Larry Elder
Thursday, February 05, 2009
"There is no disagreement," said then-President-elect Barack Obama Jan. 9, "that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jump-start the economy."
No disagreement?
During the last economic downturn -- seven years ago -- I interviewed economics professor George Reisman, author of the book "Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics." He reacted to a newspaper article that called government spending a "potent recession cure when administered properly."
Reisman: That is a view held by a large school of economists, perhaps the majority school, for the last 60 years or so. That's the Keynesian school, but there are other economists, like the Austrian school, which holds a very different position. In their view, an essential requirement to a sound economy is balanced budgets with small government. We want government limited to protecting life and property. The government should be attacking terrorists, providing police protection against common criminals, and that should be essentially it, and the people in an environment free from terror will proceed to provide for themselves economically. That has been the basic philosophy on which the United States was built.
Elder: I know you're not a journalist, but isn't it unfair to make (the "recession cure") statement … as if it's a fact?
Reisman: No, it is definitely not a fact, and it displays considerable ignorance which leaves out of account any alternative point of view, and in fact, it's easy to argue that deficits can pretty well worsen recessions with depression, because one of the main characteristics of any severe recession is widespread bankruptcies. Deficits contribute to that by withdrawing capital from availability for business. The deficits absorb savings, and those savings are then not available to be lent to business firms in need of credit, so more firms go under than would otherwise have gone under, and that worsens the depression or recession.
Elder: Is it too strong to say that this guy is simply wrong?
Reisman: … He's definitely wrong. … It's not deficits in and of themselves that promote spending, although he … seems to think that a dollar spent by the government is somehow more beneficial than a dollar spent by you or me, which is ridiculous. What people really have in mind, to advocate this position, is that the government will run at a deficit and not borrow from the general public … but will manufacture the money -- print it. So they'll enlarge total spending. So it's this mentality I would think more than anything else that's been responsible for our problems with inflation for the last 65 years or so. Every year, there is more and more money out there. … The rise in spending just outstrips the increase in production and the supply of goods, and so prices continually rise. …
Elder: (This article asserts) you can spend government money to get us out of a recession.
Reisman: That's definitely the idea that someone would come away with, and one would have no idea that one would have an alternative way to get out of the recession or depression or what one got us into in the first place. What put us into this recession and what causes every recession is precisely a preceding policy of inflation … the tremendous stock market boom fed by the Federal Reserve's rapid expansion of money. There was additional money poured into the stock market, and that … raised prices, and when they decided not to continue that … then the market fell. It would not have had that terrible fall if it had not had this artificial rise first, engineered by the Fed … a major aspect of inflation itself.
Elder: The (article) quotes an economist from the so-called "non-partisan" Brookings Institution: "Tax hikes do less damage to the economy during a downturn than an equivalent amount of spending cuts." What does that mean?
Reisman: … Keynesians argue that if you increase government spending by a dollar and increase taxes by a dollar, that serves to increase national income by a dollar. And that's what's being argued here. The joke of this argument is that the Keynesians are really very ignorant of aggregate economic accounting. … It's actually possible that by raising taxes a dollar and government spending a dollar, you can raise national income a dollar. But the way that would happen is only if the taxes were paid with funds that otherwise would have bought capital goods, like machinery and equipment.
Elder: Why the widespread myth that FDR's policies got us out of the Depression?
Reisman: I think that fits with the statist preconceptions. If you view the government as some kind of deity and you think it's omniscient and omnipotent, then that's your basic expectation. …
This interview took place seven years ago. Days ago, the libertarian think tank Cato Institute took out a full-page ad. It listed more than 200 economists -- by name -- who reject more government spending and instead urge tax cuts and smaller government. The full-pager ran in "minor" newspapers, such as The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.
So, President Obama, please read these economists' "disagreement." Whip out your BlackBerry.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Is Obama The Next Jimmy Carter?
Matt Towery
Thursday, February 05, 2009
Polling still shows that many Americans like their new president. But polling also shows that the Democratic Congress, starting with an out-of-control House of Representatives, has managed in less than two weeks to create a scenario that could permanently cripple the Obama presidency. The mess of a so-called stimulus package it passed on to the Senate became toxic with critically important independent voters so quickly that now a rework in the Senate is unlikely to reverse the bill's unpopularity.
More distressing for President Obama is that expectations of an immediate boost from stimulus legislation, which he has been desperately trying to manage, remain. And that's regardless of how many times the president warns that recovery will not come soon. But with so many organizations, state governments, special interests and scared and financially ruined people expecting relief, Obama has been placed in a no-win situation.
In my book "Paranoid Nation," about the 2008 race for the presidency, I note many similarities between then-candidate Barack Obama and former president Jimmy Carter. And I certainly was not alone in drawing such comparisons. Carter, following the years of Richard Nixon's Watergate and Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon, was viewed as an agent of real change.
Like Obama, Carter's past political career seemed foreign to most of the media -- his southern-based political past looked small time and hard for the national media to grasp. Obama's meteoric rise from Chicago-style politics to a brief stint in the Senate left him an enigma to many as well.
While Carter chose to enter the White House with a clear effort to avoid the so-called "Washington Establishment," President Obama has embraced Washington insiders in an effort to avoid amateur mistakes.
But the amateur mistakes have come rolling one after another in the past weeks. And while a failure to properly vet big names for cabinet posts resulted in a confession from Obama that "I screwed up" -- his candor helps him in the polls -- the whole issue of flawed potential administration officials is merely a sideshow.
The fact is that Barack Obama, while trying to meet a dire economic crisis, has fallen straight into the trap that led Jimmy Carter to defeat in his bid for reelection. Obama has sought to promise and do too much in too short a period of time in a city where Congress, federal departments and agencies, and bureaucrats can and will eat a new president alive.
James Fallows, a former Carter speechwriter, wrote a May 1979 piece in The Atlantic in which he reflected on the first years of the Carter presidency. He noted that Carter promised during his first "fireside chat" that he would present the nation with a comprehensive plan to deal with energy independence "within 90 days." Fallows goes on to note that Carter later came to understand that strict deadlines could be destructive "in that they might force him to go ahead with half-baked ideas."
Well, if ever there was a collection of half-baked ideas, it is the combination of George W. Bush's rushed bailout plan, which we now realize had no structure or oversight, followed up with Barack Obama's "infrastructure" effort to get people working with "shovels in the ground." That's now turned into the world's biggest collection of rubbish for not creating jobs.
Carter had to deal with a tough and Washington-savvy house speaker, Tip O'Neill. O'Neill and Carter started off on the wrong foot when Carter's staff failed to give O'Neill the proper number of inaugural tickets he sought. Things went downhill from there. And on the Senate side, Ted Kennedy was licking his chops to challenge Carter, thus forcing Carter to more liberal positions than he was expected to take.
Now Barack Obama has Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who, along with fellow Democrats, loaded Obama's bill with everything but the kitchen sink; and he has Harry Reid, who early on made it clear it was his Senate, not Obama's.
Now that the stimulus bill is in real trouble, Obama is trying desperately to pull back from the breadth of the bill.
But it was President Obama's own words to NBC's Brian Williams this week that tells the true story. He told Williams that it was necessary to use the current crisis to force the nation to deal with long-term issues such as healthcare ... and energy.
But wait: I thought Jimmy Carter had that one solved within 90 days after his first fireside chat. And look where he ended up four years later.
Thursday, February 05, 2009
Polling still shows that many Americans like their new president. But polling also shows that the Democratic Congress, starting with an out-of-control House of Representatives, has managed in less than two weeks to create a scenario that could permanently cripple the Obama presidency. The mess of a so-called stimulus package it passed on to the Senate became toxic with critically important independent voters so quickly that now a rework in the Senate is unlikely to reverse the bill's unpopularity.
More distressing for President Obama is that expectations of an immediate boost from stimulus legislation, which he has been desperately trying to manage, remain. And that's regardless of how many times the president warns that recovery will not come soon. But with so many organizations, state governments, special interests and scared and financially ruined people expecting relief, Obama has been placed in a no-win situation.
In my book "Paranoid Nation," about the 2008 race for the presidency, I note many similarities between then-candidate Barack Obama and former president Jimmy Carter. And I certainly was not alone in drawing such comparisons. Carter, following the years of Richard Nixon's Watergate and Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon, was viewed as an agent of real change.
Like Obama, Carter's past political career seemed foreign to most of the media -- his southern-based political past looked small time and hard for the national media to grasp. Obama's meteoric rise from Chicago-style politics to a brief stint in the Senate left him an enigma to many as well.
While Carter chose to enter the White House with a clear effort to avoid the so-called "Washington Establishment," President Obama has embraced Washington insiders in an effort to avoid amateur mistakes.
But the amateur mistakes have come rolling one after another in the past weeks. And while a failure to properly vet big names for cabinet posts resulted in a confession from Obama that "I screwed up" -- his candor helps him in the polls -- the whole issue of flawed potential administration officials is merely a sideshow.
The fact is that Barack Obama, while trying to meet a dire economic crisis, has fallen straight into the trap that led Jimmy Carter to defeat in his bid for reelection. Obama has sought to promise and do too much in too short a period of time in a city where Congress, federal departments and agencies, and bureaucrats can and will eat a new president alive.
James Fallows, a former Carter speechwriter, wrote a May 1979 piece in The Atlantic in which he reflected on the first years of the Carter presidency. He noted that Carter promised during his first "fireside chat" that he would present the nation with a comprehensive plan to deal with energy independence "within 90 days." Fallows goes on to note that Carter later came to understand that strict deadlines could be destructive "in that they might force him to go ahead with half-baked ideas."
Well, if ever there was a collection of half-baked ideas, it is the combination of George W. Bush's rushed bailout plan, which we now realize had no structure or oversight, followed up with Barack Obama's "infrastructure" effort to get people working with "shovels in the ground." That's now turned into the world's biggest collection of rubbish for not creating jobs.
Carter had to deal with a tough and Washington-savvy house speaker, Tip O'Neill. O'Neill and Carter started off on the wrong foot when Carter's staff failed to give O'Neill the proper number of inaugural tickets he sought. Things went downhill from there. And on the Senate side, Ted Kennedy was licking his chops to challenge Carter, thus forcing Carter to more liberal positions than he was expected to take.
Now Barack Obama has Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who, along with fellow Democrats, loaded Obama's bill with everything but the kitchen sink; and he has Harry Reid, who early on made it clear it was his Senate, not Obama's.
Now that the stimulus bill is in real trouble, Obama is trying desperately to pull back from the breadth of the bill.
But it was President Obama's own words to NBC's Brian Williams this week that tells the true story. He told Williams that it was necessary to use the current crisis to force the nation to deal with long-term issues such as healthcare ... and energy.
But wait: I thought Jimmy Carter had that one solved within 90 days after his first fireside chat. And look where he ended up four years later.
Right Directions
Change for the better in Iraq, hope for Afghanistan.
By Clifford D. May
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Iraq’s most recent elections were a sight for sore eyes. Independent observers agree they were free, fair, and valid. Iraqis voted less for sectarian parties and more for individual candidates. Extremists did not fare well. Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds all participated in large numbers. Iraq is today—and at least for now—more free and democratic than almost any of its Mideast neighbors. Those who think Arabs incapable of decent governance may yet be proven wrong. Those convinced that pluralism is impossible to sustain in a Muslim majority country also may turn out to have been mistaken.
All that is encouraging for people like me who believe freedom must either advance or retreat, and that Americans have a vital interest in which way the global tide turns. But even more important is the fact that Iraq’s third national elections since 2005 were an unmitigated disaster for both al-Qaeda and Iran’s proxies in Iraq. Their forces have been decimated—the U.S. military under the leadership of Generals David Petraeus and Ray Odierno saw to that. They were not able to either influence or intimidate large numbers of voters. Nor did they manage to stage terrorist attacks to disrupt the voting. (Four years ago, by contrast, there were nearly 300 such terrorist attacks.)
When America’s sworn enemies are frustrated in their ambitions anywhere else in the world, it counts as a battle won.
That doesn’t guarantee victory in the larger conflict against militant Islamists. It does, however, allow America’s military to wind down in Iraq more quickly than would be the case had conditions on the ground not improved.
Iraqis are increasingly taking responsibility for their own security, with American troops providing strategic and logistics support, as well as advanced training. According to current plans and agreements, America’s combat forces will be out of Iraq’s cities by this summer and out of the country by 2011. My guess is that President Obama will stand up to those on the Left who are pressuring him to withdraw more precipitously. Yes, he promised to get out of Iraq within 16 months of entering the Oval Office. But he also promised a “responsible and phased” withdrawal. The two promises were never compatible, as anyone with any sense of the situation understood.
Obama has retained Robert Gates as secretary of defense, General Petraeus as chief of Central Command, and General Odierno as commander in Iraq. We can be certain they are advising him against doing anything that would put hard-won progress in jeopardy. If Obama didn’t intend to listen to them, why would he keep them on? If their efforts were going to be undermined, why would they stay?
Meanwhile, they and other Pentagon officials also are advising Obama on Afghanistan. According to recent reports, they are recommending that the new administration limit its objectives—that the U.S. focus on eliminating Taliban and al-Qaeda safe havens both in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan, ensuring that neither country can be used as a terrorist base. For Afghanistan more broadly, the goal would be stability—rather than democratic nation-building.
It’s hard to argue with this approach, first because it is always better to promise less and achieve more, rather than promise more and achieve less (a rule the Bush administration too often failed to grasp).
Second, crushing the Taliban and al-Qaeda is a top-line U.S. strategic interest. Helping foster a free, democratic, and prosperous Afghanistan is a more challenging and much longer-term project.
Another lesson we should have learned by now: America cannot export democracy. The best we can do is support democrats where we find them and when they are bold enough to fight for freedom. If there are no serious Afghan democrats, there will be no Afghan democracy no matter what we do. But if there are serious Afghan democrats, we have a duty to assist them, and it’s in our enlightened self-interest to do so.
That said, if Petraeus, as expected, develops for Afghanistan a counterinsurgency strategy—COIN, for short—as he did for Iraq, it will include building local governing capabilities and promoting economic development. Without that, it’s not COIN.
In Iraq there is change and in Afghanistan there is the anticipation of change—though perhaps not the change some of Obama’s supporters expected. That’s a reason for hope.
By Clifford D. May
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Iraq’s most recent elections were a sight for sore eyes. Independent observers agree they were free, fair, and valid. Iraqis voted less for sectarian parties and more for individual candidates. Extremists did not fare well. Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds all participated in large numbers. Iraq is today—and at least for now—more free and democratic than almost any of its Mideast neighbors. Those who think Arabs incapable of decent governance may yet be proven wrong. Those convinced that pluralism is impossible to sustain in a Muslim majority country also may turn out to have been mistaken.
All that is encouraging for people like me who believe freedom must either advance or retreat, and that Americans have a vital interest in which way the global tide turns. But even more important is the fact that Iraq’s third national elections since 2005 were an unmitigated disaster for both al-Qaeda and Iran’s proxies in Iraq. Their forces have been decimated—the U.S. military under the leadership of Generals David Petraeus and Ray Odierno saw to that. They were not able to either influence or intimidate large numbers of voters. Nor did they manage to stage terrorist attacks to disrupt the voting. (Four years ago, by contrast, there were nearly 300 such terrorist attacks.)
When America’s sworn enemies are frustrated in their ambitions anywhere else in the world, it counts as a battle won.
That doesn’t guarantee victory in the larger conflict against militant Islamists. It does, however, allow America’s military to wind down in Iraq more quickly than would be the case had conditions on the ground not improved.
Iraqis are increasingly taking responsibility for their own security, with American troops providing strategic and logistics support, as well as advanced training. According to current plans and agreements, America’s combat forces will be out of Iraq’s cities by this summer and out of the country by 2011. My guess is that President Obama will stand up to those on the Left who are pressuring him to withdraw more precipitously. Yes, he promised to get out of Iraq within 16 months of entering the Oval Office. But he also promised a “responsible and phased” withdrawal. The two promises were never compatible, as anyone with any sense of the situation understood.
Obama has retained Robert Gates as secretary of defense, General Petraeus as chief of Central Command, and General Odierno as commander in Iraq. We can be certain they are advising him against doing anything that would put hard-won progress in jeopardy. If Obama didn’t intend to listen to them, why would he keep them on? If their efforts were going to be undermined, why would they stay?
Meanwhile, they and other Pentagon officials also are advising Obama on Afghanistan. According to recent reports, they are recommending that the new administration limit its objectives—that the U.S. focus on eliminating Taliban and al-Qaeda safe havens both in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan, ensuring that neither country can be used as a terrorist base. For Afghanistan more broadly, the goal would be stability—rather than democratic nation-building.
It’s hard to argue with this approach, first because it is always better to promise less and achieve more, rather than promise more and achieve less (a rule the Bush administration too often failed to grasp).
Second, crushing the Taliban and al-Qaeda is a top-line U.S. strategic interest. Helping foster a free, democratic, and prosperous Afghanistan is a more challenging and much longer-term project.
Another lesson we should have learned by now: America cannot export democracy. The best we can do is support democrats where we find them and when they are bold enough to fight for freedom. If there are no serious Afghan democrats, there will be no Afghan democracy no matter what we do. But if there are serious Afghan democrats, we have a duty to assist them, and it’s in our enlightened self-interest to do so.
That said, if Petraeus, as expected, develops for Afghanistan a counterinsurgency strategy—COIN, for short—as he did for Iraq, it will include building local governing capabilities and promoting economic development. Without that, it’s not COIN.
In Iraq there is change and in Afghanistan there is the anticipation of change—though perhaps not the change some of Obama’s supporters expected. That’s a reason for hope.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Hypocrites on Paying Taxes
Who do the Democrats think tax cheats are cheating?
By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
During the presidential campaign, Joe Biden insisted that paying taxes is a patriotic duty. No, scratch that. He said that supporting a tax hike was the American thing to do. “It’s time to be patriotic,” he told America’s putative tax slackers. When asked whether he might be questioning the patriotism of people who don’t want higher taxes, Biden, as is his wont, took things to the next rhetorical level. Forget patriotism, said Joe, paying higher taxes is a religious obligation to help your fellow man.
So the senator who gave an average of $369 a year to charity over the previous decade fulfills a religious obligation by cutting a tax check to Uncle Sam—a check he’s required to cut by law.
It’s always perilous to take Biden’s statements too seriously, but it does seem eminently fair to say that his comments reflect a common, though perhaps not universal, attitude among Democrats. Taxes aren’t a “necessary evil” so much as a joyous affirmation of the possibilities of government and the lifeblood of a more hopeful society. “Taxes are what you pay to be an American”—like “membership fees,” says Democratic language guru George Lakoff.
President Obama merely says taxes are necessary to “spread the wealth,” which is better for everybody. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman frames the issue more reasonably: “Nobody likes paying taxes . . . (but) most Americans also care a lot about the things taxes pay for.” In other words, paying taxes—and raising taxes, in Krugman’s view—is the adult, serious, morally responsible thing to do. Government needs every last penny, and holdouts must be smoked out.
Now, whatever the best articulation of liberal attitudes toward taxation may be, reasonable people can agree that Democrats inject a lot of moralizing, righteousness, and finger-wagging into the issue.
As one leading Democrat put it: “Make no mistake, tax cheaters cheat us all, and the IRS should enforce our laws to the letter.”
That Democrat was then-senator Tom Daschle in 1998. The same Tom Daschle, we’ve since learned, who failed to pay more than $100,000 in back taxes for perks he received as one of Washington’s most relentless influence-peddlers—that is, until he realized he might receive a job in the Obama administration spending the money most Americans conscientiously send to Washington.
Daschle’s hardly alone. Recently confirmed Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner also failed to pay taxes he owed (even though he surely must have known he owed them) until it became politically expedient to pay them. Now he runs the IRS. Take that, suckers.
Meanwhile, Rep. Charles Rangel (D., N.Y.), chairman of the supreme tax-writing body in America, the House Ways and Means Committee, is under investigation for, among other things, dodging taxes. His excuse for his admitted mistakes is that he was sloppy and ignorant, but not criminal. Geithner and Daschle make similar noises.
But doesn’t that miss the point?
When moralizing conservatives get caught, say, cheating on their wives or challenging stall mates to robust Greco-Roman wrestling in airport bathrooms, liberals justifiably howl at the hypocrisy of it all. When liberals fail to pay taxes it’s merely, to borrow an old catchphrase from Daschle, “sad and disappointing,” but ultimately not that big a deal. If Democrats are serious about their arguments for raising taxes, shouldn’t they be downright giddy about paying what they already owe? And shouldn’t they loathe tax cheating more than anything?
When he was still running the Democratic Party, Howard Dean made fighting hypocrisy his top priority. “Hypocrisy is a value that I think has been embraced by the Republican Party. We get lectured by people all day long about moral values by people who have their own moral shortcomings.”
Well, I hear a lot of lecturing from Democrats about why I should be ashamed for not liking taxes more because “the children” need it. Rep. Alan Grayson (D., Fla.) defended the so-called stimulus bill last week by saying it “shelters the homeless, and heals the sick. It helps us to look forward to the day when we beat our swords into plowshares.”
By the Democrats’ own logic, not wanting to pay for that is selfish, unpatriotic, and immoral. Who do they think tax cheats are cheating?
“I will use whatever position I have in order to root out hypocrisy,” Dean promised. “I’m not going to be lectured as a Democrat—we’ve got some pretty strong moral values in my party, and maybe we ought to do a better job standing up and fighting for them.”
Yes, I would like to see that myself. That would be change I could believe in.
By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
During the presidential campaign, Joe Biden insisted that paying taxes is a patriotic duty. No, scratch that. He said that supporting a tax hike was the American thing to do. “It’s time to be patriotic,” he told America’s putative tax slackers. When asked whether he might be questioning the patriotism of people who don’t want higher taxes, Biden, as is his wont, took things to the next rhetorical level. Forget patriotism, said Joe, paying higher taxes is a religious obligation to help your fellow man.
So the senator who gave an average of $369 a year to charity over the previous decade fulfills a religious obligation by cutting a tax check to Uncle Sam—a check he’s required to cut by law.
It’s always perilous to take Biden’s statements too seriously, but it does seem eminently fair to say that his comments reflect a common, though perhaps not universal, attitude among Democrats. Taxes aren’t a “necessary evil” so much as a joyous affirmation of the possibilities of government and the lifeblood of a more hopeful society. “Taxes are what you pay to be an American”—like “membership fees,” says Democratic language guru George Lakoff.
President Obama merely says taxes are necessary to “spread the wealth,” which is better for everybody. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman frames the issue more reasonably: “Nobody likes paying taxes . . . (but) most Americans also care a lot about the things taxes pay for.” In other words, paying taxes—and raising taxes, in Krugman’s view—is the adult, serious, morally responsible thing to do. Government needs every last penny, and holdouts must be smoked out.
Now, whatever the best articulation of liberal attitudes toward taxation may be, reasonable people can agree that Democrats inject a lot of moralizing, righteousness, and finger-wagging into the issue.
As one leading Democrat put it: “Make no mistake, tax cheaters cheat us all, and the IRS should enforce our laws to the letter.”
That Democrat was then-senator Tom Daschle in 1998. The same Tom Daschle, we’ve since learned, who failed to pay more than $100,000 in back taxes for perks he received as one of Washington’s most relentless influence-peddlers—that is, until he realized he might receive a job in the Obama administration spending the money most Americans conscientiously send to Washington.
Daschle’s hardly alone. Recently confirmed Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner also failed to pay taxes he owed (even though he surely must have known he owed them) until it became politically expedient to pay them. Now he runs the IRS. Take that, suckers.
Meanwhile, Rep. Charles Rangel (D., N.Y.), chairman of the supreme tax-writing body in America, the House Ways and Means Committee, is under investigation for, among other things, dodging taxes. His excuse for his admitted mistakes is that he was sloppy and ignorant, but not criminal. Geithner and Daschle make similar noises.
But doesn’t that miss the point?
When moralizing conservatives get caught, say, cheating on their wives or challenging stall mates to robust Greco-Roman wrestling in airport bathrooms, liberals justifiably howl at the hypocrisy of it all. When liberals fail to pay taxes it’s merely, to borrow an old catchphrase from Daschle, “sad and disappointing,” but ultimately not that big a deal. If Democrats are serious about their arguments for raising taxes, shouldn’t they be downright giddy about paying what they already owe? And shouldn’t they loathe tax cheating more than anything?
When he was still running the Democratic Party, Howard Dean made fighting hypocrisy his top priority. “Hypocrisy is a value that I think has been embraced by the Republican Party. We get lectured by people all day long about moral values by people who have their own moral shortcomings.”
Well, I hear a lot of lecturing from Democrats about why I should be ashamed for not liking taxes more because “the children” need it. Rep. Alan Grayson (D., Fla.) defended the so-called stimulus bill last week by saying it “shelters the homeless, and heals the sick. It helps us to look forward to the day when we beat our swords into plowshares.”
By the Democrats’ own logic, not wanting to pay for that is selfish, unpatriotic, and immoral. Who do they think tax cheats are cheating?
“I will use whatever position I have in order to root out hypocrisy,” Dean promised. “I’m not going to be lectured as a Democrat—we’ve got some pretty strong moral values in my party, and maybe we ought to do a better job standing up and fighting for them.”
Yes, I would like to see that myself. That would be change I could believe in.
My Eight Minutes With Jimmy
Michael Medved
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
If you’ve got only eight minutes to confront a world leader whose impact and outlook you’ve despised and denounced for decades, then what’s the best way to take advantage of the interchange?
That was the dilemma facing me last Friday when former President Jimmy Carter agreed to a brief interview on my nationally syndicated radio program. We tried on many past occasions to book President Carter on the show but made no way headway with his representatives. This time, in the midst of the national publicity tour for his new book We Can Have Peace In The Holy Land: A Plan That Will Work, his handlers gave us twenty-four hours notice of his willingness to participate in a brief interview.
I’m certain that President Carter knows that I’ve spoken about him frequently on the air, almost always with contempt and derision. I’ve identified him as the worst president of the twentieth century – and perhaps of American history. Yes, I’ve described him repeatedly as “the worthless Jimmy Carter” and coined the deliberately disrespectful designation “The Worthless One.”
If nothing else, his determination to look past these insults in order to face down one of his harshest critics and to defend his controversial ideas demonstrated confidence and courage rarely displayed by his fellow liberal Democrats. Public figures like President Obama, Vice President Biden and Secretary Clinton have never agreed to conversations on my show (or any other conservative radio show) despite the fact that I’ve never assaulted them with anything like the vitriol I reserved for President Carter.
Preparing for our short conversation, I agonized over the right approach to the former president.
I could have thanked him, for instance, for helping to make me a Republican – confessing that I voted for him (somewhat reluctantly) in 1976, but felt so betrayed and disillusioned by the record of his administration that I never again supported another Democratic presidential candidate. One could make the case that no one – not even Ronald Reagan himself – did more to assure GOP success than President Carter. When he ran for re-election in 1980, the Republicans carried 44 of the fifty states (including Massachusetts, New York and California) and knocked off twelve incumbent Democratic Senators.
Beyond reminding Mr. Carter of this singular achievement, I could also note the approaching thirtieth anniversary of the nightmarish “Islamic Revolution” in Iran, and asked President Carter if he felt proud of his role in undermining the Shah, a consistent friend of America and Israel, and replacing him with the Mad Mullahs whose medieval theocracy still rules that benighted nation. In view of all the wretched developments since 1979, would President Carter now apologize for his devastatingly destructive role?
Then there were always pertinent issues regarding management of the economy: what advice could Jimmy Carter offer Barack Obama after leading the nation into a devastating and painful period that provided far more misery for typical Americans than the current crisis? The Carter era of “stagflation” (which reached its low point in the first two years under Mr. Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan) brought much higher rates of unemployment, inflation, mortgage interest, and disruption of energy supplies than anything experienced under George W. Bush. In light of the appalling results of his domestic leadership, could President Carter single out a few glaring missteps that Mr. Obama should, at all costs, avoid?
And speaking of missteps, what about those two new cabinet departments launched under President Carter’s leadership—the Department of Energy and the Department of Education? After the expenditure of literally hundreds of billions by the twin bureaucracies, and the employment of tens of thousands of largely useless government workers in the notoriously unfocused new departments, would President Carter judge his innovations a success? Is it any accident that the two tasks undertaken by the new Carter departments – securing and diversifying energy supplies and improving the quality of public education – represent two of the most conspicuous and undeniable failures in American life over the last three decades?
I thought about these questions and much more in preparing for my precious eight minutes with a major historical figure (and Nobel Peace Prize winner) but kept returning to the official premise of our interview: the former president’s current book, and ongoing role as an angry critic of Israel. We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land is a brief, sloppily-written and utterly self-serving account of Mr. Carter’s efforts both during and after his presidency to promote an Israel-Arab settlement. His much-touted “Plan That Will Work” is little more than a restatement of the “Road Map,” already endorsed in principle by the Israelis, the Palestinian Authority, the U.S., the European Union, the Russians and the U.N. To expand his large-print text to something like book length (214 pages), the former President inserts plenty of old U.N. Resolutions, texts of past peace plans, and ludicrously inaccurate historical assertions.
For instance, he describes the crucial year of 1939 as follows:
“Later, Palestinian Arabs demanded a halt to Jewish immigration and a ban on land sales to Jews, and in 1939 Britain announced severe restrictions on the Zionist movement and land purchases in Palestine. Violence erupted from Jewish militants, some led by Menachem Begin, the future prime minister of Israel.”
The idea that violence “erupted” only in 1939 and only from “Jewish militants” would receive no support from reputable historians – not even from those teaching at Islamic universities. Bloody Arab attacks on Jewish communities in the Holy Land began in 1920 and 21 (with more than 100 unarmed Jews massacred and 500 injured), then continued with more major riots against peaceful Jewish communities in 1929, 1931, and 1936 through 1939 (celebrated by Palestinians as “The Great Arab Revolt” – and claiming at least 500 more Jewish lives.) The restrictions on Jewish immigration at the height of Hitler’s persecution (the infamous “White Paper”) didn’t produce the bloodshed in the Holy Land – they resulted from violence by Palestinian gangs and militias as the British tried (in vain) to pacify the Arabs by giving them precisely what they wanted.
In addition to Mr. Carter’s appalling distortions of history, his new book delivers some unintentional hilarity as he describes his budding friendship with the terror-masters of Hamas. As the former President solemnly and hopefully recounts, “We pursued the concept of non-violent resistance of Hamas leaders and gave them documentation and video presentations of the successful experiences of Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, and others.” Reading this sentence, I considered asking the former president whether he ever got a movie review from the Hamas chieftains on the non-violent videos he gave them. In view of the continued daily rocket fire on Israel (in blatant violation of yet another one-sided cease fire) I suppose that the terrorists considered the edifying entertainment from Mr. Carter and ultimately rated it with two bombs down.
Given the strict limits on my time with Jimmy Carter, I resolved to concentrate on his bizarrely trusting and admiring attitude toward Hamas – despite its official designation as a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States, the European Union, and even its own founding documents. The point I determined to drive home involved the folly of appeasement, of relying on unenforceable negotiated agreements with bloodthirsty adversaries who give no indication at all of reliability. The comparison that struck me most forcefully involved the Nazis and Hamas: if anything, the Germans of 1938 (the year of the Munich Conference) looked more trustworthy, more rational, more self-disciplined (certainly) and less anti-Semitic than the suicidal murderers of Hamas. After all, the Nazis at the time spoke only of driving Jews out of Germany, not killing them, while the Hamas Charter speaks openly of a religious obligation to hasten judgment day by murdering all Jews.
In any event, I prepared for this line of questioning when President Carter called my show (precisely on time) during a commercial break and we chatted for a few minutes off the air.
In the interests of full disclosure, I told him at the outset that I had been harshly critical of him in my public comments (no, I did not repeat the phrase “the Worthless One.”) Mr. Carter said he was well aware of my criticism and graciously welcomed the chance to talk about it on the show. I also felt obliged to tell him that my father and brother chose to make their lives in Israel some twenty years ago, so I couldn’t pretend to objectivity on the issues discussed in his book. I recounted to President Carter that my father, who served in the Navy in the Second World War and spent his work life as a physicist in California, decided to retire to Jerusalem. Mr. Carter responded to that description by saying, “then I’ve got something in common with your father, because I’m also a Navy man.” I could have answered by noting that they also shared a passion for physics (which Mr. Carter avidly studied prior to his service on atomic submarines) and that my dad actually voted for Mr. Carter twice, but I didn’t get the chance as we came back from the break.
A transcript of our interchange follows:
MM: President Carter, thank you very much for joining us.
Carter: It's good to be with you. Thank you.
MM: Let me just go at this directly concerning some of the material in your book and also some of the comments you've made already discussing the book. I assume that you would join in the historical consensus that it was a terrible mistake for western leaders to trust and rely upon negotiated settlements with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis back in 1938.
Carter: Yes, I certainly would.
MM: My question is, why then do you have more confidence in agreements with Hamas, given the fact that, by any standard, Hamas is more openly anti-Semitic, more openly violent and less responsible than the Nazis appeared to be in 1938?
Carter: Well, I don't agree with that premise. Do I have to agree with the premise to answer the question?
MM: No, not at all.
Carter: Okay, well I know the Hamas leaders, I've talked to them in depth and I've shared what I've learned from them with the chief negotiator between Israel and Hamas—and that is Omar Suleiman in Egypt. I went over to the mid-east in April. I first stopped at Sderot with my wife and saw the missiles coming in—and I condemned the firing of those missiles as terrorism. The mayor of Sderot called a town meeting for me and he said that Israel was neither negotiating with Hamas, nor punishing Hamas. And I promised those people there that I would go and meet with Hamas leaders and try to get the missiles stopped. So, to make a long story short, I did. I went to Damascus, met with the top leaders of Hamas—the politburo members—and I finally got them to agree to depart from their previous policy of insisting on a cease fire in Gaza—and in the West Bank…Israel would supply the full quantity of food and medicine and water and fuel they had when they were in charge of Gaza.
MM: President Carter, with all due respect...
Carter: Go ahead.
MM: You've read the Hamas Charter.
Carter: Yes, and I read the charter of the PLO too, that still stated the existence 5 years after the Olso agreement.
MM: Right but it's been changed since Olso—afterward. But the Hamas Charter includes more anti-Semitic passages than anything in “Mein Kampf.” Mein Kampf never talked about massacring all Jews. The Hamas Charter talks about that.
Carter: If you wanna talk about that ancient history, fine, but if you want to talk about what's going on now--
MM: --Well that's still the Hamas Charter, even Mr. Marzouk said they haven't changed it.
Carter: When I was there, they authorized me to make a statement for them in Israel, which I did when I got back to Jerusalem at a very large meeting of the foreign policy organization in Israel. And they made a simultaneous statement—the leader of Hamas, to Al Jazeera and a large collection of news media--that Hamas will accept any agreement, any peace agreement negotiated between Abu Mazen and Israel, if the agreement is submitted to the people in the West Bank in Gaza in a referendum and approved. That's what they have agreed to do. And they also told me, not publicly, that they would accept Israel's right to exist and to live in peace, but they would not recognize Israel diplomatically unless Israel was prepared to recognize Hamas and Fatah diplomatically. And as you know, Israel has never even recognized the Palestinian Authority, they've only recognized the PLO.
MM: Okay, President Carter, the section of the Hamas Charter—and I'm holding it in front of me—that I'm particularly concerned about---
Carter: ---I'm not going to try to defend the Hamas Charter any more than I would try to defend the PLO charter, because it calls for the destruction of Israel---
MM: ---It calls for the murder of individual Jews. It calls for the murder of all Jews so that judgment day can come. It says, "The Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realization of Allah's promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said, “The day of judgment will not come about until Muslims kill the Jews (and the passage adds: “When the Jews will hide behind stones and trees, the sones and trees will say, O Muslim, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”)
Carter:--If you want to talk about ancient history, Christians believe that in the second coming, Christ can't come back to the Holy Land until all Jews are either dead or become Christian.
MM: Nobody is calling upon the State of Israel to rely for its security on a promise from people who believe that. But you think that the State of Israel, and the United States of America, should count on promises by Hamas. Right?
Carter: As you possibly know, the United States does not recognize or, at this time, does not deal with Hamas. But, the leaders of the United States are sure—along with anyone else who is rational about it—that you can't have a permanent peace in the mid-east unless Hamas and its supporters are involved, because Hamas now has the support, probably, of a majority of Palestinians, and the Palestinians have to negotiate with Israel.
MM: Would you advise Israeli leaders to feel confident about promises from Hamas?
Carter: I know that in last April--you can look it up yourself if you will--there was a public opinion poll done in Israel reported in Haaretz where 64% of the Israeli public, including your relatives who live over there, I presume, voted that Israel should be dealing directly with Hamas--should be negotiating with Hamas. And the leaders of the three top Israeli intelligence agencies said the same thing.
MM: There's not a single Israeli politician in any of the leading parties who believes that, President Carter. I'm sorry that our time is up. I wish we could continue the conversation.....
I deeply regret that the commercial came up and the interview drew to a close before I could correct some of the misimpressions the former President conveyed. The Israelis who favor negotiating with Hamas do so on the same basis that the Bush administration suggested it could countenance such negotiation: only if Hamas renounced violence, recognized Israel, and committed to honor past agreements signed in the name of the Palestinian People. President Carter’s support for the notion that Hamas will recognize Israel only when Israel recognizes Hamas is a pathetic effort to equate a rag-tag group of terrorists who can’t even govern the tiny territory of Gaza with a prosperous, powerful and democratic nation-state that’s been a member of the United Nations for 60 years.
I also should have expressed greater indignation at Mr. Carter twice dismissing the Hamas Charter as “ancient history” even though the leaders of that organization have made no effort to alter it. In fact, they illustrate their commitment to the principles of that extremist document every day, with their profoundly self-destructive launch of rockets toward Israeli civilians.
In another sense, “ancient history” is always relevant to the Middle East since both sides base their claims on remembered greatness and perceived grievance going back for centuries. Israel and her most fervent Christian supporters make no apologies for feeling animated and inspired by ancient prophecies, and the fulfillment of those visions by the modern Jewish state.
There’s also a timeless, eternal quality to the nature of the ongoing struggle—which is, at its heart, a conflict between life and death, peace and war, good and evil. The recent fighting in Gaza highlighted the contrast between the two sides, with Hamas trying to gain by deliberately maximizing casualties (both among Israeli troops and Palestinian civilians) while Israel could succeed only by minimizing death and injury (among its own soldiers as well as among the civilians in Gaza). Jimmy Carter’s moral blindness leads him to equate those who celebrate the suicides of their own children and the murder of their neighbors’ kids, with those who mourn violence against any innocents.
Judea Pearl, the father of beheaded American journalist Danny Pearl, observed this week’s seventh anniversary of his son’s murder with a powerful piece in the Wall Street Journal. He notes that “Those around the world who mourned for Danny in 2002 genuinely hoped that Danny’s murder would be a turning point in the history of man’s inhumanity to man, and that the targeting of innocents to transmit political messages would quickly become, like slavery and human sacrifice, an embarrassing relic of a bygone era.”
Unfortunately, that transformation has yet to occur and Professor Pearl blames advocates of relativism and moral equivalence like Jimmy Carter. “Acts of terror, according to Mr. Carter, are no longer taboo, but effective tools for terrorists to address perceived injustices.”
Regardless of his dignity as a former president and his personal graciousness, this point of view-- obfuscating the essential, eternal distinction between terrorist death cults and those who resist them—counts as the worst sort of folly and denial. It is, in fact, undeniably… worthless.
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
If you’ve got only eight minutes to confront a world leader whose impact and outlook you’ve despised and denounced for decades, then what’s the best way to take advantage of the interchange?
That was the dilemma facing me last Friday when former President Jimmy Carter agreed to a brief interview on my nationally syndicated radio program. We tried on many past occasions to book President Carter on the show but made no way headway with his representatives. This time, in the midst of the national publicity tour for his new book We Can Have Peace In The Holy Land: A Plan That Will Work, his handlers gave us twenty-four hours notice of his willingness to participate in a brief interview.
I’m certain that President Carter knows that I’ve spoken about him frequently on the air, almost always with contempt and derision. I’ve identified him as the worst president of the twentieth century – and perhaps of American history. Yes, I’ve described him repeatedly as “the worthless Jimmy Carter” and coined the deliberately disrespectful designation “The Worthless One.”
If nothing else, his determination to look past these insults in order to face down one of his harshest critics and to defend his controversial ideas demonstrated confidence and courage rarely displayed by his fellow liberal Democrats. Public figures like President Obama, Vice President Biden and Secretary Clinton have never agreed to conversations on my show (or any other conservative radio show) despite the fact that I’ve never assaulted them with anything like the vitriol I reserved for President Carter.
Preparing for our short conversation, I agonized over the right approach to the former president.
I could have thanked him, for instance, for helping to make me a Republican – confessing that I voted for him (somewhat reluctantly) in 1976, but felt so betrayed and disillusioned by the record of his administration that I never again supported another Democratic presidential candidate. One could make the case that no one – not even Ronald Reagan himself – did more to assure GOP success than President Carter. When he ran for re-election in 1980, the Republicans carried 44 of the fifty states (including Massachusetts, New York and California) and knocked off twelve incumbent Democratic Senators.
Beyond reminding Mr. Carter of this singular achievement, I could also note the approaching thirtieth anniversary of the nightmarish “Islamic Revolution” in Iran, and asked President Carter if he felt proud of his role in undermining the Shah, a consistent friend of America and Israel, and replacing him with the Mad Mullahs whose medieval theocracy still rules that benighted nation. In view of all the wretched developments since 1979, would President Carter now apologize for his devastatingly destructive role?
Then there were always pertinent issues regarding management of the economy: what advice could Jimmy Carter offer Barack Obama after leading the nation into a devastating and painful period that provided far more misery for typical Americans than the current crisis? The Carter era of “stagflation” (which reached its low point in the first two years under Mr. Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan) brought much higher rates of unemployment, inflation, mortgage interest, and disruption of energy supplies than anything experienced under George W. Bush. In light of the appalling results of his domestic leadership, could President Carter single out a few glaring missteps that Mr. Obama should, at all costs, avoid?
And speaking of missteps, what about those two new cabinet departments launched under President Carter’s leadership—the Department of Energy and the Department of Education? After the expenditure of literally hundreds of billions by the twin bureaucracies, and the employment of tens of thousands of largely useless government workers in the notoriously unfocused new departments, would President Carter judge his innovations a success? Is it any accident that the two tasks undertaken by the new Carter departments – securing and diversifying energy supplies and improving the quality of public education – represent two of the most conspicuous and undeniable failures in American life over the last three decades?
I thought about these questions and much more in preparing for my precious eight minutes with a major historical figure (and Nobel Peace Prize winner) but kept returning to the official premise of our interview: the former president’s current book, and ongoing role as an angry critic of Israel. We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land is a brief, sloppily-written and utterly self-serving account of Mr. Carter’s efforts both during and after his presidency to promote an Israel-Arab settlement. His much-touted “Plan That Will Work” is little more than a restatement of the “Road Map,” already endorsed in principle by the Israelis, the Palestinian Authority, the U.S., the European Union, the Russians and the U.N. To expand his large-print text to something like book length (214 pages), the former President inserts plenty of old U.N. Resolutions, texts of past peace plans, and ludicrously inaccurate historical assertions.
For instance, he describes the crucial year of 1939 as follows:
“Later, Palestinian Arabs demanded a halt to Jewish immigration and a ban on land sales to Jews, and in 1939 Britain announced severe restrictions on the Zionist movement and land purchases in Palestine. Violence erupted from Jewish militants, some led by Menachem Begin, the future prime minister of Israel.”
The idea that violence “erupted” only in 1939 and only from “Jewish militants” would receive no support from reputable historians – not even from those teaching at Islamic universities. Bloody Arab attacks on Jewish communities in the Holy Land began in 1920 and 21 (with more than 100 unarmed Jews massacred and 500 injured), then continued with more major riots against peaceful Jewish communities in 1929, 1931, and 1936 through 1939 (celebrated by Palestinians as “The Great Arab Revolt” – and claiming at least 500 more Jewish lives.) The restrictions on Jewish immigration at the height of Hitler’s persecution (the infamous “White Paper”) didn’t produce the bloodshed in the Holy Land – they resulted from violence by Palestinian gangs and militias as the British tried (in vain) to pacify the Arabs by giving them precisely what they wanted.
In addition to Mr. Carter’s appalling distortions of history, his new book delivers some unintentional hilarity as he describes his budding friendship with the terror-masters of Hamas. As the former President solemnly and hopefully recounts, “We pursued the concept of non-violent resistance of Hamas leaders and gave them documentation and video presentations of the successful experiences of Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, and others.” Reading this sentence, I considered asking the former president whether he ever got a movie review from the Hamas chieftains on the non-violent videos he gave them. In view of the continued daily rocket fire on Israel (in blatant violation of yet another one-sided cease fire) I suppose that the terrorists considered the edifying entertainment from Mr. Carter and ultimately rated it with two bombs down.
Given the strict limits on my time with Jimmy Carter, I resolved to concentrate on his bizarrely trusting and admiring attitude toward Hamas – despite its official designation as a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States, the European Union, and even its own founding documents. The point I determined to drive home involved the folly of appeasement, of relying on unenforceable negotiated agreements with bloodthirsty adversaries who give no indication at all of reliability. The comparison that struck me most forcefully involved the Nazis and Hamas: if anything, the Germans of 1938 (the year of the Munich Conference) looked more trustworthy, more rational, more self-disciplined (certainly) and less anti-Semitic than the suicidal murderers of Hamas. After all, the Nazis at the time spoke only of driving Jews out of Germany, not killing them, while the Hamas Charter speaks openly of a religious obligation to hasten judgment day by murdering all Jews.
In any event, I prepared for this line of questioning when President Carter called my show (precisely on time) during a commercial break and we chatted for a few minutes off the air.
In the interests of full disclosure, I told him at the outset that I had been harshly critical of him in my public comments (no, I did not repeat the phrase “the Worthless One.”) Mr. Carter said he was well aware of my criticism and graciously welcomed the chance to talk about it on the show. I also felt obliged to tell him that my father and brother chose to make their lives in Israel some twenty years ago, so I couldn’t pretend to objectivity on the issues discussed in his book. I recounted to President Carter that my father, who served in the Navy in the Second World War and spent his work life as a physicist in California, decided to retire to Jerusalem. Mr. Carter responded to that description by saying, “then I’ve got something in common with your father, because I’m also a Navy man.” I could have answered by noting that they also shared a passion for physics (which Mr. Carter avidly studied prior to his service on atomic submarines) and that my dad actually voted for Mr. Carter twice, but I didn’t get the chance as we came back from the break.
A transcript of our interchange follows:
MM: President Carter, thank you very much for joining us.
Carter: It's good to be with you. Thank you.
MM: Let me just go at this directly concerning some of the material in your book and also some of the comments you've made already discussing the book. I assume that you would join in the historical consensus that it was a terrible mistake for western leaders to trust and rely upon negotiated settlements with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis back in 1938.
Carter: Yes, I certainly would.
MM: My question is, why then do you have more confidence in agreements with Hamas, given the fact that, by any standard, Hamas is more openly anti-Semitic, more openly violent and less responsible than the Nazis appeared to be in 1938?
Carter: Well, I don't agree with that premise. Do I have to agree with the premise to answer the question?
MM: No, not at all.
Carter: Okay, well I know the Hamas leaders, I've talked to them in depth and I've shared what I've learned from them with the chief negotiator between Israel and Hamas—and that is Omar Suleiman in Egypt. I went over to the mid-east in April. I first stopped at Sderot with my wife and saw the missiles coming in—and I condemned the firing of those missiles as terrorism. The mayor of Sderot called a town meeting for me and he said that Israel was neither negotiating with Hamas, nor punishing Hamas. And I promised those people there that I would go and meet with Hamas leaders and try to get the missiles stopped. So, to make a long story short, I did. I went to Damascus, met with the top leaders of Hamas—the politburo members—and I finally got them to agree to depart from their previous policy of insisting on a cease fire in Gaza—and in the West Bank…Israel would supply the full quantity of food and medicine and water and fuel they had when they were in charge of Gaza.
MM: President Carter, with all due respect...
Carter: Go ahead.
MM: You've read the Hamas Charter.
Carter: Yes, and I read the charter of the PLO too, that still stated the existence 5 years after the Olso agreement.
MM: Right but it's been changed since Olso—afterward. But the Hamas Charter includes more anti-Semitic passages than anything in “Mein Kampf.” Mein Kampf never talked about massacring all Jews. The Hamas Charter talks about that.
Carter: If you wanna talk about that ancient history, fine, but if you want to talk about what's going on now--
MM: --Well that's still the Hamas Charter, even Mr. Marzouk said they haven't changed it.
Carter: When I was there, they authorized me to make a statement for them in Israel, which I did when I got back to Jerusalem at a very large meeting of the foreign policy organization in Israel. And they made a simultaneous statement—the leader of Hamas, to Al Jazeera and a large collection of news media--that Hamas will accept any agreement, any peace agreement negotiated between Abu Mazen and Israel, if the agreement is submitted to the people in the West Bank in Gaza in a referendum and approved. That's what they have agreed to do. And they also told me, not publicly, that they would accept Israel's right to exist and to live in peace, but they would not recognize Israel diplomatically unless Israel was prepared to recognize Hamas and Fatah diplomatically. And as you know, Israel has never even recognized the Palestinian Authority, they've only recognized the PLO.
MM: Okay, President Carter, the section of the Hamas Charter—and I'm holding it in front of me—that I'm particularly concerned about---
Carter: ---I'm not going to try to defend the Hamas Charter any more than I would try to defend the PLO charter, because it calls for the destruction of Israel---
MM: ---It calls for the murder of individual Jews. It calls for the murder of all Jews so that judgment day can come. It says, "The Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realization of Allah's promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said, “The day of judgment will not come about until Muslims kill the Jews (and the passage adds: “When the Jews will hide behind stones and trees, the sones and trees will say, O Muslim, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”)
Carter:--If you want to talk about ancient history, Christians believe that in the second coming, Christ can't come back to the Holy Land until all Jews are either dead or become Christian.
MM: Nobody is calling upon the State of Israel to rely for its security on a promise from people who believe that. But you think that the State of Israel, and the United States of America, should count on promises by Hamas. Right?
Carter: As you possibly know, the United States does not recognize or, at this time, does not deal with Hamas. But, the leaders of the United States are sure—along with anyone else who is rational about it—that you can't have a permanent peace in the mid-east unless Hamas and its supporters are involved, because Hamas now has the support, probably, of a majority of Palestinians, and the Palestinians have to negotiate with Israel.
MM: Would you advise Israeli leaders to feel confident about promises from Hamas?
Carter: I know that in last April--you can look it up yourself if you will--there was a public opinion poll done in Israel reported in Haaretz where 64% of the Israeli public, including your relatives who live over there, I presume, voted that Israel should be dealing directly with Hamas--should be negotiating with Hamas. And the leaders of the three top Israeli intelligence agencies said the same thing.
MM: There's not a single Israeli politician in any of the leading parties who believes that, President Carter. I'm sorry that our time is up. I wish we could continue the conversation.....
I deeply regret that the commercial came up and the interview drew to a close before I could correct some of the misimpressions the former President conveyed. The Israelis who favor negotiating with Hamas do so on the same basis that the Bush administration suggested it could countenance such negotiation: only if Hamas renounced violence, recognized Israel, and committed to honor past agreements signed in the name of the Palestinian People. President Carter’s support for the notion that Hamas will recognize Israel only when Israel recognizes Hamas is a pathetic effort to equate a rag-tag group of terrorists who can’t even govern the tiny territory of Gaza with a prosperous, powerful and democratic nation-state that’s been a member of the United Nations for 60 years.
I also should have expressed greater indignation at Mr. Carter twice dismissing the Hamas Charter as “ancient history” even though the leaders of that organization have made no effort to alter it. In fact, they illustrate their commitment to the principles of that extremist document every day, with their profoundly self-destructive launch of rockets toward Israeli civilians.
In another sense, “ancient history” is always relevant to the Middle East since both sides base their claims on remembered greatness and perceived grievance going back for centuries. Israel and her most fervent Christian supporters make no apologies for feeling animated and inspired by ancient prophecies, and the fulfillment of those visions by the modern Jewish state.
There’s also a timeless, eternal quality to the nature of the ongoing struggle—which is, at its heart, a conflict between life and death, peace and war, good and evil. The recent fighting in Gaza highlighted the contrast between the two sides, with Hamas trying to gain by deliberately maximizing casualties (both among Israeli troops and Palestinian civilians) while Israel could succeed only by minimizing death and injury (among its own soldiers as well as among the civilians in Gaza). Jimmy Carter’s moral blindness leads him to equate those who celebrate the suicides of their own children and the murder of their neighbors’ kids, with those who mourn violence against any innocents.
Judea Pearl, the father of beheaded American journalist Danny Pearl, observed this week’s seventh anniversary of his son’s murder with a powerful piece in the Wall Street Journal. He notes that “Those around the world who mourned for Danny in 2002 genuinely hoped that Danny’s murder would be a turning point in the history of man’s inhumanity to man, and that the targeting of innocents to transmit political messages would quickly become, like slavery and human sacrifice, an embarrassing relic of a bygone era.”
Unfortunately, that transformation has yet to occur and Professor Pearl blames advocates of relativism and moral equivalence like Jimmy Carter. “Acts of terror, according to Mr. Carter, are no longer taboo, but effective tools for terrorists to address perceived injustices.”
Regardless of his dignity as a former president and his personal graciousness, this point of view-- obfuscating the essential, eternal distinction between terrorist death cults and those who resist them—counts as the worst sort of folly and denial. It is, in fact, undeniably… worthless.
Obama and Iraq's Emerging Victory
Austin Bay
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
The BBC Website headline, appearing on Jan. 31 as Iraq's provincial elections concluded, read: "Peace and Quiet Mark Iraq Polls."
How praiseworthy, BBC, I muttered -- a restrained headline touting the relative absence of violence.
And a decent job of planning and execution, Iraqi Army, I thought as I scanned the BBC's report. The scan elicited a string of memories. Civilians anywhere are always easy targets -- that's why al-Qaida, Saddam's Baathist holdouts, and the gangs we call the Mahdi Army and "special groups" still target Iraqi civilians. It's why Pakistani terrorists struck Mumbai -- the Indian Army is a hard target, a Mumbai street vendor isn't.
But voters traipsing to the polls offer terrorists particularly easy targets ripe for mass murder, which in turn generates the sensational headlines terrorists seek. Protecting civilians on sidewalks entering and exiting easily accessible locations (i.e., polling places) was one of the biggest problems confronting U.S., coalition and Iraqi forces during 2004 as they prepared for Iraq's historic January 2005 elections.
I know from personal experience -- the plans team I served with in Iraq struggled with this complex problem. The courage of the Iraqi people won that election, as ink-stained fingers became the symbol of democratic will in the face of personal danger.
Electoral peace and quiet in January 2009 told me Iraqi police and military forces conducted an intricate nationwide security operation -- another sign of organizational maturity, improving intelligence and increasing professional confidence.
The election, however, is much more than a significant headline and a solid security operation. The election demonstrates rather dramatically that Iraq's process of political maturation continues. Remember, the first post-Saddam vote took place only four years ago, and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government formed in May 2006. In this election, voters punished several sectarian parties, tossing the rascals out because they hadn't performed. In several provinces, Iraqi secular political parties did much better, which is a sharp blow to extremist Shias and their Iranian financiers.
The election is also an implicit rebuke -- delivered by the Iraqi people -- of posturing defeatists like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who declared Iraq a lost war and a hopeless cause. Perhaps the commentators who claim Arabs can't handle democracy will reconsider their position.
In the next week or so, I hope to read this headline: "Sen. Reid, we didn't lose. And there is hope in Iraq, President Obama, because there has been significant change. Now don't blow it just because you ran on a platform of retreat."
Not a headline? It ought to be.
Obama is a very lucky new president -- he has an emerging victory at hand. Securing it and reinforcing it will enhance his chances of achieving "Lincoln-esque" stature. The Iraqi people have earned their democracy. Historical accusations of "abandonment" and "self-defeat" don't burnish a presidential legacy.
Operation Charge of the Kings, launched in March 2008, showed that the Iraqi Army was able to plan and conduct large-scale combat and counter-insurgency operations. The U.S. and coalition forces, however, provided air, intelligence and logistical support.
In many respects, Charge of the Knights provided an example of what "strategic overwatch" looks like, the where U.S. air, intelligence and logistics assets aid Iraqi planned, led and manned security operations. "Strategic overwatch" is a delicate, multi-year process, "a wind-down" (force withdrawal) phase that could include a sudden "build-up" (reinforcement). "Strategic overwatch" is complicated -- it requires diplomacy, economic and political engagement, and steadying leadership.
Terror campaigns and insurgencies end with diminishing codas of violence. Peace and quiet -- prevalent during this past election -- instantly disappear when a terrorist tosses a grenade. The Iraqi government has improved markedly in its ability to handle internal violence, but troublemaking by neighbors like Syria and Iran remain a huge threat.
In Fargo, N.D., early last July, Obama began a "war flip-flop" by suggesting he might "refine" his Iraq policy. He needs to start refining right now -- and assure the Iraqis they will not be abandoned. The sharpest refinement would be to accept the challenges of "strategic overwatch" and help ensure a region-changing and potentially century-shaping victory.
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
The BBC Website headline, appearing on Jan. 31 as Iraq's provincial elections concluded, read: "Peace and Quiet Mark Iraq Polls."
How praiseworthy, BBC, I muttered -- a restrained headline touting the relative absence of violence.
And a decent job of planning and execution, Iraqi Army, I thought as I scanned the BBC's report. The scan elicited a string of memories. Civilians anywhere are always easy targets -- that's why al-Qaida, Saddam's Baathist holdouts, and the gangs we call the Mahdi Army and "special groups" still target Iraqi civilians. It's why Pakistani terrorists struck Mumbai -- the Indian Army is a hard target, a Mumbai street vendor isn't.
But voters traipsing to the polls offer terrorists particularly easy targets ripe for mass murder, which in turn generates the sensational headlines terrorists seek. Protecting civilians on sidewalks entering and exiting easily accessible locations (i.e., polling places) was one of the biggest problems confronting U.S., coalition and Iraqi forces during 2004 as they prepared for Iraq's historic January 2005 elections.
I know from personal experience -- the plans team I served with in Iraq struggled with this complex problem. The courage of the Iraqi people won that election, as ink-stained fingers became the symbol of democratic will in the face of personal danger.
Electoral peace and quiet in January 2009 told me Iraqi police and military forces conducted an intricate nationwide security operation -- another sign of organizational maturity, improving intelligence and increasing professional confidence.
The election, however, is much more than a significant headline and a solid security operation. The election demonstrates rather dramatically that Iraq's process of political maturation continues. Remember, the first post-Saddam vote took place only four years ago, and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government formed in May 2006. In this election, voters punished several sectarian parties, tossing the rascals out because they hadn't performed. In several provinces, Iraqi secular political parties did much better, which is a sharp blow to extremist Shias and their Iranian financiers.
The election is also an implicit rebuke -- delivered by the Iraqi people -- of posturing defeatists like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who declared Iraq a lost war and a hopeless cause. Perhaps the commentators who claim Arabs can't handle democracy will reconsider their position.
In the next week or so, I hope to read this headline: "Sen. Reid, we didn't lose. And there is hope in Iraq, President Obama, because there has been significant change. Now don't blow it just because you ran on a platform of retreat."
Not a headline? It ought to be.
Obama is a very lucky new president -- he has an emerging victory at hand. Securing it and reinforcing it will enhance his chances of achieving "Lincoln-esque" stature. The Iraqi people have earned their democracy. Historical accusations of "abandonment" and "self-defeat" don't burnish a presidential legacy.
Operation Charge of the Kings, launched in March 2008, showed that the Iraqi Army was able to plan and conduct large-scale combat and counter-insurgency operations. The U.S. and coalition forces, however, provided air, intelligence and logistical support.
In many respects, Charge of the Knights provided an example of what "strategic overwatch" looks like, the where U.S. air, intelligence and logistics assets aid Iraqi planned, led and manned security operations. "Strategic overwatch" is a delicate, multi-year process, "a wind-down" (force withdrawal) phase that could include a sudden "build-up" (reinforcement). "Strategic overwatch" is complicated -- it requires diplomacy, economic and political engagement, and steadying leadership.
Terror campaigns and insurgencies end with diminishing codas of violence. Peace and quiet -- prevalent during this past election -- instantly disappear when a terrorist tosses a grenade. The Iraqi government has improved markedly in its ability to handle internal violence, but troublemaking by neighbors like Syria and Iran remain a huge threat.
In Fargo, N.D., early last July, Obama began a "war flip-flop" by suggesting he might "refine" his Iraq policy. He needs to start refining right now -- and assure the Iraqis they will not be abandoned. The sharpest refinement would be to accept the challenges of "strategic overwatch" and help ensure a region-changing and potentially century-shaping victory.
Finding the Moderate Muslims
Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
In the aftermath of Sept. 11, President George W. Bush rushed to assure Americans that Islam was a religion of peace. In his first speech after the murderous attacks, Bush stated, (Islams) teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah.
Bush strained to support this position by seeking out moderate Muslims across America. One of the first groups he approached was the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Bush met with CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad soon after Sept. 11. That began a federal precedent of kowtowing to CAIR. In December 2004, FBI counter-terrorism agents in Florida were forced to attend sensitivity training by CAIR. In January 2005, CAIR met with top State Department officials to discuss American foreign policy; Awad proposed a cooperative effort to challenge Islamophobia. In January 2007, the Transportation Security Administration initiated CAIRs Hajj Sensitivity Training, featuring it on their website.
There was only one problem: CAIR is an organization with deep ties to terrorists in the Middle East. According to Andrew McCarthy of National Review, CAIR was created by a wing of Hamas, the Islamic Association for Palestine. Awad was president of the Islamic Association For Palestine . Much of CAIRs early money came from the Holy Land Foundation -- the same foundation that had its funds frozen in the aftermath of Sept. 11, and the same foundation whose founder, Ghassan Elashi, headed up the CAIR chapter in Texas.
While CAIR was posing as a defender of moderate Islam, it was simultaneously silencing critics with lawsuits. Anti-CAIR, an organization dedicated to exposing the truth about CAIRs radicalism, found itself hauled into court for defamation. The suit was dismissed in favor of Anti-CAIR. Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the southern California office of CAIR, sued National Review after writer Shawn Steel criticized CAIR. CAIR sued former U.S. Rep. Cass Ballenger, R-N.C., after he called CAIR the fund-raising arm for Hezbollah. CAIR attempted to sue columnist David Frum for similar charges.
Not only is CAIR an extreme group with Islamist sympathies and dissent-crushing tendencies, it is allegedly involved in criminal fraud and racketeering. David Yerushalmi, a securities litigator currently enmeshed in a case against CAIR, told me that CAIR was using its status as a public interest law firm to hire non-lawyers for other purposes.
Finally, in the last days of the George W. Bush administration, the FBI recognized CAIRs extremism. According to Fox News, the FBI recently cut ties with local branches of CAIR in the aftermath of a 15-year FBI investigation suggesting CAIRs connections with Hamas fundraising.
What took them so long? The desperation for a group of moderate Muslims led the Bush administration to embrace Americas enemies. The Bush administration needed to convince the American people that American Muslims are universally westernized, and so they embraced the most convenient resource: CAIR. That embrace weakened Americas security, allowed terrorist-sympathizers the ear of the law enforcement community, and legitimized extremists to the detriment of true Muslim moderates.
Bushs ignorance of our enemies -- his presumption that Western Muslims are westernized Muslims -- caused him to ignore the search for true moderate Muslims in favor of convenient front groups. Unfortunately, President Obama is following in Bushs footsteps. In Obamas recent interview with Al-Arabiya, he stated, my job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives. This evades the problem of Muslim extremism. Clearly, not all Muslims are moderate, and treating them as such does real moderate Muslims an incredible disservice. Treating all Muslims as moderate means treating Hamas members like members of the local mosque. That isnt just foolish, its dangerous.
Instead of relying on platitudes, Obama must find moderate Muslims and bolster their moderation. That requires intensive time and effort, the kind of time and effort President Bush never expended.
President Obama is uniquely qualified for such a task. If he truly wishes to reach out to the Muslim community, he must find those who share Americans love for liberty and freedom, who believe in an open society of religious pluralism. He can start by denouncing CAIR and any other domestic Islamist groups who call themselves moderate Muslims without demonstrating any moderation.
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
In the aftermath of Sept. 11, President George W. Bush rushed to assure Americans that Islam was a religion of peace. In his first speech after the murderous attacks, Bush stated, (Islams) teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah.
Bush strained to support this position by seeking out moderate Muslims across America. One of the first groups he approached was the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Bush met with CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad soon after Sept. 11. That began a federal precedent of kowtowing to CAIR. In December 2004, FBI counter-terrorism agents in Florida were forced to attend sensitivity training by CAIR. In January 2005, CAIR met with top State Department officials to discuss American foreign policy; Awad proposed a cooperative effort to challenge Islamophobia. In January 2007, the Transportation Security Administration initiated CAIRs Hajj Sensitivity Training, featuring it on their website.
There was only one problem: CAIR is an organization with deep ties to terrorists in the Middle East. According to Andrew McCarthy of National Review, CAIR was created by a wing of Hamas, the Islamic Association for Palestine. Awad was president of the Islamic Association For Palestine . Much of CAIRs early money came from the Holy Land Foundation -- the same foundation that had its funds frozen in the aftermath of Sept. 11, and the same foundation whose founder, Ghassan Elashi, headed up the CAIR chapter in Texas.
While CAIR was posing as a defender of moderate Islam, it was simultaneously silencing critics with lawsuits. Anti-CAIR, an organization dedicated to exposing the truth about CAIRs radicalism, found itself hauled into court for defamation. The suit was dismissed in favor of Anti-CAIR. Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the southern California office of CAIR, sued National Review after writer Shawn Steel criticized CAIR. CAIR sued former U.S. Rep. Cass Ballenger, R-N.C., after he called CAIR the fund-raising arm for Hezbollah. CAIR attempted to sue columnist David Frum for similar charges.
Not only is CAIR an extreme group with Islamist sympathies and dissent-crushing tendencies, it is allegedly involved in criminal fraud and racketeering. David Yerushalmi, a securities litigator currently enmeshed in a case against CAIR, told me that CAIR was using its status as a public interest law firm to hire non-lawyers for other purposes.
Finally, in the last days of the George W. Bush administration, the FBI recognized CAIRs extremism. According to Fox News, the FBI recently cut ties with local branches of CAIR in the aftermath of a 15-year FBI investigation suggesting CAIRs connections with Hamas fundraising.
What took them so long? The desperation for a group of moderate Muslims led the Bush administration to embrace Americas enemies. The Bush administration needed to convince the American people that American Muslims are universally westernized, and so they embraced the most convenient resource: CAIR. That embrace weakened Americas security, allowed terrorist-sympathizers the ear of the law enforcement community, and legitimized extremists to the detriment of true Muslim moderates.
Bushs ignorance of our enemies -- his presumption that Western Muslims are westernized Muslims -- caused him to ignore the search for true moderate Muslims in favor of convenient front groups. Unfortunately, President Obama is following in Bushs footsteps. In Obamas recent interview with Al-Arabiya, he stated, my job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives. This evades the problem of Muslim extremism. Clearly, not all Muslims are moderate, and treating them as such does real moderate Muslims an incredible disservice. Treating all Muslims as moderate means treating Hamas members like members of the local mosque. That isnt just foolish, its dangerous.
Instead of relying on platitudes, Obama must find moderate Muslims and bolster their moderation. That requires intensive time and effort, the kind of time and effort President Bush never expended.
President Obama is uniquely qualified for such a task. If he truly wishes to reach out to the Muslim community, he must find those who share Americans love for liberty and freedom, who believe in an open society of religious pluralism. He can start by denouncing CAIR and any other domestic Islamist groups who call themselves moderate Muslims without demonstrating any moderation.
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