Seth Leibson 04-27-2012

Time To Wake Up

April 27, 2012

As Broadcast on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America

By Seth Leibsohn



Dwight Lyman Moody put it this way: “The best way to show that a stick is crooked is not to argue about it or to spend time denouncing it, but to lay a straight stick alongside it.”  I’ve always liked that quote, and I think it’s an excellent instruction in how to comport ones’ self on a daily basis—in character, integrity, and in facing adversity.  But I’ve been thinking about that quote all week as I’ve been thinking about our politics, our presidential campaign, and our country.  Because, at the end of the analysis of this administration’s past three and a half years, I’m worried that a contrast in character of the candidates is simply not enough, not in politics, not in the politics we have to contend with today.



And yet, denouncing and arguing hasn’t worked either; at least not the way we’ve been doing it, and not thus far.  The RealClearPolitics average of polls right now has Obama up over Romney, by nearly four points.  That tells me this is a close election.  And everything can get shaken up—Carter was trouncing Reagan at various times throughout 1979 and 1980, too.


But there’s something different going on this time.  In this election, race will be invoked—we already see that.  Religion will be invoked—we already see that.  Economic divisiveness will be invoked—we already see that.  And we can never expect that the mainstream media will give our side a fair shake.  We have a lot of work cut out for ourselves.  Perhaps a lot more than usual.



So I’m thinking it may be time to start turning the language of Barack Obama around, taking it upon ourselves, and appealing to the fundamental decency of our fellow citizens.  President Obama likes to talk about fairness.  A lot.  And so, too, should we.



I’d like to start with some questions on first responsibilities.  The Constitution says we wrote our Constitution—and wrote our nation into existence—to, among other things (and just a few other things at that), “Provide for the common defence” and “to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”  And so, John Jay, wrote in the Third Federalist Paper: “Among the many objects to which a wise and free people find it necessary to direct their attention, that of providing for their SAFETY seems to be the first.”  And he defined “SAFETY” this way: “as it respects security for the preservation of peace and tranquility, as well as against dangers from FOREIGN ARMS AND INFLUENCE, as from dangers of the LIKE KIND arising from domestic causes.”



So, a few questions:  Is it fair to the American people, is it fair to our allies, is it fair to our military (and please keep in mind how much both parties like to speak about how much they care about our soldiers) that President Obama has put forth plans to cut our military?  Is it fair that he wants to cut it so much we will only be able to fight in one land war at a time?  Is it fair to our military that he is also cutting the salaries, health care and retirement benefits of our current military?



Is it fair to our allies that he stripped them of Missile Defense, in order to appease Russia?  And has Russia done anything for us in return?  Was it fair to the American people that President Obama signed a treaty with Russia that gave Russia a veto over American missile defenses?



How about other friends:  Was it fair that President Obama bowed to China in refusing to meet with the Dalai Lama—his fellow Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, for goodness sakes?  In fact, let’s quote the Dalai Lama, because he says something else that I’ve always liked and contemplate a lot:  “Our chief purpose in this life is to help other people. And if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them.”  Is that the Obama record?



Let us continue:  Is it fair to the American people, has it helped them or has it actually hurt them, that President Obama killed off the jobs creating and energy producing XL Pipeline from Canada?  And that his administration is responsible for “canceled leases on federal lands in Utah,” “suspended leases in Montana,” “delayed leases in Colorado and Utah, and canceled lease sales off the Virginia coast,” according to Investors Business Daily?  Is it fair to the American people, has it helped them or has it actually hurt them, that his canceling of domestic energy efforts and slow walking of permits has taken place as the price of gasoline has gone up at the same time, from $1.83 a gallon to almost four dollars a gallon?



Is it fair to the American people, has it helped them or has it actually hurt them, that unemployment has gone up under his presidency and we’ve had the longest streak of over eight percent unemployment since the Great Depression?  But the real unemployment rate, to quote Jim Pethokoukis, isn’t even close to eight percent: if you include “the discouraged plus part-timers who wish they had full time work. That unemployment rate, perhaps the truest measure of the labor market’s health, is a sky-high 14.9%.”  Is that fair to the American people, has it helped them or has it actually hurt them?  relic



Is it fair to the American people, has it helped them or has it actually hurt them, that this administration has increased the national debt five trillion dollars? Is it fair to the American people, has it helped them or has it actually hurt them, that President Obama has not submitted a budget with less than one trillion dollars in deficit spending even as he promised to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term?



I’ve not even spoken of what I think will be the twin foreign policy relics of his presidency: Egypt and Iran. Is it fair to the American people, has it helped them or has it actually hurt them; was it fair to the Egyptian people, has it helped them or has it actually hurt them; was it fair to the Israelis, has it helped them or has it actually hurt them that President Obama assisted in ushering out our ally Hosni Mubarak in Egypt only to create a situation where the Muslim Brotherhood would take over that country?  A take over, by the way, that has turned the Sinai into a terror zone and that just this week witnessed the canceling (by Egypt) of natural gas supplies to Israel.



Was it fair to the American people, has it helped them or has it actually hurt them, that when a radical Islamic nation at war with us for over thirty years and attempting to acquire nuclear weapons had its own revolution in the streets, a revolution poised to topple that nation, this President said we would not meddle—ensuring the safety and sanctity of the radical Islamic regime?  I’m of course speaking of Iran.  Was it fair to the Iranian people, did it help them or did it actually hurt them that President Obama said we would not meddle, even as protestors in the streets were asking “Where’s Obama?”



Now, let us go to the news of this week:  Has it been fair to the American people, has it helped them or has it actually hurt them, that he not only criticized Arizona for trying to tamp down on illegal immigration with a law that mirrored the federal law but then went on to sue the state and encourage boycotts?  Has it been fair to the American people, has it helped them or has it actually hurt them, that he allowed the Mexican president—standing by his side—to condemn Arizona?  Has it been fair to the American people, has it helped them or has it actually hurt them, that he has allowed his State Department officials to compare Arizona’s illegal immigration law to the Chinese as being on par with China’s human rights abuses?



By the way: If you want what we were told was one of the best defenses of Arizona, see the op-ed Bill and I did in 2010 for National Review.  It’s linked here and at BillBennett.com



On the domestic tranquility and common defense front, just one last question:  Is it fair to the American people, will it help them or will it actually hurt them, to take the posture, as was done this week, that the war on terror is over?  Here’s the story from the non-partisan, the exquisitely non-partisan, National Journal: “The Obama administration is taking a new view of Islamist radicalism. The president realizes he has no choice but to cultivate the Muslim Brotherhood and other relatively "moderate" Islamist groups emerging as lead political players out of the Arab Spring in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere.”  Thus, “The war on terror is over,” according to the State Department.



So finally, is it fair to the American people, will it help them or will it actually hurt them, to believe there is no choice but to cultivate the Muslim Brotherhood and call Islamist groups “moderate?”  By the way, the official motto of the Muslim Brotherhood, as we cannot tire of stating: “Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”  And Hamas—on our State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, the group that trains children in martyrdom in camp, school, and on television—is a self-identified Muslim Brotherhood organization.



Fairness to America and her friends.  Helpful to America and her friends.  Hurtful to American and her friends.  Just what is the straight stick and what, at long last, is the crooked one?  And just what will it mean to ratify this history?  That, perhaps, is the most crucial question of all.

Rumors of War III

Want to Know More About the Militant Islamist Groups Exposed in ‘Rumors of War III’? This Companion Profile Tells You

On Wednesday evening GBTV unveiled the highly anticipated special, “Rumors of War III, Target U.S.” The documentary examined how radical Islamist groups including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood, are gaining a foothold in America, be it via the growing threat of Mexican drug cartels or the infiltration of Muslim Brotherhood mouthpieces in the U.S. government. Given that the Obama administration has essentially declared the war on terror over, it seems some have chosen to dismiss the power, reach and actual motivations of these militant groups. In order to understand the threat, however, one must understand who these Islamists really are — their roots, ideology and ultimate stated goals.

The Muslim Brotherhood: “Jihad is our way” 

Founded in 1928 by Egyptian schoolteacher and staunch Adolf Hitler admirer, Hasan al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood is no new-comer to the game of radical Islam. In fact, the Sunni group is considered the oldest and most powerful Islamist organization in the world to date. It is the ideological predecessor of Hamas, Hezbollah and even al Qaeda. Active in at least 70 countries around the world (some estimates claim 100), the Brotherhood’s long-stated purpose is to provide resistance to the secularization and westernization of Islamic nations by promoting the tenets of the Quran and its “legal” framework, Shariah law. Further, its ultimate goal was to be the destruction of non-Islamic states through jihad — or holy war — resulting in the establishment of an Islamic caliphate — one that would eclipse the whole of the western world and beyond.

While sympathizers decry reference to the Brotherhood’s roots as merely overblown scare-tactics leveled by right-wing ”extremists,” their claim that the group is largely secular flies in the face of the entity’s very name: Muslim Brotherhood; and its motto: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Quran is our law. Jihad [struggle] is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”
Perhaps one of the reasons some believe the Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate group and force for good is through the group’s seemingly extensive community service work. A cursory glance at the Brotherhood and one sees the veneer of a socially-conscious organization focused on youth-outreach, school and mosque development, and even the coordination and promotion of sporting events for the betterment of the community. Once the veil is lifted and the group’s historical ideology is examined, however, a more sinister reality emerges.

According to analysis conducted by Discover the Networks and Jewish Virtual Library, in the 1930s, the Brotherhood was mainly an underground, paramilitary organization that amassed weapons and operated “clandestine camps that provided instruction in military and terrorist tactics.” By the mid-1940s the Brotherhood in Egypt boasted roughly 1,500 branches and by 1948 a membership that is estimated to have exceeded 2 million. During that time period, the late, disgraced PLO leader Yasser Arafat fought alongside his Muslim Brethren.

Of the Brotherhood’s dual identity, scholar Martin Kramer stated:

“On one level, they operated openly, as a membership organization of social and political awakening. Banna preached moral revival, and the Muslim Brethren engaged in good works. On another level, however, the Muslim Brethren created a ‘secret apparatus’ that acquired weapons and trained adepts in their use. Some of its guns were deployed against the Zionists in Palestine in 1948, but the Muslim Brethren also resorted to violence in Egypt. They began to enforce their own moral teachings by intimidation, and they initiated attacks against Egypt’s Jews.”

In keeping with its budding penchant for violent opposition, the Brotherhood assassinated then-Egyptian Prime Minister Mahmud Fahmi Nuqrashi in 1948, resulting in the group’s exile from Egypt and inevitably, the assassination of its own founder, al-Banna. Those who did not flee were imprisoned by the thousands, but that did not stop the militant Islamist Brotherhood. The remaining members simply disbursed to satellite locations in Transjordan, Palestine and Syria, many of whom participated in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948.
One of the Brotherhood’s more radical factions was led by writer and ideologue Sayyid Qutb. who Discover the Networks reports advocated armed conflict against non-Islamist states in the Middle East and ultimately, Western infidel nations. DTN describes Qutb this way:

Qutb — whose wordview distinguished sharply between “the Party of Allah and the Party of Satan,” — declared that Egyptian society under the secular Nasser was contrary to authentic Islam. Asserting that the Prophet Mohammad himself would have rejected such a government, Qutb claimed that Muslims had both a right and an obligation to resist it. Qutb’s writings — which challenged the views of mainstream Sunni theologians, who extolled the Islamic tradition of deference to the state and ruler — are now cited by many scholars as some of the first formulations of political Islam.

DTN continues by describing that the lynchpin of Qutb’s “fundamentalist critique” of Egyptian society was his “abiding contempt for the Western, especially the United States, which he regarded as spiritually vacant, decadent, idolatrous and fundamentally hostile to Islamic piety.”

While Qutbs influence was rising, however, the Muslim Brotherhood’s reign of terror almost came to an end in 1954 after one of its members, Abdul Munim Abdul Rauf, attempted to assassinate then-President Nasser. Ironically, the permission the Brotherhood had received to re-enter the country was hence revoked and Nasser put what can only be described as a fatwa on the militant group, burning down its headquarters and arresting approximately 15,000 members — some of whom were executed– notably, Qutb.
In an article for the Middle East Forum scholar Raymond Ibrahim considered what provoked such a violent reaction in Nasser (other than his assassination attempt). He wrote:

“Nasser, a pious Muslim, was most likely intimately, if not instinctively, aware of what the Brotherhood was—and still is: he was aware that it is impossible for Muslim organizations committed to theocratic rule to negotiate or share power, much less be trustworthy allies. In short, Nasser was aware that, once the opportunity presented itself, the Brotherhood would do everything in its power to take over: unlike secular parties concerned with the temporal, it has a divine mandate — a totalitarian vision — to subdue society to Sharia.

That is not where the madness ends. As the decades progressed, the Brotherhood was involved in a series of other “jihads” culminating in the jointly-planned assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat following the success of his Sinai Treaty with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

Later, in 2004, one of the Brotherhood’s longtime clerics and Islamic scholars, SheikhYousef Al-Qaradhawi, issued a fatwa — or religious mandate — ordering Muslims abduct and kill U.S. citizens in Iraq.

From Israel’s 1948 War of Independence to the Arab Spring; from paying a role in the assassination of the one Arab leader the world thought would usher in an era of peace and stability in the region, to having a hand in the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Muslim Brotherhood has been there in the thick of it all — and in no small way.

As we approach the present-day, after fueling the violent Egyptian Spring that successfully toppled Hosni Mubarak’s Western and Israeli-friendly regime, the organization has attempted to show its “softer side” by taking a place at the country’s political table. The Brotherhood has secured sweeping wins in Egypt’s parliamentary elections and is seeking to claim the presidency itself with candidate, Khairat el-Shater. While he was among a group of candidates recently disqualified from the race, his campaign is appealing for his reinstatement.

Under the presidency, and after decades struggling for the establishment of a theocracy, the Brotherhood promises an Egyptian “renaissance.”

Hamas: “In as much as Jews love life—we love death and martyrdom.”

Founded in 1987, the Muslim Brotherhood progeny is an Islamic terrorist organization whose base of operations is primarily concentrated in the Gaza Strip and some areas of Judea and Samaria (otherwise known as the West Bank). An Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement,” Sunni-comprised Hamas describes itself as “one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood” and is also a proxy of Iran, which frequently supplies the group arms as well as funds its various initiatives. More than this, Hamas is also a social, religious and now, after “democratic elections,“ an ”official” political movement in the region. The organization comprises a legislative and social branch, along with its military outfit, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades.

Hamas’ stated purpose, its sole reason for existence, is to liberate Palestine from its “evil” Zionist occupiers. It is not enough for Hamas that the Palestinians establish their own state alongside Israel, as the terrorist group deems Israel’s very existence an abomination and one that, ultimately, needs to be wiped from the face of the earth. To this end, it has been the primary aggressor against the Jewish State, routinely orchestrating suicide-bombings that target military and civilians alike. It also frequently launches rockets into Israel and has claimed responsibility for hundreds of attacks in the last two decades, particularly after amping up its onslaught in the wake of the Oslo Accords.

Hamas’ success at wreaking havoc in the region could not be done alone. In addition to receiving backing from Iran, the Islamist group also receives arms from its Lebanese brothers, Hezbollah, and more disturbing, al Qaeda. In a detailed analysis for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Dr. Harold Brackman explained that Hamas “has held secret summits with Al Qaeda operatives in locales as distant as India, and even sent a select few members to train in bin Laden’s Afghan camps.”

He added that even Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas claimed in 2007 that: “It is Hamas that is shielding Al Qaeda, and through its bloody conduct, Hamas has become very close to Al Qaeda [in Gaza].”

The Hamas slogan rings eerily familiar to that of its forebear, the Muslim Brotherhood, stating: ”Allah is its goal, the Prophet its model, the Quran its Constitution, Jihad its path, and death for the case of Allah its most sublime belief.”

Per the terrorist organization’s charter, Hamas asserts that jihad is a “duty binding on every Muslim man and woman” and unequivocally rejects negotiated settlements as a means to coexist with Israel. ”There is no other solution for the Palestinian problem other than jihad. All the initiatives and international conferences are a waste of time and a futile game.”
Discover the Network reviewed the charter and published several of its other tenets. Some include:

• mandates that jihad be directed explicitly against the reviled Jews: “The Nazism of the Jews does not skip women and children, it scares everyone. They make war against people’s livelihood, plunder their moneys and threaten their honor.”
• calls for the fulfillment of the Qur’anic scripture which reads: “The prophet [Mohammad] said: The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!”

To put Hamas’ destructive power in perspective, take into account that 680 missiles, rockets and mortars were fired into southern Israel, mostly by Hamas, in 2011 alone. Since its inception, Hamas has also been the primary perpetrator of suicide bombings.

Aside from operating within a vast network of militants spread across the Islamic world, Hamas ensures future success primarily via the dissemination of a steady stream of propaganda and through the indoctrination of Palestinian youth in schools. It has been widely reported the terrorist group has infiltrated the Palestinian education system, which has modelled its textbooks after Mein Kampf and other anti-Semitic works. Watchdog groups like Palestinian Media Watch and MEMRI frequently capture footage of Palestinian children chanting such slogans as “death to Israel” and “death to America.”

For good measure, review the following Hamas battle cries as listed in the Simon Wiesenthal report:
“The language of bullets and bombs is the only language that the Jews understand.”
“We tell them [the Israelis]: in as much as you love life—the Muslims love death and martyrdom.”
“Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas!”
“You [America] will face the mirror of your history for a long time to
come. . . . [With the 9/11 attacks] Allah has answered our prayers.”

Simply put, Hamas is a cult of death. There are no tenets, catch-phrases, songs of patriotism or decrees put forth by the terrorist group that do not contain, in some degree or other, reference to murder and suicide; vitriol and bloodshed. Nary a word of peaceful coexistence can be found. Instead, what is offered in spades, is murder and martyrdom.
What is perhaps most difficult for those who love life — like Americans and Israelis — to comprehend is that it is futile to attempt to appeal to groups such as Hamas, because they are impervious to reason and incapable of properly processing basic human emotion (such as love of child). This is perhaps best illustrated in its collective and continued willingness to sacrifice its children by sending them off to their deaths, strapped with explosives in the “name of Allah.” An entity that comprises people who do not value their own lives, especially those of their children, is not one that can be negotiated with. The West and Israel has no leverage over Hamas, because Hamas has nothing it values enough to fear losing.

Hezbollah: “The party of god”

Not far from Hamas’ base of operations, is the Lebanon-based Hezbollah. Led by Hassan Nasrallah, the Shia terrorist organization’s stated goal is the establishment of an Islamic state encompassing both Lebanon and Israel.
With the help of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and now Syria alongside, Hezbollah was born during Israel’s first war with Lebanon in 1982 and has been a violent opponent of the Jewish State ever since. But Hezbollah’s animus is not reserved solely for Israel. The Islamic group has also been implicated in dozens of major terrorist attacks against the U.S. and other Western targets, including the 1983 suicide truck bombings of the U.S. Embassy and U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 service men and women. It was followed by an assault on the U.S. Embassy annex in Beirut in 1984. Of the brutal attack, The Jewish Virtual Library notes:

The bombing at the Marine barracks in Beirut was the deadliest single-day death toll for the United States Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima (2,500 in one day) of World War II and the deadliest single-day death toll for the United States military since the 243 killed on 31st January 1968 — the first day of the Tet offensive in the Vietnam war. The attack remains the deadliest single attack on Americans overseas since World War II.

The militant Islamist organization is also said to have been responsible for the kidnap, torture and murder of U.S. Army colonel William R. Higgins and CIA Station Chief in Beirut, William Buckley, as well as for the 1985 hijacking of TWA flight 847, in which a U.S. Navy diver was killed. The terror group is also responsible for the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia that left 19 American servicemen dead.


The list, frighteningly continues, but the picture painted thus far rings loud and clear.

In terms of more recent developments, Hezbollah’s operations in the Middle East intensified with the onset of the second Lebanon War, when members of the militant group killed eight Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two others stationed in Israeli sovereign territory. In response, Israeli Defense Forces launched a series of strikes intended to remove the Hezbollah threat from its border. What ensued was a near-constant barrage of rocket and mortar fire into Israel. One estimate places the the number of rockets fired into Israel by Hezbollah during the conflict at roughly 4,000.

 

Since the Second Lebanon War, Hezbollah operatives have been spotted around the world, most notably in Central and South America, leading national security experts to believe the terrorist group is collaborating with America and Israel-hostile regimes in Cuba and particularly, Venezuela.

According to a report by the American Enterprise Institute, Hezbollah and its enablers in Iran have been “greatly expanding their operations in Latin America to the detriment of inter-American security and US strategic interests.”
AEI continues:

Today, Hezbollah is using the Western Hemisphere as a staging ground, fundraising center, and operational base to wage asymmetric warfare against the United States. Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and other anti-American governments in the region have facilitated this expansion by rolling out the welcome mats for Hezbollah and Iran.

It seems Hezbollah is now edging one step closer to American soil, and its intentions should undoubtedly be prompting the U.S. to take pause, and moreover, proper precautions.

Rumors of War III

Rumors of War III discusses the aforementioned Islamic groups and how they are infiltrating American society. Now that you have the background on who, and what, these militant organizations truly stand for, the documentary’s findings will prove all the more riveting.

It's the Power, Stupid!

It Was the Power, Stupid!

         Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On April 22, 2012  

I. Power—Always Was and Always Will Be

In my dumber days, between 2001-2008, I used to wonder why the Left relentlessly hammered the war on terror (e.g., renditions, tribunals, predators, preventative detention, Patriot Act, intercepts, wiretaps, Guantanamo Bay) when these measures had not only proven quite useful in preventing another 9/11-like attack, but had been sanctioned by both the Congress and the courts. In those ancient times, I was not as cynical as I am now. So I assumed that Harold Koh and MoveOn.org, though mistaken, were worried about civil liberties, or measures that they felt were both illegal and without utility.

But, of course, the Obama (who attacked each and every element of the war on terror as a legislator and senator) Left never had any principled objection at all. Instead, whatever Bush was for, they were in Pavlovian fashion against. I can say that without a charge of cynicism, because after January 2009, Obama embraced or expanded every Bush-Cheney protocol that he inherited. In response, the anti-war Left simply kept silent, or indeed vanished, or went to work extending the anti-terrorism agenda. Guantanamo Bay, in other words, was a national sin until the mid-morning of January 20, 2009.

II. The Year 4

We are in the year four of our lord, when darkness was made light, the seas gently receded, and the planet cooled. In the space of 24 hours in January 2009 the world was turned upside down: massive deficits were no longer “unpatriotic”; 5% (heck, even 9%) unemployment was no longer to be seen as a “jobless recovery”; $4 plus gasoline no longer would become “intolerable.” ^[1] Filibusters suddenly became ossified obstructionism. Recess appointments were now quite legitimate; lecturing the media about the myth of objective fairness was salutary. Pay-for-play time with the president was consulting; attacking the “unelected” courts was progressive. Voter fraud was not thugs eyeing polling monitors with clubs, but officials asking voters to present a picture ID—and mentioning any of these inconsistencies or writing about the Trostkyzation of American life was either racism or Palinism.

Around March 2008, the Ministry of Truth had issued new edicts about campaign financing, big Wall Street money ^[2], and the supposedly pernicious role of contributions: all bad if Bush trumped Kerry, all now good if Obama trumped McCain. So when Obama became the first candidate in the history of the law to renounce public campaign financing in order to shake down $1 billion, there was silence. The Left never really worried about Big Money, but only if more Big Money went to conservatives than to themselves. (Consider the current shameless money grubbing of Jon Corzine to raise cash for Obama ^[3] after Corzine’s looting of thousands of individuals’ lifetime investments, or the shrillness over Mitt Romney’s supposed mansion in La Jolla juxtaposed to the prior silence about the Kerry mansions, the multiple Gore residences, or “John’s room,” as in the huge and crass Edwards estate.) What was interesting about Hilary Rosen was not her stupid thoughts on Ann Romney, but her cursus honorum that led to hired-gun riches by parlaying political contacts into commerce.

III. Tongue-tied Presidents

We can play this Orwellian game with almost everything these days. Take presidential cosmopolitanism and the Bush-as-oaf trope. The disdain was not for an inept president, but rather a simple means to destroy an ideological opponent. Why again the cynicism? Because the Left cares little that Barack Obama has no clue where particular islands in the news are and cannot even do political correctness right when he wishes to ingratiate himself to his South American hosts by wanting to trill the “Maldives.” ^[4] We have a president who can say Talêban, drop the g’s in a black patois, and trill his Spanish words in front of Latin American hosts, but is off 8,000 miles in his geography.

Ditto “corpse-man ^[5],” the Austrian language, 57 states, and all the other parochialism and gaffes that remind us not only that it is hard being a president without making gaffes, but that it is especially hard as a conservative president when each gaffe is cited as proof of ignorance.

IV. So What?

What is going on? Two things, really. One, the media believes that the noble ends justify the tawdry means. So if it is a choice between emphasizing the latest Obama embarrassment by digging into the scary Fast and Furious ^[6], the “millions of green jobs” Solyndra insider giveaways ^[7], the Secret Service decadence, the GSA buffoonery, and the work while getting food stamps con in Washington OR endangering Obamacare and by extension “the children,” or the war to eliminate autism, or the right to breath clean air–well, why would one ever wish to derail all that by weakening a landmark progressive and his enlightened agenda?

Or for you more cynical readers, why would you wish to enervate the present comfortable culture in Washington in which the press and politics are at last one? Or why undermine the first African-American president, who is a constant reminder of our progressive advancement? Or why weaken our only chance some day to have open borders or gay marriage?

Two, the Left has always operated on the theory of medieval penance. We surely must assume that Warren Buffett has never had problems with the ethics of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. or had a company he controls sued by the IRS for back taxes ^[8]. Why? Because he has confessed his sins, and accepted the faith and paid his tithe to the Church. Ditto a Bill Gates or a rich celebrity like Sean Penn or Oprah. In the relativism of the left, if the one-percenters will simply confess that their class is greedy and needs to pay their fair share—even if they are entirely cynical in the manner of GE’s Jeffrey Immelt and penance is written off as the cost of doing
business—then they become exempt from the wages of them/us warfare and the “you want to kill the children” rhetoric.

V. Good and Bad Fat Cats

There is no difference in the way the Koch brothers or Exxon run their empires and the way that  GM, GE, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Google do. But the former are enemies of the people ^[9], while the latter are protectors who have have confessed to their bishops and agreed to mouth doctrine and thereby obtained penance to make as much money as they want and to spend it as they damn well please. Suddenly in America after 2009 there are good and bad cable networks, good and bad celebrities, good and bad CEOs, good and bad sports teams (ask Lovie Smith), good and bad states, good and bad everything—not adjudicated on the actual basis of behavior, but rather on whether some are willing to go to reeducation camp, admit their errors, and join the effort to clean the air and feed the kids.

Or do any of you believe there are not Google “corporate jet setters,” or Facebook “fat cats,” or GE executives who didn’t know when it was time not to profit, or Microsoft grandees who ignored the point at which they had made enough money? (For that matter, why could not Barack Obama have made $550,000 last year; had he not reached the point where he didn’t need any more cash?)

VI. The War on Science

We are in strange times. When the Right is in power, the press, the academy, the arts, the foundations, the liberal churches, and the zillionaire class all lecture us on greed, scandal, profit-mongering, wars against science, destroying the planet ^[10]—the entire laundry list of exploitive greed. The result is that the Right is careful. Bush walked a tightrope, as his moral concerns about stem cells became killing Christopher Reeve, and No Child Left Behind and the prescription drug program were begrudged as too little big government, too late.
When the Left is in power, all of the above go silent.

There really is a war on science in the way a Steven Chu wasted billions on irrational subsidized schemes that produced no energy, while, along with Ken Salazar, neglecting proven ways to increase oil and gas production on federally controlled lands. The GM-subsidized Volt is de facto a war against science; so is high-speed rail—at least for now. The anti-deficit properties of the Buffett rule are make-believe accounting, and entirely anti-mathematical. There really are anti-constitutional scandals in which people died as in Fast and Furious. There really are Ken Lay-type con artists still around called Jon Corzine. There really are misogynists like Bill Maher that daily declare “war on women.”

VII. Fire With Fire

I have a confession to make that may upset readers. I was neutral in the Republican primaries, but especially interested in one fact: who would take off the gloves and run a “war room” campaign in the fashion of Bill Clinton in 1992 (as opposed to the McCain model of emulating Mike Dukakis in 1988)? Romney did it first and most effectively ^[11].

The result is that when we hear that Rush Limbaugh should be taken off the air for his profane misogyny, almost immediately now there are accounts of Bill Maher’s $1 million gift to Obama ^[12] and his far greater and unapologetic slurs against women. When we hear all those creepy “concerns” about Romney’s great-grandfather as a polygamist in Mexico, suddenly we are reminded that Obama’s father in Kenya was, too. Putting a dog on the car roof is now not quite the same as eating a dog ^[13] and then matter-of-fact reading ^[14] one’s account of it on an audiotape. Trivial? Yes. Distractions from the current economic mess, and beneath us all? Perhaps. All Romney’s doing? Of course not.

But at least 2012 won’t be a default campaign. In other words, to quote Obama, Romney will get in “their faces” and “bring a gun to a knife fight.” McCain more graciously and nobly lost by putting all sorts of concerns off the table. I would expect that should Obama keep harping about Romney’s tax returns, Romney will demand Obama’s transcripts and medical records at last to be released. If Obama’s surrogates keep writing about Mormonism, we will learn of new disclosures about Trinity Church. For every Mormon bishop who said something illiberal in 1976, we will hear of a Father Pfleger or Rev. Meeks trumping that in 2007. And so on.

VIII. Only Power?

Does that mean Obama does not care about ideology? Not necessarily. You can be cynical about trashing fat cats while enjoying Martha’s Vineyard—and still believe in nationalizing health care on principled grounds. A sort of medical TSA is a win-win situation in that we all line up for bypasses and antibiotics in the way the line at the airport snakes back and forth; health officers with epaulettes will take our blood pressure and pop us pills in the way unionized TSA officers so assiduously screen our luggage, five or six to a console. Just as you see a small crowd consult whether granny’s wheelchair is laced with plastic explosives, so too the Obamacare GS-10 examiners will huddle to see whether that appendix of yours really is all that close to rupturing, as you, the paranoid and greedy, suspect.

“Share the wealth” and “fairness for all” are not incompatible with a power-hungry technocratic class, an apparat to oversee all this liberality. As recompense for their noble sacrifice, a complete exemption is granted from the consequences of their own mandates. If Michelle is exhausted from trying to make us eat well, why should she not go to Costa del Sol or R&R or Vegas? If Barack Obama is worn out trying to win for us the Buffett rule, why should he pay 30% on his $760,000 in income? If Tim Geithner is fighting on our behalf to make us pay a “premium” tax for being privileged Americans, why should he have to pay his FICA? If Steven Chu takes the heat for trying to get us $8 a gallon gas in our best interest, why should he have to buy a car ^[15] and drive?

In 2012 we will learn whether there is a year 5 or 2013.

IX. Footnote to Trayvon Martin

The liberal narrative about the case is now destroyed; it had nothing to do with finding out the truth, whether a trigger-happy vigilante murdered Trayvon Martin, or a desperate neighborhood watchman saved his head from being pounded to smithereens by pulling out a gun and shooting his assailant, or something in between. The narrative instead was solely concerned with taking a tragic shooting case and turning it into more fuel for a fossilized civil rights industry (since the case broke, dozens of violent crime cases of blacks against whites and Asians are splashed over the news, enraging readers and escaping liberal commentary). All we know now is that the “narrative”—a preteen shot “like a dog” while eating candy by a white “assassin” who uttered racial epithets and was never even touched by the victim, only to be let go by a wink-and-nod police force—is false.

I think it will be very hard to get a second-degree murder conviction, given the absence of racial malice on the tape (the narrative’s “coons” and NBC’s version ^[16] of Zimmerman on his own volunteering “he’s black” are now inoperative), eyewitness accounts of the fray, and the clear injuries to Zimmerman. Instead, the authorities will hope that by inflating the indictment, by airing the facts, and by making Zimmerman testify, tensions will ease–and so when he is acquitted or a judge throws out the case, or a lesser count is pressed, riots will fizzle.

X. Sacrificial Lambs
This is sort of the criminal version of the Scooter Libby case: after it was learned that Plame was probably not a covert agent, that her status was disclosed to Robert Novak not by Libby but by Richard Armitage, that Colin Powell knew the entire time that his deputy–not Libby–had made the initial disclosure, that there were areas of conflict of interest between Plame and Wilson in his selection for his yellow-cake mission, then Libby was sort of seen as a sacrificial lamb who had to be guilty of something to save the narrative of a fascistic effort to sabotage the Constitution.

Perhaps before the second-degree-murder charge is thrown out, the prosecution can so entangle Zimmerman in testimony that they can recharge him with perjury or conspiracy and then plea bargain him down to a year or two. The case is now not concerned with justice, but with politics, defusing threats of violence, and salvaging the careers of so many who so foolishly rushed to judgment.

BMB YAB - EO#13547 Power Grab

Executive Order 13547: “The Sleeping Power Grab”

posted at 9:29 am on April 21, 2012 by Erika Johnsen

To be fair, President Obama’s executive-order output hasn’t unreasonably outpaced that of his predecessors – his especial willingness to actively circumvent Congress and snatch huge gobs of power for the federal bureaucracy only makes it feel like he has.
In July of 2010, President Obama signed executive order 13547 – “Stewardship of the Ocean, Our Coasts, and the Great Lakes.” There wasn’t much hullabaloo about it, since it was just post-BP oil spill and it was ostensibly designed to allow the federal government to better safeguard – er, you know – ecosystems! And, sustainability! And other such politically-soothing environmental buzzwords. The broad policy afforded the feds the authority to zone and regulate the seas and waterways, and all of the activities that take place on them.
There is a great deal of commercial economic activity that goes down on our oceans, including energy, fishing, travel, and shipping, and then when you move upriver and inland, there’s mining, timber, recreation, agriculture, manufacturing, and other industries that make use of our nation’s aquatic networks. As with any large, complex endeavor with many relevant players and countless moving parts, the federal bureaucracy’s attempt to “oversee,” a.k.a. regulate and centrally plan, that endeavor usually just gums up the works and retards economic growth.
In four separate Congresses, legislation outlining the idea of zoning the oceans has been debated and subsequently dropped. Did President Obama bother to ask whether the current Congress would authorize such a move? Well, that would just be silly, when there’s executive fiat to be had, and several effects of this vaguely-defined order have begun to manifest themselves:

“This one to me could be the sleeping power grab that Americans will wake up to one day and wonder what the heck hit them,” said Rep. Bill Flores (R –Texas). …
The ocean policy has already impacted oil and gas development in the Mid and South Atlantic, where more environmental analysis is now required to determine whether new studies must also be conducted to determine its safety, according to Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar.
Jack Belcher, managing director of the Ocean Policy Coalition that represents numerous industries affected by Obama’s initiative including oil companies, says Salazar’s action is one example of how the administration is already blocking new production “on a policy that hasn’t even been developed yet.”
Still in its draft form, the plan released in January contains vague goals that call for more than 150 milestones to be accomplished by next year that will determine how the ecosystem is managed. …
“But what we are worried about, and already seeing, is it’s being used as a tool to say we’re not going to do something, or delay it,” Belcher said. “It creates another layer of bureaucracy and another opportunity for litigation. We see this as an opportunity to tie things up in complete uncertainty.” …
“This has largely been completely under the radar,” Vitter said. “And that is exactly the way the administration and their environmental allies want to do it—announce the administrative fiat is complete and that we have this new way of life that nobody knew was coming.”

The gist of this executive order is just another environmentalist front for a regulatory power grab, and a major way to expand the government’s authority over oil and gas permitting. No doubt the environmental lobby really does hope to eventually closely regulate all of the ocean’s economic activity, since they’re convinced that the earth (not to be confused with humankind) would be better off if we could rewind our industrial habits back a few thousand years.
Both House and Senate Republicans are starting take note of the disastrous economic impact the Obama administration could exercise with this order, recently asking for oversight hearings and more transparency on “cloaked funding,” and the House Natural  Resources Committee is fighting back.

Buffett Rule - How's That Go????

April 16, 2012, 2:20 pm






Warren Buffett, President Obama’s favorite billionaire, once said that “you only find out who’s swimming naked when the tide goes out.”

Well, it looks like the tide has gone out for Obama when it comes to pushing his Buffett Rule “millionaire’s” tax. There was never much of an economic rationale for the idea. It would only raise about $5 billion a year over the next decade, a span when the U.S. is on track to compile average annual budget deficits of $1 trillion or more.

Wait, actually it would add nearly $800 billion to cumulative deficits because it would replace the Alternative Minimum Tax, according to government bean counters. No, wait some more! The numbers would probably be even worse. Other taxes targeted at the rich, such as President Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax hikes and recent tax increases in the UK, either raised less than forecasted or lost money.

As Bloomberg recently pointed out, affected taxpayers–fewer than 0.5% of Americans with annual incomes exceeding $1 million and tax rates of less than 30 percent–could avoid the tax via tax-free investments such as municipal bonds. They also could time asset sales for maximum tax benefits, engage in transactions that don’t result in taxable income, and make charitable contributions that yield deductions. “Largely, the Buffett rule is going to be manageable,” said David Miller, a partner at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP in New York. “That is, with tax planning, people will be able to avoid it.”

Obama’s strongest argument, really, was his moral one: that having the rich pay a lower tax rate than middle-class voters was just plain unfair from an income inequality perspective. But now he seems to have abandoned that one, as well:

That is not an argument about redistribution. That is an argument about growth,” Obama said in response to a reporter’s question at a news conference in Colombia. “In the history of the United States, we grow best when our growth is broad based. This is not an argument about taking from A to give to B. This is not a redistributionist argument that we’re making. We’re making an argument about how do we grow the economy in a 21st century environment,” Obama said.

Really? If there is an Obama Rule, it is the one he articulated back in 2008 to Joe the Plumber, that we need to raise taxes to “spread the wealth around.” But I guess “spread the wealth” isn’t polling as strongly as Team Obama would like in 2012.

OK, so now Obama is focusing on the economic growth argument, his weakest one. Economic growth is produced by innovation and the acceptance of the creative destruction it brings. Obama would argue that by raising taxes, he could avoid cutting supposedly critical government investment to spur innovation. But is the federal government so lean and mean that the only way to reduce spending is by axing the NIH or the National Nanotechnology Initiative? Or is Obama talking about more Solyndra-style industrial policy? If that, better to keep that $5 billion in the private sector. And time for Obama to float some new economic ideas.

Modern Lynch Mob

Our Modern Lynch Mob

Democracies are in general prone to fits of the mob. Just read the Thucydidean account of the debate of Mytilene. Or watch a 1950s Western as the lynch party heads for the town jail. Fear of democratically sanctioned madness is why the Founders came up not just with classical tripartite government to check and limit power between the judicial, legislative, and executive branches, but also now generally disdained notions of allowing states to impose property qualifications for voting, the Electoral College, two senators guaranteed per state regardless of population, and senators originally selected without direct votes.

They were not concerned that under Athenian-style democracy the proverbial “people” and their populist Rottweilers in government and the press could not check the power of capital and birth, but were worried, as Juvenal later quipped, over who would police the police. So there had to be checks on the mob as well — a fickle and unpredictable force as we saw in the last eight years.

 

2006 Evil Guantanamo/ 2009 Good Guantanamo

Sometime around 2005, the anger of the mob over the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols peaked. Preventative detention, renditions, military tribunals, Guantanamo, Predators, wiretaps, and intercepts were all considered unlawful, unnecessary, and immoral. The Bush-Cheney “terror state” seemed capable of almost anything, as it shredded the Constitution while claiming to “protect” us from non-existent terrorists. Dick Cheney went from a respected and perennial Washington insider, given his due by both liberals and conservatives as a sober and judicious administrator over the past thirty years, to a pernicious Darth Vader.

The Left never really adduced any evidence to support its charges, but such serial attacks went largely unanswered. Candidate Barack Obama both benefited from and whipped up the venom, only as president to embrace or expand all of what he had once so vehemently denounced. He soon became predator-in-chief, increasing targeted assassinations eightfold, as he joked about them being unleashed at any potential suitors of Malia and Sasha.

The Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism policies were quietly reinvented as necessary (given that no post-9/11 plot [and there were many] had succeeded) and continue on today as if no one ever had questioned their utility or legality. The fist-shaking mob apparently decided that what was truly bad before 2009 was mostly good afterwards, or at least not bad enough to question an Obama presidency. So it threw down the torches and drifted on home, wanting the proverbial prisoner in the jail freed and canonized rather than hanged.

Today we are left with either one of two liberal assumptions: the Bush-Cheney protocols are still bad, but to continue to criticize them would now be to weaken the liberal agenda of their present adherent Barack Obama; or, why get riled over politics? —  every out-party attacks the in-party any way it can, so get over it.

Planet Warming on Hold

One of the most venomous lines of attack against George W. Bush was his supposed failure to address climate change. These were the mob days of the anguished Al Gore, still smarting over having won the popular, but not the electoral, vote in 2000, damning Bush as a liar, as he created Gore, Inc. — a near organic-growing merchandising empire of several hundred millions of dollars.

Gorism both hyped a global carbon threat and then offered the consulting and expertise to address it. His carbon footprints and “offsets” followed the medieval model of selling exemptions. In such holy work, there were no such things as conflict of interest, influence peddling, or simple bad manners. Gore rode his Earth in the Balance / Inconvenient Truth express train to a Nobel Prize, a sizable fortune — and a general impression that he had become unhinged, whether in his incarnation as a “crazed sex poodle” or a vein-bursting screaming “he lied!” mental patient.

No matter, Barack Obama came into office on the shoulders of this screaming mob. His team lectured us on the wisdom of withholding oil leases, on the desirability of European-level gas prices, and on why we must soon pay skyrocketing energy prices. Obama-sanctioned cap-and-trade passed the Democratic-held House.

And then?

Snow fell. Ice still formed outside the kitchen window. Chicago, as is its habit, got both really hot and really cold. Volvos still needed gas. People in Malibu still liked central heating. Philology adjusted accordingly. Global warming begat climate change and the latter begat climate chaos: if the planet were not hotter, then snow and ice were symptoms of such heating; and if even that were insufficient proof for us dunces, then tornados, earthquakes, and hurricanes would have to do.
Yet the mob mentality began to fade, as revelations about everything from doctored research, politicized grant-giving, and false conclusions about glaciers, Greenland, and polar bears began appearing in the liberal news — suggesting that if such scandal made even the mainstream media, then the phrenology-like fad was nearing an end.

Obama had done his part in postponing the Keystone pipeline, putting oil on federal lands off-limits, and talking up boondoggles like the Chevy Volt and Solyndra. But the idea of $5 a gallon gas makes even the most liberal Santa Monica Volvo driver edgy, and now the global-warming movement has collapsed. Bush is in Texas, not the White House. Obama now blames Solyndra on Republicans, brags about entrepreneurial wildcatters in the Dakotas, does photo-ops in front of derricks, and promises to allow bits and pieces of the Keystone pipeline.

And the mob? Why hurt the liberal cause by going after Obama? Suddenly, the would-be-lynchers have left the sheriff’s office porch and are in twos and threes heading back home.

Postmodern Ethics

The mob, of course, had once tried to storm the jail to get at Bush over presidential ethics and decorum. It was a valiant effort. “Rovian politics” had polluted the national scene. PACs, the revolving door, lobbying, earmarks, and mega fundraising had ruined American politics. An Enron-insider mentality had warped the White House. “Swift-boating” was Rove-inspired character assassination.

Now? We live in an age of Peter Orszag, the OMB to Citibank monorail, and $1 million sent to the Obama PAC from the misogynist Bill Maher whose “t—t” and “c—t” are the sorts of popular smears against women that Obama does not wish his daughters to experience.

The idea of a Democrat running for president according to the rules of public campaign financing was destroyed four years ago by none other than Barack Obama. His genius lies in demonizing his donors as “fat cats”, “one-percenters,” and “corporate jet owners,” while they fork over cash, again on a medieval principle that the more you lecture the usurer or money-changer, the more he purchases penance for his soul by giving the church a marble block or two for the dome of the cathedral. Or is the shakedown not a shakedown, but rather a simple connivance for the big money guys — Obama is dead even in the polls, so why not keep a stiff upper lip and hedge your bets?

I think it was around January 2009 when ethics in government ceased to be an issue. Insider influence peddling suddenly became the necessary price of getting green energy. Bundling and corporate giving were vital to getting universal health care passed. And $35,000-a-head private dinners were a sort of castor oil, a bad-tasting medicine that led to better air and water for all of us. In those happy days, John Edwards was a populist idol. Jon Corzine put his financial expertise to work for hoi polloi. Steven Chu’s Nobel P

Prize-winning physics mind would be let loose on the pernicious carbon lobby.

Then it was all over. The Obama team of Goolsbee, Orszag, Romer, and Summers headed back to tenured berths or big money or both. “Millionaires and billionaires” meant skipping the insignificant former and concentrating on shaking down the important latter. Today, we just shrug when Obama lectures us at 9 a.m. on paying our fair share, and then does a $40,000-a-plate fundraiser in the Upper West Side or Palm Beach at noon.

The Old Race Card

The same hang-the-suspect hysteria breaks out over race only to dissipate as if it never happened. Before 9/11 it was the reparations movement. Then it was the Bush neglect of the underclass. Then it was the preppie white non-rapists at Duke. Then it was Eric Holder’s lectures about “cowards,” “my people,” and the racists who wanted answers about Fast and Furious.

We went from the beer summit to Trayvon Martin’s resemblance to the boy the president never had. In each case, facts did not matter: Bush increased Great Society spending, and sent $15 billion to save black Africans from the ravages of AIDS. If there were any voting fraud, it came as a result of Acorn, Chicago wards, and the SEIU get-out-the vote machine, not Karl Rove with levers and gears.

The Cambridge police did not act stupidly. And if police do stereotype, it may be because 12% of the population commits almost half the violent crime in the nation. In the case of rare black/white and white/black murdering (94% of murdered African-Americans were killed by other African-Americans), a minority is more likely to commit murder (and rape) against a majority than the majority is against the minority.

As I write, the hysteria (is there any other word for it when Spike Lee twitters the address of George Zimmerman or the New Black Panther Party publishes a wanted poster or the mayor of Philadelphia calls the death an “assassination”?) is beginning to die down, somewhat.

The initial moblike news (in this regard, Fox News’s Shepard Smith was especially culpable in whipping up frenzy when he did not have the evidence to support his allegations) that a white, Germanic-named vigilante ran down and executed a small African-American child (at least Mr. Martin seemed so from his adolescent photos in the press) eating candy while strolling in an exclusive gated community is not quite the entire story. At least it has morphed into an account of an excitable, gun-carrying Hispanic neighborhood-watch volunteer, in a mixed community, prompting (?) a fist fight with an unarmed 17-year-old, 6’2” youth in a hoodie. Mr. Zimmerman apparently lost the struggle, and then pulled out a gun and fired — even as the narrative seemed to change with new information every day. The case is not helped by presidential editorializing that now, after the beer summit and Sandra

 Fluke, seems a gambit to divert attention from $4 a gallon gas and 8% plus unemployment (17% in Fresno County).

The Trayvon Martin tragedy is not over. We do not know all the facts; bad judgment, racism, and ill-intent may well have led to manslaughter or even second-degree murder or, then again, in theory, self-defense, but to speculate about any such charges without evidence is to become mob-like. My own view is that carrying a weapon requires greater forbearance, but I was not there and still have no idea what transpired. As I write this, the account will be out-of-date by tomorrow’s disclosures. What we are left with are no rules of national anguish: When ten African-Americans are murdered by other African-Americans in a single weekend, is it news or not news? When the occasional African-American murders a white person, as in a recent car-jacking, is it a sign of something the nation must note? When an Hispanic shoots an African-American, is it news to the degree he has a European name, but had he been Jorge Martinez with an Anglo mother, it would not have been news?

The role of a president is to rein in the mob, not to unleash it. The latter is what community organizers do; the former is what makes statesmen. Yet on issue after issue — anti-terrorism, global warming, government ethics, and racial relations — a frenzied mob, egged on by the media and demagogues like Barack Obama, have almost stormed the jail, only to dissipate when met by either evidence, or the knowledge that the incarcerated was one of their own — as if they had never screamed and threatened in the first place.

Revisionist History

Strangers in a Stranger LandPosted 

                 By Victor Davis Hanson On April 8, 2012

Trostkyzation

In ancient Rome, when the emperor or an especially distasteful elite died, his image on stone and in bronze was removed. And by decree there arose a damnatio memoriae, a holistic effort to erase away his entire prior existence. When Tiberius got through with the dead Sejanus, few knew that he had ever existed, such were the powers of the Roman state to create alternate realities. Orwell’s Animal Farm ^[1] and 1984 ^[2] explored the communist state’s efforts to airbrush away history. Orwell perhaps was most notably influenced by the removal of Leon Trotsky from the collective Russian memory to the point that he never existed. That force was used in these instances does not mean that something like them could not happen ^[3] through collective volition; indeed, I think we are starting to see dangerous signs that a sort of groupthink is already beginning.

That Was Then, But This Is What . . . ?

In our own time there are certain growing trends, most of them media-induced, that conspire to rework our collective memory, in pursuit of a supposedly noble and just cause. In the fashion of no other recent figure, President Barack Obama has brought those forces of establishing an official truth to the fore. Last week he lectured the media ^[4] that things are not just equal with two sides to a story.

Instead, they have a responsibility not to fall into the trap of equivalence — the subtext being that he is not subject to the same laws of inquiry as are his earthly opponents.

Suddenly, the Supreme Court is a suspicious organization run by unelected politicos that uses capricious judicial fiat to overturn widely popular laws. The president denigrated it in a State of the Union address and now suggests that such “unelected” jurists (as opposed to electing them?) should act responsibly and thus “must” not find a popularly enacted law unconstitutional.

I am confused: I thought we were supposed to welcome such judicial audit. Was not that the charm of the Warren Court? Did not the Obama administration go to federal court to ask justices to set aside the Defense of Marriage Act that it was entrusted to enforce — seeking judicial help not to follow a law that it chose not to seek to overturn in Congress?

I also thought that a younger Barack Obama once had regretted that the Supreme Court had never addressed “redistributive change” ^[5] and, per the U.S. Constitution, had confined itself only to defining negative liberties rather than demanding positive “rights” that legislatures were supposed to ensure — or else. And did ObamaCare really pass with broad majorities? I thought that it received no Republican votes in the House and only squeaked by. And it would have been filibustered in the Senate without the Ted Stevens pseudo-scandal and various sweetheart deals to swing senators. Or is that now inaccurate?

Good Little Citizens?

Is public campaign financing good or bad? I thought Obama in 2008 was the first presidential nominee since the law’s inception to have ignored it. But did anyone so note that? What happened to this once hallowed liberal reform? Was it not aimed at stopping the BPs and Goldman Sachses of the world from warping the election process with huge infusions of cash — as in the $1 billion range?

Are the one-percenters suspect and avoiding their fair share, or are they the most generous donors to the Obama campaign? Sometimes one feels bewildered in this now alternative universe: in the evil Bush year 2007, I remember that recess appointments were always to be seen as illegitimate ^[6], while filibusters were critical checks on abusive Republican legislative majorities. But then by 2011, the former was now a principled mechanism to sidestep reactionary obstructionism and the latter nihilistic ways of halting needed liberal progress.

What happened, or have we lost all ability to remember?

The World Made Anew in 2009

I need to go to a re-education, or perhaps a re-memorization, camp. What happened to “unpatriotic” presidents ^[7] running up $4 trillion in debt in eight years, or is trumping that in three then patriotic? Was the presidentially appointed Simpson-Bowles commission the proper bipartisan way to address deficits, or were its findings coopted by the one-percenters? In December 2010, I thought suddenly raising taxes was supposedly the wrong thing to do in tough times. Was it not by March 2011?

When did the Catholic Church declare war on women, and at what point in history did condoms or birth control pills became oppressive expenses in need of federal subsidies in a way that, say, iPhones were not? Does the crude smear “slut” by media figures threaten the world of our children or help to raise money ^[8] to donate to presidential campaigns? What words, what images, what references are taboo, and what are tolerable — and why? Did the president deprecate the working classes of Pennsylvania and Israeli Prime Minister

Netanyahu, and did he make vague promises to the Russians off mic — or were those just products of our imagination?
At what point did borrowing against our children’s futures become needed “stimulus” and “investments”? Is keeping the federal budget far larger than it was during the Bush years “social Darwinism,” a term that is acceptable political invective in a way “socialism” is not? Where did the adverb “unexpectedly” ^[9] come from, as in almost all economic news now is “unexpectedly” something: “unexpectedly” high unemployment figures or “unexpectedly” sluggish home sales?

Did unemployment ever really go over 8 percent? I thought that it had and is so now. I remember being told that high gas prices analogous to Europe’s, skyrocketing energy costs, and putting federal oil leases off limits (up to the point of risking $10 a gallon gas) were all our common aspirations ^[10] to cool the planet, to cut fossil fuel use, and to transition energy management from the oil companies to the more caring government. But now I am told all that was never so: the private sector is to be praised for producing more gas and oil on private lands than ever before; high gas prices are bad; and we certainly don’t want energy costs to skyrocket. But will the 2012 truth soon revert to that of 2000-2011?

Try Harder . . .

Sometimes we try hard, but cannot quite get straight the party communiqués. Supply and demand are irrelevant to gas pricing, we are told, in this age of energy speculation and rising Middle East tensions that warp the market. But why then do we ask the Saudis to put more oil into the global pot and ponder doing the same from our strategic reserve? Is there something called supply and demand at work, as in increasing global supply to lower prices, or at least to suggest there is more supply coming on line? Is Saudi oil and previously pumped oil of better quality than newly pumped oil?

Wind and solar will create “millions of new green jobs.” But when and how so? Government subsidies to insider green companies like Solyndra are to be deemed good, even if they produce little energy; but normal tax breaks for the oil companies are bad when they fuel the entire country. Are there solar panels on Air Force One? Is there a rule that says Solyndra cannot make what Exxon rakes in?

We are supposed to believe that Republicans in the House have done terrible things in stopping the president’s agenda. But I thought that after 2008 there were Democratic majorities in Congress that could do ^[11] whatever the Democratic president wished? What was not done in 2009 is understandable, but not understandable in 2011?

The masses are told that they will like the new federal takeover of health care. But those who like it the most are to be rewarded for their fealty by being granted exemptions from it? If we write favorably on its behalf, can we too then become exempt from it?

Constitutional Crimes

I still don’t know what Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, preventative detention, and the Patriot Act are. One day I heard that they were all both unnecessary and unconstitutional, and then I woke up a bit later and discovered that all were both critical and lawful. When did that happen? At the time when Iraq went from the “worst” (fill in the blanks) to the administration’s “greatest” achievement? When did assassinating Predators go from airborne terror to jokes about some day shooing away suitors from the presidential daughters?
I am still trying to figure out what the one-percenters are. I think they are wealthy people — but not the very wealthy people. Or are they the very wealthy people who accept that higher taxes can either be avoided or won’t substantively affect their sizable portfolios, or feel that they provide necessary psychological inoculation for their mostly segregated and elite lifestyles?

Those who run Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, or those who manage Goldman Sachs, or those who make $20 million a year in Hollywood, or those who administer Harvard and Yale or the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations have always paid their fair share, and thus are not to be fairly dubbed corporate jet owners? Or is it that these very rich, but not to be demonized one-percenters, accept that the 50%-plus of their income given in state and federal taxes was not previously enough, and so they now feel that they must up that amount and thus must pay 50% of the nation’s aggregate federal income tax revenue rather than just the paltry present 37%? Is that the truth? In other words, the good one-percenters de facto agree that they have previously in the Bush years cheated the Treasury under the present income tax code, and really did feel guilty that they had not voluntarily contributed more, but now they agree with Obama that they should be forced to pay more taxes?

I am further confused: did Bill Gates’ extravagant mansion rob the rest of us (how many of us paid too much for Microsoft Word to pay for his indulgent investment?). Does Warren Buffett’s jet mean that the rest of us have less jet fuel as we sit cramped back in the tail section? Why does James Cameron get his own submarine to explore the ocean; could he not instead have cut the ticket price ^[12] to his movies? Can we all go to Costa del Sol or Martha’s Vineyard; how many cruise missiles paid for that? What are the criteria that suggest some of the above is corporate jet-setting and some is not, when do pigs walk on four and when on two legs?

But this alternate reality is not just political, but also social. This week I read in local papers of a supposed flight from the San Joaquin Valley by the more affluent, either out of state or to the other California that is the coastal corridor from San Francisco to San Diego. The interior we are told is emptying out, keeping unemployment high and housing prices low. But the wire services also assured us that our net population did not dip, given the role of “international arrivals.” So was there an influx from Switzerland or Kenya into California that I was not aware of? Are we back to “overseas contingency operations” and “man-caused disasters”?’ Did Major Hasan lose it in a workplace rage?

In the tragic Trayvon Martin case almost everything that I saw or read for nearly two weeks seemed to me not quite true. As the days wore on, why did the narrative keep changing? Trayvon was not any longer the slight, preteen in a football uniform as his most widely disseminated photo suggested; that information matters as much or as little as information that George Zimmerman had a prior run-in or two with the authorities. Martin was not outweighed by his shooter by 100 pounds. He was not a model student; and George Zimmerman probably did not run him down in efforts to execute him. Zimmerman probably did not utter a racial epithet. To the extent that he sounded insensitive, it was largely due to a doctored NBC tape (NBC said that it was an inadvertent error ^[13] but why did it err to bolster rather than weaken the media narrative? [fake but accurate?]). Zimmerman really did suffer a head injury. The latter was half-Hispanic; but the original white-on-black crime narrative was nevertheless somewhat salvaged with the new rubric “white Hispanic.” I used to think that the idea of re-arresting someone when probable cause is still in doubt was not a compromise solution to finding out the facts.
Putting a bounty on someone’s head is not a crime? Posting a private address to followers for the intent to foment violence against the residents is not either? Nor is doctoring a tape to inflame racial tensions in a period of unrest a terrible thing to do. For congressional representatives to label someone not charged with a crime an assassin or executioner is not considered bad taste and draws little rebuke.
These are the narratives that for purposes of social justice now become reality, but tomorrow, next week, next month, next year?

Who knows? “Truth,” after all, is not the Socratic absolute, but a socially constructed commodity, defined by power and predicated on race, class, and gender, concerns that can be made to serve the greater good, if adjudicated by — well, again, fill in the blanks.

Seth Leibson 04-13-2012

April 13, 2012

As Broadcast on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America

By Seth Leibsohn



The headline from the Washington Post this morning: “Defiant North Korea fires long-range rocket.”  Now, thank heavens, this rocket failed.  But the question in front of us is what was the US prepared to do if this rocket was successful and, moreover, why did a new leader in North Korea think he could defy our agreement with his country and launch this rocket?  Let me ask this question:  We are going into another round of talks with Iran over their nuclear program this weekend.  Why, this week, did Iran’s President blast the United States as “arrogant” and repeatedly say Iran would not give up its nuclear program?  Why did he think he could do that?  All those sanctions we’ve been told were working against both countries, sanctions matched with offers to talk and negotiate: they’ve led to what?  Fear of us or pushing around of us?



Here is everything you need to know about sanctions against rogue nuclear states and soon-to-be rogue nuclear states: Two quotes from the Washington Post about North Korea:  i) “The country is one of the most heavily sanctioned on earth” and ii) “’We have all the sanction authorities we need under existing U.N. resolutions and executive orders,’” said an Obama administration official, who was not authorized to speak on the record.”



So, the heaviest of sanctions with an admission that we don’t need more stopped North Korea not at all, and puts the fear into the Mullocracy of Iran not at all.  Meanwhile, we get lied to.  Here is Secretary of State Clinton on the upcoming talks with Iran:  “We are receiving signals that (the Iranians) are bringing ideas to the table.”  What signals?  What ideas?  Does she read the speeches of the Iranian President?  And what is Iran beyond its bragging?  It is a nation at war with us.  As Steve Hayes put it in today’s Wall Street Journal:  “Tehran has provided weapons to insurgents directly responsible for killing hundreds of American troops…It has funded, trained and equipped jihadists—Sunnis and Shiites alike—targeting American forces and interests in the Middle East and beyond. And all along the way it has provided safe haven and support to al Qaeda leaders and those closest to them.”  So to this country we talk; we negotiate; and speak about high hopes.



And, if North Korea and Iran were not quite enough for us, let me give you Latin America.  Here’s the latest from Gallup: “U.S. President Barack Obama's job approval rating in Latin America is at a new low ahead of the Sixth Summit of the Americas taking place in Cartagena, Colombia, this week….Many Latin Americans have lost faith in Obama's ability to strengthen ties between Latin America and the U.S.”



Remember when Walter Mondale asked Gary Hart “Where’s the beef?”  One simple question for President Obama on the world stage, on his efforts to reset our foreign relations:  “Where’s the success?”  There is none.  There is failure.  There is weakness.  There is danger.  Remember when Jeane Kirkpatrick said she was tired of the US getting kicked around?  Remember how she and Ronald Reagan changed that?  Well we are getting kicked around again.  And it’s more dangerous now than it was back then.



This is what is happening abroad—and, to us.  Meanwhile, while those fires go on, here is what the President is doing at home—and it is very obviously his campaign theme.  It’s the theme he thinks will take down and take out Mitt Romney.  We cannot let him get away with it.  The President is now going back to arguing for the Buffett rule, the idea that if you earn more than one million dollars a year you need to pay more taxes.  He’s so proud of this point, his speech about it on Wednesday is on the White House Website—and in that speech, not for the first time, he says this:



I’m not the first President to call for this idea that everybody has got to do their fair share.  Some years ago, one of my predecessors traveled across the country pushing for the same concept.  He gave a speech where he talked about a letter he had received from a wealthy executive who paid lower tax rates than his secretary, and wanted to come to Washington and tell Congress why that was wrong.  So this President gave another speech where he said it was “crazy” -- that's a quote -- that certain tax loopholes make it possible for multimillionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary.  That wild-eyed, socialist, tax-hiking class warrior was Ronald Reagan.



President Obama went on to say we might as well call this tax on people earning more than one million dollars the “Reagan rule.”



Now this will have cache in this election if and only if one condition is met: If we are intellectually lazy.  My plea is we not be lazy.  Pericles said the secret of democracy is courage, but I think we need to update that and recognize that the secret of democracy is industry, diligence, and dedication—whatever the opposite of lazy is.



So let’s get to it.  Barack Obama is taking Reagan so far out of context Reagan would not recognize how he’s being quoted.  The speech Reagan gave that Obama is quoting from was at a school in 1985.  And here’s how it went.  First, Reagan spoke of the economic recovery we were then enjoying.  And how did we get there?  Here is what Reagan said in that speech:  “Hope has returned, and America's working again.  Now, you know how all this came about, how we cut tax rates and trimmed Federal spending and got interest rates down. But what's really important is what inspired us to do these things. What's really important is the philosophy that guided us. The whole thing could be boiled down to a few words—freedom, freedom, and more freedom. It's a philosophy that isn't limited to guiding government policy. It's a philosophy you can live by; in fact, I hope you do.”



You simply do not hear Barack Obama talking like that—and you most certainly do not hear him pleading for or celebrating cuts in the tax rates—yes, including cutting the millionaires’ taxes; Reagan cut them 20 percent by the time of his speech 1985 and would cut them again another 22 percent.



So yes, in the summer of 1985 Reagan was pushing his new tax legislation.  But here’s what his legislation called for—the diligent can look it up; I already did.  Yes, closing some tax code loopholes, but if you go back and read what loopholes, they were mostly for entertainment deductions.  Again and again the “three martini lunch” is what the White House said it was talking about and what the press kept talking about.  Entertainment expenses.



How about the rest of Reagan’s tax plan that year?  As I mentioned, he had lowered marginal tax rates from 70 percent to 50 percent and in 1985 he went on a campaign to lower them again, to 35 percent and would ultimately get them to 28 percent.  So when Obama says, as he did this week, that Reagan wanted to raise taxes on millionaires that is not what Reagan was pushing for, Reagan was pushing for lowering them, and in that year he was arguing to lower them to today’s very rate (35 percent) that Obama wants to hike!



Now, let’s look at what else Reagan said in that high school speech.  Let me quote:  “We want the part of your check that shows Federal withholding to have fewer digits on it. And we want the part that shows your salary to have more digits on it. We're trying to take less money from you and less from your parents.”



He also said there “When taxes are lowered, economic growth follows. And economic growth is good for just about everyone, especially the poor.”  That’s what Ronald Reagan’s theme was at that speech.



Reagan’s speech and his plan was about scaling down taxes and scaling down the IRS.  That’s not what Obama’s plan is—it’s the very opposite.  Hold on that thought a moment, because I’m not done with Reagan.  The very day before his speech that Obama quotes, here’s what Reagan said about his tax plan in 1985, quote:  “Some people have labored so long to make government bigger, they've developed a knee-jerk addiction to tax increases," Reagan said. "And every time their knee jerks, we get kicked.”  You don’t hear Obama quote that justification for what Reagan was arguing for in 1985.  And for good reason:  he believes the exact opposite.



So let us disabuse ourselves of this notion that the Buffett rule would receive any warrant, never mind initiation, from Ronald Reagan.  And let us disabuse ourselves from the notion that the Buffett rule means anything substantial beyond crude class electioneering.  If implemented, it would raise revenues by five billion dollars—eight times less than Warren Buffett’s entire net worth.  If Warren Buffett wants to implement his Buffett rule, nobody is stopping him and he could do it for the whole country in one fell swoop if he thinks it such a good idea, and he’d still be worth 35 billion dollars after doing so.



The point is this:  the Gateses and the Zuckerbergs and the Dells, just like the Carnegies and the Mellons and the Vanderbilts before them, have noting to be guilty about:  they make wealth and they create wealth.  They made wealth and they created wealth.



I close with what Abraham Lincoln said about wealth creation:  “Property is the fruit of labor...property is desirable...is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself.”  That is how you talk about fairness.  No, that is how you create fairness.  And wealth.  And prosperity.  And growth.  Not with the political theater of the absurd we’ve been treated to this week and will be treated with for weeks to come.



Let’s get on with this election—and let us do it with one goal in mind: Holding this President accountable.  Accountable for the increased debt; the irresponsible, deficit-laden budgets; increased unemployment; increased weakness on the world stage; increased danger to our own country; but mostly, at the end of the day, mostly let us hold him accountable for treating us as if we were stupid by continuing to offer us theater and absurd theater at that.  Accountability—that’s the other secret of this democracy.