folly of Blind Compassion
David R. Stokes
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Leon was a short, thin, 28-year old man. A self-described anarchist – a term that would translate today as terrorist – he determined to commit an act of murder. His target was the President of the United States.
Almost 100 years to the day before the 21st century faced the murderous terror of Sept. 11, 2001, Leon F. Czolgosz (pronounced: “Cholgosh”) waited his turn in a receiving line at the Temple of Music, part of the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo, New York. Everyone wanted to shake the hand of President William McKinley who had presided over a national economic recovery via a sturdy conservative approach.
A secret service agent locked eyes with Czolgosz briefly, but seeing nothing out of the ordinary he didn’t linger. Too bad, because when Leon found himself face to face with the president, McKinley reached out his right hand, which the would-be assassin batted away while bringing his own handkerchief-draped right hand up toward McKinley’s abdomen. He fired two shots from the .32 caliber Iver-Johnson "Safety Automatic" revolver he had purchased just two days before for $4.50.
President McKinley at first seemed to defy the assassin by appearing to survive, only to succumb to his wounds eight days following the shooting. The 25th President of the United States died on September 14, 1901. Czolgosz was swiftly arraigned and indicted. He was brought to trial on September 23rd – a proceeding that lasted a little more than eight hours from start to finish. Found guilty by a jury, he was sentenced to death by Judge Truman C. White three days later. There is some dispute as to whether or not the jurist added the perfunctory “May God have mercy on your soul” addendum.
That very day, as the nation’s newspapers carried news about the death penalty sentence for the presidential assassin, newsreels were released showing McKinley’s Canton, Ohio burial. It was all very real and very fresh in the minds of Americans.
Sometimes a rush to judgment is better than deferred injustice born of misguided compassion.
Czolgosz was the 50th criminal to sit in New York’s electric chair, doing so on October 29, 1901 – less than two months after his sordid act. His brother witnessed the execution and asked for the body – presumably on “compassionate grounds” – but was denied. As Leon Czolgosz was buried, jailers at the Auburn, New York facility poured liberal amounts of sulfuric acid on the body. The remains diffused into the prison-ground soil.
Sure there were some at the time who protested all of this, even suggesting that Czolgosz was a victim of social conditions. But empathy wasn’t the big debate-ending trump card back then. Even the new president, Theodore Roosevelt – a man who was actually known for his progressive leanings – denounced anarchism as “evil.” In his first message to Congress he described the anarchist as “a malefactor and nothing else. He is in no sense, in no shape or way, a ‘product of social conditions.’” He added that it was “no more an expression of ‘social discontent’ than picking pockets or wife-beating.”
Fast forward to our day and age and the ghastly sight of Abdelbeset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi being freed from prison in Scotland, with Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill citing compassionate grounds for the release and saying al Megrahi was "going home to die." Never mind that the terrorist is responsible for the death of 270 people who died when the bomb he placed on Pan Am flight 103 exploded earlier than he planned over Lockerbie, Scotland in December of 1988.
Time may heal some wounds, but it also tends to play tricks on memory and good judgment. Blind justice is one thing; willfully blind compassion is quite another. Where is the compassion for the victims and their families in this matter?
We are witnessing the fruit – an extreme example, I know, but an example nonetheless – of what happens when empathy becomes a serious factor in the pursuit and practice of justice. Compassion that becomes myopic and gets lost in the distortions and nuances of the small, subjective picture, will not result in justice, but instead will often fly in it’s very face.
This so-called compassionate act by the Scottish government is very much an in-your-face offense against the families of those who died on that fateful flight, as well as the world at large. The man who was set free the other day had already received a boatload of compassion in the fact that there was no death penalty in the system where he was tried and convicted for his horrific deed.
The difference between the two scenarios I have written about here is time. When a wound is fresh, when an injustice or evil deed is recent, there is reactive vigilance. But as time goes on and life defaults to a measure of normality, issues become blurred and memories become faulty. Things cease to be as clear-cut.
So we find ourselves at a moment, when our nation is outraged – appropriately so – at the release of a terrorist, while at the same time we are moving away from any semblance of actual vigilance at breakneck speed.
Why should some in our government denounce the action of the Scots, when in a real sense they are declaring at nearly every turn that there is no war on terror, no war against jihad, and that we are in a narrow conflict with one small group of rascals. I find the finger pointing at Scotland by some of those in our midst who want to make life easier for the bad guys to be blatant hypocrisy and mere political expedience.
Frankly, what Scotland has done, as objectionable as it is – as unthinkable as it seems - is the fruit of the kind of thinking that demonizes Gitmo and suggests that we are not at war with a murderous ideology. Even though that ideology is, in fact, very much at war with us. Liberal notions in our nation about justice for those poor misunderstood Islamists are ascendant in our culture these days. How are they really any different from the mindset in Scotland?
In the 1957 film classic, Bridge On The River Kwai, the brilliant actor Alec Guinness plays a Colonel by the name of Nicholson. The Colonel eventually becomes preoccupied with the successful building of the bridge, at the expense of his better judgment and soldierly loyalty. He develops rapport with the enemy – rapport that clouds his better judgment.
In the end, he comes to his senses, uttering “what have I done?” and blows up the bridge he labored so diligently to create.
It seems that some in our national leadership today have allowed time and other considerations to dull their senses about danger and real threat. And they have been spending more time building a bridge – one that will be used with relish by our enemies when the time comes – than they have creating and maintaining our vigilance against a powerful and persistent enemy.
One would hope that seeing Abdelbeset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi climb the stairs Colonel Gaddafi’s airplane recently, en route to a hero’s welcome in Libya, would be enough to bring some of our leaders to a Alec Guiness-like “what have I done?” moment.
But I suspect it will take many more examples of jihadist hubris and western civilization’s gullibility to bring any possible change about. Of course, by then the bridge of peace and friendship we have been building to span the chasm between us and the Islamists will be under the enemy’s complete control.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Leon was a short, thin, 28-year old man. A self-described anarchist – a term that would translate today as terrorist – he determined to commit an act of murder. His target was the President of the United States.
Almost 100 years to the day before the 21st century faced the murderous terror of Sept. 11, 2001, Leon F. Czolgosz (pronounced: “Cholgosh”) waited his turn in a receiving line at the Temple of Music, part of the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo, New York. Everyone wanted to shake the hand of President William McKinley who had presided over a national economic recovery via a sturdy conservative approach.
A secret service agent locked eyes with Czolgosz briefly, but seeing nothing out of the ordinary he didn’t linger. Too bad, because when Leon found himself face to face with the president, McKinley reached out his right hand, which the would-be assassin batted away while bringing his own handkerchief-draped right hand up toward McKinley’s abdomen. He fired two shots from the .32 caliber Iver-Johnson "Safety Automatic" revolver he had purchased just two days before for $4.50.
President McKinley at first seemed to defy the assassin by appearing to survive, only to succumb to his wounds eight days following the shooting. The 25th President of the United States died on September 14, 1901. Czolgosz was swiftly arraigned and indicted. He was brought to trial on September 23rd – a proceeding that lasted a little more than eight hours from start to finish. Found guilty by a jury, he was sentenced to death by Judge Truman C. White three days later. There is some dispute as to whether or not the jurist added the perfunctory “May God have mercy on your soul” addendum.
That very day, as the nation’s newspapers carried news about the death penalty sentence for the presidential assassin, newsreels were released showing McKinley’s Canton, Ohio burial. It was all very real and very fresh in the minds of Americans.
Sometimes a rush to judgment is better than deferred injustice born of misguided compassion.
Czolgosz was the 50th criminal to sit in New York’s electric chair, doing so on October 29, 1901 – less than two months after his sordid act. His brother witnessed the execution and asked for the body – presumably on “compassionate grounds” – but was denied. As Leon Czolgosz was buried, jailers at the Auburn, New York facility poured liberal amounts of sulfuric acid on the body. The remains diffused into the prison-ground soil.
Sure there were some at the time who protested all of this, even suggesting that Czolgosz was a victim of social conditions. But empathy wasn’t the big debate-ending trump card back then. Even the new president, Theodore Roosevelt – a man who was actually known for his progressive leanings – denounced anarchism as “evil.” In his first message to Congress he described the anarchist as “a malefactor and nothing else. He is in no sense, in no shape or way, a ‘product of social conditions.’” He added that it was “no more an expression of ‘social discontent’ than picking pockets or wife-beating.”
Fast forward to our day and age and the ghastly sight of Abdelbeset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi being freed from prison in Scotland, with Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill citing compassionate grounds for the release and saying al Megrahi was "going home to die." Never mind that the terrorist is responsible for the death of 270 people who died when the bomb he placed on Pan Am flight 103 exploded earlier than he planned over Lockerbie, Scotland in December of 1988.
Time may heal some wounds, but it also tends to play tricks on memory and good judgment. Blind justice is one thing; willfully blind compassion is quite another. Where is the compassion for the victims and their families in this matter?
We are witnessing the fruit – an extreme example, I know, but an example nonetheless – of what happens when empathy becomes a serious factor in the pursuit and practice of justice. Compassion that becomes myopic and gets lost in the distortions and nuances of the small, subjective picture, will not result in justice, but instead will often fly in it’s very face.
This so-called compassionate act by the Scottish government is very much an in-your-face offense against the families of those who died on that fateful flight, as well as the world at large. The man who was set free the other day had already received a boatload of compassion in the fact that there was no death penalty in the system where he was tried and convicted for his horrific deed.
The difference between the two scenarios I have written about here is time. When a wound is fresh, when an injustice or evil deed is recent, there is reactive vigilance. But as time goes on and life defaults to a measure of normality, issues become blurred and memories become faulty. Things cease to be as clear-cut.
So we find ourselves at a moment, when our nation is outraged – appropriately so – at the release of a terrorist, while at the same time we are moving away from any semblance of actual vigilance at breakneck speed.
Why should some in our government denounce the action of the Scots, when in a real sense they are declaring at nearly every turn that there is no war on terror, no war against jihad, and that we are in a narrow conflict with one small group of rascals. I find the finger pointing at Scotland by some of those in our midst who want to make life easier for the bad guys to be blatant hypocrisy and mere political expedience.
Frankly, what Scotland has done, as objectionable as it is – as unthinkable as it seems - is the fruit of the kind of thinking that demonizes Gitmo and suggests that we are not at war with a murderous ideology. Even though that ideology is, in fact, very much at war with us. Liberal notions in our nation about justice for those poor misunderstood Islamists are ascendant in our culture these days. How are they really any different from the mindset in Scotland?
In the 1957 film classic, Bridge On The River Kwai, the brilliant actor Alec Guinness plays a Colonel by the name of Nicholson. The Colonel eventually becomes preoccupied with the successful building of the bridge, at the expense of his better judgment and soldierly loyalty. He develops rapport with the enemy – rapport that clouds his better judgment.
In the end, he comes to his senses, uttering “what have I done?” and blows up the bridge he labored so diligently to create.
It seems that some in our national leadership today have allowed time and other considerations to dull their senses about danger and real threat. And they have been spending more time building a bridge – one that will be used with relish by our enemies when the time comes – than they have creating and maintaining our vigilance against a powerful and persistent enemy.
One would hope that seeing Abdelbeset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi climb the stairs Colonel Gaddafi’s airplane recently, en route to a hero’s welcome in Libya, would be enough to bring some of our leaders to a Alec Guiness-like “what have I done?” moment.
But I suspect it will take many more examples of jihadist hubris and western civilization’s gullibility to bring any possible change about. Of course, by then the bridge of peace and friendship we have been building to span the chasm between us and the Islamists will be under the enemy’s complete control.
What If Obamacare Actually Happens?
Austin Hill
Sunday, August 23, 2009
What if a health care bill actually passes in the Congress, and President Obama signs it into law?
Given the ways in which his “hope” and “change” are being embraced across the nation right now, such a legislative “victory” for Mr. Obama could be the worst thing, politically, for his presidency and his party.
Earlier this year, I contemplated here in this column how Obama’s behavior tends to be woefully inconsistent with his rhetoric, and how our President has a propensity for “doing the opposite” of what he says. For example, as a candidate Obama insisted that he is not a “big government” advocate, but then as President proposed a federal budget in excess of $3.5 trillion (Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is now asking Congress to raise the federal debt ceiling above $12 trillion for fear that there won‘t be money to fund Obama‘s budget after October of this year). As a candidate Obama decried the “petty distractions” and “partisan politics as usual” that stifle honest dialog, and prevent people from focusing on the real important issues. Yet from the White House Obama unleashed an intentional and strategic game of publicly demonizing talk show host Rush Limbaugh earlier this year; it appeared that members of his Administration “organized” their “friends” to demonstrate in front of the private homes of AIG Executives to harrass them for having earned bonuses from their employer last Spring; and last week Obama himself told participants in a faith-based organizing conference call that he needed their help to sell his health care take-over plans, admonishing that “I need you to knock on doors, talk to neighbors, spread the facts and speak the truth” (great “community organizing,” but not particularly presidential).
But just as President Obama has established a clear pattern of ignoring many of his campaign promises and “doing the opposite” in so many areas of his presidency, it is also true that on many economic matters, Obama is essentially in lock-step with what he promised on the campaign trail. He campaigned as an economic redistributionist. As President, he has most certainly been a redistributionist, and has displayed little comprehension or respect for the free-market economy.
As a candidate he expressed all-out disdain for business, and repeatedly promised to dramatically increases taxes and regulations on corporations, expressed anger and “outrage” when corporations reported profits that were “too big,” and promised to “give back” corporate profits to “the American people.”
So for those who have been paying attention, “Obamacare” should be no surprise. The candidate promised a “single payer” health insurance plan, and even once lamented that it may take “ten to fifteen years” to get private insurance companies out of the health insurance market entirely. When single-payer proposals began emerging in Congress and were met with staunch opposition from American citizens, President Obama changed his position on single-payer insurance, insisting that all he wanted was an “option” of government funded insurance.
And now it appears that Congress, owing to Obama’s community organizer instincts, is about to begin demonizing health insurance company executives, trashing their lavish lifestyles and portraying them as perpetrators (you thought the treatment of the AIG folks was rough? Stay tuned).
So what if some form of “Obamacare” actually comes to pass? It will likely be woefully unpopular, it could cost the Democrats dearly in the 2010 election, and could set-off an uprising far greater than anything we’ve seen in this summer’s congressional “townhall” meetings. Yet such a “reform” plan would likely be consistent with President Obama’s big-government, centrally-controlled economic sensibilities, complete with governmental conrols over what procedures physicians will perform, and how much money they will be compensated for performing them.
If “Obamacare” comes to pass, it will be a significant fulfillment of President Obama’s vision of a “transformed” America. But it will not be what Americans want.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
What if a health care bill actually passes in the Congress, and President Obama signs it into law?
Given the ways in which his “hope” and “change” are being embraced across the nation right now, such a legislative “victory” for Mr. Obama could be the worst thing, politically, for his presidency and his party.
Earlier this year, I contemplated here in this column how Obama’s behavior tends to be woefully inconsistent with his rhetoric, and how our President has a propensity for “doing the opposite” of what he says. For example, as a candidate Obama insisted that he is not a “big government” advocate, but then as President proposed a federal budget in excess of $3.5 trillion (Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is now asking Congress to raise the federal debt ceiling above $12 trillion for fear that there won‘t be money to fund Obama‘s budget after October of this year). As a candidate Obama decried the “petty distractions” and “partisan politics as usual” that stifle honest dialog, and prevent people from focusing on the real important issues. Yet from the White House Obama unleashed an intentional and strategic game of publicly demonizing talk show host Rush Limbaugh earlier this year; it appeared that members of his Administration “organized” their “friends” to demonstrate in front of the private homes of AIG Executives to harrass them for having earned bonuses from their employer last Spring; and last week Obama himself told participants in a faith-based organizing conference call that he needed their help to sell his health care take-over plans, admonishing that “I need you to knock on doors, talk to neighbors, spread the facts and speak the truth” (great “community organizing,” but not particularly presidential).
But just as President Obama has established a clear pattern of ignoring many of his campaign promises and “doing the opposite” in so many areas of his presidency, it is also true that on many economic matters, Obama is essentially in lock-step with what he promised on the campaign trail. He campaigned as an economic redistributionist. As President, he has most certainly been a redistributionist, and has displayed little comprehension or respect for the free-market economy.
As a candidate he expressed all-out disdain for business, and repeatedly promised to dramatically increases taxes and regulations on corporations, expressed anger and “outrage” when corporations reported profits that were “too big,” and promised to “give back” corporate profits to “the American people.”
So for those who have been paying attention, “Obamacare” should be no surprise. The candidate promised a “single payer” health insurance plan, and even once lamented that it may take “ten to fifteen years” to get private insurance companies out of the health insurance market entirely. When single-payer proposals began emerging in Congress and were met with staunch opposition from American citizens, President Obama changed his position on single-payer insurance, insisting that all he wanted was an “option” of government funded insurance.
And now it appears that Congress, owing to Obama’s community organizer instincts, is about to begin demonizing health insurance company executives, trashing their lavish lifestyles and portraying them as perpetrators (you thought the treatment of the AIG folks was rough? Stay tuned).
So what if some form of “Obamacare” actually comes to pass? It will likely be woefully unpopular, it could cost the Democrats dearly in the 2010 election, and could set-off an uprising far greater than anything we’ve seen in this summer’s congressional “townhall” meetings. Yet such a “reform” plan would likely be consistent with President Obama’s big-government, centrally-controlled economic sensibilities, complete with governmental conrols over what procedures physicians will perform, and how much money they will be compensated for performing them.
If “Obamacare” comes to pass, it will be a significant fulfillment of President Obama’s vision of a “transformed” America. But it will not be what Americans want.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Why the Stimulus Flopped
Under Obama, nothing is certain but death panels and taxes.
By Mark Steyn
Saturday, August 22, 2009
The other day, wending my way from Woodsville, N.H., 40 miles south to Plymouth, I came across several “stimulus” projects — every few miles, and heralded by a two-tone sign, a hitherto rare sight on Granite State highways. The orange strip at the top said “PUTTING AMERICA BACK TO WORK” with a silhouette of a man with a shovel, and the green part underneath informed you that what you were about to see was a “PROJECT FUNDED BY THE AMERICAN RECOVERY AND REINVESTMENT ACT.” There then followed a few yards of desolate, abandoned, scarified pavement, followed by an “END OF ROAD WORKS” sign, until the next “stimulus” project a couple of bends down a quiet rural blacktop.
I don’t know why one of the least fiscally debauched states in the Union needs funds from “the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” to repair random stretches of highway, especially stretches that were perfectly fine until someone came along to dig them up in order to access “stimulus” funding. I would have asked one of those men with a shovel, as depicted on the sign, but there were none to be found. Usually in New Hampshire, they dig up the road, and re-grade or repave it, while the flagmen stand guard until it’s all done. But here a certain federal torpor seemed to hang in the eerie silence.
Still, what do I know? Evidently, it’s stimulated the sign-making industry, putting America back to work by putting up “PUTTING AMERICA BACK TO WORK” signs every 200 yards across the land. And at 300 bucks a pop, the signage alone should be enough to launch an era of unparalleled prosperity, assuming America’s gilded sign magnates don’t spend their newfound wealth on Bahamian vacations and European imports. Perhaps if the president were to have his All-Seeing O logo lovingly hand-painted onto each sign, it would stimulate the economy even more, if only when they were taken down and auctioned on eBay.
Meanwhile, in Brazil, India, China, Japan, and much of continental Europe the recession has ended. In the second quarter this year, both the French and German economies grew by 0.3 percent, while the U.S. economy shrank by 1 percent. How can that be? Unlike America, France and Germany had no government stimulus worth speaking of, the Germans declining to go the Obama route on the quaint grounds that they couldn’t afford it. They did not invest in the critical signage-in-front-of-holes-in-the-road sector. And yet their recession has gone away. Of the world’s biggest economies, only the U.S., Britain, and Italy are still contracting. All three are big stimulators, though Gordon Brown and Silvio Berlusconi can’t compete with Obama’s $800 billion porkapalooza. The president has borrowed more money to spend to less effect than anybody on the planet.
Actually, when I say “to less effect,” that’s not strictly true: Thanks to Obama, one of the least indebted developed nations is now one of the most indebted — and getting ever more so. We’ve become the third most debt-ridden country after Japan and Italy. According to last month’s IMF report, general government debt as a percentage of GDP will rise from 63 percent in 2007 to 88.8 percent this year and to 99.8 percent of GDP next year.
Of course, the president retains his formidable political skills, artfully distracting attention from his stimulus debacle with his health-care debacle. But there are diminishing returns to his serial thousand-page trillion-dollar boondoggles. They may be too long for your representatives to bother reading before passing into law, but, whatever the intricacies of Section 417(a) xii on page 938, people are beginning to spot what all this stuff has in common: He’s spending your future. And by “future” I don’t mean 2070, 2060, 2040, but the day after tomorrow. Democrats can talk about only raising taxes on “the rich,” but more and more Americans are beginning to figure out what percentage of them will wind up in “the richest 5 percent” before this binge is over. According to Gallup, nearly 70 percent of Americans now expect higher taxes under Obama.
But the silver-tongued salesman sails on. Why be scared of a government health program? After all, says the president, “Medicare is a government program that works really well,” and if “we’re able to get something right like Medicare,” we should have more “confidence” about being able to do it for everyone.
On the other hand, says the president, Medicare is “unsustainable” and “running out of money.”
By the way, unlike your run-of-the-mill politician’s contradictory statements, these weren’t made a year or even a week apart, but during the same presidential speech in Portsmouth, N.H. At any rate, in order to “control costs” Obama says we need to introduce a new trillion-dollar government entitlement. It’s a good thing he’s the smartest president of all time and the greatest orator since Socrates because otherwise one might easily confuse him with some birdbrained Bush type. But, if we take him at his word, then a trillion-dollar public expenditure that “controls costs” presumably means he’s planning on reducing private health expenditure — such as, say, your insurance plan — by at least a trillion. Or he’ll be raising a trillion dollars’ worth of revenue. Either way, under Obama nothing is certain but death panels and taxes — i.e., a vast enervating statism, and the confiscation of the fruits of your labors required to pay for it.
That’s why the “stimulus” flopped. It didn’t just fail to stimulate, it actively deterred stimulation, because it was the first explicit signal to America and the world that the Democrats’ political priorities overrode everything else. If you’re a business owner, why take on extra employees when cap’n’trade is promising increased regulatory costs and health “reform” wants to stick you with an 8 percent tax for not having a company insurance plan? Obama’s leviathan sends a consistent message to business and consumers alike: When he’s spending this crazy, maybe the smart thing for you to do is hunker down until the dust’s settled and you get a better sense of just how broke he’s going to make you. For this level of “community organization,” there aren’t enough of “the rich” to pay for it. That leaves you.
For Obama, government health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture in which all elections and most public discourse will be conducted on Democratic terms. It’s no surprise that the president can’t make a coherent economic or medical argument for Obamacare, because that’s not what it’s about — and for all his cool, he can’t quite disguise that. Apropos a new poll, the Associated Press reports that Americans “are losing faith in Barack Obama.”
“Losing faith”? Oh, no! Fall on your knees and beseech the One: “Give me a sign, O Lord!”
But he has. They’re all along empty highways across rural New Hampshire: “This Massive Expansion of Wasteful Statism Brought to You by Obama Marketing, Inc.”
By Mark Steyn
Saturday, August 22, 2009
The other day, wending my way from Woodsville, N.H., 40 miles south to Plymouth, I came across several “stimulus” projects — every few miles, and heralded by a two-tone sign, a hitherto rare sight on Granite State highways. The orange strip at the top said “PUTTING AMERICA BACK TO WORK” with a silhouette of a man with a shovel, and the green part underneath informed you that what you were about to see was a “PROJECT FUNDED BY THE AMERICAN RECOVERY AND REINVESTMENT ACT.” There then followed a few yards of desolate, abandoned, scarified pavement, followed by an “END OF ROAD WORKS” sign, until the next “stimulus” project a couple of bends down a quiet rural blacktop.
I don’t know why one of the least fiscally debauched states in the Union needs funds from “the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” to repair random stretches of highway, especially stretches that were perfectly fine until someone came along to dig them up in order to access “stimulus” funding. I would have asked one of those men with a shovel, as depicted on the sign, but there were none to be found. Usually in New Hampshire, they dig up the road, and re-grade or repave it, while the flagmen stand guard until it’s all done. But here a certain federal torpor seemed to hang in the eerie silence.
Still, what do I know? Evidently, it’s stimulated the sign-making industry, putting America back to work by putting up “PUTTING AMERICA BACK TO WORK” signs every 200 yards across the land. And at 300 bucks a pop, the signage alone should be enough to launch an era of unparalleled prosperity, assuming America’s gilded sign magnates don’t spend their newfound wealth on Bahamian vacations and European imports. Perhaps if the president were to have his All-Seeing O logo lovingly hand-painted onto each sign, it would stimulate the economy even more, if only when they were taken down and auctioned on eBay.
Meanwhile, in Brazil, India, China, Japan, and much of continental Europe the recession has ended. In the second quarter this year, both the French and German economies grew by 0.3 percent, while the U.S. economy shrank by 1 percent. How can that be? Unlike America, France and Germany had no government stimulus worth speaking of, the Germans declining to go the Obama route on the quaint grounds that they couldn’t afford it. They did not invest in the critical signage-in-front-of-holes-in-the-road sector. And yet their recession has gone away. Of the world’s biggest economies, only the U.S., Britain, and Italy are still contracting. All three are big stimulators, though Gordon Brown and Silvio Berlusconi can’t compete with Obama’s $800 billion porkapalooza. The president has borrowed more money to spend to less effect than anybody on the planet.
Actually, when I say “to less effect,” that’s not strictly true: Thanks to Obama, one of the least indebted developed nations is now one of the most indebted — and getting ever more so. We’ve become the third most debt-ridden country after Japan and Italy. According to last month’s IMF report, general government debt as a percentage of GDP will rise from 63 percent in 2007 to 88.8 percent this year and to 99.8 percent of GDP next year.
Of course, the president retains his formidable political skills, artfully distracting attention from his stimulus debacle with his health-care debacle. But there are diminishing returns to his serial thousand-page trillion-dollar boondoggles. They may be too long for your representatives to bother reading before passing into law, but, whatever the intricacies of Section 417(a) xii on page 938, people are beginning to spot what all this stuff has in common: He’s spending your future. And by “future” I don’t mean 2070, 2060, 2040, but the day after tomorrow. Democrats can talk about only raising taxes on “the rich,” but more and more Americans are beginning to figure out what percentage of them will wind up in “the richest 5 percent” before this binge is over. According to Gallup, nearly 70 percent of Americans now expect higher taxes under Obama.
But the silver-tongued salesman sails on. Why be scared of a government health program? After all, says the president, “Medicare is a government program that works really well,” and if “we’re able to get something right like Medicare,” we should have more “confidence” about being able to do it for everyone.
On the other hand, says the president, Medicare is “unsustainable” and “running out of money.”
By the way, unlike your run-of-the-mill politician’s contradictory statements, these weren’t made a year or even a week apart, but during the same presidential speech in Portsmouth, N.H. At any rate, in order to “control costs” Obama says we need to introduce a new trillion-dollar government entitlement. It’s a good thing he’s the smartest president of all time and the greatest orator since Socrates because otherwise one might easily confuse him with some birdbrained Bush type. But, if we take him at his word, then a trillion-dollar public expenditure that “controls costs” presumably means he’s planning on reducing private health expenditure — such as, say, your insurance plan — by at least a trillion. Or he’ll be raising a trillion dollars’ worth of revenue. Either way, under Obama nothing is certain but death panels and taxes — i.e., a vast enervating statism, and the confiscation of the fruits of your labors required to pay for it.
That’s why the “stimulus” flopped. It didn’t just fail to stimulate, it actively deterred stimulation, because it was the first explicit signal to America and the world that the Democrats’ political priorities overrode everything else. If you’re a business owner, why take on extra employees when cap’n’trade is promising increased regulatory costs and health “reform” wants to stick you with an 8 percent tax for not having a company insurance plan? Obama’s leviathan sends a consistent message to business and consumers alike: When he’s spending this crazy, maybe the smart thing for you to do is hunker down until the dust’s settled and you get a better sense of just how broke he’s going to make you. For this level of “community organization,” there aren’t enough of “the rich” to pay for it. That leaves you.
For Obama, government health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture in which all elections and most public discourse will be conducted on Democratic terms. It’s no surprise that the president can’t make a coherent economic or medical argument for Obamacare, because that’s not what it’s about — and for all his cool, he can’t quite disguise that. Apropos a new poll, the Associated Press reports that Americans “are losing faith in Barack Obama.”
“Losing faith”? Oh, no! Fall on your knees and beseech the One: “Give me a sign, O Lord!”
But he has. They’re all along empty highways across rural New Hampshire: “This Massive Expansion of Wasteful Statism Brought to You by Obama Marketing, Inc.”
A Deck Stacked With Race Cards
Jonah Goldberg
Friday, August 21, 2009
What if America transcended race, and Barack Obama wasn't invited?
The question comes to mind as cries of racism grow ever louder from Obama's supporters.
No one should be surprised. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, liberal Democrats have to accuse their opponents of racism. Indeed, somewhat to their credit, fighting racism -- alas, even where it doesn't exist -- is one of the reasons they became liberal Democrats in the first place.
And that's the great irony of the Obama presidency. It was Obama's supporters who hinted, teased, promised or prophesied that Obama would help America "transcend race." But now, it is they who shrink from their own promised land.
After all, it was not Obama's detractors who immediately fell into the comfortable groove of racial grievance and familiar "narratives" when Henry Louis Gates insisted that a police instructor in racial sensitivity had to be a racist. That was Obama and his choir of heralds.
From day one, Obama's supporters have tirelessly cultivated the idea that anything inconvenient to the first black president just might be terribly, terribly racist.
This was always the nasty side of Obama's implied hope for unity. Obama gave oxygen to the idea that disagreement with him amounted to obstructing his mission to "transcend race." During the campaign, that meant anyone who got in his way was wittingly or unwittingly abetting racism (just ask Bill Clinton). A writer for Slate magazine insisted journalists must not call attention to the fact that Obama is "skinny." Such observations fuel racism by highlighting his physical appearance, and that in turn might suddenly alert racist American voters to the fact that Obama is ... wait for it ... black.
Now that he's president, if you question his tax policies, energy plans or health-care ambitions, you are "hoping he will fail" -- and that, with the help of roundabout reasoning, is tantamount to hoping we cannot transcend race.
Loading the deck in such a way is a gift of Obama's. Time and again, he pre-empts dissent by claiming he's open-minded, pragmatic and non-ideological, and therefore if you disagree with him, you must be some sort of zealot.
His shock troops make the same argument about race, sometimes with sophistication, sometimes with the kind of lucid clarity only profound stupidity can provide. For instance, actress Janeane Garofalo summed up the tea parties thusly: "This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up."
A more sophisticated version comes from Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell, who finds racism in complaints that socialized medicine would result in fewer Americans "taking responsibility" for their own health care. "What we know over the past 25 years," she told NPR, "is that language of personal responsibility is often a code language used against poor and minority communities." In an ABC News story about how racist white militias are somehow connected to town hall protests, Mark Potok of the dismayingly left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center insists Obama has "triggered fears among fairly large numbers of white people in this country that they are somehow losing their country."
Two weeks ago, town hallers were supposed to be members of the Brooks Brothers brigade, AstroTurf division. Now they're well-armed anti-government militias. At this rate, they'll soon be android ninjas with laser vision. Wait, strike that. They'll be really racist android ninjas with laser vision.
Suddenly, if conservatives want to transcend race, we have to agree to massive increases in the size of government and socialized medicine.
That's not transcending race, it's using Obama's race to bully the opposition into acquiescence. Actually transcending race would require treating Obama like any other president. Which is pretty much exactly what conservatives have been doing. Seriously, if Hillary Clinton were president, would conservatives really be rolling over for the same health-care plan because she's white?
Sure, racists don't like Obama (in less shocking news, bears continue to use our national forests as toilets). But that doesn't mean everyone who dislikes Obama is therefore a racist.
What's dismaying is how the press and Democrats are so desperate to obscure this point. The only notable political violence at a town hall was against a black man, roughed up by pro-Obama toughs. The assault weapon carried to a lawful demonstration was carried by a black man. That supposedly racist poster depicting Obama as the Joker? (An LA Weekly writer fumed, "The only thing missing is a noose.") That was created by a Palestinian-American supporter of left-wing garden gnome Dennis Kucinich. Whoops!
Never mind. They'll keep trying until they find a scapegoat that works, because that is what they do.
Friday, August 21, 2009
What if America transcended race, and Barack Obama wasn't invited?
The question comes to mind as cries of racism grow ever louder from Obama's supporters.
No one should be surprised. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, liberal Democrats have to accuse their opponents of racism. Indeed, somewhat to their credit, fighting racism -- alas, even where it doesn't exist -- is one of the reasons they became liberal Democrats in the first place.
And that's the great irony of the Obama presidency. It was Obama's supporters who hinted, teased, promised or prophesied that Obama would help America "transcend race." But now, it is they who shrink from their own promised land.
After all, it was not Obama's detractors who immediately fell into the comfortable groove of racial grievance and familiar "narratives" when Henry Louis Gates insisted that a police instructor in racial sensitivity had to be a racist. That was Obama and his choir of heralds.
From day one, Obama's supporters have tirelessly cultivated the idea that anything inconvenient to the first black president just might be terribly, terribly racist.
This was always the nasty side of Obama's implied hope for unity. Obama gave oxygen to the idea that disagreement with him amounted to obstructing his mission to "transcend race." During the campaign, that meant anyone who got in his way was wittingly or unwittingly abetting racism (just ask Bill Clinton). A writer for Slate magazine insisted journalists must not call attention to the fact that Obama is "skinny." Such observations fuel racism by highlighting his physical appearance, and that in turn might suddenly alert racist American voters to the fact that Obama is ... wait for it ... black.
Now that he's president, if you question his tax policies, energy plans or health-care ambitions, you are "hoping he will fail" -- and that, with the help of roundabout reasoning, is tantamount to hoping we cannot transcend race.
Loading the deck in such a way is a gift of Obama's. Time and again, he pre-empts dissent by claiming he's open-minded, pragmatic and non-ideological, and therefore if you disagree with him, you must be some sort of zealot.
His shock troops make the same argument about race, sometimes with sophistication, sometimes with the kind of lucid clarity only profound stupidity can provide. For instance, actress Janeane Garofalo summed up the tea parties thusly: "This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up."
A more sophisticated version comes from Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell, who finds racism in complaints that socialized medicine would result in fewer Americans "taking responsibility" for their own health care. "What we know over the past 25 years," she told NPR, "is that language of personal responsibility is often a code language used against poor and minority communities." In an ABC News story about how racist white militias are somehow connected to town hall protests, Mark Potok of the dismayingly left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center insists Obama has "triggered fears among fairly large numbers of white people in this country that they are somehow losing their country."
Two weeks ago, town hallers were supposed to be members of the Brooks Brothers brigade, AstroTurf division. Now they're well-armed anti-government militias. At this rate, they'll soon be android ninjas with laser vision. Wait, strike that. They'll be really racist android ninjas with laser vision.
Suddenly, if conservatives want to transcend race, we have to agree to massive increases in the size of government and socialized medicine.
That's not transcending race, it's using Obama's race to bully the opposition into acquiescence. Actually transcending race would require treating Obama like any other president. Which is pretty much exactly what conservatives have been doing. Seriously, if Hillary Clinton were president, would conservatives really be rolling over for the same health-care plan because she's white?
Sure, racists don't like Obama (in less shocking news, bears continue to use our national forests as toilets). But that doesn't mean everyone who dislikes Obama is therefore a racist.
What's dismaying is how the press and Democrats are so desperate to obscure this point. The only notable political violence at a town hall was against a black man, roughed up by pro-Obama toughs. The assault weapon carried to a lawful demonstration was carried by a black man. That supposedly racist poster depicting Obama as the Joker? (An LA Weekly writer fumed, "The only thing missing is a noose.") That was created by a Palestinian-American supporter of left-wing garden gnome Dennis Kucinich. Whoops!
Never mind. They'll keep trying until they find a scapegoat that works, because that is what they do.
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