The Gelded Age

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

The inequality police are worried that we are living in a new Gilded Age. We should be so lucky: Between 1880 and 1890, the number of employed Americans increased by more than 13 percent, and wages increased by almost 50 percent. I am going to go out on a limb and predict that the Barack Obama years will not match that record; the number of employed Americans is lower today than it was when he took office, and household income is down. Grover Cleveland is looking like a genius in comparison.

The inequality-based critique of the American economy is a fundamentally dishonest one, for a half a dozen or so reasons at least. Claims that the (wicked, wicked) “1 percent” saw their incomes go up by such and such an amount over the past decade or two ignore the fact that different people compose the 1 percent every year, and that 75 percent of the super-rich households in 1995 were in a lower income group by 2005. “The 3 million highest-paying jobs in America paid a lot more in 2005 than did the 3 million highest-paying jobs in 1995” is a very different and considerably less dramatic claim than “The top 1 percent of earners in 1995 saw their household incomes go up radically by 2005.” But the former claim is true and the latter is not.

Paul Krugman, who persists in Dickensian poverty, barely making ends meet between six-figure sinecures, is a particularly energetic scourge of the rich, and he is worried about conspicuous consumption: “For many of the rich, flaunting is what it’s all about. Living in a 30,000 square foot house isn’t much nicer than living in a 5,000 square foot house; there are, I believe, people who can really appreciate a $350 bottle of wine, but most of the people buying such things wouldn’t notice if you substituted a $20 bottle, or maybe even a Trader Joe’s special.” In an earlier piece on the same theme, he urged higher taxes as a way to help the rich toward virtue: “While chiding the rich for their vulgarity may not be as offensive as lecturing the poor on their moral failings, it’s just as futile. Human nature being what it is, it’s silly to expect humility from a highly privileged elite. So if you think our society needs more humility, you should support policies that would reduce the elite’s privileges.” That is, seize their money before they order the 1982 Margaux.

I live in the same city as Donald Trump, so the existence of rich people with toxic taste is not exactly a Muppet News Flash for me. But poor people are not poor because rich people are rich, nor vice versa. Very poor people are generally poor because they do not have jobs, and taking away Thurston Howell III’s second yacht is not going to secure work for them.  Nobody has ever been able to satisfactorily answer the question for me: How would making Donald Trump less rich make anybody else better off?

There is, obviously, one direct answer to that question, which is that making Trump less rich by seizing his property and giving it to somebody else would make the recipients better off, and that is true. But the Left does not generally make that straightforward argument for seizing property. Rather, they treat “inequality” as though it were an active roaming malice on the economic landscape, and argue that incomes are stagnant at the lower end of the range because too great a “share of national income” — and there’s a whole Burkina Faso’s worth of illiteracy in that phrase — went to earners at the top. It simply is not the case that if Lloyd Blankfein makes a hundred grand less next year, then there’s $100,000 sitting on shelf somewhere waiting to become part of some unemployed guy in Toledo’s “share of the national income.” Income isn’t a bag of jellybeans that gets passed around.

Further, if your assumption here is that this is about redistribution, then you should want the billionaires’ incomes to go up, not down: The more money they make, they more taxes they pay, and the more money you have to give to the people you want to give money to, e.g., overpaid, lazy, porn-addicted bureaucrats. Maybe you think that the tax rates on the rich are too low, especially given that the very rich tend to have income taxed at the capital-gains rate rather than at the much higher income-tax rate. Strange that when Democrats had uncontested power in Washington — White House, House, and Senate — they did not even make a halfway serious effort to change that. It’s almost as if Chuck Schumer has a bunch of Wall Street guys among his constituents. The tepidness of our national economic-policy leadership suggests very strongly that we are living in a Gelded Age, not a gilded one. We do need radical economic reform, not of the sort that Elizabeth Warren desires but of the kind that will allow the modestly off to thrive through mechanisms other than the largesse of politicians looting others on their behalf.

You can make the straightforward case for property seizure, though Democrats generally are not all that comfortable doing so around election time, or you can ritually chant the 1,001 names of the ancient demon Inequality. Or you can make it a matter of public morals and good taste: David Brooks received jeers for writing that the rich should adhere to a “code of seemliness,” but there’s something to be said for a less ducal executive style. How far you want to take that, though, is a matter of very wide discretion. Old millionaire Main Line families used to look sideways at anybody who drove anything flashier than a Buick — Lincolns and Cadillacs were not for Protestants, and BMWs weren’t even on the mental map. Michelle Obama wears a lot of Comme des Garçons for a class warrior, and the makers of the world’s most expensive cigars say Bill Clinton is a fan. We can do this all day.

What Paul Krugman et al. should do rather than fret about the rich and their conspicuous consumption is take the advice of a superior economist, the one who suggested that we should “focus on the stagnation of real wages and the disappearance of jobs offering middle-class incomes, as well as the constant insecurity that comes with not having reliable jobs or assets.” That’s not advice for a rich-are-too-rich problem, it’s advice for a poor-are-too-poor problem. And those are not the same problem.

That those words were Professor Krugman’s own makes it all the more puzzling that he fails to follow where they lead. The late 19th century saw substantial improvements in the standard of living for average working people in the United States. The early 21st century, not so much. This Gilded Age has a lot of catching up to do before it is anything near as successful as the last one.

Iraq Was Then, Syria Is Now

By Victor Davis Hanson

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

The Iraq War lies now mostly in the realm of myth. We have forgotten exactly how we got both into and out of the war.

The October 2002 joint congressional authorization to go to war was not just about fears of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Other worries prompted broad bipartisan support for the resolution. A majority of Democratic senators (as evidenced by their passionate speeches from the Senate floor) cited many of the resolution’s 23 writs. The latter were mostly concerned with things other than WMD: harboring terrorists, offering bounties for suicide bombers, giving refuge to at least one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing suspects, committing genocide, attempting to kill a former U.S. president, and so on. Hillary Clinton should watch her own 2002 speech from the Senate floor.

George W. Bush was the third consecutive U.S. president to have bombed Iraq. By 2001, the first Iraq war was seen as incomplete, in that a genocidal Saddam Hussein was not only still in power, but also had broken most of the accords signed after his 1991 defeat. The no-fly zones were eroding. That is why Bill Clinton bombed Iraq in 1998 and supposedly blew up lots of things and killed lots of Iraqis (Operation Desert Fox). Earlier that year he had signed the Iraq Liberation Act, which had passed unanimously in the Senate and overwhelmingly in the House. And still earlier he had famously summed up his administration’s fears:

    Iraq admitted, among other things, an offensive biological warfare capability, notably, 5,000 gallons of botulin, which causes botulism; 2,000 gallons of anthrax; 25 biological-filled Scud warheads; and 157 aerial bombs. And I might say UNSCOM inspectors believe that Iraq has actually greatly understated its production.

    Over the past few months, as [the weapons inspectors] have come closer and closer to rooting out Iraq’s remaining nuclear capacity, Saddam has undertaken yet another gambit to thwart their ambitions by imposing debilitating conditions on the inspectors and declaring key sites which have still not been inspected off limits. . . .

    It is obvious that there is an attempt here, based on the whole history of this operation since 1991, to protect whatever remains of his capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, the missiles to deliver them, and the feed stocks necessary to produce them. The UNSCOM inspectors believe that Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions, a small force of Scud-type missiles, and the capacity to restart quickly its production program and build many, many more weapons. . . .

    Now, let’s imagine the future. What if he fails to comply and we fail to act, or we take some ambiguous third route, which gives him yet more opportunities to develop this program of weapons of mass destruction and continue to press for the release of the sanctions and continue to ignore the solemn commitments that he made? Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you he’ll use the arsenal. . . .

The Iraq Liberation Act, and the bipartisan support for it, later set the stage in a post-9/11 climate to authorize the use of force for regime change and to establish a democratic alternative.

Note here: Bush went to war with the full support of the American people (polls showed majorities of over 60 percent in favor), with bipartisan authorization by Congress, after a lengthy but unsuccessful attempt to gain U.N. approval, and following the earlier prompts of Bill Clinton’s warnings about WMD, which were confirmed by then-current intelligence assessments available to Congress and unquestioned at that time by any in Congress who perused them.

The anger that developed in the U.S. over the Iraq War did not originate from the stated aim of removing the monstrous Saddam Hussein or even the subsequent absence of large stocks of deployable WMD within Iraq. Saddam, remember, had killed perhaps a thousand times more Iraqis, Kurds, and Iranians with WMD than has Bashar Assad (and apparent stocks of WMD mysteriously have a bad habit of still showing up in Syria and Iraq). Instead, the war became unpopular largely for two reasons.

By late summer 2003, insurgents and terrorists had begun killing Americans in large numbers. After the American public had been prepped by an easy victory and relatively light casualties in the initial invasion, and the apparent end of the war with the successful dethronement of Saddam Hussein, the unexpected violence came as a shock. Had the U.S. military lost 4,000 dead in removing Saddam — as some retired generals had warned before the war started — and imposed immediately a quiet peace, the public would not have turned against the war. It was the depressing notion that such a brilliant campaign was followed by a costly occupation that prompted grassroots anger.

Second, the Bush administration had ignored many of the emphases of the original congressional writs and instead hyped the fears of WMD. When the latter were not found in large deployable stocks, and the war had come to seem too costly, a number of the original supporters of the war — like Senators Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Harry Reid, and Jay Rockefeller — flipped and condemned not just the conduct of the war, but the circumstances under which they themselves had advocated it. No one in the media asked any of these new critics whether the Kurds had never been gassed, or Saddam had not harbored global terrorists, or the Marsh Arabs had not been destroyed, or Saddam had not tried to kill former President George H. W. Bush.

The media — and not just the mainstream media — likewise turned on the effort. Once-vigorous supporters across the political spectrum, such as William F. Buckley Jr., Thomas Friedman, Francis Fukuyama, George Will, and Fareed Zakaria, now damned the war as either ill-thought-out or incompetently run to the point that its aims were not worth the costs of the means to achieve them. If the failure to bring democratic reform to the Middle East had once been the liberal critique of George H. W. Bush’s short-sighted peace deal with Saddam Hussein, advocacy of constitutional government now became the brand of supposedly suspect neo-con pro-Israel operatives.

The incompetent occupation from 2003 to 2006, coupled with the U.S. elections of 2004 and 2006, sparked an anti-war movement in which the likes of Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, the Democratic Left, and the New York Times — mostly now silent amid Obama’s current bombing — made claims that Bush alone had started a preemptive unilateral war for the sake of oil. That he was following prior Clinton leads, had congressional authority on the basis of more than 20 writs, believed that Saddam was a supporter of global terrorists, and was already ensuring that Iraqi oil would go to market under transparent circumstances and mostly to China, Russia, and Europe — all these were conveniently ignored.

After a disastrous midterm election, and without much support among his Republican base, Bush in late 2006 gambled with the surge, and appointed General David Petraeus to pacify Iraq and win the peace. Two years later the surge was recognized even by its critics (with the exception of Barack Obama) ​as a success. Obama entered office with a relatively calm Iraq and with the monthly accident rate among the U.S military higher than the numbers of troops injured or killed by enemy action in Iraq.

In other words, as in the bungled and far deadlier Korean War, a peace was finally won, and an occupation was outlined that could ensure Iraq a pathway to stability. Whether that result was worth the horrific cost in terms of the dead, the wounded, and lost treasure can be debated. But what cannot be questioned is that Iraq in 2009–11 was far more stable than many other Arab countries, such as Libya, Egypt, or Syria. It had escaped most of the violence of the Arab Spring, and thus was hailed by Barack Obama and Joe Biden variously as stable, secure, and potentially the Obama administration’s greatest achievement.

What happened subsequent to 2008 is also a matter of record. Obama had run for president on the promise of getting all troops out of Iraq and on the premise that the surge had failed. He pulled the last U.S. peacekeepers out in 2011, and yet bragged in the 2012 campaign about the stable government that he had left behind — something that would be analogous to having yanked all peacekeepers out of South Korea in 1955, or Japan in 1950, or the Balkans in 2002, and then assuming these war-torn countries would have followed their actual mostly successful trajectories.

Once we left Iraq in 2011 — having announced that we were going to do so as early as 2009 — the once defeated and dispersed radical Islamic terrorists regrouped under the banner of the Islamic State. The Maliki government, no longer fearing U.S. oversight, hounded its Sunni enemies. Corruption spread. Iran entered the strategic vacuum. Our Sunni friends in and outside of Iraq felt abandoned. And by 2014 Iraq had regressed to 2006, with the country in open civil war.

In response to this chaos, Barack Obama has bombed Iraq without congressional support or U.N. authorization, but apparently relying on the very 2002 congressional resolution he once caricatured. He is now bombing Syria without any resolution from Congress or authorization from the U.N. He has not been able to square the circle of his own conduct, namely that his politically driven decision to leave Iraq may well have created the very conditions that led him to choose to get back into it.

Note too the absence of an anti-war movement in America today. There is no grassroots outrage that Obama did not seek resolutions from the U.N. (as opposed to merely lecturing to it). No one is angry that he bypassed Congress the way he did in bombing Libya. There is no stated worry about indiscriminate bombing or collateral damage. Instead, in the same manner in which renditions, Guantanamo, preventive detention, the Patriot Act, drones, and almost all the other Bush–Cheney anti-terrorism protocols were once proof of the Bush administration’s supposed criminality, only to be conveniently ignored when Barack Obama embraced them, now the new bombing of Iraq and Syria is likewise not a source of popular discontent.

That Obama has now bombed three Arab countries and done nothing to help ameliorate the chaos on the ground may be politically astute, but it is not a morally driven decision. Bush, the supposed war criminal, sacrificed his presidency to ensure that American bombing did not lead to a Mogadishu-like situation in Iraq. He ordered the surge, after warning what would happen if he did not — and what did, in fact, happen under Obama.

The problem with Obama in the Middle East is that he still does not know exactly whom he is hurting and whom he is helping with his bombing — and cannot know under a policy of blowing things up from the air and after a while leaving. He has no intention of cleaning up or sorting out the mess on the ground that such bombing aggravates, and he has no worry that either a popular or a media audit will ensue. Libya has already become ancient history. No one remembers our once strong support for the terrorist-minded Muslim Brotherhood or our schizophrenia about the present junta in Egypt. No one remembers that we once were on the verge of bombing Assad and now are de facto empowering him. No one recalls that Obama currently has some strategic latitude in his decisions because the fracking and horizontal drilling inside America — which he once strongly opposed, and currently mostly forbids in new leases for federal lands — have given the United States some immunity from the usual oil fallout from Middle East wartime chaos.

In sum, the only legitimate critique of George W. Bush’s Iraq War is that the lives and treasure lost in the chaotic occupation of 2003–06 were not worth the removal of the monstrous Saddam Hussein and the ensuing establishment of a stable, consensual state in Iraq. And the only legitimate defense of Obama’s subsequent policy in the region is that, while he is bombing all sorts of groups in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, has abdicated leadership in a way that has led to mass killing and destruction in the region, has no plans to help craft postwar consensual governments, and does not quite know who his enemies are or what they are planning, he so far has not lost American lives in the process — at least until the ascendant Islamic State flexes its global muscles.

Progressives’ Moral Equivalence

Derek Hunter

Saturday, September 28, 2014

You’ve seen this a lot in the last decade and a half: progressives asserting a moral equivalence between radial Islam and Christianity. The argument usually goes something like, “Yeah, sure, terrorists are bad, but they’re hardly the only people to kill in the name of their religion!” Then there’s the obligatory reference to the crusades.

OK, sure, Christianity, like most religions, has had some less-than-flattering moments. But it’s history. If you can point me to the mass graves, severed heads or buildings for Christianity in our lifetime… no need to finish that sentence because there aren’t any.

Christianity is an easy target for progressives; it has a violent past and a central boogeyman – the Vatican. Plus, they hate Christianity because it preaches self-reliance and a Supreme Being, not a supreme leader. Christianity has one Savior born 2,000 years ago, progressivism has many on the ballot every election cycle. They’re quite similar, really, when it comes down to the structure of beliefs.

Both are based on faith – one in a creator, the other in legislation. But while you can believe there is no God, you can’t prove it. It’s all speculation.

On the other hand, it can be proven that progressive policies are failures, that they do actual harm. The 20th century is littered with more than 100 million bodies of victims of progressive’s attempts to create various incarnations of heaven on earth. No such equivalent exists for Christians.

Christianity and the Judeo-Christian belief system, upon which the vast majority of the civilized world is based, took some time to get to the point where it sits today. And there were growing pains, the crusades among them. But that was 1,000 years ago.

So why bring up something a millennium ago to deflect barbaric acts now? Are they implying each religion has to go through some sort of dark period before it enters the light? Of course not. They don’t believe Christianity has entered any light. They still see Christians as the root of most, if not all, evil in the world.

That’s how, after reports that a recent convert to Islam beheaded a former co-worker in Oklahoma, you end up with Media Matters For America employees writing things like, “if (sic) you want to believe islam (sic) has a lock on violence, dont (sic) google (sic) the crusades.”

See, a series of invasions to reclaim land lost is the same as terrorism because people died.

Forget the fact that one happened 1,000 years ago and the other is happening now. To progressives, sword fights over control of the Holy Land and suicide bombing a farmers’ market full of school kids are the same thing.

Actually, they’re not. Progressives have a bigger problem with what happened 1,000 years ago than they do with what’s happening now. A sword fight 1,000 years ago between two people whose name history didn’t record is worse, to them, than people currently forcing women into sexual slavery, mutilating their genitals, mass executions and cutting the heads off of people who don’t believe what they believe. They figure the descendants of the people with the swords probably don’t vote the way progressives want them to vote. And that is the only sin in the progressives’ religion of government.

Now, if Christians are forever to be judged by the sins of those who shared similar beliefs millennia ago, shouldn’t the same standard apply to them and people who share their beliefs just a century ago? Should their rules apply only to others and not them? I think not.

Names such as Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Kim, Castro, and on an on, all share similar Utopic views on the role of government in creating “fairness,” “justice” and “equality.” But one need not go to other countries to find atrocities both advocated for and committed by progressives.

American progressives of the 20th century conceived of and oversaw brutal displays of inhumanity to their fellow man in the name of purity and science. They lied to black men with syphilis, telling them they were getting free medical treatment, because they wanted to study the natural progression of the disease as it destroyed their brains. They interred Americans for Asian heritage in prison camps simply because they were Asian.

Progressives were the conceptual forefathers of Hitler’s racial purity madness, advocating for ridding the gene pool of what they deemed inferior races, disabled, criminals and those thought not to have high enough IQs to be worthy of reproducing. Whereas Nazis simply wanted to wipe them out by killing them, American progressives wanted to breed them out through sterilization. Well, for the most part; some did want to kill them too.

Should progressives be judged by their predecessors’ barbaric acts? Perhaps they should, since they haven’t really repudiated their goals, only their methods.

Just as no Christians are invading the Middle East to reclaim lost land just because their ancestors did, not all Kennedys are Nazi appeasers or misogynistic killers of women simply because some were in the past.

Not all Muslims are terrorists; in fact, very few of them are. But when it comes to violence committed in the name of “God,” in the name of a religion, those few currently have the market cornered. To pretend otherwise would be to pretend some people are simply better than others because of their skin color, that some people should be eliminated because they are “unworthy of living,” to think World War II could have been negotiated out of happening, to believe Mary Jo Kopechne died on impact… In other words – progressive.

Stand With Israel

Ashley Pratte

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Today, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the United Nations about their struggle with Hamas.

Netanyahu noted that some of the countries that didn’t support Israel in fighting Hamas were quick to support President Obama’s actions against ISIS. Netanyahu said, “Hamas and ISIS are branches of the same poisonous tree.” Both ISIS and Hamas present a very dangerous threat, as both have the ultimate goal of global domination.

Hamas, like ISIS, seeks to establish a caliphate, yet there has been very little support for Israel. Hamas placed rockets where Palestinian children live and play, showing their true colors by using civilians as human shields. Israel defended itself against these war crimes, and the actions of Hamas have yet to be denounced.

In recent weeks we have seen campuses nationwide such as DePaul University create “divest from Israel” initiatives, which have lead to votes by student governments. These initiatives represent the broader Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, a global effort to pressure organizations and firms to divest funds from companies that support the economy in Israel’s disputed territories.

A student senate president at Ohio University even went so far as to film herself dump a “blood-like” substance over her head to create awareness of the Palestinians being killed by Israel.

What these anti-Israel students neglect or choose not to realize is the radicalization of Hamas and the dangerous threat that it poses to Israel. Hamas seeks to kill innocent civilians whereas Israel seeks to defend itself in the face of terrorism.

It isn’t surprising that there has been a growing anti-Israel sentiment among college students, since President Obama has not done much of anything to stand with Israel. In fact, just last week, before the United Nations, President Obama said, “The violence engulfing the region today has made too many Israelis ready to abandon the hard work of peace.”

Such remarks are a slap in the face to Israeli’s who are trying to protect innocent civilians from Hamas. It is no secret that the United States-Israel relationship is at one of the lowest points given that there is so much division between the countries. Israel has always been an ally and the fact that our President does nothing to publicly stand with Israel is disgraceful.

We live in a time where radical Islam is rapidly spreading, and we are fighting savage terrorists. Women are being abducted and innocent children are murdered daily. Israel faces grave danger in fighting Hamas and is in dire need of support. It is important that we stand with Israel, our ally, to help fight against this evil.