Seth Leibson 05-04-2012

Time To Wake Up

May 4, 2012

As Broadcast on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America

By Seth Leibsohn



A lifetime of welfare dependency. A capitulation to enemies that has come back to haunt us. A human rights fiasco.  An economy with no promise. That is what we see this week from President Barack Obama both in his campaign for re-election and in his policies.



Let’s begin with a lifetime of welfare dependency.  The Obama campaign unveiled a campaign slide show entitled “The Life of Julia” this week.  I guess Barack Obama likes to make composites of women because here is another one, what he and his campaign view as the typical American woman.  Here is how the slide show is introduced:  “Take a look at how President Obama's policies help one woman over her lifetime—and how Mitt Romney would change her story.”  Fine, we go to the first slide—don’t worry, I’ll go no further.  We have baby Julia and the slide says “Under President Obama: Julia is enrolled in a Head Start program to help get her ready for school. Because of steps President Obama has taken to improve programs like this one, Julia joins thousands of students across the country who will start kindergarten ready to learn and succeed.”  Then, it says “The Romney Ryan budget would cut Head Start,” etcetera, etcetera.



Let’s stop right there.  Why does the Obama campaign begin and suppose we all will gel to, affiliate, and associate with, or be a child in need of Head Start?  Head Start is a Great Society program for disadvantaged children—a several billion dollar program for, well, not-the-average American. At least not now.  So why do we start with this person?  Here’s why, to quote another keen observer of this: The President and his left-wing view of the world think of a woman and think “a woman can live her entire life by leaning on government intervention, dependency and other people's money rather than her own initiative or hard work.”  They truly believe living off the government, by the government, and from the government is the best way to live.  And of course a program like Head Start has tens of thousands of government employees, don’t forget that.



But what many don’t know is that Head Start is an abject failure.  Study after study has shown its ineffectiveness and, sometimes even, harm.  Here’s just one, as summarized by the Heritage Foundation: A scientifically rigorous evaluation called the 2010 Head Start Impact Study found the program “ineffective at providing a boost to children while in kindergarten and the first grade,” the years Head Start is geared toward.  Just a little more:



For the four-year-old group, access to the program failed to raise the cognitive abilities of Head Start participants on 41 measures compared to similarly situated children who were not allowed access to Head Start. Specifically, the language skills, literacy, math skills, and school performance of the participating children failed to improve.



Alarmingly, access to Head Start for the three-year-old group actually had a harmful effect on the teacher-assessed math ability of these children once they entered kindergarten. Teachers reported that non-participating children were more prepared in math skills than those children who participated in Head Start. Head Start failed to have an impact on the 40 other measures.



The Heritage analysis concludes if there’s one anti-poverty education program that should be cut, it’s Head Start.  But the left presupposes American women in it.  Why?  Margaret Thatcher put her finger on this kind of thinking, this ideology (a word we will come back to), if you will.  She said this kind of welfare state thinking is the “debilitating concept of the all-powerful state which takes too much from you to do too much for you, constantly substituting the politicians' view of what the people should have for the people's own view of what they want.”



Is Head Start something we should want?  A billions dollar program that doesn’t work but does make a discipline of government dependence and government employment?  According to the Obama team, the answer is yes.



Another headline: “Russia's top military officer has threatened to carry out a pre-emptive strike on U.S.-led NATO missile defense facilities in Eastern Europe if Washington goes ahead with its controversial plan to build a missile shield.”  This is the very shield President Obama is now proposing because he thought dismantling the Missile Defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, which he did, would satisfy the Russians.  That, obviously, was not the case.  President Obama upset and weakened our allies in Poland and the Czech Republic, we now see, for no benefit at all.  And in appeasing the Russians then, by throwing our allies overboard, we showed no strength or resolve to the Russians so they can today feel free to cavalierly threaten pre-emptive strikes against us again—as if this were 1961 all over again.



And, this week, we also have another human rights fiasco.  The New York Times headline today “Dissident’s Plea for Protection From China Deepens Crisis.”  CNN puts it this way:  “Chen case is another human rights issue for Obama.”  Staying with CNN a moment, here is how their story opens:



Iran, Syria and now China. President Barack Obama faces a third front of vulnerability on his administration's record of defending human rights with the muddled situation involving activist Chen Guangcheng.

With his re-election campaign just hitting full stride, Obama hoped to capitalize on foreign policy successes such as last year's raid that killed Osama bin Laden to blunt Republican attacks on the sluggish U.S. economic recovery.



When CNN says you have a muddled situation, a sluggish economy, and points out that you are using the killing of bin Laden as a political ploy, all in two sentences, you have a problem.  CNN could have gone on to add Sudan and so many other places—do people even know that Islamist Northern Sudan is bombing the South of Sudan again?  We’ll leave that for another day so surfeited are we just now with Iran, Syria, Egypt, China, Russia, Venezuela, and other places that have become both more dangerous to us on President Obama’s watch and less solvable due to President Obama’s policies and ideology.



It should actually be no surprise that we have muddled the human rights case of a Chinese dissident and human rights lawyer.  This administration has shown from year one it doesn’t know what human rights abuses are.  It was Obama’s very own Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner who told Chinese officials two years ago during a human rights summit that our two countries both have work to do.  The AP reported that in discussing human rights with China, Posner “raised on his own” Arizona’s anti-illegal immigration law as part of our own dark record.  Yes: the very law the Supreme Court, and even its liberals, seem to be in support of.  As Arizona is to illegal immigrants, China is to killing of millions of citizens.  It’s all the same moral plane according to this administration.



Just as the Mullahs in Iran were on the same moral plane as the citizens of Iran when President Obama sent a new year’s message to the leaders and citizens of Iran in the same message, saying our two countries both had the same hopes and dreams—the problem was one country’s rulers shoots people in the streets and the other’s does not, and the dissidents in the first country heard from the leader of the second only support for those who were doing the shooting, totally ignoring (and killing off) their pleas for help.



When you do not understand human rights you do not know how to work for them.  Ideology is what is behind this, it’s an ideology that cares more about diplomacy and negotiations for the sake of diplomacy and negotiations over the actual God-given rights of people and human beings.  It’s what somebody smart once said of the UN:  The UN cares about lines and maps, it doesn’t care about people.  And that’s the same exact ideology that makes a compulsion, a talisman, of government programs whether they work for people, for human beings, or whether they fail them.



It’s an ideology, at center, that puts the state above the person.



And it is that ideology that is the exact opposite of our Founding where the state was to be the servant of the person because the person, the human, was given rights by God and created the state, not the other way around where the state created the person and made the person subservient to it.  Remember the words: “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”



When you understand our Founding and the appropriate human relationship to government, you understand human rights.  When you do not understand our Founding, you cannot understand human rights because the state, in that case, not the person, is the entity of preferred status and your mission is to protect and defend the state, not the individual or the human.



It is this same ideology that is driving our economic stagnation.  Here’s all I need to know about this, because it’s the example that reveals both President Obama’s view of America at the same time it reveals his view about economics.  When he was in France three years ago and asked whether he believed in American exceptionalism he said “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”  Two socialist economies, one a complete basket case based on out-of-control, cradle-to-grave spending where the state takes too much from you in order to do too much for you.  When asked about American greatness, his mind went to a comparison with Greece.



So today, as a result of no reduction in spending and no plan to inspire growth and prosperity, we will get a jobs report whose numbers will not decrease the unemployment rate.  And, thus, we will hear pleas for more spending and even more taxes, and we will hear nothing about how to inspire, energize, and promote small business or private sector growth.



Why is this all of a piece with a blinding ideology?  Bill Bennett likes to quote the philosopher Hanna Arendt as saying there is nothing so blinding as ideology.  He’s right to do so.  Arendt wrote more on this in her book on Totalitarianism, saying “all ideologies contain totalitarian elements.”  Why do they?  She gave several reasons, the most important, she wrote, was “ideological thinking becomes independent of all experience from which it cannot learn anything new.”



And that is President Obama.  An ideologue who sees states and statism, governments and governmental programs, not humans and not individuals and not humans and individuals who can operate free of the state but must instead be cared for by it.  He was trained in this school of thought, a school of thought that taught America (and thus America’s Founding) was responsible for the ills of the world.  And so a changed or, in his words, “fundamentally transformed” America would (independent of all experience) put us on the path of curing the world.  Thus, no exceptionalism. Thus, more capitulation to, rather than standing up to, tyrants. Thus, more statism and less individualism and free enterprise.  Thus, more welfare. Thus, more government control and less individual rights.



And the result?  We see it all around us, here and abroad.  Even in this week’s headlines.



Lincoln said our Declaration, our Founding, provided a “maxim for free society, which could be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”



A simple question:  Is the government we have now, are the policies we have now, is the President we have now doing this?  Does he understand it? Does he believe it? Or, in his ideological fixation, is his thinking so independent of all experience such that he cannot learn anything new?  The question answers itself.  And we see the answer all around us.