Note to Paul Krugman: Here's Real "Eliminationist" Rhetoric

By Dennis Prager

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

 

Have you noticed that the left regularly condemns alleged conservative "hate speech" but is almost completely silent on the most pervasive hate speech in the world?

 

Take New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, for example.

 

On Jan 8, 2011, in Tucson, Ariz., Jared Loughner murdered six people and gravely wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. That very day (published the next day), based on nothing, Paul Krugman wrote that the murders were a result of hate-filled rhetoric that saturates conservative and Republican life.

 

"When you heard the terrible news from Arizona, were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen?

 

"Put me in the latter category.

 

"It's true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn't mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event ...

 

"There isn't any place for eliminationist rhetoric, for suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary.

 

"And it's the saturation of our political discourse -- and especially our airwaves -- with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence.

 

"Where's that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let's not make a false pretense of balance: it's coming, overwhelmingly, from the right ...

 

"So will the Arizona massacre make our discourse less toxic? It's really up to G.O.P. leaders. Will they accept the reality of what's happening to America and take a stand against eliminationist rhetoric? Or will they try to dismiss the massacre as the mere act of a deranged individual and go on as before?"

 

Most of the American left echoed Krugman's libel.

 

So, then, here's the question: With an American ambassador and three other Americans murdered by Muslim mobs in Libya, and with tens of thousands of Muslims violently demonstrating around the world against a video on the Internet that virtually no one on Earth saw or even heard of, will anyone on the left write the truth about the greatest hate-filled rhetoric in the world -- Islamic rhetoric?

 

Or, as I suggest, does the left engage in as much deception regarding the Islamic world as it does about conservatives?

 

The answer can be readily ascertained by taking the Krugman column and simply substituting some of his words with those placed in parentheses. Then the morally upside-down world of Krugman and the left becomes immediately apparent.

 

"When you heard the terrible news from (Libya, Egypt, and elsewhere in Muslim world), were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen?

 

"There isn't any place for eliminationist rhetoric (emanating from the Muslim world)."

 

"Where's that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let's not make a false pretense of balance: it's coming, overwhelmingly, from the (the Muslim world).

 

"So will (the Libya massacre, and the massacres of Christians in Nigeria, Egypt, and Iraq) make our discourse less toxic? It's really up to (Muslim) leaders. Will they accept the reality of what's happening to (the Muslim world) and take a stand against eliminationist rhetoric? Or will they try to dismiss (all these massacres) as the mere act of a (tiny, unrepresentative, radical fringe group of Muslims) and go on as before?"

 

What I wrote in parentheses is what is true. What Krugman wrote is not true. Krugman deceives about the right, and he and the left deceive concerning the Islamic world.

 

There is a world replete with hate and with what Krugman calls "eliminationist" talk. It is not the world of American conservatives and Republicans. It is the Islamic world. Of course, not all Muslims, religious or otherwise, are haters. But in the world today, by far the most gratuitous and most lethal hate emanates from the Muslim world.

 

Why, then, do Paul Krugman and the left identify American conservatives and Republicans with hate and eliminationist rhetoric? And why does the left smear anyone who identifies the real producers of eliminationist rhetoric as bigoted and "Islamophobic"?

 

The explanation is this: Those who do not hate evil hate those who do hate evil.

 

This was the record of the left during much the Cold War. Instead of hating the Communists, the left hated the anti-Communists.

 

To paraphrase the Talmud, those who treat the cruel with kindness will treat the kind with cruelty.

 

Given their silence regarding Islamic hate and their preoccupation with alleged conservative hate, the Talmudic insight can serve as the working motto of Krugman and his ideological allies.

Can Republicans Talk?

By Thomas Sowell

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

 

The first time I saw Chris Christie on television, shortly after he became governor of New Jersey, my immediate reaction was, "My Gosh! A Talking Republican!" It was almost like seeing a talking giraffe or a talking salamander.

 

Technically speaking, Republicans do talk, but talking is definitely not their strong suit. Nor do they seem to have put a lot of thought into what they say or how they say it. The net result is that articulate Democrats can get away with the biggest lies, without any serious rebuttal from most Republicans.

 

I have not heard any Republican official or candidate even try to answer a standard claim of the Democrats, that "deregulation" is the reason the housing market went haywire and brought down the economy. Therefore, according to the Democrats, Republicans who want to restore a free market are just trying to "go back to the same policies that got us into this mess in the first place."

 

That sounds very persuasive, if you don't know the facts -- and it sounds like pure hogwash if you do.

 

 But facts don't speak for themselves. And if we wait for the Republicans to speak, the whole country can be in big trouble.

 

The "deregulation" gambit is not new. It was tried out years ago, in California, when some of the most heavy-handed regulation of the electrical utility companies forced them to charge less for electricity than they had to pay to buy it. After this led to their financial collapse, and then to power failures and blackouts that outraged the public, the Democrats' response was that this was all due to -- you guessed it -- "deregulation."

 

It is the same story today on the national level. Federal agencies with powers of economic life and death over banks and other lenders forced these lenders to lower their lending standards. The words of the regulators themselves are a matter of public record, and they sound like something out of "Alice in Wonderland." They ought to be quoted, to give the lie to claims that "deregulation" is the reason for the housing boom and bust.

 

Some people think that nonsense is too silly to answer. But not answering it can just allow nonsense to prevail -- to the detriment of the whole country.

 

Much as I admire the approach of Congressman Paul Ryan, I cringed during one of his speeches when he said -- in just one sentence -- that none of his reforms would deny benefits to people already getting Social Security. When the truth is just a passing blip on the screen and the lies go on at great length, guess which one is likely to prevail politically.

 

Vulnerable people, depending on that monthly Social Security check, need to hear that you understand that they paid into Social Security for years when they were working, and that it would be unconscionable to now cheat them out of what they paid for.

 

Policy wonks already know that nobody in his right mind has proposed any such thing. But, if you depend on the votes of policy wonks to win elections, be prepared to lose in a landslide.

 

One of the biggest of the election year lies is that Republicans want to sacrifice the poor in order to have "tax cuts for the rich." That would be grossly immoral -- if it were true. Unscrambling the confusion in that argument can involve work. But if people on welfare can be expected to work, surely people running for high office can put in a little work too -- including the work of explaining in plain words what is totally false about the "tax cuts for the rich" argument.

 

I know it can be done because I have done it. You can see my essay on the subject on my website (www.tsowell.com) under the title "Tax Cuts."

 

But so long as Republicans don't seem to feel any urgency about refuting the Democrats' claim that they just want to help the rich at the expense of the poor, they are courting defeat on election day. Why lose to a lie because you didn't bother to explain the truth?

 

Some of the time that was spent at the Republican convention trying to "humanize" Mitt Romney could have been better spent debunking the Democrats' talking points. After all, we are not going to be voting for a Buddy-in-Chief in the White House, but for someone with some clear ideas about what this country needs -- and who is willing to share those ideas with us in plain English.

Obama on the Middle East

By Victor Davis Hanson

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

 

The last three and a half years, Barack Obama has gone out of his way to bow, apologize, contextualize, and scapegoat in order to win Middle Eastern affection. Yet, his reset, “Bush did it” policy is now in shambles, and he apparently has nothing with which to replace it.

 

So I have a modest suggestion. Obama has a formidable arsenal of invective that he has unleashed against conservatives, Republicans, and just about anyone else on the domestic scene he doesn’t like. Why, then, not redeploy these fire-in-the-belly attacks against those who kill Americans abroad?

 

All Obama has to do is imagine that the mobs in the Middle East are not misunderstood Muslims — who overreacted a bit to an offensive American video — but rather suspect conservatives and opponents of progressive thought. Then, mutatis mutandis, Obama might get fired up and level a much-needed warning.

 

If he did, it might go like this:

 

I know my country has not perfected itself. At times, we’ve struggled to keep the promise of liberty and equality for all of our people. We’ve made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions.

 

But let’s be perfectly clear, the Middle East acted stupidly.

 

If the people of the Middle East cannot trust their governments to do the job for which they exist — to protect them and to promote their common welfare — all else is lost. It’s not surprising, then, that those on the Arab street get bitter; they cling to their religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-American sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

 

Make no mistake about it — the point I am making is not that Middle Easterners harbor any racial animosity. They don’t. But there is a typical Middle Eastern person, who, if they see somebody on the street that they don’t know, you know, there’s a reaction that’s been bred in their experiences that don’t go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that’s just the nature of religion and race in their society. And so what I think we know — separate and apart from these incidents — is that there is a long history in their countries of average Americans being singled out disproportionately, and that’s just a fact. On more than one occasion, they have uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that have made us cringe.

 

Nonetheless, whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower. So if they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun. Because from what I understand, folks in America like a good brawl. I’ve seen our football fans. Make no mistake about it: We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us. So I want America to argue with those radicals in the Middle East and get in their face.

 

Finally, as far as Middle Eastern governments go, I don’t want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess. I don’t mind cleaning up after them, but don’t do a lot of talking. They just can’t drive their SUVs and eat as much as they want and keep their homes on 72 degrees at all times — and then just expect that other people are going to say okay. That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen.

 

Amen, Mr. President.

Re-branding Guevara: Che the Butcher

By John Fund

Monday, September 17, 2012

 

The stern photo of revolutionary Che Guevara taken by Alberto Korda in 1960 is one of the most reproduced images on the planet, appearing on posters, flags, postcards, T-shirts, and even bikinis. Sadly, the ubiquitous appearances of Che — hailed today usually by his first name only — demonstrate the near-total failure to educate people about the blood-soaked cruelty he really represented.

 

But there are, thankfully, some limits to the use of Che’s famous image — if people complain. A recent e-mail sent by the Environmental Protection Agency to mark Hispanic Heritage Month included Korda’s image of Che along with the slogan “Hasta la victoria siempre,” or “On to victory, always.” After facing criticism, the EPA said the e-mail had been “drafted and sent by an individual employee, and without official clearance.”

 

Nonetheless, it’s unsettling to see Che’s image appropriated by a government agency that has a notorious reputation for violating property rights and imposing arbitrary controls on growth. Just last March, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that an Idaho couple seeking to build on their land had their rights violated when the EPA imposed fines of $75,000 a day without giving the couple the ability to challenge its rulings.

 

Also this year, the EPA regional administrator Al Armendariz was forced to resign after he described his enforcement philosophy in a public speech: “Find people who are not complying with the law and you hit them as hard as you can and make examples of them.” He compared the tactic to that used by ancient Roman soldiers: “The Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw, and they would crucify them. And then you know that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.”

 

That sounds a lot like how Che operated. After Fidel Castro seized power in 1959, Che was instrumental in setting up forced-labor camps for dissidents, gays, and devout Catholics. He was put in charge of La Cabaña Fortress prison for five months. There are varying accounts of how many people were executed under his command during that time, and how many deaths are attributed directly to Che as opposed to the regime overall, but some sources say that more than 100 journalists, businessmen, and followers of the previous regime faced death by firing squad at La Cabaña, under Che’s jurisdiction.

 

Violence was at the core of Che’s philosophy. Shortly before his death at the hands of Bolivian troops in 1967, he wrote “Message to the Tricontinental.” In this essay he advocated the effective use of violent hatred:

 

Hatred as an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.

 

A decade earlier, when he murdered Eutimio Guerra, he recorded in his diary: “I ended the problem with a .32 caliber pistol, in the right side of his brain. . . . His belongings were now mine.”

 

Nor was Che’s violence directed only against Cubans. Author Humberto Fontova points to evidence that Guevara, the chief instigator of Castro’s revolutionary efforts overseas, was involved in a November 1962 terrorist plot to use 1,200 pounds of TNT to blow up Macy’s, Gimbels, Bloomingdale’s, and Grand Central Station on the day after Thanksgiving, the busiest shopping day of the year. Such an act could have rivaled 9/11 in its destruction. This is hardly a man who deserves to be honored as a hero on T-shirts.

 

The Obama administration deserves credit for distancing itself from the EPA’s flirtation with Che. But Obama acolytes haven’t always been so sensible. During the 2008 campaign, a Houston TV station taped the inside of an Obama get-out-the-vote office that featured a large Cuban flag on the wall, with the image of Che stamped onto it.

 

The spokeswoman for the Obama office who sat down with the TV station for an interview repeatedly called questions about the Cuban flag “a distraction” and a “waste of time” and said, “I don’t have time to talk about the Cuban flag.” Or Che, for that matter.

 

But it’s time we start to talk about Che. He may have died 45 years ago, but his pernicious philosophy is still very much under debate in Latin America. On the one hand, even liberals such as Rory Carroll, the Latin American correspondent for the Guardian in Britain, acknowledge that the Cuban model would have been a “debacle” if exported to other countries. “To challenge the U.S. empire, Che dreamed of creating ‘many Vietnams,’ not least in his Argentine homeland,” Carroll wrote. “Who today can seriously wish he had succeeded? . . . Who needs Che?”

 

But while overt Communism isn’t on the march in Latin America, Che-style thinking is ascendant in the anti-American authoritarians who today rule Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Nicaragua. Che is much more than an image on a T-shirt to leaders in those countries: He is an inspiration on how to seize and maintain power. It’s for that reason that we should push back whenever and wherever Che’s image surfaces. If people wore T-shirts with images of Nazi butchers, most of us wouldn’t let them pass by without comment. The same should be the case with Che, whether his image shows up on college campuses or in EPA e-mails.

Romney Is Right

By Rich Lowry

Friday, September 14, 2012

 

When a U.S. embassy gets stormed by protesters overseas, it’s usually a matter of public concern. And it might even occasion debate between presidential candidates.

 

Unless one of the candidates is President Barack Obama and the other is Mitt Romney. Then, everything changes.

 

In the immediate aftermath of the deadly attacks on U.S. diplomatic installations in Egypt and Libya, the political debate fastened on the propriety of Romney criticizing the administration for its initial response. You know, the important stuff.

 

The glowing media reports from earlier this week about how President Obama would use foreign policy as a cudgel against Romney had barely faded when the press pack turned around and declared politics must stop at the water’s edge, thank you very much.

 

The old complaint about Romney was that he didn’t talk about foreign policy; the newly minted complaint about Romney was that he did talk about foreign policy.

 

As demonstrators gathered — supposedly in response to an anti-Islamic film promoted by Pastor Terry Jones — the embassy in Cairo released a statement that was craven and dumb. It rebuked “the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.”

 

The first thing to say about this is that it shamefully aped the reasoning of efforts to restrict free speech in order to protect Muslim sensibilities. The second is that it failed to appease the mob. American-hating thugs usually don’t check out the websites of their targets on the off chance that something posted there might dissuade them from trying to burn the place down.

 

The embassy reaffirmed its statement via Twitter even after protesters had stormed the compound. At one point the embassy had to tweet, pathetically, “Of course we condemn breaches of our compound, we’re the ones actually living through this.” These people work for the world’s lone superpower?

 

Late that night, Romney condemned the thoroughly condemnable embassy press release. In a rapid confirmation of Romney’s wisdom in doing so, the White House threw the embassy’s statement under the bus. But reporters and liberal pundits reacted in collective horror at Romney’s temerity.

 

No one should get the vapors over Romney’s critique. Matters of war and peace are inherently political. Does anyone remember the Vietnam War? I’m sure Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon would have loved a rule that put debating it off limits. Instead, anti-war protesters and politicians are still lionized.

 

In 1980, the foreign-policy debate didn’t stop because Americans were held hostage in Tehran. Nor did it stop in 2004 because Americans were fighting in Iraq. One of John Kerry’s ads included the graphic: “2 Americans beheaded just this week.”

 

The embassy attacks shine a light on our deteriorating position in the broader Middle East. The signature Obama foreign-policy success has been killing people — Osama bin Laden with a special-forces raid and a bunch of other al-Qaeda terrorists with drones. If that could be the sum total of U.S. foreign policy, we’d be in fine shape. We’re not.

 

Relations with Israel are poisonous. We lost an ally in Egypt, and the revolution there may yet prove Iran 1979 redux. Iraq is sliding into the orbit of Tehran and perhaps back into chaos. Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon. We have made progress in the Afghanistan War but may throw it away with an arbitrary withdrawal, and the Pakistanis hate us more than ever.

 

This is not the record of a modern-day Metternich. Some of this is the president’s fault, some of it is the drift of events. But none of it serves to vindicate Obama’s initial theory that as long as we sound soothing enough, pressure Israel to make concessions, and end our wars, the Middle East will enfold us in its warm embrace.

 

If this isn’t the time to talk about this record, when is the right time? For the press, politics doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. It stops wherever is most convenient for Obama’s reelection campaign.

Don't Misplace Blame for Middle Eastern Mayhem

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, September 14, 2012

 

An incendiary video about the prophet Muhammad, "Innocence of Muslims," was blamed for the mob attacks on our embassies in Libya and Egypt (and later, Yemen). In Libya, Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were murdered. The video stirred some passion here in America as well.

 

Over at MSNBC a riot of consensus broke out when contributors Mike Barnicle and Donny Deutsch as well as University of Pennsylvania professor Anthea Butler all agreed that the people behind the video should be indicted as accessories to murder. "Good Morning," declared Butler, "How soon is Sam Bacile [the alleged creator of the film] going to be in jail folks? I need him to go now."

 

Barnicle set his sights on Terry Jones, the pastor who wanted to burn the Koran a while back and who was allegedly involved in the video as well. "Given this supposed minister's role in last year's riots in Afghanistan, where people died, and given his apparent or his alleged role in this film, where ... at least one American, perhaps the American ambassador is dead, it might be time for the Department of Justice to start viewing his role as an accessory before or after the fact."

 

Deutsch helpfully added: "I was thinking the same thing, yeah."

 

It's interesting to see such committed liberals in lockstep agreement with the Islamist government in Egypt, which implored the U.S. government to take legal action against the filmmakers. Interestingly, not even the Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Egyptian government demanded these men be tried for murder.

 

Now, I have next to no sympathy for the makers of this film, who clearly hoped to start trouble, violent or otherwise. But where does this logic end? One of the things we've learned all too well is that the "Muslim street" -- and often Muslim elites -- have a near-limitless capacity to take offense at slights to their religion, honor, history or feelings.

 

Does Barnicle want Salman Rushdie, the author of "The Satanic Verses," charged with attempted murder, too? That book has in one way or another led to several deaths. Surely he should have known that he was stirring up trouble. Perhaps the U.S. Justice Department and the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security could work together on a joint prosecution?

 

Perhaps Rushdie's offense doesn't count because he's a literary celebrity? Only crude attacks on Islam should be held accountable for the murderous bloodlust they elicit.

 

One might ask who is to decide what is crude and what is refined? But that would be fruitless because we know the real answer: the Islamist mobs and their leaders. Their rulings would come in the form of bloody conniptions around the world.

 

Are we really going to hold what we can say or do in our own country hostage to the passions of foreign lynch mobs?

 

If your answer is some of form of "yes," than you might want to explain why U.S. citizens aren't justified in attacking Egyptian or Libyan embassies here in America. After all, I get pretty mad when I see goons burning the American flag, and I become downright livid when a U.S. ambassador is murdered. Maybe me and some of my like-minded friends should burn down some embassies here in Washington, D.C., or maybe a consulate in New York City?

 

Of course we shouldn't do that. To argue that Americans shouldn't resort to mayhem, while suggesting it's understandable when Muslims do, is to create a double standard that either renders Muslims unaccountable savages (they can't help themselves!) or casts Americans as somehow less passionate about what we hold dear, be it our flag, our diplomats or our religions. (It's hardly as if Islamists don't defame Christianity, Judaism, moderate forms of Islam or even atheism.)

 

But, I'm sorry to say, that may in fact be the case. After all, with barely a moment's thought these deep thinkers on MSNBC were willing to throw out the First Amendment for a little revenge. It was a moment of voluntary surrender to terrorism.

 

Within 24 hours, however, it became increasingly clear that the video wasn't even the motive for the murders; it was a convenient cover for them. In effect, the terrorists behind the Libyan attack not only successfully played the Muslim street for suckers, they played Barnicle & Co. for suckers, too.

Obamanomics Has Failed Dismally

By Larry Kudlow

Saturday, September 15, 2012

 

About 30 years ago, Paul Volcker launched a monumental monetary effort to bring down inflation. As Fed chairman, he sold bonds, removed cash from the economy and cared not one wit about rising interest rates. And it worked. Gold plunged, King Dollar soared, and the drop-off in bank reserves and money extinguished high inflation -- and actually launched a multi-decade period of very low inflation.

 

This week, current Fed chairman Ben Bernanke embarked on an absolute reversal of Volcker's policy. He is launching a monumental effort to buy bonds and inject new money into the economy in order to reignite economic growth and job creation. It's like history is repeating itself, but in reverse. Gold is soaring, the dollar is falling. Something's wrong with this picture.

 

Bernanke's QE3 is an unlimited Fed effort to buy mortgage bonds with new cash. The plan -- which starts immediately -- envisions $40 billion of bond purchases and money-creation per month, coming to $480 billion over the next year. And there are no limits to these purchases. These operations are open-ended. This could last for years -- maybe in perpetuity -- until job creation shoots way up and unemployment comes way down.

 

Nothing like this has ever been used by our nation's central bank. The Fed's balance sheet, which has ballooned from around $800 billion to $2.5 trillion under Bernanke, will go to $3 trillion, or $4 trillion, or who knows how high.

 

But here's the rub: More money doesn't necessarily mean more growth. More Fed money won't increase after-tax rewards for risk, entrepreneurship, business hiring and hard work. Keeping more of what you earn after-tax is the true spark of economic growth. Not the Fed.

 

In the supply-side model, the combination of lower marginal tax rates, lighter regulation and a downsized government in relation to the economy is the growth-igniter. Money, on the other hand, determines the value of the dollar exchange rate and subsequently the overall inflation rate. A falling dollar (1970s) generates higher inflation; a rising dollar (1980s and beyond) generates lower inflation.

 

This is the supply-side model as advanced by Nobelist Robert Mundell and his colleague Arthur Laffer. In summary, easier taxes and tighter money are the optimal growth solution. But what we have now are higher taxes and easier money. A bad combination.

 

The Fed has created all this money in the last couple of years. But it hasn't worked: $1.6 trillion of excess bank reserves are still sitting idle at the Fed. No use. No risk. Virtually no loans. And the Fed is enabling massive deficit spending by the White House and Treasury.

 

Now, one key political point is that Bernanke's desperate money-pumping plan to rescue the economy is a very blunt admission that Obamanomics has completely failed. The president is asking voters to give him more time, which is a very weak argument. But his Fed chairman is essentially saying we are running out of time and have to embark on this massive monetary action. Mitt Romney should use the Bernanke argument, but not the Fed solution.

 

Some argue that Bernanke so desperately wants a victorious Obama to reappoint him that he's printing money and driving up stock prices on the eve of the election. I prefer not to believe this cynical interpretation. As an old ex-Fed staffer, I would argue that it's not a political agency. Although I have to admit, on the eve of the election, the question is going to be asked.

 

More to the point, the Achilles' heel of the Bernanke plan is the collapse of King Dollar, the result of printing so many new ones for so long. That, in turn, will drive up commodity prices, especially energy and food, and will do great damage to the middle class, which is already suffering from income declines and rising living standards.

 

This is what happened in 2011, when QE2 did more harm than good to the economy. Middle-class savers and retirees will also get their heads handed to them because of rock-bottom interest rates. And bank lenders may withhold credit since the difference between short and longer rates is so narrow there's no incentive to make loans.

 

So at the end of the day, Obama's economic program of tax, spend and regulate has been a dismal failure. And now his Fed chairman is acting dramatically to bail him out. Guess what? It won't work.

Which Is Melting Faster: America's Position in Middle East or MSM's Position in America?

By Hugh Hewitt

Friday, September 14, 2012

 

If an American consulate had been attacked and four Americans including the ambassador slaughtered on George W. Bush's watch --on 9/11, no less-- the outrage broadcast over the nation's elite media would have been intense and round-the-clock.

 

Had George W. Bush then responded to those events by jetting to Vegas for a fundraiser and campaign rally marked by a rote and emotion-less nod towards the victims and a callous transition to the difficulty of campaign life for political volunteers, well, the hysteria that would have followed would have melted wires.

 

Because Barack Obama is the MSM's favorite president ever; however, when these events followed that outrageous attack on Wednesday, the Manhattan-Beltway media did not even pause from their unremitting attack on...Mitt Romney, of course.

 

When the President compounded the day's fiasco by announcing to a stunned foreign policy elite via Telemundo that Egypt was not an "ally," much of the MSM didn't even bother to note the pratfall, nor the fact that it was juxtaposed with the President's chest thumping dismissal of Mitt Romney as as "shoot-first, aim later" candidate.

 

It was as though Jimmy Carter had campaigned on his hostage release negotiation skills in 1980, or Bill Clinton on a chastity platform in the mid-terms of 1998.

 

Perhaps the pressure on American media from declining ad sales and dwindling circulation and viewership has caused a collective crack-up. The elite media have always been left but rarely have they been so collectively delusional.

 

By Thursday night the MSM's effort was underway to validate their shared embarrassment by proclaiming that Mitt Romney was "toning down" his criticism of President Obama even though the Republican nominee blasted away at the President's assault on defense spending in the day's one open media event. CNN, NBC, Politico all relayed their "toned down" judgment despite the obvious compounding of Wednesday's display of bias transmitted thereby.

 

It is a collapse. A complete collapse. As Mark Steyn said on my show Thursday, the MSM is "acting like a deranged, drugged up mob."

 

And everyone but the media knows it.

 

Meanwhile the Arab world is in a spasm of violence that the President seems almost indifferent to, so remote is his demeanor. "No drama Obama" is looking more and more like Chance the Gardener Obama, the "Being There" president in fact being only in campaign mode and detached from even the most pressing aspects of his job.

 

 I can only conclude that he took his already-evaporated convention bounce as a predictor of the November vote and a ratification of his own immense self-esteem. Fine by Team Romney which must be clinking glasses at the president's cluelessness and the media's enabling of his spiral into retirement. The likely voter polls show a dead heat nationally, and the map is full of Romney paths, with Wisconsin heading Romney's way and Obama's alleged lead in Ohio gone in the last Rasmussen survey (and never existing in the Columbus Dispatch poll.)

 

Obama threw everything at Romney, including hundreds of millions in negative ads, Bill Clinton in prime time, and all of the Manhattan-Beltway media, but it is a tie and the disaster in the Middle East is just sinking in.

 

The President appears certain that he will not have to leave the White House next January, so assured is he of his charm and competence. But like his speech in Cairo long ago or his appeal on behalf of the Chicago Olympics, the president is nothing if not overly generous in his own estimate of his own abilities.

Disgrace in Benghazi

By Mark Steyn

Saturday, September 15, 2012

 

So, on a highly symbolic date, mobs storm American diplomatic facilities and drag the corpse of a U.S. ambassador through the streets. Then the president flies to Vegas for a fundraiser. No, no, a novelist would say; that’s too pat, too neat in its symbolic contrast. Make it Cleveland, or Des Moines.

 

The president is surrounded by delirious fanbois and fangurls screaming “We love you,” too drunk on his celebrity to understand this is the first photo-op in the aftermath of a national humiliation. No, no, a filmmaker would say; too crass, too blunt. Make them sober, middle-aged midwesterners, shocked at first, but then quiet and respectful.

 

The president is too lazy and cocksure to have learned any prepared remarks or mastered the appropriate tone, notwithstanding that a government that spends more money than any government in the history of the planet has ever spent can surely provide him with both a speechwriting team and a quiet corner on his private wide-bodied jet to consider what might be fitting for the occasion. So instead he sloughs off the words, bloodless and unfelt: “And obviously our hearts are broken . . . ” Yeah, it’s totally obvious.

 

And he’s even more drunk on his celebrity than the fanbois, so in his slapdashery he winds up comparing the sacrifice of a diplomat lynched by a pack of savages with the enthusiasm of his own campaign bobbysoxers. No, no, says the Broadway director; that’s too crude, too ham-fisted. How about the crowd is cheering and distracted, but he’s the president, he understands the gravity of the hour, and he’s the greatest orator of his generation, so he’s thought about what he’s going to say, and it takes a few moments but his words are so moving that they still the cheers of the fanbois, and at the end there’s complete silence and a few muffled sobs, and even in party-town they understand the sacrifice and loss of their compatriots on the other side of the world.

 

But no, that would be an utterly fantastical America. In the real America, the president is too busy to attend the security briefing on the morning after a national debacle, but he does have time to do Letterman and appear on a hip-hop radio show hosted by “The Pimp with a Limp.” In the real State Department, the U.S. embassy in Cairo is guarded by Marines with no ammunition, but they do enjoy the soft-power muscle of a Foreign Service officer, one Lloyd Schwartz, tweeting frenziedly into cyberspace (including a whole chain directed at my own Twitter handle, for some reason) about how America deplores insensitive people who are so insensitively insensitive that they don’t respectfully respect all religions equally respectfully and sensitively, even as the raging mob is pouring through the gates.

 

When it comes to a flailing, blundering superpower, I am generally wary of ascribing to malevolence what is more often sheer stupidity and incompetence. For example, we’re told that, because the consulate in Benghazi was designated as an “interim facility,” it did not warrant the level of security and protection that, say, an embassy in Scandinavia would have. This seems all too plausible — that security decisions are made not by individual human judgment but according to whichever rule-book sub-clause at the Federal Agency of Bureaucratic Facilities Regulation it happens to fall under. However, the very next day the embassy in Yemen, which is a permanent facility, was also overrun, as was the embassy in Tunisia the day after. Look, these are tough crowds, as the president might say at Caesar’s Palace. But we spend more money on these joints than anybody else, and they’re as easy to overrun as the Belgian consulate.

 

As I say, I’m inclined to be generous, and put some of this down to the natural torpor and ineptitude of government. But Hillary Clinton and General Martin Dempsey are guilty of something worse, in the secretary of state’s weirdly obsessive remarks about an obscure film supposedly disrespectful of Mohammed and the chairman of the joint chiefs’ telephone call to a private citizen asking him if he could please ease up on the old Islamophobia.

 

Forget the free-speech arguments. In this case, as Secretary Clinton and General Dempsey well know, the film has even less to do with anything than did the Danish cartoons or the schoolteacher’s teddy bear or any of the other innumerable grievances of Islam. The 400-strong assault force in Benghazi showed up with RPGs and mortars: That’s not a spontaneous movie protest; that’s an act of war, and better planned and executed than the dying superpower’s response to it. Secretary Clinton and General Dempsey are, to put it mildly, misleading the American people when they suggest otherwise.

 

One can understand why they might do this, given the fiasco in Libya. The men who organized this attack knew the ambassador would be at the consulate in Benghazi rather than at the embassy in Tripoli. How did that happen? They knew when he had been moved from the consulate to a “safe house,” and switched their attentions accordingly. How did that happen? The United States government lost track of its ambassador for ten hours. How did that happen? Perhaps, when they’ve investigated Mitt Romney’s press release for another three or four weeks, the court eunuchs of the American media might like to look into some of these fascinating questions, instead of leaving the only interesting reporting on an American story to the foreign press.

 

For whatever reason, Secretary Clinton chose to double down on misleading the American people. “Libyans carried Chris’s body to the hospital,” said Mrs. Clinton. That’s one way of putting it. The photographs at the Arab TV network al-Mayadeen show Chris Stevens’s body being dragged through the streets, while the locals take souvenir photographs on their cell phones. A man in a red striped shirt photographs the dead-eyed ambassador from above; another immediately behind his head moves the splayed arm and holds his cell-phone camera an inch from the ambassador’s nose. Some years ago, I had occasion to assist in moving the body of a dead man: We did not stop to take photographs en route. Even allowing for cultural differences, this looks less like “carrying Chris’s body to the hospital” and more like barbarians gleefully feasting on the spoils of savagery.

 

In a rare appearance on a non-showbiz outlet, President Obama, winging it on Telemundo, told his host that Egypt was neither an ally nor an enemy. I can understand why it can be difficult to figure out, but here’s an easy way to tell: Bernard Lewis, the great scholar of Islam, said some years ago that America risked being seen as harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend. At the Benghazi consulate, the looters stole “sensitive” papers revealing the names of Libyans who’ve cooperated with the United States. Oh, well. As the president would say, obviously our hearts are with you.

 

Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the local doctor who fingered bin Laden to the Americans sits in jail. In other words, while America’s clod vice president staggers around pimping limply that only Obama had the guts to take the toughest decision anyone’s ever had to take, the poor schlub who actually did have the guts, who actually took the tough decision in a part of the world where taking tough decisions can get you killed, languishes in a cell because Washington would not lift a finger to help him.

 

Like I said, no novelist would contrast Chris Stevens on the streets of Benghazi and Barack Obama on stage in Vegas. Too crude, too telling, too devastating.

How Much Does the U.N. Cost Us?

By Brett D. Schaefer

Friday, September 14, 2012

 

Most everyone knows the United States is the largest contributor to the United Nations and its affiliated funds, programs, and specialized agencies. But nailing down precisely how much we pay into the U.N. system every year is no easy task.

 

Although most U.S. contributions come from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, hundreds of millions of dollars also flow into the U.N. system from other parts of the federal government. For instance, the U.S. Department of Agriculture provides funding to the Food and Agriculture Organization, the Department of Energy gives money to the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the Department of Health and Human Services supports the World Health Organization.

 

Given the complexity of the funding flow, no definitive tally of total U.S. contributions to the U.N. system was available prior to 2006. Until then, estimates relied on incomplete State Department data.

 

That changed when Senator Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) asked former OMB director Rob Portman for a comprehensive report on total U.S. contributions to the U.N. system for fiscal years 2001 through 2005. Because OMB is in charge of overseeing the preparation of the president’s budget, it was in a position to require all parts of the U.S. government to report the requested information.

 

The first report was an eye-opener. The OMB calculated that U.S. contributions totaled $4.115 billion in 2004 and $5.327 billion in 2005. The State Department had estimated 2004 contributions at “well over $3 billion” — only about 75 percent of the actual amount.

 

For the next two years, Congress required the State Department to compile the report. But State implausibly reported that the U.S. had reduced its U.N. contributions in FY 2006 and, again, in FY 2007.

 

In response, Congress tasked OMB to compile the report. According to OMB, FY 2010 marked the third consecutive year in which U.S. contributions reached record highs. In FY 2010, they exceeded $7.691 billion — more than $1.3 billion higher than FY 2009’s record of $6.347 billion.

 

If you’re wondering how much we contributed last year, good luck. Congress neglected to renew the reporting requirement. I’ve spoken to Obama-administration officials, and they say they’ve prepared the data in anticipation of producing the report, but OMB will not issue the report without a Congressional mandate.

 

Congress appears set to address this in the imminent Continuing Resolution on government funding. The Senate report on the Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Bill includes a requirement that the administration “post the United States assessed contributions under this heading to the United Nations and its affiliated agencies . . . in a timely manner, and the first such posting should include funding detail for fiscal years 2011 and 2012.” But there is a problem. The direction is for the secretary of state to prepare the report so, once again, Congress could get incomplete information.

 

Congress should renew this important reporting requirement, but doing so in annual appropriations bills is not enough. Lawmakers should make the OMB reporting requirement permanent.

Let Bush be

By Victor Davis Hanson

Thursday, September 13, 2012

 

The theme of the president's 2012 re-election campaign is that George W. Bush left such a terrible mess that Barack Obama could hardly be expected to clean it up in four years.

 

In other words, 43 months of unemployment rates above 8 percent, $5 trillion in new borrowing, $16 trillion in aggregate debt, gas prices of nearly $4 per gallon, a dive in average family income and involvement in two wars were all due to George Bush and simply too difficult for anyone else to overcome. So Obama cannot be judged on his record between 2009 and 2012.

 

At first glance, this is a most unusual claim. Gerald Ford followed the mess of Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal and the Arab oil embargo. After serving for less than three years, he failed to win re-election. His successor, Jimmy Carter, seemed to make a bad situation even worse. He exited four years later, tagged with a high "misery index" fueled by rampant unemployment and roaring inflation.

 

Ronald Reagan took office under Carter's baleful legacy but ran for re-election successfully in 1984 based not on "Carter did it," but on the recovery he engineered.

 

Bill Clinton was elected on "it's the economy, stupid" in 1992, and he was re-elected four years later after claiming credit for boom times. George W. Bush inherited the aftershocks of the dot.com meltdown, and a country ill-equipped to respond to terrorist assaults after the nonchalance of the 1980s and 1990s. Despite the 9/11 attacks, Bush was re-elected on the themes of a good economy and a safer country.

 

Blaming or praising presidents for their four years of governance is an American tradition. That is why Obama asserted at the outset that if he could not turn around the economy, his presidency would be a "one-term proposition."

 

Like all presidents, Obama inherited both positive and negative legacies. True, there was a war in Iraq, but the surge -- which candidate Obama opposed -- had by mid-2008 mostly won the peace. That is why Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker had already negotiated a timetable for American withdrawal. Obama followed that settlement; he no more ended the war alone than did he start it. For Obama to claim sole credit for ending the war in Iraq would be about as fair as blaming Obama for making things worse in Afghanistan -- given that more than twice as many Americans have died in that war on Obama's watch than were lost during the entire eight years of the Bush administration.

 

Obama did inherit a terrible economy in January 2009, but one not quite still in full free fall from the mid-September 2008 panic -- which abruptly gave Obama a four-point lead over John McCain in the polls after being down four points.

 

By Inauguration Day 2009, the gyrating stock market had bottomed out, and the Dow Jones industrial average had not dipped below 8,000 in four months. The TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program) rescue package had been enacted by Bush in October 2008, stopping runs on the banks and mostly restoring financial stability.

 

Blaming Bush for some of the mess is legitimate in politics, but the housing bubble and collapse -- the catalysts for the September meltdown -- were a bipartisan caper of pushing Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to underwrite risky subprime loans to the unqualified who had no business buying homes at inflated prices. Washington insiders ranging from Clintonite Rahm Emanuel (Obama's former chief of staff) and Franklin Raines (a Clinton administration grandee) to Tom Donilon (the current national security advisor), James Johnson (an Obama campaign bundler) and Jamie Gorelick (deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration) got in on the Freddie/Fannie profit-making despite thin banking resumes. Even with the last four months of crisis, Bush still averaged a 5.3 unemployment rate for his eight years in office.

 

Obama should be congratulated for ordering the successful hit on Osama bin Laden. But the intelligence apparatus and antiterrorism protocols that provided much of the expertise for the mission were well established when Obama entered office -- despite his own prior verbal attacks on Guantanamo Bay, renditions, tribunals, preventative detention and the Patriot Act, all of which he almost immediately embraced without a nod of thanks to his predecessor.

 

Obama, for example, inherited the controversial Predator drone program, an anathema to liberals during the Bush administration. But Obama expanded the drone missions and in four years approved the killings of seven times as many suspected terrorists as Bush had in eight -- to the sudden silence of the antiwar Left.

 

It is past time for President Obama to forget Bush, and, like all of his predecessors, make the argument that things are better than when he entered office almost four years ago, and that he deserves the credit for the turnaround.

 

Voters will weigh that claim. And history will judge George W. Bush on his two terms -- as it will judge Barack Obama's own four (or eight) years in office.

Forward to What, Democrats?

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

 

"Forward" is a perfectly appropriate slogan for progressives.

 

Progress suggests forward or upward motion. That's why revolutionaries and radicals as well as liberal incrementalists have always embraced some derivation of the forward trope. So ingrained are these directional concepts in our political language, we often forget they are mere geographic metaphors applied -- and often misapplied -- to policy disputes.

 

For instance, some on the left might see enrolling more people on food stamps as a step in the right direction, moving us "forward" to a more generous and all-encompassing welfare state. But other self-described progressives might see a swelling of the food stamp rolls to be a step backward, either in strict accounting terms (we are, after all, broke) or even in cultural terms. Some Democrats have even been known to brag when they've gotten people off the food stamp rolls.

 

In other words, even for progressives, what counts as moving forward depends entirely on where you want to go -- and where you think you've been.

 

And that's where the Democratic Party, and liberalism itself, tends to get horribly confused. According to President Obama and the whole team of Democratic all-stars, we've been moving forward to a better place these last four years.

 

Joe Biden shouted from the podium, "America is coming back, and we're not going back!"

 

"Back to what?" you might ask. The answers to that question are usually no less vague for being passionately stated. Perhaps the ugliest answer, an insinuation really, came from Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a hero of the civil rights movement. He seemed to suggest that a vote for Mitt Romney was a vote to return to the Jim Crow era and the beatings Lewis endured to overturn it.

 

A more common answer came from Obama. "After all that we've been through, I don't believe that rolling back regulations on Wall Street will help the small businesswoman expand or the laid-off construction worker keep his home," he explained to a enraptured crowd. "We have been there, we've tried that, and we're not going back."

 

This is an appeal to the mythology of the Bush years as some kind of anarcho-capitalist dystopia in which "market fundamentalism" reigned and Republicans tried to shrink government to the point where "we can drown it in the bathtub" (to quote anti-tax activist Grover Norquist).

 

This was always a bizarre liberal hallucination. Government grew massively under President Bush. He was a bigger spender than any previous president going back to Lyndon Johnson. He massively expanded entitlements, grew food stamp enrollment (almost as much as Obama) and nearly doubled "investments" in education. He created a new Cabinet agency -- Homeland Security -- and signed into law sweeping new regulations, like No Child Left Behind, Sarbanes-Oxley and McCain-Feingold.

 

This, according to Democrats, amounts to telling Americans "you're on your own."

 

But even now, the Bush-Cheney years are being rehabilitated by comparison to the dark fantasies of what a Romney-Ryan administration might deliver.

 

The idea that Romney is a cut-government-to-the-bone minarchist is based on a mix of unsubstantiated assertion, wild fantasy and guilt by association; you see, even if there's no evidence that Romney's a libertarian, he's been captured by the heartless Tea Party types. Why, just look: He picked Paul Ryan, patron saint of the barbarian hordes, as his running mate.

 

It is a sign of what an unmitigated mess we are in as a country when Ryan is considered a heartless right-winger who wants to set old people adrift.

 

The famously heartless Ryan plan (moot now that he's hitched his wagon to Romney's) that supposedly slashes the budget doesn't reach a projected balance until the year 2040 and increases spending over the next decade.

 

Ironically, it was Bill Clinton who mocked Republicans last week for conjuring an "alternative universe" where Americans are self-reliant individualists. The real truth is that Democrats rely on fantasy worlds -- including a past that never was -- in order to make walking in circles seem like progress.