December 31, 2014

Ringing Out The Year With Liberal Double Standards

Jonah Goldberg

12/31/2014 12:01:00 AM - Jonah Goldberg

Many conservatives finished the year angry about the same thing they were angry about at the beginning of the year: liberal double standards.
As I write this, GOP House Whip Steve Scalise is in hot water over reports that he spoke to a group of racist poltroons in Louisiana 12 years ago. Whether it was an honest mistake, as Scalise plausibly claims, or a sign of something more nefarious, as his detractors hope, remains to be seen.
But one common response on social media is instructive. Countless conservatives want to know: Why the double standard? Barack Obama was friends with a domestic terrorist, Bill Ayers. His spiritual mentor was a vitriolic racist, Jeremiah Wright. One of his administration's closest advisers and allies is Al Sharpton, a man who has inspired enough racial violence to make a grand dragon's white sheets turn green with envy.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party venerated the late Sen. Robert Byrd, a former Klansmen himself. He was one of 19 senators (all Democrats) to sign the Southern Manifesto opposing integration. One of his co-signers was William Fulbright, Bill Clinton's mentor.
When Republicans are in power, "dissent is the highest form of patriotism." When Democrats are in power, dissent is the racist fuming of "angry white men."
Peaceful, law-abiding tea party groups who cleaned up after their protests -- and got legal permits for them -- were signs of nascent fascism lurking in the American soul. Violent, anarchic and illegal protests by Occupy Wall Street a few years ago or, more recently, in Ferguson, Missouri, were proof that a new idealistic generation was renewing its commitment to idealism.
When rich conservatives give money to Republicans, it is a sign that the whole system has been corrupted by fat cats. When it is revealed that liberal billionaires and left-wing super PACs outspent conservative groups in 2014: crickets.
When Republicans invoke God or religious faith as an inspiration for their political views, it's threatening and creepy. When Democrats do it, it's a sign they believe in social justice.
One can do this all day long. But while examples are easy, explanations are hard.
I don't know who first said, "Behind every apparent double standard lies an unconfessed single standard" (and as far as I can tell, neither does the Internet), but whoever did was onto something.
What looks like inexplicably staggering hypocrisy from the conservative perspective is actually remarkably consistent from the liberal perspective.
Well, "perspective" is probably the wrong word because it implies a conscious, deliberate, philosophical point of view. What is really at work is better understood as bias, even bigotry.
If you work from the dogmatic assumption that liberalism is morally infallible and that liberals are, by definition, pitted against sinister and -- more importantly -- powerful forces, then it's easy to explain away what seem like double standards. Any lapse, error or transgression by conservatives is evidence of their real nature, while similar lapses, errors and transgressions by liberals are trivial when balanced against the fact that their hearts are in the right place.
Despite controlling the commanding heights of the culture -- journalism, Hollywood, the arts, academia and vast swaths of the corporate America they denounce -- liberals have convinced themselves they are pitted against deeply entrenched powerful forces and that being a liberal is somehow brave. Obama, the twice-elected president of the United States, to this day speaks as if he's some kind of underdog.
Frank Rich, the former New York Times columnist and theater critic, recently interviewed Chris Rock for New York Magazine. He wanted to know why right-leaning comedian Dennis Miller isn't as funny (at least according to Rich) as Jon Stewart of "The Daily Show." He asked Rock, "Do you think that identifying with those in power is an impediment to laughter?"
It was a hilarious and revealing moment. Stewart -- who recently had to turn down a pleading request from NBC to take over "Meet the Press" -- has long identified with liberals in power. Moreover, he's easily one of America's most powerful liberals, routinely creating and enforcing liberal conventional wisdom (much as Rich had done from his perch at the Times). Miller, meanwhile, has nowhere near the same cultural clout precisely because he doesn't affirm the single standard at the heart of liberalism: "We're the good guys."

How to Avoid Govt. Shutdown Option

JOHN MCGINNIS & MIKE RAPPAPORT: How to End the Government Shutdown Option: Budget impasses have a way of working out badly for the GOP. Here’s a way to avoid the next crisis.

The GOP almost always bears the blame for a shutdown, because the smaller-government message of Republicans is easily portrayed as aiming to deprive the public of government services. President Clinton faced off against House Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1995, and Mr. Clinton won. President Obama dueled with the Republican House in 2013 and Mr. Obama won.
The advantages to the political party that favors higher spending—i.e., the Democrats—reflect the existing legal regime. But the next Congress can change the law (the most relevant one being the Antideficiency Act) so that the public suffers less inconvenience when the political parties cannot agree on spending levels. In case of a government shutdown, the government would continue to spend on discretionary programs at a level close to the amount authorized by the previous year’s budget. A reasonable default target might be 95%.
Such a law could be a political game-changer. The public would be less likely to suffer serious inconvenience with spending at this default target, and a 5% solution would strengthen the leverage of the party favoring less spending, i.e., the GOP. A 5% cut would in any event be closer to what Republicans ultimately want. They could hold out for a deal preferable to the default, since there would be very low costs imposed on the public in the interim.
A budget reform law should also include provisions to deter a president from increasing the political costs of a government shutdown. Pursuing what is known as the Washington Monument strategy, the executive branch often closes down popular government services such as the Washington Monument or White House tours, claiming that it lacks the funds to keep them open.
The law could discourage this strategy by requiring each agency of the federal government to reduce spending in the way that would be the least disruptive and costly to the public. The government should also be prohibited from taking certain specific actions, such as furloughing employees, that are known to cause significant disruptions to the public.

Indeed.

Opinions

Government for the strongest

By George F. Will Opinion writer December 5

Intellectually undemanding progressives, excited by the likes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — advocate of the downtrodden and the Export-Import Bank — have at last noticed something obvious: Big government, which has become gargantuan in response to progressives’ promptings, serves the strong. It is responsive to factions sufficiently sophisticated and moneyed to understand and manipulate its complexity.

Hence Democrats, the principal creators of this complexity, receive more than 70 percent of lawyers’ political contributions. Yet progressives, refusing to see this defect — big government captured by big interests — as systemic, want to make government an ever more muscular engine of regulation and redistribution. Were progressives serious about what used to preoccupy America’s left — entrenched elites, crony capitalism and other impediments to upward mobility — they would study “The New Class Conflict,” by Joel Kotkin, a lifelong Democrat.

George F. Will writes a twice-weekly column on politics and domestic and foreign affairs. He began his column with The Post in 1974, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1977. He is also a contributor to FOX News’ daytime and primetime programming. View Archive

 

 

The American majority that believes life will be worse for the next few decades — more than double the number who believe things will be better — senses that 95 percent of income gains from 2009-2012 went to the wealthiest 1 percent. This, Kotkin believes, reflects the “growing alliance between the ultra-wealthy and the instruments of state power.” In 2012, Barack Obama carried eight of America’s 10 wealthiest counties.
In the 1880s, Kotkin says, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s railroad revenues were larger than the federal government’s revenues. That was the old economy. This is the new: In 2013, the combined ad revenue of all American newspapers was smaller than Google’s; so was magazine revenue. In 2013, Google’s market capitalization was six times that of GM, but Google had one-fifth as many employees. The fortunes of those Kotkin calls “the new Oligarchs” are based “primarily on the sale of essentially ephemeral goods: media, advertising and entertainment.”


He calls another ascendant group the Clerisy, which is based in academia (where there are many more administrators and staffers than full-time instructors), media, the nonprofit sector and, especially, government: Since 1945, government employment has grown more than twice as fast as America’s population. The Founders worried about government being captured by factions; they did not foresee government becoming society’s most rapacious and overbearing faction.
The Clerisy is, Kotkin says, increasingly uniform in its views, and its power stems from “persuading, instructing and regulating the rest of society.” The Clerisy supplies the administrators of progressivism’s administrative state, the regulators of the majority that needs to be benevolently regulated toward progress.
The Clerisy’s policies include dense urban living as a “sustainable” alternative to suburbia, and serving environmentalism by consuming less. Hence the sluggish growth and job creation since the recession ended in June 2009 — a.k.a. the “new normal” — do not seriously disturb the Clerisy. It preaches what others — including the 43 percent of non-college-educated whites who consider themselves downwardly mobile — are supposed to practice. The result, Kotkin says, is a “more stratified, less permeable social order.” And today’s “plutonomy,” an economy fueled by the spending of the relatively few people who guaranteed that luxury brands did best during the recession.
Michael Bloomberg, an archetypical progressive, enunciated a “ ‘Downton Abbey’ vision of the American future” (Walter Russell Mead’s phrase) for New York. As New York City’s mayor, Bloomberg said: “If we can find a bunch of billionaires around the world to move here, that would be a godsend, because that’s where the revenue comes to take care of everybody else.” Progressive government, not rapid, broad-based economic growth, will “take care of” the dependent majority.
In New York, an incubator of progressivism, Kotkin reports, the “wealthiest 1 percent earn a third of the entire city’s personal income — almost twice the proportion for the rest of the country.” California, a one-party laboratory for progressivism, is home to 111 billionaires and the nation’s highest poverty rate (adjusted for the cost of living). One study shows that young Californians are less likely to become college graduates than their parents were. “The state’s ‘green energy’ initiatives,” Kotkin observes, “supported by most tech and many financial Oligarchs, have raised electricity rates well above the national average, making it difficult for firms in traditional fields like manufacturing, fossil fuels, agriculture or logistics.” California is no longer a destination for what Kotkin calls “aspirational families”: In 2013, he says, Houston had more housing starts than all of California.
In 2010, there were 27 million more Americans than in 2000 — but fewer births, a reflection, surely, of what Kotkin calls “the end of intergenerational optimism.” The political future belongs to those who will displace the progressive Clerisy’s objectives with an agenda of economic growth.
Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.

George Will: Another case for term limits

 

 

By George F. Will Opinion writer December 3

In 2010, Plymouth, Conn., was awarded $430,000 for widening sidewalks and related matters near two schools. This money was a portion of the $612 million that Congress had authorized for five years of the federal Safe Routes to School program, which is intended to fight childhood obesity by encouraging children to burn calories by walking or biking to school. Really.

Fortunately, Plymouth is near Sharon, Conn., home of the Buckley family, whose members, when their gimlet eyes notice nonsense, become elegantly polemical. So Congress’s Safe Routes silliness inadvertently did something excellent. It helped to provoke James Buckley to write a slender book that, if heeded, would substantially improve American governance.

George F. Will writes a twice-weekly column on politics and domestic and foreign affairs. He began his column with The Post in 1974, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1977. He is also a contributor to FOX News’ daytime and primetime programming. View Archive

 

 

Buckley’s late brother Bill, when asked how he found topics for three columns a week, said the world irritated him at least that often. James, 91, who has now been constructively annoyed by Congress, was a U.S. senator (1971-1977), then an undersecretary of state, then a judge on the nation’s second-most-important court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Now, with his “Saving Congress from Itself: Emancipating the States and Empowering Their People,” he continues the family tradition of standing athwart destructive tendencies and shouting “Stop!”

Buckley proposes ending federal grants to state and local governments, a category of spending that has ballooned from $24.1 billion in 1970 to an estimated $640.8 billion in fiscal 2015. Devising such spending, Buckley says, absorbs much of Congress’s time, diverting it from “core national responsibilities” and toward concerns that are properly — he says constitutionally — the concerns of the states. 

Courts, however, have construed the “general welfare” language of the Constitution’s spending clause (taxes may be raised “to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare”) as permitting Congress to spend on anything , including to “induce” (the Supreme Court’s word) states to accept federal preferences about state responsibilities. In 1987, the Supreme Court said that it was “question[able] whether ‘general welfare’ is a judicially enforceable restriction at all.”

So congressional spending is limited only by Congress’s self-restraint, or that of state and local governments that are free to reject the spending and the administrative costs that come with it, and the federal preemption of lower governments’ latitude in setting priorities. By 2010, Buckley says, the more than 1,100 grant-in-aid programs available to states and/or localities constituted 17 percent of the federal budget, the third-largest spending category after entitlements and defense.

But “free” money can be expensive. Washington used $455 million to induce Connecticut to provide the remaining $112 million needed for an unneeded 9.4-mile busway linking New Britain and Hartford, which were already linked by bus service — and $112 million was diverted from more crucial state needs. Buckley explains:

“Anyone who has ever eaten lunch on an expense account will understand the perverse incentives generated when a person is given access to funds that may only be used for a particular purpose. . . . Organizations, governments included, will act in the same way. When someone else picks up the check, they consume goods and services inefficiently.”

The political class, however, uses grants-in-aid to purchase the votes of citizens who see only the large sums of federal money, not the distortions of state and local decisions. Having lived long and seen much, Buckley knows how unlikely it is that members of Congress will embrace his idea, absent an ancillary reform: term limits.

During the 19th century, Buckley says, when the Senate actually earned the sobriquet “world’s greatest deliberative body,” fewer than 10 percent of the senators “who served the equivalent of at least one term went on to serve more than two.” Of the three antebellum giants — Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster — only Webster served the equivalent of three full terms. “This,” Buckley writes, “suggests that a senator is able to make a significant contribution to his country’s welfare within the 12-year limit that I would place on senatorial service.”

Buckley will soon have a term-limits ally less than half his age. Ben Sasse (R), 42, Nebraska’s senator-elect, plans to introduce a constitutional amendment limiting House and Senate members to four and two terms, respectively. Will legislators addicted to purchasing incumbency with grants-in-aid submit to the states for ratification an amendment that would limit their tenure in office? State legislatures are responsive to public support for term limits and are composed of politicians eager to open federal offices to their ascent.

Congress can be bludgeoned by a public aroused on behalf of term limits. And when purged of careerism, Congress can cure its addiction to grants-

The Two Empires We Must Defeat

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

The Two Empires We Must Defeat

Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 1 Comments

There is a thread that connects many of our conflicts, whether it's the one against terrorism or the one between the Republican establishment and its conservative insurgency. To win a war, we have to understand the nature of the conflict and how we got there. And that's often the missing piece.

The left blames imperialism for our conflict with terrorists. And it's right. Just not in the way that it thinks.

Empires may be expansionist, but they're also tolerant and multicultural. They have to be, since out of their initial phase they have to enlist the cooperation and services of subjects from a variety of cultures and religions. An empire may initially be fueled by the talents and skills of a core nation, but as it reaches its next phase, it begins sacrificing their interests to the larger structure of empire.

The argument between the establishments of the right and the left is over two different kinds of empires. The Republican establishment in America and its various center-right counterparts abroad have attached themselves to the liberal vision of a transnational empire of international law so much that they have forgotten that this vision came from the left, rather than from the right.

This Empire of International Law proved to have some uses for global trade and security, particularly during the Cold War. These practical arrangements however are overshadowed by the fact that it, like every empire, sacrifices the interests of its peoples to its own structure. This is true of the structure at every level, from the EU to the Federal structure of the United States. The system has displaced the people. And the system runs on principles that require cheap labor leading to policies like amnesty.

The Empire of International Law needs Muslim immigrants even if its people don't, because it envisions integrating them and their countries into this arrangement and rejects national interests as narrow-minded and nativist.

This formerly liberal vision now embraced largely by centrists is the left's vision, which includes today's liberals, is of a completely transnational ideological empire in which there are no borders, but there are countless activists, in which everything and everyone are controlled by the state.

Like the more conventional imperial vision, the left's red Empire of Ideology depends on enlisting Muslims and Muslim countries into its ranks. This is the basis of the Red-Green alliance.

These two types of imperialists are incapable of representing native workers or communities because they are transnationalists. Their vision is cosmopolitan, rather than representative. They are entranced with a byzantine international arrangement and uninterested in the lives of the people they are ruining.

This Imperial blindness is why the West is falling so swiftly to Islam. It's why the pockets of resistance are coming from nations outside the imperial sphere.

Countries like Israel, India or Burma are dependent on specific groups and are not truly part of either empire. They are not transnational. They are national. And it's why they are still holding out.

The empires have made their inroads into them. Israel has its tycoon class that would love nothing more than to join the transnational empire. It has its radical left that would destroy Israel for the world revolution. But it also has millions of people that understand that their lives are on the line.

The resistance to Islam has come from outside the empire. It has come from countries that are neither part of Islam nor the Empire. Those countries may be large, like India or China, or precariously small, like Israel, but they have a dominant ethnic and/or religious identity and are not truly part of the Empire, though they have extensive interconnections with it.

These countries have minority groups, including sizable Muslim minorities, but they also have a national interest that is tethered to its majority.

The United States used to be that way, until not long ago. And then it lost touch with itself. It became diseased with empire and the disease of empire has nothing to do with pith helmets or planting flags. It's what happens when the structure of the system becomes more important than the people. When that happens the old principles that are based on the people are set aside and replaced with principles that are based on the system.

That is how globalism came to trump American workers. It's how accommodating Islam came to matter more than anything else.

An empire may begin by conquering other countries, but it invariably ends by conquering and consuming its own. The empire we are part of isn't, despite the left's rhetoric, a conquering empire. American territorial expansionism ended long before we became part of an empire. Instead we are part of an empire of systems, an empire of principles, an empire of internationalism, of trade and of pieces of papers, legal and financial, being moved through the bowels of our endless systems.

This is the thing that we call international law. And it has to die for us to live.

This is the empire that feeds armies of foreign immigrants through our countries. It's also the empire that pays allegiance to Islam because empires have to diversify to expand. Diversity isn't the source of our strength. It is the source of imperial expansionism which has to absorb many more peoples.

To empires, people are interchangeable. If the natives have a low birth rate and a long lifespan, then workers with high birth rates and lower lifespans are brought in to replace them. If the natives are reluctant to pay higher taxes, immigrants from countries that are fine with voting for high taxation are imported. That is how empires, not nations, do business.

This is what the political establishment in most countries believes. This is what tearing them apart.

The only way for the nations to survive is for the empire, in all its forms, the ideological revolutionary empire of the left and the centrist empire of international law, to to be cast off.

Every political revolution that fails to take into account the power of these two empires on our national politics is doomed to fail. To win a conflict, you have to understand what you are fighting.

We are fighting against two variations on the same set of ideas about the importance of transnational institutions over national ones. We are fighting against the entrenched loyalty to systems and ideology over people. We are fighting empires that have displaced people for ideas.

The only possible revolution that can succeed against these two empires is populist. It must emerge from the needs of the people of a country to be free, to be prosperous and to manage its own affairs. It must proceed by showing the people how they have been victimized and how they are being victimized. And it must show them that they reclaim what their grandparents had if they take back controls over their own countries and destinies.

The rhetoric of empire is seductive. Our educational systems implant it at an early age. It is not the empire of explorers and conquerors, but of lawyers and social justice activists. Against it we must raise the flag of national interests.

The left and the right establishments pretend that they have two very different sets of ideas about the world. They have the same set of ideas, one is a more extreme version of the other. The left fights its own heresies much more fiercely than it does the right. Its rhetoric about imperialism is a rejection of its former ideas about empire for its more radical empire. And we do not want either empire.

What we must have is an end to empires and the rise of nations. Only nations that answer to the national interests of their people can stand against the savage barbarian migrating tide.

A Legacy of Liberalism

Thomas Sowell

11/18/2014 12:01:00 AM - Thomas Sowell

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said there were "phrases that serve as an excuse for not thinking." One of these phrases that substitute for thought today is one that depicts the current problems of blacks in America as "a legacy of slavery."
New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof asserts that there is "overwhelming evidence that centuries of racial subjugation still shape inequity in the 21st century" and he mentions "the lingering effects of slavery." But before we become overwhelmed, that evidence should be checked out.
The evidence offered by Mr. Kristof in the November 16th issue of the New York Times seems considerably short of overwhelming, to put it charitably. He cites a study showing that "counties in America that had a higher proportion of slaves in 1860 are still more unequal today." Has he never heard statisticians' repeated warnings that correlation is not causation?
The South long remained a region that blacks fled by the millions -- for very good reasons. But, in more recent years, the net migration of blacks has been from the North to the South. No doubt they have good reasons for that as well.
But there is no reason to believe that blacks today are unaware of the history of slavery or of the Jim Crow era in the South. Indeed, there are black "leaders" who seem to talk about nothing else. Yet blacks who are moving back to the South seem more concerned with the present and the future than with the past.
Kristof's other "overwhelming" evidence of the current effects of past slavery is that blacks do not have as much income as whites. But Puerto Ricans do not have as much income as Japanese Americans. Mexican Americans do not have as much income as Cuban Americans. All sorts of people do not have as much income as all sorts of other people, not only in the United States, but in countries around the world. And most of these people were never enslaved.
If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. In other words, we could compare hard evidence on "the legacy of slavery" with hard evidence on the legacy of liberals.
Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and "war on poverty" programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began.
Over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points, compared to the 40-point drop in the previous 20 years. This was the continuation of a previous economic trend, at a slower rate of progress, not the economic grand deliverance proclaimed by liberals and self-serving black "leaders."
Ending the Jim Crow laws was a landmark achievement. But, despite the great proliferation of black political and other "leaders" that resulted from the laws and policies of the 1960s, nothing comparable happened economically. And there were serious retrogressions socially.
Nearly a hundred years of the supposed "legacy of slavery" found most black children being raised in two-parent families in 1960. But thirty years after the liberal welfare state found the great majority of black children being raised by a single parent.
The murder rate among blacks in 1960 was one-half of what it became 20 years later, after a legacy of liberals' law enforcement policies. Public housing projects in the first half of the 20th century were clean, safe places, where people slept outside on hot summer nights, when they were too poor to afford air conditioning. That was before admissions standards for public housing projects were lowered or abandoned, in the euphoria of liberal non-judgmental notions. And it was before the toxic message of victimhood was spread by liberals. We all know what hell holes public housing has become in our times. The same toxic message produced similar social results among lower-income people in England, despite an absence of a "legacy of slavery" there.
If we are to go by evidence of social retrogression, liberals have wreaked more havoc on blacks than the supposed "legacy of slavery" they talk about. Liberals should heed the title of Jason Riley's insightful new book, "Please Stop Helping Us."

Random Thoughts - T Sowell

December 31, 2014

Random Thoughts

Thomas Sowell

12/30/2014 12:01:00 AM - Thomas Sowell

Random thoughts on the passing scene:Now that Barack Obama is ruling by decree, he seems more like a king than a president. Maybe it is time we change the way we address him. "Your Majesty" may be a little too much, but perhaps "Your Royal Glibness" might be appropriate.
It tells us a lot about academia that the president of Smith College quickly apologized for saying, "All lives matter," after being criticized by those who are pushing the slogan, "Black lives matter." If science could cross breed a jellyfish with a parrot, it could create academic administrators.
Mitt Romney seems to be ready to try again to run for president in 2016. But most defeated presidential candidates who ran again lost again. There are much stronger Republican candidates available now than there were in 2012, including governors Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana. At this crucial juncture in the nation's history, why run a retreaded candidate?
Explaining differences in achievements between groups often pits those who attribute these differences to ability against those who attribute differences to barriers. Neither seems to pay much attention to differences in what people want to do. Few guys from my old neighborhood were likely to end up as violinists or ballet dancers, simply because that was not what they were interested in.
When Professor Jonathan Gruber of M.I.T. boasted of fooling the "stupid" American public, that was not just a personal quirk of his. It epitomized a smug and arrogant attitude that is widespread among academics at elite institutions. There should be an annual "Jonathan Gruber award" for the most smug and arrogant statement by an academic. There would be thousands eligible every year.
Every society has some people who don't respect the law. But, when it is the people in charge of the law -- like the President of the United States and his Attorney General -- who don't respect it, that is when we are in big trouble.
Has anyone asked the question, "How could so many people across the country spend so much time at night marching, rioting and looting, if they had to get up and go to work the next morning?"
Hillary Clinton's idea that we have to see the world from our adversaries' point of view -- and even "empathize" with it -- is not new. Back in 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said, "I have realized vividly how Herr Hitler feels." Ronald Reagan, however, made sure our adversaries understood how we felt. Reagan's approach turned out a lot better than Chamberlain's.
Our schools and colleges are laying a guilt trip on those young people whose parents are productive, and who are raising them to become productive. What is amazing is how easily this has been done, largely just by replacing the word "achievement" with the word "privilege."
There are few modest talents so richly rewarded -- especially in politics and the media -- as the ability to portray parasites as victims, and portray demands for preferential treatment as struggles for equal rights.
Republicans complain when Democrats call them racists. But when have you ever heard a Republican counterattack? You don't win by protesting your innocence or whining about the unfairness of the charge. Yet when have you heard a Republican reply by saying, "You're a lying demagogue without a speck of evidence. Put up or shut up!"
President Obama's establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba was not due to what the American public wanted or even what his own party wanted. It was a decision in defiance of both, just as his decisions about military matters ignore what generals say and his decisions about medical matters ignore what doctors have said. Yet pundits continue to depict him as a helpless lame duck president.
When the political left wants to help the black community, they usually want to help the worst elements in that community -- thugs they portray as martyrs, for example -- without the slightest regard for the negative effect this can have on the lives of the majority of decent black people.
If anyone in the mainstream media is at a loss for what New Year's resolution to make, try this:Stop "spinning" or censoring stories about race, and try telling the plain truth, if only for the novelty of it.  

 

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December 31, 2014

Random Thoughts

Thomas Sowell

10/28/2014 12:01:00 AM - Thomas Sowell

Random thoughts on the passing scene:The great boxing champion Joe Louis once said about one of his opponents, who was known for his speed: "He can run but he can't hide." In the Congressional elections this year, many Democrats are running away from Barack Obama, but they can't hide their record of voting for Obama's agenda more than 90 percent of the time.
Now that the Western democracies have learned the hard way what the consequences are when you admit all sorts of people into your country -- including people who hate both the principles and the people of your society -- will that cause zealots for open borders and amnesty to have some second thoughts, or perhaps first thoughts?
I hope Yankees manager Joe Girardi was watching the World Series when Madison Bumgarner was allowed to come out and pitch the 9th inning, even though he had already made 107 pitches. Time and again, Girardi has taken out a pitcher who was pitching a great game, and brought in a reliever who lost it. Baseball statistics provide good rules of thumb, but bad dogmas on a given day.
There seem to be a lot of comic-book-level movies, with human beings playing the role of cartoons.
Never take other people for granted. There is a point of no return in all relationships.
Back in 1947, J.A. Schumpeter said, "effective political reasoning consists mainly in trying to exalt certain propositions into axioms and to put others out of court." That is still the game being played by "global warming" zealots.
Some people question Barack Obama's competence, because he appointed a man with no medical background to be the Ebola czar. But Obama is not trying to solve a medical problem. He is trying to solve a political problem, on the eve of an election -- and a political partisan is the way to do that. Expecting Obama to be concerned about a medical threat to the American people is unrealistic, in view of the man's whole history.
When I see some of the bonehead plays by professional football players, I cannot understand why guys getting paid millions of dollars cannot stay alert for two hours, once a week.
Too many intellectuals are too impressed with the fact that they know more than other people. Even if an intellectual knows more than anybody else, that is not the same as saying that he knows more than everybody else put together -- which is what would be needed to justify substituting his judgment for that expressed by millions of others through the market or through the ballot box.
Sean Hannity recently pointed out an essential parallel between Islamic extremists and Nazis. One believed that they were the "master race" and the other that they are the only true religion. Both believed that this entitled them to kill others, just for not being part of their group.
Unless the Secret Service is given unambiguous authority to shoot anyone who climbs over the White House fence, without being second-guessed by people who will say "he shot an unarmed man," any president is needlessly at risk -- and millions of American voters' choice for that office can be nullified by any crackpot. You don't know who is armed or unarmed until it is too late.
Attorney General Eric Holder hit a new low, even for him, when he acted indignant about the leak of evidence supporting the police officer in the Ferguson, Missouri shooting -- on grounds that this was an attempt to influence public opinion before the grand jury makes its ruling. What was Holder doing from day one, other than trying to influence public opinion in the opposite direction?
In going through my mail, I am always amazed at how many people seem to think that a series of unsubstantiated pronouncements constitutes an argument.
Except for Congressional elections, the most important election this year is the close race for governor of Wisconsin. Governor Scott Walker has shown that he has substance and guts, rather than image and rhetoric, by opposing the government employee unions that have been bleeding the taxpayers. He would make a far better Republican presidential candidate in 2016 than Congressional phrase-makers or a retreaded candidate who lost in 2012.

Suddenly, things look up for the GOP.

---

On a Roll

Suddenly, things look up for the GOP.

Fred Barnes

December 15, 2014, Vol. 20, No. 14

Republicans have lost the last two presidential elections, but not much else over the past six years. They’ve captured the House and Senate. They now hold 31 governorships and 69 of the 99 state legislative chambers. What this means is pretty simple: There’s an emerging Republican majority.

The GOP still has significant emerging to do before reaching majority status. It may never get there. The rise this year may be Republicans’ peak for now. They may have achieved nothing more than what University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato calls “the emerging outline of possible GOP victory in 2016.”

At the very least, a Republican must win the White House in 2016 while maintaining control of Congress. Republicans need to attract more votes from minorities, particularly Hispanics. They must continue to improve their appeal to women. Most of all, Republicans must avoid self-inflicted wounds such as prompting another government shutdown or nominating a poor presidential candidate.

That’s a lot to pull off. But Republicans have advantages they lacked in the presidential years of 2008 and 2012. One is the eight-year itch. That’s the tendency of voters to change parties in the White House after a two-term presidency. The only exception in the last seven instances of such a presidency was the election of George H. W. Bush in 1988 after Reagan’s two terms.

And President Obama is likely to make things worse for the Democratic candidate in 2016. He is not only unpopular but also appears committed to an unpopular agenda. Every poll shows Americans want compromise in Washington. Obama’s preference is for confrontation.

Then there’s the ideological direction of the Democratic party. It’s tilting left.
All the energy and passion is on the left. The party is being McGovernized. Moderates have about as much influence as liberals do in the Republican party. The Democratic agenda—bigger government, higher taxes, increased spending, and cultural nihilism—isn’t a winning combination for 2016.

Midterm elections are not predictive of presidential outcomes. We know that from recent history: After winning in a landslide in the 2010 midterm, Republicans lost the presidential race two years later. Still, the 2014 election offers some clues about political trends. For instance, it suggests the Obama coalition is not the same as the Democratic coalition.

Obama was a great presidential candidate. He maximized the Democratic vote. But when he wasn’t on the ballot in 2010 and 2014, Democrats lost badly. Their turnout machine didn’t work as effectively without him on the ticket. So the Democratic coalition will probably be less broad in 2016.

Democrats think they have a number of current issues on their side. But issues that poll well don’t always cause voters to back candidates of the party associated with those issues. Raising the minimum wage is a good example. It’s clearly a Democratic issue. In November, voters in Arkansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Alaska backed increases in the minimum wage. At the same time, they elected Republicans to the Senate—and by large margins except in Alaska.

Among the major Democratic issues today are global warming, same-sex marriage, abortion, and voter ID. Global warming is so far down the list of issues that voters care about, it has dropped out of sight. The fight over gay marriage is over. Democrats benefited in two election cycles from blaming Republicans for a “war on women” involving abortion and contraception. That issue died in 2014. Opposing voter ID laws may galvanize African Americans and the party base, but that’s it. Besides, there’s no evidence such laws prevent voting.

Immigration is different. It divides the country. It’s a problem for Republicans, who need 40 percent or more of Hispanic voters to win the presidency. It is one of the few issues that actually may help Democrats. Even so, Republicans fared better with Hispanic voters in 2014 than in 2012. In Texas, Republican Greg Abbott got 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in winning the governor’s race.

The Hispanic vote is growing, but it’s voters over 65 who are increasing the fastest as a share of the electorate. According to one estimate, seniors will be 30 percent of voters in 2030, Hispanics only 15 percent. And older voters tend to be more conservative, thus inclined to vote for Republicans.

The youngest voters, 18 to 29, are beginning to slip away from Democrats, too. Exit polls showed House Democrats had “half the advantage” with voters under 30 this year than they did in 2006. “The party’s grip on the young may be loosening,” wrote Mark Bauerlein in the New York Times.

Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe said Democrats ought to have touted aggressively the economy in the 2014 campaign. He should know better. Employment has improved, especially if you’re happy with a part-time job. But the recovery from the 2008-2009 recession is the slowest in many decades as average middle-class income stagnates and the exodus of Americans from the job market continues.

Assuming Obama sticks to his unimaginative Keynesian policies, it’s doubtful the economy will be any better in 2016. And a mediocre or worse economy won’t boost Democratic candidates, quite the contrary.

Finally, it’s worth looking at the Democratic presidential candidates. They’re old. Hillary Clinton will be 69 in 2016, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders a ripe old 75, and Jim Webb, the former Virginia senator, 70. Outgoing governor Martin O’Malley of Maryland will be a mere 53, but the main feature of his governorship—tax hike after tax hike—was repudiated in this year’s election. True, younger candidates may jump in.

The Republican presidential race, in contrast, is brimming with potential candidates in their 40s or early 50s. A partial list includes Bobby Jindal, Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, Rand Paul, Scott Walker, and Ted Cruz. Who’s likely to be a more exciting candidate in 2016, Hillary Clinton or Marco Rubio?

Favorable trends guarantee nothing in politics. But if they didn’t exist, Republicans wouldn’t have emerged in 2014. Should they continue in 2016, Republicans will emerge again. And in the not too distant future, they’ll be the majority party.

Fred Barnes is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard.

Obama's Worldview Is A Toxic Mix Of Policy Failures

December 30, 2014

Obama's Worldview Is A Toxic Mix Of Policy Failures

By JOHN BOLTON
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

This is typically a time to compile the "biggest news stories" of the year ending and make predictions for the one upcoming. This time, however, in foreign and defense policy, both the retrospective and prospective lists are quite short.
In fact, for the last six years, and almost certainly the next two, the biggest news is Barack Obama's systematic unwillingness to advance U.S. national-security interests around the world. His record marks him as the only president since at least Franklin Roosevelt who has not emphasized protecting America as his highest priority.
Obama's worldview is a toxic mix combining distrust of our power (especially the politico-military variety) and an appallingly wide-eyed naivete. He focuses on national security only when he has no choice, such as when presented with a clear opportunity to eliminate Osama bin Laden.
Even where Obama acts strongly, as in the surge in Afghanistan, he has signaled clearly that he was actually of two minds by simultaneously announcing the surge's end date.
Or he acts inconsistently, as with North Korea's recent hacking of Sony Pictures' computers while all but ignoring that country's ongoing nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. Of course, Pyongyang's nuclear and cyberwarfare capabilities are not disconnected in Kim Jong Un's mind, even if they are in Obama's.
Most concretely, Obama's military budgets have fallen dramatically, nearly $1.5 trillion below Bush administration projections, even after removing the Iraq and Afghanistan war costs from the comparison.
Of these cuts, the effects of sequestration (resulting from the 2011 budget deal, a catastrophic Republican political and philosophical mistake), while only a comparatively small part, are still not yet over.
Obama boasts that he has ended conflicts where the American public has grown weary. But, in fact, our fellow citizens respond to presidential leadership in international affairs.
Public opinion polls are not blocks of granite. When presidents fail to explain foreign threats and the necessary responses to them, the public can be excused for believing that these dangers have diminished, especially when the opposition party fears taking the subject on or confronts a rising isolationism within its own ranks.
The real problem with both Obama's defense cuts and his abysmal leadership is his systematic weakening of America's deterrence capabilities. We protect U.S. interests best by dissuading potential adversaries from even thinking about mounting challenges.
When they see retreat or incompetence, however, they calculate lower risks and greater opportunities, thus increasing threatening behavior. Weakening American capabilities therefore does not enhance the prospects for peace but diminishes them.
The consequences of Obama's personal indecisiveness and his ideological view that American strength increases international tension and conflict are grave. Both U.S. allies and adversaries perceive a weaker, less-attentive U.S. across the world's geographic regions.
And make no mistake, even small and medium-sized countries focused on their own regions carefully monitor America's performance globally. They believe, rightly, that Washington's policy in one area reveals much about our government's thinking worldwide.
The results of applying Obama's worldview for six years are only too apparent. The Middle East and North Africa are descending into anarchy, with Iran's nuclear and ballistic-missile programs proceeding unchecked. Obama wants to restore full diplomatic relations with Cuba and has hinted at doing the same for Iran.
Long-standing international boundaries are disappearing as terrorist groups such as the Islamic State are literally creating new states out of existing ones, and countries like Libya and Yemen are dissolving day by day.
Israel and our Arab friends (such as Jordan and oil-producing Arabian Peninsula nations) believe Obama has all but abandoned stopping Iran or the growing terrorist threats.
The list is nearly endless:
Russian military adventurism in Ukraine, China's belligerent territorial claims in the South and East China Seas and bending the knee to leftist caudillos in Latin America like the Castro brothers.
To be sure, the global collapse in oil prices has harmed Iran, Russia, Venezuela and others — outcomes we can all appreciate, but ones hardly due to Obama, any more than lower gasoline prices' stimulus to America's economy had anything to do with his domestic economic policies.
The systematic weakening of U.S. global influence is thus more than a year-end feature story. It requires a sustained national debate on what our proper place in the world should be.
Do we believe American strength is necessary to sustain our way of life, or are we part of the problem? We did not adequately debate this existential question during the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, and we have paid a devastating price.
If we fail to do so in the already-launched 2016 campaign, we have only ourselves to blame.
• Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

2014 and Historic Turn Pointa (T. Sowell)

December 30, 2014

2014: A Year Of Anniversaries That Provide Lessons

By THOMAS SOWELL
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

 

Thomas Sowell

2014 has been a year of anniversaries. It was the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I — a war that many at the time saw as madness, and they predicted that it would be the harbinger of a second world war a generation later.
2014 was also the 70th anniversary of the fateful landing at Normandy that marked the beginning of the end of World War II.
2014 was likewise the 60th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, which marked the beginning of the end of racial segregation, and the 50th anniversary of both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the beginning of President Lyndon Johnson's "war on poverty" programs.
Anniversaries are opportunities to look back at historic turning points, compare the rhetoric of the time with the reality that we now know unfolded — and to learn hard lessons about the difference between rhetoric and reality for our own time.
A hundred years ago, the president of the United States was Woodrow Wilson — the first president to claim openly that the Constitution of the United States was outdated, and that courts should erode the limits that the Constitution placed on the federal government.
Today, after a hundred years of courts' eroding the Constitution's protections of personal freedom, we now have a president who has taken us dangerously close to one-man rule, unilaterally changing laws passed by Congress and refusing to enforce other laws — on immigration especially.
Like Wilson, our current president is charismatic, vain, narrow and headstrong. Someone said of Wilson that he had no friends, only devoted slaves and enemies. That description comes all too close to describing Barack Obama, with his devoted political palace guard in the White House that he listens to, in contrast to the generals he ignores on military issues and the doctors he ignores on medical issues.
Both Wilson and Obama have been great phrase makers and crowd pleasers. We are still trying to cope with the havoc left in the wake of Wilson's ringing phrase about "the self-determination of peoples."
First of all, it was never "self-determination." It was the arbitrary determination of the fate of millions of people in nations carved out of empires dismembered by the victors after World War I. Neither the Irish in Britain nor the Germans in Bohemia were allowed to determine who would rule them. Nor was anybody in Africa.
The consequence of fragmenting large nations was the creation of small and vulnerable nations that Hitler was able to pick off, one by one, during the 1930s.
Minorities who protested that they were being oppressed under the Austro-Hungarian Empire got their own nations, where their own oppression of other minorities was often worse than they had experienced in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
We are still trying to sort out the chaos in the Middle East growing out of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. How long it will take to sort out the havoc left behind by Obama's foreign policies only the future will tell.
It should be noted that, after the charismatic Wilson, none of the next three presidents was the least bit charismatic. Let us hope that the voters today have also learned how dangerous charisma and glib rhetoric can be — and what a childish self-indulgence it is to choose a president on the basis of symbolism.
Wilson was the first Southerner to be elected president since the Civil War, as Obama was to become the first black president. But neither fact qualified them to wield the enormous powers of the presidency. Nor will being the first woman president, the first Hispanic president or other such firsts.
Since 2014 has been the 50th anniversary of President Johnson's "war on poverty," we should note that this was another war that the Johnson administration lost. Both he and President Kennedy before him said that the purpose of the "war on poverty" was to help people become self-supporting, to end dependency on government programs. But 50 years and trillions of dollars later, there is more dependency than ever.
Let's hope we have learned something from past debacles.

Gift To ACORN And Democrats

December 30, 2014

Mel Watt's Christmas Gift To ACORN And Democrats

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Cronyism: The Obama regime has quietly ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to start donating hundreds of millions of dollars a year to a permanent affordable-housing slush fund for Democratic activist groups.
Earlier this month, while few were paying attention, Federal Housing Finance Agency chief Mel Watt sent letters to the mortgage giants to "set aside in each fiscal year 4.2 basis points of each dollar of unpaid principal balance of new business purchases to be allocated to the Housing Trust Fund and the Capital Magnet Fund."
That's a 0.042% tax to equip the funds. HUD will run the housing fund; the Treasury Department will run the capital fund.
If the funds had been operating in 2010, when Fannie and Freddie together bought $856 billion in new mortgages, Fannie and Freddie would have pumped a whopping $360 million into the funds. Estimates put their total for fiscal 2015 at half a billion dollars.
The money will help build apartments for extremely low-income Americans, says Watt, the former Congressional Black Caucus leader whom President Obama hand-picked to regulate Fannie and Freddie. The funds will also help the poor afford their own homes through down payments and other assistance.
But nonprofit housing activist groups will distribute the funds. So count on money being diverted to ACORN fronts and clones, beholden to the Democratic Party, who in the past have laundered housing grant money to finance political campaigns.
As we've reported previously, ACORN affiliates are still operational in New York and other cities, having renamed themselves after ACORN was busted for fraud and corruption during the 2008 presidential campaign. They're also still receiving HUD housing grants.
In the past, these groups have used HUD grants to pressure banks to make ill-advised home loans that sped the mortgage crisis. Now a permanently funded war chest will aid their shakedown — courtesy of taxpayers still on the hook for Fannie and Freddie.
The last thing the nation needs is another Washington scheme that further politicizes the lending and home-building markets. Yet rest assured that will be the end result of these national housing funds.
Making matters worse, they're unaccountable to congressional appropriators, making them ripe for corruption and cronyism. We're talking about billions of dollars funneling through left-wing nonprofits and floating around in urban reinvestment projects sponsored by the likes of Rahm Emanuel and Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.
With this potential $500 million slush fund, moreover, the Obama regime is effectively turning Fannie and Freddie into off-budget welfare agencies — indeed, a self-sustaining shadow government for the left wing that will survive even Republican administrations.
Now we know what the president really had in mind when he promised to "reform" the bankrupt mortgage giants.

GQ, can’t find any crazy Democrats? Here are 16

Hey GQ, can’t find any crazy Democrats? Here are 16

By Kyle Smith

December 28, 2014 | 6:00am

In a survey of the “Craziest Politicians of 2014,” GQ had difficulty locating any Democrats. Seventeen out of 20 on the list were Republicans, with the only liberals being Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, Georgia Rep. Hank Johnson and America’s reigning nabob of nuttiness, Joe Biden.
In a note appended to the story, GQ defensively said it wasn’t guilty of “standard liberal-media bias,” it just couldn’t find any loony Democrats to speak of.
Let’s give GQ a little help, shall we? Here are 16 more Democrats for the list of the most cra-cra political figures.


Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democratic National Committee chair (Fla.):

Compared Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to a wife-beater: “Scott Walker has given women the back of his hand. I know that is stark. That is direct. But that is reality. What Republican tea party extremists like Scott Walker are doing is they are grabbing us by the hair and pulling us back. It is not going to happen on our watch.” Wait, I’m confused, this abuse already happened, is happening, but “it’s not going to happen”?


Rep. Barbara Lee (Calif.):

Barbara LeePhoto: Getty Images

Called for a $26 minimum wage so that “people . . . could afford to live in areas now where they cannot afford to live” and “you would increase diversity in certain communities where you don’t have diversity anymore. You would have economic parity.” Nah, $26 an hour isn’t going to diversify Park Avenue. Try $260 an hour, that’ll work!



Sean Eldridge and Chris Hughes, rich and clueless:

Chris Hughes (left) and Sean EldridgePhoto: PatrickMcMullan.com

Eldridge tried to buy a New York congressional seat, purchasing a $5 million house in one district, then, when that didn’t work, grabbing a $2 million home in another. He outspent his opponent 3-to-1, but still lost (dashing his hopes, the Daily Beast reports, of being “the first openly gay president”). Meanwhile, Eldridge’s husband, Facebook co-founder Hughes, decided to take out his frustration on the magazine he bought, The New Republic. He fired the editor and said the tweed jacket brigade would become a “vertically integrated digital-media company.” The liberal writers who lost their minds over this made up a crazy list all its own.


Gubernatorial nominee Wendy Davis (Texas):

Wendy DavisPhoto: AP

Approved a disparaging ad that featured images of a wheelchair like the one her opponent Greg Abbott has had to use for years since a freak accident. The ad was credited with adding five points to Abbott’s huge margin of victory.


Outgoing Sen. Kay Hagan (N.C.):

Kay HaganPhoto: Getty Images

Allowed an empty chair to represent her at an October debate with challenger Thom Tillis. Tillis, who spent an hour explaining his positions and slamming Hagan, won the debate and the election.



Senate Veteran Affairs Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (a Democrat who identifies as a Socialist, in a reversal of the usual custom):

Bernie SandersPhoto: AP

Said the VA provides “very high quality health care, period” and that the shocking scandals surrounding it were traceable to “a concerted effort to undermine the VA” led by the “Koch Brothers and others, who want to radically change the nature of society.” So that’s why the Koches are funding all those hospitals! It’s really a roundabout way of making the VA look bad.



MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, paid architect/spokesman for ObamaCare:

Tapes emerged of him saying that only the stupidity of American voters allowed ObamaCare to pass. Then, in congressional testimony, suffered an unfortunate public episode of schizophrenia as he called himself a liar for all the times he’d previously said he helped write ObamaCare.


Outgoing Sen. Mary Landrieu (La.):

Mary LandrieuPhoto: Reuters

Locked in a fight for her political life, in the final days of her campaign she called her own constituents racists and sexists. About President Obama, she said he was unpopular in her state because “The South has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans. It’s been a difficult time for the president to present himself in a very positive light as a leader.” About herself she said, “It’s not always been a good place for women to present ourselves. It’s more of a conservative place.” Maybe Landrieu should have run someplace like Massachusetts, where the party of Obama is popular and Martha Coakley easily won the governor’s . . . whoops, wait. No, she didn’t.


UN Ambassador Samantha Power:

Samantha PowerPhoto: AP

Tweeted that “Daniel Pearl’s story is reminder that individual accountability & reconciliation are required to break cycles of violence.” Either that or it’s a reminder that murderous anti-Semitic Islamist fanatics should be broken into as many pieces as possible. But the quote is perfectly sane if Power is hoping her next job will be al Qaeda ambassador to the UN.



Outgoing Democratic Congressional Committee Chairman and Rep. Steve Israel (N.Y.):

Steve IsraelPhoto: Getty Images

Sent out a string of increasingly deranged fundraising emails that sounded as if they were coming from a guy who was strapped to the wall in Madame de Sade’s Torture Dungeon and maybe even enjoying it, featuring subject lines such as “CRIPPLING blow,” “DEVASTATING defeat,” “EVISCERATED,” “HORRIFYING,” “HUMILIATING” and “WHOA.” Israel put his gift for hyperbole to use when he wrote his first novel, “The Global War on Morris.” He said he was inspired to pursue fiction by things he heard while sitting in on national security briefings. Good to know that those are useful for something.


House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi:

Nancy PelosiPhoto: AP

After Republican Rep. Tom Marino gave a speech mentioning that Pelosi had done nothing on immigration reform when she ruled the House, an enraged Pelosi chased him down two aisles, gesturing wildly and hurling imprecations until a group of fellow lawmakers intervened. Said “Democrats are not fear mongers” but “Civilization as we know it would be in jeopardy if Republicans win the Senate.” Right. Because if, say, the minimum wage or gun laws stay the way they are right now, the Book of Revelation kicks into effect.


Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid:

Once muttered the words “Koch Brothers” 27 times in a speech. Said the Koch Brothers are “one of the main causes of [climate change]. Not a cause, one of the main causes.” Koch Industries is responsible for one-third of 1 percent of the carbon emissions in one country. It’s like saying Scranton is one of the main cities in the country.


Outgoing Sen. Mark Udall (Colo.):

Mark UdallPhoto: Getty Images

Approved an attack ad that said opponent Cory Gardner was secretly waging an “eight-year crusade that would ban birth control.” If so, calling for selling the Pill over the counter (as Gardner did) was a funny way to go about it.



First Lady Michelle Obama:

Michelle ObamaPhoto: WireImage

“There’s too much money in politics . . . Here is something you can do right now today to make a difference, and that is to write a big, fat check.”


President-in-Waiting Hillary Clinton:

Hillary ClintonPhoto: AP

Defined “smart power” as “Showing respect, even for one’s enemies, trying to understand and insofar as psychologically possible, empathize with their perspective and point of view.” Hey, Muhammad, I feel your pain. Tell me, does your wrist ache from slitting that guy’s throat?

Crime as Politics

Crime as Politics

Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On December 28, 2014 

 In the last few days, the local Fresno community was outraged — or at least was reportedly to be so — at the vandalism of a local Islamic cultural center ^[1].

The police authorities almost immediately, and without waiting for the full evidence to be collected, declared the minor burglary and damage the apparent dividend of illiberal dark forces. The chief of police, without compelling evidence, and without explaining why a secular medical building was also trashed in the spree, rushed to hold a press conference. He declared the broken window and moderate trashing of the center’s interior, not just a “hate crime,” but in fact a “brazen hate crime.”

What next followed was Fresno’s comic version of what now is normal race and gender news.

Almost immediately it was learned that there was a video of the suspected perpetrator in mediis rebus. Mr. Asif Mohammad Khan was a Muslim, with a record of mental disturbances, and had attended the center. He claimed that he had vandalized the buildings as part of payback to other center attendees who, he claimed, had bullied him — and reportedly was known to be an admirer of Osama bin Laden. The “brazen” hate crime and the atmosphere of intolerance vanished with the local morning fog. The FBI, of course, is still “investigating” a possible “hate crime.” But they too will quietly go away in short order.

But just a few days earlier, there was another Fresno crime captured on video, both violent and in theory fueled by racial animus, or at least more deserving of a FBI second look at such a possible catalyst. At a local municipal bus stop an elderly man with a walker bravely protested ^[2] that a large youth was bullying a smaller teen. The video captures the thug in response yelling at the defender, then striking the man to the pavement. The latter hit his head on his walker and momentarily lost consciousness.

The attacker was a large, rather young African-American; the victim a 62-year-old white man. What followed was no police hectoring. No lectures about the safety of the city’s bus stops. No police chief warnings about interracial tensions. No brazen hate crime sermons about the hale and young attacking the elderly or disabled. Indeed the police initially did not even consider the attack a crime, but rather a “fall.” Only a chance bystander’s video of the incident led to a reinvestigation and the suspected perpetrator’s arrest.

Unlike the city’s failed effort to turn the Islamic center vandalism into a teachable moment, this really was a teachable moment, perhaps in two unfortunate regards. One, heroism is rendered foolish. So far no one in the city has stepped forward to congratulate a disabled senior’s heroic (and apparently successful) efforts to divert the bullying of teenager onto his own person. His only reward was to have been knocked out by the attacker, and the crime initially not considered a crime, but his injuries due supposedly to his own clumsiness.  Second, the disabled victim is lucky he was not armed. Had he pulled out a legal, concealed weapon when the bully approached him to attack, and fired in self-defense, we would have another Trayvon Martin hate crime, and charges that a climate of racial intolerance had led to the death of another unarmed African-American. In comparison to all that, a head injury is apparently preferable.

In some cynical fashion I sympathize with local officials and the police. To rush to judgment on the pseudo-“brazen” hate crime at the Islamic center is to win laurels and careerist points; to deplore the truly brazen beating of a solitary old white guy trying to protect the weaker from a much larger African-American thug who fled the scene is to court social ostracism and career implosion. Note well that there is no downside for the police chief in feebly retracting his shoot-from-the-hip damnation of supposedly local hatred that fueled the vandalism. He just shrugged, made inoperative his prior false news release, and went on.

I don’t doubt that there are occasional hate crimes against various ethnic and religious groups. After all, the United States is still a great experiment that seeks to unite the world’s tribes into a coherent whole. And never has that gambit been more problematic in the age of hyphenation and the salad bowl in lieu of the melting pot.

But right now, discussion of crime is too often constructed as an ideological tool to serve larger political agendas. We see that cycle with the unproven feminist assertion that 20% of coeds will be raped on campus during their undergraduate tenures — when the government’s own statistics show that women on and off the campus have less than a 1% chance of being sexually assaulted in any given year. If the former myth is true, then the engine of feminist studies, counselors, and therapeutic curricula is fueled; if the latter fact is canonized, then society can in part be thankful that such violent sexual assault has declined from far higher percentages during past decades.

Surely most neither believe nor act as if the Stanford campus is a more dangerous place than is East Palo Alto, or the Columbia dorms more perilous than a nearby Harlem public housing project. The Duke lacrosse case, the Rolling Stone fiasco, the mythographies of Lena Dunham all teach us that it is far more dangerous to be falsely accused as a sexual predator than to falsely accuse the innocent as a sexual predator. People are human and therefore make the necessary adjustments.

In the age of Ferguson, the tragedy of Eric Garner, and a host of other politicized crime incidents, is there any resolution in sight? None that I can see given the nature of the fuel that feeds such fires.

Had the police chief of Fresno been publicly shamed for such false allegations, he might not be so eager to rush to judgment next time. Had the bus stop thug been charged with a hate crime — and I do not count out that the victim’s race, age, and feeble health encouraged the attack — perhaps a larger message might be sent about such altercations.


My pessimism is not ideological but empirical. The stuff of the recent protests are weary police of the inner city confronting hundreds of thousands of times a week a small subset of the population (perhaps African-American males between ages 15 and 50 constitute no more than 2-3% of the population) who account for nearly 50% of violent crime. For such a formula for disaster to dissipate, either one of two things would have to occur. One, the police will silently avoid such confrontations, to the degree that they can mask their noncompliance without career repercussions. That is, when a call comes in that an African-American young man is walking down the middle of the street and is a suspect in a recent strong-arm robbery, they will simply avoid him, or when complaints are voiced that a large African-American vendor is illegally selling cigarettes, with a history of 30 prior arrests, they will not answer the call. Unfortunately I think such the repercussions of that adjustment will be higher crime rates ^[3], especially in the inner city.

Two, the nation would have to have the Eric Holder-coveted national dialogue of race, rather than a name-calling sessions about “cowards.” The purpose would be to address the foundations of young black criminality — the break-up of the family, the pernicious role of federal subsidies, a value system that deprecates academic learning and idolizes sports and acts of supposed masculinity, the misogyny and racism of popular rap and other cultural expression, the neglect of the inner city by the rest of America, the legacy of racism on the individual psyche, and on and on. Yet to have such a discussion, not to mention their remedies, would put the Al Sharptons ^[4] and others out of business.

Moreover, the entire Obama electoral strategy was to galvanize the black community to register, turn out at the polls, and vote in monolithic fashion for Obama, as the emblematic black candidate.

Because there was no margin of error in such calculus (given that racial chauvinism turns off one voter for every voter it attracts), if the cases of Skip Gates, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and the Eric Garner were not politicized, others would have to be invented to create the needed outrage and solidarity that translates into political clout.

There are tragic self-corrections in politics. For the next few years, police will weigh the dangers of intervening in incidents in which African-American youths confront authorities, and too often abdicate — until crime rates inch back up, cities like New York revert to their 1970s status ^[5] or present-day Chicago ^[6], the public demands recalibration, and we go back to proactive policing.

Similarly, bloc ethnic voting will create backlashes or counter-movements in kind (will there be a day when conservative black Congress people outnumber those in the Black Caucus?)  and we will see ethnic candidates run as individuals, in fear that appeals to the color of our skins rather than our character spell suicide.

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Article printed from Works and Days: http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/crime-as-politics/

Hillary’s Bad Politics and Worse Ideas

December 10, 2014 7:15 am / 16 Comments / victorhanson

by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine

Photo via FrontPage Magazine

Once again Hillary Clinton has given the Republicans some suicidal soundbites they should stash away for 2016 in the likely event she is the Democratic candidate for president. A review of some of her recent statements reveals that Clinton is not just entitled, money-grubbing, unlikeable, unpleasant, and unaccomplished. Nor do they just show that she is a political dunce who has obviously learned nothing from her politically brilliant husband. More seriously, they expose her commitment to failed ideas and dangerous delusions.
First there was the “What difference at this point does it make!” she practically shrieked to Senator Ron Johnson during a January 2013 hearing on the Benghazi debacle that unfolded on September 11, 2012. Clinton had told the grieving parents of the victims during the transfer of remains ceremony at Andrews Air Force base that they died because of “an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.” Four Americans, including an ambassador, had been murdered on her watch, but she refused to explain to the Senate why she blamed the hapless maker of a YouTube video, who spent a year in jail.

This evasion is significant, for within hours of the attack it was clear that it had been a carefully coordinated, well-planned assault, not the spontaneous reaction to a video. Soon it also became known that ambassador Stevens had repeatedly requested increased security, but had been denied by officials in the State and Defense Departments. As Secretary of State, Clinton was ultimately responsible for those decisions made by State, as well as for the astonishing failure to notice the escalating violence in the months before the attacks, or the significance of the anniversary of 9/11, or the immediate evidence that the attack was not a spontaneous reaction to a video that had been on YouTube for weeks.
But in her response to all this evidence of negligence and post facto political spin, all she could do was indignantly declare that all these failures were irrelevant. In 2016, this footage of the arm-waving, shrill Clinton transparently trying to misdirect the Senators and the citizens from her patent incompetence should be played and replayed in political ads.
Next came the more recent revelation of her embarrassing economic ignorance, shameless pandering to her left-wing base. At a campaign event in October, attended also by lefty heartthrob Elizabeth Warren, Clinton lectured, “Don’t let anybody, don’t let anybody tell you that, ah, you know, it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs. You know that old theory, trickle-down economics. That has been tried, that has failed. It has failed rather spectacularly.”
Somehow Clinton missed the 1980s, when economic and tax policies that encouraged business investment led to spectacular growth. As the Laffer Center explains,
“According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, 1982-1999 was one continuous mega-economic expansion.  In fact, as it stretched into 2007, this 25 Year Boom saw a tripling in the net wealth of U.S. households and businesses from $20 trillion in 1981 to $60 trillion by 2007.  When adjusted for inflation, more wealth was created in this 25-year boom than in the previous 200 years. This sustained economic growth is not only impressive on its own, but even more astonishing as it compares to the period immediately preceding it.  In the 10 years from 1972-1982, recessions were deep and recoveries were short.  In fact, throughout American history, the nation’s economy has been in recession or depression roughly one-third of the time.  But from 1981-2005, the annual growth rate of real gross domestic product (GDP) in the U.S. was 3.4 percent per year, and 3.8 percent per year during the 1983-1989 Reagan expansion alone.”
Compare that to the performance of Obama’s economic policies over the last 6 years, when intrusive regulatory regimes like Dodd-Frank and a runaway EPA, Obamacare’s highjacking of the health-care industry, the trillion-dollar stimulus squandered on crony socialist projects like “green energy,” and the anti-business rhetoric of Obama’s “you didn’t build that,” have all led to sluggish economic growth, metastasizing debt, declining income for the middle class, an explosion in entitlement spending, and nearly 20 million unemployed and under-employed.
Contrary to Clinton’s Keynesian superstitions and dirigiste magical thinking, what has “failed spectacularly” has been progressive economic policies that think parasitic politicians and unaccountable government bureaucrats can manage a complex, dynamic economic system better than a free market that incentivizes people to actually build businesses that create jobs and increase wealth. And just as spectacularly incompetent is Hillary’s political tin ear that lets her make such a statement just to curry favor with a narrow base of anti-capitalist fundamentalists, when she surely must know that come the 2016 presidential election, those words will be pinned to the Obama albatross sure to be hanging around her neck.
Finally, there is the bizarre statement at Georgetown last week about improving our foreign policy with what she called “smart power”:  “Using every possible tool and partner to advance peace and security. Leaving no one on the sidelines. Showing respect even for one’s enemies. Trying to understand, in so far as psychologically possible, empathize with their perspective and point of view. Helping to define the problems, determine the solutions.” She then added a banal cliché of modern feminism, suggesting that the lack of women negotiators and signatories was responsible for the failure of many peace treaties. After all, women are naturally more empathetic and sensitive to others’ “point of view,” one of those Victorian stereotypes that feminists used to tell us were sexist insults.
These comments embody everything that is wrong with a modern foreign policy based on Kantian delusions about a global “harmony of interests,” the notion that all peoples are just like us and want all the same goods such as peace, prosperity, political freedom, and respect for human rights. If they behave differently, it’s because they just don’t know these goods are in their best interests, or they have been traumatized by history, particularly the depredations of Western colonialism, imperialism, and capitalist exploitation, which are the causes of their violent aggression and brutality. Thus if we “understand” and “empathize” with the roots of our enemies’ behavior, they will see the light and abandon aggression and tyranny.
This is the same delusion that Obama based his foreign policy on, as evidenced by his infamous “apology tour,” on which he donned the hair shirt of Western sin and groveled before foreign audiences. It’s the application to foreign affairs of the two-bit psychologizing that dominates the public schools, where boosting self-esteem and “empathizing” with punks and bullies are the favored mechanisms for teaching and civilizing young people. It utterly lacks any understanding of the tragic constants of human nature and the wisdom accumulated by the human race since the ancient Greeks and Hebrews––that, as Machiavelli said, “all men are bad and that they will use their malignity of mind every time they have the opportunity.”
For all her alleged foreign policy toughness, Clinton’s philosophy embodies the bad utopian ideals that have enabled much of the disorder afflicting the world since their spectacular failure in preventing World War I. We hear the same delusions in the words of Neville Chamberlain after Hitler’s Anschluss of Austria in March 1938, when he told the House of Commons, “We should take any and every opportunity to try to remove any genuine and legitimate grievance that may exist,” and then imagined telling Hitler, “The best thing you can do is to tell us exactly what you want for your Sudeten Deutsch.” Such blind “empathy” and “understanding” and “respect” for Germany’s “grievances,” of course, in 6 months culminated in the debacle of Munich and the devastating sequel of World War II.
Contrary to Clinton and Obama, enemies like Vladimir Putin, ISIS, Bashar al Assad, Hamas, Hezbollah, Boko Haram, the Ayatollah Khamenei, and Xi Jinping are not the global village’s wayward teenagers “acting out” because they don’t know their own best interests and suffer from insufficient self-esteem and “respect.” They are hard, brutal men, vicious and ruthless, who know exactly what they want, and who possess beliefs alien to Western ideals like liberal democracy, human rights, tolerance, and a preference for diplomatic words and “mutual understanding and respect.” In their “perspective” and “point of view,” violence is a tool of international relations, and a legitimate instrument for achieving their aims and interests. And they have nothing but contempt for our schoolmarmish empathy and respect, which they correctly interpret as civilizational weakness and a failure of morale. All they respect is force. That’s the most important truth we need to “understand.”
These 3 statements reveal political beliefs and character flaws that should automatically disqualify Hillary Clinton from being president. And even if we attribute them to rank ambition and venal opportunism rather than sincere belief, their sheer political stupidity and lack of prudence bespeak a mind and character unfit for leading the most powerful country on the planet.

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