Politics

What is the problem with California’s economy, with its 12.5% unemployment and a gaping budget deficit, conditions that make California, along with Michigan and Nevada, the Greece of the United States?

Well, there is the problem of the public employees unions, with their expenditures of taxpayer-supplied funds for their political gain. Of the top five political spenders, who spent more than a billion dollars over the last decade on influencing politicians, two are the teacher’s union and the public employees’ union:

“Fifteen special interest groups including casino operators, drug firms and unions for teachers and public employees spent more than $1 billion during the last decade trying to influence California public officials and voters, the state’s watchdog agency reported today….Five special interests were responsible for more than half of the billion dollars spent since 2000, including:

–The California Teachers Assoc., which spent $211.8 million.
–The California State Council of Service Employees, $107.4 million.
–The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, $104.9 million.
-The Morongo Band of Mission Indians, which operates a casino under a state-approved compact, $83.6 million.
–The Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians, which also operates a casino, $69.2 million.”

Liberals are feverish about the idea that corporations might be able to spend to money on advertisements during political campaigns. They might unduly influence the political process, it is said. Looks like the government workers’ unions and the California Indian tribes are doing the job corporations can only hope to do.

On a related matter, though these are federal, not state, numbers, the federal stimulus funds primarily helped teachers, by far. Assuming, that is, that the stimulus really helped save those jobs. More likely, government budgets are set a year in advance, so that teachers and other government workers were protected from significant job losses by budget decisions made before the brunt of the recession was felt. Judging by the political outcry, this year might be quite a different matter. Via Instapundit.

Meanwhile, the dysfunctional California state government, led by the Governator, makes the situation worse with a regulatory powergrab through its “climate change law” that will increase joblessness and cause more businesses to flee the state.

Not long ago, former Vice President Dick Cheney opined off-hand that Barack Obama would be a one-term wonder. Since then, I have heard a similar point made on occasion by other speakers. It just so happened that I was wondering the same not long before I read of Cheney’s remark.

Mr. Obama as a one-termer has been, of course, a hope of the more fevered denizens of the swamps of the conservative hinterland since November 5, 2008, the day after the election. I was scornful of the likelihood that their hope would be realized, and, on balance, I continue to believe that the President will be re-elected. But what shook my previous confidence in having to prepare myself for eight years of an Obama White House was the increasingly obvious combination of toxic ideology, incompetent administration, and personal detachment that emanates from Mr. Obama and his minions.

Looked at historically, it is very difficult to dislodge an incumbent who chooses to run for re-election. The task becomes almost impossible if that incumbent succeeded a President from the opposing party. In the twentieth century, only four incumbent Presidents were defeated for re-election. Three of those defeats, involving William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, and George H. W. Bush were cases where they had gained the White House after Presidents from their own party. Party fatigue had set in after twelve years or more of the same party in the White House. In both Taft’s and Bush’s defeats, there were strong third party challenges that affected the outcomes. In those races, the winner received substantially less than 50% of the vote. Of the three, only Herbert Hoover, running in the political gale of the Depression, lost decisively after one term.

There has been only one instance in well more than a century of an incumbent president losing a re-election bid when that incumbent had taken over the White House from the opposite party. That loser was Jimmy Carter in 1980. Leaving aside the odd sequence (and diversion of popular and electoral votes) of the Grover Cleveland-Benjamin Harrison contests in 1888 and 1892, there arguably has not been another case where an incumbent President of a major party lost re-election after succeeding someone from the opposing party. (President John Tyler lost his re-election bid in 1844, but he ran as a third-party candidate and abandoned his campaign before the election.)

The standard for losing as an incumbent, then, is set by the inept Jimmy Carter. Short of sinking to that level, Mr. Obama should be assured of re-election. How close to the Carter standard an incumbent can safely get depends also on the quality of the opposition. Carter was faced with Ronald Reagan, a powerful campaigner and Teflon candidate. There is no Republican of similar political potency on the scene. Sarah Palin comes close, and a comparison of the dismissive treatment she receives with that directed at Reagan yields remarkable similarities. However, Palin is on balance a more polarizing figure than Reagan, which would make it more difficult for her to make the same kind of pitch to close the deal with independents and Democrats that Reagan made in his debates against Carter. In addition, Obama is a much better campaigner and presents a more likable persona than Carter was able to do in a side-by-side comparison with Reagan.

That said, Mr. Obama is doing his remarkable best to imitate Jimmy Carter. The drip, drip, drip of news about botched anti-terror efforts (The ludicrous “The system worked” declaration by Janet Incompetano as a response to the Crotchbomber), missteps in trials for accused terrorists such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the cluelessness of reaction to the Honduran constitutional dispute, the continuing debacle of healthcare “reform” in which the administrations comes up with patently absurd claims, all undermine the public’s confidence in Obama’s administrative competence. His weakness in foreign relations, complete with bowing before sundry monarchs and dictators; his failure to constrain Iran; his apparent appeasement of Russia; his coziness with Latin American leftists; his nuclear disarmament and anti-missile technology decisions; his decisions of interrogations of terrorists; his (and Eric Holder’s) attempted or threatened moves against Bush administration officials and against CIA interrogators, and his 2009 Obama World Apology Tour all show a profound weakness, stemming from personality and ideology, in protecting American interests. If they have not hurt the President yet, and I think they have hurt in the public’s perception of him, they present catastrophic political danger to him, should there be an attack on the U.S.. They at least present persistent, if not catastrophic, political danger through their cumulative negative effect.

Every administration has periods of good luck and bad. So, timing means a lot. Assuming that Mr. Obama has had neither extraordinary good nor bad luck overall as measured by “events” so far, he is early on showing a lot of Carteresque tendencies. Assuming also that those tendencies continue in approximately similar manner, Mr. Obama could be in trouble in 2012, something that seemed to exist only in the realm of fantasy a year or even six months ago.

But being as bad as Carter will not defeat Obama. There is one thing that Obama has that Carter did not, and which will give him 10% of the vote that Carter could not get. That thing is Obama’s race. The additional turn-out among Blacks, along with an even more heavily pro-Democrat tilt than usual among that group, will account for some of the boost. Similar increases, though perhaps less significant, will manifest themselves among other racial minorities. But many Whites, too, will refuse to vote against the first, at least partially, African-ancestry President. Riddled with racial guilt, these liberals will not vote to confirm Obama’s political failure and their own failure to recognize their candidate’s lack of experience and qualification for the office that was so glaringly apparent to less partial observers. As already has been made clear by various journalists, well, by Chris Matthews, immediately after Obama’s inauguration, for them, Obama the “Black President” is too important and big to fail.

If I recognize this, Mr. Obama’s savvy political advisers will know it at least as well. They will make sure that the racial undercurrent remains in full flow in 2012. Opposition to, or criticism of, the President will once again be slammed as racist by Obama, his minions, and the newspapers, TV networks, and other parts of the media wing of the Democratic Party. This will serve to drive such doubting liberals and weak-kneed moderates back into the party line. In short, then, Mr. Obama can be as bad as Jimmy Carter, and not worry about re-election. To vote Mr. Obama out of office would require disasters far worse than the economic malaise and the national security weaknesses that characterized the Carter years. What might suffice as a big enough disaster is hard to say. But an unemployment rate even of 10%, a high inflation rate, an Iranian nuke, an Iranian attack on its neighbors, a new 9/11, or a Russian, North Korean, or Chinese invasion of their neighbors probably won’t pry loose enough Obama disciples to turn him out of office. Some of his former supporters will turn against him or not show up to vote, but, as the religious imagery associated with support of the “Black Jesus” demonstrates, for too many (including, perhaps, the President himself) Obama is not merely a politician, but a movement or cause.

For those reasons, primarily the reason of his race, I do not believe that Obama can be defeated in 2012. The Republicans will not be facing Jimmy Carter, but a Jimmy Carter simulacrum that benefits from affirmative action. That said, I think that there is a 10% chance that Mr. Obama will not be President in 2013. The reason is Mr. Obama himself. He may opt not to run again.

It has become abundantly clear already that he does not enjoy being President. For all the idle comparisons between Obama and FDR or John Kennedy, those others enjoyed the job itself, not just the perks. They brought a “vigah” (in Kennedy’s phrasing) to the position that the incumbent does not. Even before the election, Obama had a reputation of not wanting to work at the hard stuff. He produced no significant legislation in the Senate. His absenteeism was legendary. He made a habit of voting “present” in the Illinois legislature. Earlier in his life, he did not like the temporary jobs working in finance and law. On a more benign level, he appears to be genuinely committed to his family. He enjoys more leisurely intellectual contemplation.

That explains why he likes to get out of D.C. so much and why just two weeks into his term he explained his visits to local schools by confessing that he did not like being in the White House. That explains also his incessant campaign mode, his campaign-style political speeches with their hard edges and political platitudes and generalities (see, for example, the State of the Union address), and the meetings and “summits” where Obama presides like a professor in a seminar.

The there is the outward appearance of lack of passion to the job. His supporters initially saw this as a surfeit of “cool.” We more skeptical types considered it aloofness, even coldness, that was a reification of his psychological elitism. By now, I have read of even some of his supporters active in the media and in politics grousing about this detachment and “above the fray” approach and comparing Mr. Obama unfavorably in that regard to George W. Bush. In political whispers behind cupped hands, such people point with reluctant respect to Bush’s leadership, his emotional commitment to his work that allowed people to know where he stood, and, despite some notable failures, his ability to get things done even with a Democratic Congress. Mr. Obama, they say, lacks these qualities. His coolness has become a liability.

Being President is hard work, and Presidents age visibly. Pictures of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush in the first and eighth years of their Presidencies show remarkable physical changes far greater than can be attributed merely to the lapse of seven years. Bush was battered politically and fanatically for eight years by his opponents and had to deal with serious challenges to the country’s national security. I am not sure that Obama has either the, shall one say, “flexible” personality and the ability to lose himself in personal “diversions” of Bill Clinton, or the orneriness and strong sense of self of W.

Obama has made his name in American history as the first “non-White” President. If he is faced with four more years of a sour economic mood, and if he has either completed his ideological agenda that will (negatively) transform the U.S. domestically and internationally, or he has found that the agenda cannot be completed, he may decide that there are better ways to spend his time. Given the likelihood that, after 2012, he will face a Republican Congress or at least a Congress composed of Republicans and enough unhappy Democrats that his political agenda is a dead letter, he may not want to continue. He does not have the political inclinations toward true compromise (”bipartisanship” not being the same as compromise) or the political skills of triangulation that Mr. Clinton possessed. Nor is it likely that his “A” team would continue with him into a second term; subsequent hirees often do not possess the personal loyalties to the President, the political skills, or the calibrated ideological commitment of the initial group.

Presidents almost universally get frustrated in their second term, for some combination of various reasons, such as public fatigue, their quasi-lame duck status, the accumulation of unfinished projects and the passage of time, the departure of trusted individuals, the inevitable scandals involving present or former associates or acquaintances, media feeding frenzy for stories, economic cycles, rivalries and conflicting interests with Congressional barons eager to share your successes and distance themselves from your failures, the constant baying from the opposing party, and on and on. Perhaps President Obama decides that the journey was more enjoyable and personally satisfying than the destination. A second term, then, would be an unnecessary punishment.

Would it not be much better, he might say, to seek an appointment to the Supreme Court rather than re-election to the White House? He could make history as only the second President to be a Supreme Court justice. He could enjoy a lifestyle much more suited to his temperament. He could seek to have his agenda of a transformed “positive” Constitution adopted just by persuading four other justices. That would allow him to seek to impose on the American people various elements of his vision of socialized health care, environmental restrictions, expanded constitutional protections for unlawful enemy combatants, and racial spoils systems that he might not be able to attain democratically. He would be, for the most part, among other academically-inclined intellectuals. He would rejoin, and interact with, for the rest of his life, members of the legal elites and adoring laws students. True, he could still do that after a second term as President. But why wait if, as appears, he really does not like his current job?

It is unlikely to happen. But if Barack Obama is not the President after January, 2013, it is more likely due to his decision not to seek re-election than to having suffered a defeat in an active campaign for the office.

California attorney general Jerry Brown has thrown his hat into the political ring in the race for governor in November. With plenty of name recognition, he should have an easy time of it in a state that has an unpopular incumbent Republican governor and a 3-2 Democratic registration advantage. Yet the polls show Brown tied with the likely Republican nominee, former Ebay CEO Meg Whitman. Why? Brown has a reputation, not entirely fairly, as, shall we say, “idiosyncratic.” He has tried to shed his old “Governor Moonbeam” persona, a project that has been generally successful due to his stints as a no-nonsense mayor of Oakland and as attorney general.

But Brown is a symbol of the past. He is much older, and, like it or not, as a former governor is seen as an insider. While Schwarzenegger is a Republican, he is perceived as a weak-tea RINO, who has stressed his bipartisan approach and surrounded himself with Democrats. That, combined with the Democratic dominance of the extremely unpopular state legislature and general dissatisfaction with Democrats (due to their control of Congress), allows a calm- and sensible-sounding Republican candidate like Meg Whitman to have a decent chance at winning.

There has been much talk of the Democrats using “reconciliation” to pass Obama/Reid/PelosiCare if they cannot get the 60 votes needed to “invoke cloture” (conclude debate) and end a filibuster. The problem arises from a tradition in the Senate as a deliberative body that allows relaxed rules of debate. Unlike the “democratic” House, where the leadership acting in conjunction with the Rules Committee strictly defines the terms of debate on a bill, the Senate is more of a club of equals where courtesy and independence dictate fewer restrictions on the opportunity for members to rise and speak.

Reconciliation has traditionally been used in very limited circumstances, usually to reconcile appropriations- and tax-related bills in the Senate to budget measures already passed by both houses. But that process is regarded as a distinct exception to the Senate tradition of debate. Therefore, there are many criteria and specifications for when, why, and how reconciliation may be used. The Senate parliamentarian, a scrupulously non-partisan individual, is often called on to make rulings to limit the scope of reconciliation. Those rulings themselves are binding on the Senate, though only by tradition. The parliamentarian’s rulings can be overridden by unanimous consent, not a likely option if the process is used for anything other than the routine and fairly innocuous matters for which reconciliation traditionally was used. Alternatively, the Vice President can overrule the parliamentarian absent unanimous consent, an option fraught with political danger, a figuratively nuclear political option.

This is an overview of the reconciliation process. Read it if you dare. If Congress and the President need to resort to anything that complicated to get a bill passed over opposition, there is something wrong with the bill. It’s worse than seeing sausage made. Here is an overview of reconciliation applied to Obama/Reid/PelosiCare.

Obviously, reconciliation in the Senate is far from a sure thing. Therefore, the result-oriented ideologues in the White House and Congress might decide that they will find a way to proceed without reconciliation. A bill already has passed the Senate. The House can vote on that bill, with promises that there will be changes through follow-up amendments in a reconciliation bill. But if the House passes the Senate bill, that one can go to the President’s desk, as it has met the Constitution’s bicameralism requirement, namely, that a bill must pass both houses in identical language before being presented to the President. Once Mr. Obama signs the bill, it becomes law. There is no legal compulsion for the Senate then to live up to its word and pass the amendments it promised. They might give it a try, and, finding that they don’t have the 51 votes to go forward, abandon the effort. That would be a tremendous breach of trust toward the House, but Pelosi and the leadership might go along with it, just so they can have some health care “reform” adopted. The real losers would be those House members in swing districts who were opposed to the earlier bill and who voted for something that can prove to be toxic for their re-election in November.

This is a risky procedure for the Congressional Democrats, and the possible use of such a tactic presumably is known to the Democratic fence-sitters. Thet do not trust either the House and Senate leadership or the administration and would push for another alternative. That alternative is to have the Senate pass amendments (which would require the cumbersome reconciliation described above) and the House to approve that amending bill before the House votes on the underlying health care bill. As long as the President then signs the health care bill before he signs the amending bill, everything is in proper order.

All of these procedural gyrations are done to get around the Senate tradition of the filibuster and to engineer an eventual government take-over of one-sixth of the economy against the wishes of a majority of the American people. But don’t hold your breath that this will happen. Reconciliation and adoption of the Senate bill are far from assured. Right now, the votes are not there, and the odds appear to be getting longer.

One sign of an administration running into political headwinds is the leaking of information critical of this or that insider. The higher the position of the target, the more significant the leak, as it is likely that people close to this person and of similar prominence are leaking the information to gain an advantage in the jockeying for political influence that occurs in the White House. That is the playground of major league political egos, after all. When those targets of criticism are high level associates of the President and, indeed, the President himself, and when the criticism occurs early in the second year of the administration, this is a sign of serious discord and of an administration stuck in a morass.

Therefore, when an article appears in The Washington Post that extols the virtues of President Obama’s chief of staff, the tiny, Tourette’s-tending terpsichorean Rahm Emanuel, eyebrows are raised. The skeptic’s interest is particularly piqued when that article appears in the middle of (leaked) rumors and increased demands from the moon-baying Left that the President must fire Emanuel because the latter is responsible for the political stalemate of the Obama agenda despite overwhelming Democratic Party advantages in the Congress. According to this article, the President’s other advisers are responsible for this debacle, a result that would not have occurred, had the President only listened to “Rahmbo.” Sample graph that conveys the tone:

“Obama’s problem is that his other confidants — particularly Valerie Jarrett and Robert Gibbs, and, to a lesser extent, David Axelrod — are part of the Cult of Obama. In love with the president, they believe he is a transformational figure who needn’t dirty his hands in politics.

The president would have been better off heeding Emanuel’s counsel. For example, Emanuel bitterly opposed former White House counsel Greg Craig’s effort to close the Guantanamo Bay prison within a year, arguing that it wasn’t politically feasible. Obama overruled Emanuel, the deadline wasn’t met, and Republicans pounced on the president and the Democrats for trying to bring terrorists to U.S. prisons. Likewise, Emanuel fought fiercely against Attorney General Eric Holder’s plan to send Khalid Sheik Mohammed to New York for a trial. Emanuel lost, and the result was another political fiasco.

“Obama’s greatest mistake was failing to listen to Emanuel on health care. Early on, Emanuel argued for a smaller bill with popular items, such as expanding health coverage for children and young adults, that could win some Republican support. He opposed the public option as a needless distraction.”

This protrayal of Emanuel as the omniscient sage lays it on so thick that the inevitable suspicion is that Emanuel himself is the source of these leaks against his own President. As expected, Emanuel denies any complicity, and the very ham-handedness of the leaks ironically gives credence to his denials. Emanuel, after all, is known for his skill at political infighting and his (fiercely partisan) pragmatism. But then, if one were truly Macchiavellian, one might suggest that this apparent overkill is exactly what Rahm needs to hide his fingerprints.

The episode is also useful to try to insulate Obama from political fall-out if his health care take-over collapses. He (through Rahm and these leaks) can lay the blame at the feet of the left-liberal Congressional leadership and the besotted Obama lovers Gibbs, Axelrod, and Jarrett. Of course, that still exposes some political flaws in the President for having had the lack of political acumen and the inexperience not to listen to Emanuel but to defer to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and his own sycophants. The article also concedes what those of us who have declined to become The One’s disciples have long known, namely, that those on the other side too often are the O-bots we’ve characterized them as being.

Needless to say, this hagiography of Emanuel has not gone unnoticed and uncriticized by his (many) enemies in and out of the administration.  At the Huffington Post, one particularly huffy Huffster huffed, “The fact is that after a campaign that appealed so successfully to idealism, Obama hired a bunch of saboteurs of hope and change. Rahm was simply their chief of staff. And now, this hypercompetitive bantam rooster is attempting to blame others for what went wrong. That’s evidently so important to him that he’s trying to take a victory lap around the wreckage of what was once such a promising presidency.

President Obama has declared the time for talking about health care reform to be over. He is, however, still calling on those who support his program to make their voices heard, an endeavor for which his advocacy group’s website has prepared a handy-dandy list to guide “seminar callers” to talk shows. Those who oppose his program, the majority of those responding in many different polls, should sit down and be quiet, presumably.

Once upon a time, i.e., in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, then-Senator Obama was not only against reconciliation, but rejected the idea that something as huge as health care reform could be done by a bare majority:

“[Health care reform] is an area where we’re going to have to have a 60% majority in the Senate and the House in order to actually get a bill to my desk. We’re going to have to have a majority to get a bill to my desk that is not just a 50-plus-one majority.”

Mark Steyn, on our “Greek” future: A growing and unsustainable welfare state, with the predictable results. Actually, Steyn is not entirely correct in his analogy, as the U.S. is not suffering from the demographic collapse of the Greeks that inverts the entitlement pyramid even more. With, again, the exception of population growth, Greece is less like the U.S. than is Europe as a whole. Greece is more like California, as Steyn correctly notes:

“Think of Greece as California: Every year an irresponsible and corrupt bureaucracy awards itself higher pay and better benefits paid for by an ever-shrinking wealth-generating class. And think of Germany as one of the less-profligate, still-just-about-functioning corners of America such as my own state of New Hampshire: Responsibility doesn’t pay. You’ll wind up bailing out, anyway. The problem is there are never enough of ‘the rich’ to fund the entitlement state, because in the end it disincentivizes everything from wealth creation to self-reliance to the basic survival instinct, as represented by the fertility rate. In Greece, they’ve run out Greeks, so they’ll stick it to the Germans, like French farmers do. In Germany, the Germans have only been able to afford to subsidize French farming because they stick Americans with their defense tab. And, in America, Obama, Pelosi and Reid are saying we need to paddle faster to catch up with the Greeks and Germans. What could go wrong?

An earlier Greek had an insightful discussion of the weakness of democracy, a weakness that inevitably leads into collapse and tyranny. I am speaking of Plato and his work The Republic. This is a good summary of his Book 8:

“Now they begin speaking about how democracy leads to tyranny: the insatiable good that democracy defines as freedom. However, should the city fall into misfortune, the people will blame the rulers and call them oligarchs. Should anyone then obey the rulers, they will be denounced as voluntary slaves; they honor rulers who act like subjects and subjects who act like rulers. This extends to homes, so that parents must act like children and children like parents. Similarly, teachers are terrified of pupils, and children fight with adults about everything. There is also complete freedom and equal rights between the sexes, and slaves are as free as their owners. This makes the citizen’s soul too sensitive to endure any slavery, and eventually they will disregard the laws, as they must have no master over them. In democracy, there are three classes: the drones [politicians and rent-seeking members of various elites that are part of the political class], who speak and transact; the rich, from whom the drones can get money; and the people, the peaceful, self-employed, workers and farmers who form the largest class. The revolution starts because the majority sees what the rich have and believe that they are oligarchs. The drones incite this even further, and there is a main advocate for the people [a demagogic leader]. Inevitably, the advocate becomes the tyrant and fights in a civil war against the property-holders. When they get this far, they are often scared that the rich will try to kill them, and so ask for bodyguards to defend the ‘defender of democracy.’ The people provide this because they trust the tyrant.

In the beginning, when a tyrant walks around he will greet everyone, deny being a tyrant, and make promises to individuals and the state. He will also cancel debts, distribute land to the people, and pretend to be kind and gracious to everyone. [I.e., he promotes a welfare state.] However, after exiling his enemies, and befriending the others, there will be no need for him as a leader, and therefore he will keep starting new wars so that the people keep thinking that they need him. He will also need to raise war taxes and the like, and people will begin to hate him, even the people who put him there in the first place will start to speak against him. Therefore, if he wants to survive as a tyrant, he must eliminate everything until he is left without a single friend or enemy, and he must always beware of everyone around him. Ultimately, he is either to live with worthless people, or die.”

In the book itself, Plato is even blunter, at times. He describes how the people will not support the politician unless “they get a little honey” from the politicians. Plato describes the polity as analogous to a beehive. He also describes how the “orderly class,” the productive wealthy will be squeezed by the political class, the “drones.” The incipient tyrant props himself up as the “protector of the people,” only to turn on them and upon any in the political class who dare to oppose him. “And therefore he must look about him and see who is valiant, who is high-minded, who is wise, who is wealthy…he is the enemy of them all,….”

It is becoming more and more obvious that President Obama and the Congressional Democrats are going to pass something, anything, concerning health care. Bad as passing something that the American people reject is better for them politically than passing nothing at all. Their political calculus is that they are going to lose seats in November, no matter what, but that they will lose more if they are perceived to be political failures than if they can point to something that they have done and declare victory. Moreover, they are not going to walk away from an issue that their President has made his signature policy since he began running for the office.

Towards that end, their strategy is to do the most radical that they can persuade enough of their waivering members to accept, and, at the same time, bring in as many Republican-connected ideas to put forth an image of bipartisanship. The latter is doubly beneficial in that it might get some Republicans to sign on, depending on how radical the rest of the proposal is. But even if no Republican signs on, the calculus is that the Democrats can portray the result as a “bipartisan” bill. As Nancy Pelosi proclaimed, a bill can be bipartisan if it includes Republican ideas, even if no Republican ends up voting for it. That also allows the Democrats to portray the GOP as simply obstructionist, with the upshot that it buys the Democrats come political cover and may reduce their losses in November. So, while the Pelosi approach is conceptual nonsense, it makes political sense.

Another advantage to the Democrats of adopting some bill, is that, whatever the bill contains, they can declare victory and then claim to be focusing on other issues. It moves the discussion, at least temporarily, to other matters and allows the Democrats to claim that they are addressing “jobs” and other economic issues. Moreover, there will be a cushion of time, perhaps seven months, before the election, including the three months of summer during which political issues normally recede into the background of voters’ minds. Come fall, the Democrats can try to blunt Republican efforts to raise the health care issue by accusing the GOP of bringing up issues that have been decided rather than addressing ongoing issues.

The bill that will emerge will be sufficiently ambiguous that the Congressional Budget Office will not be able to have enough specific figures to challenge whatever absurd claims of low costs the White House produces. Moreover, the bill can be rather small, as long as it contains the seeds for the eventual government take-over of health care. Then, there can be incremental increases over time, as this feature is added or that program is expanded. The same pattern has occurred historically with all taxpayer-funded entitlement programs. This has always been the advice of Mr. Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, regarding this issue. The Democrats understand that the Republicans, even if they retake Congress and the White House, will be too weak-willed to undo sush entitlements, as the issue will be demagogued effectively by the Democratic opposition.

Moreover, all the talk about the difficulty of getting a majority of Congress to vote for the bill is hot air. Even when the earlier version passed by only 220-215, I pointed out that the Democratic leadership had enough possible votes in reserve. They simply allowed as many endangered Democrats as possible to vote against the bill, so as to give them political cover with their constituents. Even if some anti-abortion Democrats who previously voted “yes” now balk, there will be some former “nay” votes who will switch. As I said, they will tweak the language until they get enough votes.

The Senate will, if necessary, avoid the likely filibuster by invoking the “reconciliation” process. That only requires a majority vote as there is no unlimited debate (absent a 60-vote cloture motion) permitted. Reconciliation has been used for budgetary matters and never for such a broad substantive issue. As such, the Democrats’ moves would be subject to being rules out of order by the Senate parliamentarian, a historically scrupulously non-partisan officer. However, the Democrats have already whispered that, is necessary, they will vote to overrule any decisions of the parliamentarian that would frustrate their political goals. Though it would normally take unanimous consent for such overruling, the Democrats have threatened to jettison even that rule. It is clear that any such moves would destroy the Senate’s rules for the future, once the GOP regains control of that body. But the Democrats figure that the ends justify the means, and that there will always be time in the future to engage in hypocrisy about the sanctity of the Senate’s rules that foster deliberation and give voice to the minority. After all, as I have written before, the Democrats were very much in favor of the inviolability of the filibuster (in 2005) before they were against it now.

While that is the Democratic calculus, and probably is the best of bad alternatives for them, it is not without costs. By the time the process is finished, it will be some time in April. That is only six months before the election. Any “reform” that emerges over Republican opposition will not be seen as bipartisan, regardless of Madame Speaker’s pronouncements. The issue has been such a hot topic for too long. It is too indelibly etched into the political consciousness of the voters. The process has been too messy, with too much back room dealing. The eventual bill will do nothing to change the concerns about costs that have been raised successfully, as well as the taint that the government will make these health care decisions. Six months, especially with the issue coming front and center for a large and motivated portion of the voters, is not long, given the fact that the issue has been on the front burner for over a year. The public has simply got too engaged on the issue for the usual stupor to return in time to save the Democrats this November. This is not an obscure bill or a matter of only marginal concern for voters.

Moreover, the health care issue cannot be divorced from the rest of the Democratic agenda. The deficit, cap-and-trade (coming as it does during a time when the global warmongers have seen their arguments suffer grievous erosion of public support), tax increases, and unemployment all will continue to be issues that hurt the Democrats for various, though interrelated reasons. In the end, passing a health care bill may save a few Democratic House seats, but it will not avert the political tide that is threatening to overtake them. There are simply too many causes for that tide. But saving even a few seats may preserve Democratic control of the House, and that is enough to cause the leadership to urge the politically-vulnerable members of its caucus to commit political suicide by voting for a bill that the majority of the American public does not want.

During the Bush administration, Senate Democrats filibustered lower court judicial nominations. When they began to threaten filibusters for Supreme Court nominees in 2005, with openings on the Supreme Court looming, the Republicans had enough. They moved to suspend the filibuster for judicial appointments on a point of order, a “nuclear option” by invoking the unconstitutionality of the filibuster for that purpose.

The argument for unconstitutionality in that circumstance is that a filibuster of pending legislation is within the Senate’s control over its own legislative function. But when the President nominates officers of the United States, he is entitled to have the Senate vote on them by the usual majority vote, since the Constitution does not specifically authorize a super-majority requirement. There are other Senate rules and procedures that allow individual Senators to frustrate the appointment process. But those do not apply to Supreme Court appointments. A filibuster in such nomination battles carries with it a serious invasion of the checks and balance system envisioned in the constitutional separation of powers that does not apply when the Senate is deciding how legislation is to be brought to a floor vote as a matter of internal procedure.

Although I was not in favor of this nuclear (or “constitutional”) option, it had some constitutional grounding and even had been legitimated in a procedural opinion 50 years ago. The Republicans were not trying to change or avoid the filibuster in purely legislative matters. Even then, the Republicans in the end did not use the nuclear option in appointment votes.

Still, the Democrats screamed (literally, in the case of the New York Senator sometimes caustically referred to as “Shrillary”) about what they saw as this unprecedented attack on the Senate’s traditions. Here is a collection of their objections to the nuclear option, led by that great supporter of the filibuster, Barack Obama, who extolled its virtues as the bedrock of the Senate’s constitutional role. Today, of course, the Democrats and their sycophants in the press decry the filibuster twelve ways from Sunday as undemocratic and, therefore, unconstitutional. Hardly a week passes without yet another demand that the filibuster be ended, or another threat to use the budget device of “reconciliation” to shove Obama/Reid/PelosiCare down the throats of the American people.

That was then, and this is now. I’m sure that, when the Senate turns Republicans, those same Democrats and their media wing will once again recognize the filibuster to be the bulwark against the same majority rule that they decried in this video.

George Will chimes in.

My favorite atheist/lesbian/feminist/Democrat (yes, I have one), Camille Paglia, speaks truth to power about the Obama administration, its political acumen, and its health care fiasco. Though the article is nearly six months old, its message is still fresh and hot. She gets in some excellent points about the Democratic Party:

“Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem.”

In similar vein, universities come under truly “critical” review of the type that I have put forth many times over the years:

“Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it’s invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote ‘critical thinking,’ which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms (’racism, sexism, homophobia’) when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it’s positively pickled.”

These observations lead to the only reasonable conclusion. “It was as if Democrats live in a utopian dream world, divorced from the daily demands and realities of organization and management.” Indeed. The self-proclaimed “reality community” really isn’t.

Her take on the Republican Party is at least partially justified, though in the personalities she mentions she is tilting at windmills from the past. Also, her hackneyed characterization of Afghanistan as the graveyeard of empires is not up to par for her usual efforts. The history of Afghanistan is a lot more complicated than that, whether or not one agrees with her conclusion.

September, 2008: Candidate Barack Obama ridicules John McCain’s proposal for a commission to study the  country’s economic problems in the recession. Says Mr. Obama, “Just today, Senator McCain offered up the oldest Washington stunt in the book – you pass the buck to a commission to study the problem. But here’s the thing – this isn’t 9/11. We know how we got into this mess. What we need now is leadership that gets us out. I’ll provide it, John McCain won’t, and that’s the choice for the American people in this election.”

Here’s another version, extolling the need for presidential leadership rather than commissions. Starts at about 0:40: 

February, 2010: President Obama signs an executive order to form a commission to suggest steps to solve the debt and deficit problems.

Whatever happened to presidential leadership? I agree with candidate Obama’s assessment that these issues ultimately depend on political will and leadership, qualities in scarce supply in this administration. I also agree with his self-indictment that commissions are old Washington stunts to “pass the buck.”

This commission is just showboating. The commission’s recommendations aren’t due until December, after the election. That way, the inevitable tax increases (including on the middle class) needed to fund the massive spending increases the administration’s programs envision, won’t be a hot topic during the election. The Democrats can try to fool the American people about how serious they are about the deficit and cut their electoral losses. They can talk “responsibility” and “deficit reduction,” when everyone knows they won’t act that way, except to raise taxes.

The tax increases won’t be voted on until 2011, the maximum possible time before the 2012 election. Moreover, the Obama and the rest of the Democrats can hide behind the “bipartisan” nature of the commission to blunt the Republicans’ message in 2012. If the Democrats raise taxes and the Republicans balk, Obama can say that the GOP is irresponsible because the (Democrat-dominated) commission found such tax increases necessary. If some members of the Congressional GOP go along, Obama again can portray the tax increases as “bipartisan” and ridicule any GOP dissenters. Either way, he and the Democrats can shun responsibility. That’s not leadership. Why not just elect functionaries in the form of commissions to decide issues?

Meanwhile, there won’t be spending cuts. Quite the opposite. The matter will take on catastrophic shape if the government increases its meddling in health care, its regulation of business, and its environmentalist cap-and-trade and anti-energy policies. The charade is illustrated by the President’s statement that he has ordered a freeze on discretionary spending. That amount is a very small portion of federal expenditures. It won’t start until next year. And it has recently been raised substantially.

The “PayGo” legislation that Obama mentions towards the end is more such empty symbolism. Within days of Obama’s announcement that any new programs would have to show how they will be financed, the Congressional Democrats were funding programs under an “emergency exception” and trying to find other ways around the PayGo law.

Once again, this decision demonstrates the utter lack of seriousness of the President and his cohorts. Moreover, it is yet another campaign promise with an expiration date. See also, no middle class tax increase (”No one making under $250,000 will have to pay a dime in additional taxes”). “Guantanamo will be closed within a year.” “Unemployment will not go above 8% with the stimulus law.” “We have a plan.”

President Obama has pledged federal loan support for construction of two nuclear power plants. While I am not supportive of federal subsidies (including tax breaks) for any energy sources (oil and gas, “green,” or nuclear) or of corporate welfare generally, I support the building of nuclear power plants on the grounds of reducing both pollution and dependence on (foreign) fossil fuels. In light of his past statements and the administration’s decision to kill the proposed storage site for spent fuel at Yucca Mountain, Nevada (reversing the policies of four previous administrations), I do not trust the President on this. I see it as a cheap political way to deflect from his opposition to the further development of domestic sources of fossil fuels. He knows that his environmentalist allies and state regulators will delay these projects, for the half-life of uranium, if possible. So, I am a skeptic until I see the projects built.

Roger Sowell of Sowell’s Law Blog discusses some downsides of nuclear power. He correctly points out the expense and the contribution to global warming from nuclear power through the release of hot water vapor due to the necessary reactor cooling process. As is well-known, water vapor is far more of a greenhouse gas than is CO2, and there is far more of it. I am not sure that Roger is ultimately against nuclear power (though he is an oil-and-gas man at heart), and his observations are valid. As a supporter of all types of efficient energy, including fossil fuels and nuclear, I place a significant part of the blame for expense at the irrational fears of environmentalists who have captured the regulatory apparati of, especially, the states. The licensing hurdles and delays tend to make such projects too cumbersome. Efforts need to be directed to lessen the pwoer of these environmentalist apparatchiks.

Regarding global warming from water vapor, I have two responses. One, I do not believe that these emissions will produce any more than some local warming. There are many heat island effects from human activity that do not translate into global warming. Second, and related, human activity is generally so insignificant compared to natural forces and planetary environmental balances that I would want to see much clearer evidence that the increase of water vapor discounted by the correlative decrease in production of other greenhouse gases will overload the system before restricting nuclear power on that basis. I would also want to see how the production of water vapor will not be cleared from the ecosystem fairly quickly through precipitation.

The President has been making the rounds preaching the virtues of spending within one’s income and saving for the future. If that sounds schizophrenic, it is, coming on the heels of his reckless budget. In making his point, Mr. Obama in effect dismissively refers to Las Vegas as a frivolous and wasteful use of money. This being his second such dismissive remark about Sin City, the reaction came forcefully. Even Harry Reid told Obama to knock it off. But it was Las Vegas mayor, Oscar Goodman, who was most forceful. Accusing Obama of having a psychological problem and being a slow learner, Goodman told Obama that he was not welcome in Las Vegas unless he straightened this matter put quickly. Ouch! And Goodman is not a Republican. Republicans don’t win political races in Vegas. The President caved quickly.

As the furor around the President’s nigh-on $4 trillion FY 2011 federal budget with its $1.5+ trillion deficit continues, it is important to keep in mind what is Mr. Obama’s fault and what is not. It is not Mr. Obama’s fault that the country is in a recession. Nor is it Mr. Obama’s fault that unemployment has gone up, or even that it has reached 10%, according to one measure (17%, according to another), different numbers according to yet others. Nor is it Mr. Obama’s fault that there is a broad asset devaluation that is eliminating froth, a devaluation that has both a short-term and a long-term component. Nor is this year’s (FY 2010) or next year’s (FY 2011) deficit entirely, or even mainly, the fault of Mr. Obama. Nor was last year’s (FY 2009).

With the disclaimers in favor of the President out of the way, let me be clear (to borrow a phrase from the press-anointed great orator) that I am not joining him in saying that those conditions therefore are the fault of his predecessor. Indeed, one aspect of Mr. Obama’s responsibility for the degree of current economic problems is his habit of blaming his predecessor rather than getting on with it. More about that later.

Still, Mr. Bush is to blame for some of the current misery. The increased federal funding for education and the drug prescription programs, along with other non-defense and non-national security items, enlarged the size of the federal budget significantly during his tenure. The tax cuts were not the problem, as they, predictably, increased federal revenue. Federal revenue, adjusted for inflation, did not go down; federal expenditures went up. Even the wars were essentially funded, with the FY 2007 deficit (pre-recession) dropping to around $160 billion. Many of us on the Right opposed Bush’s spending programs (even though the prescription plan ended up costing less than we had feared). As an aside, it is entirely unconvincing for Mr. Obama to rail about the fiscal irresponsibility of Bush’s prescription drug benefit when his own proposal is to expand it and to pay for that expansion in some undisclosed fashion. Adding to the budgetary strain of Bush’s compassionate conservatism was Congress’s profligate spending, including during 6 years of Republican hands on the spigot. Bush’s unwillingness, as a bargain for Congress’s support of his foreign and national security policies, to exercise his veto until the Democrats took over Congress in 2006 exacerbated the fiscal irresponsibility.

With the recession swinging into full force in 2008, deficits went up towards the end of FY 2008. Revenues dropped due to the slow down in economic activity and the financial panic, while federal spending increased, including the first portion of TARP loans to the banks. Still, the deficit at the end of FY 2008 was under $500 billion. With the economic inertia moving in the direction of recession, those deficits clearly would have increased, no matter whether Bush or McCain had been President in 2009, rather than Obama.

Looking at the recession itself, rather than the deficit, to the extent we are seeing the result of an unsustainable asset bubble, Bush is also partly to blame. So are Greenspan, Clinton, both Congressional delegations, and various bureaucracies, such as the SEC. On the deficit front once more, Bush, to his credit, tried to reform Social Security to bring its future costs under control, only to be demagogued by the Democrats and the media to the point where these people plus enough politically spineless Republicans (who typically lost their seats in 2006 and 2008 anyway—Chris Shays, are you listening?) derailed his proposals.

On the asset front, Bush and members of his administration many times warned about the problem of sub-prime loans, especially those under laws to pressure banks into lending to increase home ownership among poor and certain racial minority home buyers to purchase houses. His administration also warned about murky derivatives and the banks’ purchases of such investments. His proposal to curb these practices did not make it out of committee in the Senate due to loud wailing by Congressman Barney Frank (who, contrary to more recent posturing, was oblivious at the time to the dangers of over-leveraging) and officers of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (including well-paid Democrats). Then there was the filibuster threat from the Democrats (who controlled well more than 40 votes) against legislation to curb these practices that Frank and others described as “not broken.” Perhaps Bush should have used more political capital to push this matter along, but his eyes were on national security and the obstructions and attacks from the Democrats and the media on that front. Still, he does bear some responsibility for the failure to address these excesses more resolutely and successfully.

Greenspan’s role in artificially keeping interest rates too low, opening the spigots, cheapening the dollar, and driving investors to more and more speculative risk-taking (fueled by government participation through programs that reduced the risk of failure) is well-known. Plentiful dollars were looking for safety in commodities, starting with real estate, including investments in riskier and riskier loans. The bundling and securitization of these loans, together with the opacity of these bundles that might contain mixes of solid and risky loans in unknown ratios, contributed to the uncertainty about bank holdings that helped trigger and sustain the panic of 2007-2009. Eventually the limits of plausible real estate investments were passed and capital looked for other commodity havens, from gold to oil to rice. Commodity prices soared, with speculation in oil contracts fueling a huge spike in energy costs. That asset bubble, too, contributed both to the dollar inflation and the self-reinforcing cycle of commodity fever, and eventually helped cause the economic bust as many of those speculative positions had to be liquidated and the froth wrung out.

These economic trends are well beyond the power of any President to control and direct. To blame Bush or Obama is ridiculous. If any single institution were blameworthy, it would be the Congress, which, after all, is constitutionally and politically responsible for taxing and spending decisions. But even Congress by itself did not cause these conditions. Nor can Congress control them.

However, the President and the Congress can mitigate or exacerbate these conditions. For that, Mr. Obama and the current Congress bear much blame. Although I was inclined against the TARP law, I could see the argument for it. Obama likes to portray the cost of TARP as a Bush-caused deficit issue. But, first, the TARP was a loan program, much of which has been repaid during Obama’s administration. So, this should help his current deficit numbers. The problem is that Obama wants to spend these funds on other programs, so they contribute to the deficit once more. Second, Bush only signed off on the first half of the authorized TARP funds; Obama signed off on the second half. He did not have to do this. That decision is his responsibility and, to the extent that he argues the entire FY 2009 deficit should be assigned to Bush, this is deceptive.

Moreover, the “stimulus” that supposedly has saved and created so many jobs (but in fact has done so mainly for government jobs) was an Obama decision. As were the 2009 bail-outs of automakers. These aspects of the deficit clearly belong to Obama. Since the government no longer tries to figure out the impossible task of computing the number of jobs saved/created by the stimulus, but says that any jobs for which such money went automatically were saved/created, it is difficult to say what real impact the stimulus had on joblessness. The broader consensus outside the White House is that it has had little or no impact. As well, there is a negative effect of the stimulus on jobs. The need to borrow the funds for the stimulus crowds out private access to credit that might have saved those jobs. If the government is simply monetizing these costs, the bill will come due through inflation or taxes, the latter of which especially are job killers.

That brings me to the crux of the blame Obama must take. His radical programs reduce incentive for private capital to come in and take risks for job-creating expansion rather than sit on the sideline and invest in safety (gold prices have shot up) or by bidding up stocks to dubious price-earnings levels. His class-warfare tax rhetoric, the massive and radical collection of entitlement spending proposals (health care, student loans), the looming cap-and-tax regulations, the radical bureaucrats he has appointed (such the head of the off-the-rails EPA), the take-over of—and meddling in—car companies, the faux-populist attacks on banks and Wall Street, all spook investors and discourage risk-taking.

If I am a truly wealthy person, and I am threatened with higher taxes, I park my wealth in low- or no-tax investments (e.g., municipal bonds) or figure out tax avoidance devices. If I have to work because I own a business, I will squeeze my employees for at least some of the additional cost, by lowering their compensation/benefits, by firing some and having the others work more, or by moving more of my business out of the U.S. If the workers don’t like it, they can quit, and I will replace them with unemployed workers at the lower price. None of these things will increase jobs or, in the aggregate, help the economy. People are not passive, and history shows this to be the expected reaction. It happened in the late-1930s in response to FDR’s class warfare rhetoric and his tax and regulatory policies. Unemployment actually increased and did not come down significantly until the labor shortages created by WW II took care of it.

With lower economic activity induced by Mr. Obama’s rhetoric and proposals, and with the cost of these programs, no wonder that the deficits stretch out as far as projections are made. His spending proposals, unlike the temporary expenditures on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that Mr. Obama likes to blame, create structural deficits. They impose continuing and increasing costs. Worse, those expenditures, and his regulatory proposals, suppress economic growth, the very thing that might allow him to finance at least some of the anticipated growth in the cost of existing programs, such as Medicare. They do that by requiring government either to raise taxes, thereby reducing investment, if taxes are targeted at the rich, or depressing consumption, if taxes are targeted at the middle class. Alternatively, the government can borrow, thereby raising the cost of credit for private institutions competing with the government for loans and again reducing investment. Finally, the government can print money and create inflation, thereby creating great uncertainty about the value and stability of investments made now and also raising the cost of credit.

So, while Mr. Obama cannot be blamed for the recession and for all of the deficit, he (and the equally radical leadership in Congress) can be held accountable for the lingering joblessness and for increasing proportions of the deficits. Those are, even now, exacerbated by the economic fear and uncertainty created by his own radical agenda and his destructive and partisan class warfare rhetoric and tax proposals. It is ridiculous to blame his predecessor when his own projected deficits, in its best years, exceed his predecessor’s deficits in his worst year. With each passing month, his excuses become more laughable. Voters are getting that message better than, apparently, he is. His whining and attempts to deflect from his responsibility arising from his own proposals are backfiring.

Mr. Obama did inherit a recession; he did inherit a deficit, just as Mr. Bush inherited the collapsing NASDAQ and, to a lesser extent, Dow Jones, with the economic slow-down of 2001. Obama’s advisers and supporters are right in saying that the deficits and the recession would have been here no matter who was President. But they are wrong in not accepting that it is Mr. Obama who is prolonging and exacerbating the condition.

From Investor’s Business Daily comes Michael Ramirez’s impression of Mr. Obama:

I realize that federal hiring is booming. I also realize that the new administration has to replace lots of Bush administration officials with hires who reflect the composition of the Obama administration’s political coalition. Still, it is at least a bit odd that the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division would be making special efforts to hire these previously underrepresented groups: “The Civil Rights Division encourages qualified applicants with targeted disabilities to apply. Targeted disabilities are deafness, blindness, missing extremities, partial or complete paralysis, convulsive disorder, mental retardation, mental illness, severe distortion of limbs and/or spine.”

“Mental retardation?” “Mental illness?” That does explain many of the recent decisions of Attorney General Holder regarding national security issues. Why is the Civil Rights Division allowed to use the “r”-word, while Rahm Emanuel is not?

In the SOTU speech, President Obama touted the wonders that the stimulus package has done to create or save jobs. Never mind that such estimates, especially of jobs “saved,” are difficult to make. Never mind also that the great majority of such jobs went to public employees with powerful unions that contribute to Democrats, such as teachers, police officers, and fire fighters. Never mind also that, once the stimulus ends, such jobs presumably will disappear, as well, unless the government plans on many years of subsidized jobs. Never mind also that each such artificially maintained job has to be paid for by taxes (thereby reducing investment and capital formation and, ultimately, inhibiting job creation) or by borrowing (thereby crowding out private borrowers and inhibiting job creation).

Focus instead on the sheer waste of funds for the number of private jobs supposedly created. Focus also on the political corruption and cronyism that attends government hand-outs. Gateway Pundit links to a story about the company to which Obama was referring. According to the story, based on publicly available information, they created 15 jobs in 2009 and plan to create 27 more in 2010. For a price tag of “only” $100 million. The money may not all be for this company’s jobs; the story is a bit hazy on that point. But even if the company only gets some of the money and its subsidiaries get the rest, 42 jobs even for a small fraction of $100 million is ridiculous. But the reason for this extravagance is easy to uncover. The company’s owner is a heavy contributor to Democrats and sat with Michelle Obama at the SOTU. Just another average Joe trying to make a living and having his failing business and despondent workers rescued by the taxpayers beneficent federal government.

This is Sarah Palin’s tremendous response to the SOTU speech. Again and again she lays bare the empty rhetoric and the generally meaningless content of the speech. The GOP should have let her give the response. An excerpt:

“Everything seems to be ‘unexpected’ to this administration: unexpected job losses; unexpected housing numbers; unexpected political losses in Massachusetts, Virginia, and New Jersey. True leaders lead best when confronted with the unexpected. But instead of leading us, the president lectured us. He lectured Wall Street; he lectured Main Street; he lectured Congress; he even lectured our Supreme Court Justices.
“He criticized politicians who ‘wage a perpetual campaign,’ but he gave a campaign speech instead of a state of the union address. The campaign is over, and President Obama now has something that candidate Obama never had: an actual track record in office. We now can see the failed policies behind the flowery words. If Americans feel as cynical as the president suggests, perhaps it’s because the audacity of his recycled rhetoric no longer inspires hope.”

Via Gateway Pundit comes Rush Limbaugh’s speech to Mr. Obama.

Here is the Republican response by Virginia governor Bob McDonnell. On health care:
“All Americans agree, we need a health care system that is affordable, accessible, and high quality. But most Americans do not want to turn over the best medical care system in the world to the federal government. Republicans in Congress have offered legislation to reform healthcare, without shifting Medicaid costs to the states, without cutting Medicare, and without raising your taxes. We will do that by implementing common sense reforms, like letting families and businesses buy health insurance policies across state lines, and ending frivolous lawsuits against doctors and hospitals that drive up the cost of your healthcare. And our solutions aren’t thousand-page bills that no one has fully read, after being crafted behind closed doors with special interests.”

On the role of government:
“Many Americans are concerned about this Administration’s efforts to exert greater control over car companies, banks, energy and health care. Over-regulating employers won’t create more employment; overtaxing investors won’t foster more investment. Top-down one-size fits all decision making should not replace the personal choices of free people in a free market, nor undermine the proper role of state and local governments in our system of federalism. As our Founders clearly stated, and we Governors understand, government closest to the people governs best.”

Re: the SOTU speech, here is Victor Davis Hanson with a spot-on dissection of this trite and infuriating performance.

Alex Castellanos on the lack of substance beyond the platitudes.

Former intelligence agent and speech writer Marc Thiessen goes beyond the same criticisms others have made. Excerpt:

“He scolded Scott Brown (without mentioning his name) and all those who have criticized his handling of the Christmas Day bomber, declaring that ‘all of us love this country’ and warning critics to ‘put aside the schoolyard taunts about who is tough.’ If you disagree with Obama’s policies, you are questioning his patriotism. Imagine what the reaction would have been if Bush had tried that in a State of the Union with those who criticized the surge in Iraq. The howls of the liberal media would have been deafening.
“His one moment of ‘humility’ came when he acknowledged his biggest mistake of the past year: his failure to adequately explain his policies to all of us. This was a State of the Union for the slow learners. His message to all of us was: ‘Let me speak slowly for you.’”

I must say that I am taken aback by Obama’s State of the Union speech. With rare exceptions, this has to be the most classless, arrogant, petulant, nasty, partisan, hypocritical, defensive, unpresidential pile of, ahem, words ever uttered in this context. When combined with the trademark aloofness and upturned chin, its arrogance is at once more pronounced and more chilling. Leaving aside the substance of proposals, there is no way that any of his four predecessors would have delivered that kind of speech. There were, as expected, the more than 100 self-reverential references to “I,” “me,” or “my.” Fine. There were the usual repeated castings of blame on the Bush administration, with only one brief and unconvincing admission of any responsibility of his own. Some of these came just about the time he was declaring that he was uninterested in relitigating the past. We’ve come to expect that kind of buck-passing, as well, and it is less and less politically effective.

But then there were the more outrageous aspects of the speech, spoken by someone who seemed quite annoyed that his wishes had not been heeded. There were the false appeals to bi-partisanship, as he vigorously attacked the previous administration and conservatives, and as he told Democrats to stay the course and follow him, while Republicans should join them or, with their Congressional minorities, present their own proposals (which, of course, they have and plan to do again soon, according to Senator Tom Coburn and Representative Paul Ryan).

Then there were the lies and deceptions about spending and the deficit, as the CBO reports make clear. The bald-faced deceptions about the administration’s so-called transparency and restrictions on lobbyists. The calls for more government spending. The tax incentives for college students to do “public interest” work, i.e., community organizing and such, rather than productive work that really provides a public service (such as providing someone a job). The deceptive tax proposals that will continue to stifle economic growth.

Then there was the unprecedented and gratuitous rhetorical drive-by attack on the Supreme Court, while six of the justices were sitting there, an attack applauded by the Democratic legislators and bureaucratic hacks sitting nearby. Obama attacked the justices over the campaign finance decision, and managed to make two misstatements in just one sentence. He was wrong about the age of the precedent (20 years, not 100) and about the foreign corporations campaign contributions (though Obama got a lot of eyebrow-raising contributions from Nigerians in 2008). Since he was touted as a constitutional law expert, he must know these accusations to be false. Ergo, he lied. Justice Alito mouthed that Obama’s statements weren’t true. Good for him. I suspect there will be far fewer, if any, Supreme Court Justices at the next SOTU speech. BTW, Obama ignored the McCain-Feingold public funding/campaign spending limits in his run for the Presidency.

His discussion of national security issues was by turns off-base (Iraq), perfunctory (domestic security), deceptive (”torture”), non-existent (KSM, interrogations), insulting (moral equivalency of U.S. and Iran re: possession of nuclear weapons), and delusional (isolation of North Korea and Iran).

His condescension at times was palpable, as when he chided himself for not having explained his programs adequately (and slowly enough) for the American people. This after an unprecedented number of televised speeches, speeches before Congress, speeches around the country, and media interviews. We’re just too dumb to get it.

The only redeeming moments were his surprising calls for nuclear energy and offshore drilling and his uplifting closing. The former was probably made under the safe assumption that Pelosi and Co. are in the back pockets of the enviros and will never accede to that. The latter is diminished by the rest of the speech.

Here is a text of the speech released by the White House.

The speech went in excess of an hour. Why do Democrats talk so much?

For those of us who tend to be cautiously optimistic about the human condition and about the future, reading this article is a rather bracing experience, like a bucket of cold water. Just about every paragraph contains an item of bad news. Politically speaking, the bad news falls mainly on the Democrats, which may mean good news in the longer run for the country. But, however much Schadenfreude one might enjoy over the predicament of the Obama/Reid/Pelosi gang, they’re just politicians who are (other than the potential ego-deflating electoral defeat) rather insulated from the plague they visit on the rest of us. And therein lies the problem. To produce political misery for the Democrats, the rest of us have to suffer economically and in the ways we run our everyday lives. After all, the disaster that is Obama/Reid/PelosiCare will affect us in a concrete way, to the detriment of our economic and personal well-being. I’d rather the country be spared this misery, even if it meant that the political reckoning for the inevitable overreaching by the Democrats is postponed a few years.

I found Barack Obama’s evasive response to Diane Sawyer’s question about being a one-term president rather telling. I don’t think that he will forego another run, and I still think he will be re-elected, though the odds have come down from 90% to about 60% in the last several months. But I think that he is not enjoying the job. Being President is different from running for the position. With his agenda in disarray, he appears more detached than ever.

Democrats have tried to take solace in odd explanations for the Massachusetts Miracle. Usually, it’s Coakley as the bad candidate, voter “anger” at government, or the bad economy. President Obama opted for the second, even throwing in his usual tired theme of blaming President Bush. In this article, Charles Krauthammer, analyzing polling results, focuses on the most direct cause in voters’ minds, Obama/Reid/PelosiCare. Krauthammer cleverly punctures the President’s illusions: “Let’s get this straight: The antipathy to George W. Bush is so enduring and powerful that . . . it just elected a Republican senator in Massachusetts? Why, the man is omnipotent.”

On the topic of the voters’ discontent, Krauthammer correctly fixes the target, or, rather, targets, all explicitly raised by Scott Brown in the campaign, led by opposition to Obama/Reid/PelosiCare.

“And the Democrats are delusional: Scott Brown won by running against Obama, not against Bush. He won by brilliantly nationalizing the race, running hard against the Obama agenda, most notably Obamacare. Killing it was his No. 1 campaign promise.
Bull’s-eye. An astonishing 56 percent of Massachusetts voters, according to Rasmussen, called health care their top issue. In a Fabrizio, McLaughlin, & Associates poll, 78 percent of Brown voters said their vote was intended to stop Obamacare. Only a quarter of all voters in the Rasmussen poll cited the economy as their top issue, nicely refuting the Democratic view that Massachusetts was just the usual anti-incumbent resentment you expect in bad economic times.
Brown ran on a very specific, very clear agenda. Stop health care. Don’t Mirandize terrorists. Don’t raise taxes; cut them. And no more secret backroom deals with special interests.”

Why were the Democrats surprised by the result in Massachusetts after the losses in Virginia and New Jersey? “The reason both wings of American liberalism — congressional and mainstream media — were so surprised at the force of anti-Democratic sentiment is that they’d spent Obama’s first year either ignoring or disdaining the clear early signs of resistance: the tea-party movement of the spring and the town-hall meetings of the summer. With characteristic condescension, they contemptuously dismissed the protests as the mere excrescences of a redneck, retrograde, probably racist rabble.”

Why, then, do they continue to make the same mistakes? Until November, 2010, one hopes? “Democrats must so rationalize, otherwise they must take democracy seriously, and ask themselves: If the people really don’t want it, could they possibly have a point?”

Fortunately for conservatives, based on the people I know, most liberals are not truly “liberal” and most Democrats are far from democratic.

Via Rich Lowry at National Review Online’s “The Corner” comes this bit of Obama nostalgia from a year ago: “Obama hopes to avoid Clinton health care missteps.” Hah!

Some excellent parts that sound like parodies: “The strategy begins with giving people the chance to highlight their concerns and experiences….By asking anybody and everybody to share their health care experiences, Daschle is confronting one of the major criticisms of 15 years ago: that the effort to craft former President Bill Clinton’s plan for universal coverage was too secretive. ‘We have to make this as inclusive a process as possible,’ Daschle…said in a speech in Denver.”

“He cited other lessons, too. This time around, lawmakers cannot try to address every detail when it comes to legislation. ‘Details kill,’ Daschle said. ‘If we get too far into the weeds, if we produce a 1,500- or 1,600-page bill, we’re going to get hung up on all the details and we’re never going to get to the principles.’ [Note: They listened to Daschle; they didn’t produce a 1500-page bill; it was a 2000-page bill.] Once Congress does take up a health plan, it also can’t divert attention to other subjects, he said.”

“But the insurers want to require that people buy insurance, while Obama only supports a coverage mandate for children.”

Does it seem to anyone else that they did not follow that plan?

Meanwhile, from Nancy Pelosi: “I don’t have the votes for it at this time.”

Not clear whether this headline is an endorsement or just an expert’s opinion: Barney Frank: Martha Coakley is not Barack Obama in drag. Either way, if I were Barney I’d be less casual about throwing around the phrase “in drag.”

I previously mentioned the desperation that has engulfed Massachusetts Democrats as they now appear to be in real danger of losing the Massachusetts Senate election. Republican Scott Brown has now taken the lead (60-40 at the latest) on the usually very accurate Intrade political handicapping site. The numbers are not vote percentages, but reflect the likelihood of victory or defeat. Evidence for that desperation is concern in the White House that has prompted the last-minute visit of President Obama to Massachusetts. There, Obama attacked Scott Brown, but then admitted he knew nothing about Brown’s policy positions. No longer the careful concern about facts before making charges about the suspects that the President exhibited when responding to the Fort Hood shooting and the attempted airliner attack by the crotchbomber. The President appears to be attacking Brown repeatedly for driving an older truck. That is politically tone-deaf, as it confirms the elitism that Obama, Martha Coakley, and the Democratic Party increasingly represent to many voters.

A further sign of the desperation is this Democratic Party ad accusing Scott Brown of wanting hospitals to turn away all rape victims. The reason? He supports freedom of conscience provisions for health personnel regarding birth control and abortions. That would be the same protections that Ted Kennedy assured the Pope in a letter would be provided for Catholics: “I believe in a conscience protection for Catholics in the health field and I’ll continue to advocate for it as my colleagues in the Senate and I work to develop an overall national health policy that guarantees health care for everyone.” Coakley appears to be more radical than Ted Kennedy, if one can imagine such a thing within a supposedly mainstream political party.

That also would be the same kind of protection that President Obama claims he supports and has guaranteed would be available in any federal support for abortion. That also would be the same kind of protection supporters of same-sex marriage claim would be available for religious institutions that don’t want to perform same-sex marriages. Conservatives have scoffed at those assurances. I have thought that those assurances were in good faith. I seem to have been mistaken in that belief.

Meanwhile, according to the N.Y. Times, former Democratic Senator and presidential candidate Bob Kerrey (no relation to the Massachusetts Senator and 2004 presidential nominee John F. Kerry) has made the bizarre accusation that Brown does not believe in evolution. Brown’s spokesman responded with a classic: “Scott Brown believes in evolution but in the case of Bob Kerrey he’s willing to make an exception.”

Then there is more demonstration of the out-of-touch political ineptness of Martha Coakley. Calling Boston Red Sox All-Star pitching legend Curt Schilling a “[New York] Yankees fan”? That remark came after taking a swipe at ice hockey fans lined up to see a Boston Bruins game. If her other inept comments don’t doom her campaign, rabid Boston sports fans are not going to look past these statements as further evidence of Coakley’s elitism. 

Charlie Cook came out with a special edition of his report that confirms the Intrade movement in Brown’s direction. The report summarizes the dramatic movement in the race as voters began to focus on the candidates and as the health care debate simmered in Washington. As an aside, the L.A. Times today speculated about the Massachusetts voters voicing a referendum on President Obama and his health care (and other domestic) policies. Cook’s report moved the race from solid Democratic in December to leaning Democratic on January 7 to toss-up on January 14. Today, he considers it toss-up in the sense that there are many variables that make state races, especially in special elections, difficult to call. But he says that it is a toss-up with a finger on the scale in favor of Brown that he believes will hold up on election day.

UPDATE: Intrade is now at 65-35 Brown over Coakley.

UPDATE #2: Rothenberg Political Reports (a Democratic polling firm) has moved the race from Toss-up to Leaning Take-over.

UPDATE #3: Pro-Brown trends based on an average of polls, including Democratic polls.

Massachusetts state attorney general Martha Coakley is the Democratic nominee to fill the Senate seat left open when Ted Kennedy died. The governor appointed an interim placeholder, who is not running for the seat. Coakley’s Republican opponent is state senator Scott Brown. Massachusetts has not elected a Republican Senator since Edward Brooke in 1972. Brooke, incidentally, was the first popularly-elected Senator of African ancestry.

Massachusetts, it is safe to say, is an exceedingly Democratic state, where Democrats outnumber Republicans three-to-one, though there also are independents. Coakley, who has the full backing of the Democratic establishment, should be able to win in a cake-walk. That may have been her thinking, as well, so she tried to avoid debating her opponent. Initial polls showed her ahead comfortably, as would be expected in a state where the Democrat typically starts with a 20-30 point advantage.

That has changed, and dramatically so. The polls are very close, with one of the most recent showing a 4-point Brown lead, barely still within the margin of error. The response of the Democrats has been panic. They have launched a series of bizarre attack ads, such as this gem from New York’s ever-classy Senator Chuckie Schumer. They have tried to seize the high ground of bathos by making this a race about keeping “Teddy’s seat” in Democratic hands. This tactic was aided and abetted by a question posed to Scott Brown by David Gergen at a debate. Brown hit the pitch out of the park by reminding viewers that the seat was not the Kennedys’ nor the Democrats’, but the people’s. While it may have been a bit over-dramatic, the retort gained Brown a lot of press and torpedoed the Democrats’ tactic.

Coakley has tried to go on the offensive, but has only succeeded in shooting herself in the foot. She has run an inept campaign and shown herself to be an empty suit to a degree that is impressive even for Massachusetts Democrats. She seems to have learned the art of the gaffe from the genre’s master, Vice-President Biden. Powerlineblog has begun a feature, Quotations from Chairman Martha. One of Coakley’s TV ads misspelled the state’s name. She said that Catholics opposed to birth control can exercise their freedom of religion by not working in emergency rooms. In an answer to a question about her foreign policy experience, she said that she has a sister who lives overseas and even has travelled to the Middle East, and that she (Martha) , too, has travelled abroad. On the last, I seem to recall the press and pundits, not to mention the “comedians,” having a field day with Sarah Palin’s statement that one can see Russia from Alaska (not the Tina Fey version). Though there is considerable interest in the Massachusetts race, there has been no similar coverage of Coakley’s response. Odd thing, that.

Having finally deigned to debate Brown (as her lead began to shrink), she said that she wanted all troops home from Afghanistan because there were no longer any terrorists in that country. That was particularly bizarre, given that ten days earlier eight CIA agents were killed in Afghanistan by a terrorist homicide bomber. And if, by her remark, she was claiming instead that the Taliban were gone from Afghanistan, she obviously hasn’t listened to President Obama or read the newspapers in the last six months. Say, maybe the press could ask her what newspapers she reads, as they did Sarah Palin. No, I’m not holding my breath, either. Now, the Democrats likely will hold the seat, despite Coakley’s incompetence and ignorance. But the mere fact that there is a credible opponent and that the Democrats have to work so hard to retain the seat, speaks volumes.

The over-the-top attacks on Scott Brown have one benefit. They have given rise to good politically conservative satire. Such as this: The next Martha Coakley attack ad. One word that one never utters in polite company around the many college campuses in the state is featured prominently. The very utterance of it causes women to scream, children to huddle fearfully, and dogs that don’t fit in purses to snarl. That word is “Republican.”

And there is the ever dependable Iowahawk who has decided to join the fun and prepare his own anti-Brown ad. He has also succeeded in getting his alcohol-fueled readers to come up with their own creations, a couple or so of which actually are funny. Iowahawk predicts, “If — God forbid — Brown wins, he will be the first Republican elected in the state since Cotton Mather, and America will soon descend into a post-apocalyptic fundamentalist hellscape of witch trials and cross-burnings, interrupted only by the ritual mass bulldozing of corpses killed by lack of access to affordable health care. Not to mention relaxed federal fuel efficiency standards!” He means this reaction among Democrats as a joke. I know better; I work at a (redundancy alert) liberal law school.

The one quote from Martha Coakley that actually has some heft comes from one of her fundraising appeals: “If I don’t win, 2010 is going to be hell for Democrats….Every Democrat will have a competitive race.” From your lips to God’s ear, Martha.

I can’t believe it myself. After mulling this over driving to work the morning I heard about it, I concluded that I just do not understand the fuss about Senator Reid’s description of candidate Barack Obama and his electability, as reported from the book “Game Change.” According to the book,

He (Reid) was wowed by Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama - a “light-skinned” African American “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,” as he later put it privately.

Reid has been raked over the coals for this remark and has apologized repeatedly to Obama and to whoever else would listen. Some excitable conservative commentators and politicians, sensing an opportunity for political payback for past hysterical claims of racism by cynical and sanctimonious Democrats over the slightest misstep by a conservative figure, piled on.

Now, to establish some bona fides: I fully agree that, in general, anything that embarrasses Harry Reid is good. As is payback for the hypocrisy of Democrats for their absurd theatrical claims of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., against conservatives. I also understand the desire to teach liberals a lesson for their habit of playing six degrees of separation from racism for perfectly innocuous remarks by conservatives that get twisted in bizarre Orwellian ways to mean something entirely different from anything a rational person would have understood them to mean. I, too, find contemptible the liberal penchant to equate criticism of President Obama and his policies and ideological stands with racism. And then there is the not-so-small matter of the double standard under which conservatives toil. Conservative remarks, even if distorted, send the media and the racial grievance peddlers into a frenzy of feigned outrage and hurt that even abject apologies by the speaker, bewildered about the racism attributed to him for an off-hand innocent comment, cannot abate. Not so for liberals. Their remarks usually pass, barely reported. If they are sufficiently blatant to trigger a response, a perfunctory apology for “carelessly-worded remarks that, taken out of context, might be misinterpreted and cause hurt” will bring prompt absolution. Not for them the wearing of the hair shirt.

All of that is understood as facts of life in the United States of the past quarter century. Still I cannot for the life of me see any racism in Harry Reid’s remarks. Perhaps it is that I am not of the referenced racial identity, but I don’t even see the words as objectionable, just descriptive. His choice of the word “Negro” may be out-dated. But the remark is no more super-annuated than the speaker himself. He was using a term that was used in Reid’s formative years as the then-appropriate appellation in a long line of ever-changing “proper” terms to describe Americans of African ancestry. Perhaps he might have updated his language to comport with current fashion, but that failure to do so hardly makes Reid (or his remarks) racist.

Maybe the problem here is the supernova of the word “racism” over the past four decades. According to the dictionary (well, one from twenty years ago), “racism” means a belief in the superiority of one’s ethnic or racial group over others. But for some, racism has taken on a politicized all-encompassing meaning reserved for the conscious or subconscious states of mind of Whites. This approach is particularly to be found among the hypersensitive members of certain identity groups who see life through the lens of race and ethnicity and their White enablers, with both collections of culprits often found in university environs and in educational bureaucracies. The term is also useful for liberals as an all-purpose emotional response in any disputation with a conservative to characterize the latter’s thoughts and words when liberal talking points have failed to silence that conservative.

But hewing to the accepted meaning of the word, Harry Reid is not racist. At least not based on those remarks. He is supporting Obama and believes that the American voters are ready to accept a Black candidate. Of course, Reid turned out to be correct. His reasons are also astute. People as a whole would not vote for Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson as readily because of their heavier “Black” accents. Actually, Sharpton’s accent is rather light; but voters see him for what he is, an unsavory race hustler. For that matter, liberals made fun of Sarah Palin’s nasal Midwestern-style twang, yet another way in which she managed to annoy them, you betcha.

Voters likely would also consider a heavy New York accent as a detriment (see Al Smith in 1928) or, less negatively, a heavy Southern accent. National candidates try to adopt a rather bland American speech tone in general, though they may revert to their regional patois when the political occasion demands. Hillary Clinton was ridiculed for that in the primaries, when she rediscovered her Southern voice during forays across the Mason-Dixon line. Of course, being a Clinton, Hill overplayed her hand and tried to affect Black speech patterns during appearances before Black audiences.

The “Sage of South Central,” columnist and radio commentator Larry Elder has expressed similar bewilderment:

“‘Light-skinned’? Didn’t black director Spike Lee do a film, ‘School Daze,’ about how light-skinned fraternity students considered themselves more appealing than their dark-skinned counterparts?
“‘Negro’? The term is on this year’s census. What about the United Negro College Fund?
“‘No Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one’? Last January, National Public Radio interviewed black Obama supporter and linguistics professor John McWhorter. He said: ‘(Obama) is a very bidialectal person. … He can talk in a way where you would not know that he was black over the phone. … But then, especially when he talks to a black audience, he can sound quite a bit like (Martin Luther King colleague) Rev. Lowry sounded at the inauguration.’”

Poet and playwright Stanley Crouch provides some historical context for his own embrace of the word “Negro.”

By all means, Republicans should pay a lot of attention to Reid’s seat and select a strong candidate to retire Reid by exploiting his political weakness in his home state. Hammer away at Reid’s corrupt real estate deals. Bring in a passionate speaker and engaging personality to contrast with Reid’s bland speech patterns and his dour and shifty-eyed demeanor. Tie Reid to Obama/Reid/PelosiCare so tightly they look like one. Reid should never be mentioned without a reference to Pelosi. But don’t undercut the force of the bigger issue by transparently bogus claims of racism that can only gain Reid sympathy and detract from the substance of the political message about what a shambles the Democrats under his leadership are making of this country.

Americans were witness last year to President Obama’s cult-like status among his acolytes. News stories of women fainting during his speeches, the sale of religious icons in the likeness of Mr. Obama, and the YouTube videos of children singing hymns (some with distinct religious imagery) to The One and of older youngsters doing marching/drill team routines with distinct military cadences in support to him were all-too-frequent occurrences. The observers seamlessly became one with the observed, as “journalists” who prided themselves (undeservedly, it turned out) on “speaking truth to power” turned into giddy school girls experiencing their first celebrity crushes.

Nor was this mania restricted to the U.S., as candidate Obama’s European tour showed. Indeed, those foreigners who see in the President a kindred spirit in their shared views of the United States are probably more infatuated with a persona whose concrete policy manifestations they need not endure as do Americans. And none are as likely to go 110% as the Germans, with their stereotypical thoroughness and their near-fanatical enthusiasm for those things American that they like.

So, it comes as no surprise that the Germans are staging “Hope,” a musical honoring Obama. Usually, personal musical tributes celebrate accomplishments, real (the opera “Nixon in China” comes to mind) or mythical (Wagner’s works, for example). But the American writer/composer and his German collaborators did not want to wait for something as pedestrian as a real accomplishment. With the Nobel Peace Prize committee setting a high bar of sycophancy and mindless adulation with its award based on a nomination at most ten days into Mr. Obama’s presidency, the musical’s creators had a tough act to follow. Worse, this is not the first Obama musical. That “honor” belongs to an English production, “Obama On My Mind.” As Mark Steyn notes in a nod to the musical Oklahoma, “Oooooo-bama, where the thrills come tingling down your leg.”

A good gauge of the political tenor of the piece is the description of Sarah Palin’s part: “Sarah Palin also has her own solo, surrounded by a troop of scantily clad dancers.” Doesn’t that just capture the essence of Sarah Palin’s values and policy positions and her appeal to the Republican base?

Don’t worry if you cannot get to Frankfurt to see this artistic masterpiece. There is talk of a future U.S. tour for “Hope.” The cynic suspects that this tour will happen sometime in 2012. By that time three years of the Obama administration will be in the books and, judging by the events of the first year, for many of us, that musical may be the only aspect of “Hope” left.

On a curiously coincidental matter of socialist realist “art,” there is news from Caracas, Venezuela, that Obama’s book club pal Hugo Chavez has “asked” Venezuelans to follow the example of his good friend and abrazo partner Fidel Castro’s Cuban workers’ paradise and make “socialist” soap operas. He has offered the assistance of the government’s own propaganda film-making center. No word whether Michael Moore is creative adviser.

I’m sure hordes of Venezuelans are eagerly awaiting programs about heroic socialist workers happily toiling with ideological commitment and without pay, braving capitalist-created storms, capitalist tarantulas, capitalist drug dealers, capitalist prostitutes, capitalist bosses who insist on paying you only for what you’ve earned, capitalist subversives spreading anti-revolutionary ideas such as freedom and personal initiative, all to bring in that record-breaking sugar crop to fund the export of Chavez’s and el lider’s glorious revolution to Latin America through the narco-terrorist FARC. But, since there is a distinct likelihood that government-approved socialist soap operas will lack the popular appeal of decadent capitalist-themed soap operas, Oogo has also offered government funding for the endeavor. Sounds like PBS, NPR, liberal talk radio and liberal cable TV shows. In funding and lack of market success, not just leftist ideology. Indeed, it describes the liberal vision of health care and all other human enterprise. Since that vision can’t compete on its own merits, it requires government funding. Only as an “option,” of course.

As was entirely predictable, last fiscal year’s political fix, with its paltry spending cuts, its tax increases, and its accounting gimmicks did nothing to address the real problems of the structural disaster that is the California budget. As was also entirely predictable, the deficits that are the inevitable product of California’s Democrat-dominated dysfunctional political system are, once more, making their annual appearance.

Many politicians, intellectuals, members of the scribblariate, and representatives from “good government” elites blame the current state of disrepair on the use of the popular initiative. These folks, who prefer a less robust democracy left in the hands of the supposedly more reflective legislators or, better yet, the unelected judiciary, believe that the fiscal mess is due to the voters’ approval over the years of initiatives that require various spending obligations without provisions for financing. For example, a certain percentage of the budget must go to education and to highways. There are numerous bonds and expenditures for pet projects such as stem cell research.

These are problems, to be sure. I vote against most bond indebtedness, especially if it does not directly contribute to infrastructure construction. For example, while I appreciate the service of veterans, I don’t believe that they or various public employees, such as law enforcement, fire fighters, or teachers should get tax breaks or loan benefits for life’s expenses. The critics have a point that such special interest group protections burden the California budget and prevent flexibility needed especially during economic downturns.

But those are not the only problems in California. Heavy reliance on a sales tax that is just shy of 10%, as well as a similar income tax rate in a system that relies heavily on taxing the upper middle and upper classes, make the California treasury especially vulnerable during economic downturns. Extremely generously paid public employees, especially those in law enforcement, prison guards, teachers, and fire fighters, put a strain on the budget. The pension obligations owed to many among those, usually as a result of the past political efforts of strong unions, are a particular drag as people retire early and draw on the system.

Those obligations are the result of political bargaining and influence, not popular initiatives. Of those that were approved through popular initiatives, such as the fiscally unconscionable feel-good protection of education spending, many were strongly supported by Democratic politicians and their public sector union allies. Complaints about voter profligacy and the call for restraints on popular initiatives, especially constitutional initiatives, sound hollow. One suspects that the elites are bothered less by popular votes that put spending mandates in place than by those, such as Proposition 8, that rein in radical judicial fantasies such as the sudden discovery by the California Supreme Court that the state constitution contains a right to same-sex marriage.

That suspicion is heightened when, in the teeth of a projected $20 billion deficit, the nominally Republican governor in his state-of-the-state speech addresses California’s fiscal woes by calling for a specific guarantee of spending for the state’s universities. Spending on universities must never be less than for prisons, he says. The plan envisions a minimum of 10% spending on universities, with prison spending eventually capped at 7%. That latter number will not hold, as the government will regularly scare the voters into voting more funds for prisons. But this gives the universities political cover for a safe-haven of funding that, once again locks the state into funding that diminishes budgetary flexibility. To add to the irony, Schwarzenegger proposes to add this fiscal millstone through a constitutional initiative to be placed before the voters.

The solution to California’s budgetary crisis is to cut spending on social welfare programs, flatten out the tax base to broaden taxpayer participation, eliminate the budgetary protections for education, radically revamp the delivery of education (including state-wide funding) that costs among the highest in the country yet delivers among the worst results, break the power of public sector employee unions, put the governor’s “green jobs” fantasies on ice, reduce taxes and business regulations (especially environmental) that hamper capital formation and job creation. In other words, what is needed is to take California out of the fantasy world of liberal ideology that blankets California politics. And that, I regret to say, will not happen until that corrosive world view turns California into much more of a failed economic state than it is even now.

I have posted several times over the past month or so about the political omens for the 2010 Congressional elections. Two strong measures of the political winds are switches in party affiliation by politicians and decisions of incumbents not to run for re-election. In 2006 and, to a lesser extent, in 2008, these measures fell heavily on Republicans, which foretold the electoral difficulties for the GOP. In 2009 and 2010, the winds have shifted and are threatening to swamp the Democrats. Following the Democratic losses in the 2009 off-year state and local elections (which, looked at broadly rather than at an individual race, also are a barometer of approaching political storms), there have been one Democrat who has switched to the GOP and several Democratic Representatives who have declined to run for re-election.

Now comes further such news. North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan has said that he will not seek re-election. Dorgan once was a left-leaning “prairie populist” in the tradition of many state politicians from the politically-schizophrenic Upper Midwest farm states that usually lean Republican, especially in national elections. He has tacked more to the political center and been consistently hailed in the press as a “moderate.” It is unclear, however, to what extent that shift is real and to what extent Dorgan has not changed but the ground has shifted under him through the Pelosi-Reid-Boxer-Obama lurch into leftist la-la-land.

Dorgan is 67 years old, which is not retirement age for Senators who are playing leading roles in the Senate as chairmen of committees involved in crafting major legislation. But he was facing a tough re-election fight, with polls showing him trailing in a contest against the popular governor of North Dakota, John Hoeven, who has won his last two elections with more than 70% of the vote. Moreover, Dorgan’s prominent role in crafting the Senate version of Obama/Reid/PelosiCare will make him an even more inviting target for Republican campaign ad barrages.

It is also likely, in that connection, that Dorgan has looked at the poll numbers of Nebraska’s Senator Ben Nelson, whom the media held up as a conservative, blue-dog Democrat. But, while the media and some conservative wishful thinkers emphasize the “blue-dog,” I prefer to emphasize the “Democrat,” especially when it comes to signature campaign promises by the Democratic standard bearer, President Obama, and the Democratic Congressional leadership. ”Blue dogs” will still vote as Democrats in sufficient numbers not to embarrass their leaders, especially this early in the President’s term. Nelson, predictably, caved after trying to cover himself with Nebraska voters by pulling a [Louisiana Senator] Mary Landrieu and getting a provision that taxpayers in other states will be subsidizing the increased Medicare costs for Nebraskans under the Senate health plan.

Still, Nelson’s poll numbers took a dive. They took such a dive, in fact, that Nelson bought airtime during the Holiday Bowl football game, in which the University of Nebraska was playing, to defend his vote on the bill. Polls showed him losing badly in a hypothetical match-up with the state’s Republican governor. The good news for Nelson is that he does not have to run until 2012, which is a long time in political terms, and will bring out more pro-Obama voters likely to vote for him than would the mid-terms. That said, it is difficult for a politician to recover from the low standing in which Nelson finds himself in a deeply Republican state. Moreover, the message here could not have been lost on Dorgan, who does have to run in 2010 in an only slightly less deep Republican state.

Then came the announcement by Connecticut’s Senator Christopher Dodd that he would not seek re-election. Dodd has been plagued by allegations of financial irregularities and suffers from a public perception of lack of honesty and trustworthiness. He was trailing his most likely Republican opponent, a former Congressman.

Having Dodd retire is a very smart move by the Democrats. Connecticut is a Democratic state. Not at the level of Massachusetts, California, or Maryland, but still solidly so. The Democrats have recruited the popular state attorney general to run, which, despite brave Republican talk to the contrary, likely means the Democrats will hold the seat. The Republicans made a similarly smart move by persuading Kentucky’s Republican Senator Jim Bunning not to run for re-election. Bunning, a strong conservative but not one of the sharpest blades in the drawer, was in serious danger of losing in a normally Republican-trending state even in a Republican year. With Bunning’s departure, the Republicans can fall back on the dynamics of recruiting an acceptable candidate (probably 37-year-old Secretary of State Trey Grayson, not Ron Paul’s son Rand) and the natural political leanings of the Kentucky voters combined with the anti-Democratic tides of the mid-term election to retain the seat even against relatively strong potential Democratic candidates such as a the lieutenant governor or the attorney general.

Then came news that Colorado’s Governor Bill Ritter will not seek re-election after just one term in office. Colorado is a swing state that had been trending more Democrat over the last several election cycles. Ritter is a telegenic politician and was considered a rising star in the Democratic Party. But he, too, was done in by low poll numbers and public antipathy to the Democrats. I see this, too, as a smart—and coordinated—political move by the Democrats. The Democrats also have a Senate seat to defend, with a weak incumbent, Michael Bennet, who was just appointed (by Ritter) to serve out the term of Ken Salazar, who, in turn, was appointed Interior Secretary by President Obama. By removing Ritter and replacing him with a better candidate, the Democrats remove the mutually reinforcing political drag of a governor with low poll numbers and a Senator with equally low numbers. Perhaps, from the Democrats’ perspective, the governorship can be saved. With some luck, this will energize enough Democrats to save the Senate seat, as well, although that is unlikely. Polls have consistently shown the likely Republican candidate, former Lt. Gov. Jane Norton, beating the Democrat.

But in this election, the governors’ races are probably more important that Senate races. The reason is the re-drawing of legislative district lines after the 2010 census. In most states, this is a political process, so the party in control of the state legislatures and governorships can use their political advantage to help entrench themselves over the next decade. With the success of the Republicans in state legislative and gubernatorial races in the 2009 off-year election, the warning flags are flying for the Democrats.

There are at least a couple of successful Democratic politicians who might be recruited to run for the Colorado governorship, the politically ambitious Denver mayor John Hickenlooper, and Ken Salazar. I would bet on the former, who is more likely to scheme to get the nomination, rather than the latter, who gave up a Senate seat for an executive position he’d have to surrender early in the President’s term. Hickenlooper’s main advantage is his position as mayor of the biggest city, with the media exposure and name recognition that brings. His main disadvantage is that he is the mayor of Denver, a place about which many Coloradans feel the same way as many Californians feel about San Francisco and Los Angeles. Combined. The Democrats are in serious trouble with the Senate seat in Colorado, but the Ritter announcement increases their chance of holding the governorship from likely loss to toss-up.

I think there will be more such announcements, either due to personal decisions by the Democratic incumbents or because of a concerted culling of the herd by Democratic Party operatives. The Obama administration can certainly do its part by promising to reward decisions by weak Democratic incumbents to step aside. A cushy executive branch appointment or diplomatic assignment can do wonders to salve the wounds suffered by political egos when they are pushed aside for the greater good of the party.

From rightwingnews.com comes this collection of the 40 best political quotes of 2009. Obviously, these are not selected by the usual media and entertainment pundits, whose fare tends to the more grandiloquent but substantively empty effusions from those of a decidedly more leftish tendency (though the master of empty grandiloquence in the White House merits a quote in the collection).

While it is difficult to choose, among my favorites are:

The ever dependable Charles Krauthammer:
“It’s hard to appreciate an entity’s leading role in the world when it’s been sucking on your tit for 60 years as Europe has with regard to the United States, parasitically.”

The cerebral Thomas Sowell, who has several stellar entries:
“Since this is an era when many people are concerned about ‘fairness’ and ’social justice,’ what is your ‘fair share’ of what someone else has worked for?”

The acerbic Ann Coulter, on what plagues much of U.S. culture:
“‘Diversity’ is a difficulty to be overcome, not an advantage to be sought. True, America does a better job than most at accommodating a diverse population. We also do a better job at curing cancer and containing pollution. But no one goes around mindlessly exclaiming: ‘Cancer is a strength!’ ‘Pollution is our greatest asset!’”

The semi-anonymous Robyn of Berkeley, who reflects on a fundamental truth known to Token Conservative:
“The Left has declared war on Palin because she threatens their existence. Liberals need women dependent and scared so that women, like blacks, will vote Democrat. ”

Even the “reach-across-the-aisle-to-my-Democratic-friends” John McCain:
“It seems to me that President Carter has earned his place as if not the worst president in history, the worst president of the 20th Century.”

Read ‘em and agree.

Last week, I posted about the drip-drip-drip of retirements of Democrats in vulnerable House districts in advance of the 2010 elections. Such retirements of members of the majority party from competitive districts, when otherwise unprompted by a decision to run for another office or advanced age, are usually a sign of political danger for that party and portray electoral vulnerability. I noted that the only clearer sign of electoral danger is when members of the majority party switch sides. That had not happened when I wrote those remarks.

Now it has. A vulnerable Democrat from an Alabama district has switched to the GOP. John McCain carried that district in 2008, and the Congressman won by a small percentage. It is highly likely that the district will go Republican next year. Freshman Congessmen typically are the most vulnerable of incumbents, for several reasons, such as electoral tides, fluke candidate pairings, and temporary local issues. Congressman Griffith has read the political tea leaves and decided, in inverse of an old advertising slogan, he’d rather switch than fight.

Posting has been a little slow lately due to a couple of things. For one, I have a stack of 120 essay exams that I have to grade within four weeks right around Christmas, but that is another story. The other is the planning for Christmas, a holiday that our family traditionally tries to make into a particularly occasion. Again, a topic for another day. I have graded about half the exams so I hope to be able to post with more frequency.

One topic that recently came up in Commentary magazine was why American Jews are so liberal, politically. Why Are Jews Liberals is also the title of a book by the late Norman Podhoretz, a conservative Jewish intellectual. Most of my Jewish acquaintances are rather conservative, but that may simply reflect sympathies born of broadly shared views among us, not the make-up of the greater collection of American Jews. Many of the older among my Jewish acquaintances, though sharing conservative values, long voted Democratic (if they don’t continue to do so). That paradox was captured in a sardonic comment made by a Jewish political observer years back that, every time Jews enter the polling station, they think Franklin Roosevelt is on the ballot. The point of the question is to ask why, when one might expect cultural and religious traditions to point Jews in a conservative direction at least to the same extent as with other mainstream successful groups within society, so many are liberal.

I hasten to note that to talk about Jews as a monolithic liberal political bloc misses the cultural texture of, and the fractures within, American Judaism. One would expect the Orthodox to behave differently than the Conservatives (a creation of American Judaism) and they than the Reform (steeped in Western European Social Democracy). Those latter two groups are much more politically liberal than are the Orthodox. Moreover, there is an unusually large percentage of atheists and religious agnostics among Jews compared to other people of other cultural and religious heritage. That, too, is likely to affect the overall pro-liberal bent, yet also underscore the internal variation of political beliefs among Jews.

Another explanation for Jews’ overall political liberalism is their historical position as outsiders, a self-perception that continues even as Jews have flourished and become an important and integral part of the social, cultural, political, and economic fabric of the most tolerant society in which they have dwelt. The sense of being outsiders may simply be the product of ingrained cultural attitudes that have resulted from centuries of at most grudging acceptance by those around them in the “old countries.” Or, it may be a kind of badge of identity that no longer reflects reality and has outlived its usefulness, yet still provides a kind of tribal cohesiveness for a minority whose identity is threatened by the very success it has achieved in the broader American society.

And other explanations abound. The afore-mentioned Commentary article collects the views of several well-known American Jewish commentators, generally of conservative political view. I find them all intriguing but none more so than Michael Medved’s disturbing view that American Jewish liberalism mostly reflects a suspicion of, and intolerance towards, Christianity. The more Christian a politician is viewed, the more Jews are suspicious of him or her. The fact that Christians are the most reliable supporters of Israel matters not. As Medved points out,

“This political pattern reflects the fact that opposition to Christianity—not love for Judaism, Jews, or Israel—remains the sole unifying element in an increasingly fractious and secularized community. The old (and never fully realized) dream that Zionist fervor could weave together all the various ideological and cultural strands of American Jewry looks increasingly irrelevant and simplistic. In an era of budget plane flights and elegantly organized tours, more than 75 percent of American Jews have never bothered to visit Israel. The majority give nothing to Israel-related charities and shun synagogue or temple membership. The contrasting components of the American Jewish population connect only through a point of common denial, not through any acts of affirmation.”

Medved points out the greater hostility among Jews towards Christianity than towards any other group, some of whom pose an existential threat to Jews (or at least to Israel) today. “Anyone who doubts that rejection of Jesus has replaced acceptance of Torah (or commitment to Israel) as the eekur sach—the essential element—of American Jewish identity should pause to consider an uncomfortable question. What is the one political or religious position that makes a Jew utterly unwelcome in the organized community? We accept atheist Jews, Buddhist Jews, pro-Palestinian Jews, Communist Jews, homosexual Jews, and even sanction Hindu-Jewish meditation societies. ‘Jews for Jesus,’ however, or ‘Messianic Jews’ face resistance and exclusion everywhere. In Left-leaning congregations, many rabbis welcome stridently anti-Israel speakers and even Palestinian apologists for Islamo-Nazi terror. But if they invited a ‘Messianic Jewish’ missionary, they’d face indignant denunciation from their boards and, very probably, condemnation by their national denominational leadership.”

Mark Steyn, were he asked, would concur. He has often pointed out how mainline Jewish organizations, such as the ADL and the Canadian Jewish Congress, carry on about marginalized neo-Nazis in Canada and about conservative Christians in the United States, while going out of their way to preach tolerance regarding radical hate-spouting Islamic extremists. Medved presents as the cause of American Jews’ political liberalism a disturbing and socially destructive paranoia among them towards their Christian countrymen.

More optimistic than Medved (and, ultimately, than Podhoretz himself) is Jonathan Sarna, who sees American Jews as not condemned to perpetual liberalism. Rather, he sees conservatism as much more consistent with fundamental Jewish cultural attitudes:

“But then one looks at the growing number of -Orthodox Jews in America, who do not bow down before the ‘Torah of liberalism’; and at the growing political maturity of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, the most politically conservative voting bloc within the American Jewish community; and at the Democrats, who, with their powerful majority, are recklessly challenging and criticizing the state of Israel, potentially alienating American Jewish voters; and at all the other major Jewish communities in the world that vote for conservative candidates in significant numbers—and then one wonders at Podhoretz’s pessimism.

“’The natural Jewish political attitude’ may reassert itself sooner than he imagines.”

Let’s hope so.

President Obama’s speech today at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, Norway, was a pleasant surprise. There was still far too much self-reverence, judged by the number of “I”s. There was too much meandering sermonizing, and the speech was too long. And there was this unforgivable descent into megalomaniacal self-glory: “I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war.” As well, the history of war was too simplistic and at times too close to historical fiction (the reference to the Crusades was unnecessary and distorted). There was no need for, yet again, the old Obama bad war (Iraq)/good war (Afghanistan) false dichotomy and implied criticism of his predecessor.

Still, the tone was a much needed corrective to the Nobel Peace Committee’s self-delusional decision to grant him the prize based on a nomination that had to be made when he was less than two weeks in office. I believe that the speech is entirely motivated by political self-calculation, as the President had taken much criticism and ridicule for the choice. He clearly believed, judging from the content such as the declared humility, that there had to be a figurative rebuke to the Nobel Prize committee for popular consumption by voters back home.

That said, by comparison to his prior efforts, the speech was powerful and appears to have taken aback the Euro elites that came to hear it. Little applause interrupted the speech except when he promised to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center, albeit without a time commitment. The President generally avoided his past habit of bowing to foreigners either physically or figuratively through apologies for this or that real or imagined American failing, though he could not escape it entirely. He emphasized the need to use power, even military power, rather than “sitting down and talking without preconditions.” Better yet, he did so without the usual degree of equivocations and rhetorical bobbing and weaving that signified his preference for moral equivalence between the U.S. and various oppressive enemy regimes. There wasn’t to the same extent the mostly flat delivery and internal contradictions that characterized his Afghanistan War speech at West Point recently.

Now it remains to be seen whether the President will follow up this speech with actual resolve in dealing with other countries, both in military confrontation and diplomatic engagement. Or will it just be business as usual, which will define the speech as pure political opportunism that other countries can ignore? There is much evidence from the President’s past, his circle of advisers, and his conduct of foreign affairs and national security matters so far that gives cause for alarm. But for now, the President struck the right notes.

Some other reactions: Judith Miller of the Manhattan Institute agrees. As does Sarah Palin. Mark Steyn casts a “nay” vote.

President Obama has been plagued by falling poll numbers. This first appeared in regards to particular issues, such as national security. There, as early as last spring, his proposals regarding the closing of Guantanamo Bay, restrictions on interrogations of terrorists, investigation and prosecution of Bush officials and/or CIA agents, publication of records of interrogations, etc., were decidedly unpopular. More people sided with Dick Cheney’s views than with Obama’s. By summer, his health care proposals were taking a beating. Indeed, the more he pushed for them, the more public support declined. His handling of the economy and the looming deficits hurt him next. Support for Obama/Reid/PelosiCare is now below 40%. There are now polls showing that Republicans are trusted more on health care than Democrats. On the generic party preference ballot, Republicans are now up by 9% in one poll.

The erosion of Democratic support is also occurring on the state level, which is an important matter, as the states will reapportion their state and Congressional districts after the 2010 census. Republicans have won 33 of 50 special elections for state legislative districts since November, 2008. Three Congressional Democrats who represent Republican-majority or competitive districts (won by W in 2000 and/or 2004 and by Obama in 2008) already have announced their retirement before the 2010 election.

While his standing with the public on particular issues has cratered, people still tended to give him majority support on his overall job performance. This is due to his personal standing, as there is no way that people can disapprove of his position on issue after issue, believe that the country is on the wrong track, yet still approve of his overall job performance. Recently, however, poll after poll has begun to show his overall job approval sinking below 50% into a statistical tie between those who approve and those who don’t.

Now comes the killer. In a Public Policy Polling survey of whom they preferred to see as President, Mr. Obama or George W. Bush, Mr. Obama won. By 6%. Six percent separates the supposedly worst President ever from The One who would cause the world’s sea levels to lower and the planet to heal. And this is in a poll by a liberal, but credible polling firm. Those numbers are likely to improve for W and decline for O the longer the latter is in office. Indeed, among Whites Obama is already significantly in the negative against Bush, while Blacks and, to a lesser extent Hispanics, still strongly support Obama. There is a gender gap, in that men now prefer Bush while women support Obama. There is an age gap, with Obama being preferred by those under 45, and Bush and Obama tied among those over 45. The Northeast and the West, with its bicoastal elites in large urban centers, strongly favors Obama, while flyover country in the Midwest and South strongly supports Bush.

At the very least, this shows two things. One, nothing cures popular dissatisfaction with a President more than do the follies of his successor. Two, while Democrats will try to use the Bush card for the foreseeable future, and President Obama will continue to blame his predecessor for his own failings, this will be an increasingly feeble and, indeed, risky strategy.

On a side note, I do not agree with the 20% of respondents who want to see Obama impeached. There are no bases for such a move right now, and this would just be a distraction from dealing with the more pressing issues of defeating Obamaism politically. A move towards impeachment right now would simply give the Democrats political cover and hurt conservatives politically with the great majority of the people. Political disagreement is not ground for impeachment, and Obama’s political decisions do not evidence criminality or the degree of craven corruption that impeachment requires.

Obama’s flailing internationally and his radicalism domestically, combined with his penchant for fingerpointing and blame-shifting, have produced vigorous blow-back from Dick Cheney. Ol’ Vice has emerged as the principal defender of the Bush administration and point man in the attack on Obama’s mischaracterizations and ideological demonization of Bush’s national security policies on which Cheney had a not inconsiderable influence. Some Republicans, such as the former leader of the Log Cabin Republicans, want Cheney to assume a more prominent political role. This has led to the start of a “Draft Cheney” movement to get him to challenge Obama for the Presidency in 2012. Cheney would be the anti-Obama candidate temperamentally, politically, intellectually, and ideologically. That might be a potent combination by 2012. I’d certainly vote for Darth. But I do not see it happening, due to Cheney’s health and age and his own emphatic rejection of the idea,

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently compared Republicans who want to slow down the railroad to Obama/Reid/PelosiCare to the supporters of slavery and to the opponents of the civil rights acts of the 1960s. Reid delivered the remarks in that lugubrious tone that he affects so easily. Yesterday, rather than apologize as GOP Senators have demanded, Reid doubled down.

There is, of course, the sleaziness of the comparison itself. Opposition to an eventual government takeover of health care is the same as supporting the buying and selling of human beings? If anything, those who want the government to control people’s health care decisions and to seize taxpayer’s money to pay for that control, thereby impoverishing them and making them dependent on government largesse, are the ones supporting a form of bondage. The same would be said regarding the civil rights acts. Supporting those acts meant supporting individual freedom against state deprivation. The Republicans, in opposing government control over health care, are supporting individual choice and freedom, while Reid and his ilk are the ones seeking to deprive people of that freedom.

Morever, Reid is displaying his historical ignorance. Just as with the Democrats’ relentless efforts now to implement a command-and-control society through the President’s agenda, it was members of Reid’s party who supported slavery and overwhelmingly constituted the opposition to passage of the civil rights laws. If Reid is going to engage in a cheap political smear campaign by vituperation and calumny, he ought to take care to display his ignorance less blatantly.

Via Allahpundit at Hot Air comes definitive evidence, courtesy of the liberal Pew polling organization, that former Vice President Dick Cheney has won the debate against President Obama over enhanced interrogation. For the first time since Pew began such polling, a majority of the American public believes that torture is often or sometimes justified. Only 25% of Americans believe it is never justified, which would be those who identify themselves as liberal in other polls (21%) plus a small fraction of independents. These folks are usually called professors. Since carefully controlled and circumscribed enhanced interrogations of the type conducted by the CIA are not torture by definition or in practice, public support for those procedures likely is even higher. This distinction between waterboarding or rude interrogations and real torture is not lost on the American people (or al Qaeda), though it seems not to register with members of, especially, the legal academy.

Support for torture is up by 9% since Obama took office, most of that since he and his administration began the publicized debate with ol’ Vice. All one has to do is watch the two and hear their arguments. In matters of national security, whom would one rather see in charge, Barack Obama or Dick Cheney? For most Americans the choice is clear. It’s one thing to listen to Obama’s feel-good rhetoric when the serious adults are still in charge. It’s quite another when the Candyman is actually in charge. Obama is an inspiring head of state figure. A war chief? Not at all.

More interesting is that support for torture has risen most dramatically among Democrats (+18%) and independents (+9%). This change in attitude parallels an increased public perception that Mr. Obama is not tough enough in foreign relations. Again, most of that change is due to Democrats and Independents souring on the President. Mr. Obama’s apology tours, his softness towards Iran, and his delay in formulating an Afghanistan policy are beginning to cement an impression of the President in the mind of the public.

Perhaps the President’s deflationary polling and the perception of weakness is related to his Afghanistan policy. The timetable for withdrawal of forces announced by the President is seen overwhelmingly negatively by the American public.

The story at this link is almost unbelievable. I say “almost” because I am becoming progressively less shocked by the extent to which political correctness and the toxins of mindless multiculturalism have infected the body politic in even its military incarnation. In 2004, four Blackwater security contractors were brutally murdered in Fallujah, Iraq. Their bodies were mutilated, burned and dragged through the streets. Two of them were hung from a bridge in a ghastly display for the amusement of the demented onlookers. The ringleader of this brutal escapade, Ahmed Hashim Abed, for years was one of the most wanted terrorists. He was eventually hunted down by U.S. Navy Seals in September of this year. He was turned over to the Iraqis. Once in their custody he claimed that the Seals had punched him, causing a bloody lip. When the Iraqis saw the lip and heard the claim, the story is, they returned Abed to American custody. His story caused an investigation that resulted in three Seals being charged with assault and other transgressions. They have rejected a non-judicial proceeding and demanded a court martial to have the charges aired. It seems to me that an informal reprimand should have been the end of the matter. Mr. Abed, on the other hand, should have been shot “trying to flee,” rather than captured.

As best as I can tell, there has not been the same rush from the law professoriate and other paragons of due process to come to the aid of the accused Seals, as they rush to defend, by word and deed, accused terrorists. In fact, there has been not a peep. There is only the sound of crickets chirping. Nor would I expect them to do so. After all, defending someone in the American military would be defending a denizen of a culture entirely alien to the ideology and world view of most law professors and eager elite attorneys seeking to make a name for themselves. Defending a terrosist enemy combatant, on the other hand…. More than likely, there will be no shortage of members of the legal elite who will push to represent Abed.

Then there is the compensation issue. The government of Kuwait and others of that ilk may stand ready to pay the handsome fees of Attorney General Eric Holder’s old law firm to defend accused terrorists, but they are hardly inclined to defend a member of the American military who gave a bruised lip to the ringleader of a murdering, body-mutilating, exhibitionist killer mob. The Seals will just have to rely on their appointed military lawyer.

As predicted, President Obama managed to disparage and blame his predecessor for the situation in Afghanistan, just as he had blamed Mr. Bush for the problems in Iraq while he was still a Senator, all while opposing the change in military strategy and tactics that defeated the al Qaeda-sponsored terrorists in that country. In his latest speech, Mr. Obama then adopted a version of the Bush policies to address the military situation in Afghanistan. But his heart was not in it. As I’ve noted before, O is not W. The latter loved and respected the military. The former does not.

The line by the television reporter at the end is priceless, talking about the tepid reception given to Mr. Obama by the Marines.

Last night, President Obama delivered further proof of his leadership style. His speech about Afghanistan was 4,582 words long. He mentioned himself 44 times. He mentioned “victory”—well, not at all. This is hardly the kind of speech that will rouse the spirit of sacrifice among the troops, inspire the American people, frighten the Taliban, or reassure the increasingly skeptical Afghanis and Pakistanis about the American commitment. I’ll have more to say later, after some more reflection. Would Bush or Cheney have given this kind of speech?

In anticipation of President Obama’s loooong-awaited decision about troops in Afghanistan, I have some thoughts. As noted before, Mr. Obama has tried to sell his delay as intellectual reflection and cautious pragmatism. It is neither. One must recall that Mr. Obama during his campaign pronounced Afghanistan the “necessary war” to contrast it for himself and his base from the “optional war” in Iraq. He pledged to pursue that war vigorously and consequentially, even threatening to expand operations into Pakistan unilaterally, if necessary, to destroy the Taliban and capture bin Laden. Any number of liberals liked to taunt the Bush administration and conservatives with the fact that bin Laden was not captured as a way to demonstrate the incompetence of the administration. When those liberals were not fretting that Bush was hiding bin Laden somewhere to spring him as an October surprise before the election of 2004. And then 2006. And then 2008.

Mr. Obama also crowed during the campaign that Afghanistan was so important that his team had been working on an Afghanistan strategy. Later, he and his media supporters confidently asserted that they were the best-prepared transition team ever and were ready to hit the ground running. Though that wasn’t the case, and only an expanded use of drones to attack suspects in Pakistan resulted, the President in March reemphasized the importance of Afghanistan and declared that, in accordance with his view that failure was not an option, a thorough strategy had been developed that would be in place shortly. Later that spring, he fired the commander in Afghanistan and placed his own choice, General Stanley McChrystal, in charge of operations there.

McChrystal was given the task of developing a new strategy, in light of supposedly suddenly changed circumstances on which no one elaborated. When the general came up with a new plan within a few weeks, he found himself unable to get the President’s attention to discuss it. Only once that state of affairs leaked out to the public did Mr. Obama find the time in late summer/early fall for some well-publicized brief encounters with his general. Now, finally, a decision has been made, one-and-a-half years after candidate Obama’s revelation about his preparations for a plan for Afghanistan, more than 10 months since the inauguration, more than eight months since Mr. Obama’s grand speech on Afghanistan in March, more than six months since General McChrystal was appointed, four months since the general completed his assessment, and nearly three months since the report was submitted.

And to do what? To build on the existing presence and increase the American commitment there by 30,000 or so troops. Not to initiate a military offensive. Now, for one thing General McChrystal requested up to 80,000 troops (and a minimum compromise strategy number of 40,000) and warned that the lower the number, the higher the likelihood of failure. Thus, 30,000 or so is below that minimum threshold. The President is apparently hoping that the allies will make up the difference, a hope that is not based on anything the allies have said and done. Indeed, all indications from the allies are just the opposite.

The greater problem here, though, is the psychological one, something that will inevitably affect the morale of American troops and the American people negatively and the Taliban and other terrorist elements around the world positively. That problem comes from the dithering that has accompanied the decision. Dress it up as he might, this no longer comes across as a careful and deliberative process. It might have done so in February, March, April.Perhaps even May and June. But not now. It reeks of indecision and of being driven purely by political calibration and stands as a stark contrast to the stubborn politics-be-damned defense of American interests by George W. Bush.

Combined with the second manifestation, the much-heralded “exit strategy,” complete with benchmarks and, soon to come, timetables, this also looks like defeatism. It is a biding of time, like someone who cannot wait to leave a gathering but will stay the shortest time possible to meet social obligations. That atmosphere of defeatism, of looking for a way out, and the perception of a war based only on domestic political calculations rather than on an existential need cannot but corrode the effort. Everything the administration has done here, both in the delayed process and in the unsatisfactory substance, underscores that. Better then to bring the troops home than to let them get bogged down in a Vietnam-style struggle for stalemate and defeat.

Turning back to the still-hot topic of Obama/Reid/PelosiCare, via Hot Air come some enlightening, but entirely unsurprising updates. Liberals have been fond of saying that the government option will leave you with the same choices and not increase your cost. In fact, they’ve claimed that the government option will likely cause people’s premiums to go down, through increased competition as insurance companies cut into their “massive” 3% profits and through generous initial government subsidies. Of course, they’ve also said that they will have a sizable excise tax on so-called “Cadillac” plans to help keep everything “revenue-neutral.” As an aside, that’s a truly ironic name, given that Cadillac is made by G(overnment) M(otors). Since there is no indexing for inflation for that tax, it won’t be long before even Subaru plans will be considered Cadillacs.

I have always agreed with the contrary position that increased mandates to insurance companies to insure the uninsured and uninsurable combined with increased insurance company administration of medical choices determined by government directives will increase costs. Now comes word that insurance premiums will go up for the great majority of Americans, according to the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation. Moreover, taxpayers will have to pay for the subsidies to those whose premiums will decrease. Either that, or the deficit will go up. Worse for the plan, but as expected, most taxpayers will try to avoid the Cadillac tax by opting for less expensive policies. That, in turn, will lessen receipts from the excise tax on which the administration is counting to fund its program. The resulting funding gap has to be plugged by further taxes or by deficit spending. People are rational and act dynamically, whereas government planners are fixed on the concept that people are robots and act statically.

Entirely unsurprising, too, at least to conservatives, is the Washington Post’s astonished recognition that the plan will do nothing for the deficit. Even the Senate bill claims to reduce the deficit only by a rounding error in a deficit projected to reach 14% of GDP by 2035. Those numbers won’t happen of course, because they are unsustainable and the country will be bankrupt long before then. But the point remains. Obama/Reid/PelosiCare won’t “bend the cost-curve downward” and help solve the deficit. Significantly, the government’s calculations assume that the massive cuts in Medicare benefit and doctor compensation come to pass along with significant planned tax increases. In reality, those are already being modified or jettisoned. Medicare cuts promised in the past have never materialized, as Congress lacks the political will to do so. Rather, benefits have always been expanded. The House is also planning to change doctor compensation for Medicare services, but change it upward. The Senate will surely follow suit.

In a further display of their ingrained elitism on display during summer’s townhall meetings, Democrats plan to push this health care “reform” law through soon anyway, even though these government health plans are more unpopular than ever, with a 10% overall negative rating that threatens Democratic majorities in 2010. They are hoping to put this political hot potato behind them well before the 2010 election and hope for a rebound of the President’s political fortunes. That threat won’t be avoided by rushed passage of a huge bill like the nearly 2100-page Senate version or the nearly 2000-page House version, according to this analysis of the impact that the passage of high-profile pet legislation has had on the public approval ratings of prior Presidents.

I am perfectly happy to have the Democrats throw themselves onto the shoals of political ruin. But the long-term cost to the country if the government takes over a huge swath of the economy and proceeds to mandate and administer in the usual excessive command-and-control mode of liberals, is simply too high. I would rather see a failure of Obama/Reid/PelosiCare and have a weakened Democratic majority retain control of Congress than to see passage of such a law and have the Republicans take over Congress in 2010.

Columnist Mark Steyn reaches into his archives to unearth a column he wrote several years ago about one of the economic and personal costs of the socialized Canadian health care system, the cost of waiting. The time wasted waiting for medical services under such an inefficient system lowers economic productivity in the aggregate and imposes suffering and death on the ill and afflicted. These costs are never figured into the equation when liberals complain about the costs of American health care. But one of Steyn’s sources has it right. In the U.S., doctors want to provide necessary services as quickly as possible. The insurance may not want to pay for the service as readily as the doctor wants to provide it or you want it done, but, among the parties a rough efficiency and judgment of necessity of treatment are worked out. The procedure, done quickly, puts money into the doctor’s pocket quickly, as well. In a socialized system, there is no such profit motive. There is no incentive on the part of doctors to provide the service quickly and efficiently. Yet, the government (the ultimate insurance company) wants to save money, which it can do best by denying service. The rough efficiency and judgment of necessity of treatment do not materialize. And the cost of waiting, once the expectation of delay insinuates itself into all aspects of the system, manifests itself in other repulsive ways, judging by Canadian experience.

In his first State of the Union speech, President Bill Clinton outlined his domestic agenda. A part of that agenda a call for fundamental change in the health care system. That plan was later dubbed HillaryCare, as Hillary Clinton was put in charge of a task force to develop a reform proposal. One interesting aspect of the Clinton speech is how he emphasized that the economy would suffer severely if his proposals for health care “reform” were not adopted. As history has shown, the economy did not collapse from the rejection of HillaryCare. In fact, it grew tremendously, assisted no doubt by the unfolding of the computer tech revolution, the peace dividend, and fiscal discipline imposed by the partisan self-interest of the post-1994 Republican-controlled Congress. It grew despite the 1993 tax increases that temporarily stifled growth and underscored for the public the reflexive tax-and-spend orientation of the Democratic Party. The voters’ perception of the Democrats’ overreaching from the HillaryCare threat and from the middle class-targeted tax increases, combined with Newt Gingrich’s and Dick Armey’s dynamic leadership that produced the GOP “Contract With America” led to the Republican take-over of the House after 40 years of Democratic control.

According to the historically very accurate Rasmussen poll, support for Obama/Reid/PelosiCare has dropped to its lowest level yet, with only 38% approving while 56% oppose the plan. Among those whose views are most intense and who therefore are likely to be the most committed voters, twice as many strongly oppose as strongly approve (43% to 21%). An interesting warning to Obama and the Democrats is that at this time in the electoral cycle before the political earthquake of the 1994 election, more people supported HillaryCare than now support the administration on health insurance/care.

Another warning from Rasmussen concerns Obama’s own job approval rating, which has dropped to its lowest number in the poll, 45%. Again significant is the strong approval/strong disapproval rating, which has a significant difference between those most likely to vote, with a 27%/42% split. Among independents, only 16% strongly approve, while 51% strongly disapprove. The generic party preference poll also continues to favor the Republicans, considerably more so than it did before the Republican mid-term election success in 1994.

The President has done a trifecta, bowing to the King of Saudi Arabia, the Emperor of Japan, and, now, the head of Communist China. There’s something special about authority figures that makes our leader swoon.

On Wednesday of this past week, Rush Limbaugh interviewed Sarah Palin. The transcript and the audio are both available. While there is no earth-shaking news from that interview, Mrs. Palin seems to put to rest the idea that she would lead her supporters into the political desert of a third-party movement. Better to influence the direction of the suddenly resuscitated Republican Party. Leave third-partyism to Ron Paul’s followers.

On a slightly different note, one wonders whether popular media perceptions of Sarah Palin might be different, had the McCain campaign had her do a series of interviews in friendlier venues before throwing her to Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric. Had she gone on the air with Limbaugh, Hannity, Hewitt, and any number of other interviewers less vested in furthering the cause of their party nominee, Barack Obama, Palin could have got her sea legs for national campaign interviews that are qualitatively different from interviews during a campaign for mayor or governor. Once she had gained some sense of her skills in answering those types of questions, she could have adjusted her style of trying to cram answers as if she were taking an exam. That was the eventual atmosphere of her Gibson/Kouric experiences. Even though the two “journalists” had no better understanding of the questions they were told to ask than did Palin, she came off worse because she tried to represent herself as knowing those answers. Asking the player to play a style to which she is not suited or accustomed was simply bad coaching by the McCain team.

On the other hand, one doubts that there is anything Palin could have done to avoid the media’s stereotyping. After all, Mr. Obama’s inexperience and lack of preparation that was no less painfully obvious then than it is now, yet these deficencies were not held against him. Indeed, to mention such matters was another reason for the Democrats and the media to brand the critic a “racist.”

When the elite punditry and the talking heads of the “mainstream” media commentabout Sarah Palin, their contempt for her is palpable. They subject her to the most grotesque speculations about herself and her family, down to questioning her motherhood of her youngest son (see, e.g., Andrew Sullivan) and his very right to live. She and her family are the targets of crude “jokes” that range from her participation in beauty contests decades ago to false assertions about slutty behavior by her young daughters (see, e.g., David Letterman). Her private and public past is put under a microscope of critical review. Every new public comment and appearance is scrutinized for the slightest misstep, and when one finally appears, is ridiculed massively and mercilessly and then given great significance as evidence of her unfitness for, well, pretty much everything.

And yet, those same media “guardians” protecting the public against the political temptations from the siren Palin time and again announce her political demise. They laugh her off as someone who cannot possibly, without a doubt, ever be a viable national political candidate. They dismiss her alternately as a simpleton and as an evil force of hate-mongering. Her supporters are ridiculed as a narrow and intolerant fringe.

These media elites, mainly left-wing, but with a sizable cohort of conservative toffs added to the mix, do not see the paradox of their condescending certitude about the ex-governor’s lack of a political future set off against their slavish addiction to reporting everything Palin. Or, perhaps, they just cannot help themselves. Drawn to her like moths to a flame, yet trapped by their ideological and cultural boundaries, they respond in a way that comes across to the observer as, alternately, professional schizophrenia and hapless ignorance.

With those habits, it comes as no surprise that the release of Sarah Palin’s new book, Going Rogue, has triggered a new spasm of media attention. After all, when her mere Facebook postings drive the health care discussion for weeks on end and trigger White House responses (see, e.g., “death panels”), a Palin book is a figurative ICBM exploding in the midst of the political and chattering classes. No wonder, then, that the Associated Press assigned eleven “fact-checkers” to scour Palin’s book. That is the same AP that is firing a lot of their reporters due to lack of funds. This phalanx of truth-seekers managed to uncover what? Six “errors,” the prime example of which is this shocker:

PALIN: Says she made frugality a point when traveling on state business as Alaska governor, asking “only” for reasonably priced rooms and not “often” going for the “high-end, robe-and-slippers” hotels.

THE FACTS: Although she usually opted for less-pricey hotels while governor, Palin and daughter Bristol stayed five days and four nights at the $707.29-per-night Essex House luxury hotel (robes and slippers come standard) for a five-hour women’s leadership conference in New York in October 2007. With air fare, the cost to Alaska was well over $3,000.

So, as Mark Steyn points out, Palin said that she “not often” stayed at luxury hotels, while the AP says she usually did not stay at luxury hotels and uncovered one instance where she did. The AP report, if anything, makes Palin sound as if she overstated her stay at luxury hotels. The rest of the six ”errors” found by the AP’s journalistic Clousseaus add up to a collection of their own mischaracterizations, tendentious assertions, and self-contradictions. I do agree with one of the AP’s conclusions, namely, that Palin’s book is a step towards a future presidential candidacy. In view of the current political landscape, I would hope and expect that future to be in 2016, not in 2012.

That same media knee-jerk anti-Palinism is also why MSNBC, stuck with perpetual low ratings despite (or, perhaps, because of) their decision to become the Obama network, assigns one of their starsto check whether Palin supporters at a book signing know about Palin’s political positions. Never mind that the reporterette, Norah O’Donnell, mischaracterizes Palin’s position. Palin in fact was opposed to the TARP and other bailouts, as even the AP concedes, until John McCain in October, 2008, swung behind them. At that point, Palin, as the V-P candidate, supported McCain’s position. The Palin supporter actually has Palin’s position pegged more accurately than does O’Donnell. Moreover, O’Donnell is then caught in some fibs about her own role.

One would expect that these assiduous efforts to fact-check the book by a supposed political has-been, at most a zombie that appears periodically to raise havoc among the populace and terrorize the elites, would be replicated regarding the writings and statements of actual politicians. The President, let’s say. Or, the leaders of the Democratic Party that run Congress, such as Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, and John Kerry. Or, in the past, actual Democratic candidates for President, such as John Edwards. Or, prominent Democrats who are also point men on other hot-button political issues. Al Gore, say. But one would expect wrongly. The only fact checking done by “mainstream” media of the President’s effusions was by CNN. Of course, they “fact-checked” a Saturday Night Live comedic skit that lampooned the President. The goal there was to defend Mr. Obama and demonstrate to the world the error of SNL’s ways. It was one more piece in a pattern of indirect intimidation of those who utter anything even slightly critical of The One that has become all too familiar with this administration and its courtesans.

In contrast with the thoroughness and frenzy with which the media and its associates in the Democratic Party vetted Sarah Palin—and continues to do so—no such investigations occurred by them regarding Mr. Obama’s writings. Indeed, while Palin’s academic records, like Bush’s, were dissected and laughed at, there has been a curious lack of interest in Mr. Obama’s performance. No release of the academic transcripts, no records of any “thesis/seminar papers,” no swift and public investigation into the Harvard Law Review’s selection process. Yet this about a man who has been praised as the greatest intellect in the White House, ever.

Nor will there be similar fact-checking about Al Gore’s new photo-shopped book. Or any of the President’s speeches, like the whoppers he told about the health care bill that caused Representative Joe Wilson’s “You lie” outburst.

In the end, that’s fine. Even while they minimize her importance as a force in American politics, the media will say that they react to her because her book is a best seller. Or because the administration is reacting to her statements. Or because so many Americans pay attention to her. On Facebook. The administration pronounces its determination to ignore her, even as they respond to her to the point of having the Congressional leadership change what is, by their own claim, the most important piece of social legislation in decades. They have let it become obvious that she is inside their OODA loop.

The media, along with the administration, are just admitting by their actions what they seek to deny by their words. Sarah Palin, using Facebook and a book tour, is dominating the American political scene to a degree exceeded only by the President himself aided by his corps of minders, press liaisons, and most of the media functionaries. How it must gall MSNBC and CNN not only to be dwarfed by FOX news, but by a Facebook account.

Palin may or may not run in 2012. I have said many times that, barring an even greater collapse of the Democratic Party Left, I hope that she waits until 2016. Either way, she may not win the election, or even the nomination. She may be the latest incarnation of Barry Goldwater. Or she may not even get that far and be nothing more than the head of an insurgency that exhausts itself after two or three campaigns. That would have been Ronald Reagan, had he not succeeded in 1980.

She is not Ronald Reagan. Not the fallible human, and certainly not the myth. But she is following the Reagan (and Nixon) playbook perfectly after a failed national campaign. She is also saying the words. I would hope that she would end up also learning to sing the tune in a better Reaganesque pitch. But that is another topic. 

During his trip to China, Obama was pressured on the American deficits and the decline of the American dollar. Very specifically, he was quizzed about Obama/Reid/PelosiCare and its cost. Obviously, the Chinese are not too impressed by the bogus figures the administration has put out there to make it seem as if a government take-over of health insurance/care will actually lessen the deficit. When the tea party attendees questioned the government’s numbers and protested the plan, they were branded racist. Are the Chinese racist, too?

Many supporters of same-sex marriage view those who support the age-old and universal definition of marriage as simple-minded bigots and/or religious simpletons. They view themselves as persecuted victims and gentle and misunderstood souls. By now, enough contrary evidence has appeared that it should be apparent to anyone who looks that these stereotypes are baseless caricatures. While those who hew to the traditional definition of marriage as between one man and one woman have in their midst some whose position on the matter is part of a broader animus against homosexuals, they are a small minority, especially among mainstream religious groups such as Catholics and Latter Day Saints. I specifically mention those religious groups because their members were active in the campaign against the California Supreme Court’s aggressive judicial imperialism of imposing on Californians a heretofore alien concept of marriage. By and large, opponents of same-sex marriage have no animus against homosexuals, and Christian teaching has long distinguished between the nature of the act and the nature of the actor.

Thus, one finds that opponents of same-sex marriage, the broad middle class of Americans hard at work to support their families and maintain inherited cultural traditions that cement social bonds, are far less likely than excitable, and often disproportionately younger and unattached, supporters of same-sex marriage to engage in abusive efforts to embarrass and intimidate the opposition through thinly-veiled threats of violence or acts of vandalism. I have posted about my own thoughts and impressions about this before. Columnist Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe courageously opines about this intolerance, contempt, and hatred that is so jarringly obvious in many actions taken by the supposed powerless victims who support same-sex marriage.

Aside from matters of simple decency and the tone of civility the Left allegedly wants now that a Democrat occupies the White House, after going 0 for 31 when the matter is put to a public vote (including in the liberal Democratic states of California, Maine, Oregon, and Wisconsin), one would suppose that same-sex marriage supporters would be less tone-deaf politically. Jacoby quotes Barney Frank on that point:

“After 31 losses in 31 states, it’s time for same-sex marriage activists to seriously consider a piece of advice Barney Frank offered a few years ago. ‘There’s something to be said for cultural respect,’ the nation’s most prominent gay political figure said in 2004. ‘Showing a bit of respect for cultural values with which you disagree is not a bad thing. Don’t call people bigots and fools just because you disagree with them.’’’

But perhaps it isn’t their fault, and Jacoby is too harsh in his judgment. Perhaps this kind of intolerance and boorishness, like other forms of aggressiveness, is hard-wired and not a matter of personal choice. But if such conduct is at least partly based on free will, supporters of same-sex marriage should control their baser impulses and extend to their opponents the respect that they wish extended to themselves. While they are at it, they might also want to think about the image their confreres present in the nationwide “Gay Pride” parades and various celebrations in San Francisco’s Castro district. I have known a number of homosexuals who are horrified by those parades. But, as the name indicates, such grotesque displays of hedonism are still an integral part of that group’s proffered identity. Fair or not, it is hardly surprising that an image of domesticity and stability is not what comes to mind for most people.

Once upon a time, a Senator lauded military trials as designed under American law as giving Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a fair trial “with all the bells and whistles.” That Senator was Barack Obama, now attempting to distance himself from the removal of KSM to the ordinary federal court. The video of Senator Obama’s comments demonstrates again that the current civilian trial strategy is a solution in search of a problem. Relevant segment at about 1:30.

The national debt reached $11 trillion about eight months ago. It has just reached $12 trillion. Given the projected deficit over this fiscal year, it is possible that the deficit will reach $14 trillion within a year. Under Obama’s spending plans, it is expected to reach $24.5 trillion by the end of the coming decade, more than the annual GDP. That puts the country in failed economy league. And, of course, this does not include government spending from Obama/PelosiCare.

I’m not sure deficits actually will be that high. The projections are based on projections from current expenditures. But some of those, like the Iraq war spending, are likely to decrease, as are various “stimulus” payments. Still, the danger is that Obama’s proposed programs are going to be permanent federal commitments and, therefore, contribute structurally to the deficit. Annual $800 billion deficits, far more than anything George W. Bush had in even one year, are simply unsustainable.

One tactic that appears superficially to be a solution. Let all the Bush tax cuts expire. Some commentators already perceive the administration to be floating trial balloons of this type for a $3 trillion tax hike over ten years. I have been wondering about this for some time. But I think that the timing would be politically risky for Obama. The tax cuts expire at the end of 2010, which would precipitate considerable discussion about the matter shortly before the midterm elections. The Democrats could vote a one-year extension to put the matter over until 2011, but that still would not avoid the acrimony in 2010 entirely. It would also threaten Obama’s 2012 campaign. More likely, the matter would be extended through 2013, although they might be permitted to expire on schedule as to certain higher-income earners. After that, all bets are off, and everyone will be hit hard of the cuts expire, especially if they are not phased in.

Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats are also looking to impose a huge European-style value-added tax that is hidden in the price of goods. That will make goods much more expensive for Americans even as their wallets are emptied by other higher taxes. Moreover, tax collections never meet government projections, because people change their economic behavior in response to changes in tax laws. Taxes on income and on capital formation (e.g., through taxes on dividends and capital gains) reduce job formation, thereby depressing GDP growth. Economic growth is the only way to provide effectively for tax revenues because rates can be kept low while still producing significant amounts.

Another alternative, actually to reduce government spending, seems not to be on the table.

My prediction: A weak currency, weak job growth, and high taxes. A lost decade or more of growth, with stagflation eroding people’s living standards and depressing American initiative and creativity.

Odd tales from the Porkulus. Apparently, the government has published numbers of “jobs saved or created” by the stimulus—in New Hampshire Congressional districts that do not exist. Stranger still, the same thing happened to the tune of $750,000 in a fictional Arizona Congressional district. When the administration spins about the millions of jobs saved or created by the Porkulus, they may be counting those jobs in non-existent jurisdictions. In real jurisdictions, the jobs tend to be measured by the thousands and, if one excludes public sector jobs such as teachers, the numbers are measured in the single digits.

As expected, liberals are jumping in to defend President Obama’s goofy bow to Japan’s Emperor Akihito. The defense, predictably, is “cultural sensitivity.” Ed Morrissey at Hot Air dismantles that excuse in light of the tradition, unbroken for more than two centuries of American leaders not bowing to foreign leaders. Moreover, as I pointed out yesterday, bowing to other heads of state definitely is not a tradition of international relations. Morrissey embeds this video by the University of Connecticut’s College Republicans that juxtaposes Mr. Obama’s greeting with that of many other dignitaries.

Morrissey also points out that, when President Clinton in 1994 almost bowed to Akihito, the New York Times lambasted him for almost doing something “unthinkable” and looking “obsequent.” So far, the Timeshas kept its counsel about Obama, who is after all, more than “Bubba” Clinton, one of their own class. If Obama does it, one certainly must not chide him on etiquette.

The President raised lots of eyebrows earlier this year when he bowed deeply and unexpectedly to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at the G20 London economic gathering before kissing his hand. I wrote about the matter at the time. While the legacy media generally ignored the spectacle, conservatives had some fun at the President’s expense. Now come photos and videotape of Mr. Obama bowing deeply to the Emperor of Japan.

The gesture was so stark that even the Los Angeles Times, well, at least its blog, courtesy of Andrew Malcolm, took notice. Obama bending himself in half might be seen as just meeting the custom of the place where he is or the person whom he is greeting. George W. Bush, after all, was photographed walking with King Abdullah at the Texas ranch holding the monarch’s hand. That elicited lots of comments and mirth among journalists.

But any comparison between the two based on custom only redounds to Mr. Obama’s disadvantage. While the sight of two leaders walking hand-in-hand may seem odd to modern American eyes, much as the French bi-cheeky air kiss, or the Russian hug-and-smooch do, in many parts of the world, and in the West in the past, this is seen as a sign of a relationship of friendship and equality. Bowing deeply, on the other hand, and kissing another leader’s hand is everywhere an expression of deference. Indeed, in regards to Japanese custom, the deeper the bow, the greater the submission. Obama’s bow so reeked of an inferior’s homage to his superior, it is what used to be called “bowing and scraping.”

The Emperor did not reciprocate the bow. Neither did King Abdullah in the earlier scenario. As the pictures show, when Dick Cheney met the Emperor of Japan, he shook the latter’s hand. No bowing for Darth Cheney. It may be that this is yet another faux-pas by an inexperienced and unqualified naif, as many conservatives saw Obama during the campaign. Perhaps, especially when this happens more than once, it has a more sinister meaning for the U.S. Foreign leaders of whatever stripe pay attention to these matters of etiquette. To them, such expressions of submission are of a kind with Obama’s World Apology Tour 2009 and project an air of weakness and docility that may, no, will cause the U.S. much trouble in the future to correct. At the very least, these signals can cause the kind of miscalculation that lets a foe take a bellicose position that draws the U.S. into unwanted confrontation. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait is said to have been such a misstep based on miscues from words to the dictator by President George H.W. Bush’s ambassador in Iraq.

Given the White House’s current occupant’s penchant for gestures of supplication to foreign leaders, especially ones not popularly elected, one wonders what to expect from him when he meets the Chinese leadership. After all, their importance in helping Obama finance his record deficits far outweighs that of either King Abdullah or Emperor Akihito.

* Mark Steyn’s phrase

This is a long list of detailed and documented instances of various forms of intolerance, bigotry, abuse, intimidation, and violence by supporters of same-sex marriage against their opponents. Since the “lame-stream” media cartel is not likely to give a thorough airing to such matters, it is useful to have the information collected in one spot. Now, some of the incidents are much worse than others. Some, in fact, seem rather mild and any culpability seems nebulous. But for all of them, one should ask how the incident would be treated if the action had been taken against a racial/ethnic minority, female, homosexual, or liberal by someone not of that class. How many “soul-searching” journalistic plaints about the evils of our “dominant culture” would there be? Or about the religious institution or faith with which the attacker was affiliated, if any? How many “hate speech/crimes” laws and prosecutions would be proposed and undertaken? How quickly and how broadly would the guilt for such acts be extended to all who do not belong to the victim group? How soon would it be before politicians, up to the President, would jump to politically correct conclusions before the evidence is in? Through long and grating experience with elite reactions to such events (which often turn out to be hoaxes), we know the answers. As typified by the reaction by the members of the elite institutions among the press, the military brass, and politicians, we also know the answers when the actions are done by a member of an officially protected minority.

With elements of the Left in control of the U.S. government in a manner not seen in a couple of generations, if ever, discredited socialist policies of central planning and government intrusion into, and absorption of previously private economic endeavors have escaped from the padded lecture halls and professors’ offices at universities. Policies of government intervention into the economy spurred by amisguided attempt to combat the “evils” of capitalist profits inevitably lead to government intervention in other domains of individuals and groups. When people refuse to go along with such suffocating government intervention, there will be threats and, if necessary, draconian action taken against them for their deviation from the “true path.” A limited version of this is the provision in PelosiCare that requires people to buy health insurance or bay a tax equal to two-and-a-half percent of their adjusted gross income to the government. The failure to comply would result in a fine up to $250,000 and/or five years in federal prison.

A former resident of Czechoslovakia describes the economic privation in the socialist/communist workers’ paradises of Eastern Europe. What is worse still, as the writer so vividly portrays, is the destruction of the human spirit that such all-enveloping states engender. Much is written, correctly, about how government nanny-statism stifles human initiative. Anecdotal evidence and broader studies show that people defer looking for jobs until the unemployment benefits are about to run out. Extending unemployment benefits just pushes that day of reckoning and responsibility into the future. And that is a mild case.

As the line between the political and the non-political in all its aspects, but most crucially in the economic, is blurred, so is the line between the public and the private. Private groups cannot compete with the state, which subsidizes its own success through enforced financial exactions from the people and changes the rules in its favor until competing private associations disappear. An example would be favored labored unions affiliated politically with the government. Those private associations that cannot be made to disappear in this manner are dealt with more directly. The abolition of churches or young people’s groups such as the Boy Scouts will occur in the name of separation of church and state or of goals of non-discrimination against favored groups. In any case, the public option ends up to be the only option. The state more and more assumes the form of a penetrating fog, a Leviathan from which there is never escape for the increasingly isolated individual.

The result is a destruction initially of human initiative. To the extent it continues, it is focused not on innovation and improvement of people’s lives, but on getting ahead in the world of politics, which is the world of rationing of increasingly scarce goods. Survival in a political order that becomes more and more cut-throat is the only way to participate in the only thing that politics does, that is, create an order within which winners and losers for such scarce resources are picked. It hardly makes sense for most to strive in a game that very few will win and then not on the merits of their contribution to society’s or individuals’ welfare.

Over time, the destruction of initiative so enervates human existence that the participants become mere shadows or simulacrums of full humans, never able to attain human flourishing. Even if their basic needs are taken care of (a big “if”), they cannot look forward to an improvement in their lives or in the lives of their children. They do not control their future. Rather, their reward is the satisfaction that their neighbors’ misery equals their own. That fosters minding their neighbors’ affairs to assure that they are not getting an advantage. Such envy and paranoia is thin glue for social cohesion and, sooner or later, will lead to an explosion of discontent from those who have not yet been lost entirely to abject submission to the state.

If such an explosion comes, and the socialist nightmare finally ends, many of the same people will be too far destroyed psychologically to cope with the new reality. The demands of freedom with its foundation of free will and personal responsibility are simply too much. It is like asking someone who has been forcibly addicted all his life to a powerful narcotic suddenly to pick himself up and fend for himself cold turkey.

That describes the people of the old Soviet bloc countries, as those people lived then within a system that deprived them of material comfort and, worse, of their soul. It also describes many of them today, especially the elderly and those who grew up in the most oppressive regimes, such as in the Soviet Union itself. It is a ghastly system that today can only be defended by those, such as academics, who spend their lives in the realm of theory and ideology, and by other members of the “out-of-touch” elites, rather than in the domain of the ”lived life.” Given the influence of such academics on an American administration whose leaders have their roots in the academic and social world of the Left elite, one has cause for concern about the growth of government.

HT: Byron Stier

I like New York Times columnist E.J. Dionne. He is a basically decent fellow and certainly does not lack intelligence. But, with the exception of former theater critic Frank Rich, he has to be the worst political analyst in the paper’s amply-populated stable of left-liberal and center-left scribblers. If he just wrote for the HuffPo or on some Markos Moulitsas forum, this would be expected. But, then, the Times is not what it once was, even twenty years ago. Following the recent electoral smack-down of the Democratic Party, Dionne wrote a column focusing on, of course, the special election in New York’s 23rd Congressional District, an area that, though it had been held by Republicans for well over a century, was carried by Mr. Obama by 5% in 2008. The lesson Dionne takes from the election in general and the New York district in particular is that the Democrats were given a warning (to make people feel better), while the voters actually rebuked the GOP’s conservatives’ message. Riighht.

Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey takes some time to fillet Mr. Dionne’s argument. It’s an easy, but time-consuming task, given the amount of nonsense Dionne wrote. So I’m glad Morrissey did the work for us, even providing links to a couple of Dionne’s old columns where he celebrated as an act of principle the Left’s 2006 primary challenge to incumbent Senator Lieberman, a challenge that many on the Left openly billed as political revenge. Today, the same Dionne is horrified at the fact that a Conservative Party candidate could run because of voter dissatisfaction with the pseudo-Republican nominee selected in a back room by 11 local party bosses.

Of course, the same Left in the Democratic Party wants the Senate leadership to strip Lieberman of his committee chairmanship (though officially an “Independent,” he caucuses with the Democrats) for Lieberman’s support of John McCain in 2008 and for pledging to vote against ending a potential filibuster of a Senate government health care bill. From a political viewpoint, I understand the Left’s sentiment in Lieberman’s case. They are also consistent in that various Lefties have openly threatened with left-liberal primary challenges any Democratic legislator who votes against a government health care plan. One is left waiting for Dionne’s response to these plans.

The L.A. Times published a disheartening poll this weekend that showed 80% of California voters believe the state to be on the wrong track. According to the Times’s interpretation of the poll, voters also believe that the best years of the state are over. Those sentiments may well be colored by current economic conditions. Moreover, one really cannot project into the future. I remember hearing from people in Germany in the mid-1970s about a flood of articles over there that quoted California politicians and other members of the civic elite that the state’s best years were over.

The poll also showed a deep political divide between the more heavily populated liberal coastal counties and the conservative interior. Therein lies the problem, as I see it. The poll claims that President Obama still has a 60% approval rating, considerably higher than what he enjoys in the nation as a whole. More striking is that California’s left-wing, do-nothing (fortunately, one supposes), ditzy “Senator” Barbara Boxer, enjoys solid support that likely will get her elected to yet another term.

Obviously, not enough Californians have yet suffered vigorously enough the consequences of a dysfunctional and rabidly liberal political and social culture. California’s liberals, ranging from moderate (Gov. Schwarzenegger) to radical (the Legislature’s leadership) control all aspects of state government. Their public employee and correctional officers union allies dictate the financial direction by which the California state government’s growth has far outstripped inflation and population increases. The entire government apparatus, the vocal entertainment industry, and the academic-media complex are in thrall to radical environmentalism. The economic poison of home-made environmentalism is supplemented by doses from the federal government. The Central Valley’s agricultural sector is laid waste by some federal district judge’s decision that starves Central and Southern California of water to help a small baitfish in the Delta, with nary a squeak from our public servants. The state’s notoriously business-hostile (except for movie-making) climate has not improved. Taxes are high and getting higher, with nothing to show for that, except business flight. More and more laws and regulations intrude into business operations and personal life. But the left-liberal elite continues to believe that people, especially those who produce eceonomic wealth, will not be affected by these laws but will continue to be the good tax slaves to be exploited for the elite’s social schemes. Such fairy-tale faith leads them to be surprised at a nearly 13% state unemployment rate, one that, if underemployed and discouraged workers are taken into account, more likely approaches 20%.

Until the self-described “reality-based community” on the Left (who are blissfully unaware of the irony of their description), or at least enough among the population at large, come to grips with the unsustainability of their governing model, California will continue to take on more and more characteristics of a third-world country. There may be pristine beaches for the few, and plenty of water for the Delta smelt. But the middle class will shrink by impoverishment or flight, and there will be a larger and larger cohort of a poor and handout-addicted underclass.

No mention was made of President Ronald Reagan in the speeches at the celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall that the current President was unable to attend. While German Chancellor Angela Merkel talked about Reagan’s contribution to that historic and generally unexpected event at a speech last week, there is a broader effort among the transnational elite to scrub the record of Reagan’s contribution and lay the cause entirely at the feet of Mikhail Gorbachev. Certainly Gorby had a big role to play, but the Russians themselves earlier conceded Reagan’s vision and steadfastness of purpose as forcing them into an untenable economic, military, and, eventually, political position.

Peter Robinson was then a speech writer for Reagan. Indeed, Robinson was the one who put to more complete words Reagan’s sentiment about the USSR and its oppressive domination of various political satellites in that classic 1987 speech near the Brandenburg Gate: “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Robinson recollects Reagan’s determination, over the objections of the timid naysayers in the State Department and on his own National Security Council, to see that wall come down. So the speech was one tactic, albeit a very powerfully symbolic one, in the President’s overall strategy to topple the “Evil Empire.”

Peter Robinson does an interview with Steven Hayward, the author of authoritative accounts of Reagan’s early years in national politics, The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, and of Reagan’s presidency, The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution.

They develop a fascinating portrait of an engaged President with a clear agenda on specific domestic and foregin relations issues. Hayward also describes Reagan as having to fight his own advisers and the Congressional Republicans almost as much as the Democrats and the media. Again and again, Reagan ignores his advisers on crucial questions, the great majority of which result in vindication for him. 

This is a transcript of the interview. [Caution: The transcript is done from the video, so that words are often transcribed according to how the sounds register, rather than what the actual words are.]

While the President managed an increasingly criticized “shout-out” and some rambling remarks about a conference held by an ethnic identity group before delivering himself of a rather bloodless and detached brief statement about the Fort Hood attack by the would-be suicide shooter, former President Bush and his wife went to the base to meet with soldiers and their families. And he did it in secret and unannounced, a trip not known until FOX News broke the story the next day. Oh, Mr. Obama will appear later this coming week at a major press-saturated ceremony.

Lest some say that this was an aberration, or that Bush was able to do this in secret because he is now just a private citizen whose movements no one follows, there are a few responses. For one, the press is able to cover the former President’s movements just fine when he goes to make a speech or two in Canada. More important, Mr. Bush is just continuing what he and former Vice President Dick Cheney did with thousands of troops while they were in office, secretly and without fanfare visiting with them and/or their families or writing personal letters.

The majority of American voters who elected Mr. Obama fancied his detached cool, yet one more aspect of the voters’ tendency to elect the opposite of the outgoing incumbent. They got what they wanted, and then some. The telepromptered Mr. Obama can speak the words, but he has yet to master the tune. With his emotional tonedeafness, I doubt that he ever will. He is no Ronald Reagan. Nor is he a Bill Clinton. Or, obviously, a George W. Bush.

This is rich, coming from an organization whose incompetence and institutional political correctness failed to prevent a real threat to civil rights, namely, the right not to be murdered by a U.S. officer-terrorist. As I’ve said before, maybe the government should deal with real threats to life before concerning itself with hypothetical bigotry.

Not to be outdone, the hapless Homeland Security Secretary declares that she is intently working to prevent outbreaks of anti-Muslim violence in the U.S. over the Fort Hood terror attack. And she says this anti-American nonsense in a conservative Arab country, the UAE, to boot. Great job.

Mark Steyn has more about the reckless political correctness that threatens the U.S. in so many ways. The Army was warned about Hasan by his fellow students, who “complained to the faculty about Hasan’s ‘anti-American propaganda,’ but said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim student kept officers from filing a formal written complaint.” There is also his participation in 2008 to 2009 in a George Washington University-affiliated task force for the Homeland Security Policy Institute on “Security Priorities for the Next Administration.” Unbelievable.

An allegory of government health care, put in a quick tale that most Americans can understand.

HT: Matthew Cohen

Karl Rove has put together a summary of the Republican proposals for health care/insurance reform. While this is long on platitudes and short on specifics (which have been presented by various Republican Congressmen), it does set forth several good ideas. I have my doubts about some of them (the proposal to allow employers, or anyone else, to promote employees’ healthy lifestyles is particularly suspicious). Overall, though, to the extent they actually are substantive, these proposals are sound. They rely on private markets and more individual choice, rather than on the notoriously incompetent public servants, to make medical decisions.

The fall of the Berlin Wall happened twenty years ago. Unlike other world leaders, past and present, President Obama could not attend. He claims to be too busy. So, while even Mikhail Gorbachev and current Russian president Dmitry Medvedev attend the fall of that Communist symbol, Mr. Obama sends his regrets. Though this is the celebration of a great victory, both symbolic and concrete (no pun intended), for freedom and self-determination, he cannot take time from what, exactly? His Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech? When the occasional pundit likens Obama to Ronald Reagan, it is imperative to keep in mind Obama’s conduct here. Reagan stood for the spread of freedom fostered by a strong and confident United States. Obama? Not so much. I shall be charitable here and not endorse the comments that I have read on other sites that Obama would have gladly attended the construction of that wall. But one wonders just a little, given Obama’s fondness for appearing in the company of world leaders, why he would absent himself. Perhaps it is exactly the presence of so many, with festivities focusing on this event, that made Obama feel diminished.  He would be just one of the crowd. After all, it would not be like an adulatory campaign appearance at a Berlin rock concert, a venue much more to the liking and in the comfort zone of a man who has yet to make fully the transition from campaigning to governing.

Over the past several weeks there has been a lot of back-and-forth over the Obama administration’s attacks on FOX News. There has been much speculation about the reasons for the actions by the President and his advisers. One must look at this on several levels to gain a proper appreciation for this puzzling behavior.

Most obvious, and clearly significant, is the distaste, if not outright enmity that Obama and his minions have for FOX News. Unlike the purring and obsequious “journalists” at CNN, NBC, and MSNBC, FOX actually challenges the administration’s claims. Those claims often are risible and violate fundamental perceptions of common sense, but the non-FOX media willingly suspend the disbelief they so profusely lavished on every word George W. Bush uttered. On the other hand, while FOX fact-checks Obama’s health care claims, CNN does fact-check an SNL skit that is a mild parody of Obama’s lack of accomplishments.

That, what is it called? Oh yes, journalism. That journalism is foreign to the President’s experience of receiving, with few mild exceptions, adulation and uncritical acceptance. And to matters foreign to one’s experience, one is likely to react with suspicion.

The President’s campaign seems quixotic, in that FOX News not only has a huge following among Democrats and Independents, as well as among Republicans, and is actually gaining readership and sympathy from this contest. The President is seen as unsympathetic towards free speech and as a vindictive whiner.

Another partial explanation is that Obama simply has certain personal shortcomings. He is a small man, psychologically, one who, despite his carefully-staged public persona, is not comfortable in his own skin. He is the opposite of George W. Bush, who, in that regard, always gave off a “don’t give a damn” vibe through that smirk that drove liberals crazy. Obama shows all the characteristics of someone with an inferiority complex and a fear that, at any moment, someone is going to draw back the curtain and discover the charade. It is the uncertainty about his lack of accomplishments and qualification for the Presidency that lurks within him.

The upwards-tilted gaze and projecting jaw that Obama likes to present, the messianic speeches and images, the snide attacks on critics when the mask slips, the bullying attacks on Americans who oppose his policies while figuratively prostrating himself before America’s enemies abroad who push back, his attacks on Rush Limbaugh, his minions’ proposals to curtail free speech through the “fairness doctrine,” “hate speech” laws, “diversity mandates,” and threats of criminal action during the 2008 campaign, all present someone who is not comfortable with notions of dissent. His followers often are similarly afflicted, as the frequent references by Democratic polticians and administration spokesmen and supporters to the protests by “tea party” attendees and the questions from town hall participants as “unpatriotic” and “un-American” vividly illustrate. Dissent suddenly is no longer the highest form of patriotism, but an attack on Obama and, thereby, on the U.S. itself. One recalls in vain George W. Bush attacking or seeking to marginalize the media and liberal commentators who savaged him for eight years. Obama has far more profoundly legitimized undermining of constitutionally-protected free speech rights of dissenters than anything that Bush can be accused of with any conceivable basis in fact.

Why is Obama pursuing what appears to be a rather stupid tactic? Part of the explanation lies in his vanity. He is accustomed to surrounding himself with political acolytes. In his earlier elected positions, no one criticized him, as he operated within thoroughly liberal environments. Those that opposed him, such as other primary or general election candidates had a habit of suddenly withdrawing from races as pressure was brought through revived old news, suddenly leaked “sealed” records, and such. It was the election equivalent of turning up floating lifelessly in the Hudson, or Chicago, River. Obama had a remarkable run of lucky political coincidences at critical junctures.

With FOX challenging his exaggerations, attacks on political opponents, prevarications, and ideology, he strikes back. Rather than ignoring these people that dare to oppose him, he is only too eager to put them in their place. Even if he is “lowering” himself to the level of mere scribblers.

But that isn’t the only explanation. After all, FOX only benefits from the controversy by having its ratings go up. Moreover, Obama is insulting the many viewers of FOX when it insults the network. Those viewers know that FOX in fact does provide the most balanced of news among all networks. That’s why almost a third of FOX’s viewers are Democrats.

But Obama really doesn’t care about FOX ratings or the FOX viewers. He is trying to do three things. First, he is trying to influence other media outlets by preemptively deligitimizing stories picked up by FOX, such as the Van Jones exposure. Tarring FOX as being a mere opinion or entertainment network will, he hopes, make other reporters less willing to go quickly with stories that originate there and that are embarrassing to the administration.

Second, he is trying to give other media outlets cover for their fawning coverage of him. After all, if FOX is critical of him and can be made to appear to be unfair, this allows the other networks to shill for him and dismiss any criticism by others by claiming that they are providing the true “news” aspect of the story.

Third, he is hoping to use such attacks on FOX and on conservative commentators to distract the public’s (and FOX’s) attention from some political topic. It’s a classic feint to change the subject when the topic gets embarrassing. The media (including FOX) quickly take the bait and run after this new topic that is more superficial but also captures the public’s attention more than yet another dry exchange over health care.

Fourth, he is trying to distract his political base. He has not delivered significantly on the substantive programs that his supporters think he promised them during the campaign. Judging from Kos and other Leftie bloggers and media types, there is mounting frustration with the lack of progress in achieving the earthly utopia of secular progressivism. By feeding them the story of the alleged sinister misdeeds of FOX, he can play into the Left’s prejudices, as well as lead them off the scent of his lack of substantive accomplishments regarding the environment, health care, the economy, taxes, Guantanamo, the war in Afghanistan, and so forth.

Even if this latest effort at demonizing his opponents peters out, one can look for similar such tactics to reappear. That would hold true, even if the President wins some successes in promoting his domestic agenda. They are simply too good a fit for the President’s political style and personal character traits to be jettisoned.

Despite being outspent two-to-one by same-sex marriage supporters, voters in Maine apparently have repealed a law that would have allowed same-sex marriage. The legislature had enacted that law as a result of political pressure and lobbying. But their vote did not represent the views of a majority of Maine residents. Just as voters in California did last November, the people of this moderately liberal state rejected the attempt at radical transformation of the traditional institution of marriage. They continue an uninterrupted string of thirty victories for traditional marriage when the states’ voters have been permitted to speak unencumbered by legislative hurdles and without a short-circuiting of democracy by some unaccountable elite of judicial guardians.

Those of us not taken in by the Obama phenomenon have long marvelled at the worship and adulation heaped upon this basically unremarkable man and at the sycophancy displayed journalists, artists, and others who like to see themselves as courageous skeptics and dissenters who dare to “speak truth to power.” So it comes as no surprise to us to have yet another fatuous statement about the brilliance and glory of the current occupant of the White House delivered courtesy of one of these members of the artistic “avant garde.”

This time, the deification of the President takes the form of adoring him as the “the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar” most powerful writer since Julius Caesar.” Caesar’s account of Gaul is, indeed, a classic, and one with which many a Latin student over the years reluctantly has become familiar. It has an elegance and simplicity (for Latin) that makes it more readable than many other works. The jury is out, however, on whether Obama’s telepromptered speeches will be read in two thousand years. The same goes for his two books, including his break-out work, Dreams From My Father. If he actually wrote that book, with its rhetorical stylings in which some have detected the ghost of Bill Ayers, without a helping hand.

As to the substance of the “most powerful writer” remark, there might be some who would differ. The number of writers who have lived since Caesar whose prose style and literary content are more powerful than Obama’s is so numerous one has no time to list them. Given the obvious hyperbolic nonsense of Rocco’s bloviation from that perspective, it is claimed that he meant the remark as “politically powerful.” After all, the argument is, if the President is the most powerful man in the most powerful nation since ancient Rome, and if he is a writer, ergo, by the distributive property, he is the most powerful writer since Caesar.

Actually, with that interpretation, the remark is no less fatuous, though the fatuousness shifts from an artistic judgment to just plain imbecility. Let us assume that Obama in fact is the most powerful man in the U.S., a matter that is in quite some dispute as a practical matter. (I would suggest that I am far more powerful in determining issues that deal with my family’s everyday lives than is Obama or any other president.) Let us also assume that the U.S. is the most powerful nation since ancient Rome, a matter that has to be looked at in relation to other countries at that specific time in order for the evaluation to have any meaning whatever. (Just to keep it simple, let us also ignore the administration’s efforts to make the U.S. less powerful.)

By that reckoning, the U.S. was even more powerful in relation to the rest of the world after World War II. (No, the USSR at that time was not in the U.S.’s league, either in conventional or in nuclear weapons.) John F. Kennedy wrote a book, too. At least, let us assume, as we did with Mr. Obama, that Kennedy actually wrote Profiles In Courage. Richard Nixon wrote eight volumes. Do we also apply the same test to foreign princes and politicians who governed the world’s strong countries in the past?

There are more problems with this brown-nosing, aside from the fact that is smacks of further cult-of-personality worship reminiscent of Kim Jong-Il’s North Korean functionaries. The cheerleader is Rocco Landesman, the head of the National Endowment for the Arts. He recently succeeded Yosi Sergant who left after it was disclosed that he was trying to push artists into using their work to support President Obama’s domestic agenda. Though he had to resign, Sergant hardly need have worried. As I have posted before, artists have only been too willing to do the administration’s bidding. Landesman and Sergant are yet two more reasons why there should be no NEA. Government-funded art merely becomes Soviet-style appropriation of art for political purposes, just as government-funded science becomes appropriation of science for political purposes. Example: global climate change politics.

Then there is the open comparison of Obama to Caesar, a historical blunder of the first magnitude. There are those on the right who are paranoid that Obama will abolish elections, or at least term limits, to install himself as a quasi-dictator a la Hugo Chavez. Add to this the bread-and-circuses mentality of the Left in charge of the Congress, the massive intrusion of the federal government into more and more private decisions, and the debasement of the dollar. Of course, there is also the proliferation of unaccountable administration officials openly denominated “czars.” Justifiably or not, for many on the Right, this becomes a vision of the Roman Republic in its waning days.

The Founders of the American Republic admired the ancient Roman Republic, its civic virtue, its political institutions, and its commercial success and military honor. At least, they admired an idealized version of that republic. Early American writings make that admiration of Rome, its institutions, and citizens very clear. At the same time, the Americans feared the rise of an American Caesar and set up a selection process for the President that sought to avoid the rise of such a figure. Taking the vote for President from the people and reposing it in the hands of electors selected through a process determined by the state legislatures was intended to produce the nomination of several candidates from those most qualified under norms of republican virtue. It was a process designed to have the best in each state nominate the best in the several states. By the terms of the Constitution, election of the President from those nominated would, more likely than not, be in the House of Representatives. That was another step to produce a deliberated choice, rather than one selected directly by the people who would be prone to emotional appeals to vote for some popular tribune skilled in the low arts of popular politics.

When Andrew Jackson was elected as the first general since George Washington, his candidacy was greeted with dismay by those who adhered to the old republican ideology of the founding generation. Thomas Jefferson was horrified by Jackson. Henry Clay derisively referred to Jackson as just a “military chieftain.” But Jackson, aided by the emerging modern political party system, won by appealing exactly to those low political arts the Founders despised. “King Andrew I” was the American Caesar who was a danger to the Republic.

From a social and political standpoint, Landesman’s adulation of Obama is both risible in its fawning and, in following a path well-trod by Obama supporters, vaguely sinister. As the article points out, comparing Obama to Caesar when other Presidents were available as more sympathetic companions, is revealing about the administration on many levels. None of them good.

According to this report from Election Journal via Ed Morrissey, the New Jersey Democratic Party is using criminals for its get-out-the-vote effort in New Jersey. These “community organizers” are given names and addresses of potential voters, including those, in this case, of a police officer who recognized one of the criminals.

This is of a kind with the 2004 effort by the Kerry campaign and its use of Americans Coming Together, as described in this older Morrissey post. Then there were the 2008 efforts by the notorious ACORN to get out the vote on behalf of Barack Obama. Those efforts are under investigation or have resulted in charges in several states.

And who can forget the voter intimidation last November by the New Black Panther Party across the river from New Jersey in Philadelphia. The career lawyers at the Justice Department had already secured a default judgment against these goons and were about to get sanctions against them, when the Eric Holder political appointees at Justice ordered the case dropped. But Democrats would have us believe that the Holder Justice Department is non-politicized, unlike that bad Bush Justice Department. The fact that Holder was hip-deep involved in the corrupt pardon of Marc Rich by Bill Clinton is also conveniently forgotten in this myth about his allegedly non-political decision-making.

This is all of a sort with the political appeals that Democrats have been making for years to the Felon-American community. Democrats have been at the forefront of allowing felons to vote, even if they are still in prison, and of repealing or judicially overturning state laws that prohibit convicted felons from voting. On that latter score, the courts have disagreed with their constitutional and statutory arguments.

The state of New Jersey is probably the most politically corrupt state in the Union, with the possible exception of the President’s home state, Illinois. So, of course, the New Jersey governor has tried to claw his way back into the race by attaching himself politically to Mr. Obama. The corruption in New Jersey is deep, endemic, and Democratic, ensnaring the governor as at least an aider and abettor. As a former head of Goldman, Sachs the governor is not in a position to carry on the feigned “I’m shocked,” Captain Reynaud act.

But that doesn’t mean that Corzine will lose his re-election bid. If the race is at all close, the corrupt Democratic state machine and its allies in the Service Employees’ International Union will find enough suddenly-discovered ballots in the trunks of cars or in boxes left behind water coolers to swing the election to Corzine. That is what happened with the Washington State election for governor in 2004 and the Minnesota Senate election in 2008. For some reason, when Republicans are ahead by small numbers, they never end up ahead after the magic Democratic ballots appear. But the tide never goes the other way.

The Republican, Chris Christie, has been leading this race for a long time, and the polls long have shown him ahead. But some of the polls are close and within the margin of error. Left-wing Democratic groups are already pressing ahead to ignore the signature requirements on absentee ballots and to have defective ballots like that counted “provisionally” to establish a high vote total for the Democratic candidate either to thwart a recount if the Democrat leads, to produce one if the Republican leads narrowly, or to establish a position that makes it difficult to discard a lot of ballots without bogus charges of disenfranchisement.

Hugh Hewitt wrote a book, If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat, about turning out the Republican vote to prevent the predictable Democratic Party tactics in close races. That would be a word to the wise today.

There is a line that was parroted for years during the Bush years by those on the liberal side of the political spectrum. It declared that the war against Saddam Hussein was a bad war and a distraction. The good war, the story went, was the war in Afghanistan. It was the latter, those liberal politicians, journalists, and entertainers assured us, that was the “good war,” the one that they were rock-solid in supporting. That was the war that the whole world was backing. True to their beliefs that the U.S. should only act in its defense to whatever extent the “international community” approved, liberals felt liberated to be on the side of the U.S. Today, of course, with the Afghanistan campaign heating up after the rout of al Qaeda from Iraq, liberals are abandoning their “rock-solid” support. As Ann Coulter has observed acidly (does she ever observe any other way?), liberals always support the war the U.S. is not fighting, never the one it is.

Now, those of us who actually remember those days recall that the “international community” was less than solid in its support. Widely-publicized celebrations in the Middle East in support of the attackers, and general (understandable) apathy in Africa, Asia, and South America, marred the picture of rousing solidarity. That official organ of international cooperation, the UN, quickly had difficulty doing much of anything. But, then, that’s par for the course. Nothing to see there.

On the domestic front, within a couple of weeks of commencement of military operations against the Taliban, every temporary lull in operations caused journalists in certain newspapers to fret about the operation turning into a quagmire, even as the military routed the enemy. Various celebritards and some politicians denounced American efforts there. Indeed, paid newspaper ads almost immediately after 9/11 opposed any military response. Academics, such as Ward Churchill (I know, the word “academic” has suffered greater devaluation than the dollar), instead laid the blame at America’s feet. Offering at most a perfunctory nod to the dead of 9/11, these same dwellers of cloud cuckoo land engaged in hand-wringing over imagined widespread popular retaliation against Muslims living in the U.S., results that, of course, never materialized.

Among the more astonishing reactions was that of America’s feminists. They should have been delighted at the liberation of Afghani women from the repressive misogynist and sexual paranoia of the Islamistregime in Kabul. Instead, in an exquisite, if unintentional, parody, feminists embraced their multiculti feelings—and blamed the West. In an old, but timeless, column, Mark Steyn returns us to those days of feminist foolishness. Actually, idiocy is a better word. The reason the column is timeless is that the same kind of feminist effluent still spews from the same suspects. It’s the stuff that, in more superficially jurisprudential(and duller) manner, is found in “Women and the Law” courses and in the jargon-heavy written insomnia cures that get feminist law professors tenure. My contempt for the “intellectual” directions of the feminist project (though not for certain ur-feminist quests for relief from demonstrable and concrete conditions of discrimination) echoes that of Camille Paglia.

The Steyn column is a wonderful distillation of the many reasons to be contemptuous. He captures the essence of the weird logic (if I may be excused for using a patriarchal term in describing feminist reasoning—oops, another inappropriate term) of feminist musings that almost invariably miss the point of a particular situation. Looking at things only through a particular political prism will distort the whole. Steyn has a wonderful appreciation of that prism and the feminist jargon that expounds the diffracted view of feminist reality:

“Meanwhile, the Worldwide Sisterhood Against Terrorism And War, which includes Susan Sarandon, Gloria Steinem, Alice Walker and about 75 other sisters and is ‘Worldwide’ mainly in the sense the World Series is, organized a petition called ‘Not In Our Name’. ‘We will not support the bombing,’they declared, and who can blame them? I dropped out of women’s studies in Grade Two, but, as I recall, a bombing campaign is a quintessential act of patriarchal oppression and sexual domination. The male pilot, looming over the curvy undulating form of the Third World hillside, unzips his bomb carriage and unleashes his phallic ordinance to penetrate his target. Needless to say, he explodes on contact, typical bloody men.”

Some good news for conservatives. Twice as many Americans call themselves conservative as they do liberal. At 40% conservative, 37% moderate, and 20% liberal, that’s quite a difference. At the same time, these numbers do not represent a huge shift from a few years ago, especially given the inevitable margin of error in polling. Nevertheless, even a net five percent shift conservative-liberal can mean a significant trend in voting turnout and behavior.

The ideological split does not necessarily translate into equal partisan numbers. True, the generic ballot, which favored the Democrats so long, has tightened and, in some polls shows a Republican advantage. True, too, that the difference in overall party identification among the population, which greatly leaned towards the Democrats in late 2008, now has recovered to the point that it is the closest in a number of years. But there still is a difference that favors the Democrats that is out of step with the ideological split.

The likely reason for the continuing partisan divide has to do with the disaffection of many Republicans with their party over the last several years. Reasons include Bush fatigue (some of it justified—large spending increases in education and Medicare prescription benefits, deficits, the beginning of TARP, Harriet Miers nomination—much not, even about those same topics), dissatisfaction with McCain as a perceived RINO on domestic regulatory and tax issues, the fecklessness of the Congressional Republicans who squandered opportunity after opportunity to be something other than Democrats-lite and who seemed determined to match their friends across the aisle in personal corruption, the media drumbeat of holding Republicans to a higher standard than Democrats, and the somewhat greater tendency among Republican voters actually to hold their candidates to higher personal standards than Democrats do.

There are two very encouraging signs, however. First, the independents are becoming more conservative. That may be ex-Republicans who have assumed the independent label for whatever reason (dismay at the party, as noted above; the “cool” idea of being independent that, implicitly (and erroneously), projects a higher intellect and discernment than being affiliated with a party does), but who still likely vote for Republican candidates the great majority of the time. The ideological breakdown among independents roughly reflects that of the public at large, though, as one might expect, there are more “moderates” among the independents.

Moreover, what constitutes “moderate” is likely to ebb and flow with the political times. With public polling showing majorities concerned about the growth of government, the deficit, the health care proposals, and other policy positions that are reactions against the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress, “moderate” may be the new conservative for many. That, in turn, is likely to translate into a political advantage for Republican candidates in the midterm elections, when presidential personalities matter much less, even though it might not turn into open partisan affiliation. The one difference between such disaffected moderates and those who openly call themselves conservative, and especially those who newly call themselves conservative, is that those who actually adopt a label are more likely to follow that commitment up with a trip to the polls in 2010. It is that increase in voter intensity along with the shift in percentages that tends to cost the party in control of the White House and Congress during the midterms.

The second encouraging sign is explained in this piece by William Kristol in The Washington Post. The emerging and invigorated conservatism and, by extension, Republican Party affiliation, is of the more libertarian-populist type, rather than the Beltway-Country Club type, or the fascistic-populist type. It is of the Rush Limbaugh/Sarah Palin kind, rather than the David Brooks/Mitt Romney kind or the Keith Olbermann/Michael Moore kind. The first is the kind that is likely to make its positions loud and clear, and to resonate with broad swaths of an American people disaffected with the direction and extent of “Hope ‘n Change.” At some point, that libertarian-populist energy will need to be channelled through some more coherent intellectual framework that can be articulated by a political leader and through a broad political platform. Columnist Ross Douthat and Governor Bobby Jindal come to mind as potential contributors to that effort, though they are still incompletely formed in that regard. But we are not there yet, and there is no particular need to quell the tumult until after the 2010 elections. Let the ferment continue and have an intellectual articulation arise once the movement has gathered more force, a bottom-up rather than top-down process that works best in a democratic republic.

So, all in all, it is increasingly a good prospect for conservatives, as the President Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi have done in a few months what even optimistic prognosticators thought would take several election cycles, namely, invigorate and unify the opposition. But, as Kristol points out, while they have important roles to play to delay or derail Obamanomics, the Republican insiders do not have the legitimacy or qualities to lead that opposition openly. That will fall to outsiders who can more convincingly don the mantle of libertarian-populist opposition to the collectivism promoted by the political elites currently in control of the government and most civil institutions.

President Obama has insisted that a “public option” merely provides some more choice for consumers of health insurance. Conservative critics allege (and I certainly agree) that the option is a Trojan Horse intended to drive private health insurance (except perhaps some boutique policies) out of the market and bring about a single payer system. Candidate Obama in his early incarnations certainly supported such an outcome.

This post at Verum Serum documents some of the deceptions of Democratic politicians and liberal journalists and other supporters of the public option as a strategy to reach the objective of single payer. Here’s the video, where the mask slips and the truth comes out.

There is a version of the “golden rule” that says, “He who has the gold makes the rules.” An old variant of this is the “silver rule” that says, “You take the king’s silver, you become the king’s man.” It’s a repetitive and old lesson that is being learned again at the highest level of business. As has been obvious for some time, the official Pay Czar has ordered significant cuts in pay for the highest level executives at seven companies that received taxpayer bail-outs. There will also be benefits cuts and a shift in compensation from cash to long-term stock holding. I yield to no one in my disdain for Bank of America or Government Motors GM, but this is very troubling. Despite the White House’s protestations to the contrary, it is predictable that there will be further attempts to control executive pay. The Fed chairman already has made noises about controlling all bank executives’ pay.

Also, there is no guarantee that this will not happen to other businesses that receive government funds, or that it will be limited to highly-paid executives. Right now, the administration is just talking about milder internal corporate governance measures that are not, on the whole particularly dramatic. But more potent interference is a distinct possibility. The federal and state governments already put many conditions on government contractors that interfere with internal administration and with very basic property rights. Government puts mandates on educational institutions that receive a variety of federal funds. The precedents are in place, and there is no reason for confidence that, once habituated to this kind of interference, an ideologically leftist administration will restrain itself.

While the business executives at General Motors have to take this interference, the union bosses and the union workers whose demands over the years under the cover of protective labor laws have helped cause the companies’ difficulties suffer no government interference in their operations and compensation. Moreover, while the shift of executive pay from cash to performance-based stock options is a defensible idea, history tells us that this will not quell the class-warfare rhetoric from the Democrats when the time seems right to them. When some executive or another exercises those stock options in the future and realizes a large profit, the accusations of greed will fly. The politicians will conveniently ignore that the reason for those profits will be the years of lower cash compensation and a promise that the executive will be rewarded based on the company’s performance.

The solution, as with many such matters, is not to take the government’s poisoned apple. Take the Hillsdale College approach and refuse the government’s hand. Sooner or later, that hand will try to choke your freedom.

Robert Samuelson, writing in The Washington Post, succinctly lays out the fallacies of the “public option.” From affordability to cost control to improved quality of care to competition and choice, the government option as sold by the politicians is a mirage. Many Americans have the common sense to understand that government cannot repeal the laws of economics and create something out of nothing. But the politicians hope that a fantasy repeated often enough will convince a sufficient number of people who believe in bumper sticker policy to get the public option through Congress.

A point not mentioned by Samuelson is the fiction of the “state opt-out” that is being touted as a way for states to avoid the public option if their voters don’t want it. The problem, as my students know from studying Congress’s use of the spending power to “persuade” states to comply with federal policies, is that political reality cannot conform to theory. Under the plan, the residents of the United States will be taxed to pay for the government plan’s costs. Those costs, as Samuelson demonstrates, will inevitably rise through a number of predictable developments (such as the withering away of private plans and increased number of participants in the government plan). Whatever private plans remain will provide more limited coverage and will become more expensive as the pool of participants drops. It will become politically untenable for a state to have its citizens pay taxes for a plan that will offer lower, taxpayer-subsidized costs to people in other states, yet make such an option unavailable locally.

A real state choice plan would be to have no national public option, but allow the states to develop their own. The increasingly desperate financial state of RomneyCare in Massachusetts and the problems with the limited child-oriented LingleCare in Hawaii would put brakes on any careless state forays into government-funded health care for the general population.

This is a trend that has been occurring for some time. The Democratic Party is the party of the wealthy and the poor and of minorities. That leaves the Republican Party representing the broader middle class.The longer-term ramifications of this will take time to sort out, of course. The solution proposed by the commentators that Republicans need to recapture some of those wealthier, educated voters sounds simple enough. But I don’t know how feasible that is in the near term. Sure, the wealthier may reconsider their leanings now that the Democrats are moving beyond their class-warfare, redistributionist rhetoric to actual policies. However, the process of education that subjected them to a drumbeat of liberal ideas and, often, liberal four-year reeducation camps in the form of elite residential colleges, has molded them into communitarian transnationalists more than libertarians or conservatives who adhere to the American values and Western traditions of the broader middle classes. Too often, based on experience or assimilation, the wealthy educated elite see themselves more as citizens of the world (or the environment) than Americans solely or even primarily. It is difficult to see how, absent some economic, political, or military catastrophe, Republican efforts to propagandize Democratic failings will fall on fertile ground there.

As for many other reasons, conservatives need to emulate the long march through the communications media and the cultural and educational institutions that liberals and Leftists undertook seriously starting in the 1960s, though initial efforts were made beginning with the Progressives a century ago. That process will take several decades at least, just as it did for the liberals. It is not clear to me that conservatives are personally likely or even congenitally capable of spending that time and effort, since most of them are more inclined to raise families, produce measurable wealth, and donate time to private service organizations and charities. Absent such a commitment by conservatives to recapture the institutions of public influence, the only agent of change will be the inevitable decay of what is today’s Leftist cultural paradigm, as today’s radicals are overthrown by the radicals of tomorrow.

President Obama’s supporters bristle at the characterization of their man as a socialist by his detractors. But those remarks do not come from nothing. There has been a strong undercurrent about the evils of capitalism in the administration’s demonizing of the health insurance industry. From the President down, therehas been a constant drumbeat about the allegedly obscene and undeserved profits of health insurance companies. When Nancy Pelosi attacks these companies’ profits as obscene and immoral, one assumes she knows of which she speaks, given her history of questionable steering of government funds and projects to family and friends. I have seen many defenders of socialized health insurance/care attack the profits of insurance companies the elimination of which, they say, will allow the government to provide better care to more people at a lower price. Of course, the hostility to the concept of profit among these people presumably does not extend to their own livelihoods, including the profit they make from the sale of their labor at a cost higher than what is necessary to sustain them at a minimal level of physical survival.

Leave aside that most Americans by far who are covered by private insurance plans are participants in non-profit entities such as Kaiser Permanente and (in most states) Blue Cross-Blue Shield. As this article explains, the health insurance industry’s profits are comparatively anemic compared to other enterprises, a number of which, such as the railroads, are heavily subsidized. Though at times somewhat higher, recent profits have been about 2%, with the highest at 5%. Somehow I doubt that these facts will get in the way of a good hate campaign. But there should be no doubt then that these arguments are driven by an ideology and by a view of profits and of private initiative and enterprise that is, well, socialist.

Every political alignment has its more ideologically extreme members. They, presumably, consider themselves ideologically principled. On the Right, they often rap themselves in the Constitution and the Flag. Fair enough. These folks serve a purpose because often they push the debate on policy and give a voice to issues that turns out later to be prescient. But too often they come across as strident and even demented. This effort to launch a movement to impeach President Obama is one of those moonbattery moments among the Right.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air thoroughly explains the political and constitutional foolishness of such an effort at this time. I fully agree with the message of his posting. Obama’s actions so far do not meet the constitutional understanding of “high crimes and misdemeanors” under even the most generous reading. Democrats will not launch impeachment proceedings even if the evidence of qualifying wrongdoing by Obama were orders of magnitude clearer. If anything, the Congressional leadership considers Obama insufficiently committed to the radical cause. For the Republican minority to press such an issue would not only be fruitless, it would be politically suicidal. It would allow the Democrats to shift attention from their disastrous policies onto comparisons of personality. And, whatever their political skills, House Minority Leader Boehner and Senate Minority Leader McConnell cannot match the President’s propaganda machine or his on-camera telepromptered charisma.

The American public punished the Republicans politically for the dubious impeachment efforts directed at President Clinton. Those Republicans at least had perjury and obstruction of justice as predicate offenses by the President. Any attempt to replicate such efforts against Obama would tar the Republicans and invite a political backlash that the GOP cannot afford. It would waste an increasingly promising opportunity to expose the Democrats on their substantive radicalism to slow them down in 2010 and beyond. The American people are not forgiving of contrived impeachment efforts or other tactics that are unnecessarily divisive and alter political issues into legal or quasi-legal ones.

That is one reason why I have not been unduly concerned about efforts by the extreme Left, as represented among a number of the faculty at my school, to prosecute Bush-era officials. The Democrats would pay dearly politically for such a course, and I do not see Obama pursuing it unless he felt supremely confident of his political position. Given his eroding approval ratings, that is unlikely. Or, Obama feels driven into a political corner with nothing to lose. He is nowhere near that, given the difficult struggle for his ambitious and radical domestic agenda.

I, along with Ed Morrissey, am also sick and tired of the Nazi-comparisons coming from both sides. This is done far less often by the Right than by the Left (during the Reagan and Bush administrations, and now against anyone who dares to express disapproval of Obama policies at town hall meetings). But when the Right does it, it is equally despicable and over-the-top, unless there is a direct and relevant factual comparison. Here, there is not.

There are plenty of troubling policy initiatives that threaten disastrous economic and social consequences, but neither Obama nor the Democrats are carting peaceful American dissenters off to camps any more than Bush and Cheney were doing through the Patriot Act. There are plenty of personality cult stirrings in the administration and its supporters. It is perfectly legitimate to point out the similarities of both the President and his supporters in this regard to the natural dynamic between the totalitarian leader in history and his followers. But it is not legitimate to call him Hitler until he, well, starts to act like Hitler in his policies.

I disagree with Morrissey’s column on one minor point. He accepts that a reading of Federalist 65 (though not the Constitution’s text) supports the claim that impeachment can be done for political reasons. Not exactly. Hamilton agreed that impeachment was not simply a criminal process. Hence, someone could be tried in the courts for conduct that led to his impeachment, without violating double jeopardy or due process. But to assert that the process was, at some level, “quasi-political,” not “legal,” does not validate the use of the procedure for purely political differences.

Hamilton is clear about that distinction between process and substance. The process could only be used for misconduct that, even if it did not amount to criminal bahavior, showed unfitness for office by undermining the constitutional order. English practice that, in the 17th century, had allowed impeachment for purely political differences during the Long Parliament of Charles I, by the latter part of the 17th century already required more solid, non-political cause. Early American state constitutional practice that had flirted with the purely political model of impeachment, had moved to the language and custom reflected in the U.S. Constitution, as well. Hamilton recognized those roots, affirmatively citing the English precedent. Impeachments, therefore, are never pursued on the formal grounds of even severe political differences, though such political squabbles may fuel the decision to pursue impeachment for conduct that otherwise would be ignored.

Sarah Palin adds her voice to the skepticism over the Baucus bill and explains its fiscal unsustainability.  She criticizes the bill’s anti-free market approach and the administration’s lack of transparency. She also sketches out some pro-free market, pro-consumer reforms.

Predictably, Palin’s political opponents have responded disparagingly. I find it amazing that Palin, a mere private citizen, has so much influence. Her forthcoming book is heavily pre-subscribed. Her opponents are hoping to make some money off her by rushing out a copy-cat parody on the same day. But, no, she has no future in American politics according to the punditocracy.

Palin’s Facebook strategy itself has drawn attention. As Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post describes, with nearly a million Facebook followers, this allows Palin to get her message out without the partisan screening to which her message is likely to be subjected if she tried to deliver it through the old-line media. I would add that this approach, combined with a number of blogs that report on her doings, allows her to reach her followers by capitalizing on the “democratic” aspects of new media, unencumbered by the elitist meddling of the fading media aristocracy.

Note the snark at the end of the Cillizza piece, quoting a Republican media hack, that Facebook is easier for Palin because correct grammar does not matter. As if the mangling of the English language that occurs regularly among the legacy media’s columnists goes unnoticed, say, the confusion between “comprise” and “compose.” It is just that attitude among elitist “gatekeepers” that makes Palin’s approach so popular with the middle class. BTW, Obama, too, the greatest orator ever, if his press acolytes are to be believed, used such social networking sites to reach his followers. Perhaps he did it despite such sites’ indifference to proper language use. Oh, yes, I forgot, Obama’s grammar, when not telepromptered, is nothing to trumpet.

Another useful fact to keep in mind. As this blog points out, Palin’s Facebook followers number the same as the entire print circulation of Mr. Cillizza’s Washington Post.

Center-left commentator Juan Williams reacts to being told to “get back on the porch” by a Black liberal small-time commentator, a slur that is the functional equivalent to being called a “house negro.” Williams had defended Rush Limbaugh against charges of racism for supposedly having made comments that later were found to be concocted.

Williams also discloses that the head of the NFL Players Association, who has been vociferous in his demand that Limbaugh not participate even as a minority owner in the NFL, was part of the Obama transition team. That fact, combined with the Obama administration’s barely-disguised hatred for Rush Limbaugh (remember Obama laughing at a Wanda Sykes eruption at the White House Correspondents Dinner about hoping Limbaugh’s kidneys fail, and the administration’s efforts to demonize Limbaugh and then portray him as the head of the GOP?), gives some credence to rumors that the administration has been involved in the Limbaugh-NFL controversy. Not that the Chicago gang of David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel would ever do something like that now, right?

It is interesting that, here, one has two Black men (one of whom is a moderate liberal) and a lesbian woman defending Rush Limbaugh against these accusations of (non-existent) racism. Not to be forgotten is that Limbaugh’s producer, Bo Snerdley, is Black and has defended Limbaugh. All of them denounce the bigotry coming from liberals. Indeed, it is the Left that not only makes race the dominant topic in its entire political discourse and the primary consideration in all matters of personal opportunity, success and responsibility, but so frequently turns around and smears with racist stereotypes and accusations of race treason any member of a minority who dares to escape from the shackles of the liberal thought cave.

Via Mark Steyn

The British nanny state as the canary in the coal mine. Twenty years from now, with ObamaCare in full swing, this is an entirely imagineable event, taking seven children, including a one-day old baby, from their parents and placing them in foster homes because they might become obese like their parents. Obese defined here as 322 lbs., or the weight of a not inconsiderable number of Americans. As Mark Steyn explains, why not take the children from their parents because they might become smokers, gun owners, or homophobes, all of them physical or mental health concerns according to the politically correct New Puritans? Hillary Clinton’s favorite dystopia come to fruition.

I have not written about my fellow constitutional law professor Doug Kmiec in a while. Professor Kmiec, teaching at Pepperdine University Law School, was a staunch Catholic Republican pro-lifer who served in the Office of Legal Counsel during the Reagan administration. During the most recent election, after supporting the doomed primary candidacy of Mitt Romney, he parlayed his distaste for the more openly pro-life John McCain into an increasingly full-throated support of—Barack Obama. Not only did Professor Kmiec support Obama, he came to view the latter as the true pro-life candidate and one of the most pro-life Presidents ever.

The tenor of Kmiec’s increasingly militant pieces on the topic caused much derision among his former political associates and ideological fellows, about which I have posted before. Academics, such as Princeton philosophy professor Robert George lined up to dismantle Kmiec’s philosophic arguments. Members of the Catholic priesthood and hierarchy began to question Kmiec’s religious assertions. Columnists have dismissed Kmiec’s political rationalizations. I met Doug Kmiec a few years ago and was quite impressed by his philosophic rigor about the application of natural law thinking to current issues of rights. I barely recognized the new Doug Kmiec. 

As the Obama administration faced questions about its domestic policies, Kmiec vigorously defended it. When Notre Dame was criticized for extending an invitation to the President to speak at the graduation ceremony and to receive an honorary degree, Kmiec was right there to defend the university and to laud the President in a gush of fawning verbiage. When Justice Souter retired and even before Sonia Sotomayor was nominated, Kmiec immediately (and unconvincingly to me) jumped on the Obama ”empathy” bandwagon.

Kmiec even reversed himself clumsily on the D.C. v. Heller decision. In 2007, he had supported an amicus curiae (”friend of the court”) brief in support of the constitutional argument for an individual right to bear arms for self-defense and against the D.C. ban on private possession of handguns. In 2008, the Supreme Court had adopted the position that brief advanced. In 2009, Kmiec criticized that same ruling as unconstitutionally ignoring the prefatory clause of the Second Amendment. He also opposes extension of that right to protect against state and local gun possession bans like the one in Chicago that is currently on review before the Supreme Court in McDonald v. Chicago. Apparently, that natural law/natural rights approach that Professor Kmiec so favors in his constitutional law casebook does not apply to the right of self-defense that is crucial to protection of the right to life. Once more, he abandons his former straightforward pro-life position for one to match the nuances, not to mention bald-faced contradictions, on the topic coming from his idol in the White House.

That flip-flop was in accord with Kmiec’s reversal of his position on California’s Proposition 8, the pro-opposite sex marriage vote, something he also was for, before he was against it. In what has become drearily predictable, Kmiec has also reversed himself on the jurisprudential issue of constitutional interpretation. He now ridicules the “conservative” position that courts should interpret constitutional clauses in light of the original understanding of the language when it was adopted. This is in sharp contrast to his long-held and published previous views, voiced as recently as two years ago, when he was still working for the Romney campaign, about the essential nature of original understanding constitutional interpretation. His embrace of the jurisprudence of original understanding has disappeared along with his philosophic attachment to natural law.

Many have wondered what is producing this conversion. While not happening with the speed of Paul’s epiphany, it is nevertheless producing an equally complete Road-to-Damascus reversal of deeply-held beliefs, albeit in the opposite direction. I have previously speculated that Kmiec was angling for a federal judgeship. Others thought it was an ambassadorship to the Vatican. But the Vatican apparently let it be known behind the scenes that Kmiec was too blatant in his dubious assertions of the pro-life qualities of the President and unconvincing in his protestations of his own continuing pro-life stance. His increasingly accommodating views about abortion that essentially measured compromise as surrender to the pro-abortion rights side were unacceptable to the Vatican. Of course, the reality of Kmiec’s new-found acceptance of common ground mimicked that of the President himself, the most radically pro-abortion President ever and someone whose position on partial-birth abortion and whose hostility towards protecting babies born alive after abortion was more radical than even Senator Boxer’s.

So the question remained exactly what Kmiec was after. Now we know. It is indeed an ambassadorship. To Malta. For that, one surrenders life-long positions that, presumably, were deeply held and carefully thought-through philosophic and religious tenets? I am again reminded of something I have posted before, a remark from Sir Thomas More (”A Man For All Seasons”) to Richard Rich, the snivelling opportunist who acts as the King’s tool to bring down More in return for becoming Attorney General of Wales: “For Wales? Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world…But for Wales!”

For Malta, Doug? For Malta?

David Kahane styles the life story of one Barack Hussein Obama as a proposed comedy getting the plot development treatment in a fictional Hollywood setting. Who’d believe it, right?

Another Krauthammer masterpiece. His speech begins about 6 minutes in with some jokes. The main part begins about 8 minutes in. For those who don’t know anything about Krauthammer, he is paralyzed as a result of a diving accident his first year of medical school. Krauthammer is a noted psychiatrist who has published some important papers in the field. On a less professionally lofty level, but playing off his training, he coined the concept BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) to characterize liberals’ visceral dislike of anything connected with George W. Bush. Liberals since then have tried to appropriate the “derangement syndrome” concept for their own use.

This is the transcript of the speech. The speech is a classic, and there is no justice that I can do to it by quoting passages. The whole thing has to be read and studied. That said, I cannot resist a couple of quotes to give a taste of a wonderful repast. Describing the difference between the center-left liberal internationalism of the Clinton administration and the left-liberalism of the Obama administration, Krauthammer observes:

“For what might be called the New Liberalism, the renunciation of power is rooted not in the fear that we are essentially good but subject to the corruptions of power–the old Clintonian view–but rooted in the conviction that America is so intrinsically flawed, so inherently and congenitally sinful that it cannot be trusted with, and does not merit, the possession of overarching world power.
“For the New Liberalism, it is not just that power corrupts. It is that America itself is corrupt–in the sense of being deeply flawed, and with the history to prove it. An imperfect union, the theme of Obama’s famous Philadelphia race speech, has been carried to and amplified in his every major foreign-policy address, particularly those delivered on foreign soil. (Not surprisingly, since it earns greater applause over there.)”

America as deeply flawed is a theme that is taught over and over in our schools. I see it in the multiculti relativism and the transnationalism embedded in our law school faculty and in the burning desire to see those, such as Bush administration officials who sought to protect Americans from terrorist attacks after 9/11, punished here or abroad. It is a poison that flows through our elite institutions and ultimately threatens our political existence.

And there are other poisons that come from the administration’s left-liberalism. The signs are everywhere and obvious to all who will look. The effects are beginning to be felt and will be felt more and more, as the wind Obama has sown will be reaped as a whirlwind of national decline. Obama’s focus on the need for a moral rebirth of the United States before it can tell other nations what to do leads him to apology tours and other harebrained schemes that will backfire on the U.S., politically at best, militarily at worst. They do nothing to help the U.S. and seem designed more to sate Obama’s hunger to be recognized as a transformative figure, the secular messiah of his acolytes’ imaginations and the media’s hagiographic portrayals.

Peter Wehner agrees that Krauthammer hits the nail on the head in this speech and reads it as distilling the reason that Mr. Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize:

“In his address, Krauthammer says,

as he made his hajj from Strasbourg to Prague to Ankara to Istanbul to Cairo and finally to the U.N. General Assembly, Obama drew the picture of an America quite exceptional — exceptional in moral culpability and heavy-handedness, exceptional in guilt for its treatment of other nations and peoples. With varying degrees of directness or obliqueness, Obama indicted his own country for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness (toward Europe), for maltreatment of natives, for torture, for Hiroshima, for Guantánamo, for unilateralism, and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world.

“That, in two sentences, explains why Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize today. Now the Nobel Committee couldn’t quite come out and say that directly; it decided to couch the award in this language, taken from the citation: ‘[Obama’s] diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.’
“There you have it: Barack Obama has given voice to what many of the world think about America — and it’s not flattering. That much of the world — composed as it is of autocrats and dictators and weak and wobbly defenders of human rights and human dignity — isn’t happy with the United States is not news. What is news is that an American president would validate many of those charges. I find that deeply disquieting. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, not surprisingly, considers it worthy of its highest honor.”

Two columns on America’s obsession with race. Andy McCarthy reflects on the race-baiting and race-hustling that undid Rush Limbaugh’s bid for minority ownership in the St. Louis Rams on the basis of ideological differences and personal animosity. Prominent in what passed for discourse in that matter were two of the champions of such odious techniques who should have been marginalized years ago from participation in serious public discourse of such matters. I am referring, of course, to the Reverend Jesse (”Hymietown”) Jackson, Jr., and the Reverend Al (”Tawana Brawley”) Sharpton. BTW, what is it with these men of the cloth and their publicity-hunting (and profit-generating) racial divisiveness?

On the other hand, a study analyzed by liberals shows that, whatever conservatives’ objections are to President Obama, they are not based on his race. Hallelujah and Amen. What has been obvious to anyone who would look has been supported by further investigation. People were just as opposed to HillaryCare in 1993. They would have been opposed to such a program as ObamaCare even if it were HillaryCare 2.0 or EdwardsCare. They were opposed to what they saw as the comparatively minor-league expansion of domestic federal spending programs and deficits of President George W. Bush, just as they are opposed to the Obama deficits. And in California they have been opposed to the Governator’s economically-disastrous environmental tax and regulation policies just as much as they are to Obama’s Cap-And-Tax bill.

James Capretta at National Review Online describes the “Baucus death spiral” that happens to insurance plans when regulators force insurers to offer coverage (“guaranteed issue”) at premiums below the known risk of those they are insuring, without any assurance that the shortfall can be made up elsewhere. The way out was the mandate that young, healthy people join the insurance pool or pay a hefty excise tax. But, as Capretta points out, that mandate is politically unpalatable so it has been reduced and delayed, but without a way for the insurance companies to avoid the increased costs. The industry is trying to get the mandate back in, which Capretta calls the wrong approach. I agree in that an approach that removes impediments to market forces and consumer choice is the far better and more sustainable solution.

But the real problem is not economic. Most understand the questions and the answers. The real hang-up is political. As Capretta notes, Democrats “are desperate to enact something they can call ‘universal coverage’ without any coherent plan to slow the pace of rising costs. In that context, a new entitlement for subsidized insurance is exceedingly expensive, which is why the sponsors try to hide some of the costs behind mandates, hidden taxes, compulsion, and insurance regulation. However, as they are now finding out, there’s no free lunch here. Someone has to pay for it all. It’s just a question of who and how much.”

Capretta links to this blog post on the Baucus bill, by an expert in health insurance/health care issues. He declares that the Baucus bill would explode the health insurance market. He gives some examples how families would be affected by the new premium structure and why they would avoid paying for health insurance until they became sick.

Many people understand about the fundamental folly of the whole government health insurance/health care debacle, the problem of lack of sufficient information and the inefficiency in evaluating information and making decisions that is the ruin of central planning. The British National Health Service is the world’s third-largest employer, after the Chinese People’s Army and the Indian National Railways. And they make decisions for a population less than 20% that of the U.S. “Successful” programs in the Scandinavian countries or in the Netherlands (actually, the Dutch are trying to privatize their system more) are in countries with a small fraction of the population of the U.S. What could go wrong?

From Slate, of all places, an insightful evaluation of why the political and economic realities dictate that the costs for ObamaCare proposals such as the one in Senator Baucus’s bill inevitably will exceed those advertised.

Unlike the House, the Senate has a procedural tradition that allows Senators very generous latitude for debate of bills and for proposed amendments. In the House, the powerful Rules Committee provides rules that govern the debate on a proposed bill. Requirements of germaneness limit the number and scope of amendments. By contrast, the smaller number of Senators and the tradition of the Senate as a debating body allow Senators to talk as equals on each bill. There is none of the sense that junior members “should be seen, but not heard,” as there is in the House.

Senators, then, can talk. And talk. And talk. Filibustering a bill is also a time-honored Senatorial tradition that, on the one hand, promotes consensus and collegiality and, on the other, paralyzes the Senate’s business. Through rules proposed and amended over the years, the Senate can vote to cut off debate and end a filibuster. That is known as a cloture vote. It takes 60 Senators to impose cloture, which still gives a determined minority considerable clout to derail, slow down, or dilute controversial bills.

There are a few scenarios where filibuster is not permitted and bills are approved without debate or with limitations. One of those is a bill that already was debated in the Senate, but then went to a Senate-House conference to resolve differences in the language between the two chambers’ versions of the bill. Another is the “reconciliation” process that attends to certain budget bills. Invoking this process requires that the bill, indeed, be related to the budget, such as reducing the deficit. Or, at least be made to appear so.

The Democrats, fearful of a filibuster on their ObamaCare proposals, want to circumvent the usual enactment process and use “reconciliation.” They face two hurdles. One is that they need coordination between the House and Senate to set the bill up as a budget bill. They have been assiduous in laying the groundwork for that, which is one reason why the focus on the Baucus bill is misplaced. There is a rival bill in the Senate, and there are other proposals in the House. The Senate bills need to be coordinated, which gives the leadership considerable flexibility in drafting the bill. Moreover, having the House bill originate in the Ways and Means (Taxation) Committee and move to the Budget Committee allows that to be the bill considered by the Senate for purposes of the reconciliation process. Indeed, the Senate can make that bill its own, but strike essentially all language and substitute its own as an “amendment” to use the simple majority of reconciliation. Then, the House-Senate conference can iron out the details and come up with whatever bill it chooses (on which both houses then must vote, of course, but with a simple majority).

The problem, and thereby the second hurdle, is that this is using a budget process to enact a policy that really has nothing to do with the budget. It is a perversion of the process. But it can be challenged under Senate rules for each provision of the bill. The Senate’s parliamentarian, who emerges as a central figure in this tactic, can be asked to issue a rule whether the challenged provision really reduces the deficit (one reason that the contrived Baucus framework sought an opinion from the Congressional Budget Office about the proposal’s effect on the deficit). If it does not, the parliamentarian can rule that reconciliation does not apply and the provision (e.g., insurance company mandates re: preexisting conditions) has to be dropped from the bill. Needless to say, this can complicate adoption of a comprehensive reform bill. The parliamentarian’s rule can be overridden by sixty votes, the same as for cloture. Alternatively, the dropped provision can be enacted as a separate law, making it vulnerable to the filibuster. As a final alternative, the Senate could ignore the parliamentarian’s ruling, but it is loath to do so because of the internal strife such a blatant power play would induce in a body with a long institutional memory.

The lesson is that it is always important to keep one’s eyes on the ball. In the Congress, especially in the Senate, with its arcane procedural rules, appearances can be deceiving. That is one reason why the hullabaloo about the Baucus proposal is misplaced in so many ways. Such trickery and deception can provide political cover to politically endangered politicians by allowing them to fudge their votes. For example, a Senator can vote to impose cloture and shut down debate, but then vote against a bill that is unpopular with this constituents, as long as his vote is not needed by his party to pass the final bill by majority vote. That may sound like a lot of deception, but it may be the best way for the Left that is controlling Congress to get a politically unpopular bill enacted over the wishes of the voters.

There has been speculation that President Obama’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize is only a prelude to future such awards to him. The current award has been characterized by the head of the prize committee as an encouragement to the President to continue to move the U.S. in a direction of subjecting American action to restraint by transnational organizations and foreign regimes. The President himself has often stressed the need for the U.S. to change the (imagined) unilateralism of the Bush administration. He has paid obeisance to the United Nations’ “importance,” made the need to talk to the U.S.’s enemies without preconditions (from the American side only) a prime foreign policy plank, and embarked on major tours to apologize unilaterally for various sins of the United States. His pronouncements pander to the most baseless grievances of thuggish regimes that gives those regimes legitimacy to suppress domestic dissent and violate human rights with impunity, while demoralizing movements towards democracy and liberty that traditionally could have counted on American support. He supports a program of weakened national defense and strengthened domestic social collectivism. The Obama administration’s path reminds me of a dream I had.

From Tehran, President-for-life Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad congratulates President Obama for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize. The American president received the prize for his contribution to world peace through the executive agreement that he made with Ahmadi-Nejad to remove American troops from Afghanistan and Iraq in 2011 and to recognize Iranian suzerainty over the Persian Gulf region, and for his willingness to talk with Iran without preconditions for the 18 months that it took for Iran to complete construction of its first six atomic bombs. Ahmadi-Nejad notes his gratitude to Obama for these steps, without which it would not have been possible for Iran successfully to invade the Arabian peninsula and Jordan and to develop a direct land connection to its allies Hamas and Lebanese Hizb’Ullah.

From Pyongyang, North Korea, Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il congratulates President Obama for the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. Mr. Obama received the prize for his contribution to world peace by withdrawing American armed forces from South Korea, the Philippines, and the rest of the Western Pacific as part of his massive reductions of American armed forces to help pay for the far-greater than publicized costs of the new American health care public-only option modeled after the Cuban system. Bringing the troops home on the model of what the President did in Iraq and Afghanistan, as so many of Obama’s left-wing supporters demanded, allowed North Korea to launch an attack on South Korea using the nuclear-tipped missiles it had been developing while dragging out long-running talks demanded by the American Left and by the North Koreans. While the South Korean military resisted valiantly, the North Koreans, supplied and reinforced by the Chinese who were glad to find a solution to the internal economic weakness of the North Korean system that had threatened to destabilize it and send refugees into China, eventually overwhelmed the defenders.

From Kabul, Afghanistan, Russian President-for-life Vladimir Putin and his Afghani counterpart, Mullah Omar, congratulate President Obama for the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize. As a result of Obama’s decision in 2009 to scrap the American agreement with Poland to place a defensive missile shield there, and of the treaty in 2010 to eliminate 2200 nuclear warheads from the U.S. and Russian arsenals (leaving the U.S. with none and Russia with 600), Russia was able to reestablish the boundaries of the old Warsaw Pact. With Obama’s de facto unilateral nuclear disarmament of the U.S., the formerly free nations of Eastern Europe chose to obtain the best bargain they could from the increasingly assertive Russians. The Russian economy was in a near-meltdown when Putin introduced rigorously capitalist measures in 2011, even as the U.S. was heading down a strongly socialist path against which Putin warned Obama. Those reforms, combined with a massive capital inflow due to the replacement of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency after the disastrous inflation and subsequent economic depression caused by the Obama administration’s massive deficits and takeovers of large portions of the American economy, have revitalized the Russian economy. Putin is in Kabul to commemorate the Pact’s latest victory, conquering the Caucasus nations of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, and to sign a friendship treaty with the Taliban government of Afghanistan and their allies, the Taliban government of Pakistan. It is peace in our time, as the Russians even put the Czech Republic and Slovakia back together with Obama’s help and an armored division of Soviet Russian troops sent to Prague. With NATO now disbanded after its humiliating 2011 defeat in Afghanistan, once the Biden program of minimizing the American presence there and relying of Special Forces raids proved to be the massive failure that former Generals McChrystal and Petraeus had predicted, the European Union has declared a Finnish-model neutrality of cooperation with Russia and proclaimed itself a demilitarized region. Putin is also pleased that Obama has rejected the overtures of a suddenly-concerned China for a military alliance against the Russians. He has publicly thanked Obama for “correcting another American mistake” by returning Alaska to Russia for the $6 million that the U.S. paid for that purchase in 1867. Of course, after the inflation of 2010-12, that sum is now worth only 6,000 Bush-era dollars.

From Ramallah, the leadership of Hamas congratulates President Obama for the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize. Mr. Obama received the prize for his contribution to world peace through the decision to sever ties with Israel and to vote for a complete U.N. embargo against the small nation enforced by U.S. warships. That made it possible for a joint Iranian-Syrian-Egyptian-Hamas-Hizb’Ullah invasion to destroy Israel, after Iran used its nuclear stockpile, four of which found their targets. True, Iran lost a dozen cities in the Israeli desperation counterattack, but, as the Iranians pointed out before, they could afford to lose millions of people and still win a war with Israel. Moreover, with the demise of the Zionist entity, the Middle East peace envisioned by the administration and its electoral base has been attained, though it is a peace of the grave.

From Caracas, the capital of the new Bolivarian Federation, President-for-life Hugo Chavez congratulates President Obama for the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize. Chavez, whose Bolivarian Federation includes Central America below Mexico, the northern portion of South America (including the former countries of Colombia, Peru, and Equador), various Caribbean domains such as Cuba, and the former U.S. state of Florida, acknowledges Mr. Obama’s contribution to his successful war of liberation. It was Obama who agreed to remove U.S. forces and military protection from those countries, which allowed Chavez to use his newly-acquired Russian military equipment and the assistance of Russian military forces on bases in the former Venezuela to overthrow the bourgeois capitalist democracies in many of those countries and to advance his vision of socialism. Once he used one of his Iranian nuclear weapons to bomb the Colombian capital, Bogota, Chavez’s threats to nuke other cities made his task much easier. Not to be outdone by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, Chavez has awarded Obama the Simon Bolivar Medal for Obama’s contribution to the advance of socialism and for Obama’s agreement, after duly apologizing for American aggression, to return Florida to control by Spanish-speakers from whom the area was “stolen” almost two centuries ago. Obama’s new Secretary of the Treasury, Michael Moore, and the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, George Soros, accept the award on President Obama’s behalf.

From Sacramento, Nuevo California, Mexican President (and former drug cartel boss) Miguel Duran congratulates President Obama for the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. Mr. Obama received the prize for his contribution to world peace for the treaty made by him and approved by the Senate elected in 2016. The treaty was made after Mr. Obama suspended parts of the Constitution in 2016 to allow him to run for as many terms as he wants and after opposition parties were declared “enemies of hope and change” and were prohibited. The treaty returns to Mexico all land acquired by the United States through the annexation of Texas, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican War, and the Gadsden Purchase.

From Brussels, the president of the newly-restructured demilitarized European Union congratulates President Barack Obama for the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize for Mr. Obama’s continuing efforts to reduce the influence of the U.S. in world affairs. The latest effort towards that end is the treaty with the EU that returns to France the territory acquired by the U.S. as a result of Thomas Jefferson’s 1803 treaty with Napoleon Bonaparte and called the Louisiana Purchase. Under this recent treaty, all American inhabitants not of Cajun or American-Indian ancestry (proper blood-lines to be shown to a “Race and Ethnicity Commission” established under UN auspices) are to be removed from that area within five years.

From London, the president of the newly-established Islamic Republic of Londonistan congratulates President Barack Obama for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. Mr. Obama received the prize for his contribution to world peace for the treaty he made with the Islamic Republic to return all lands gained by the United States as a result of the Treaty of Paris in 1783 that ended the American war for independence from then-Great Britain. The new treaty stipulates that the territory within 250 miles of the Atlantic Ocean, as well as the city of Chicago shall remain under U.S. control until the death of President Obama. At that point all shall revert to the Islamic Republic of Londonistan. All people of non-American Indian descent shall be repatriated to their continents of origin within twenty years after the return of the land. There will be an exception made for a twenty square-mile area around the site of the Jamestown, Virginia, settlement and the town of Williamsburg, Virginia, and another four square-mile site in the District Columbia, both of which shall be preserved as sites to commemorate the entity that was once the United States of America. The sites will serve as a warning to those who would seek to establish a society formed on outdated notions that individuals are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” and that governments are established only to secure these rights.

I then woke up, bathed in sweat, relieved that it was only a nightmare. I turned on the news. The President had won the Nobel Peace Prize.

There are those who say that the President does not deserve the ridicule that he has received over the Nobel Peace Prize because he did not seek the award. Assuming the last part is true, and there is some suggestion it is not, the President still could have declined the prize as undeserved. When Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese minister Le Duc Tho were co-recipients for “Peace With Honor” in Vietnam, Le had the decency to decline the prize. Kissinger not so much. It is just not Obama’s personality to decline something like that.  But Thomas Friedman of The New York Times has another idea. In a powerful column, Friedman provides another alternative for Obama. Go to Oslo, decline the award for himself, but accept it on behalf of the American military as the ultimate peacekeepers. As Friedman points out, that approach would destroy the Nobel committee’s conceit that they can use their award for blatantly political attempts to influence American policy in a EUnuch direction of pacifistic transnationalism that is subject to UN control.

While I can see the President making some mildly laudatory remarks about the U.S., and even about the military specifically, in what will be a closely watched speech, I do not see him making the kind of ringing endorsement of American military power that Friedman advocates. That just isn’t who he is.

A few more words about the NFL-Rush Limbaugh spat. It now looks as if Limbaugh will be squeezed out of the bid. The claim continues to be that he is too controversial and does not represent the “values” that the NFL wants to project. Oh, really? Then why did the NFL approve Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas as a minority owner (same position as Rush Limbaugh would have been)? When she has delivered herself of statements (lyrics) such as these from a song the title of which, “Sex,” reflects the degree of nuance in the lyrics. [Caution: language.] These are the values that the NFL seeks to promote? Or is it that Limbaugh’s bid really was sunk because of his political views? 

Regarding the apparently concocted racist statements that were attributed to Limbaugh, some of the unsourced Wikipedia entries may have come from a New York law firm. According to research done by one of Mark Steyn’s readers,

“The quotes were added by a user with the IP address of 69.64.213.146. This address has been used mostly to make changes to the article about Rush, but also Karl Rove, Sean Hannity, Rush, James Dobson and Sara Palin from 2005 until earlier this year.
“While others have noted this in various forums, no one seems to have made the connection that this IP address is used as a gateway by the law firm Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP (see here, for example) that all users from that IP address come from the pbwt.com domain.”

Could it be that a lawyer was posting these arguably defamatory accusations?

An interesting problem at the intersection of “rights” and health care. Many supporters of ObamaCare claim that health care is a right. But they don’t mean that in the commonly understood sense in the U.S. that, if one has a right to something, one is, as a general proposition, protected against government deprivation of that right. Thus, government attempts to limit one’s access to privately chosen health care would be a violation of that right. But, in the view of ObamaCare supporters, this notion gets turned on its head. A right is that which the government provides to the public as a result of emotion-driven and reason-free sloganeering, such as “No one should go bankrupt because of an accident or a disease.”

One of my colleagues has advanced an equality-based right to tattoos, clothing, and make-up. Whatever may be its constitutional oddness, this proposal relies on traditional rights notions at least to the extent of providing a restraint on government interference with one’s lifestyle choices. Of course, being grounded on notions of equality, especially cultural group identity-based equality, there is a fast path to requiring government protection of such individual “rights” from private infringement. Still, there is no sense that government itself provide the tattoos, clothing, and make-up.

With the developing health care “right,” there is an obligation for government to pay for the exercise of such rights, at least if people cannot afford to do that on their own. Let’s leave aside for now the odd notion that something can be a right but can be rationed by the government. If health care is a right, and if a right includes personal appearance that must be promoted by the government as an aspect of equality of identity, we get this conceptual mess, the human right to large breasts. At least for transsexuals who have a right to psychological well-being that apparently transcends the breast size limitations imposed by nature (and the government) on “natal females.” Natal females sounds like some less developed form of female (outside the breast department). However, it is just an edgy, politically correct and progressive way of referring to, well, actual women, rather than chromosomal males with some sexual identity issues.

Mark Steyn refers to this slyly as the problem of rights inflation. If the concept of rights gets inflated to mean anything that someone desires, the more real rights in the sense of freedom from government control, get curtailed. I have noted this before, in the notion that the scope of government grows and grows, becoming more intrusive through its regulations and burdensome through its voracious demand for tax money. Still, liberals cheer this on. All is well, as long as government recognizes more and more sexual license. Besides being a rather dreary and animalistic view of human nature, it ignores the manner in which government has taken control over our individuality beyond matters of superficial appearance and carnal satisfaction.

Note that I am not against either of those last two, though I do question the easy collective acceptance of our excessive preoccupation with such matters. Nor am I opposed to large breasts. On policy grounds, I could even be persuaded to have taxpayer money expended on such beautification projects rather than on yet another bridge to nowhere or another government-funded racial, sex-based, sexual proclivity-based, or other identity group grievance study. And such a program should definitely not be limited to transsexuals. But the very idea that we should be debating such issues, which are the inevitable outgrowth of a perverse conception of rights and of the societal acceptance of the responsibility of others for one’s health care, strikes me as a powerful illustration of our intellectual fecklessness and of the accelerating descent of the West into irrelevance as an ethical and political model for the world.

Michael Lewis, writing in Commentary, discusses the Art of Obama Worship. He addresses how current artists are disregarding the prior American norm of separating art from politics. That reflected a healthy separation of the private intellectual domain from the corrosive influence of politics. Using art for political indoctrination and for, by turns, idolizing the ruling clique and demonizing its opponents, is an attribute of totalitarian systems. To the extent that American art was politicized, beginning in the 1960s, it took a skeptical, indeed cynical, position against American institutions. Art was not just politically progressive. Itoften revelled in its transgressiveness, as anti-Christian and anti-Republican (especially that featuring George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld) art showed. Artists prided themselves on “speaking truth to power.” Even when their “speech” had the reasoned content and controlled delivery of a Tourette’s sufferer:

“This is not to say that 9/11 did not call forth a volcano of moral rage among artists—only that this rage found no outlet until 2003, when it came to be directed at George W. Bush. Among all the scatological, puerile, and corrosive caricatures of Bush that began to be shown at that time, one looks in vain for even one corresponding image of Osama bin Laden or Mohamed Atta. For example, In the Shadow of No Towers, Art Spiegelman’s intensely personal graphic memoir of the 9/11 attacks, contains not a single depiction of bin Laden, while we are treated to scurrilous images of President Bush toppling the Statue of Liberty and a gleeful Dick Cheney slitting the throat of the American eagle on whose back he is riding.”

This sometimes self-consciously hostile art was a worrisome shift towards a mutual interaction between art and politics, especially as government funding of art expanded, a funding that began with the New Deal art that at times seemed to be a less virulent form of “socialist realism.” But, at least for a generation, this oppositional art (while clearly selective and ideologically biased in its targets) still maintained a semblance of opposition to the status quo. All of that has changed with the ascension of Barack Obama (and his political support for Artists Corps, a new federal program to support artists). And, unlike the sometimes hagiographic art that grew around other Presidents (Washington, Lincoln), Obama worship, like the Nobel Peace Prize, has erupted before the man has done anything of sufficient consequence to merit the worship. Much of that art, as I have written before, smacks of religious-type adulation:

“In one three-month period, 787 Obama paintings were auctioned on eBay, showing the new president in every possible pose, and a few impossible ones: standing commandingly before the White House, cradling a basketball and wearing a Washington Wizards uniform, gamely wrestling a bear on Wall Street, even flying naked on the back of a unicorn.
What is striking about these paintings is not their quality, about which the less said the better, but their consistent tone. They belong to that class of objects known as ‘devotional art.’ Such objects are not only intended as votive offerings, to serve as the focus of veneration; the actual process of making them is itself an act of piety, a consideration that all but places them outside the realm of aesthetic judgment.”

A leader in the Obama worship genre of current art is Shepard Fairey, the artist with the irresistibly effete name, whose Hope (and other captioned) graphic poster presentation of Obama adorns in miniaturized form many an automobile. The poster has become so paradigmatic that enterprising conservatives have made their own version. I have the “Nope” version, preferring it to the less respectful one that shows the Obama profile with the caption “Dope.” Fairey more than the others inadvertently has exposed the flackery and the lack of legitimacy of American artists when they claim to be cutting-edge critics. The true dissenters among the highly conformist artist class have been conservatives, that is, those who would expose the above-mentioned flackery and the ideological conformity and rigidity of the “arts community,” a term used loosely, as one must to include the low-brow art of these political propagandists. Such a term would also extend to the large class of musicians, singers, and actors, and accurately describe their ideological herd mentality.

Columnist Mark Steyn has made his name in part by writing obituaries of the famous and, at times, the more obscure. His pieces usually provide details about the subject of the article that make the deceased come to life, so to speak. They capture the essence of the deceased’s character and speak to the deceased’s contribution to humanity. Often, they are humorous.

This piece about Ted Kennedy meets some of those benchmarks. But the piece is not humorous; it only touches barely on Kennedy’s contribution to humanity. In other words, it goes directly to the essence of the deceased’s character. No use dwelling on Kennedy’s sense of humor, when that sense of humor extended to Chappaquiddick jokes. His contributions to humanity were at that level of abstraction that sponsoring legislation entails. Not personal charity and commitment. Hardly. Kennedy’s personal dealings, at least with people not his blood relations, often were less than chivalrous and, all too frequently, downright vulgar and even, dare one say this, criminal.

His “contributions” enabled the political class to exercise control over the productive class by taking from some and giving to others, with due assurance that the political class would get its vigorish for facilitating the robbing of Peter to pay Paul. After all, these programs have to be administered by someone. Subsidized housing construction through various government programs needs facilitators to work through the maze of government regulations, a process that eventually results in some fraction of Peter’s money benefiting Paul, while a lot more benefits the Teds of this world and their associates.

But, why be such sticks-in-the-mud if eventually Paul somehow benefits? Besides, the money that goes to the friends of the politician is just “honest graft,” in the words of turn-of-the-20th century Tammany Hall pol and New York state senator George Washington Plunkitt. Everyone but Peter is happy, though Paul might have benefited more had he been obliged by events to respond to his circumstances by altering his lifestyle in a manner that stopped externalizing the cost of his decisions onto Peter. The difference between giving a man a fish and teaching him to fish, and all that.

Kennedy was that type of man. Generous with other people’s money that produced lots of laws with his name and a perverse public adulation. With individuals, his dealings were far less magnanimous, and Steyn describes that more quotidian Kennedy precisely.

Bonus: Andrew Ferguson of The Weekly Standard gives his observations about the Kennedy machine’s myth-creation aided and abetted for decades by a pliant media by turns credulous and deceiving. “The Kennedys died, the media lied,” would be an apt summary. (These are my characterizations, not Ferguson’s.) He describes Ted Kennedy’s book, True Compass, posthumously rushed into print yet languishing in sales, as a spartan effort that contrasts markedly with the lush intellectual veneer that covered Ted’s 1979 effort, Our Day and Generation, and Jack Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning (and ghost-written) Profiles in Courage. With Ted’s passing, Ferguson believes, and rightly so, the Kennedy myth-making machine is uttering its last wheeze:

“With the endless multiplication of grandchildren and great grandchildren, the family blood thins and so does public interest; another episode of drug addiction or sexual assault among this latest generation would scarcely rouse even the most desperate tabloid. So True Compass may well be the last chance the Kennedy family will have to place before the public its own version of its history, here seen through the life of its greatest generation’s youngest son.”

Ferguson’s obit is generally acerbic and starkly paints the narcisism, intellectual limitations and personal contradictions of Ted Kennedy that the media-driven history seeks to ignore or white-wash. But he is not unsympathetic to the family and personal burdens Kennedy bore, which help explain the man that eventually emerged, warts and all.

Claudia Rosett exposes the strange background of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, headed by a Norwegian active for decades in the Socialist International. Roger Kimball notes that Obama has won the Yasser Arafat prize and points out that even those who like the result acknowledge its worthlessness. And The London Times hits the nail on the head:

“Rarely has an award had such an obvious political and partisan intent. It was clearly seen by the Norwegian Nobel committee as a way of expressing European gratitude for an end to the Bush Administration, approval for the election of America’s first black president and hope that Washington will honour its promise to re-engage with the world.
“Instead, the prize risks looking preposterous in its claims, patronising in its intentions and demeaning in its attempt to build up a man who has barely begun his period in office, let alone achieved any tangible outcome for peace.”

As Kimball correctly concludes, this is another EUnuch strike against American power and prestige as personalized in what to them is the symbol of the ancien regime, George W. Bush.

Andy McCarthy at National Review Online concludes that the award was given to the President because the international Left considers Obama to be their best shot of knocking America off its pedestal: “The award is a symbolic statement of opposition to American exceptionalism, American might, American capitalism, American self-determinism, and American pursuit of America’s interests in the world. That is why Obama could win it based on only ten days in office — merely by capturing the White House and the levers of power, he stands to do more for the Left’s ‘knock America off its pedestal’ program than any figure in history.”

John Podhoretz agrees and sees the inevitable logic in the move. Liberals, too, are mocking this award, in this case The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen. Yural Levin at National Review Online sees this as a further confirmation of Obama’s self-importance and reinforcement of his narcissism, a characteristic that is becoming incerasingly problematic for him with the American people. Former Senator John Danforth calls it the apotheosis of Barack Obama and sarcastically refers to the President as the “orator of all orators.”

In reflecting on the award, it is important to keep in mind this:

More mirth at the expense of The One getting his Nobel Peace Prize. These comments are courtesy of Mark Steyn.

Reacting to the remarks by the Democratic National Committee’s Director of Communications that Republicans have joined terrorists by daring to criticize the Nobel Peace Prize Committee’s choice of recipient. As Jonah Goldberg points out, once again it’s the Democrats who consider even well-deserved criticism of Obama on even a minor matter to be unpatriotic.

Suggesting that Obama also be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his “groundbreaking work demonstrating that ‘profit’ is part of ‘overhead.’” There is a link in Steyn’s post that includes an embedded video of the President’s greatest hits of economic nonsense. Unfortunately, the buffering is annoying, but the subjects are hilarious. It includes the President’s famous “profit/earnings ratio” formula.

In response to a reader’s suggestion that the award might constitute an award analogous to a Lifetime Achievement award for those who get passed over for OSCARs, characterizing the Prize as a “Pre-Lifetime Achievement” award.

Bonus: Carbolic Smokeball is first out of the box with news about the President’s use of his new stature as Nobel Peace Prize winner: Apologize to the Moon for the spacecraft that was crashed into it in a search for ice.

James Delingpole in the UK Telegraph attributes Obama’s win to one of three factors. My money is on the quality of the competition: Robert Mugabe, Osama bin Laden, Ahmed Jibril, and the late Pol Pot.

The eyebrow-raising decision to award Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize calls for not just the well-deserved ridicule it has received, but also for a discussion about what the decision says about the various participants. This article gives an insight into the Committee’s thinking and into the international elite’s preconceptions about Obama and about any American President who, like George W. Bush, would seek to press for American interests over what John Kerry referred to as the “global test.”

This should provide the Right’s commentariat with fodder for vitriol and humor for quite some time. Obama as winner of the Nobel Peace Prize? Does the Left have absolutely no sense of proportion? Is there nothing about their messiah that does not cause them to cringe? The Norwegian committee that makes this choice had rather lost its credibility in the past, when it chose Jimmy Carter (who has never met a leftist thug he doesn’t like) in 2002 and Al Gore (whose vocal flatulence has caused more global warming even than his mansion and his SUVs) in 2007. Both of those awards were rightly seen as political jabs at George W. Bush. But now, this committee of primarily socialist lickspittles has completely turned the award into a politicized farce. One has to remember that, to qualify for the award, Obama had to be nominated by February 1, less than two weeks after the inauguration.

The article points out that the Left objected to the 1973 Peace Prize being given to Henry Kissinger. I sympathize with the Left’s objection to that award. But the article fails to point out that the Left did not object to the prize being given to Le Duc Tho, the minister of the expansionist North Vietnamese Communist regime. Mr. Le, however, had the decency to decline the award and thereby saved the Left further need to publicize their double standard. Notice that, with the exception of Teddy Roosevelt, every American who has received the reward has done things to embarrass the U.S. or otherwise to participate in its humiliation abroad. Obama’s foreign policy and his World Apology Tour 2009 are cases on point. This theater of the absurd makes one consider favorably, however briefly, even the Ron Paul “Fortress America” isolationism to let the rest of the world devour each other.

Obama has accomplished nothing remotely worthy of any award. The committee claims it is trying affirmatively to encourage behavior. This is, then, an affirmative action award, given under the usual criteria that characterize such policies. The result of this will simply be further to convince Obama that his mere presence will achieve his goals. That is a dangerous view for Americans, as it will further make dissent seen as, at best, disrespectful to The One and, at worst, un-patriotic and intolerable. But it also carries political risk for Obama, who will come to be seen more and more for what he is, a transnationalist and not an “American” President. It builds on the developing image of Obama as narcissistic, beholden to foreigners, and weak.

On a related matter, George W. Bush did far more to promote peace and freedom than Obama has, especially for Muslims. So it is not surprising that Obama’s adviser on Muslim affairs gives an interview on radical Muslim TV in Britain, extolling the virtues of Shari’a law in providing “gender justice” for women. Other than her reasonable and apt observation that promiscuity and the breakdown of traditional values is what Muslims like least about the West, her remarks and her silence to the comments of others (such as repeated attacks on secular “man-made law” and the West’s “lethal cocktail of liberty and capitalism”) are indefensible.

Daniel Henninger of The Wall Street Journal takes on Michael Moore’s opinion that Obama is a “socialist” President, a view that Obama himself seeks to dispel with his rhetoric, except when he doesn’t. What I find more enlightening than ideological hairsplitting about what kind of socialist Obama is, if any, is Henninger’s assessment of the stagnating state of the American political system:

“Michael Moore’s ‘Capitalism,’ however awful, should not be passed off as irrelevant. Beyond the agitprop lie individuals screaming at political and economic institutions that are manifestly bogged down.
“Congress’s approval rating is dead in the water at 22%. California is being described as America’s first failed state. Voters in New Jersey, which may already be a failed state, must choose soon between the ineffectual Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine and his hapless GOP opponent Chris Christie.
“If Mr. Moore and his gallery of weeping victims took a closer look, they’d see their problem is not capitalism but politics. Once elected, virtually all politicians in the U.S. or Western Europe join the Not Much of Anything Party, and that includes Barack Obama, or soon will.
“In the U.S., both Republican and Democratic pols define capitalism as a system with economic activity sufficient to produce campaign contributions. But that ensures income stagnation for Mr. Moore’s masses.”

In one sense, I have no problem with political stagnation. Were it only so. Political stagnation might let economic freedom flourish by getting government out of the way. I don’t think it is stagnation, but an active and increasingly dangerous effort to make all economic decisions secondary to political goals. It is worse than mercantilism, a 21st century version of which the Chinese are pursuing. The American approach is a leftist version infused with political ideology. That which is personal is political has become everything is political. The political class is causing the U.S. increasingly to resemble a star consuming its nuclear fuel at ever-increasing rates and turning into a red giant before fading into insignificance.

Henninger describes the IOC’s rejection of Chicago’s Olympic bid in favor of Rio’s as rejection of the past for the future. I’m not quite that optimistic about Rio. Brazil has been underperforming and disappointing due to its social and political pathologies for a century. He is also off-base comparing the growth rates of China, India, and Brazil with those of the U.S. over the next decade. A 2% GDP growth for the U.S. translates into far higher absolute numbers than a 5% growth for Brazil, in light of the higher wealth base from which the U.S. proceeds. But he is right that the U.S.’s problem is not too much capitalism, but too little. And that is something that Michael Moore and his “socialist” President (and, to some extent, other members of all political parties in the U.S. and Europe) want to keep secret. Unfortunately for them, as the “Tea Party” movement and other stirrings of popular discontent show, the American people are beginning to get an inkling of the political class’s destructive self-dealing.

If Richard Cohen of The Washington Post is not careful, he will get banned from the reading list of the typical liberal Post customer. Especially when Sarah Palin agrees with his analysis. Writing perceptive and balanced columns about the choices facing the administration in Afghanistan won’t get subscriptions renewed. But Cohen is correct in all parts of this analysis. His impression of the President:

“This is the president we now have: He inspires lots of affection but not a lot of awe. It is the latter, though, that matters most in international affairs, where the greatest and most gut-wrenching tests await Obama.”

Indeed. Cohen might have added that Obama is flunking the awe test in the shock-and-awe sense that matters in foreign affairs. In Afghanistan, the worst that the President can do is to split the difference on General McChrystal’s troop request. Cohen understands the stakes of keeping the Taliban out of power, the connection between al Qaeda and the Taliban, between the success of those two groups and the stability of Pakistan, and the connection between a stable Pakistan and peace on the Indian subcontinent and points closer to home. Those were points that the President himself made a few weeks ago, as well as during his campaign when he repeatedly pronounced Afghanistan as the good war that he made his own once he was inaugurated. The President’s more recent waffling and outwardly coy pseudo-noncommittal are not good signs. Is this another Obama promise that has reached its expiration date? Cohen correctly dismisses automatic comparisons between Afghanistan and Vietnam. True enough, but Vietnam was not predestined, either. And Afghanistan can easily be turned into Vietnam by political paralysis and military half-measures.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air discusses the affordability (or lack thereof) of ObamaCare for middle-class Americans. The news is not good, as Ed discusses in more detail here, complete with graphs. Upshot: That Obama promise not to raise taxes on the middle class is soon to be just another of the President’s works of modern fiction. I also like how the fees to be imposed on insurers are designed to punish growth, i.e., success. Such a quintessentially liberal policy.

This is an alternative to ObamaCare, courtesy of the Swiss. It is universal health care, but operating within a private insurer framework. I think that some aspects of the Swiss approach are good. Overall, however, the Swiss, too, cannot repeal certain basic laws of economics, such as the interrelationship among supply, demand, and price. The two tools used to achieve the Swiss health care paradise? Higher costs to consumers, squeezing compensation to doctors (always a desirable way to insure quality medical care, isn’t it?), and rationing of pharmaceuticals and “expensive” procedures. Hmm, what does that sound like? The difference is that in Switzerland, that’s done by private insurers, not a government bureaucracy. However, unlike in the U.S., customers cannot avoid the insurer cartel and get private cash-out-of-pocket medical care, since they all have to buy insurance.

With Michael Moore’s latest “mockumentary” addition to his anti-capitalist ouevre, the frankly anti-capitalist Capitalism: A Love Story, appears yet another example of Hollywood’s perennial populist posing. Ned Rice on Big Hollywood points out some open secrets about “anti-capitalist” preener Michael Moore:

“Michael Moore has built a career out of parlaying social activism into a series of lucrative ‘documentaries,’ if an investigative film whose findings are written before shooting starts is your idea of a documentary.  Moore has been called… OK, by me… the only filmmaker in Hollywood who shoots three different ending to his documentaries and then uses the one that tests the best.  For all of his blathering about ‘the little guy’ and workers’ rights, Moore is notorious for not paying his crews union wages, not giving his writers the on-screen credits they deserve, and generally being a miserable person to work for.  Moore’s four most popular films alone have grossed over $300 million; if his earnings for TV, publishing and speeches are included his tales of exploited G.M. workers, exploited teens, exploited Iraqis, exploited sick people, and exploited victims of the banking crisis have generated close to half a billion dollars.  Some might say that capitalism, described by Moore in his latest offering (which I refuse to plug here) as evil, has been pretty good to him.  But if Michael Moore is re-distributing the millions he’s pocketed to the victims he and his film crews have, uh… well, exploited in order to make those millions, it’s the best-kept secret in Hollywood.”

But, as Rice points out in this post, this is hardly a failing of Michael Moore alone. Posing and preening about some social issue, making money from it, lecturing others about it in vapid displays of moral superiority, and not actually committing of themselves except through the press conference, publicity trip, or bumpersticker, is trademark herd behavior in the Industry. Using the fate of Crystal Lee Sutton, the fictionalized subject of Sally Fields’s performance in Norma Rae, Rice addresses that Hollywood failing. I don’t agree that Hollywood types are hypocrites. I think that they believe their posturing and are convinced that what they are preaching is the right thing to do. They just fail to follow through. It isn’t that they preach it but don’t believe what they are saying. That last would be hypocrisy. Still, that does not change the fact that Hollywood’s preachiness that inevitably goes in a predictable leftward direction is insufferable and causes me to avoid at least going to movie theaters.

That said, Moore is a hypocrite. He is intelligent enough to know that his nonsense about exploitation flies in the face of his own carefully calculated actions. One might ask whether he really would rather go to his contrived Cuban health care paradise for, say, a stomach operation to reduce his weight, than to have such an operation in the filthy capitalist U.S. health care system. Or even to have a routine physical exam. Still he chooses to engage in his filmic fabulisms, while acting with the economic self-interest of the supposed practitioners of cut-throat capitalism that he excoriates. But he is not the modern equivalent of Leni Riefenstahl or Sergei Eisenstein as a propagandist filmmaker, his work being rather like Twinkies than an elegant and complex cake. He, therefore, is not able to rise above his contradictions, as they were able to do in creating art despite the ideologically puritannical constraints of their totalitarian overlords.

As I wrote last week, and as so many others have opined, the President was remiss in going to Copenhagen to lobby for the Olympics. Making such a high-profile appeal made the exercise highly political and forced opponents and supporters of both the President and of bringing the games to Chicago to approach this as having more at stake than would have been the case had the President not broken new ground here. No previous American president has taken such a personal approach, though this is not unheard of from the heads of lesser countries. In normal diplomatic matters, the President does not meet his foreign counterpart until the lower-level contacts have produced an agreement that the heads of state merely ratify. That’s why Obama’s campaign promise to sit down without preconditions to talk with the axis of anti-American tyrants raised so many eyebrows and signaled to all the candidate’s naivete or hubris.

Chicago’s bid might have failed, regardless of the President’s efforts. But by going all in, Obama insured that the Olympic Committee’s rebuff rubs off on him, as the writers at The New York Times recognize, to their credit. I do not believe that Obama helped or hurt the city’s efforts. These matters are not decided by having the Obamas appear, Oprah Winfrey in tow, to make a rather emotional and predictably self-centered appeal (on that last point, listen to the George Will snippet in a link, below). But that is precisely why this was such a fool’s errand. The office of the President has been diminished by his having paid attention to matters not suited to the position. He himself has been diminished by the snub to Chicago of losing big in the first round, a result that appears to have taken them by surprise.

At the very least, Obama’s and the administration’s overconfidence before the vote shows political incompetence of the sort that led him to make projections about the economy and his ability to implement policies that have fallen far short of his promises. At worst, it shows an arrogance about his abilities to show up and, through emotional speeches, change the course of nature, as well as human nature. He and David Axelrod may have thought that the Byzantine politics and Olympian corruption of the IOC would be manageable given their background in Cook County politics, but Obama’s excessive self-regard in that matter reminds one of the campaign speeches in which he messianically presented himself to the world as the one during whose reign the world would finally begin to heal itself and the oceans begin to subside. One next expected him to promise a new covenant between himself and the world.

After an initial burst of honest disappointment at their failure, Obama’s acolytes in the media have quickly begun to spin the story in multiple new directions. All done to avoid the personal political cost that comes from such an overt injection of personal politics into the process. Had Chicago been awarded the games, as many in the administration apparently believed, Obama and his supporters would have trumpeted his personal powers of persuasion as the single most important factor. In a strange turn-about, success would have had one father; now, failure has many potential fathers, all but The One. Among the weirdest assertions has been that the Copenhagen fiasco must be blamed on George W. Bush, because hostility to him is still causing other countries to shun the U.S. This smear conveniently forgets, of course, that Chicago was chosen as a finalist when the despised Bush was still President. As a link within the above link shows, at least some of the IOC members were put off by what they saw as Obama’s arrogance, though that also seems to be due to an affliction of an oversized ego from which these Olympicrats suffer.

Another tactic among Obama defenders is to accuse the Republicans as being, what else, un-American and unpatriotic for being glad that Obama failed. As if the point here is to be glad that he failed, rather than that he was warned against foolishly meddling in the matter. The media and other Obama defenders choose to forget that these were the same criticisms that Obama and his campaign made against John McCain last fall when McCain suspended his campaign to return to Washington to participate in the TARP debate.And that was a considerably more deserving matter than the Olympic Games of having Obama (who stayed away from the Senate yet again) participate directly. One might almost think that the financial benefit to Axelrod’s firm and to other Obama contributors and supporters was motivating the White House’s futile full-court press in favor of the Chicago bid.

If Obama cannot succeed on such a comparatively minor matter when he puts the presidency’s prestige on the line, will this tell him something about the likely reception he is going to get in Tehran or Pyongyang? Contrary to Obama’s sports analogy, any do-overs you get are going to be much more difficult. International diplomacy is a game of perceptions, and one perceives that the perceptive foreign perceiver’s perceptions of American diplomatic prowess are not going to be enhanced.

You know that a liberal politician is in serious political trouble when the folks at Saturday Night Live lampoon him rather mercilessly. That is something normally reserved for Republicans. Criticism of the entertainment industry’s favorite liberal is usually muted, at least until a more favorite liberal comes along. See, the treatment of Hillary until Obama appeared. But this skit takes direct aim at the administration’s lack of accomplishments. Again, George W. Bush did not have any greater accomplishments as of, say, September 10, 2001, than does Obama at a similar point of his presidency. But Bush had a much more modest view of the President’s role in constitutional government and of the government in people’s lives than does the incumbent. Bush also did not come into office with the same fanfares of change and the boundless belief that he could just remake the United States, no, the world, by his ascension, as has been the relentless message of Obama and his supporters. 

Is this a role for the federal government? Regulating texting while driving? I have no problem with the states regulating texting while driving, but the division of the American polity into dual sovereignties of the several states and the Union in the Constitution contemplates a different role for the federal government than micromanaging driving habits. Deal with international matters, issues of war and peace, interstate squabbles, and national problems that, due to their extent and complexity, are beyond the ability of the states to control.

Moreover, if this is such an important matter that it demands federal control, why is this done by executive order? This goes well beyond internal White House office control, mere procedural clarification of some matter entrusted to the President by Congressional delegation, or an operational aspect of some core executive power, such as battlefield conduct by American soldiers.

It is certainly within the President’s formal power to do this under currently accepted constitutional law that only requires that the letter of the Constitution be followed in meeting the formalities of federal power. Chief Justice Marshall in 1819 in the foundational case McCulloch v. Maryland declared that the Court would strike down attempted exercise of power by the federal government that, while it might meet the letter of the Constitution, violated its spirit of federalism. In a later newspaper editorial defending that decision, Marshall strenuously rejected the arrogation of power by the federal government through pretextual use of the proper constitutional formalities. But Marshall’s concern about the improper use of federal power has long since given way to an acceptance of pretext and clever manipulation to increase the federal government’s reach into people’s daily lives. The President, the Congress, and the Court all participate in this charade.

I find the application of this restriction to private persons who do business with the feds particularly instructive:

“Extending this policy to cover Federal contractors is designed to promote economy and efficiency in Federal procurement. Federal contractors and contractor employees who refrain from the unsafe practice of text messaging while driving in connection with Government business are less likely to experience disruptions to their operations that would adversely impact Federal procurement.”

While the actual order merely tells the federal agencies to “encourage” such private behavior, the precise means of encouragement are left unsaid and up to the bureaucratic mindset of the relevant paper-shufflers. Hardly an encouraging sign. Is there anyone who doubts that a similarly controlling and nannying approach will be used against private citizens in their personal lives, once government controls health care? It is in the very essence of the President himself and in his coterie of ideological fellow travelers. It grips them with such force they simply cannot help themselves.

One of the concerns of an actor is overexposure. You don’t want to be seen so frequently in so many roles that the brand becomes tarnished. That goes even more for the President who, in addition to being a politician, is also the head of state. Frequent public appearances, press conferences, grand formal speeches, televised productions, along with a deluge of discussions on more minor broadcast venues are fine during a political campaign. But once the campaigning stops and you assume the office, different rules apply. As the head of state you have to be seen as above politics to a significant degree. The number and style of your public appearances must change. Otherwise you risk being seen as nothing more than the ordinary politician, and you will be judged accordingly.

The styles of President George W. Bush and Barack Hussein Obama are quite different. Bush left himself open to the criticism from the Right that he was not active enough. When he defended his programs vigorously, both his and those programs’ public popularity rose. Bush was seen by many as too willing to stay above the fray rather than hit back, convinced as he was of the ultimate wisdom of his cause.

Obama has the opposite tendency. Conservatives have contended that Obama is overexposed and is cheapening his brand. One cannot deny, though, that they probably have secretly cheered Obama on. Polls have shown that, since late spring, the more Obama talks about policy and the more actively he campaigns, the less popular the policies—and Obama—have become. ObamaCare is the prime piece of evidence.

Obama’s constant presence in the public eye and his grand spectaculars are at best losing him audience and, more likely, causing him to become a diminished figure as people resent his hectoring. He is like the guy who follows you everywhere to comment how you should be doing things differently. Worse, he begins to reinforce in the minds of many those cult-of-personality traits that have dogged him, his supporters, and his administration since the campaign (remember the singing kids, the fainting women, and the theatricality of “Greek columns” in the stadium for his acceptance speech).

Obama holds a speech to a joint session of Congress for health care. Though not unprecedented, that is not a venue normally chosen for a presidential address unless it’s the State of the Union address or a war message. Worse, he says nothing that he hasn’t said in a couple of prime-time press television addresses (another means of communication that he has overused in his few months in office), some televised press conferences, and various televised “townhall meetings.” Worse, still, his speeches are long on generalities, imprecise on the truth of the claims, and short on specific explanations. They look and sound, in other words, like campaign speeches, repeated again and again.

Then, Obama makes a speech before the UN. That is to be expected in his first year in office. However, he also chairs a meeting of the Security Council (televised, of course), a task usually left to some diplomatic underling. No U.S. President has ever done that, and I wonder if any other of the leaders of the Big Five has. Then he hosts the G20 (formerly the more realistic G8, but increased so that US influence decreases), which, again, is fine. But from there he flies to Copenhagen to get the 2016 Olympics for Chicago. I don’t know that any U.S. President has involved himself in that effort before. Add to that his world tours in just his first few months, and one gets the impression that he likes the campaigning for the office, the public adulation, and the perks of the office much more than the work and that needs to be done. After only a couple of weeks in office, he already complained how he had to get out of the White House, so he visited a school.

Now, one might think that this is just another criticism of the President coming from a blogger who is unsympathetic to Obama’s program. I must confess, however, that I am warming to Obama’s constant lecturing and alarm-mongering, though, admittedly, for selfish reasons. Initially, he got traction for his programs. But the more he talks now, the less his words matter. Given the time, he has exposed himself for what he is.

But it isn’t just conservatives who recognize this. It is broken clock time. There are now liberals who are concerned that Obama is wasting the prestige of the office, and that his amateurishness and infatuation with himself are harming U.S. interests. More precisely, Richard Cohen, frequently of The New York Times, castigates the President for his electioneering and empty posturing:

“The election has been held, but the campaign goes on and on. The candidate has yet to become commander in chief.
“Take last week’s G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh. There, the candidate-in-full commandeered the television networks and the leaders of Britain and France to give the Iranians a dramatic warning. Yet another of their secret nuclear facilities had been revealed and Obama, as anyone could see, was determined to do something about it — just don’t ask what.
“The entire episode had a faux Cuban missile crisis quality to it.”

It gets worse, as Cohen correctly judges Obama to be losing credibility:

“The trouble with Obama is that he gets into the moment and means what he says for that moment only. He meant what he said when he called Afghanistan a ‘war of necessity’ — and now is not necessarily so sure. He meant what he said about the public option in his health care plan — and then again maybe not. He would not prosecute CIA agents for getting rough with detainees — and then again maybe he would.
“Most tellingly, he gave Congress an August deadline for passage of health care legislation — ‘Now, if there are no deadlines, nothing gets done in this town … ’ — and then let it pass. It seemed not to occur to Obama that a deadline comes with a consequence — meet it or else.
“Obama lost credibility with his deadline-that-never-was, and now he threatens to lose some more with his posturing toward Iran….”
“Obama is our version of a Supreme Leader, not given to making idle threats, setting idle deadlines, reversing course on momentous issues, creating a TV crisis where none existed or, unbelievably, pitching Chicago for the 2016 Olympics. Obama’s the president. Time he understood that.”

I couldn’t have said that better myself, even as to the (for Cohen non-parodic) reference to Obama as a Supreme Leader.

UPDATE: When it rains, it pours. Another liberal, none other than Representative Charlie Rangel, fresh from amending his income tax returns, has weighed in with his assessment that Obama’s meddling in local matters is not presidential. By the way, is Rangel racist, too, when he criticizes the President?

Time again for a video by another group of Obama schoolkids chanting the name and the credo of the Great Teacher.

Not as overtly idolatrous as the Barack Huseein Obama, mmm-mm-mmmm, video from a few days ago. But still.

A few weeks ago, there arose a considerable hubbub over the President’s plan to address the nation’s schoolchildren. I believe that the reaction in some conservative quarters was overblown, as he is the President, and there is nothing wrong with having him deliver a rather stolid message of perseverance to the children. I also believe it to be fine for children to send pictures or letters to the President. It is a proper teaching device to instill respect for the office and the person of the President in those children.

That would extend, of course, to letting students know that just because the ACLU litigates to let them wear Bush=Hitler t-shirts or similar anti-Bush insults to school does not mean that this is appropriate behavior. Nor is it for a teacher to do so. Presumably teaching students respect for the President does not depend on whether it is a Democrat or a Republican in the White House. On the other hand, the different treatment given (by the same school district) to anti-Obama and anti-Bush expression does not give one much confidence in that regard.

But what bothered some people at the time was the likely reaction of the schools, who, given the predominant political views among the teachers and administrators, might use the opportunity to proselytize in favor of Obama and his policies. While a single speech would not cause me worry about some sort of “cult of personality,” repeated addresses or the schools’ inappropriate reactions would be more troublesome.

Those concerns are not entirely overblown. The political reaction caused the Department of Education to modify its proposed lesson plans for the occasion. Moreover, the concern about teachers has solid basis in fact. There is, of course, this video of little children paying homage to the person of Obama and to his policies in a quasi-religious manner reminiscent of Kim Jong-Il. Now, I am not saying Obama is Kim Jong-Il; I am saying the teachers are playing the role that such functionaries play in totalitarian regimes. Then, there is this campaign classic. The latter is less of a concern to me because they were private families training their kids to be O-bots; the former is a public school with kids who are collateral damage in this effort. For another example of school indoctrination, there is this quiz on the Obama health care speech given to a high school anatomy (!) class.

Here are some other videos with similar tone. As a German, I find I find this paean to ObamaCare particularly disturbing. Then there is this gem. As a reminder of just how far gone the adult Obama supporters can be, there is the video from the campaign where Obama gets applause for—blowing his nose.

Expect government regulation of diet to become more insistent if ObamaCare passes. After all, we already see this with motorcycle helmet laws and other paternalistic laws premised on the notion that we can regulate these people because we pay for the medical care for some of them. It is already starting, but taxes of “junk food” and subsidies of Sesame Street-endorsed fruits and veggies (preferably that wonderful fresh arugula and those organic strawberries) will not change habits enough to suit the emerging diet police. Moreover, such taxes are extremely regressive because poorer people are more likely to consume the food targeted as junk food. Unless they propose to raise taxes sky-high, these New Puritans (to paraphrase H.L. Mencken, a puritan is someone who has the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy) will have to resort to more direct regulation. After all, as the Secretary of Energy has declared, Americans are like unruly teenagers who have to be disciplined and guided by the government. And as Bill Clinton declared in his opposition to tax cuts when he was President, Americans would just spend that money unwisely. Ahh, yes, the tolerant liberal mindset that the “masses are asses” (a sentiment expressed to me many years ago by a very well-educated liberal woman I was dating) and need the helping hand of the government to avoid the folly of their stupidity and ignorance as to even the most basic decisions in life.

Mark Steyn is a journalist. Canadian by birth, he now lives in New Hampshire. On his website, he has allowed his readers to tell of their experiences or about news reports of others’ experiences with the storied Canadian health care system. The collection of reader responses tells a different story about the Canadian system than what the Left in the U.S. will tell you. And its so predictable: Lack of beds; lack of doctors; lack of care. The most interesting ones were the links to newspaper articles about Canadian and European health care rationing (the preemie who was two days too young to save, per NHS regulations; the Irish guy who was dying but couldn’t get a liver transplant because he hadn’t been 6 month alcohol-free) and lack of beds and doctors, but there are also others that describe Medicare appeals panels judging the medical necessity of procedures.

Meanwhile, the administration resorts to scare tactics as to what happens if ObamaCare in some version is not adopted. One of the often-heard points is the supposed plight of the millions of uninsured. Another likely to be launched soon comes from a convenient study that “finds” that 45,000 Americans die annually from lack of health insurance, and that a person without health insurance has a 40% higher chance of death than someone with health insurance. (So, private health insurance has been a good thing, then?) I have already seen a Reuters piece that trumpets the study’s result. But a junk science expert has taken apart the study’s methodology and debunked the results. It’s unlikely we will hear that. The Congressional Budget Office which, though it tends to lean Democratic in its analyses, is becoming the administration’s worst enemy regarding Obama’s economic projections and fiscal policies, comes up with a quite different analysis. They project that low income people without insurance have a 3% higher risk of death than insured people (reasons not clear), while higher income uninsured have no statistically different risk of death.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air explains one of the misrepresentations by President Obama in his health insurance proposals, the impact of the large number of self-insured employers who use insurance companies only to administer their plans. Some employers partially self-insure for minor expenses, though they may buy a catastrophic-type policy from insurance companies. I believe that’s what my employer does. Participation by employers increases the competitive nature of health insurance/care coverage, as the link to John Lott demonstrates.

Most employees don’t realize this aspect of their health care. Morrissey is right that ObamaCare would only make the whole process even more opaque. The way to restore transparency and to maximize competition is to promote policies that make the payment for medical services akin to that for automobile services and to increase the direct contact (and bargaining) between customers and, on the other sides, doctors and insurance companies.

Years ago, the late George Carlin created a comedy routine in which he satirized the Seven Dirty Words that could not be uttered in broadcasting. The routine drew its humor from Carlin’s exaggerations and clinical explanations that made the words sound harmless, if, in the case of a couple, somewhat crass. Carlin was not the only one who used the psychology of repeating words to “desensitize” the listener to their shock value.

I was reminded of that when I heard America’s worst former President, Jimmy Carter, expound on his scientific conclusion that the overwhelming portion of people who oppose President Obama’s policies do so out of racism. Clueless as Carter has proved himself time and again, he is somewhat of an expert on racism. His own. I attribute his accusations to what psychologists, Freudians as well as Jungians, have referred to as projection, a psychological defense mechanism through which we avoid dealing with our own problems and biases by projecting them onto others.

Carter has a substantial and documented history of blaming the ills of the Middle East, and beyond, on specifically Israel and, albeit more ambiguously, on Jews. For Carter, as well as many other leftists, the code word for the latter often is “Neocons.” His scribblings have produced endorsements from some unsavory characters, such as Osama bin Laden. They have produced several challenges from Professor Alan Dershowitz for Carter to debate the latest anti-Israel book, challenges that Carter has wisely declined to accept. Then there is Carter’s infamous race-baiting 1970 campaign for the Democratic nomination for governor of Georgia against Governor Carl Sanders, the details of which turn one’s stomach.

So, I recognize that, due to his expertise as a racist, Carter’s opinion deserves some consideration. However, ultimately his judgment in this matter is the product of the “clueless” hemisphere of his brain, not the “racist” one. And that goes for the rest of the Democratic politicians and commentators, and the liberal media and useful idiots who have trumpeted this theme along with their accusations that opponents of ObamaCare are un-American, unpatriotic, Nazis, brownshirts, domestic terrorists, and so on and on.

To return to the racism theme. Does it not strike any of these people as strange that Americans who oppose ObamaCare also opposed HillaryCare, the slightly less massive transformation of the American health care system promoted by the Clinton administration in 1993? I remember well the press’s “analysis” of the 1994 mid-term elections as the return of the “angry” conservative males. As far as I can tell, the Clintons are Whites, though I remember that many liberals in the 1990s proclaimed Billy Jeff as the first Black President. That honorific is heard no more. Instead, the Clintons themselves were targeted by the O-bots as “racists” during the 2008 primaries. So, if people who now oppose ObamaCare also opposed the health care socialization proposed by the now-revealed racists who are Bill and Hillary, wouldn’t that make such opponents anti-racists? Boy, this racism metaphysics is almost Hegelian in its density.

Moreover, how can Americans who oppose ObamaCare to the tune of 56%, according to a reliable poll (and more if only those who take a position are considered) be racists, when 53% of Americans voted for Obama? I don’t recall a large campaign effort directed at mobilizing “Racists for Obama.”

Returning to the Carlin routine. The word racist has lost much of its force by overuse. indeed, a reader may get a sense of that just by reading this post, which has made liberal use of the word. Democratic efforts at race-baiting reek of political desperation. I always know who has won an argument when an opponent resorts to ad hominem, particularly comparison to racists or Hitler. The last one only works if you have some very careful analysis of policy and rhetoric that is beyond the ken of the vast majority of, say, anti-war demonstrators who routinely compared President Bush’s policies to protect national security to Hitler’s policies. Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism is such a careful and scholarly work that draws very nuanced comparisons and distinctions. But bumper stickers on Priuses and Subarus, and outbursts by MSNBC talking heads are not.

So, go ahead, liberals, and call opponents of Obama’s policies racist. It only provides evidence of your intellectual bankruptcy. As far as I am concerned, the word is flatus vocis, verbal flatulence. And it makes the less ideologically opposed to Obama mad and loses you even more supporters.

On a related topic, Nancy Pelosi bemoans the use of harsh and over-the-top language. Democrats have, after eight years of lunatic ranting about George Bush (examples of which I have posted before and which include contributions by Pelosi), Bush assassination chic, Bush Derangement Syndrome, and vicious political attack ads on Bush, Cheney, and Republicans, rediscovered the virtues of civility. But civility apparently means not opposing Obama policies, since to do so is racist. Oh, and Madame Speaker equates opposition rhetoric with the assassination of Harvey Milk. Not harsh and over the top, that comparison, is it?

Jonah Goldberg at NRO sees Carter’s and the Left’s racism fits through the same prism.

Cass Sunstein is a Harvard law professor and a former colleague of sorts of President Obama while at the University of Chicago Law School. He is also Obama’s czar of regulations. That is, Sunstein is in charge of reviewing federal regulations for efficiency and proposing changes and new ergulations. That description is misleading in one sense. Unlike the other czars, such as the recent and not-lamented “czar of green jobs” Van Jones, Sunstein’s position required Senate confirmation. That confirmation, while forthcoming, was only by 57-40, a surprisingly small margin for such an invisible position. More surprising still is that a number of Democrats voted against the appointment (and an equal number of Republicans voted for), which is a reflection, to some extent at least, of Sunstein’s odd views.

Sunstein occasionally has been mentioned as a potential Supreme Court nominee. But I think that, without other intervening experience in a more high-profile government position such as Circuit Court judge, Solicitor General, or at least Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel, Sunstein is not headed to the Supreme Court. Unless Obama gets to reappoint the whole Court, which is an unlikely result in a natural progression of events. The narrow vote to confirm him as regulations czar further spells trouble for him in that regard.

As a law professor, I have heard about Sunstein for a long time. He is a very smart guy and a prolific author of academic publications and a “star” in his fields of regulation and constitutional law. His views are well within the mainstream of the legal academy, if not the population at large. Indeed, compared to most law professors, he might even be on the right side of center. His theories, whose oddness has given him some problems with Senators, gain him favorable attention within the closed universe of academic musings and discussions.

What has gotten him that favorable attention within the rarefied intellectual atmosphere of the academy recently are a couple of works. One, written with a co-author advances the theory of “libertarian paternalism” as a basis for a kinder and gentler regulatory nanny state. The other is the proposition that animals should be able to sue humans over farming and hunting. Though the actual suit would be done by humans, the rights vindicated would be those of animals.

As his nomination stalled, he stepped back from some of his assertions in a confirmation conversion and declared that various of his musings were merely meant to be provocative. I accept that. To an extent. The way to gain positive recognition among academics (in contrast to the real world inhabited by normal human beings) is to say provocative things, though only in a certain ideological direction. I have a provocative thought to offer Sunstein and other academics: Embryos and fetuses are human beings. They are rights-bearing creatures, among which rights are the right to sue and the right to life, i.e., not to be torn apart limb by limb in an abortion obtained because the pregnancy is “inconvenient.” As if that would get positive acceptance among academics! Better to argue for the rights of chickens and deer.

I want to address in this post the animal rights proposition beyond whatever particulars Sunstein proposes. We hear a lot about animal rights recently, a notion that I find to be without merit. Indeed, such a concept is, to borrow from Jeremy Bentham, “nonsense on stilts.”

The problem, as I see it, is the failure to consider the nature of rights accurately. One defense of “animal rights” has been that a legal system can recognize any rights in anyone or anything it wants. Now, at some level, I suppose that’s true. If we want to say that a dog has rights, we certainly can. Same in the case of a dog’s flea, a bush that the dog “marks,” or a dog food dish. That may well be the post-modern relativist approach that, despite the occasional objection, is influenced strongly by normative positivism in law and by the elimination in various strands of “critical studies” of a distinction between law based on reason and politics based on will and power.

From a constitutional standpoint, of course, many provisions refer to “the people,” “person,” or “citizens.” All of these provisions would seem to mean human beings. One amendment, the sixth, refers to “the accused,” which, one supposes, could be extended beyond humans.

But even as to the other provisions, at least one court (the Ninth Circus Court of Appeals, of course) in Cetacean Community v. Bush has said that the Constitution is not limited to humans. After all, the judges “reasoned,” admiralty suits can be brought in the name of ships, and corporations and other fictitious “legal persons” can sue in their names. Therefore, the Constitution’s use of words that commonly denote human characteristics need not be interpreted so restrictively. The Court then added that Congress had not, however, intended to give animals the right to sue. But, presumably Congress could do so, without violating the Constitution’s more ecumenical approach to standing and, by inference, to rights more generally. Of course, were such suits to be brought, humans would have to act as actual litigating plaintiffs. No word as to whether the concept of the “kangaroo court” would undergo political rehabilitation.

This, presumably, is in line with Sunstein’s thinking. But, it seems to me that both his views and those of the Ninth Circuit are the strangest examples of anthropomorphized jural beings since Caligula allegedly tried to make his horse Incitatus a Senator. The problem arises if one wants to go beyond mere declarations of who has rights to considering why something has rights. The examples of ships and corporations cited by the Ninth Circuit all involve human constructs whose existence is not “natural.” The legal fiction of their existence as jural entities is not due to their own existence as natural beings (the view of animals held by Sunstein), but to vindicate legal interests of human beings (the ship owners or the shareholders).

That isn’t the animal rights theory as here expressed, though it has been the basis for protection of animals in other contexts. Thus, endangered species laws has been justified as protecting the human interest of being able to observe such animals. Protection of certain fish can be justified by the human interest of protecting the food supply. A more difficult problem is raised by animal cruelty laws. It is unclear just what human interest is served by them, other than the interest in promoting standards of civilized conduct through legislation based on conceptions of morality.

To get to Sunstein’s position that animals have rights of their own, more is necessary. It has to be established that animals are rights-bearing creatures. Otherwise, why stop with animals and not proceed to rights for lettuce? As many others have done, I will argue that such line-drawing requires that animals be rational and self-conscious actors who belong to a group with at least the potential to grasp the notion of moral choices. Instinctive actions or those based on influences other than a considered awareness of one’s life within a larger group don’t provide a proper basis for rights. At bottom, rights demand an awareness of wrongs in a normative, ethical sense.

That doesn’t mean every particular member of the species must have that consciousness of self and community in its full flower. Otherwise, human fetuses, infants, and toddlers, or the mentally handicapped, might be creatures without rights. Although such individuals often have a less complete fullness of rights consistent with their condition (i.e., a young child has no right to use contraceptives), they are still rights-bearing creatures and share with all other humans certain basic rights to life and liberty.

From a classical perspective, for example that of the Stoics (sometimes said to be the originators of natural law/natural rights theory), humans are the only creatures capable of participating in the moral laws of the universe. Only humans have the power of abstract reasoning and complex linguistic expression to grasp such moral standards (through the application of “right reason”) and make them the basis for an order of living. Only humans can make “moral choices.” It is ridiculous to scold a dog as being “bad” for chewing on a sofa pillow or on Grandpa’s prosthetic leg. It is similarly bizarre to accuse a lion of being “bad” for eating a child. That’s what lions do by nature. In fact, it would be more accurate to call the lion “bad” if the lion passed up the child for some broccoli, as he would be acting inconsistent with his nature. Going back to the dog. Yelling at the dog does not cause the dog to grasp the notion of right and wrong. Rather, he hears what to him is a growling noise and a threatening gesture from someone whose dominance he recognizes. There is a reason why dolphin trainers use fish as incentives, rather than a lecture on the moral rightness of entertaining curious children or on the advantages of human-cetacean cooperation in making profits for the enterprise.

Humans, having such capacity for moral distinctions, are duty-bound to act toward others in ways consistent with that capacity. They have a commensurate right both to have others act in the same manner towards them, and to exercise those rights necessary to allow them to meet the obligations the universal natural moral law imposes on them. Thus, a duty to care for one’s offspring creates a right to direct the upbringing of those children broadly free from meddling by others. Incidentally, a drive is not the same as a right. All living things have a drive to reproduce. That may lead to a moral duty to reproduce, but one constrained to what will optimize the success of the endeavor. Similarly, the right to do so is also constrained to what is commensurate to the duty.

A being whose nature does not admit of such intellectual rationality and moral discrimination is not a rights-bearing creature. No creature other than humans meets that definition. Some might claim that certain animals, such as apes or dogs have the requisite rationality. They point to asserted verbal signing skills. Others point to the supposed intelligence of some dog breeds being the equivalent of young children.

Assuming that the gorilla “communication” is not a product of human projection, and that the dog intelligence is of the same sophistication as that which allows even a two-year old to sing songs and understand relational concepts such as big and small, the animals are at the top of what is for their species an attainable intelligence. The two-year old human is not. Because of the two-year old’s comparative immaturity and incomplete development, he is not held to the moral choices of an adult at that stage. But he is of the type (human) that can exercise such moral discretion, and has the potential to reach that stage of full development to make such moral choices. The brutes do not. Recognition of one’s status as a rights-bearing creature depends on the common characteristics of the group judged in its fully-matured condition, not on the individual peculiarities of particular members of the group. Otherwise, the old or infirm would be less than human and lose their status as rights-bearing creatures. After all, even a mentally infirm human is still a human and is a rights-bearing creature, even if the particular rights he may enjoy freely may be restricted to those he needs commensurate with what can be expected of him as to satisfying moral obligations.

Now, if we suddenly discover that there is the porpoise equivalent of the law of copyright, or of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, or of St. Augustine’s Confessions, then we can certainly start talking about imposing moral duties on such animals and trying them in courts of law for dereliction of those duties. By the same token, they would be rights-bearing creatures.

If we try to draw a line between rights-bearing creatures and those who are not on a basis other than their rationality, self-consciousness, and linguistic capacity, we run into problems. There is no other principled basis for distinction. Purely physical factors such as pain sensation or mobility get us nowhere, as they have nothing to do with rights except that we merely say so. Would we declare rats to be rights-bearing creatures? Lobsters? Worms?

But that is exactly where animal rights advocates such as Sunstein take us. It wouldn’t be just animal cruelty or hunting that would be prohibited. So would eating meat (a goal Sunstein probably advocates, in light of his recent other work, Libertarian Paternalism) and even encroaching on animal habitat. Some animal rights activists already liken the fate of threatened animals to genocide. While there may be ways to justify laws whose secondary effects are to the benefit of animals, they have to be based on other than such a faulty conception of animal “rights.”

There has apparently been a drought in presidential humor. Obama jokes on the evening talk shows are few and far between. Those that are made, are tame and often not directed at Obama himself. Yet jokes about private citizens Cheney, Palin, and, to a lesser extent, Bush and the Clintons, still abound.

Time Magazine has analyzed the problem and come up with an answer. According to the sage writers at this august publication, the problem is not the cowardice and lack of imagination of the horde of infatuated comedians and pundits with their snivelling obsequiousness. It is the lack of a target: “For eight years [political comedians] had enjoyed a comedic gift from the gods in George W. Bush, whose bumbling presidency provided even richer material than the cartoonish excesses of the Clinton years. But Obama, with his obvious smarts, low-key style and (most important) ability to catch the prevailing tone of irony and laugh at himself, has left the comics with little to hang their punch lines on.” Huh? Obama, who has been described as testy and mean to those who dare question him has the, presumably unheard-of, disarming quality “to laugh at himself”?

Time points to the lost golden age of political comedy, the George W. Bush years, when ”political comedy came back in style, not just for late-night hosts like David Letterman and Jon Stewart — who are far more willing than Carson was to let their (usually left-of-center) political views show through — but also for the foot soldiers of the comedy clubs, where even guys who made their living from penis jokes were getting laughs from W.”

Ahh yes, even those bards of poetic comedy, the (liberal) penis jokesters could get laughs from an appreciative audience at the expense of the low-hanging fruit of W. The audience could laugh knowingly at the shared insight between them and the speaker about the, by turns, incompetence, stupidity, and cunning malevolence of the President. A statistically significant number of them had “Somewhere in Texas, a Village Is Missing Its Idiot” bumperstickers on their Priuses and Subarus, right near the “BusHitler” and “Coexist” stickers. The comedian probably was a drop-out from the local community college theater-arts program, and the audience had their sociology degrees from Antioch College or, worse, had a doctorate of education from anywhere. In other words, they possessed the kind of intellectual fool’s-gold plating that allowed them to fantasize undeservedly that they could pass judgment on the intelligence of a Yale College and Harvard Business School graduate.

Alas, to read Time’s account, the comedic plenty of the Bush years was just a bubble. The value of the comedian’s main asset, the political joke, was inflated by excessively easy access to material, and, as Time’s reference to the penis comics (the subprime borrowers of comedic material) makes clear, increased demand for such jokes led to jokes with lower and lower quality. The bubble burst with the election of Obama, and a panic has ensued. Obama jokes are a precious asset as rare as a new line of credit secured by a residence. To the extent that Obama jokes exist, Time reports with evident satisfaction and in fine detail, they are jokes—still at the expense of Republicans, especially Bush! Others take issue with Obama for not being leftist enough.

The reality of the problem is quite different, and Time’s obvious failure to do more than touch on it in a few lines is proof. The problem isn’t the lack of comedic material in Obama; it’s the lack of talent of the comedians. Seeing one’s own absurdity is very difficult. That requires figuratively stepping outside oneself in a manner that is almost impossible psychologically. It is the psychological analogy to tickling oneself, a physical phenomenon said to be impossible.

One may be able to achieve some basic recognition of one’s peculiarities and character quirks, but it likely is a blurry vision, akin to trying to see something too close. True perspective requires a distance one does not have from oneself, but others do. It takes the outside observer to see the absurdity in each of us that leads to sharp satire. It is that distance that produces the proper balance between exaggeration and truth that is the mark of the skilled satirist.

Obama is a walking, talking caricature by now. The comedians and bloggers on the right have been having a field day with this guy and his followers for many months. May I just suggest two sites, Iowahawk and Scrappleface, that have mined Obama for many entertaining columns. Michael Ramirez has skewered Obama in his cartoons. Rush Limbaugh has musical parodies of Obama and his coterie of advisers and followers. I have read English columnists parody Obama. JibJab had a wonderful parody of Obama well over a year ago. Obama’s mannerisms, his speech patterns, his self-importance and arrogance, his strange “factual” declarations and misunderstanding of concepts (”profit-earning ratios,” anyone?), his medical mis-prescriptions, his apology tours, his failure to find the right doors at the White House and various other faux-pas of the type that the comedians and the press lampooned mercilessly when they happened to W, and on and on.

The problem is not a lack of material. Obama is a veritable lode of comedic gold. And his followers certainly sweeten the deal. The real problem is that the comedians, like the press, are too invested in Obama. Time very briefly alludes to that problem but doesn’t develop it. Just as Obama does not have the perspective to see his absurdity, neither do the (left-leaning) comedians. One cannot expect O-bots to exercise the requisite critical faculties regarding The One. They lack those faculties due to their self-identification with their putative object of ridicule.

Further proof that the problem is ideological, not comedic, is the comedians’ seeming ability to dredge up humor, usually of rather crude and distorted kind, about Sarah Palin (and her children), a former vice-presidential candidate and now private citizen, and about Dick Cheney, a former vice-president. Yet the current vice-president, a man who pitches gaffes more consistently than a major league all-star pitcher delivers strikes, a man whom comedians should make an honorary member of whatever union they have, is rarely skewered. They don’t even have to make anything up about this guy. Just recite his “greatest hits.”

In addition, comedians don’t know how to handle Obama’s race, proof that we have not matured to the point where a Black (or, more accurately, a mixed-race) man is accorded the same right as a White man to fall on his face, as well as to succeed. Comedians who so vainly and vaingloriously claimed that they love to “speak truth to power” have fallen silent and have proven just what gasbags they are. Their sycophantic approach to Obama that is unwittingly revealed in the Time article should lay that canard to rest once and for all.

An entertaining summary, complete with pictures, of the D.C. rally this weekend by opponents of the administration’s programs, especially ObamaCare. Those would be the types of folks dismissed by mindless reporters, columnists, (Maureen Dowd, I’m writing about you) and other media types in sweeping terms as racists for opposing the President’s policies.

I know that he’s dead now, but I’ve been meaning to post this telling example of just what kind of person Senator Edward Kennedy was. As if the shameful tale of his behavior connected to the death of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, were not enough. Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution describes the attempt by then-Senator Kennedy in 1983 to induce the Soviet leader (and former KGB chief) Yuri Andropov to collaborate with Kennedy in interfering in the American elections the next year. According to documents in the Soviet archives (the content of which was never denied by the Kennedy camp), Kennedy sent his close friend, former California Senator John V. Tunney, to Moscow to make the deal through confidential contacts.

Robinson writes:

“Kennedy’s message was simple. He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. ‘The only real potential threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations,’ the memorandum stated. ‘These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign.’

“Kennedy made Andropov a couple of specific offers.

“First he offered to visit Moscow. ‘The main purpose of the meeting, according to the senator, would be to arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they may be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the USA.’ Kennedy would help the Soviets deal with Reagan by telling them how to brush up their propaganda.

“Then he offered to make it possible for Andropov to sit down for a few interviews on American television. ‘A direct appeal … to the American people will, without a doubt, attract a great deal of attention and interest in the country. … If the proposal is recognized as worthy, then Kennedy and his friends will bring about suitable steps to have representatives of the largest television companies in the USA contact Y.V. Andropov for an invitation to Moscow for the interviews. … The senator underlined the importance that this initiative should be seen as coming from the American side.’”

Why would Kennedy do this? Primarily for personal advantage: “‘Tunney remarked that the senator wants to run for president in 1988,’ the memorandum continued. ‘Kennedy does not discount that during the 1984 campaign, the Democratic Party may officially turn to him to lead the fight against the Republicans and elect their candidate president.’”

It is revealing that, even after his defeat for the 1980 Democratic nomination and his supposedly great valedictory speech at the party convention that promised that the fight would continue, Kennedy planned to run for President. Perhaps “plotted” is the more fitting word. It is simply mind-boggling that this man is so lionized by the Democrats.

Via Ed Morrissey @ Hot Air

Apparently, some on the Left believe that this is a winner and have poured $1 million into the campaign of the guy who is challenging Joe Wilson. First, that shows how obsessed liberals are with their messiah. They put lots of money into the collection box when The One is disrespected. Unfortunately, once this news got out, conservatives responded with an equal outpouring to Wilson. The liberals are just wasting their money. As I’ve written before, the Joe Wilson controversy is not a political winner for Democrats. Wilson beat that same challenger in 2008 by 54%-46%, in a year when Republicans had a disastrous showing. It is highly unlikely that 2010 will be similarly bad for the GOP. Though it is still a long time until election day, current trends suggest a rather serious drubbing in the works for Democrats. Wilson’s district has gone Republican in each election in the last 44 years. So knock yourselves out and waste your money.

Moreover, every rehashing of the situation brings up once again the, shall we say, incongruity of the health care plan’s treatment of illegal aliens and of Obama’s handling of that matter. It again stirs up the seething opposition to ObamaCare. It brings up Obama’s own characterization of Palin. It causes people to rehash the many whoppers and distortions Obama came up with in the speech. These things are not helping the Democrats, but are hurting their credibility. Joe Wilson is becoming a new popular hero to a lot of people, as a catalyst for the popular opposition to the administration’s blatant statism. He is this year’s “Joe the Plumber.” So, as far as I am concerned, the Democrats should keep this front and center.

Historians have often pointed to American protectionism in the 1930s, such as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, and European trade retaliation as exacerbating the economic downturn that became the Great Depression. Economists have been warning some time now that the U.S. should reject any similar moves, as they likely would trigger trade retaliation that would threaten economic recovery. There has been considerable concern that President Obama would resort to protectionist actions, as he and his advisers had often expressed hostility to free trade while he was a Senator and during the presidential campaign.

However, he also let it be known, to the Canadians, for example, that he did not really mean his protectionist rhetoric and, instead, was a closet free trader. Once elected President, the Europeans and the Chinese warned Obama against protectionist actions. Obama kept a low profile and stayed away from protectionist moves, except to the extent that driving down the dollar and making American exports cheaper overseas might be seen as economic warfare. No more. The President has slapped duties on cheap Chinese tires.

The result of this will be several-fold. First, these tires (which are preferred by lower-income buyers) will cost consumers more. American sellers purchase these tires for resale. Domestic manufacturers opposed the duties, as they cannot manufacture such tires profitably due to higher labor costs. Moreover, American manufacturers are not equipped to pick up the slack, even if they wanted to, because of the different processes involved. That’s why those domestic producers purchased those tires from China and rebranded them.

The real supporters of this action were the manufacturers of other goods who want the President to impose similar tariffs to protect their industries and, of course, the United Steelworkers Union, whose bidding Obama is doing. Big Business, Big Labor, and Big Government is a combination sure to bode ill for the American consumer. This protectionism, extended to other industries, too, will raise prices and throttle competition, as was shown by the experience of the American car industry when they received protection from competition from Japanese car makers years ago. American cars were of poor quality and comparatively expensive, a reputation from which the car industry still has not fully recovered.

Then there is the inevitable Chinese retaliation against American producers. Predictably, the Chinese launched investigations into charges of “dumping” by the U.S. of chicken and automobile products. If the Chinese penalize those American products, it would roughly equal the amount the Americans are imposing on Chinese tires. Purely by coincidence, I’m sure. Predictably also, the Obama administration is loudly proclaiming the unfairness of the Chinese protectionism, while confidently defending their own. Agricultural producers had asked the administration not to apply the tariffs because they feared the likely Chinese reaction against such important American exports.

There is real danger from such protectionist tit-for-tat. A trade war would be very harmful to economic recovery, especially as the U.S. needs exports (which were a true jobs stimulus over the past year) to fuel employment. However, most experts believe that, after this initial spitting contest, China and the U.S. will work to keep the trade friction within manageable bounds.

I suppose I’ll add my thoughts to Representative Joe Wilson’s by-now infamous outburst at the President during Mr. Obama’s address on healthcare to the houses of Congress. Now, calling the President a liar is not on the level of (South Carolina, again) Representative Preston Brooks’s violent caning of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner in 1856. Nor is it on the level of the fracas between Congressman Roger Griswold of South Carolina (what is it with South Carolina congressmen?) and Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont in 1797 when, after exchanges of insulting speeches and acts, the two went at each other with cane and fireplace tongs.

That said, it was clearly inappropriate for Wilson to call Obama out in this manner on what the President in fact was doing. The word “liar” or “lie” hurled at an opposing politician apparently will even get one disciplined in the much more rough-and-tumble setting of the British House of Commons. So, much as one hates to admit this, a reprimand by the House of Joe Wilson would not be inappropriate. Perhaps he should have used the word “prevaricator,” but that would have required too many folks to run to the dictionary. If there is such a reprimand, if I were Wilson, I’d use it as an opportunity to challenge Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Howard Dean, and other Democrats who have insulted President Bush and other public officials, including through the use of the word liar.

Again, to be clear. Wilson should not have said what he did. The President as an individual, and the dignity of the office, demand more respect from Wilson. However, from a political perspective, this is not a winning argument for the Democrats on several levels. That explains the quick acceptance by Obama of Wilson’s apology, Wilson’s refusal to apologize in Congress and his forcing the Democrats to go the formal reprimand route, and Speaker Pelosi’s uncharacteristically mild response and her professed willingness to let bygones be bygones.

What is ridiculous, however, is the faux outrage of the administration officials and of the media about Wilson’s outburst. Here is the New York Times about the Obama campaign’s penchant for accusing John McCain and Sarah Palin of lying.

Kevin Williamson at National Review Online explains that, on substance, Wilson was right. The experience of the states and the feds with Medicaid expenditures shows how illegal aliens benefit from government programs even when such programs are generally restricted to those who are here legally. That experience is likely to be replicated with ObamaCare. Now, being mistaken is not lying, despite what liberals said about the allegedly faulty intelligence that claimed since the Clinton administration that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. However, the administration must in fact know the truth about Medicaid, since various government agencies have detailed what has happened. Moreover, the Democrats in Congress have voted down Republican efforts in committee to have express prohibitions of subsidized government health care for illegal aliens. Here, Williamson provides some more detailed figures. A Senate committee is now considering additional language to address the issues raised by Wilson’s outburst.

Going back to undiplomatic behavior, especially accusing the President of lying. I suppose it would be impolite to bring up how Democrats for years accused President Bush of lying. That includes Harry Reid, who called Bush a liar, for which he still hasn’t apologized. Quite the contrary, he has made it a point of pride that he has not apologized. He also called Bush a loser, for which he did apologize. To Democrats and the media, this was just evidence that Harry called ‘em as he saw ‘em. Nancy Pelosi, of course, is no stranger to the concept of calling others liars, such as her remarks about the CIA and waterboarding.

As far as rudeness during presidential speeches, there were Democrats booing and heckling George W. Bush at the 2005 SOTU speech. [See video.] Then there were the Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama at Bush’s 2006 SOTU speech cheering their own obstructionism (and that of various RINOs) in Congress’s failure to heed Bush’s warning a year earlier to bring Social Security and entitlement spending under control. One of those Democrats of course was The One. Those same people are now suddenly supposedly concerned about unsustainability of health care expenditures. Then there was Hillary Clinton’s rude behavior during Bush’s address to Congress following the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Then there is the President himself. Shortly before he was called a liar, he had said that the claim that “death panels” were part of the health care bill was a “lie, plain and simple.” Without explicitly mentioning her name, he had called Sarah Palin a liar, and people who had been following the back-and-forth over this knew what he was doing. So the use of the word “lie” in the speech was started by Obama himself. Whether or not he is correct about that being a lie is irrelevant, as there are many who believe that Obama, too, was, in fact, lying.

Again, this is not a tu quoque. Just because the Democrats constantly engage in this type of rhetoric doesn’t validate it. However, they should abandon their manufactured outrage.

I had to shake my head over this one. An acquaintance of mine and former colleague, whom I respect as an intellectual type with great insight and analytical talent, wrote about his negative reaction to the anti-Obama marchers in D.C. Granted, he is a standard-issue academic liberal and reflexive supporter of Obama and his domestic policies. So it is predictable that he would oppose the protests. Fair enough. One would predict that he did not oppose the anti-Bush protests between 2001 and 2008, or the protests by leftist groups at the political conventions last year. Or any other left-leaning protest or rally. Again, fair enough; he doesn’t have to be ideologically unbiased in his approach to political rallies. I’m not, either.

But what struck me, apart from some odd historical references, was the, well, patent lack of seriousness of his criticism. It boiled down to mocking the anti-government message of the protesters because those protesters travelled on federal highways on buses certified by federal safety inspectors or in cars subject to federal safety regulations. Moreover, one of the protesters quoted in the New York Times was a teacher, perhaps in a government school (possible, but based on my experience with the politics of government school teachers, the odds are against that). Even more scandalous judging by my acquaintance’s tone, they make use (at some time presumably) of fire departments and police departments. Well, at least they live their lives confident that, if necessary, they can call on the assistance of such government departments. Or something like that. And the sarcastic tone he used to describe the protesters’ goals belie any claim that he was writing with bemusement at the irony of the protesters’ opposition to government take-over of health care.

Many of those protesters probably would oppose the substantial intrusion by government in some of the same matters that he described. As to others, even libertarians believe in a proper, albeit quite limited, role for government. But, as always, the difficulty is one of line-drawing. Just because I buy groceries with the assistance of the produce manager at the local Von’s doesn’t mean I agree to have him sleep at my house whenever he wants. It seems to me that the administration’s policies of huge government take-overs of private businesses, the nationalization of banking, economically ruinous fiscal and monetary policies, and the relentless entry of government into more and more personal matters, capped by an attempt to seize health care (with the inevitable intrusion of government into matters of diet, beverages, exercise, medications, and leisure activities) are more significant invasions of personal liberty and threats to human thriving than is setting up a police department or building a road. Or, at least, perfectly reasonable people might suppose so.

But, let us engage my acquaintance on his turf. Most of Obamanomics simply amounts to transfers from productive individuals to the rent-seeking political classes (I believe the term among some for the latter is “drones”) and to the shiftless permanent underclasses created by decades of dependence-inducing dysfunctional government welfare policies based on moralizing leftism that suddenly has no problem with laws that intrude on personal autonomy. If the operative principle is simply that opposition to such “soft totalitarianism,” particularly as it affects highly personal matters, is illegitimate because of the existence of other government intrusions, or indeed because of the very existence of government, then opposition to any government program is similarly illegitimate. Certainly the intrusion into the privacy of a relatively few from government wiretapping to detect terrorist conspiracies is far less prominent and far less promiscuous than government intrusion into the health care decisions of many.

But I suspect that liberals won’t take the same devil-may-care approach to such national security protections just because government already taxes them for the support of an army from which they benefit. Indeed, if my acquaintance is right as a matter of principle, no matter how outrageous and oppressive the government’s action, you cannot complain. Government abolishes private property, prohibits dissent, takes your first-born? You cannot complain because you use a government-maintained road to get a Slurpee at the local 7-11. Something tells me, though, that liberals would sing a different tune if government ever restricted how or with what or whom someone could have sex because you live in a house built through a government permit process. But the worst for liberals would be government restriction of their most sacrosanct liberty of all, abortion, justified because the deed is done by a doctor who got a degree under a government licensing process and the woman used a car to get to his office.

Those who wrote in support of my acquaintance’s ruminations were, well, let’s just say “naive.” One of them uses the old tried-and-true liberal appeal of last resort, to accuse everyone who opposes Obama’s policies of racism. Talk about bigoted generalities. I don’t see the protesters playing the race card over and over and over as do liberals. But it’s to be expected from the self-proclaimed and inaptly-named “reality-based” community. Can’t respond on the merits? Use the old ad hominem, even one that is suffering from overuse and losing its potency.

The other supporter who wrote in was even more “naive.” She claims that private insurance companies, not the government, have more interest in cutting health care costs and hastening death. Leave aside the facts about government rationing that Obama has admitted in the past, and leave aside her own apparent concession that government doesn’t care about costs and thereby dooms government health care to exactly the same kind of fiscal lunacy to which every other government program is prone. She then proclaims that people do not elect insurance companies and therefore cannot rid themselves of private insurance companies the way they can vote out politicians.

No, I am not making this up. This person has not the slightest clue about economics or politics. Unfortunately, I have heard this type of comment before, even from a supposedly educated law professor on another occasion. She obviously has not the slightest notion of the essential difference between voluntary private organizations and the involuntary nature of the political state. She doesn’t realize that, if you don’t like the insurance company, you are not bound to it, in theory or in practice. The state is another matter. To paraphrase Trotsky on war, “you may not be interested in government, but government is interested in you.”

Moreover, you can always pay for the medical procedure yourself. You cannot nearly as readily withdraw from the state. Again, let’s leave aside that health care decisions will be made by faceless and unelected bureaucrats. The DMV comes to mind. Or, to use Obama’s example, the Post Office with its monopoly on certain services. The problem is more fundamental. Given the nature of collective decision-making in a democracy, the hopeless gerrymandering of political districts, and the judicial interference in democratic decision-making, political responsiveness to social discontent is far more inflexible and difficult to obtain than is change in one’s relationship to private business. The notion that you as an individual can readily rid yourself of a government imposed health care system is ludicrous. And the “option” claim for government insurance has been shown to displace private insurance and result in anything but a mere option.

I really had hoped for better arguments.

Once again, I find myself ahead of the public policy curve. I resolved long ago to stop voting in favor of increased subsidies for the government schools. I already pay significant taxes to support them, and I have witnessed the incompetency, bureaucratic intransigence, and inefficiency. That’s before I get into the curricular substance of some of the social “science” indoctrination. That said, I would be happy to have more reward go to the very excellent and dedicated teachers among the herd, who instruct in classes that actually teach something worthwhile. If there were an effective voucher system in place that forced academic competition on these schools; if the damaging political power of the teachers’ unions were broken; and if the schools were released from some of the layers of social engineering mandates that are piled on by the state and federal governments, I would be much more inclined to support the resulting institution. The one potential glimmer is the increased use of charter schools and the gradual reliance by the government schools on more private models. The U.S. pays more for education per pupil than just about every country in the world (