For one thing, I don’t really have heroes, not in politics anyway. For another, Ron’s weakness has always been a too-strong adherence to ideological consistency. You can’t get past a certain point in politics without some small quantity of the fudge factor. From that point of view Ron isn’t operating so much in politics as in what Kingsley Amis (who was speaking of Enoch Powell at the time) called “some obscure branch of the truth-at-any-price business.”
For another, in the case of the mosque, Ron seems not to have done his due diligence. He sounds ill-informed, talking about the mosque issue as if it’s entirely a matter of private-property rights. But if the money is being put up by foreign governments, how is the mosque private property? And since we don’t know who is putting up the money, but the funders of mosques and “Islamic cultural centers” have a long and slimy trail of duplicity in these matters, why should we not suppose the worst?
And then Ron says: “The neo-conservatives who demand continual war in the Middle East and Central Asia . . . never miss a chance to use hatred toward Muslims to rally support for their ill-conceived preventative wars.”
Say what? Well nigh the first thing über-neocon George W. Bush did after 9/11 was show up at a local mosque to make a gassy speech saying the attacks had nothing whatsoever to do with true Islam, which is a religion of peace, doncherknow? The people Ron calls “neo-conservatives” and the people who have been most shamelessly kissing up to the CAIR thugs, the slippery imams, and the shady Saudis this past nine years, look to me like the same people.
And come to think of it, Ron does know how to fudge. When he was campaigning in 2008, he departed considerably from the libertarian True Faith on immigration, even going so far as to give a friendly interview to the immigration-restrictionist site VDARE, if I recall correctly.
Well, perhaps Ron only fudges on the campaign trail. That would make him only nine times more honest than the average politician, versus my previous estimate of ten.
Trendline Test Having been somewhat dismissive of libertarianism there, let me try to make up a bit. There are some follies in libertarianism, but some excellent good sense too.
I’m a math geek, so my favorite chapter in Charles Murray’s book What It Means to Be a Libertarian is the one titled “The Trendline Test.” Murray shows us a marvelous way to illustrate the futility of most government action.
What you do is, draw a graph of some social-progress indicator over time. Murray uses “Deaths Per 100 Million Vehicle Miles Traveled” as an example, but the Trendline Test can be applied to any such indicator: poverty, health, education, and so on.
Now see whether, by examining that graph, you can spot where the government took strong action to affect the indicator. In Murray’s example, the strong action was the imposition of the 55 mph speed limit in 1974. Did the fatalities graph thereupon take a sharp downward turn? Nope.
Murray allows that there have been cases where government action made a positive difference. Mostly, though, as he says: “Among trendlines involving social indicators — crime, the family, community, education, welfare — deterioration has been the rule and improvement is the exception. Among trendlines involving safety and health by far the most common result is . . . nothing. Whatever was happening before the government got involved continued to happen after the government got involved.”
I spotted a very striking illustration of this great truth in the August 21 issue of The Economist, page 31. The graph in this case is titled “China’s fertility rate, live births per woman.”
I rest my case — I mean, Charles Murray’s case.
Eagle Scout A word of congratulation to our friends the Meagher family of Greenlawn, N.Y., whose son Brian made Eagle Scout this month. We attended the presentation ceremony, which was nicely done, and a timely reminder in this, the BSA’s centenary year, of how much good the organization does in that most challenging of all social endeavors, the civilizing of young males.
The event also gives me a chance to expiate my guilt at having nursed uncharitable thoughts about the Boy Scouts in my own adolescence. Youth-training-wise, there were two games in town when I was a teen: the Boy Scouts and the Cadet Force (i.e., boy soldiers). There was a strong expectation that every boy should join one or the other. Boys who’d been in the Cub Scouts naturally gravitated to the Boy Scouts. Never much of a joiner, I’d missed out on Cub Scouts; and anyway the Cadets looked more exciting, with guns and stuff. So I yielded to expectations and became a cadet.
Once committed to the Cadets, we of course got caught up in an ethos of rivalry with the Scouts. We thought they were juvenile, with their shorts and toggles and made-up code words and rituals. They thought we looked ridiculous in our army surplus uniforms (generally a couple of sizes too big), squeaking out orders at parade-ground drill and stamping our boots theatrically as we did about-face.
Looking back, I’m not sure they were wrong. We all had fun in our own way, though, and kept out of trouble for a few years, and learned to take orders and carry out disagreeable tasks without complaining.
My first reaction on seeing that picture was: “It’s a doodlebug!” Yes, I know, it’s a different beast, but it sure looks like a doodlebug.
“Doodlebug” was the name given by the English to the V-1 unmanned flying bomb in World War II. Before my time, but I heard all about it from the older generation, on whom it made a great impression. The doodlebug had a very distinctive sound, so everyone knew when one was coming over. Then (everyone told us), in that heartlessly self-protective way that people get after a few years of war-weariness, you prayed that it would keep going. If the sound stopped, that meant it had run out of fuel and was falling, possibly on you. “Then you got under the table and waited for the crash.”
Nearly ten thousand of the things fell on southern England in the last year of the war, causing around twice that number of casualties. That’s war. Squinty should know all about it — he lived through the war with Iraq in the 1980s, which included heavy shelling and air attacks on Iranian cities. For us in the West, it’s all a remote memory. To remember hearing a doodlebug coming over, you need to be in your seventies at least.
The experience of war doesn’t necessarily seem to make people less warlike; just more determined to get it right next time.
Fat poets The question came up across the dinner table the other day: Can you name a fat poet? After a moment’s reflection I offered G. K. Chesterton. A fellow diner trumped me with Samuel Johnson. We pretty much ran out of names right about there, though. This doesn’t seem right. Surely there have been more fat poets than that?
Get a Government Job, Series #19,846 Stephen Meister in America's Newspaper of Record, August 24: “A shrinking group of private workers — now numbering 107 million — is paying the salaries and benefits of more than 22 million government workers. Thus, every five private-sector workers chip in to cover the costs of one government worker. (Maybe taxpayers should get cards with the name and picture of the government worker they’re sponsoring.)”
That took me back to my days teaching college in China. Reading up on the country before I went, I’d learned that 80 percent of Chinese people were peasants. In other words, it took four peasants to feed one townie.
My college was out at the edge of a provincial town, with villages and fields nearby. Once I’d settled in enough to kid around with my students, I used to point to peasants working in the fields, telling any students nearby: “See those four there? They’re mine! They’re feeding me!” The students would laugh, though probably only out of politeness. (The Chinese, even more than other foreigners, incline to the view that all English people are slightly wrong in the head.)
Now the boot’s on the other foot. Some cop, teacher, DMV bureaucrat, or federal GS-15 somewhere is reading this and chuckling: “Yeah right, Derb. You’re one of my five, pal! You’re feeding me!”
In the movies again I spent an interesting morning being filmed by leftist documentary-maker Justin Strawhand for his new project, a movie about nihilism. He asked me to do a spot and I agreed from simple vanity, though I shall probably regret it. Justin told me the film will be shown at London’s Tate Gallery sometime round about a year and a half from now, so there’s something to look forward to.
I’m still not sure what I’m doing in a movie about nihilism. I certainly don’t consider myself a nihilist, unless having zero interest in the supernatural makes you one. I certainly believe in the natural world and all its countless fantastically complicated productions, among which I include myself. That’s not nothing; it’s a great deal. But Justin had read my latest book and spotted some themes he wanted me to talk about.
The encounter turned out to be very convivial. We’d read a lot of the same authors and visited a lot of the same websites. The conviviality was marred only slightly by, on Justin’s part, a Hitler obsession the size of an asteroid and a failure to grasp the elementary principles of scientific inquiry, and, on my part, irritated impatience with all that plus the usual insecurities about my effectiveness at expressing myself in speech. I am much better at writing.
Justin assured me, however, that the couple of hours of me that he’d filmed would be edited down to a few potent minutes, so sometime in early 2012 we’ll see what transpires.
Chick flick Still on movies, but this time big box-office blockbuster ones.
None of the Derbs saw the movie Avatar when it came out last year. Well, this month it came round again, at a local theater with the full IMAX and 3-D deal. We decided to go see it, the whole famn damily. So off we went: Dad, Mom, daughter, and son.
When the movie was over and we came out, Dad and son headed for the men’s room, Mom and daughter for the other place. The following conversation then took place in adjacent stations in the men’s room.
Junior: So, Dad, whaddya think of the movie?
Dad: Tell you the truth, Son, I was rooting for the Colonel.
Junior [laughing]: Me too.
Dad: For goodness’ sake don’t tell Mom I said that, though.
Junior: Course not.
Europe’s gypsy problem Europe’s getting into some nasty problems with gypsies. As movement between EU members has become more and more free, gypsies from Romania and Bulgaria have been showing up in numbers all over Western Europe. Their behavior, wherever they go, has been appalling.
Here’s a news story from the East Midlands of England, where I grew up. A riverside park and wildlife preserve has been taken over by Romanian gypsies (the “Eastern European immigrants” of the story). They are slaughtering the wildlife, camping in the carefully tended picnic areas, poaching the fish stocks, and covering the scenic spots with layers of litter. Local people are now afraid to fish in the river. Earlier this year a man in my home town left his house for less than an hour and found on his return that a Romanian gypsy family had moved in after forcing the locks. (And this was by no means the only such case.)
The British welfare state has been easy game for gypsy criminals, who have milked it for millions, often — as in that case — under cover of “human rights” campaigning. Children are shipped in to be used in these benefit-fraud schemes, and to be raised in Oliver Twist–style pickpocket academies.
Western Europeans are very seriously fed up with the gypsy problem. There is a surprising degree of hostility toward the gypsies. You can be sitting with left-liberal, stuff-white-people-like, PC-as-all-get-out, middle-class Europeans, and mention the gypsies, and their faces go purple and they start foaming at the mouth. In Italy there were anti-gypsy riots, followed by expulsions.
Now France is taking action. On orders from Pres. Nicolas Sarkozy, hundreds of gypsies have been expelled this month, put on planes back to Romania. The EU human-rights busybodies are making a fuss, but the expulsion policy seems broadly popular in France (though it hasn’t done much for Sarko’s poll numbers, which are in the tank on account of economic issues).
This story will run and run. Nobody really knows what to do about the gypsy problem. There is not even general agreement on what kind of problem it is. Human rights? The model here for Americans is always segregation and Jim Crow, where black people were denied bourgeois goods to which they desired access — school and college places, housing and job opportunities — and suffered legal disabilities. None of that is the case with the gypsies in Western Europe. The welfare state is generous to them, and the judicial authorities are scrupulously — over-scrupulously, in the opinion of some of the commenters on those news stories — respectful of their rights in law.
The problem is that the gypsies, or far too many of them, like being gypsies. They don’t want bourgeois goods; they want to continue to live as their ancestors did, by begging and stealing. They don’t want their kids to go to school; they have no desire or aptitude for regular work. They are Europeans, but nomads, with no allegiance to any country, and only scorn for the law, and for non-gypsies.
What’s the answer? I have no clue. I can only assure you that, as I said, you’ll be reading occasional stories out of Europe about this issue for many years to come.
Channeling Espy In some private exchanges about the mathematics of voting, the name of the Marquis de Condorcet naturally came up. My correspondent reminded me that Condorcet’s wife, an intellectual lady who ran a famous salon, bore the evocative name Sophie de Grouchy. This inspired me to doggerel in the style of the late great Willard Espy, thus:
Madame Sophie de Grouchy
Was no intellectual slouch. She
Took her knickers off
For a famous philosophe.
So far as I can discover the lady defied her name, being of a sunny and uncomplaining disposition.
When Spain was different I see that Catalonia is to ban bullfighting, beginning in 2012. Most of the commentary on this puts it down to Catalan nationalism — they just want to differentiate themselves from the rest of Spain, with a view to eventual secession and independence.
I can’t say I have any strong feelings about bullfighting, a thing I’ve never seen myself. It does seem a bit cruel to the bull; but then, the matador risks his life too, and not infrequently loses it, so it’s an honorable combat. The real cruelty, as I recall from reading eyewitness accounts, is to the horses of the picadors, when the bull gets his horns under their protective blankets and disembowels them.
It does seem a shame, though, for a nation to lose its distinguishing characteristics and become just another bland modern glorified shopping mall, with airhead politicians babbling about global warming, universities teaching Women’s Studies, the populace gawping at “reality TV,” and a Starbucks every hundred yards. On those vague, general, and reactionary grounds, put me down as pro-bullfighting.
I was only once in Spain, for a summer month in 1963. The place was still frozen in the Francoist time-warp. None of the buildings in Barcelona seemed to be less than 200 years old. In the waiting rooms of country railroad stations peasants drank wine from goatskin bags beneath yellowing Proclamaciónes Reales still pasted to the walls. The police were brutish, arrogant, and corrupt. Outside the towns the grinding poverty described in El Cordobés’s biography was still in plain sight. The whole country slept through the afternoon. It was another world, far and away the most different place I had been to at that point in my young life (I was 18).
Flamenco memories Actually my strongest early impression of Spanish culture, even before I went to Spain, came not from bullfighting but from flamenco dancing.
The English country town I grew up in had a theater. They mostly staged lowbrow comedies and thrillers, with an occasional Sheridan or Shaw for the carriage trade. Once a year, though, they were visited by a flamenco dance act. It was a Spanish couple — I forget their names — presumably man and wife, with a guitarist-singer for accompaniment.
Every year through the early 1960s this trio would show up for a few days and perform to sold-out houses. They were sensational; after 50 years I can still recall their act vividly. Their duets practically threw off sparks, they were so erotic (so perhaps the dancers weren’t married after all . . . ) but they each did solos, too — to give each other a break I suppose. To us hicks, stuffed up to the gills with English restraint, our upper lips frozen stiff, the sheer sweaty exotic stomping vitality of it was incomparably thrilling.
Perhaps if I saw it today, in jaded late middle age, I’d think it corny, I don’t know. I just went browsing on YouTube to see if I could recapture the thrill, but nothing much came up. This clip gives the general idea; but there are no sparks, and where are the castanets? Same remarks for this one. I suspect these people are closer to the real thing, but it’s a terrible recording, mostly dark. Anyone know of a good-quality clip with castanets and sparks?
(Halfway through writing that segment I thought it might make up a bit for my earlier negative remarks about gypsies, since I’ve always supposed that flamenco was a product of gypsy culture. Reading up on it, though, the gypsy connection seems doubtful. Flamenco was apparently created by 19th-century entrepreneurs working from traditional Spanish folk dances. Oh well. For gypsy cultural influence, we still have Carmen.)
Marmite meets the love fascists I’m a bit late with this one, but have to post it anyway. It concerns Marmite.
Yes, Marmite, that delicious savory spread so beloved of the English (though not the Australians, who unaccountably spurn it for the loathsome and inedible Vegemite), was in the political news a few months ago, in the run-up to the election campaign for the European Parliament.
In Britain, as here, there is a common political outlook you might call “love fascism.” This is the point of view that regards any opinion to the right of, say, David Brooks as a species of “hate.” People with correct opinions — opinions, that is, to the left of, oh, Frank Rich — are motivated by “love.” People in between are infected to some degree with “hate,” though perhaps not irredeemably so. They need to be re-educated over to the side of “love” — or, failing that, lumped in with the “haters” and excluded from polite society.
Well, the Marmite people ran a TV ad for their product that was entirely premised on the love-fascist approach. This probably wasn’t intentional: love fascism is the default position for the kind of media types who make and approve TV ads. They no more notice it than they notice the air they breathe. The ad compared the Love party, which of course is pro-Marmite, to the Hate party (footage of a skinhead rally), which spreads(!) lies about Marmite.
The British National party, which was running candidates in the election, took umbrage at this, not unreasonably. They’ve been trying for years, with mixed success, to shuck off their old street-fighting, skinhead-attracting image and present themselves as serious players in British politics. They returned fire with an ad on their website prominently displaying a jar of Marmite.
Unilever, the manufacturers of Marmite, threatened a lawsuit, and the BNP backed down.
That is the end of the Marmite news.
Human dominoes. I mentioned dominoes last month. Over in the People’s Republic, someone picked up the theme: “A total of 10,276 people in China’s Inner Mongolia have broken the world record for the biggest human domino chain, state media say. The participants in the city of Ordos sat cross-legged and fell backwards in sequence in a record which took an hour and 20 minutes. The group of mainly high school students spent more than twelve hours over three days to train for the event.”
Well, I’m glad they're keeping themselves busy over there in Inner Mongolia; though what their world-conquering ancestors would have thought, beggars the imagination.
Math Corner I’m sorry: In my July diary I posted a dud link to my June solution — the “Tuesday’s Child” conundrum. If you haven’t already had enough of it, the worked solution, with many notes, is here.
Here’s one for this month.
I have an ordinary deck of 52 playing cards. I shuffle it thoroughly. What is the probability that not one card is in its original position?
Related, but more general:
I have a deck of n cards, numbered from 1 to n. I shuffle the deck thoroughly. Then I turn the cards over one by one. If the k-th card I turn over bears the number k, call that a “match.” What is the probability that after going through the whole deck I shall have tallied m matches, where m is some number in the range from zero to n?
Before peace can come, Palestine’s culture must be changed.
Hamas sent a greeting card to the quintet of leaders meeting in Washington, D.C., this week to initiate negotiations about a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. In a well-planned ambush, they killed four Israeli civilians near the city of Hebron, two men and two women (one nine months pregnant), creating seven orphans. The murderers escaped, and may perhaps have videotaped the atrocity. In Gaza that evening, 3,000 celebrants clogged the streets, waving flags, setting bonfires, passing out candy, and carrying their children on their shoulders. If there is videotape, it will presumably permit the revelers to relive the pleasure, even as the video of Daniel Pearl’s beheading has circulated on the Internet.
While the Palestinian Authority did condemn the attack, Prime Minister Salam Fayyad did so, he explained, because “the operation went against Palestinian interests.” It would be difficult for a leader of the “moderate” (that word is always attached) PA to condemn such attacks as, say, immoral or despicable, as the Palestinian Authority itself (formerly the PLO or Fatah) was conceived in violence and continues to honor its spirit. In the course of the past few months, the PA has named a square and a children’s summer camp in honor of a terrorist who murdered 37 Israeli civilians on a bus, and provided a hero’s funeral to Amin Al-Hindi, one of the terrorists who kidnapped and murdered eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. The official PA newspaper described Al-Hindi as “one of the stars . . . who sparkled at the sports stadium in Munich.” Both Abbas and Fayyad attended the funeral.
#ad#These realities, reflecting as they do the unreadiness of the Palestinian people for peace with Israel, have been and will continue to be ignored by the Obama administration, the so-called international community, and most journalists. Instead, world leaders, very much including President Obama, speak of borders, and confidence-building measures, and opportunities for peace, as if the problem were one of details. This thoroughly misconceives the nature of the dispute. An Israeli saying (now decades old) captured the essence: If the Palestinians were disarmed tomorrow, there would be no conflict. If the Israelis were disarmed tomorrow, there would be no Israel.
With whom would Israel be making binding agreements? Since a bitter civil conflict in 2007, Palestinian society has been divided. Hamas controls the Gaza Strip and the PA controls the West Bank. Just last month, the PA canceled scheduled municipal elections for fear that Hamas might again triumph at the polls as they did in 2006. Hamas and Fatah thugs continue to target and assassinate one another. By standing up the wobbly Abbas and perhaps even signing a treaty with him, the Obama administration may imagine that they can strengthen him. But this is a figure so unsure of his current standing with his people — and this is before making any unpopular concessions — that he canceled elections.
Abbas’s weakness in this regard is not so much a personal failing as an inheritance. The entire Arab world (and Iran) has conspired to embitter and enrage the Palestinian people in perpetuity, encouraging maximalist demands and enshrining bloodshed and frenzied hatred. Though Abbas has shaken hands all around in Washington, D.C., the incitement at home continues. A year ago, at Fatah’s general congress in Bethlehem, the delegates reaffirmed their longstanding commitment to “armed struggle” as “a strategy, not a tactic. . . . This struggle will not stop until the Zionist entity is eliminated and Palestine is liberated.”
Just this week, the PA’s minister for prisoners' affairs presented an award called the Shield of Resoluteness and Giving to Um Yousuf Abu Hamid. Her accomplishment? Four of her sons are serving long sentences in Israeli prisons for committing terrorist attacks. Handing her the plaque, the minister intoned: “The Palestinian mother is a central partner in the struggle, by virtue of what she has given and continues to give. It is she who gave birth to the fighters, and she deserves that we bow to her in salute and in honor.”
A Palestinian children’s-television program instructs its viewers that all Israeli cities — including Haifa, Lod, Ramle, and Acre — are “occupied Palestinian” cities. Another show aimed at children, which often dispenses advice like “drink your milk” and “obey your parents,” also advised a young viewer named Saraa that “all Jews must be erased from our land. . . . We want to slaughter them, Saraa, so they will be expelled from our land. . . . We’ll have to [do it] by slaughter.”
This latest iteration of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks midwived by the U.S. is doomed just as all of its predecessors were — because it is based on a fallacy and a stubborn refusal to face the truth about Palestinian society.
Tea partiers are mad as heck, and they’re letting the world know — politely.
The much-analyzed speeches at the Glenn Beck Lincoln Memorial rally weren’t as notable as what the estimated 300,000 attendees did: follow instructions, listen quietly to hours of speeches, and throw out their trash.
Just as stunning as the tableaux of the massive throngs lining the reflecting pool were the images of the spotless grounds afterward. If someone had told attendees they were expected to mow the grass before they left, surely some of them would have hitched flatbed trailers to their vehicles for the trip to Washington and gladly brought mowers along with them.
#ad#This was the revolt of the bourgeois, of the responsible, of the orderly, of people profoundly at peace with the traditional mores of American society. The spark that lit the tea-party movement was the rant by CNBC commentator Rick Santelli, who inveighed in early 2009 against an Obama-administration program to subsidize “the losers’ mortgages.” He was speaking for people who hadn’t borrowed beyond their means or tried to get rich quick by flipping houses, for the people who, in their thrift and enterprise, “carry the water instead of drink the water.”
The tea party’s detractors want to paint it as radical, when at bottom it represents the self-reliant, industrious heart of American life. New York Times columnist David Brooks compares the tea partiers to the New Left. But there weren’t any orgiastic displays at the Beck rally, nor any attempts to levitate the Lincoln Memorial — just speeches on God and country. It was as radical as a Lee Greenwood song.
A New York Times survey earlier this year occasioned shock when it found that “Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and are no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class.” We’re so accustomed to the notion of a revolt of the dispossessed that a revolt of the possessed (in the non-demonic sense, of course) strikes us as a strange offense against the nature of things. But it’s threatening to wash away the Democratic congressional majorities in a historic wipeout.
In extremis, Democrats and liberal commentators have dragged the debate over the tea party into the well-worn rut of elite condescension to the bourgeois, a term coined in its modern sense by Rousseau and not meant as a compliment. For more than a hundred years, the bourgeois have been accused of being insipid, greedy, and unenlightened. To the long catalogue of their offenses can now be added another: unenthralled by Barack Obama, the Romantic hero seeking to transform the nation.
#page#The tea party represents a revolt against his revolution, and thus a restoration. If a tea-party-infused Republican party were to take Congress and manage to cut federal expenditures by a sharp one-fifth, that figure would only be back to its typical level of recent decades of roughly 20 percent of GDP. If the party were to succeed in making the federal government more mindful of its constitutional limits, it would only be a step toward the dispensation that obtained during most of the country’s history.
To be sure, the tea partiers are fiercely anti-establishment, and that produces political candidates who are exotic and unexpected. Then there’s Beck himself. As he’d probably be the first to admit, he’s an unlikely leader for the disaffected bourgeois. He’s emotionally extravagant and conspiracy-minded, an intellectual enthusiast and rollicking showman.
#ad#The last time Republicans benefited from a wave election, they had their own Beckian figure at the top in the person of House Speaker Newt Gingrich. They wallowed in their revolution and let Gingrich’s ideological grandeur define them — to their regret in the end. If the wave comes this time, Republicans should endeavor to be a sober and responsible party for sober and responsible people, resolutely cleaning up after the failed Obama revolution.
They could do much worse than to take their cue from the tea partiers at the Lincoln Memorial, who knew how to make an impression without scaring anyone or trashing the place.
Our Distracted Commander-in-Chief | read this item
Some presidents may not like being wartime leaders. But they don’t get to decide; history does.
Many have charged that President Obama’s decision to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan ten months from now is hampering our war effort. But now it’s official. In a stunning statement last week, Marine Corps commandant Gen. James Conway admitted that the July 2011 date is “probably giving our enemy sustenance.”
A remarkably bold charge for an active military officer. It stops just short of suggesting aiding and abetting the enemy. Yet the observation is obvious: It is surely harder to prevail in a war that hinges on the allegiance of the locals when they hear the U.S. president talk of beginning a withdrawal that will ultimately leave them to the mercies of the Taliban.
#ad#How did Obama come to this decision? “Our Afghan policy was focused as much as anything on domestic politics,” an Obama adviser at the time told Peter Baker of the New York Times. “He would not risk losing the moderate to centrist Democrats in the middle of health insurance reform and he viewed that legislation as the make-or-break legislation for his administration.”
If this is true, then Obama’s military leadership can only be called scandalous. During the past week, 22 Americans were killed over a four-day period in Afghanistan. This is not a place about which decisions should be made in order to placate congressmen, pass health-care reform, and thereby maintain a president’s political standing. This is a place about which a president should make decisions to best succeed in the military mission he himself has set out.
But Obama sees his wartime duties as a threat to his domestic agenda. These wars are a distraction, unwanted interference with his true vocation — transforming America.
Such an impression could only have been reinforced when, given the opportunity in his Oval Office address this week to dispel the widespread perception in Afghanistan that America is leaving, Obama doubled down on his ambivalence. After giving a nod to the pace of troop reductions being conditions-based, he declared with his characteristic “but make no mistake” that “this transition will begin — because open-ended war serves neither our interests nor the Afghan people’s.”
These are the words of a man who wants out. Most emphatically on Iraq, where from the beginning Obama has made clear that his objective is simply ending combat operations by an arbitrary deadline — despite the fact that a new government has not been formed and all our hard-won success hangs in the balance — in order to address the more paramount concern: keeping a campaign promise. Time to “turn the page” and turn America elsewhere.
At first you’d think that turning is to Afghanistan. But Obama added nothing to his previously stated Afghan policy while emphatically reiterating July 2011 as the beginning of the end, or more diplomatically, of the “transition.”
Well then, at least you’d then expect some vision of his larger foreign policy. After all, this was his first Oval Office address on the subject. What is the meaning, if any, of the Iraq and Afghan wars? And what of the clouds that are forming beyond those theaters: the drone-war escalation in Pakistan, the rise of al-Qaeda in Yemen, the danger of Somalia falling to al-Shabaab, and the threat of renewed civil war in Islamist Sudan as a referendum on independence for southern Christians and animists approaches?
This was the stage for Obama to explain what follows the now-abolished Global War on Terror. Where does America stand on the spreading threats to stability, decency, and U.S. interests from the Horn of Africa to the Hindu Kush?
On this, not a word. Instead, Obama made a strange and clumsy segue into a pep talk on the economy. Rebuilding it, he declared, “must be our central mission as a people, and my central responsibility as president.” This in a speech ostensibly about the two wars he is directing. He could not have made more clear where his priorities lie, and how much he sees foreign policy — war policy — as subordinate to his domestic ambitions.
Unfortunately, what for Obama is a distraction is life or death for U.S. troops now on patrol in Kandahar province. Some presidents may not like being wartime leaders. But they don’t get to decide. History does. Obama needs to accept the role. It’s not just the U.S. military, as Baker reports, that is “worried he is not fully invested in the cause.” Our allies, too, are experiencing doubt. And our enemies are drawing sustenance.
Jim DeMint Looks toward November, and Beyond | read this item
The American people are finally waking up — and the Senate Republican old bulls had better take note.
Joe Miller (Alaska), Sharron Angle (Nevada), Ken Buck (Colorado), Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania), Marco Rubio (Florida), Dino Rossi (Washington), Ron Johnson (Wisconsin), Mike Lee (Utah) — these are just a few of the Reaganite insurgents with whom Sen. Jim DeMint (S.C.) hopes to work in the upper chamber come January. Should they win in November, DeMint predicts, this new crop of conservatives will help to push the GOP back toward the party’s principled, free-market roots.
“These candidates have gotten the message,” DeMint says in an interview with National Review Online. “They understand that if we get the majority, and we don’t do what we said we would, then we’re dead as a party — and should be.”
GOP incumbents, DeMint warns, should pay close attention to what is happening around the country. Even if there is a Republican sweep, he says, “many Americans fear that senior members of our party will go back to focusing on getting earmarks for their states, that we will betray them again. But with ten to 15 new allies in the Senate, which I think we’ll have, that will not be tolerated any more.”
#ad#Even if conservatives make major gains, DeMint says, he will not challenge Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky in a Senate leadership contest. Still, he pledges that he will do his best to change the direction of the party with the help of however many new colleagues he may have. But don’t expect him to try to corral freshman Republicans into a DeMint bloc — “I’d like to throw that idea into the trash can,” he says. “It’s simply not true. These candidates are leaders in their own right. I’m supporting them, because they’re not running on some consultant’s talking points. They’re running on principle.” Jockeying for a leadership position, he says, is not his focus. “What I’m interested in is turning this country away from its fiscal cliff — and for the first time since Reagan, I think that we have a chance for real action, not just political posturing.”
Still, without naming names, DeMint remains critical of many establishment GOP senators. Earlier this summer, former Senate majority leader Trent Lott (Miss.) told the Washington Post that the Senate does not “need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples.” Party leaders, he said, need to move quickly to “co-opt” any rabble-rousing conservatives who may find their way to the marble halls of Washington. DeMint, with a hint of disgust, says, “We need to realize that Trent Lott was speaking for many senior Republicans.”
But some of the GOP elders, DeMint notes, understand the stakes, and they may be open to working for a fresh conservative coalition. There are some “good aspects,” he says, to Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) winning his primary last month. “McCain is a real opponent of earmarks, he supports a balanced budget amendment, and, during the campaign, he really addressed border security. If those things stay in place, we’ll be fine. I’ll work with all Republicans, and I can work with John McCain.”
Try as they may, big-spending Democrats — and Republicans — will not rule if the “people continue to make their voice heard,” DeMint predicts. The South Carolinian points to Joe Miller’s victory in Alaska’s GOP Senate primary as the most recent example of what he calls a “stunning American awakening” that may force Congress to change its ways.
Even DeMint’s PAC, the Senate Conservatives Fund, which has funneled millions to primary challengers this cycle, was surprised by Miller’s out-of-nowhere win. “Joe was certainly the candidate we supported philosophically, but it did not appear that he was in play,” DeMint explains. “It was, obviously, a mistake on our part. I underestimated the movement in Alaska.” But he couldn’t be more pleased about the outcome.
What does he make of Glenn Beck’s Washington rally and the tea parties? “Everywhere people are pulling together and connecting the dots,” DeMint says. “They see a fiscally out-of-control, immoral federal government that is destroying our culture, our economy, and our opportunity. That [belief] is solidifying in this country, and I think Reagan Democrats, independents, and conservative Republicans are coming together to pick candidates — sometimes it’s the least bad candidate, but sometimes, as with Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, there are people to get excited about.”
As we parted, DeMint was heading off to celebrate his 59th birthday. But he left me with a final thought: “This is not about me or the Senate Conservatives Fund. We are just a little bit of a catalyst, trying to raise the profile of some good candidates.”
– Robert Costa is a political reporter forNational Review.
Obama Could Use Some Clintonesque Salesmanship | read this item
Obama’s condescending tone makes his policies even more unpopular.
There’s been a lot of talk about Bush nostalgia lately.
At Martha’s Vineyard, the Obama-bilia wasn’t moving like it was during the Obamas’ previous visit there. The biggest seller was a T-shirt depicting a smiling George W. Bush with the tagline “Miss Me Yet?”
#ad#Meanwhile, liberal writers, and even the president in his Oval Office address, have had kind(er) words for Obama’s predecessor.
“Words I never thought I’d write: I pine for George W. Bush,” Peter Beinart recently vented in the Daily Beast, in response to Obama’s vacillating and lawyerly support for the Ground Zero mosque.
Well, I’d like to return the favor, a little. I’m suffering from a mild case of Bill Clinton nostalgia.
Yes, I’m grading on a curve. I was no fan of Clinton’s — I vaguely recall predicting in writing that he’d spend eternity in Hell sandwiched between Michael Flatley, Lord of the Dance, and the cast of Cats.
And while I can’t say I pine for the Caligula of the Ozarks, I have mellowed in my animosity for the man. More to the point, I miss having a Democrat who could sell.
Clinton, a political prodigy of the first order, loved the human side of politics. He listened to the hoi polloi more than he listened to the Harvard faculty. It made him a less consequential but more democratic president.
Meanwhile, Obama’s “People of Earth Stop Your Bickering” aloofness often makes him seem exasperated with the country he leads. He doesn’t seem to care what the people think. If voters disagree with him, that’s their mistake.
He’s lost — if he ever had it — his appetite for persuasion. Oh, he can explain things just fine. But there’s a difference between explaining your position and selling it. Clinton, the consummate salesman, understood the difference.
When you look back, the only thing Obama really sold on the campaign trail was the semi-magical thrill of being one of “the ones we’ve been waiting for.” He didn’t sell policy proposals; he sold abstractions. He even picked fights with abstractions, insisting, for example, that his biggest opponent in the Democratic primary was “cynicism.”
Lots of salesmen start by trying to sell you on a fantasy. That’s how they get their hooks in you. Get the customer to say “yes” in principle before he even knows what he’s buying. “Would you like to look young, feel great, and eat all you want?” That’s the easy part. The hard part is translating that abstract yes into an actual sale.
Obama has never been good at that. There was a lot of talk in the late stages of the Democratic primary about how Obama couldn’t “close.” People liked the Hope and Change stuff, but he fell short on convincing people he could transmogrify the rhetorical gold into reality. Sure, he won in the end. It was a change election, and he was the ultimate change candidate, with no real record to serve as ballast for all of his hot air.
But then came the governing, when the steak needed to outrank the sizzle. Obama has had remarkable success cramming his agenda through Congress — often thanks to the sorts of backroom deals he swore to oppose — but he hasn’t made a sale outside of the Beltway. For instance, despite a year of infomercial-level hawking, Americans still don’t want his health-care reform (the American people loved the fantasy car he described, but they’ve balked at both the clunker and the financing). He’s gone straight from messiah to Michael Dukakis.
In fairness, he’s tried to sell. He claimed the Gulf oil spill proves we need cap-and-trade. He told us from the Oval Office this week that we owe it to the troops to unite around his economic agenda. But these weren’t arguments so much as condescending harangues. No one who doesn’t already agree buys such nonsense. Rather, they ask, “How stupid does this guy think we are?”
Just as often, Obama confuses explanation for persuasion, as if simply telling us that because he thinks X, then X must be the way to go. More infuriating, nearly all of his explanations assume that disagreement with him must stem from ignorance or villainy. That pose worked a little when he could claim that opposition was synonymous with Republican partisanship. But now that disagreement has moved to the mainstream, he seems to have an adversarial relationship with the people he’s supposed to represent.
I’m not shopping for a Clinton version of the “Miss Me Yet?” T-shirt, but I do miss having a Democratic president who didn’t seem to think the job was beneath him.
David Limbaugh chronicles the reasons for the freefall.
David Limbaugh has a solid track record of writing comprehensive, damning indictments. He’s gone after Janet Reno’s Justice Department. He’s exposed domestic crimes against religious freedom. Now, he has written Crimes against Liberty: An Indictment of President Barack Obama. The full brief is still, of course, a work in progress, but Limbaugh’s timely, hot-off-the-deadline book comes just in time for the final stretch to the November elections — just in time to limit the damage. He talks to National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez about what has been done and what can still be done.
#ad#KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Is Crimes against Liberty a little bit of an I-told-you-so?
DAVID LIMBAUGH: I suppose you could say that, though I don’t derive any pleasure from having accurately discerned Mr. Obama’s character and ideology during the campaign. Many of those who didn’t were permitting themselves to be blinded by fantastic hopes of deliverance from times that, in retrospect, were not as terrible as many claimed. Moreover, as much as I and countless others predicted this national nightmare, Obama has actually been worse, both personally and in terms of his agenda, than most of us anticipated.
The greatest challenge in writing this book was finally putting it to bed, as our president was steadily committing new outrages. I was adding new material every day, but eventually the printer refused any further additions. Still, in the end, I trust readers will find the book remarkably up to date, as both my publisher — Regnery — and the printer were quite accommodating.
LOPEZ: You were calling him a threat to liberty before he was elected, never mind inaugurated. What accounts for his “popularity freefall” now? Did people have to see him in action to believe it?
LIMBAUGH: A couple of things account for his plummeting popularity. First, Obama’s agenda has been far more extreme than naïve well-wishers assumed it would be. Second, his policies have already had disastrous results, which he can no longer credibly pawn off on his predecessor. And third, he has flagrantly thwarted the will of the people in foisting his policies upon us through abuses of power, legislative trickery, unseemly, unethical deals, and worse. He has acted decidedly un-presidential in slandering and bullying his opponents, has repeatedly played the race card, and has misrepresented his signature legislation for all to see. Even some of the conservatives who decided to hitch their wagon to him admitted at the outset they simply hoped he wouldn’t govern according to his leftist ideology. What gave them this hope is beyond rational comprehension, but surely most of them have now seen the light. In fact, it’s remarkable that Obama has any significant support at all. I daresay that most of his remaining supporters are probably among those not “contributing” income taxes to our general revenues.
LOPEZ: What’s a “Crime against Liberty”? Surely President Obama hasn’t done anything illegal.
LIMBAUGH: I am speaking more figuratively. I am neither accusing President Obama of having committed high crimes and misdemeanors nor advocating his impeachment. Many of us were preoccupied with such pursuits during the Clinton high-crimes era, for which I don’t apologize. But I’d rather focus on the more realistic goal of alerting people to Obama’s egregious personal behavior and policies as we try to turn this nation around in the 2010 and 2012 elections. Having said this, intellectual honesty compels me to confess that some of Obama’s audacious and shocking abuses of power could arguably constitute impeachable offenses were we less apathetic about the Constitution and the rule of law, but I am certainly not advocating going there, if for no other reason than it would likely backfire and enhance Obama’s popularity as a sympathetic victim. One example is his pledging of $140 billion to the IMF not only without executive authority, but in contravention of legislative directives. Another is his four cabinet secretaries’ sending simultaneous letters to Arizona senator Jon Kyl threatening to cut off Arizona’s stimulus funds because Kyl suggested that Obama freeze stimulus spending due to the failure of stimulus money to stimulate anything besides debt. This is incredibly abusive stuff — an administration threatening to withhold federal money to punish an entire state because one of its senators expressed an opinion they deemed critical. This is what I mean by “Crimes against Liberty” — it refers to Obama’s policies and actions that are systematically undermining our liberties, to his bankrupting the nation, and to his undermining our national security. The book abounds with further examples.
#page#LOPEZ: What was his ultimate Crime against Liberty?
LIMBAUGH: At this point — and the list of infractions expands daily — it seems to be a toss-up between the unapologetic bankrupting of the federal government and the imposition of a universal health-care system that represents a systemic cancer on our liberties, not to mention our medical system and our treasury.
#ad#LOPEZ: Are there some crimes against truth? Like the idea that he is some kind of post-racial figure?
LIMBAUGH: There are two separate chapters specifically chronicling Obama’s pattern of deceit. Chapter Two details his fundamental misrepresentations to the electorate about who he is and what he stands for — a complete fraud in the inducement — and Chapter Three examines the specific lies he’s told and other deceits he’s engaged in concerning the various aspects of his policy agenda. Even well-informed readers will be shocked at the sheer volume of his lies, for which I can’t think of an acceptable euphemism.
LOPEZ: You wrote a book on Janet Reno’s Justice Department, indicting it for a “legacy” of “corruption.” How does Eric Holder’s compare thus far?
LIMBAUGH: It’s difficult to compare, but Holder’s Justice Department is, like Reno’s, highly politicized. The most striking example is probably the dismissal of the already-won case against New Black Panther party members for voter intimidation purely for reasons of politics and race. Disclosures from former DOJ insiders reveal that this DOJ has adopted the unwritten policy of not prosecuting alleged civil-rights abuses by minorities against whites — an enormously disturbing development for those who believe in equal protection under the law. But there are many equally shocking cases. Did you know there is a “blog squad” inside the DOJ, monitoring the Internet for political opposition and posting comments favorable to the administration — all on the taxpayer’s dime? And please don’t get me started on Obama and Holder’s approach to the War on Terror, including Mirandizing enemy combatants on the battlefield. That is so ridiculous I thought the story came from [the parody site] Scrappleface the first time I read it.
LOPEZ: Why was he “almost willing to jeopardize his sacred Obamacare over his extreme pro-abortion views”?
LIMBAUGH: For a while, it looked like the Obamacare bill would fail due to Obama’s refusal to meet Bart Stupak’s demand that the bill ban federal funding for abortion. But it’s possible that’s an overstatement, because it might well be that Obama knew the whole time that Stupak would cave, or perhaps Obama planned to cave if Stupak didn’t. As it turns out, they both cynically pretended to cave — Obama by issuing an unenforceable executive order prohibiting federal funding for abortion, and Stupak by agreeing to vote for Obamacare in exchange for that meaningless order. But the bottom line is that Obama is an irrepressible ideologue, as to both his extreme pro-abortion views and his dogged determination to force nationalized health care on a resistant American citizenry.
LOPEZ: Will Barack Obama pay a price if he does not deliver more to the Left on these social issues? His position on marriage, for instance, is so incomprehensible that not even David Axelrod has successfully or comfortably spun it.
LIMBAUGH: Obama’s position on marriage is brazenly cynical. First and foremost, he couldn’t be more supportive of the radical homosexual agenda. He doesn’t openly admit that, but everyone knows where he really stands and that he will do everything in his power to promote that agenda through Alinskyite strategies. He simply knows that to acknowledge his real goals would be counterproductive. I doubt he’ll pay a price from the Left for anything he does, if by “price” you mean at the polls. The Left have nowhere to go. They certainly can’t afford to support any opponents of Obama, and they know it. They’re just bellyaching and causing him angst — which is mildly amusing, but ultimately insignificant.
#page#LOPEZ: Why is Gitmo still open?
LIMBAUGH: Because it has to be. Obama vastly underestimated the complexity of closing Gitmo and relocating these dangerous jihadists. It’s a marvelous display of the disconnect between his skills as a campaigner and his incompetence as a leader, not to mention his self-absorption — making such an expansive promise without, apparently, giving the slightest consideration to whether and how he could fulfil it.
#ad#LOPEZ: Is his treatment of Israel a Crime against Liberty?
LIMBAUGH: Yes, and shamefully so. It’s still shocking to me that we haven’t seen a bigger backlash from the Jewish community, though former New York City mayor Ed Koch wrote a few stinging pieces calling out Jewish politicians, such as Sen. Chuck Schumer, for remaining silent in the face of Obama’s utter mistreatment of the Jewish state, and Schumer finally responded.
Those who closely watched the campaign should not be surprised by Obama’s hostility toward Israel, given his relations with pro-Palestinian, virulent critics of Israel and his voluntary membership in Reverend Wright’s decidedly anti-Semitic church. Furthermore, his campaign website featured anti-Semitic posts. One of them, titled “How the Jewish Lobby Works,” argued that “no lobby is more feared or catered to by politicians.” It’s not sufficient to say Obama didn’t endorse the posts. How did people of such prejudices have access to his own campaign website?
So as a candidate, he was already bad on Israel; but in office, he’s been even worse than I anticipated. He began by appointing James Jones, hardly a friend of Israel, as his national-security adviser. And from the beginning, his foreign-policy team has worked to impose a “solution” on Israel. He has also been ambiguous about whether he would honor George W. Bush’s promise to Israel that the Jewish state would retain sovereignty over parts of Judea and Samaria that have large Jewish majorities. He has tied our efforts to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions — one of our most pressing national-security challenges — first to Israel’s evacuating West Bank settlements, and then to Israel’s acquiescence to a Palestinian state. He presided over the United States’s return to the U.N. Human Rights Council, which the U.S. had left nine months earlier because the council obsessively demeans Israel while overlooking the daily, horrific abuses of Mideast dictatorships.
Obama also cancelled a scheduled meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and announced he would end the Bush tradition of hosting Israeli prime ministers when they were in Washington. His State Department demanded that Israel negotiate with Syria — a primary sponsor of Hezbollah — just two days after Syrian foreign minister Walid Mualler praised an inflammatory speech by Ahmadinejad calling Israel “the most cruel and repressive racist regime.” Obama’s Mideast envoy, George Mitchell, doing Obama’s bidding, adopted the controversial 2002 Arab peace initiative, which called for Israel not only to withdraw from Eastern Jerusalem, the entire West Bank, and the Golan Heights, but also to accept the influx of millions of foreign Arabs as Israeli citizens as part of the so-called “right of return.”
What do the Israelis get in return for these alarming concessions? The Arab world will promise to be peaceful toward it. But that’s entirely moot, because after all those concessions there will be no more Israel; as Caroline Glick notes, the “right of return” would mean “Israel would effectively cease to be a Jewish state.”
And of course, I should mention the bizarre U.S. demand that Israel stop building homes in parts of its own capital of Jerusalem, and Vice President Biden’s harsh, direct “condemnation” of Israel for defying Obama’s dictates on this score. Suffice it to say that this type of heated denunciation of an ally — for a municipal zoning decision, no less, and for acting within its sovereign authority — is highly unusual, if not unprecedented.
#page#LOPEZ: What are “Crimes against Statesmanship”? Do they simply amount to not actually being a statesman?
LIMBAUGH: This is the second half of the title for Chapter Two: “The Narcissist: Crimes against Statesmanship.” Unfortunately, our worst fears about Obama’s narcissism have been validated, as he has demonstrated most of the traits of a clinical narcissist. His enormous opinion of himself, his arrogance, his inability to withstand criticism and his lashing out at his critics, and his delusions of grandeur translate into Obama’s governing on behalf not of the American people or the national interest, but on behalf of Obama himself — and his obsessive quest to fundamentally change the nation. Obama’s personality traits, coupled with his extreme-leftist agenda, make him particularly dangerous to the American ideal and to the preservation of our founding principles, as well as to the liberty and prosperity they guarantee. His narcissism contributes to his imperviousness to counterarguments and empirical evidence of the failure of his prescriptions, his hostility to his critics, and his utter lack of empathy as he drives America over the financial cliff.
#ad#LOPEZ: What do you mean by “Obama Mostly Hears Obama”?
LIMBAUGH: Liberals hold themselves out as being open-minded and responsive to the will of the people, such as with Hillary Clinton’s vaunted — but completely phony — listening tour. In fact, Obama couldn’t be less interested in the will of the people, as he showed in the deplorable way he crammed Obamacare down Americans’ throats. On the heels of passing that widely reviled monstrosity, he boasted that he had just achieved a victory for the American people and vowed to continue to work for us, which was as surreal as it was insulting. Following Republican Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts Senate election, which was a direct repudiation of Obama’s agenda, many expected Obama to show some contrition in the State of the Union Speech and promise to modify his bill to accommodate people’s concerns. Instead, he said he wanted the American people to take another look at his plan. Sarah Palin put it best when she said, “Instead of sensibly telling the American people, ‘I’m listening,’ the president is saying, ‘Listen up, people!’”
LOPEZ: Why do you call him the “Commissar”? You know he never wanted to run GM, don’t you?
LIMBAUGH: That title refers to his seizing control over executive salaries, and his cram-down of a restructuring scheme for both GM and Chrysler that ripped off many secured creditors while favoring unsecured creditors who happened to be Obama’s union friends. When he couldn’t get all of Chrysler’s secured creditors to roll over, he publicly slandered them as greedy speculators who had received bailouts but weren’t willing to sacrifice for the public good. His surrogates threatened to ruin the reputation of these creditors, who were merely asserting their legal rights. Michael Barone aptly referred to these sordid events as an example of “gangster government.”
And we can’t overlook Obama’s recklessly wasteful and arbitrary spending of stimulus funds, nor his effort to preclude the repayment of TARP money, because his Keynesian indoctrination compelled him to believe that the money needed to remain in the system to generate growth. With no authority under the Constitution or anywhere else, he attempted to delay those repayments, and then to divert some of the money that was repaid, prompting Judd Gregg to remind the administration that it had no authority for its actions and that “TARP is not a piggy bank.”
LOPEZ: You write that Barack Obama has “demonized anyone to the political right of Ted Kennedy.” Is that entirely true? Hasn’t he, for instance, taken Paul Ryan seriously?
LIMBAUGH: Obamahas pretended to respect Paul Ryan, but did you see his palpably irate expression during the health-care summit as Ryan took him to school on the numbers? With virtually every part of his agenda, Obama has vilified certain groups in order to avoid debate on the substantive issue at hand — health care, financial reform — and make the issue about his particular scapegoat of the day. Whether it’s defaming financial institutions as “fat-cat bankers,” insurers as making “obscene profits,” physicians as greedy and immoral, or President Bush as responsible for every imaginable sin — or lashing out at Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Jim Cramer, Jim Santelli, the Supreme Court, or British Petroleum — Obama has outdone himself in thuggish, Chicago-style politics. This behavior is wholly unbecoming of a president.
#page#LOPEZ: Which of President Obama’s Crimes against Liberty should Democrats have to answer for in November? If Republican candidates would listen to your advice in this regard, how would you counsel them?
LIMBAUGH: I believe not only that Democrats should have to answer for every one of Obama’s Crimes against Liberty in November, but also that they most emphatically will. They have enabled him in every particular and should be held accountable at the ballot box. Many of us conservatives have warned of what liberals would do with virtually unchecked power, and we have been vindicated. In almost every case, the overwhelming majority of Democrats in government have enabled his recklessly destructive agenda.
#ad#Thus my advice to Republicans is to stick to their guns, to adhere to conservative principles unapologetically. They must not lose courage and listen to the faint of heart or move toward the center in a phony and cynical effort to appeal to so-called independents. Independents are already flocking away from Obama in droves. They just need somewhere to go, and that somewhere is not mushy moderation and uncertainty and vacillation. Statecraft isn’t rocket science, and we know that we need much smaller government and an unleashing of the private sector.
At this point, we need a radical rollback of the statist agenda. We must reform entitlements, which were on the path to bankrupt this nation eventually even before Obama came along. Democrats will demagogue any efforts to reform as they always do when Republicans are in office or on the ascendancy, but we must plow forward. I say to moderates that we no longer have the luxury of moderating our prescriptions on domestic policy. Unless we greatly reduce our tax burden while also seriously reducing our discretionary and “mandatory” spending, we won’t be enjoying growth and prosperity. We have no choice but to reverse the present course.
The good news is that the public is waiting to hear this kind of message. The tea-party movement is a grassroots, bottom-up phenomenon, not an astroturf hoax. We need inspired leadership to carry forward the grassroots agenda. If we do not present a principled message of less government across the board — including repealing, not just modifying, Obamacare — we will lose the momentum we have as we dispirit the American people, who are relying on principled conservatives to implement their agenda.
– Kathryn Jean Lopez is an editor-at-large of National Review Online.
To the victor go the spoils; this year’s spoils are enormous.
Presume, for a moment, that Republicans have a really good election cycle this year: Control of the House shifts away from the Democrats, and a Republican (John Boehner?) prepares to become speaker. The Democrats lose, or almost manage to lose, control of the Senate (which they hold today by a nine-seat margin). Republican governors-elect and state legislators–elect prepare to take their oaths in state capitols across America.
What will our political landscape look like if that comes to pass?
#ad#The U.S. House of Representatives: The districts that change hands will most likely be the moderate ones, so the House’s Blue Dog caucus is likely to be much smaller. Of the current 54 members of the Blue Dog Coalition, 32 are in districts that McCain won; most of the 22 others are in districts where Obama won narrowly.
Many members of Congress who do survive a GOP wave will probably do so by the skin of their teeth and face uncertain prospects for 2012. On the one hand, the re-election bid of President Obama could drive up Democratic turnout. On the other hand, the Obama of 2012 is likely to face tougher sledding in swing districts; he won’t be able to run the same campaign as four years earlier, promising a net spending cut and running ads touting his bona fides as a moderate featuring Warren Buffett and Colin Powell.
Then, of course, there is the factor of redistricting. Demographics and polling guru Michael Barone examines that potential factor here. The governorships of Ohio, Tennessee, and Wisconsin appear key, along with control of the legislative chambers in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Barone also notes that to maximize Republican advantages, Meg Whitman will need to be in a position to veto the Democrats’ most lopsided efforts in California. He adds that district lines redrawn to favor one party aren’t guarantees; over the course of the decade, voters move, attitudes change, and once-safe seats start drifting into the grasp of the opposition.
In July, the Republican State Leadership Committee — the national committee that tracks, coordinates, and leads GOP efforts at the state-legislative level — projected that Democrats would not take control of a single state legislative chamber in the country this year, and that Republicans would pick up four chambers, with twelve additional Democrat-controlled chambers in key states “in play.” Their assessment concluded, “Republicans have an opportunity to create 20–25 new Republican Congressional Districts through the redistricting process over the next five election cycles, solidifying a Republican House majority. In fact, 33 of the 75 most competitive congressional districts, as identified in National Public Radio’s June report, are located in [RSLC] target states this year. If [RSLC] achieves its goals, nearly half of the traditionally swing districts will be redrawn by Republicans before the 2012 election cycle. The remaining seats will either be subject to Democrat control or part of a partisan-neutral redistricting process.”
Some House Democrats who survive the 2010 onslaught will find themselves in even less favorable terrain in 2012, while Republicans who squeak by this year may find smoother sailing by Election Day 2012. In the meantime, a Republican speaker of the House could find himself with quite a bit of leverage over these nervous Democrats.
The U.S. Senate: The senators up for re-election in 2012 won election in 2006, a strong year for Democrats, who rode voter frustration with Iraq and outrage over the Jack Abramoff and Mark Foley scandals to many unexpected victories. These Democrats will, in all likelihood, find themselves facing a tough political environment. Retirement may seem like a tempting option.
In Nebraska, Ben Nelson has already felt the need to run ads explaining his vote for the health-care bill; his defense has already cost the DNC almost $1 million. In December, Rasmussen found that only 40 percent of Nebraska voters had a favorable opinion of Nelson, while 55 percent had an unfavorable view. In a world that has seen party departures and switches from Joe Lieberman, Arlen Specter, Charlie Crist, and Parker Griffith, one has to wonder how strong Nelson’s party loyalty will be in the coming two years.
#page#One of the current cycle’s biggest surprises came in North Dakota, where Democratic senator Byron Dorgan suddenly retired and effectively handed his Senate seat to the GOP. Next cycle, 62-year-old Kent Conrad will have to decide whether he wants to run for another term; he has represented the state in the U.S. Senate since 1986. An early-August Rasmussen poll in North Dakota put Obama at a 42/58 approval/disapproval split in the state.
In Montana, Democrat Jon Tester’s victory over GOP incumbent Conrad Burns was one of the closest of the cycle; his margin of victory was 3,562 votes out of 406,505 cast, a margin of less than 1 percent. The limited polling indicates Tester has suffered less than some other Mountain State Democrats, but he may face a top-tier challenger in GOP congressman Denny Rehberg.
#ad#Several swing states appear to have passed their Democratic apex. Jim Webb won his seat in Virginia over George Allen by less than 0.5 percent, while the local media was pillorying the incumbent over his “macaca” statement and while Webb, who served as secretary of the navy in the Reagan administration, was running on distinctly conservative themes. (One GOP wise man recently cracked, “Ronald Reagan was in Webb’s ads more frequently than Webb was.”) Despite bucking his party on immigration and affirmative action, Senator Webb has been largely a loyal Democrat, with a lifetime ACU rating below 15(out of a possible 100). In a statewide race in Virginia, that is likely to be toxic.
In Ohio, Sherrod Brown benefited greatly from the scandals engulfing the state’s GOP in 2006. The poll positions of gubernatorial candidate John Kasich and senatorial candidate Rob Portman suggest that clouds no longer linger over Buckeye State GOP headquarters. In a classic swing state, Brown isn’t a classic swing lawmaker: His lifetime ACU rating is below nine. Public Policy Polling put Brown’s job approval at 38 percent and his disapproval at 34 percent.
In Pennsylvania, Bob Casey Jr.’s wide margin of victory over incumbent Rick Santorum in 2006 suggested that the Keystone State had become unfriendly territory for Republicans. But now Tom Corbett is a strong favorite in the governor’s race, and Pat Toomey leads the Senate race by a healthy margin. Casey, like Brown, is enduring generally “meh” job-approval numbers; PPP puts him at 36 percent job approval, 35 percent job disapproval, although they had him lower earlier in the year.
Most cycles, Missouri is a classic swing state, but it narrowly preferred McCain when Obama was winning much more Republican states such as Indiana, North Carolina, and Virginia. Since Election Day 2008, Obama’s approval rating has plummeted to miserable levels in the Show Me State. Claire McCaskill narrowly defeated Republican incumbent Jim Talent in the 2006 U.S. Senate election, by a margin of 49.6 percent to 47.3 percent. While McCaskill has worked hard to cultivate an independent image, she’ll face an uphill climb if Obama’s job-approval rating remains low.
Will these senators want to spend the final two years of their first term tethered to the Obama agenda? Or will they find a new level of independence, now that Obama is significantly less popular in their states? The GOP may hold only 51 or fewer seats, but the number of senators amenable to conservative legislation may be significantly higher.
The White House: Perhaps the biggest question in American politics in early 2011 will be how the Obama administration adjusts to a dramatically different political landscape.
Analysts can argue as to when the new president hit trouble: the angry town halls of summer 2009, the big wins for the GOP in the gubernatorial elections of 2009, the shock of Scott Brown’s win in early 2010, the passage of health-care reform in the face of staunch public opposition this spring, or some other moment. But whatever the tipping point, the Obama administration spent much of the last year on the wrong side of public opinion, and chose to charge ahead anyway, certain that voters’ minds would eventually be swayed.
#page#The same dynamic extends to the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against the Arizona immigration law and Obama’s whiplash-inducing statement of support for the Ground Zero mosque and subsequent revision. On the deficit, the administration seems to think the recent spike is a temporary reflection of surprisingly low tax revenues, while the public sees it as evidence of irresponsible governance. The Obama camp is convinced the stimulus’s success is evident from their “jobs created or saved” metric, while much of the public looks at the unemployment rate and deems it a failure. The president is convinced his administration’s response to the oil spill was fine; in the Gulf states, it is rated worse than the Bush administration’s response to Katrina. With large (and mostly loyal) Democratic majorities in Congress, Obama and his team could ignore bad poll numbers and muscle their agenda through. If the GOP has big wins in November, those days are over.
#ad#The challenge for Obama, and liberals in general, will be at least as great as the one they faced after the 1994 GOP tsunami. Until Obama, no president had enjoyed a 60-vote Senate majority for his party since 1979; liberals have more influence over Congress than they’ve had at any point since the years of Lyndon Johnson. Majorities that large usually take several cycles to erode. While a few progressives will probably tell themselves that the public option, an even bigger stimulus, or renegotiating NAFTA would have ensured a better Election Day 2010 for them, most will be forced to recognize that after Obama spent two years governing as a liberal, the electorate responded by punishing his party severely.
Of course, all of this depends on one big supposition: that Republicans take care of business in every competitive race from coast to coast and from the top of the ticket to the bottom.
Why Islamic Moderates Are So Scarce | read this item
It goes back to a ninth-century theological dispute.
As past statements of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf continue to surface, many Americans have concluded that the would-be builder of a mosque at Ground Zero is lying when he calls himself a “moderate” representative of his faith. The more disturbing possibility, however, is that he’s telling the truth — that Rauf is indeed the voice of mainstream Islam.
One indication is the resounding silence from the rest of the Islamic community. If that community were truly moderate — as we in the West understand the term — one might expect it to distance itself from a man who blames the U.S. for the 9/11 attacks, says we have more innocent blood on our hands than al-Qaeda, and refuses to disown the genocidal agenda of Hamas.
A few brave Muslim individuals have indeed come out against the mosque, but they are exceptions. Where are the large numbers of Muslims who find Rauf’s statements offensive? Where are their organizations and institutions? Why aren’t they weighing in to repudiate Rauf and his apparent aims?
#ad#It’s a common problem. Each time some new offense is perpetrated in the name of Islam — whether it’s the latest suicide bombing in a public square or a woman’s being beaten and mutilated by her own family — it is mostly Western leaders and the press who voice their disapproval. The more one looks for the larger Muslim community to denounce the violence, the more “moderate Islam” seems to vanish like a mirage in the desert.
Why this is so — what happened to moderate Islam and what sort of hope we may have for it in the future — is the subject of Robert Reilly’s brilliant and groundbreaking new book, The Closing of the Muslim Mind. Reilly is a veteran of the Reagan White House, director of the Voice of America under George W. Bush, a board member of the Middle East Media Research Institute, and a frequent contributor to numerous national publications. He has made a deep dive into Muslim thought and history to discover the sources of the present Islamic condition.
The result is anything but dry. Closing is a page-turner that reads almost like an intellectual detective novel. It is among those few brave books on Islam — others would include Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations and Andrew McCarthy’s recent The Grand Jihad — that should be read by anyone who wants to understand one of the most fundamental causes of conflict in the 21st century.
Reilly does in fact locate the elusive moderate Islam — back in the 8th and 9th centuries, when the rationalist Mu’tazilites dominated Islamic thought under Caliph al-Ma’mun. The period is often referred to as the “golden age of Islam,” when that civilization produced some of its highest achievements in philosophy and science. It didn’t last. In 849, the second year of the reign of Caliph Ja’afar al-Mutawakkil, the Mu’tazilites were overthrown. Holding Mu’tazilite beliefs became a crime punishable by death, and the decidedly anti-rationalist Ash’arites soon came to dominate the faith, as they would continue to do, in one form or another, through the modern era.
What makes Closing so compelling is Reilly’s ability to tie seemingly arcane questions of Islamic theology to many of the characteristics of Islamic civilization that we in the West find so hard to fathom. Fundamentally, Ash’arism was a rejection of “natural law” and reason in favor of an all-powerful God of pure will and power. The idea of an ordered universe that behaves according to certain ordained laws — whether moral or physical — would have been understood by the Mu’tazilites. For the Ash’arites, this was blasphemy, an outrage against God’s omnipotence.
In the language of philosophy, this way of looking at the world is known, somewhat confusingly, as “voluntarism.” To quote Reilly, it “holds that God is the primary cause of everything and there are no secondary causes. There is no causal mediation. Therefore, what may seem to be ‘natural laws,’ such as the laws of gravity, physics, etc. are really nothing more than God’s customs or habits, which He is at complete liberty to break or change at any moment.”
#page#While Christianity recognizes the possibility of miracles, when God intervenes to supersede natural law, in Islam every nanosecond is the functional equivalent of a miracle, the result of God’s divine act. Thus there is no law of gravity, only God’s will, determining moment by moment that the apple will fall from the tree. Neither is there any morality, no objective good and evil as we in the West would see it, only the arbitrary decrees of an all-powerful God. There is no “truth that is written in our hearts,” only the truths that are written in the Koran, which could just as well be otherwise if such were the whim of God. As Ibn Hazm pronounced in the 11th century, “He judges as He pleases, and whatever He judges is just. . . . If God the Exalted had informed us that He would punish us for the acts of others . . . all that would have been right and just.”
The problem, one might say, is obvious. In science, the repudiation of natural law meant the explicit denial of cause and effect. No wonder that the rise of the Ash'arites coincided with the decline of a once-vibrant Islamic intellectual culture after the 13th century. And no wonder that societies that exalt the power and arbitrary will of God to the exclusion of reason can hardly understand, let alone embrace, modern democratic institutions, which are founded, as our Declaration of Independence makes clear, in the self-evident and enduring truths of natural law.
#ad#Nor can we be surprised that such cultures endorse institutionalized domestic violence or rampant terrorism and the murder of innocents. As hard as it is for the secular Left to accept, Western culture is founded on and steeped in the Judeo-Christian assumption that our innate understanding of what is right is a direct reflection of God’s goodness and justice as reflected in His universal law, to which even He adheres. We make a mistake when we assume other cultures are necessarily speaking the same moral language.
Is there a possibility that Islam can find its way back to the root philosophies of its golden age? There are those within Islam who want to, but — like the voices raised in opposition to the mosque — they are lonely, even threatened, outposts within their faith. One thing Reilly’s account makes clear: Only when we move beyond the common platitudes of our contemporary political discussion and begin to deal with Islam as it really is — rather than the fiction that it is the equivalent of our Western culture dressed up in a burqa — will we be able to help make progress in that direction.
Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right | read this item
Stuck in L.A. traffic with Barack Hussein Obama II and the SEIU.
No doubt you’ve all been wondering where I’ve been these past few months and what I’m up to, because this one thing I know is true: You wingnuts find the liberal, leftist, ecologically correct lives we progressives live out here in La-La Land to be infinitely fascinating, almost as fascinating as we find them ourselves. So I’m here, reporting for duty once more.
#ad#You’ll forgive me if there are a few typos in this story. I’m writing it on my secure BlackBerry, typing with my thumbs as I sit in traffic. That’s because, believe it or not, I’ve been trying to get from Santa Monica back downtown to my palatial pad in Echo Park for the past couple of weeks now, and, as you read this, I’m just inching my way east of Western Avenue. With any luck, I’ll be home before Festivus.
First there was the big fundraiser for my president and yours, His Excellency Barack Hussein Obama II, Lord of the Flies, Keeper of the Hoops, Vacationer-in-Chief, and Protector of the Holy Cities of Chicago and Honolulu. You can’t believe how flattered I was to be able to join my close friends Barbra Streisand and Jeffrey Katzenberg, as one of the $30,000-a-pop no-shows at the big do in Hancock Park, no-shows on account of we literally couldn’t get there from here, BO2 having commandeered every available freeway, surface street, and SUV in Los Angeles County in order to motor in the style to which he’s become more than accustomed from Air Force One to the La Brea Tar Pits, where he might have paused for a moment to contemplate the statue of the woolly mammoth, slowing sinking into the nonrenewable resource that somehow lies like an ocean beneath Wilshire Boulevard but which we shouldn’t drill, baby, drill for because we don’t need that oil.
And the evening had started so wonderfully, too . . .
You see, there I was, tooling down Sunset Boulevard in my late-model Prius, figuring I’d zip over to Dukes on the Strip for a little nosh before reversing course and heading back east, having long ago lost my appetite for rubber chicken, even expensive Hancock Park rubber chicken. I cannot tell you how my heart swelled with pride as I encountered what would later prove to be an ominous portent of things to come: a standstill, caused by the heroic proletariat as they labored away resurfacing the Sunset Strip. And while I was impatient to blow past Sunset Plaza and get to my chow, I couldn’t help thrilling to the sign on the north side of Sunset, which proclaimed that this most-needed project was brought to me by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, B. Hussein Obama Jr., POTUS for now.
Yes, if there’s one place in the country that needs to be stimulated by the Stimulus, it’s Sunset Boulevard, repository of the nation’s hopes, dreams and aspirations, the place where a thousand dreams come daily to die, where nubile young beauties from Minnesota — okay, Somalia, if you want to go all the way back — come to . . . Anyway, there I was cheering your tax dollars at work when I became aware that not only was the Strip not moving, nothing was moving. I mean, it was like some weird scene out of Roland Emmerich’s 2012, minus the earthquakes, volcanoes, general mayhem, and John Cusack, which we tolerant Angelenos try to keep confined south of Jefferson, except for Cusack.
#page#Eventually I made my way to the ocean, spent a week camping out on the beach behind what’s left of William Randolph Hearst’s and Marion Davies’s cottage in Santa Monica, then fired up the green gerbils living in my Prius’s engine and headed for home once more. Alas, it was not to be: Just my luck that I hit Century City — known to us Industry Insiders as the “old Fox back lot” — just in time to hit a wall of doughnut-chomping, overtime-racking L.A. cops, who had cordoned off a six-block area around someplace or other in order to allow the heroic purple-shirted proletariat of the Service Employees International Union — that’s the SEIU to you, pal — to exercise their First Amendment right of peaceful assembly. And once again my heart soared at the sight of non-nomenklatura schmucks using your tax dollars in order to protest the capitalist system while being protected from the consequences of their First Amendment rights by the pigs of the LAPD, who are also supported by your tax dollars! Is this a great racket — er, country — or what?
#ad#Suddenly, I was struck with a flash of blinding insight, just like one of the characters in my own movies. You morons really don’t have a clue, do you? Even now, with victory in your grasp should you only choose to carpe the good ol’ diem, you’re floundering around, lurching like John Kerry from his medals to his magic hat. You go from cheering the fascist theocrat Beck at the Mall (while that woman I still hate, hate, hate beams on, a Mama Grizzly hunting for her next meal and looking at us like we’re 2012’s dinner) to wondering if the preternaturally tanned Ohioan, John Boehner, has the right stuff to be third in line to the throne of Emperor BHO II. You don’t know whether to cheer the ghost of *^%BUSH&^*&! or despise him, to welcome Mr. Newt back or to banish him to that ice floe whereon still dwells the spirit of Victor Frankenstein. In short, you can’t decide whether to write more chits to the U.S. Treasury or draw the blinds and wait for the end.
And that’s when I started typing in earnest. Not just one of these occasional and irregular pieces of drooling idiocy, my pearls before the swine of the vast right-wing conspiracy, but a real honest-to-Gaia book, even better than Paula Barbieri’s memoirs, if I do say so myself. Like Ulysses facing the Sirens, I lashed myself to the mast, eschewing the blandishments of Teix, Fat Fish, Giorgio Baldi’s, Tom Bergin’s, the thrill of my afternoon constitutional at the LAPD’s firing range in Elysian Park, and even my annual camping trip to Death Valley in order to finish it.
And you know what? I did!
Sure, there were plenty of difficulties along the way. I had to think the whole thing up, which even for an A-list screenwriter like myself wasn’t as easy as, say, writing the script for The Expendables. Then the hapless fool in my employ whom I call the Amanuensis — basically, the guy who types my stuff — went AWOL claiming he was “sick.” And finally the publisher imposed something on me I wasn’t used to: a “deadline,” which I didn’t like the sound of one bit, which meant that my date with Lindsay Lohan had to get postponed yet again — although I knew she would have canceled on me anyway. And so, less than a month from now, my little ditty will hit bookstores across this soon-to-be-formerly-great land of ours, from polluted sea to unsustainable shining sea. A tome so wicked, with advice so evil, that Alinsky’s dedicatee himself will blush with pride. A book dedicated to the proposition that Paradise Lost, The Screwtape Letters, Rules for Radicals,and random Rolling Stones songs can all coexist, if not in perfect harmony, then at least in joyous cacophony. It even has an introduction by my father, the sainted “Che” Kahane, so what’s not to like?
You have no idea how hard it is to type a whole book with your thumbs.
– David Kahane is proud to be published by Ballantine Books on September 28. He invites you all to browbeat him on Facebook or at kahanenro@gmail.com. Or not, as the case may be.
