Posts Tagged ‘Obama’

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Sarah Palin, libertarian

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

UPDATE: I’m not the only one thinking about this.

I’ve been thinking about the surprise announcement of Sarah Palin yesterday. It has stimulated a huge amount of speculation on both left and right. Both left and right wing blogs have long comment sections on posts about her announcement. Why did she do it ? There are a number of speculations. Certainly, she has been subject to an unbelievable amount of abuse, much of it obscene and/or delusional. Andrew Sullivan, for example, has ended whatever credibility he had remaining on the right by his fascination with the birth of Trig Palin. The David Letterman slur was obscene but that is not the worst of the harassment. She has been deluged with frivolous ethics complaints, none of which has been upheld but she and her husband have $500,000 in legal bills to pay. Even mainstream Democrats have been frothing at the mouth.

Some of the speculation is that the harassment has convinced her to quit politics. I would not blame her if that were true. There is another possibility, however. The other phenomenon of this spring has been the Tea Parties. They have also been an object of derision by the left. The left has called them “teabagging parties,” a reference to homosexual jokes about oral sex. At first, participants used the terms interchangeably being unaware of homosexual jokes. The political left is far more familiar with homosexual terminology, especially when it is scatological.

Though supported by Republican think tanks, it is a grass-roots movement comprised of independents, conservatives, and libertarians, many say. Few attending these events have protested before, says Donalsonville, Ga., organizer Becky Worsham, adding, “A common joke at our first one was, ‘Gosh, I’ve never protested anything in my life, and this feels pretty good.’ ”

The protesters’ concern, she says, is that Washington “will really bring our country down to where we’ll no longer be a superpower.”

The April 15 protests

As many as half a million people attended the April 15 protests, according to the conservative Pajamas TV network. Events ranged from amateurish to professional: One in Atlanta featured massive TV screens and professional bands, while another in Lake City, Wash., drew only two dozen protesters.

The significance of this movement is still not established but it could be important.

Many Republicans, including this one, are tired of the weakness of our candidates who, once elected, choose the same big spending, big government pathway to electoral success. This occurs even at the local level and the Bush Administration did little to rein in the big spending Republican Congress. The result was an inability to distinguish the two parties on the issue of big government and the loss of the majority in 2006. Now, there is a level of despair in Republican circles I haven’t seen before. The closest thing to it is the aftermath of the Nixon resignation.

There are many, many – many – Americans who are no longer impressed with the qualities even the smartest political pundits consider essential in our politicians. We’ve had all the politicians who do everything the way they are supposed to – and their record is inexpressibly unimpressive. Many people have reached the point of saying, Don’t tell me only a politician who follows your set of rules is good for me. The rule-followers are the ones who have given us a national deficit so colossal we almost certainly can’t recover from it without severe economic dislocation – and an anomic, irresponsible, ignorant, and yet irrationally arrogant electoral demographic that voted Barack Obama into office, and threatens to make sure that government of, by, and for the people shall, if they have anything to do with it, perish from the earth, by next Thursday – and covered in a “Townhall” by ABC.

What we are enduring today is the America that the politics-as-usual rule-followers have delivered for us. It is far from unreasonable to recognize that having a comfortably conventional political profile, one that pleases Charles Krauthammer and Rick Brookhiser, is no indicator that a politician will guard constitutionalism, limitations on government, and individual liberty.

I wonder if the next trend is one of libertarian revision, either within the party or as a third party. I also wonder if Sarah Palin sees this, as well. She really governed Alaska as a libertarian, given the level of federal control of the state’s economy. For example, she vetoed a bill that would have banned benefits for gay partners. Although that source grumbles that she was reluctant, that is just left wing politics.

In 1856, the Whig Party, which had been formed to support business interests and the development of new territory (by building roads and canals), collapsed because the members could not resolve the issue of slavery. There were southern slave owning members, as well as northern abolitionist members. The Compromise of 1850 had postponed the issue but by 1856 the party was over. From the shell of the Whigs came the abolitionist Republican Party than won the presidency in 1860. Might we be seeing something like this happening to the Republicans now ?

Dennis Hastert is largely responsible for the failure of George W Bush to veto spending bills as deficits piled up. Hastert convinced him that the key to continued Republican control of Congress was spending and improved relations with lobbyists, the so-called “K Street Project.” Unfortunately for this theory, Democrats are the natural allies of lobbyists and will always outbid Republicans in spending. Hastert’s own seat in Congress was lost to a Democrat in 2008, partly because of local scandals about Hastert’s family connections.

Might there be a libertarian future for the Republican Party ? They have to do better than the British Conservative Party which seems unable to represent traditional values voters in their concerns about the decline in patriotism and family values. Even feminists who might be considered opposed to Sarah’s positions, may rebell at the abuse she has received. We’ll see how that works out.

At the end of the Thatcher years Britain was transformed. Europe’s sickest economy had become its strongest. The recipe had been low taxes. Simple taxes. Effective regulation. Privatisation. Free trade. Reform of the trade union movement. Intolerance of inflation.
They were necessary things to have done and I don’t say that lightly. They saved Britain from terminal economic decline.?? But somehow they didn’t create a nation that was quite at ease with itself. Margaret Thatcher knew that herself and used her memoirs to regret that she hadn’t been able to initiate ‘Social Thatcherism’.

We know how that feels. We still have a greater pool of traditional values in the population than Britain, which has suffered from years of Labour progressive education. Here, education is still local although George Bush and Ted Kennedy tried to make it national. What we have now is the financial quagmire that has engulfed Britain and is engulfing us. What we need is libertarian reform, either within the Republican party or without it. Maybe Sarah Palin sees this, too.

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Posted in financial, History, politics | Comments Closed

When privileged minorities govern

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

We are entering a strange time in this country. We have elected a black President who appointed a black Attorney General and who has now nominated a Supreme Court candidate who is of Puerto Rican heritage. One would think that this proves racism is gone and we can all advance to the future as allies. What is happening ? This essay says what I think, and I wonder how many others are starting to think about this.

Michelle Obama describes the fear that Sotomayor felt at Princeton — and its lasting effects to this day — and then compares it, of course, to Michelle’s own ambiguous feelings toward the same Princeton campus (cf. Michelle’s thesis for the details), that one is willing to put up with for the education and prestige it gave, but does not really like for the presence of apparently so many stuck-up, rich, preppy kids and their ubiquitous exclusive campus culture.

Sotomayor was a radical activist at Princeton, advocating Puerto Rican independence, among other causes. Puerto Rican independence gained 2% of the vote in elections in Puerto Rico. I think that makes it a fringe position.

The Princeton thesis was written at a time of heated political debate over Puerto Rico’s future. Beginning in 1974 and continuing for nearly a decade, the paramilitary group Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional, or FALN, carried out bombings in the U.S. to push for independence for the island.

Ms. Sotomayor described the inconclusive debate over Puerto Rico, even after a 1967 plebiscite in which 60% of voters agreed with Mr. Muñoz Marin in favoring commonwealth status.

She had never lived in Puerto Rico, of course, but that is typical of left wing radicals.

Many Americans were terrified about our first year in college. Some left farms for sophisticated urban environments and were lost; others were the first in their families to go to colleges, and so on. The Ivy League is by definition snobbish to all outside its traditional insular orbit, whether white, black, brown, country folk, foreigners, etc. But by predicating such common discomfort on their own race and gender, Ms. Obama and Judge Sotomayor deprecate a universal human experience, and instead claim it as something unique to identity politics.

Some of us left home at age 18, traveled 2500 miles and knew no one when we started college in a strange city with very little money, no car and very limited experience of the world. The Ivy League may be snobbish but it can’t have been much more snobbish than 1956 USC.

Once more we see the schizophrenia of affirmative action, diversity, and identify politics — the university is both obliged to select students on the basis, at least in part, of race, class, and gender, but then almost immediately faulted for a climate that, in the eye of the recipient, stigmatizes those to whom it gives unusual consideration (what is the answer? — no race/class/gender consideration at all?; constant race/class/gender consideration that begins at admission and continues through graduation?; damned if you do, damned if you don’t?).

Affirmative action has had very mixed results for many beneficiaries. The anger of the well fed and prosperous members of Reverend Wright’s church suggests that the recipients of such beneficence are not always grateful for the support. It seems to feed resentment. Now, those people seem to be in charge of the government.

And the remedy for feeling separate at elite colleges is apparently to reemphasize separatism based on identification with the tribe (e.g., Justice Sotomayor’s senior thesis, like that once written by Ms. Obama, is predicated on ethnic and racial grievance).

The irony of the demands for racially segregated dormitories never seems to occur to the new generation whose parents and grandparents fought segregation.

All this should disturb Democrats because it fuels a general and growing perception (cf. Sotomayor’s white-male references, Eric Holder’s “cowards” remark, the serial Obama apologies abroad, the confusion about America being an important Muslim nation, etc.) among the public that something very strange is going on — a sort of generic anger being expressed at the highest levels of government that seems fueled by long past resentments against a perceived establishment that at times apparently is to roughly characterized as white, or white male, or rich, or Christian, or something other than poor, of color, or of female?
One would have thought with the presidency, or nomination to the Supreme Court, or with the office of Attorney General, or First Lady, such hurt feelings and old grievances might wane; but instead the resentment seems to be ubiquious, and growing, and the lectures will be with us for the next four years in almost every imaginable circumstance. If the administration is not careful, millions of Americans are going to begin feeling that they are caricatured pretty much as those once were in rural Pennsylvania.

I even feel a bit of this in the gay marriage arguments. It is not enough to have all the old grievances corrected. They must move on to new grievances and keep pushing the majority until the good will is exhausted. It will be a long four years.

More about Sotomayor here.

In her thesis, Sotomayor punctuated her radical nationalism by referring to the United States Congress as the “North American Congress” or the “mainland Congress.” At least she didn’t call it the “running dog imperialist Congress.” As Princeton’s former president William Bowen says, she was always respectful.

Always respectful. Now that she is about become a member of the “North American Supreme Court.”

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Posted in politics | 1 Comment »

Triangulating national security

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

UPDATE #2 MOre from Andy McCarthy on why bringing terrorists to the US is a bad idea.

UPDATE: Charles Krauthammer has a higher opinion of Obama than I do.

Today there is a post on Commentary’s blog that is so insightful and important that I will reproduce it here with a few thoughts of my own. Bill Clinton was famous for “triangulating” policy, splitting the difference between the Democrats, who hated free trade and welfare reform, and Republicans who hated his “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” compromise on gays in the military and his weakness on national security. The author of the post points out that national security itself has never been the subject of triangulation. Clinton’s weakness in responding to the repeated attacks on foreign soil by al Qeada was the consequence of his policy choices and advisors, like Anthony Lake. He doesn’t seem to have done it for electoral purposes alone although few Democrats had any appetite for adventures abroad.

Obama seems to be risking national security in his attempt to do the minimum necessary to protect the country and keep his leftist credentials intact. Here is the original piece in the NY Times.

As President Obama defends his national security strategy, he faces a daunting challenge. He must convince the country that it is in safe hands despite warnings to the contrary from the right, and at the same time persuade the skeptical left that it is enough to amend his predecessor’s approach rather than abandon it.

Arguably on the defensive over policy for the first time since taking office, Mr. Obama is gambling that his oratorical powers can reassure the public that bringing terrorism suspects to prisons on American soil will not put the public in danger.

At the same time, he must explain and win support for a nuanced set of positions that fall somewhere between George W. Bush and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Rather than an easily labeled program, Mr. Obama is picking seemingly disparate elements from across the policy continuum — banning torture and other harsh interrogation techniques but embracing the endless detention of certain terror suspects without trial, closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, but retaining the military commissions held there.

A caller to Hugh Hewitt’s show yesterday emphasized just how dangerous the policy of closing Guantanamo and incarcerating terrorists in US prisons will be. The caller is a corrections officer in a California prison. He explained the realities of the life of gang leaders in US prisons. They immediately declare themselves “pro per” or representing themselves in place of a court appointed lawyer. This gives them access to computers and allows meetings with all sorts of outsiders and other prisoners. Many large gangs are run from prison in this fashion. It will be immediately apparent to these jihadists that a “pro per” request will be the ticket to return to the battlefield, even while physically confined in a US prison.

This is exceedingly dangerous for all of us. And there is no excuse except politics for this action.

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Posted in politics, terrorism | Comments Closed

Obama-Netanyahu

Monday, May 18th, 2009

Bibi Netanyahu is in Washington today to talk to President Obama. Last week, I was very concerned about some tough talk that had come out of the Obama administration. This week the concern seems to have been premature. Obama has been cautious in action, much more cautious than in talk. Theodore Roosevelt famously proposed to “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Obama appears to believe the opposite.

Obama is much stronger politically, but he has consistently acted with caution, particularly in the foreign policy arena. Much of his foreign policy follows from the Bush administration. He has made no major breaks in foreign policy beyond rhetoric; his policies on Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Russia and Europe are essentially extensions of pre-existing policy. Obama faces major economic problems in the United States and clearly is not looking for major changes in foreign policy. He understands how quickly public sentiment can change, and he does not plan to take risks he does not have to take right now.

I don’t know if the serious people Obama has to deal with across the world will grow tired of his lies but, for now, they are better than his proposals. The realities of the situation make his previous assertions about a two-state solution sound foolish.

The foundation of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process for years has been the assumption that there would be a two-state solution. Such a solution has not materialized for a host of reasons. First, at present there are two Palestinian entities, Gaza and the West Bank, which are hostile to each other. Second, the geography and economy of any Palestinian state would be so reliant on Israel that independence would be meaningless; geography simply makes the two-state proposal almost impossible to implement. Third, no Palestinian government would have the power to guarantee that rogue elements would not launch rockets at Israel, potentially striking at the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem corridor, Israel’s heartland. And fourth, neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis have the domestic political coherence to allow any negotiator to operate from a position of confidence. Whatever the two sides negotiated would be revised and destroyed by their political opponents, and even their friends.

So, the two-state solution is a delusion. What comes next ?

Overall, Israel is a conservative power. In terms of nation-states, it does not want upheaval; it is quite content with the current regimes in the Arab world. But Netanyahu would love to see an international conference with the Arab states roundly condemning Israel publicly. This would shore up the justification for Netanyahu’s policies domestically while simultaneously creating a framework for reshaping world opinion by showing an Israel isolated among hostile states.

Obama is likely hearing through diplomatic channels from the Arab countries that they do not want to participate directly in the Palestinian peace process. And the United States really does not want them there, either. The peace process normally ends in a train wreck anyway, and Obama is in no hurry to see the wreckage.

So, once again, it is all theater and talk, no substance. Since most of Obama’s policies fit that description, it should be no problem.

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Another Democrat veteran

Saturday, May 16th, 2009

This is so common, beginning with John Kerry’s “Winter Soldier” farce in the 70s, that is shouldn’t surprise anyone anymore but watch out for veterans who support left wing Democrats. Until Vietnam, this was a rare circumstance. The occasional politician inflated his resume, like Senator Tom Harkin and even a couple of “oldest Civil War veterans.”

The same year, Iowa Senator (and later presidential candidate) Tom Harkin boasted that he had flown F-4s and F-8s on combat air patrols and photo-reconnaissance support missions in Vietnam. No, wait, it was combat sorties over Cuba, he corrected himself when challenged by Senator Berry Goldwater. Harkin finally acknowledged that he had never seen combat — that his military experience consisted of ferrying damaged aircraft for repairs from Japan to the Philippines.

Kerry started the current wave of anti-war “veterans” with his treasonous conduct in 1972. His “winter soldier” media circus, the name taken from “The Crisis, a pamphlet by Thomas Paine, was supposed to indicate that these anti-war veterans were the real patriots. Except:

Enemy documents from 1971 show that Vietnamese communists guided the American antiwar movement via meetings between the communist delegations to the Paris Peace talks and American antiwar activists. John Kerry and the VVAW were working toward the exact goals set forth in the communist directives.

Well, the present anti-war veterans seem to have an agenda, as well. Elect anti-war Democrats who will lose the Iraq War.

Rick Strandlof, executive director of the Colorado Veterans Alliance and the man most colleagues knew as Rick Duncan, was front and center during the 2008 political campaigns in Colorado.

He spoke at a Barack Obama veterans rally in front of the Capitol in July, co-hosted several events with then- congressional candidate Jared Polis and attacked Republican Senate candidate Bob Schaffer in a TV ad paid for by the national group Votevets.org.

And the mostly Democratic candidates he supported — looking for credibility on veterans issues and the war — lapped it up appreciatively.

Now, politicians are dealing with news that the man they believed to be a former Marine and war veteran wounded in Iraq by a roadside bomb, in fact, never served in the military — but did spend time in a mental hospital.

Oh well, another Democrat veteran. It may have elected Clare McCaskill to the Senate in 2006.

There may be a problem with one of the most effective television ads being run by Democrat for U.S. Senate candidate Claire McCaskill. Her campaign can’t prove it is true, KMBC’s Micheal Mahoney reported.
The commercial is called “Josh.” It is named after Kansas Citian Josh Lansdale, a medic who served and was wounded in Iraq. “I returned from Iraq with a busted ankle and post-traumatic stress. It was six months before I could see a doctor,” Lansdale said in the McCaskill ad.
Officials with the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Kansas City said Iraqi vets like Lansdale are priority veterans. “We see them within 30 days of their entry into our system,” said Jane Alley of the VA Medical Center.
…Mahoney reported that he went to one of the addresses for Lansdale, and for more than a week, Mahoney and the McCaskill campaign tried to contact Lansdale. Mahoney said he even asked Lansdale’s mother to have him call KMBC.
In one brief telephone conversation, Lansdale praised the VA’s mental health program, but he complained about how his ankle problem was treated. Mahoney said that indicates some sort of contact, but if, when and for how long cannot be determined.
…Mahoney reported that since Lansdale would not meet with him to answer questions or take phone calls from the McCaskill campaign, he was unable to prove the accuracy of Lansdale’s claim. The commercial is no longer airing on KMBC-TV.

But she won the election. Her credentials ? She was the widow of a former governor.

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War is coming

Saturday, May 9th, 2009

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Here is David Pryce-Jones opinion on the coming meeting between Obama and Netanyahu.

UPDATE #2: The London Times tomorrow will have this story, with the same theme as below.

The critical juncture will be what comes out of the Obama-Netanyahu meeting. If there is procrastination by Israel on the two-state solution or there is no clear American vision for how this is going to play out in 2009, then all the tremendous credibility that Obama has worldwide and in this region will evaporate overnight if nothing comes out in May. All eyes will be looking to Washington in May. If there are no clear signals and no clear directives to all of us, then there will be a feeling that this is just another American government that is going to let us all down.

UPDATE: The NY Times dutifully regurgitates the Obama line on Israel. Israel is building parks in East Jerusalem, an action viewed as enhancing their ownership of the city.

“Everything Israel does now will be highly contentious,” said Robert H. Serry, the United Nations special Middle East coordinator, on a recent tour of East Jerusalem. He warned the Israeli authorities “not to take actions that could pour oil on the fire.”

The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says, however, that it will push ahead. Interior Minister Eli Yishai said last week of the activity in one core area: “I intend to act on this issue with full strength. This is the land of our sovereignty. Jewish settlement there is our right.”

As part of the plan, garbage dumps and wastelands are being cleared and turned into lush gardens and parks, now already accessible to visitors who can walk along new footpaths and take in the majestic views, along with new signs and displays that point out significant points of Jewish history.

The parts of the city that are being developed were captured in the 1967 Middle East war, but their annexation by Israel was never recognized abroad.

The fact that the holiest site in all of Judaism is included was not mentioned in the article.

Israeli officials point out that when East Jerusalem was in Jordanian hands from 1949 to 1967, dozens of synagogues in the Jewish Quarter were destroyed, Jewish graves were desecrated and Jewish authorities were largely denied access to the Western Wall or other shrines. By contrast, in Jerusalem today Muslim and Christian authorities administer their holy sites in a complex power arrangement under Israeli control.

This doesn’t matter to Obama. He has his own agenda; making friends with Islam. The Palestinians even deny that Jews ever lived there.

At the same time, the Web site of Al Quds University, one of the most important Palestinian institutions, states that the Western Wall, the remnant of the Jewish temple destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70, was probably built by the Romans because the temple could not have stood there.

There is no scholarly dispute about whether the temple stood beneath what is today the Aksa Mosque compound.

These are the people Obama is trying to make friends with. Israel stands in his way.

The Obama administration is taking steps that, if carried through, will lead to a Middle east war within two years. He has been on an apology tour of Europe and is now planning more “outreach” to the Islamic world. No doubt this will be an attempt to depict the US as a cuddly, friendly little cub that no one would fear or distrust. Unfortunately, cuddly, friendly cubs get eaten unless there is a mother bear nearby. We have been that mother bear for the past 64 years but Obama seems determined to end that. His target is Israel.

His administration is planning to present Israel with a fait accompli with regard to the Palestinians.

Using the annual AIPAC conference as a backdrop, this week the Obama administration launched its harshest onslaught against Israel to date. It began with media reports that National Security Adviser James Jones told a European foreign minister that the US is planning to build an anti-Israel coalition with the Arabs and Europe to compel Israel to surrender Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to the Palestinians.

According to Haaretz, Jones was quoted in a classified foreign ministry cable as having told his European interlocutor, “The new administration will convince Israel to compromise on the Palestinian question. We will not push Israel under the wheels of a bus, but we will be more forceful toward Israel than we have been under Bush.”

He then explained that the US, the EU and the moderate Arab states must determine together what “a satisfactory endgame solution,” will be.

As far as Jones is concerned, Israel should be left out of those discussions and simply presented with a fait accompli that it will be compelled to accept.

I think Bibi Netanyahu knows enough history to recall Czechoslovakia in 1938. I wonder if Obama does ?

As far as the Obama administration is concerned, Israel is the only obstacle to peace.

To make certain that Israel understands this central point, Vice President Joseph Biden used his appearance at the AIPAC conference to drive it home. As Biden made clear, the US doesn’t respect or support Israel’s right as a sovereign state to determine its own policies for securing its national interests. In Biden’s words, “Israel has to work toward a two-state solution. You’re not going to like my saying this, but not build more settlements, dismantle existing outposts and allow the Palestinians freedom of movement.”

What Obama may not understand is that the Jews will not be complicit in another Holocaust, no matter his convenience and his desire to accommodate Muslims.

As Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel made clear in his closed-door briefing to senior AIPAC officials this week, the administration is holding Israel indirectly responsible for Iran’s nuclear program. It does this by claiming that Israel’s refusal to cede its land to the Palestinians is making it impossible for the Arab world to support preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Does anyone else remember Chamberlain’s words ?

Speaking over British radio, in words that again ring
familiar, Chamberlain called the Czech issue “a quarrel in a
faraway country between people of whom we know nothing,” and
observed that “however much we may sympathize with a small nation
confronted by a big and powerful neighbor, we cannot in all
circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in
war simply on her account. If we have to fight, it must be on
larger issues than that. … War is a fearful thing.”

I would suggest that Obama consider the consequences of convincing Israel that they are alone, or worse, that we sympathize with their enemies. For the consequences, you might read this report by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

he expects, writes Martin Walker of United Press International,

some 16 million to 28 million Iranians dead within 21 days, and between 200,000 and 800,000 Israelis dead within the same time frame. The total of deaths beyond 21 days could rise very much higher, depending on civil defense and public health facilities, where Israel has a major advantage.

It is theoretically possible that the Israeli state, economy and organized society might just survive such an almost-mortal blow. Iran would not survive as an organized society. “Iranian recovery is not possible in the normal sense of the term,” Cordesman notes. The difference in the death tolls is largely because Israel is believed to have more nuclear weapons of very much higher yield (some of 1 megaton), and Israel is deploying the Arrow advanced anti-missile system in addition to its Patriot batteries. Fewer Iranian weapons would get through.

The report also points out that Israel, backed into a corner, would most likely strike at its other potential enemies, including hostile Arab states. The fallout would probably mean the end of the Age of Petroleum, since the oil fields in the Middle East would be unusable for decades.

I don’t think Obama is equipped to make these judgements. He is starting down a very dangerous road with no evidence that he understands the risks. Neither did Chamberlain.

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Posted in energy, financial, History, Israel, military, politics, science, terrorism | 5 Comments »

The culture war

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

The past eight years has seen the growth of a culture war between traditional values, like marriage and religious belief, and cultural attitudes toward gay rights, gay marriage and the environment. Some of these differences have become heated, such as animosity toward religious believers by gay marriage advocates. Another set of values that is under attack could be called “fiscal prudence” or “The Protestant Ethic.” We work and save and get an education and eventually we own something like a house and a car and some money in the bank. Recently the latter value system has come under attack by a political party that believes in “spreading the money around.” When I was a child, there was a nursery story called “The Three Little Pigs” which emphasized the point that the prudent person is safest in the long run.

Of course, John Maynard Keynes dismissed this idea by pointing out that In the long run we are all dead.

The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again.

We can see that our present leadership is firmly of the belief that short term plans are best because who knows what the future brings ? What we see right now is a war on capitlalism and saving and investing.

There is a major cultural schism developing in America. But it’s not over abortion, same-sex marriage or home schooling, as important as these issues are. The new divide centers on free enterprise — the principle at the core of American culture.

Despite President Barack Obama’s early personal popularity, we can see the beginnings of this schism in the “tea parties” that have sprung up around the country. In these grass-roots protests, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans have joined together to make public their opposition to government deficits, unaccountable bureaucratic power, and a sense that the government is too willing to prop up those who engaged in corporate malfeasance and mortgage fraud.

The data support the protesters’ concerns. In a publication with the ironic title, “A New Era of Responsibility,” the president’s budget office reveals average deficits of 4.7% in the five years after this recession is over. The Congressional Budget Office predicts $9.3 trillion in new debt over the coming decade.

The US educational system has been busy re-educating the youth about capitalism and the free market.

Just 35% of American voters believe that a free market economy is the same as a capitalist economy. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 38% disagree and 27% are not sure.
This helps explain earlier data showing that 77% prefer a free market economy over a government managed economy while just 53% prefer capitalism over socialism.

That is surprising since I don’t know how a free market operates in any but a capitalist system. I expect that this is a consequence of Marxist professors teaching college students that capitalism, a word coined by Marx, is bad. They aren’t completely stupid, though, because they don’t think the government can run the auto companies. Only 18% expect Obama to do a good job with them. I guess that’s his base. Democrats, as expected, are clueless.

However, two-thirds of Democrats (67%) say it is at least somewhat likely that Chrysler and GM will become profitable again under union and government ownership, a view shared by just 34% of Republicans and 33% of unaffiliated adults.

What is going on ? We are seeing the Chicago Way in action as the Obama people threaten those, like the Chrysler secured creditors, who would like the law to apply instead of Obama “spread it around” favoritism. Megan McArdle, who voted for Obama, has reservations but a little late. We could have told her.

This is troubling, because it’s now clear that the worry many of us had at the time of the bank bailouts has come true: the government is using its intervention in the banking system to pressure banks to give special deals to the government’s special friends.

(The government is apparently still taking the line that they are only intervening because the automakers are splendid, robust companies that got caught in a “perfect storm”. If so, Chrysler must be stuck in the Bermuda Triangle, because owners have been playing “hot potato” with its dying brands for most of the last decade.)

Countries that use their banking systems this way don’t get good results. If you’re a fairly uncorrupt developed country, you get slower growth and bloated “critical” sectors that are usually more critical in providing campaign support, lavishly remunerated make-work jobs, and photo ops, than any products the public actually wants. Then, if something like Japan happens, you have a twenty-year “lost decade” while everyone pretends as hard as hard can be that everything is all right, in the sincere but misguided believe that wishing hard enough will make it so.

If you are a badly managed country, you end up like much of Latin America or Africa, with a dysfunctional economy that booms only along with the price of some commodity you happen to produce.

We are hardly Zimbabwe, or even Venezuela. But if we keep using TARP to create a sort of “Most Favored Borrower” status, we’ll erode the safeguards that keep election to office in America from being the kind of giant spoils system that’s common in much of the world. What the bankruptcy judge did was entirely right and proper–it’s his job to allocate losses among creditors. And it’s always true that some of the credtiors won’t like the deal they get. On the other hand, what the administration did really wasn’t. It got its pet majority stakeholders to screw both their own shareholders, and the other creditors, in order to give a powerful union a sweetheart deal.

Imagine even having to say that “We are not Zimbabwe” under the last president.

This will not end well.

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Posted in financial, politics | 13 Comments »

Obama’s foreign policy

Sunday, April 26th, 2009

We have seen over the past several weeks the Obama approach to foreign policy. He has been on an apology tour from Europe to South America. At the Summit of the Americas conference, he was humiliated by Hugo Chavez when that Venezuelan dictator handed Obama a leftist book that blames all of Latin America’s problems on the bad old USA. Obama, of course, didn’t realize that he was being humiliated, which makes it even worse. Now that the atmospherics are about over, serious issues are coming to a head, especially in Pakistan.

The Pakistani government, a supposedly democratic one is headed by former felon, Asif Ali Zardari, husband of slain leader Benazir Bhutto. Previously known as “Mister 10%”, he has a reputation as a corrupt, but very rich, man. Last fall, the Pakistan government signed a truce with the Taliban that included Sharia law in a large part of the country. It is no surprise that the truce only emboldened the Taliban who now threaten to take over the country with its nuclear arsenal.

Obama will thus have a chance to show his mettle a bit sooner than we feared. Things are happening very fast.

Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, accused Pakistan this week of “abdicating to the Taleban”, which “poses a mortal threat to the security and safety of our country and the world”. … Mrs Clinton’s remarks followed a recent deal between Mr Zardari and the Taleban in the Swat Valley, allowing them to establish a fundamentalist enclave in the former tourist area in exchange for laying down their arms.

The Taleban have not disarmed, and this week its fighters poured out of Swat into the neighbouring district of Buner, taking control of government buildings and digging in at strategic positions around the major towns.

I’m sure Hillary’s disapproval will galvanize the Paks to fight back. Obama, no doubt, will give this all serious thought and look pensive. Of course, his peace and apology offensive has not emboldened the Paks who wonder what he will do next to undercut their defenses.

However, the administration itself has been talking about negotiating with the moderate Taliban for some time. Carlotta Gall, writing in the New York Times, said last month that preliminary talks had already begun. “Even as President Obama floated the idea of negotiating with moderate elements of the Taliban, Afghan and foreign officials here said that preliminary discussions with the Taliban leadership were already under way and could be developed into more formal talks with the support of the United States.” While it is difficult to equate the Pakistani agreement with any that Washington is contemplating, the Pakistani experience underscores how badly wrong ‘peace deals’ can go.

Indeed.

Maybe the Paks have learned that we are now supporting al Qeada terrorists in Somalia.

Well, unlike that false urban legend about US sponsoring Islamist terrorists, it’s my sad duty to report that today the US is sponsoring Islamist terrorists. Directly.

I’ve mentioned Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys in the past, but today he officially returned to Somalia to join the US and UN sponsored reconciliation government, but let me recap why his return means that the US is now directly funding terrorists.

Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys was once heavily funded by Osama bin Laden, helped shield the US embassy bombers form justice, and is on the U.S. State Department’s list of designated terrorists:

Designated on November 7, 2001…
Hassan Dahir Aweys

Are you getting this? The U.S. State Department has Aweys on their list of designated terrorists. This means that all of Aweys assets are to be frozen.
But it’s not just the U.S. that has designated Aweys a terrorist. So, too, has the UN:

A U.N. Security Council resolution has designated Aweys as a terrorist
Today Aweys is back in Somalia as part of the new government.
The very same government that is backed by the US:

Does anyone else get the feeling that Obama is more comfortable with our enemies than our allies ? I still remember Jimmy Carter deciding to throw his lot in with Ayatolah Khomeini in Iran and allowed the Shah, an old ally, to be thrown out. At least Iran did not have nuclear weapons, then.

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Posted in military, politics, terrorism | 1 Comment »

Tortured logic

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

UPDATE #2: Well, maybe not. With Obama, one never knows for sure.

UPDATE: Obama seems to be backing away from the issue but that’s nothing new.

We now have a debate going on in this country over whether some of the detainees at Guantanamo and prisoners of our war with radical Islam were tortured. There has been a lot of speculation before this based on International Red Cross statements and books by radical leftist writers like Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. This week, Hugh Hewitt had a valuable debate on his radio show between two law professors, one a leftist and the other conservative. The debate was stimulated by several developments in the controversy, one release of previously classified memos from the Justice Department on whether the techniques used by the CIA constituted torture. These memos concluded that such techniques as waterboarding were not torture.

Many on the right think release of these memos will harm the country. Obama visited the CIA to try to reassure the Agency that he does not want to harm its ability to defend us. He has also promised that no CIA employee will be prosecuted for following the advice given in the memos. He initially made the same promise about the lawyers who provided the opinions of legality of the techniques, now called torture by the left. Since then, he has reversed course, leaving the question of prosecution open.

Let’s read a bit of the debate from Hugh Hewitt’s guests to get the tone. First, professor Chemerinsky, the new Dean of UCI Law School:

EC: I am pronouncing no judgment on anyone. I am saying, though, based on the Jane Mayer book The Dark Side, the Red Cross report and these torture memos, that there is evidence that international law and domestic law was violated. The law…

HH: Erwin, stop right there. What evidence have you got, not Jane Mayer, she’s not credible, she has been discredited many, many times. But what evidence do you point to that’s not contested that says these, Jay Bybee, Judge Bybee broke any law?

EC: First, I strongly disagree about your attack on Jane Mayer. I think her book describes in detail torture that occurred. The Red Cross report describes it. And these torture memos describe things that are clearly cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. Now the question is what caused such torture to occur, assuming that it did? If it could be shown that the actions of Dick Cheney, David Addington, Jay Bybee, and John Yoo among others, led to individuals being tortured, then I think that’s war crimes and they ought to be prosecuted.

So, Professor Chemerinsky relies on a book by a controversial writer to decide what is torture. There is more detail further on.

I think there’s two questions here. First, were individuals tortured by those under American command? I think if you read the Jane Mayer book, you read the Red Cross report, there’s no doubt that individuals were tortured. Waterboarding has been regarded as torture since the early 20th Century. Forcing men to be nude except for diapers is degrading treatment. Physical pain by prolonged staying in the same position is torture. Jane Mayer describes individuals who literally died as a result of torture by American officials. So the first question is did torture occur? We have to investigate. The second question is if so, why did it occur? If the memos that were written led to the torture occurring, then I think they’re responsible. I don’t think they can hide behind being part of Office of Legal Counsel. I don’t think they can hide by saying it was just memos. If their memos led to torture, then they’re responsible just as memos that might have led to Nazi gas chambers are responsible for that resulting. And I do intentionally liken it, torture, to what the Nazis did.

So, we don’t see much doubt there. It looks to me like we are about to disarm the country in a war that is chiefly being fought with intelligence techniques. Why would Obama go after Bush Administration people like this when it has never been done before ?

Well, there is a precedent. In the Reagan Administration, there was a political witch hunt called “Iran Contra.” Some detail is here. Almost all the literature on this affair is deeply colored by politics. At the bottom, it was a political difference- whether to fund the Contras, a rebel group trying to overthrow the Sandanistas, a communist dictatorship installed by the Soviets when Jimmy Carter refused to support the Somoza Regime in Nicaragua. Reagan was banned by Congress from funding them so he turned to private individuals to fill the gap until Congress changed its mind. A Special Prosecutor named Lawrence Walsh indicted a number of Reagan officials, including Cap Weinberger, Secretary of Defense who had had nothing to do with the scandal. Weinberger was pardoned eventually by George Bush.

In essence, the Democrats have been successful in criminalizing policy differences. Ray Donovan, Secretary of labor in Reagan’s Adminstration, was such a case and after he was exonerated by a jury, he asked Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?” Often, the process alone can bankrupt the targeted official, even forcing him to settle rather than go bankrupt with legal fees. Something like that was done with Michael Milken, who pleaded guilty to avoid having his brother indicted. The technique, in the hands of an unscrupulous prosecutor, can be devastating. Why would Obama do this ? Maybe the New York Times has the answer.

Mr. Obama and his allies need to discredit the techniques he has banned. Otherwise, in the event of a future terrorist attack, critics may blame his decision to rein in C.I.A. interrogators.

There, I believe, is the motive for this shameful decision. He is already anticipating that his actions may result in another attack. He wants to avoid responsibility. Harry Truman said “The buck stops here” but that was a long time ago and the Democratic party was a very different organization.

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Posted in politics, terrorism | 3 Comments »

Obama cuts spending

Monday, April 20th, 2009

Today, Obama announced that he has instructed his cabinet secretaries to cut a total of $100 million from the federal budget. In a federal budget of $4 trillion, that is a rounding error. What is going on? The Obama people do everything with a view to campaigning, not governing. They appear to believe that the American public cannot handle large numbers and will think $100 million is a substantial cut in the budget. They may be correct, at least for Obama voters.

Michael Ramirez always seems to get the idea into a cartoon. The question is whether the US economy can survive Obama’s machinations and those of his crew. The people who ran the Titanic into the iceberg were skilled, unlike the Obama clowns.

Even Paul Krugman is dismissive.

Let’s say the administration finds $100 million in efficiencies every working day for the rest of the Obama administration’s first term. That’s still around $80 billion, or around 2% of one year’s federal spending.

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Posted in financial, politics | 7 Comments »

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