A Year of Liberal Double Standards

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Many conservatives finished the year angry about the same thing they were angry about at the beginning of the year: liberal double standards.

As I write this, GOP House whip Steve Scalise is in hot water over reports that he spoke to a group of racist poltroons in Louisiana twelve years ago. Whether it was an honest mistake, as Scalise plausibly claims, or a sign of something more nefarious, as his detractors hope, remains to be seen.

But one common response on social media is instructive. Countless conservatives want to know: Why the double standard? Barack Obama was friends with a domestic terrorist, Bill Ayers. His spiritual mentor was a vitriolic racist, Jeremiah Wright. One of his administration’s closest advisers and allies is Al Sharpton, a man who has inspired enough racial violence to make a grand dragon’s white sheets turn green with envy.

Meanwhile, the Democratic party venerated the late senator Robert Byrd, a former Klansmen himself. He was one of 19 senators (all Democrats) to sign the Southern Manifesto opposing integration. One of his co-signers was William Fulbright, Bill Clinton’s mentor.

When Republicans are in power, “dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” When Democrats are in power, dissent is the racist fuming of “angry white men.”

Peaceful, law-abiding tea-party groups who cleaned up after their protests — and got legal permits for them — were signs of nascent fascism lurking in the American soul. Violent, anarchic, and illegal protests by Occupy Wall Street a few years ago or, more recently, in Ferguson, Mo., were proof that a new idealistic generation was renewing its commitment to idealism.

When rich conservatives give money to Republicans, it is a sign that the whole system has been corrupted by fat cats. When it is revealed that liberal billionaires and left-wing super PACs outspent conservative groups in 2014: crickets.

When Republicans invoke God or religious faith as an inspiration for their political views, it’s threatening and creepy. When Democrats do it, it’s a sign they believe in social justice.

One can do this all day long. But while examples are easy, explanations are hard.

I don’t know who first said, “Behind every apparent double standard lies an unconfessed single standard” (and as far as I can tell, neither does the Internet), but whoever did was onto something.

What looks like inexplicably staggering hypocrisy from the conservative perspective is actually remarkably consistent from the liberal perspective.

Well, “perspective” is probably the wrong word because it implies a conscious, deliberate, philosophical point of view. What is really at work is better understood as bias, even bigotry.

If you work from the dogmatic assumption that liberalism is morally infallible and that liberals are, by definition, pitted against sinister and — more importantly — powerful forces, then it’s easy to explain away what seem like double standards. Any lapse, error, or transgression by conservatives is evidence of their real nature, while similar lapses, errors, and transgressions by liberals are trivial when balanced against the fact that their hearts are in the right place.

Despite controlling the commanding heights of the culture — journalism, Hollywood, the arts, academia, and vast swaths of the corporate America they denounce — liberals have convinced themselves they are pitted against deeply entrenched powerful forces and that being a liberal is somehow brave. Obama, the twice-elected president of the United States, to this day speaks as if he’s some kind of underdog.

Frank Rich, the former New York Times columnist and theater critic, recently interviewed Chris Rock for New York magazine. He wanted to know why right-leaning comedian Dennis Miller isn’t as funny (at least according to Rich) as Jon Stewart of The Daily Show. He asked Rock, “Do you think that identifying with those in power is an impediment to laughter?”

It was a hilarious and revealing moment. Stewart — who recently had to turn down a pleading request from NBC to take over Meet the Press — has long identified with liberals in power. Moreover, he’s easily one of America’s most powerful liberals, routinely creating and enforcing liberal conventional wisdom (much as Rich had done from his perch at the Times). Miller, meanwhile, has nowhere near the same cultural clout precisely because he doesn’t affirm the single standard at the heart of liberalism: “We’re the good guys.”

A Year of Anniversaries

By Thomas Sowell

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

The past year marked a number of important anniversaries. It was the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War — a war which many at the time saw as madness, and predicted that it would be the harbinger of a Second World War a generation later.

2014 was also the 70th anniversary of the fateful landing at Normandy that marked the beginning of the end of World War II.

2014 was likewise the 60th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that marked the beginning of the end of racial segregation, the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and of the beginning of President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty” programs.

Anniversaries are opportunities to look back at historic turning points, compare the rhetoric of the time with the reality that we now know unfolded — and to learn hard lessons about the difference between rhetoric and reality for our own time.

A hundred years ago, the President of the United States was Woodrow Wilson — the first president to openly claim that the Constitution of the United States was outdated, and that courts should erode the limits that the Constitution placed on the federal government.

Today, after a hundred years of courts’ eroding the Constitution’s protections of personal freedom, we now have a president who has taken us dangerously close to one-man rule, unilaterally changing laws passed by Congress and refusing to enforce other laws — on immigration especially.

Like Woodrow Wilson, our current president is charismatic, vain, narrow, and headstrong. Someone said of Woodrow Wilson that he had no friends, only devoted slaves and enemies. That description comes all too close to describing Barack Obama, with his devoted political palace guard in the White House that he listens to, in contrast to the generals he ignores on military issues and the doctors he ignores on medical issues.

Both Wilson and Obama have been great phrase makers and crowd pleasers. We are still trying to cope with the havoc left in the wake of Woodrow Wilson’s ringing phrase about “the self-determination of peoples.”

First of all, it was never “self-determination.” It was the arbitrary determination of the fate of millions of people in nations carved out of empires dismembered by the victors after the First World War. Neither the Irish in Britain nor the Germans in Bohemia were allowed to determine who would rule them. Nor was anybody in Africa.

The consequence of fragmenting large nations was the creation of small and vulnerable nations that Hitler was able to pick off, one by one, during the 1930s.

Minorities who protested that they were being oppressed under the Austro-Hungarian Empire got their own nations, where their own oppression of other minorities was often worse than they had experienced in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

We are still trying to sort out the chaos in the Middle East growing out of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. How long it will take to sort out the havoc left behind by Barack Obama’s foreign policies only the future will tell.

It should be noted that, after the charismatic Woodrow Wilson, none of the next three presidents was the least bit charismatic. Let us hope that the voters today have also learned how dangerous charisma and glib rhetoric can be — and what a childish self-indulgence it is to choose a president on the basis of symbolism. Woodrow Wilson was the first Southerner to be elected president since the Civil War, as Obama was to become the first black president. But neither fact qualified them to wield the enormous powers of the presidency. Nor will being the first woman president, the first Hispanic president, or other such firsts.

Since 2014 has been the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty,” we should note that this was another war that the Johnson administration lost. Both President Johnson and President John F. Kennedy before him said that the purpose of the “war on poverty” was to help people become self-supporting, to end dependency on government programs. But 50 years and trillions of dollars later, there is more dependency than ever.

Let’s hope we have learned something from past debacles.

The Wisdom of Peace through Strength

By Ben Carson

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

It was extremely encouraging to see the United States and Sony eventually stand up to the cyberbullying of the North Koreans by allowing the movie The Interview to be released despite threats of retaliation.

Freedom of speech and freedom of expression are hallmarks of American life, and we must jealously guard these values from both internal and external threats. In fact, all of the freedoms guaranteed to American citizens by our Constitution must be steadfastly preserved, or they will be eroded. Vigilance and courage are necessary every day if we are to remain a free society.

I am proud of the president of the United States for taking a tough stand on this issue, although I am not sure that his promise of proportional retaliation is the correct answer. The response should go far beyond proportionality, and an example should be made of the perpetrators by using a host of available options to inflict punishment not easily forgotten. If we use proportionality as our standard, future adversaries need consider only certain consequences for encroaching on our rights. If, on the other hand, they realize that they will suffer enormous consequences, I believe their adventurism would be tempered.

I do not advocate becoming a bully on the global stage, but I do believe that strength is a quality that is respected by all cultures, regardless of their ideological bent. I remember how much trouble students in my high school in Detroit caused the weak teachers who had no idea of how to control them. There was one teacher, 5 feet tall, who tolerated no foolishness, and even the burly football players feared her. You could hear a pin drop in her room, though the same students produced total chaos in other classrooms. She was extremely nice to me and the other cooperative students and would go out of her way to ensure that we received a good education. I think the lesson here is obvious.

There was a time when American citizens were relatively safe, no matter where they traveled in the world. Everyone knew that there would be significant consequences for harming Americans. Today, not only is the fear gone, but there is little respect for our leaders because our nation appears to be a paper tiger. This is a situation that can be quickly rectified with courageous and principled leadership. Many will remember the Iran hostage crisis in the late 1970s and early 1980s. During that time, we had a president who was neither feared nor respected. On the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president, the hostages were released.

It is imperative that, as a nation, we say what we mean and we mean what we say. This contributes to the safety and stability of the world and, in the long run, will cost us less money and fewer lost lives. Our friends around the world should have no better ally, and our enemies should have no fiercer foe. We certainly do not need to make everyone conform to our values, but we must protect and defend those values, including freedom of expression. We should never yield to evil nor should we ignore it; we do so at our own peril.

McDonald’s Is Microsoft

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, December 30, 2014

For people who dislike and misunderstand capitalism (or free markets, or laissez-faire, or economic liberalism, or whatever you want to call it), the governing principle of market competition is the “Walmart effect.” According to this model of how the economy works — a model with very little basis in reality, but never mind that — big companies such as Walmart muscle into a market or a territory, use advantages of scale and predatory pricing (“predatory” here meaning “saving consumers money at the expense of relatively well-off business owners”) to drive out so-called mom-and-pop operations, lower workers’ wages, and then make like Scrooge McDuck doing his Greg Louganis impersonation into a mile-high stack of hundred-dollar bills. Big businesses vs. small businesses, employers vs. employees, factory owners vs. consumers: Every relationship in the marketplace is in this view distorted by power imbalances that almost always work in favor of entrenched business interests that use their relative power to further heighten the advantages they enjoy.

The opposite of the “Walmart effect” understanding of how the economy operates, a view more prevalent among people who like or simply understand capitalism, is the “Bill Gates’s nightmare effect.” Back in 1998, when Microsoft was at the height of its power — it had just become the world’s most valuable company — and Gates was at the height of his prestige, he told Charlie Rose that what worried him wasn’t competition from IBM or Apple or Netscape: “I worry about someone in a garage inventing something that I haven’t thought of.” That was in March of 1998; in September, two guys in a garage in Menlo Park incorporated Google. Gates was correct and incorrect at the same time: Microsoft was surprised by Google and also lost ground to Apple, a company that many technology watchers at the end of the 1990s believed was at the end of its days. Microsoft had market power far in excess of what Walmart enjoys, but it got its flabby corporate butt kicked by a couple of kids.

The archetypal big, monolithic, faceless corporation is McDonald’s, though anybody who thinks about it for two seconds understands that McDonald’s is the case study of which competitive markets are good for consumers. McDonald’s has very little power in the marketplace: It would dearly love to raise its prices or to lower its labor costs (a less straightforward proposition than you might think), but it has a hard time doing either. I experienced firsthand just how utterly beholden McDonald’s is to consumer preference some years ago when I covered the opening of its first restaurant in New Delhi in the 1990s: Despite operating a 100 percent beef-free restaurant (beef politics in India are a complicated matter of religious, regional, and communal rivalry) the local McDonald’s offered burgers that were indistinguishable from the conventional American model. The restaurant also operated a second, entirely vegetarian kitchen out of deference to local sensibilities. Where there is competition, the consumer is king.

Not that the consumer’s preferences always make sense. There are very few things in this life for which I am willing to stand in line for more than two minutes, and a hamburger is not one of them. And, at the risk of casting myself in the role of Tupac Shakur in that other bitter East–West rivalry, I cannot imagine standing in line even for 120 seconds for a hamburger from Shake Shack, a perfectly acceptable New York City sandwich that is nonetheless inferior in every way to its unpretentious West Coast rival, In-N-Out. But my tastes do not prevail: Walk around Manhattan and you’ll see inexplicable lines of people at Madison Square Park and Battery Park City eager to pay too much for an unremarkable hamburger. In 2000, Shake Shack was a food cart. Ten years ago, it was one kiosk in a park. In 2015, it’s going to have an initial public stock offering.

Bear in mind that Shake Shack has gone from cart to corporation over a period of time during which the iconic hamburger juggernaut, McDonald’s, has found it increasingly difficult to maintain sales and profits. McDonald’s scope and reach has been as much a hindrance to its success as an advantage: The company knows that it has problems with quality and customer service, but the enterprise is so large and so complex that corporate managers have no way of even really knowing what is going on at any particular location; imagine the variables that go into a corporate turnaround involving 35,000 restaurants in 119 countries. But, as with Microsoft and Google, it isn’t Burger King (my sentimental favorite) or Wendy’s that is outclassing McDonald’s, but a formerly obscure New York City food cart, i.e. a business no doubt operated, at least in part, out of a garage.

The aggregate effect of competitive capitalism is indistinguishable from magic, but we are so used to its bounty that we never stop to notice that no king of old ever enjoyed quarters so comfortable as those found in a Holiday Inn Express, that Andrew Carnegie never had a car as good as a Honda Civic, that Akhenaten never enjoyed such wealth as is found in a Walmart Supercenter. The irony is that capitalism has achieved through choice and cooperation what the old reds thought they were going to do with bayonets and gulags: It has recruited the most powerful and significant parts of the world’s capital structure into the service of ordinary people. And it would do so to an even greater degree if self-interested politicians in places such as India and China (and New York and California and D.C.) would get out of the way.

The difference between market and state — between the world of choice and the world of command — is that whether you’re an In-N-Out aficionado or a Shake Shack man, nobody is going to put a gun to your head and tell you that you can’t have it your way. To paraphrase that great national embarrassment: If you like your burger, you can keep your burger.

Hollywood’s Munich Moments

By Victor Davis Hanson

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

North Korea supposedly hacked Sony and exposed hundreds of embarrassing behind-the-scenes e-mails, humiliating the company into giving in to blackmail by delaying for a time the release of its new film Interview. Perhaps the murderous North Korean thugocracy thought that, by revealing the innermost illiberal thoughts of the global corporate elite, it might win adulation commensurate with that accorded the liberal crusader Julian Assange — the heartthrob hacker who exposed U.S. government secrets and the private musings of the ruling American hierarchy.

Kim Jong-un’s hackers were supposedly displeased by the Sony Corporation’s unkind depiction of North Korea’s nightmarish dystopia. For a while at least, Hollywood backed down and acceded to the new reality that a foreign country can dictate the scope of artistic expression to U.S. residents.

Now another nuclear power, Pakistan, is angry at Hollywood. According to Pakistani diplomats, Showtime’s series Homeland failed to note the supposedly liberal, humanitarian, and compassionate nature of the Pakistani government. American filmmakers were faulted for making no effort to highlight the lush greenery and general upbeat atmosphere of underappreciated, tony Islamabad.

Unlike crazy North Korea, Pakistan is not necessarily just blowing smoke. For years, elements of the Pakistani intelligence services have worked hand-in-glove with al-Qaeda–affiliated terrorists to thwart American efforts to build consensual government in neighboring Afghanistan. It was no accident that Osama bin Laden lived with impunity for years right under the noses of Pakistani authorities.

Not to be left out, Egypt’s junta is likewise furious at another new Hollywood film, Exodus. In fact, the junta just banned Exodus from Egypt. Apparently, the censors believe that the movie is an effort by Jewish movie moguls to unduly glorify the ancient Jews and deprecate the pharaohs — as part of a Zionist plot to champion Israel at the expense of its Islamic neighbors. Not long ago, Egypt and other Arab countries banned Noah, on the grounds that its portrayal of Noah, whom Islam considers a prophet, was blasphemous.

The filmmakers seem somewhat baffled by all the pushback. They should be. It is understandable why they would feel that their consistently anti-American, multicultural fides could never be questioned.

Of course, Western filmmakers know that the stuff of dictatorships is censorship and cheap bullying of free expression. But such recognition wars with the elemental anti-American DNA deeply embedded within Hollywood, which leads it to champion the so-called Third World while trashing the United States.

Do not the North Koreans, the Pakistanis, and the Egyptians remember the slew of recent Hollywood movies — Body of Lies, In the Valley of Elah, Redacted, Syriana — in which American soldiers, the CIA, and conservative presidents murdered noble innocents around the globe? Have the North Koreans, Pakistanis, and Egyptians forgotten Michael Moore, whose fantasy documentaries savaged U.S. culture and delighted our enemies? Do they not appreciate that the usual villains of Hollywood action dramas are sunburned white bigots with Southern accents, or neo-Nazi foreigners with German-sounding patois and South African connections? As far as Jewish conspiracies go, did not the Egyptians watch Munich, in which the Palestinian assassins of innocent Israeli athletes were portrayed as the moral equivalent of the Mossad teams that hunted them down?

In regard to portraying the death of foreign leaders, Kim Jong-un should relax and watch the British-made film The Death of a President, released in 2006, which was fueled by the Bush Derangement Syndrome that was sweeping the international progressive community at the time. BDS was manifested by novels imagining the killing of Bush, and various op-eds like the 2003 New Republic rant “Why I Hate George W. Bush” or the 2004 Guardian op-ed expressing disappointment that assassins like John Wilkes Booth were not around when they were needed.

The Death of a President was called a “future historical docudrama,” which I think translates into something like, “In a fair world, this might just happen at some time in the not too distant future.” The North Koreans should have relished the soap-opera plot. Bush is gunned down in Chicago in payback’s-a-bitch fashion. A diabolical Dick Cheney takes over and foists his fascistic agenda on the U.S., including ideas about bombing Syria and renewing the Patriot Act. The usual scheming government rigs evidence (of course) to scapegoat a poor innocent Arab (of course), while the real killer is an unhinged white male (of course) Persian Gulf veteran (of course), finally gone off the deep end because of the death of his son — a pawn (of course) sacrificed in Bush’s redux war of 2003. In an example of reality imitating film, Janet Napolitano three years later issued a Homeland Security warning that the country was threatened by “right-wing extremists,” and that “Returning veterans possess combat skills and experience that are attractive” to these extremists.

In case the audience did not follow the first-grade-level moralizing of The Death of a President, the film ends with a grim printed reminder of the renewal of the nefarious Patriot Act. The film was awful — amateurish, cheap, macabre, and a pathetic propaganda effort — and even the usually anti-American global public appeared to agree: Although it opened in nearly 150 U.S. theaters, The Death of a President failed to earn a mere $1 million.

No matter. Here at home, liberal critics mostly loved the message. Roger Ebert was ecstatic: “The Death of a President is electrifying drama, and compellingly realistic.” I suppose the image of Bush’s head exploding when the bullets struck it was at least compelling in its realism. The film was shown at the Toronto Film Festival of 2006 and won the International Critics’ Prize, among other awards. Surely The Death of a President should have won the Western film industry some future good-deed exemption from the ungracious North Koreans. I doubt that director Gabriel Range will do a sequel, substituting Barack Obama for George Bush, or that he will amplify his previous anger at Bush with current outrage over the Obama administration’s embrace of the Patriot Act, renditions, and military tribunals; its bombing in Libya, Iraq, and Syria; and a tenfold increase in the Predator death program.

Did North Korea’s rulers ever watch a segment of Game of Thrones, in which the head of George W. Bush is served up on a platter and impaled on a stake, the filmmakers’ crude way of showcasing their anti-American fides?

As for the ingrates Pakistan and Egypt, never before has a Western industry been so kind to Middle Eastern authoritarian regimes and so critical of Western democracy. When the jihadists put hits out on Western cartoonists for supposedly poking fun at the Prophet, did many Hollywood actors and directors stand up for the concept of free artistic expression? Apparently, Hollywood was not too much bothered that an edgy provocateur Dutch filmmaker was murdered for portraying Islam negatively. One wonders which are better grounds for collective artistic outrage — humiliating liberal Hollywood corporate grandees as racists and sexists for imagining the death of a North Korean psychopath, or slicing up an independent filmmaker for negative commentary about Islamic-inspired terrorism?

The constants in these recent embarrassments of Hollywood are abject hypocrisy and childish surprise that its obsessive anti-American themes never quite satisfy anti-American dictatorships. In truth, the Western film industry has become predictable and trite in its cardboard-cutout saints and villains, and in its cowardly and selective responses to criticism. I could empathize with George Clooney in his unsuccessful efforts to rally actors around the idea of universal artistic expression free of dictatorial threats, if he had shown the same zeal to come to the aid of the unsavory Nakoula Nakoula, who was accused by the Left of precipitating the Benghazi attack. Nakoula lacked Sony’s PR apparatus, although he showed far more audacity in his crude online video than did Sony in its glossy movie. Nakoula’s childish Innocence of Islam was no more or less slanted than Hollywood’s usual fare. The only difference was cash. Had Nakoula had a Hollywood budget he might have upped the production quality of his crude propaganda.

Do we remember the way the Obama administration, in the runup to the 2012 election, reacted to the threats on Nakoula’s life? Or the serial occasions when Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama falsely blamed the easy target Nakoula for their own laxity that led to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi? Or how a federal judge conveniently jailed Nakoula on a trumped-up probation violation?

Maybe a hurt and scared Hollywood should be worried about the juxtaposition of Barack Obama’s damnation of filmmaker Nakoula with his recent opportunistic lecture to Sony that “We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States, because if somebody is able to intimidate us out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they start doing once they see a documentary that they don’t like or news reports that they don’t like.”

Yes, let us imagine for a moment. In that 2012 election cycle, Barack Obama did exactly what North Korea is now trying to do: silence and punish a videomaker for a stupid movie that he found politically inconvenient. If Obama can criticize Sony for its cave-in over its slick, high-priced Interview — “That’s not who we are. That’s not what America is about.” — then Hollywood could at least have reminded Obama about his untrue and opportunistic charges against Nakoula’s YouTube Innocence of Islam. And added a rejoinder that “Yes, that’s exactly what America is now about.”

Free speech is won not just by championing a global corporation’s high-budget hit piece on an isolated and universally hated thug, but more importantly by protecting the right of an unpleasant cheapster to caricature radical Islamists, who, unlike North Korea’s blustering dictator, have a proven record the world over of executing those with whom they disagree.

A final lesson from this sad chapter: Trashing the United States does not satiate foreign despots, but only increases their appetite for their own versions of unwavering and predictable political correctness.