The Return of the Queue

By  Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, December 03, 2013

The American writer Bill Bryson once wrote that it was a shame that the “important experiment” of Communism had been left to the Russians when the British would have “managed it so much better.” Prepared by their reserved and ordered culture for the deprivations that come inevitably with government control, he proposed, the Brits would have accepted their fate with alacrity. Keep Calm and Carry On, and all that.

In some sense, they already had. During the stagnation and decline of the 1970s, the people of Bryson’s adopted home demonstrated an uncommon readiness to “queue patiently for indefinite periods” and to “wait uncomplainingly for years for an operation or the delivery of a household appliance.” Surely, the reasoning went, this could be pushed ad infinitum? Surely, there was no line so long that an Englishman wouldn’t join it?

As a piece of social commentary, the basic thrust of Bryson’s claim is correct: Traditionally, the British are rather patient. Nevertheless, the notion that even a patient people will queue indefinitely is so much romantic fluff. They won’t. And for a government to ask them to do so is for that government to open itself up to defeat.

This, the polls suggest, is precisely what the Obama administration has been busy doing over the past few months. Before October of this year, conservatives trying to make the case that state intrusion led inexorably to queuing and to inefficiency were forced to rely on local failures to illustrate their point. “Do you really want your healthcare run by the DMV?” was a common refrain. “How about the Post Office?” Nowadays, there is no need for hypotheticals. Critics can just say “Obamacare.” In December of 2013, dissenters can point to the long lines, to the shoddy service, and to the reports of frustrated users waiting for hours to get onto the site — and they can say, “I told you so!” It’s been two months since the website was launched, and swathes of people remain unable even to browse plans. Isn’t this exactly what we were warned about?

If he has the time and the stomach, the president could do worse than to read the story of the 1979 British general election. The Right’s post-rationalizations notwithstanding, Mrs. Thatcher’s ascent was not primarily a sign that the British had been magically converted to the charms of privatization, free markets, tax cuts, and a strong defense, but that they were sick and tired of what socialism had done to their country and that they were reluctantly prepared to give the other side a shot. To her immense credit, Thatcher recognized this, and she made sure that her branding focused more on dissatisfaction with the status quo than on her own ideology. The Conservative party’s election-season message was pitch-perfect for the moment: Showing a snaking line of people outside an unemployment office, giant posters across the country featured three simple words: “Labour Isn’t Working.”

The great genius of the ’79 campaign was that it served as a veritable Rorschach test onto which voters could project their many grievances. The high unemployment rate was certainly a critical problem for the incumbent government, yes. But arguably more so was that years of ludicrous statism had led to trash piling up in the streets, to the dead going unburied, and to the electricity supply’s being so capriciously limited that many households enjoyed just three days of power a week. By the late 1970s, nearly every government service in Britain was wholly dysfunctional — which was a problem given that almost everything had been nationalized. When my parents were in their mid-twenties, it was not uncommon for customers to wait six months just to receive a telephone from British Telecom. Interminable queues were a way of life, even for the lucky employed. Eventually, the public revolted.

That the public will eventually rebel against government-imposed misery has long been the savior of reformers on both sides of the Atlantic. In the 1980s, America’s radicals knew deep down that they had not yet won the libertarian argument with the public. Instead, they had the long lines, inefficiency, and public-sector dysfunction as shorthand for their opponents’ political shortcomings. During the 1979 energy crisis, as cars piled up outside gas stations and panic buying set in, a stunned Republican party recognized that it could just sit back and wait. Democrats, stung for a generation by a reputation for incompetence and overreach, won office again only after they had near explicitly disavowed “big government.”

It is difficult to overstate just how dangerous to the progressive agenda the rollout of Obamacare has been. “HealthCare.gov has a lot of visitors right now!” the site’s failure screen announces bluntly when the system is overloaded (which is always). “We need you to wait here so we can make sure there’s room for you.”

As of yesterday, the site quite literally asks visitors to enter a “queue.” This is the ugly language of the unemployment office or the understaffed hospital — not, suffice it to say, what advocates had hoped consumers would see.

Most disquietingly for the Left, the failure has transcended the political arena. So widely known are the site’s woes that “Obamacare” has become a lazy joke — a byword for catastrophe than merely needs to be repeated to elicit laughter. In recent weeks, it has appeared in various forms on homemade signs at football games, in late-night monologues, and in a thousand memes across the apolitical Internet. Mockery being perhaps the most difficult attack to counter, this will be a difficult blow from which to recover.

Which makes it all the more peculiar that advocates have taken to selling the long lines as a virtue — a feature, not a bug. “By GOP logic,” MSNBC’s Alex Wagner inexplicably tweeted on Monday, “black friday was a complete failure because of all those people lined up outside the stores.” Leaving to one rather large side the fact that private stores judge their successes not by the size of the queues but by the number of items that they sell, this really isn’t the pitch I’d be making. Conservatives have been warning from the outset that the federal government can’t run a system this large, that forcing people to become reliant upon exchanges run by Washington, D.C., was a mistake, and that rationing was unavoidable. They have been painting pictures of shoddy treatment and long lines. These critiques have been sharpened, not overwritten, by the rollout. What gives?

Nevertheless, pointing to the size of the backlog has been a mainstay of the progressive defense. From the Washington Post’s Wonkblog, through the Daily Kos, to the White House itself, “look at all the people trying to get onto the site!” has been the tactic du choix through launch, failure, and relaunch. If conservatives should worry that a working website will remove one weapon from their arsenal, progressives should be waking up at night quivering at the thought that their apologists are drawing attention to their movement’s historical bête noire: the queue.

Thus far, Obamacare’s principal achievement has been to kick millions of people off of plans with which they were happy while mandating that they buy replacement insurance through a government-run choke point that’s sometimes just closed entirely. I suspect that, if the website is ever truly “fixed,” the law is going to become more, not less, of a liability for the Left. Either way, it is almost certain that next time somebody suggests a vast government program as the remedy to America’s ills, it will be more than just conservative critics who say, as one, “your heart’s in the right place, but remember how Obamacare went . . . ”

Liberals Are Culture War Aggressors

By Jonah Goldberg

Monday, December 02, 2013

Maybe someone can explain to me how, exactly, conservatives are the aggressors in the culture war? In the conventional narrative of American politics, conservatives are obsessed with social issues. They want to impose their values on everyone else. They want the government involved in your bedroom. Those mean right-wingers want to make "health care choices" for women.

Now consider last week's decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to consider two cases stemming from Obamacare: Conestoga Wood Specialties v. Sebelius and Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores. Democratic politicians and their fans on social media went ballistic almost instantly. That's hardly unusual these days. But what's revealing is that the talking points are all wrong.

Suddenly, the government is the hero for getting deeply involved in the reproductive choices of nearly every American, whether you want the government involved or not. The bad guy is now your boss who, according to an outraged Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., would be free to keep you from everything from HIV treatment to vaccinating your children if Hobby Lobby has its way. Murray and the White House insist that every business should be compelled by law to protect its employees' "right" to "contraception" that is "free."

I put all three words in quotation marks because these are deeply contentious claims. For starters, the right to free birth control — or health care generally — is not one you'll find in the Constitution. And even if you think it should be a right, that is hardly a settled issue in American life.

The right to own a gun is a far more settled issue constitutionally, politically and legally in this country, but not even the National Rifle Association would dream to argue that we have a right to free guns, provided by our employers. If your boss were required to give you a gun, your new employer-provided Glock still wouldn't be free because non-cash compensation is still compensation. The costs to the employer are fungible, which means whether it's a pistol or a pill, the cost is still coming out of your paycheck — and your coworkers' paychecks.

"Regular, predictable expenses such as birth control pills cannot be defrayed by insurance; they can only be prepaid, with a markup for the insurer's administrative costs," writes Bloomberg's Megan McArdle. "The extra cost is passed on by the insurers to your employer, and from your employer to you and your fellow workers, either by raising your contribution or lowering the wage they are willing to offer."

Last, birth control pills really aren't the issue. Both companies suing the government under Obamacare have no objection to providing insurance plans that cover the cost of birth control pills and other forms of contraception. What both the Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties object to is paying for abortifacients — drugs that terminate a pregnancy rather than prevent one. (Hobby Lobby also opposes paying for IUDs, which prevent implantation of a fertilized egg.) The distinction is simple: Contraception prevents fertilization and pregnancy. Drugs such as "Plan B" terminate a pregnancy, albeit at an extremely early stage.

The plaintiffs in these cases aren't saying the government should ban abortifacients or make it impossible for their employees to buy them. All they are asking is that the people using such drugs pay for them themselves rather than force employers and co-workers to share the cost. In other words, Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood want such birth control decisions to be left to individual women and their doctors. Leave the rest of us out of it.

But leaving the rest of us out of it is exactly the opposite intent of the authors of Obamacare. The law forces not only arts and crafts shops but also Catholic charities and other religiously inspired groups to choose between fulfilling their mission or violating their values. You may have no moral objection to such things, but millions of people do. By what right are liberals seeking to impose their values on everyone else? Isn't that something they denounce conservatives for?

They could have allowed for plans that exclude controversial forms of birth control — or even uncontroversial ones — which would have lowered premium costs and expanded health care coverage to more poor people.

But Democrats wanted a wedge issue to drum up a new battle in the culture war — a war in which liberals have always been the aggressors.

Explaining the Test-Score Gap

By  Thomas Sowell

Tuesday, December 03, 2013

Depressing news about black students scoring far below white students on various mental tests has become so familiar that people in different parts of the ideological spectrum have long ago developed their different explanations for why this is so. But both may have to do some rethinking, in light of radically different news from England.

The November 9–15 issue of the distinguished British magazine The Economist reports that, among children who are eligible for free meals in England’s schools, black children of immigrants from Africa meet the standards of school tests nearly 60 percent of the time — as do immigrant children from Bangladesh and Pakistan. Black children of immigrants from the Caribbean meet the standards less than 50 percent of the time.

At the bottom, among those children who are all from families with incomes low enough to receive free meals at school, are white English children, who meet the standards 30 percent of the time.

The Economist points out that, in one borough of London, white students scored lower than black students of every London borough.

These data might seem to be some kind of fluke, but they confirm the observations in a book titled Life at the Bottom by British physician Theodore Dalrymple. He said that, among the patients he treated in a hospital near a low-income housing project, he could not recall any white 16-year-old who could multiply nine by seven. Some could not even do three times seven.

What jolts us is not only that this phenomenon is so different from what we are used to seeing in the United States, but also that it fits neither the genetic nor the environmental explanation of black-white educational differences here.

These white students in England come from the same race that produced Shakespeare and the great scientist Sir Isaac Newton, among other world-class intellects over the centuries. But today many young whites in England are barely literate, and have trouble with simple arithmetic. Nor are these white students the victims of racial discrimination, much less the descendants of slaves.

With the two main explanations for low performances on school tests obviously not applicable in England, there must be some other explanation. And once there is some other explanation in this case, we have to wonder if that other explanation — whatever it is — might also apply in the United States, to one degree or another.

In other words, maybe our own explanations need reexamination.

What do low-income whites in England and ghetto blacks in the United States have in common? It cannot be simply low incomes, because children from other groups in the same low-income brackets outperform whites in England and outperform blacks in America.

What low-income whites in England and ghetto blacks in the United States have in common is a generations-long indoctrination in victimhood. The political Left in both countries has, for more than half a century, maintained a steady and loud drumbeat of claims that the deck is stacked against those at the bottom.

The American Left uses race and the British Left uses class, but the British Left has been at it longer. In both countries, immigrants who have not been in the country as long have not been so distracted by such ideology into a blind resentment and lashing out at other people.

In both countries, immigrants enter a supposedly closed society that refuses to let anyone rise — and they nevertheless rise, while the native-born at the bottom remain at the bottom.

Those who promote an ideology of victimhood may imagine that they are helping those at the bottom, when in fact they are harming them, more so than the society that the Left is denouncing.

We in America have gotten used to vast gaps between blacks and whites on test scores. But this was not always the case, in places where there was anything like comparable education.

Back in the 1940s, before the vast expansion of the welfare state and the ideology of victimhood used to justify it, there was no such gap on test scores between black schools in Harlem and white, working-class schools on New York’s Lower East Side.

You can find the data on pages 40–41 of an article of mine in the Fall 1981 issue of Teachers College Record, a journal published by Columbia University — that is, if you think facts matter more than rhetoric or social visions.

Lies and Hypocrisy Are Essential Components of Liberalism

By Kurt Schlichter

Monday, December 02, 2013

Recent events once again demonstrate that there is no point arguing with liberals. Reason, facts, truth – these bourgeois concepts mean nothing to the adherents of progressivism. You are never going to change the mind of someone who believes in nothing except the imperative of his own absolute power. You simply have to defeat him.

Progressivism is not a coherent ideology so much as a purpose – to control every aspect of our lives. It is about consolidating progressive power. Nothing else matters. That includes the truth.

This is why we see YouTube videos of Harry Reid, Joe Biden and Barack Obama waxing eloquently, while in the minority, about the moral necessity of the preserving the filibuster that they just shot through the forehead when in the majority.

This is what led to an agreement ensuring that a power that explicitly states its intention to reboot the Holocaust, once it finishes hanging all its gays, will be able to create the means to do so.

This is the reason the President repeated dozens of times that if you like your health plan and your doctor you can keep them even though he knew this to be an outright lie.

Progressivism is not about principles but necessity. Yesterday, the left needed the filibuster to bar conservative judges. Today, it needs to pack courts with allies who will rule in whatever way progressives need, so the filibuster goes.

Sure, progressives pose as friends of Jews and gays when it’s convenient, but now it’s more convenient to get the Obamacare abomination off the front page while simultaneously weakening America and Israel. For progressives, that’s a win-win-win. And if some Jews and gays have to die, well, uh … hey look! Republicans want to make you pay for your own birth control!

Progressives needed to provide cover to their legislators to socialize the health care system, so they simply lied. The only fault the progressive-owned mainstream media can find with that is with us for being stupid enough to believe what the liberals told us.

I agree. If you believe anything a liberal tells you, if you imagine you can count on a liberal to hold to any particular principle when that principle stops being useful as a means to accumulate power, you are a fool.

Such people still get surprised when the pro-woman party slut shames women who object to being used as sex toys by feminist heroes. Teddy got drunk and left a woman to drown in his Oldsmobile after he drove off a bridge on the way to a routine session of joyless, creepy Kennedy adultery. Mary Jo Kopechne died; Teddy was hoisted on a sea of liberal shoulders and hailed as the “Lion of the Senate.”

But Teddy arguably had the moral high ground compared to liberal icon Robert Byrd, the Grand Imperial Cyclops Kleagle of the Senate. Their degeneracy was irrelevant; they were both useful to progressivism. Nothing else mattered.

Yet the squish caucus wing of the GOP still imagines that it can make deals with the liberals, as if this time Lucy Reid is really, truly, totally going to hold that football in place so that the Lindsey Browns can kick it.

Look at these GOP mouth-breathers and their undying fixation on amnesty. Obama won’t enforce the laws we have. In what universe could any idiot be stupid enough to imagine that he might enforce any of the laws that the GOP amnesty appeasers might get in exchange for their abject capitulation?

You can’t negotiate with progressivism. You can’t reason with it. You can’t compromise with it.

You have to destroy it, utterly, root and branch.

Understand that progressivism isn’t just another way of looking at things. It isn’t an equally valid lifestyle that we should treat with respect and courtesy. It is not an intellectual peer of conservatism.

Progressivism is the hapless Cousin Oliver of the collectivist Brady Bunch. Whether you label it “progressivism,” “socialism,” “communism” or “fascism,” it’s all just the same collectivist tyranny, varying only by degrees of bloodshed and fashion choices. Differentiating them is like choosing between herpes strains – it’s just a matter of the size of the chancres.

We need to know our enemy and understand it, because when we do we can destroy it.

Expect hypocrisy. Expect lies. Highlight them certainly, but not for ourselves. We know that hypocrisy and lies are essential components of progressivism. Do it instead for those who don’t yet understand. Do it for the undecided in the battle for the soul of America.

It’s that mass of people who are not aware of just what a sick power grab progressivism really is behind its false front of “caring” and “social justice” that we need to reach. If their hearts and minds weren’t in play, the progressives wouldn’t bother lying to them. They would enforce their will with storm troopers.

We are still at the stage where the opinions and desires of people who aren’t progressive still matter – the hypocrisy and lies are part of the long-term process designed to change that forever.

We must continue to highlight this truth: Progressives care about gays, women, blacks and other groups only to the extent that appearing to do so brings short-term political advantage.

Does anyone think progressives wouldn’t abandon their belief in their right to government-funded abortion at will if having that belief stopped being useful? You could ask the gays in Iran about how pro-gay progressives are when liberal leaders need to change the news cycle, except they’ll be hard-pressed to answer with nooses around their necks.

Arguing with progressives is a waste of time because they believe in nothing except that they should rule over us. Progressives don’t seek justice. They seek power. Treat them accordingly.

We Live in a World of Lies

By Dennis Prager

Tuesday, December 03, 2013

Remember the terrible murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyo. in 1998 -- tortured, beaten and left hanging on a fence to die -- because he was gay?

The American people were led from the outset to believe that Shepard was the victim of a hate crime, murdered because he was gay. And that is how virtually every American still views the story. In the words of Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), "Matthew Shepard is to gay rights what Emmett Till was to the civil rights movement." A play based on Shepard's killing, "The Laramie Project" became, according to the Wall Street Journal, "one of the most produced theatrical shows in the country." And in 2009, Congress passed, and President Barack Obama signed, the Matthew Shepard Law, which expanded the definition of hate crimes to include crimes motivated by a victim's actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability.

It turns out that Matthew Shepard's murder had nothing to do with his being gay.

As early as 2004, the ABC News program "20/20" broadcast (to its credit) a denial by both murderers, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, that the murder had anything to do with Shepard's being gay. It was, they both claimed, a robbery gone bad.

"It was not because me and Aaron had anything against gays," Henderson told ABC.

As a result, ABC News was widely attacked by all those who had a vested interest not in truth, but in maintaining the homophobia story: the liberal media, the gay rights movement and the lawyers for the victim's mother.

The New York Times reported: "Those leading the charge against the heavily promoted ABC report [included] Joan Garry, executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD)."

Sean Maloney, the aforementioned congressman who was then the lawyer for Judy Shepard, Matthew Shepard's mother, called the program "'just bad journalism ... there is a mountain of evidence that anti-gay bias was a trigger for the beating that left Matthew dead after they robbed him."

Now a book has been published, written by Stephen Jimenez, himself a gay man, that confirms the accuracy of the 2004 ABC News report. Matthew Shepard was involved in the hyperactive Wyoming meth drug culture; he was murdered over a drug deal; and his primary murderer was a bisexual who had probably slept with Shepard.

The media aspect of this case was summed up in a Wall Street Journal review: "Mr. Jimenez's book is most useful in illuminating the power of the media to shape the popular conception of an event. It shows how a desire for Manichaean morality tales can lead us to oversimplify the human experience."

That's a bit delicate. Actually it shows how powerful the left-wing media are, how they are dedicated to agendas rather than to truth, and how much of what Americans believe is shaped accordingly.

Remember the 2006 story about nooses that were hung by racist white students in Jena, La. to signify lynchings?

As CNN reported: "Jena's racial tensions were aggravated in August 2006, when three white teens hung the nooses the day after a group of black students received permission from school administrators to sit under the tree -- a place where white students normally congregated."

That was the national story: There was a tree near the high school under which only white students sat, one day a black student sat under the tree, and the next day nooses were hung from the tree. As late as August 2007, the Washington Post still wrote about "Jim Crow-like hangman's nooses dangling from a shade tree at the local high school."

None of this story was true.

First, the tree was never reserved for white students. As the Associated press reported in September 2007: "According to teachers and school administrators, students of all races congregated under it at one time or another."

Second, the nooses had nothing to do with lynchings or race. As the Christian Science Monitor reported in October 2007: "An investigation by school officials, police, and an FBI agent revealed the true motivation behind the placing of two nooses in the tree ... [They] were understood to be a prank by three white students aimed at their fellow white friends, members of the school rodeo team.

Remember the white lacrosse team players at Duke University charged with gang rape of a black stripper -- and how the New York Times and Duke University and everyone in between reported this as an example of privileged white boys' racism?

That, too, was all a lie. The stripper made up the whole story. (Last week, she was convicted of murdering her boyfriend. Have you read about that?)

The list of lies is almost endless.

The New York Times reporter in the Soviet Union, Walter Duranty, denied that there was a famine in the Ukraine in 1931-32 -- the Communist-induced famine that killed about five million Ukrainians. And he won a Pulitzer Prize for it.

The media portrayed the Kennedy assassination as the product of Dallas's "right-wing" "climate of hate" -- even though a card-carrying Communist committed the assassination.

The media told us over and over about a heterosexual AIDS "epidemic" in the U.S. There was none. The media fabricated the heterosexual epidemic in order to remove stigma from gay males and in order to garner support for more AIDS research money.

Why all this mendacity?

There are truth tellers and there are liars on the right and on the left. But for the left, truth is subordinated to whatever it is the left most cares about: gay rights, minority rights, women's rights, government health care and environmentalism being only the most obvious current examples.

That's why talk radio, conservative websites, Fox News and conservative opinion pages, such as those of the Wall Street Journal and Investors Business Daily, are so important.

Europe doesn't have them. And its population is brainwashed. No wonder Europeans believe that America and Israel are the most dangerous countries in the world. Their media told them so.