The left loses their minds over Hobby Lobby decision
posted at 12:41 pm on June 30, 2014 by Noah Rothman
I imagine the horrified shrieks that rose from the streets outside the Supreme Court on Monday as the decision in the Hobby Lobby case began to filter out into the crowd of liberal observers was reminiscent of those poor souls who watched helplessly as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire claimed the lives of 146 young, female garment workers.
In fact, the similarities are eerie. It seems that liberal commentators have convinced themselves that, just as was the case in 1911, the courts and the country have deemed women to be of lesser value than their male counterparts. The distinction between these two eras, of course, is that while that argument could be supported in 1911, it exists only in the heads of progressives in 2014.
NBC News journalist Pete Williams, an accomplished reporter who is not prone to indulge in speculation, went out of his way to insist repeatedly that the Court’s decision in this case was a narrow one. He noted that the decision extends only to the specific religious objections a handful of employers raised about providing abortifacients (as opposed to contraceptives). Williams added that Justice Anthony Kennedy allowed in his concurring opinion that the federal government can pay for and provide that coverage if employers would not.
The Federalist published a variety of other observations about this ruling which indicate that it was narrowly tailored to this specific case. The Court ruled that Hobby Lobby and other employers could not simply drop health coverage in order to avoid mandates. This decision does not apply to other government mandates like those requiring employers cover vaccinations. Finally, if the will of the public in the form of an electoral mandate creates a groundswell of support for a government-funded program which provides access to abortifacients, then that would be perfectly constitutional.
Williams’ MSNBC colleagues nodded along and, when asked for their contribution, proceeded to display none of this NBC reporter’s caution.
“I think we’ve seen a real goal post-moving here,” MSNBC.com’s Irin Carmon said. “We may say it is a narrow ruling because Taco Bell and Wal-Mart can’t opt out, but it is still an enormous expansion of corporate rights and of the refusal from the laws that are passed to create benefits for everybody.”
“The larger doctrinal implication here is potentially significant,” MSNBC host Ari Melber agreed. “For the first time, the Court is going and taking the First Amendment rights that we’ve seen long established for certain corporate entities and extending them to the religious idea.”
“Just because it was only restricted to women’s health access doesn’t mean that it doesn’t create a devastating precedent which says that women’s health care should be treated differently,” Carmon added. She added that the Republican Party is the biggest beneficiary of today’s ruling. “So, the context of this is an all-out assault on access to contraception and access to other reproductive health care services.”
June 29, 2014
"Supremes Saving Worst Decision For Last?" is the big banner headline at HuffPo right now.
Tomorrow is the Court's last day of the term, and the "worst decision" HuffPo is stirring its readers up about right now is Hobby Lobby, the case about whether a for-profit corporation is entitled to relief from the "substantial burden" on religion arguably imposed by the Obamacare regulations about contraceptives.
HuffPo doesn't bother to mention that the case is based on a federal statute — the Religious Freedom Restoration Act — which Congress could amend and to which Congress could have put an exception in the Affordable Care Act. Except that Congress couldn't do any of those things, and the contraceptive mandate wasn't even something Congress put in the ACA, because Congress only just barely passed the ACA, and an exception from the need to provide religious exemptions would have made the ACA less politically viable, not more.
Which is why — however you feel about birth control, religious objections to it, and for-profit corporations that find a way to be religious — it's not bad for Hobby Lobby to win.
But if it does, the "worst decision" will instantly plunge us into war-on-women, election-year politics.
Why can't I just plunge into my 4th-of-July swimming pool?, you might ask.
No. The internet will never allow you to go back to your summer holiday week as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.
Posted by Ann Althouse
Monday, June 30, 2014
Where Have All the Jobs Gone?
Where Have All the Jobs Gone?
Stephen Moore / June 28, 2014
The commerce department reported Wednesday that the economy contracted by nearly 3 percent from January through March. This dismal shrinkage in output has many Americans worrying about a dreaded double dip recession.
On the jobs front, it feels to many Americans that the recession never ended. One of the misleading headlines from last month’s employment report was that all the jobs lost during the recession have finally been won back.
Well, not really.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), in 2007 on the eve of the recession, there were 146.6 million Americans working. Today, there are 145.8 million Americans in jobs. So nearly 7 years later, we are still 800,000 jobs below the previous peak. That’s some jobs recovery.
But the missing jobs in this economic recovery are much higher than that. A new analysis of the labor force numbers by Heritage Foundation economists places the real jobs deficit in America closer to 5.5 million, even after accounting for changes in population and demographics.
This jobs deficit results from two unfavorable developments in the labor market. First, the unemployment rate is far higher than expected at this stage of a recovery. Mr. Obama promised an unemployment rate of 5 percent after he passed his $830 billion “stimulus” plan in 2009. The difference between the expected 5% jobless rate we were supposed to have by now and the actual 6.3% rate (as of May 2014) is 1.3%.The math here is straightforward. The shortfall in jobs comes to just about 2 million, based on the number of those officially in the “labor force.”
But that’s only half the story. Nearly everyone knows the real unemployment rate is far above the “official” 6.3 percent rate because of the disappearance of Americans over the age of 16 from the workforce. Since the peak of the last recovery in 2007, the labor force participation rate (the percentage of the population either employed or actively seeking employment) has fallen by more than three percentage points (7.9 million people) to 62.8%.
Some of this drop in labor force participation is due to the changing age profile of workers over the last six years. Since 2008, the ranks of the 65+ plus demographic have swelled by about 8 million Americans. On average, the older population is less likely to be part of the workforce than the younger population. As the older population grows proportionally larger, this does tend to lower the overall participation rate.
However, our analysis reveals that the increased numbers of those aged 60+ only accounts for only a bit more of one-third of the decline in the participation rate. More than 5 million additional people age 16-50 would be in the labor force today had the rate remained unchanged for those demographics. The drop in labor force participation for the younger population (under 60) is responsible for 63% of the drop!
A summary of these statistics reveals a startling pattern. Of 9 age demographics analyzed, labor force participation declined in the 7 youngest brackets and increased in the 2 oldest brackets.
Originally posted on Fox News.
Stephen Moore / June 28, 2014
The commerce department reported Wednesday that the economy contracted by nearly 3 percent from January through March. This dismal shrinkage in output has many Americans worrying about a dreaded double dip recession.
On the jobs front, it feels to many Americans that the recession never ended. One of the misleading headlines from last month’s employment report was that all the jobs lost during the recession have finally been won back.
Well, not really.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), in 2007 on the eve of the recession, there were 146.6 million Americans working. Today, there are 145.8 million Americans in jobs. So nearly 7 years later, we are still 800,000 jobs below the previous peak. That’s some jobs recovery.
But the missing jobs in this economic recovery are much higher than that. A new analysis of the labor force numbers by Heritage Foundation economists places the real jobs deficit in America closer to 5.5 million, even after accounting for changes in population and demographics.
This jobs deficit results from two unfavorable developments in the labor market. First, the unemployment rate is far higher than expected at this stage of a recovery. Mr. Obama promised an unemployment rate of 5 percent after he passed his $830 billion “stimulus” plan in 2009. The difference between the expected 5% jobless rate we were supposed to have by now and the actual 6.3% rate (as of May 2014) is 1.3%.The math here is straightforward. The shortfall in jobs comes to just about 2 million, based on the number of those officially in the “labor force.”
But that’s only half the story. Nearly everyone knows the real unemployment rate is far above the “official” 6.3 percent rate because of the disappearance of Americans over the age of 16 from the workforce. Since the peak of the last recovery in 2007, the labor force participation rate (the percentage of the population either employed or actively seeking employment) has fallen by more than three percentage points (7.9 million people) to 62.8%.
Some of this drop in labor force participation is due to the changing age profile of workers over the last six years. Since 2008, the ranks of the 65+ plus demographic have swelled by about 8 million Americans. On average, the older population is less likely to be part of the workforce than the younger population. As the older population grows proportionally larger, this does tend to lower the overall participation rate.
However, our analysis reveals that the increased numbers of those aged 60+ only accounts for only a bit more of one-third of the decline in the participation rate. More than 5 million additional people age 16-50 would be in the labor force today had the rate remained unchanged for those demographics. The drop in labor force participation for the younger population (under 60) is responsible for 63% of the drop!
A summary of these statistics reveals a startling pattern. Of 9 age demographics analyzed, labor force participation declined in the 7 youngest brackets and increased in the 2 oldest brackets.
Originally posted on Fox News.
Friday, June 27, 2014
Democrats Struggle With How to Ban Free Speech
Posted on June 26, 2014 by John Hinderaker
Democrats Struggle With How to Ban Free Speech
We ridiculed here an absurd constitutional amendment that the Democrats proposed in the Senate Judiciary Committee, with the support of 42 Democratic senators. The amendment would give Congress unfettered powers to regulate spending on political campaigns in any way that it chooses. I wrote:
Many observers have noted that if the Udall amendment became law, Congress could set ridiculously low contribution and spending levels, so as to virtually guarantee the re-election of incumbents. This is true–campaign finance “reform” has always been largely about incumbent protection. But I think the proposed amendment is even worse than that. Given its appallingly poor draftsmanship, I don’t see any reason why Congress couldn’t permit a high level of spending on behalf of incumbents (or no limit at all), while setting low limits for spending on behalf of challengers, or prohibiting such contributions altogether. The Democrats’ amendment would repeal the First Amendment with respect to its most fundamental application–supporting candidates in elections.
The Democrats, chastened, tinkered with their amendment. They still want to do away with free speech–no change there–but they are looking for a little camouflage. Byron York reports on the most recent developments:
Senate Democrats are steadily pushing forward with what they hope will become the 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The proposed amendment would give Congress authority to regulate every dollar raised, and every dollar spent, by every federal campaign and candidate in the country. It would give state legislatures the power to do the same with state races. …
The problem is, Democrats aren’t quite sure exactly what the amendment should say. In a move that received virtually no attention, they recently re-wrote the measure — and in the process revealed its fatal flaw.
This is the heart of the amendment as originally written by Udall and Bennet:
To advance the fundamental principle of political equality for all, and to protect the integrity of the legislative and electoral processes, Congress shall have power to regulate the raising and spending of money and in-kind equivalents with respect to federal elections, including through setting limits on –
(1) the amount of contributions to candidates for nomination for election to, or for election to, federal office; and
(2) the amount of funds that may be spent by, in support of, or in opposition to such candidates.
There are literally no limits to congressional power in those words.
So, ridiculed by me and others, the Democrats went back to the drawing board.
To show how reasonable the measure is, Durbin proposed a new wording for the amendment. This is the heart of the revised version:
To advance democratic self-government and political equality, and to protect the integrity of government and the electoral process, Congress and the States may regulate and set reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to influence elections.
The big difference is the insertion of the word “reasonable,” which Democrats apparently believe will allay concerns about government overreach. Don’t worry — we’ll be reasonable!
But who decides what is reasonable?
Ultimately, of course, the courts would. The Democrats are happy to take their chances with federal judges, pretty much all of whom will be nominated by Democratic presidents once tens of millions of new immigrants, legal and illegal, are given the vote. It isn’t hard to see where this will go: the First Amendment says, in ringing, uncompromising terms, that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
But Democrats hate competition, so they want to rewrite the amendment to give all power to incumbents (i.e., them): Congress may make any law it pleases, abridging the freedom of speech and of the press and the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances, insofar as those rights are exercised in connection with elections to public office, as long as Congress’s limitations on freedom of speech and freedom of the press are deemed reasonable by judges, all of whose appointments must be confirmed by Congress.
That is not, obviously, the charter of a free people. Which is what the Democrats want: they have sworn eternal hostility against every limitation on government’s tyranny over the mind of man.
Democrats Struggle With How to Ban Free Speech
We ridiculed here an absurd constitutional amendment that the Democrats proposed in the Senate Judiciary Committee, with the support of 42 Democratic senators. The amendment would give Congress unfettered powers to regulate spending on political campaigns in any way that it chooses. I wrote:
Many observers have noted that if the Udall amendment became law, Congress could set ridiculously low contribution and spending levels, so as to virtually guarantee the re-election of incumbents. This is true–campaign finance “reform” has always been largely about incumbent protection. But I think the proposed amendment is even worse than that. Given its appallingly poor draftsmanship, I don’t see any reason why Congress couldn’t permit a high level of spending on behalf of incumbents (or no limit at all), while setting low limits for spending on behalf of challengers, or prohibiting such contributions altogether. The Democrats’ amendment would repeal the First Amendment with respect to its most fundamental application–supporting candidates in elections.
The Democrats, chastened, tinkered with their amendment. They still want to do away with free speech–no change there–but they are looking for a little camouflage. Byron York reports on the most recent developments:
Senate Democrats are steadily pushing forward with what they hope will become the 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The proposed amendment would give Congress authority to regulate every dollar raised, and every dollar spent, by every federal campaign and candidate in the country. It would give state legislatures the power to do the same with state races. …
The problem is, Democrats aren’t quite sure exactly what the amendment should say. In a move that received virtually no attention, they recently re-wrote the measure — and in the process revealed its fatal flaw.
This is the heart of the amendment as originally written by Udall and Bennet:
To advance the fundamental principle of political equality for all, and to protect the integrity of the legislative and electoral processes, Congress shall have power to regulate the raising and spending of money and in-kind equivalents with respect to federal elections, including through setting limits on –
(1) the amount of contributions to candidates for nomination for election to, or for election to, federal office; and
(2) the amount of funds that may be spent by, in support of, or in opposition to such candidates.
There are literally no limits to congressional power in those words.
So, ridiculed by me and others, the Democrats went back to the drawing board.
To show how reasonable the measure is, Durbin proposed a new wording for the amendment. This is the heart of the revised version:
To advance democratic self-government and political equality, and to protect the integrity of government and the electoral process, Congress and the States may regulate and set reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to influence elections.
The big difference is the insertion of the word “reasonable,” which Democrats apparently believe will allay concerns about government overreach. Don’t worry — we’ll be reasonable!
But who decides what is reasonable?
Ultimately, of course, the courts would. The Democrats are happy to take their chances with federal judges, pretty much all of whom will be nominated by Democratic presidents once tens of millions of new immigrants, legal and illegal, are given the vote. It isn’t hard to see where this will go: the First Amendment says, in ringing, uncompromising terms, that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
But Democrats hate competition, so they want to rewrite the amendment to give all power to incumbents (i.e., them): Congress may make any law it pleases, abridging the freedom of speech and of the press and the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances, insofar as those rights are exercised in connection with elections to public office, as long as Congress’s limitations on freedom of speech and freedom of the press are deemed reasonable by judges, all of whose appointments must be confirmed by Congress.
That is not, obviously, the charter of a free people. Which is what the Democrats want: they have sworn eternal hostility against every limitation on government’s tyranny over the mind of man.
The Obama Administration Will Govern By Fiat Until It Is Stopped
June 26, 2014
The Obama Administration Will Govern By Fiat Until It Is Stopped
By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
The Supreme Court this week admonished the Environmental Protection Agency for overreaching in regulating greenhouse gases. The Clean Air Act covers polluters that emit 250 tons per year (or in some cases, 100 tons). This standard makes no sense if applied to greenhouse gases. Thousands of establishments from elementary schools to grocery stores would be, absurdly, covered. So the EPA arbitrarily chose 100,000 tons as the carbon dioxide threshold.
That's not "tailoring," ruled the Supreme Court. That's rewriting. Under our Constitution, "an agency has no power to 'tailor' legislation to bureaucratic policy goals by rewriting unambiguous statutory terms."
It was a welcome constitutional lesson in restraint, noted The Wall Street Journal. One would think — hope — that an administration so chastened might reconsider its determination to shift regulation of the nation's power generation to Washington through new CO2 rules under the Clean Air Act.
Fat chance. This administration does not learn constitutional lessons. It continues marching until it meets resistance. And it hasn't met nearly enough.
The root problem is that the Clean Air Act, passed in 1970, was never intended for greenhouse gases. You can see it in its regulatory thresholds which, if applied to CO2, are ridiculously low. Moreover, when the law was written, we hadn't yet even had the global cooling agitation of the 1970s, let alone the global warming panic of today.
But with only two of nine justices prepared to overturn the court's 2007 ruling that shoehorns greenhouse gases into the Clean Air Act, the remedy falls to Congress. It could easily put an end to all this judicial parsing and bureaucratic mischief with a one-line statute saying that the Clean Air Act does not apply to CO2 emissions.
Congress can then set about regulating greenhouse gases as it wishes, rather than leaving it to the tender arbitrary mercies of judges and bureaucrats. Otherwise, we will soon have the EPA unilaterally creating a cap-and-trade regime that will make its administrator czar of all power regulation in every state.
Of course, a similar scheme failed to pass a Democratic Congress in 2010. Our president doesn't let such niceties stand in his way, however. He has an agenda to enact, boldly enunciated in his Feb. 24, 2009, address to Congress promising to transform America in three areas: health care, education and energy.
Education lags, but he's now on the verge of centralizing energy regulation in Washington through naked executive action, having already succeeded in centralizing health care in Washington through the Affordable Care Act.
With energy, he'll do it by executive order after failing to pass the desired legislation. With health care, he does it with a law that he then amends so wantonly after it passed that the ACA itself becomes a blank slate on which the administration unilaterally remakes American medicine.
Employer mandate? The ACA says it was to go into effect Jan. 1, 2014. It didn't. The administration decreed that there should be several classes of employers, each with different starting dates, contradicting its own law.
Private insurance? The law says that plans not conforming to ACA coverage mandates must be canceled. Responding to the outcry that ensued, Obama urged the states and insurers to reinstate the plans — which would violate the explicit mandate of his own law.
One bit of ACA lawlessness, however, may prove a bridge too far. The administration has been giving subsidies to those who sign up through the federal exchange. The ACA limits subsidies to plans on the state exchanges.
This case will reach the Supreme Court. It is hard to see how the court could do anything other than overturn the federal-exchange subsidies. The court might even have a word to say about the administration's 22 (or is it 37?) other acts of post-facto rewriting of the ACA.
Perhaps. But until then, the imperial president rules.
Having been supine for years in the face of these encroachments, Congress is stirring. The Republican House is preparing a novel approach to acquiring legal standing before the courts to challenge these gross executive usurpations. Nancy Pelosi, reflecting the narrowness of both her partisanship and her vision, dismisses this as a "subterfuge."
She won't be saying that on the day Democrats lose the White House. Then, cheered on by a suddenly inflamed media, the Democrats will no doubt express horror at such constitutional overreach.
At which point, the temptation to stick it to the Democrats will be overwhelming.
At which point, Lord make us strong.
Historical Revisionists Have A Field Day On Why We Invaded Iraq
June 26, 2014
Historical Revisionists Have A Field Day On Why We Invaded Iraq
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
So who lost Iraq? The blame game mostly fingers the incompetent Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.
Or is Barack Obama culpable for pulling out all American troops monitoring the success of the 2007-08 surge? Some still blame George W. Bush for going into Iraq in 2003 in the first place to remove Saddam Hussein.
One can blame almost anyone, but one must not invent facts to support an argument.
Do we remember that Bill Clinton signed into law the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 that supported regime change in Iraq? He gave an eloquent speech on the dangers of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
In 2002, both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly to pass a resolution authorizing the removal of Saddam Hussein by force. Senators such as Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Harry Reid offered moving arguments on the Senate floor as to why we should depose Saddam in a post-9/11 climate.
Democratic stalwarts such as Sen. Jay Rockefeller and Rep. Nancy Pelosi lectured us about the dangers of Saddam's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. They drew on the same classified domestic and foreign intelligence reports that had led Bush to call for Saddam's forcible removal.
23 Reasons
The Bush administration, like members of Congress, underestimated the costs of the war and erred in focusing almost exclusively on Saddam's supposed stockpiles of weapons. But otherwise, the war was legally authorized on 23 writs.
Most of them had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction and were unaffected by the later mysterious absence of such weapons — which is all the more mysterious given that troves of WMD have turned up in nearby Syria and more recently in Iraqi bunkers overrun by Islamic militants.
Legally, the U.S. went to war against Saddam because he had done things such as commit genocide against the Kurds, Shiites and Marsh Arabs, and attacked four of his neighbors. He had tried to arrange the assassination of a former U.S. president, George H.W. Bush. He had paid bounties for suicide bombers on the West Bank and was harboring the worst of global terrorists.
Saddam also offered refuge to at least one of the architects of the first World Trade Center Bombing in 1993, and violated U.N.-authorized no-fly zones.
A number of prominent columnists, right and left — from George Will, David Brooks and William F. Buckley to Fareed Zakaria, David Ignatius and Thomas Friedman — supported Saddam's forcible removal. When his statue fell in 2003, most polls showed that over 70% of Americans agreed with the war.
What changed public opinion and caused radical about-faces among the war's most ardent supporters was the subsequent postwar violence and insurgency between 2004 and 2007, and the concurrent domestic elections and rising anti-war movement. Thousands of American troops were killed or wounded in mostly failed efforts to stem the Sunni-Shiite savagery.
A Million Of His Own
The 2007-08 surge engineered by Gen. David Petraeus ended much of the violence. By Obama's second year in office, American fatalities had been reduced to far less than the monthly accident rate in the U.S. military. "An extraordinary achievement," Obama said of the "stable" and "self-reliant" Iraq that he inherited — and left.
Prior to our invasion, the Kurds were a persecuted people who had been gassed, slaughtered and robbed of all rights by Saddam. In contrast, today a semi-autonomous Kurdistan is a free-market, consensual society of tolerance that, along with Israel, is one of the few humane places in the Middle East.
In 2003, the New York Times estimated that Saddam Hussein had killed perhaps about 1 million of his own people. That translated into about 40,000 deaths for each year he led Iraq. A Saddam-led Iraq over the last decade would not have been a peaceable place.
We can also imagine that Saddam would not have sat idly by the last decade as Pakistan and North Korea openly sold their nuclear expertise, and as rival Iran pressed ahead with its nuclear-enrichment program.
Nor should we forget that the U.S. military decimated al-Qaida in Iraq. Tens of thousands of foreign terrorists flocked to Anbar province and there met their deaths. When Obama later declared that al-Qaida was "on the run," it was largely because it had been nearly obliterated in Iraq.
Launching a costly campaign to remove Saddam may or may not have been a wise move. But it is historically inaccurate to suggest that the Iraq War was cooked up by George W. Bush alone — or that it did not do enormous damage to al-Qaida, bring salvation for the Kurds and by 2009 provide a rare chance for the now-bickering Iraqis to make something out of what Saddam had tried to destroy.
Historical Revisionists Have A Field Day On Why We Invaded Iraq
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
So who lost Iraq? The blame game mostly fingers the incompetent Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.
Or is Barack Obama culpable for pulling out all American troops monitoring the success of the 2007-08 surge? Some still blame George W. Bush for going into Iraq in 2003 in the first place to remove Saddam Hussein.
One can blame almost anyone, but one must not invent facts to support an argument.
Do we remember that Bill Clinton signed into law the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 that supported regime change in Iraq? He gave an eloquent speech on the dangers of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
In 2002, both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly to pass a resolution authorizing the removal of Saddam Hussein by force. Senators such as Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Harry Reid offered moving arguments on the Senate floor as to why we should depose Saddam in a post-9/11 climate.
Democratic stalwarts such as Sen. Jay Rockefeller and Rep. Nancy Pelosi lectured us about the dangers of Saddam's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. They drew on the same classified domestic and foreign intelligence reports that had led Bush to call for Saddam's forcible removal.
23 Reasons
The Bush administration, like members of Congress, underestimated the costs of the war and erred in focusing almost exclusively on Saddam's supposed stockpiles of weapons. But otherwise, the war was legally authorized on 23 writs.
Most of them had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction and were unaffected by the later mysterious absence of such weapons — which is all the more mysterious given that troves of WMD have turned up in nearby Syria and more recently in Iraqi bunkers overrun by Islamic militants.
Legally, the U.S. went to war against Saddam because he had done things such as commit genocide against the Kurds, Shiites and Marsh Arabs, and attacked four of his neighbors. He had tried to arrange the assassination of a former U.S. president, George H.W. Bush. He had paid bounties for suicide bombers on the West Bank and was harboring the worst of global terrorists.
Saddam also offered refuge to at least one of the architects of the first World Trade Center Bombing in 1993, and violated U.N.-authorized no-fly zones.
A number of prominent columnists, right and left — from George Will, David Brooks and William F. Buckley to Fareed Zakaria, David Ignatius and Thomas Friedman — supported Saddam's forcible removal. When his statue fell in 2003, most polls showed that over 70% of Americans agreed with the war.
What changed public opinion and caused radical about-faces among the war's most ardent supporters was the subsequent postwar violence and insurgency between 2004 and 2007, and the concurrent domestic elections and rising anti-war movement. Thousands of American troops were killed or wounded in mostly failed efforts to stem the Sunni-Shiite savagery.
A Million Of His Own
The 2007-08 surge engineered by Gen. David Petraeus ended much of the violence. By Obama's second year in office, American fatalities had been reduced to far less than the monthly accident rate in the U.S. military. "An extraordinary achievement," Obama said of the "stable" and "self-reliant" Iraq that he inherited — and left.
Prior to our invasion, the Kurds were a persecuted people who had been gassed, slaughtered and robbed of all rights by Saddam. In contrast, today a semi-autonomous Kurdistan is a free-market, consensual society of tolerance that, along with Israel, is one of the few humane places in the Middle East.
In 2003, the New York Times estimated that Saddam Hussein had killed perhaps about 1 million of his own people. That translated into about 40,000 deaths for each year he led Iraq. A Saddam-led Iraq over the last decade would not have been a peaceable place.
We can also imagine that Saddam would not have sat idly by the last decade as Pakistan and North Korea openly sold their nuclear expertise, and as rival Iran pressed ahead with its nuclear-enrichment program.
Nor should we forget that the U.S. military decimated al-Qaida in Iraq. Tens of thousands of foreign terrorists flocked to Anbar province and there met their deaths. When Obama later declared that al-Qaida was "on the run," it was largely because it had been nearly obliterated in Iraq.
Launching a costly campaign to remove Saddam may or may not have been a wise move. But it is historically inaccurate to suggest that the Iraq War was cooked up by George W. Bush alone — or that it did not do enormous damage to al-Qaida, bring salvation for the Kurds and by 2009 provide a rare chance for the now-bickering Iraqis to make something out of what Saddam had tried to destroy.
Wednesday, June 25, 2014
Obama's World Disorder
Obama's World Disorder
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
Amid all the talk of the isolationism that supposedly characterizes the Obama administration’s foreign policy, we forget that since World War II, the global order has largely been determined by U.S. engagement. The historically rare state of prosperity and peace that defined the postwar world were due to past U.S. vigilance and sacrifice.
Germany in the last 150 years has been at the center of three European wars, winning one, losing another, and destroying much of Europe and itself in the third. Yet present-day Germany has the largest economy in Europe and the fourth largest in the world. It is a global leader in high technology and industrial craftsmanship. For seventy years Germany, even after its second historic unification in 1989, has not translated such economic preeminence into military power, much less aggression. In fact, the strategic status quo of postwar Europe—with Britain and France, and their relatively smaller and weaker economies, as the continent’s two sole nuclear powers—remains mostly unquestioned.
That strange fact is due almost entirely to the U.S.-led NATO’s determination to protect the Eastern flank of Europe from potential enemies, to reassure Germany that it need not rearm to enjoy pan-European influence, and to quietly support the European nuclear monopolies of Britain and France. While the U.S. has always talked up the American-inspired United Nations, its first allegiance has always been to assure liberal democratic states in Europe of unshakeable American support. Any weakening of the latter might send Europe back into the tumultuous twentieth century.
A similar paradox exists in Asia. Pakistan and North Korea are two of the weakest economies and most unstable political systems in the region. Yet both nations are nuclear—despite rather than because of U.S.-led efforts at nonproliferation. In comparison, by any logical measure, far wealthier and more sophisticated states like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, and perhaps the Philippines should all be nuclear, given their expertise, dangerous locales, and the looming shadows of three proud, and sometime aggressive nations—China, India, and Russia—in their midst. Yet none have. That fact too is largely because of American security guarantees.
Why, then, has the Obama administration sought to negotiate nuclear arms reduction agreements solely with the Russians? The latter does not have any responsibilities resembling the host of American dependents and clients in Asia and Europe that could become nuclear, but choose not to, only because of U.S. guarantees of their strategic security.
Economically successful but non-nuclear Asian nations claim a portion of the U.S. deterrent force as critical to their own survival. Any failure to reassure our Asian and Pacific partners that our own nuclear forces are pledged to their survival would lead to a sizable increase in the world’s nuclear family.
In addition to protecting postwar Europe and the Pacific, the United States has traditionally sided with historically persecuted and vulnerable peoples, who, in the calculations of realpolitik, might not otherwise warrant such staunch friendship. U.S. security guarantees to Israel—a mere 7 million people, until recently without oil reserves, and surrounded by a host of more numerous and oil-wealthy enemies—for a half-century have assured the viability of the Jewish state.
For all the present acrimony over the Iraq War, we forget that one dividend was the emergence of a semi-autonomous and largely constitutional Kurdistan of some 7 million people, whose recent tragic history had been one of ethnic cleansing, gassing, and slaughter. Only prior liberation by and current support from America keep viable the small landlocked province.
The same is largely true of Taiwan. While the current security guarantees accorded Taiwan by the U.S. are nebulous, even such uncertainty for now continues to keep Taiwan autonomous amid constant Chinese pressure. Also consider tiny Greece, a country that has been alternately friendly and hostile to the United States. But its long unhappy history is a testament to the dangerous neighborhood of this country of 12 million inhabitants: the turmoil of the Arab spring is to its south, an ascendant Islamist and neo-Ottoman Turkey are to the east, and the ethnic powder keg in the Balkans lie to the North, capped by understandably unsympathetic European Union creditors. Only Greece’s NATO membership—a euphemism for an omnipresent American 6th fleet—has offered the Greek people both security and the opportunity to chafe at its dependence on U.S. arms.
In fact, there are a host of tiny moderate nations, which, while not formally allied with the U.S., count on American friendship in extremis, from Jordan and Kuwait to Chile and Colombia. Any American recessional puts at risk all such vulnerable states. The Obama administration’s policy of forcing concessions from the Israelis, pulling out all constabulary troops from an unstable postwar Iraq, and cozying up to an increasingly absolutist and Islamist Turkey makes no sense.
Then there is the rogue’s gallery. Just as Rome once put down nationalists, insurrectionists, and challengers of the Pax Romana, such as Ariovistus, Boudicca, Cleopatra, Jugurtha, Mithridates, Vercingetorix, and Zenobia, so too the United States has gone after state and non-state enemies of the postwar system, both during and after the Cold War. Sometimes authoritarians sent their armies across national borders or were guilty of genocide; at other times, unhinged nation-states and free-lancing zealots sponsored or committed acts of international terrorism. In response, the U.S.—sometimes successfully, sometimes not so much—has gone to war or at least gone after the likes of Moammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Slobodan Milosevic, Ho Chi Minh, Manuel Noriega, Kim Il-sung, and the Taliban. Like it or not, only the United States can prevent the theocracy in Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, the Assad dictatorship from gassing its own people, or al Qaeda from staging another 9/11 attack.
The United States offered resistance to illiberal and autocratic regional powers that have at time challenged the protocols of the postwar order. And that pushback has allowed weaker nations—such as Poland or the Baltic States—to escape the orbit of post-Soviet Russia, while in the Pacific ensuring that an Australia, New Zealand, or the Philippines is not bullied into subservience by China
This strange postwar world ushered in the greatest advancement in prosperity amid the general absence of a cataclysmic world conflagration or continental war since the dawn of civilization. For the first time since the rise of the Greek city-state, most nations have been able both to prosper and to assume that their boundaries were inviolate and their populations mostly free from attack. A system of international communications, travel, commerce, and trade is predicated on the assumption that pirates cannot seize cargo ships, terrorists cannot hijack planes, and rogue nations cannot let off atomic bombs without a U.S. led coalition to stop them from threatening the international order.
For the U.S. to continue this exceptional role of preserving the postwar system in times of economic weakness and spiritual exhaustion, it is critical for the Obama administration to articulate to the American people exactly what the United States has accomplished, how the postwar order arose, and what precisely are the benefits that justify such enormous sacrifices in blood and treasure.
Unfortunately, it has not offered systematic defense of the world order it inherited. For all the grand talk of working with the United Nations, the Obama administration ignored it in Syria, vastly exceeded its no-fly-zone and humanitarian aid resolutions in Libya, and misled it when it asserted to the General Assembly that a video-maker had prompted the violence against U.S. facilities in Benghazi. Moreover, Obama’s foreign policy team has serially faulted the prior administration as unilateral, forgetting that it obtained UN resolutions to retaliate in Afghanistan, tried desperately to obtain them for the Iraq invasion, and then assembled a large and diverse group of allies.
The Obama administration’s reset with Russia paid no attention to our Eastern European friends, who were eager to work with America on missile defense and integration within the West. It also ignored that reset essentially undid the punishments accorded Vladimir Putin for his 2008 invasion of Georgia. Meanwhile, China is angry and confused that the U.S. suddenly warns it to behave in the Pacific, after turning a blind eye for five years as it bullied most of its neighbors.
After assembling a coalition to beef up sanctions again Iran, the U.S. eased them to begin new negotiations with the theocracy—without prior consultation with our allies. The Obama administration has gone after al Qaedists through drone attacks, but such terrorists have spread throughout the Mideast in the wake of U.S. retrenchment and a misguided and euphemistic outreach to radical Islam.
No one in Latin America knows to what degree, if any, the U.S. opposes the creeping spread of authoritarian Marxist governments. No one in the Middle East knows quite what the evolving American position is on Iranian nuclear proliferation. And no one quite knows whether the United States is distancing itself from Israel while gravitating toward its enemies.
The Obama administration declares climate change the chief global threat. That new inanimate target is welcome news to aggressive nations that had once feared that their own reckless behavior might have been so singled out.
Americans did not fully appreciate the costly postwar global order that the United States had established over the last seventy years. Maybe they will start to as they witness it vanish.
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
Amid all the talk of the isolationism that supposedly characterizes the Obama administration’s foreign policy, we forget that since World War II, the global order has largely been determined by U.S. engagement. The historically rare state of prosperity and peace that defined the postwar world were due to past U.S. vigilance and sacrifice.
Germany in the last 150 years has been at the center of three European wars, winning one, losing another, and destroying much of Europe and itself in the third. Yet present-day Germany has the largest economy in Europe and the fourth largest in the world. It is a global leader in high technology and industrial craftsmanship. For seventy years Germany, even after its second historic unification in 1989, has not translated such economic preeminence into military power, much less aggression. In fact, the strategic status quo of postwar Europe—with Britain and France, and their relatively smaller and weaker economies, as the continent’s two sole nuclear powers—remains mostly unquestioned.
That strange fact is due almost entirely to the U.S.-led NATO’s determination to protect the Eastern flank of Europe from potential enemies, to reassure Germany that it need not rearm to enjoy pan-European influence, and to quietly support the European nuclear monopolies of Britain and France. While the U.S. has always talked up the American-inspired United Nations, its first allegiance has always been to assure liberal democratic states in Europe of unshakeable American support. Any weakening of the latter might send Europe back into the tumultuous twentieth century.
A similar paradox exists in Asia. Pakistan and North Korea are two of the weakest economies and most unstable political systems in the region. Yet both nations are nuclear—despite rather than because of U.S.-led efforts at nonproliferation. In comparison, by any logical measure, far wealthier and more sophisticated states like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, and perhaps the Philippines should all be nuclear, given their expertise, dangerous locales, and the looming shadows of three proud, and sometime aggressive nations—China, India, and Russia—in their midst. Yet none have. That fact too is largely because of American security guarantees.
Why, then, has the Obama administration sought to negotiate nuclear arms reduction agreements solely with the Russians? The latter does not have any responsibilities resembling the host of American dependents and clients in Asia and Europe that could become nuclear, but choose not to, only because of U.S. guarantees of their strategic security.
Economically successful but non-nuclear Asian nations claim a portion of the U.S. deterrent force as critical to their own survival. Any failure to reassure our Asian and Pacific partners that our own nuclear forces are pledged to their survival would lead to a sizable increase in the world’s nuclear family.
In addition to protecting postwar Europe and the Pacific, the United States has traditionally sided with historically persecuted and vulnerable peoples, who, in the calculations of realpolitik, might not otherwise warrant such staunch friendship. U.S. security guarantees to Israel—a mere 7 million people, until recently without oil reserves, and surrounded by a host of more numerous and oil-wealthy enemies—for a half-century have assured the viability of the Jewish state.
For all the present acrimony over the Iraq War, we forget that one dividend was the emergence of a semi-autonomous and largely constitutional Kurdistan of some 7 million people, whose recent tragic history had been one of ethnic cleansing, gassing, and slaughter. Only prior liberation by and current support from America keep viable the small landlocked province.
The same is largely true of Taiwan. While the current security guarantees accorded Taiwan by the U.S. are nebulous, even such uncertainty for now continues to keep Taiwan autonomous amid constant Chinese pressure. Also consider tiny Greece, a country that has been alternately friendly and hostile to the United States. But its long unhappy history is a testament to the dangerous neighborhood of this country of 12 million inhabitants: the turmoil of the Arab spring is to its south, an ascendant Islamist and neo-Ottoman Turkey are to the east, and the ethnic powder keg in the Balkans lie to the North, capped by understandably unsympathetic European Union creditors. Only Greece’s NATO membership—a euphemism for an omnipresent American 6th fleet—has offered the Greek people both security and the opportunity to chafe at its dependence on U.S. arms.
In fact, there are a host of tiny moderate nations, which, while not formally allied with the U.S., count on American friendship in extremis, from Jordan and Kuwait to Chile and Colombia. Any American recessional puts at risk all such vulnerable states. The Obama administration’s policy of forcing concessions from the Israelis, pulling out all constabulary troops from an unstable postwar Iraq, and cozying up to an increasingly absolutist and Islamist Turkey makes no sense.
Then there is the rogue’s gallery. Just as Rome once put down nationalists, insurrectionists, and challengers of the Pax Romana, such as Ariovistus, Boudicca, Cleopatra, Jugurtha, Mithridates, Vercingetorix, and Zenobia, so too the United States has gone after state and non-state enemies of the postwar system, both during and after the Cold War. Sometimes authoritarians sent their armies across national borders or were guilty of genocide; at other times, unhinged nation-states and free-lancing zealots sponsored or committed acts of international terrorism. In response, the U.S.—sometimes successfully, sometimes not so much—has gone to war or at least gone after the likes of Moammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Slobodan Milosevic, Ho Chi Minh, Manuel Noriega, Kim Il-sung, and the Taliban. Like it or not, only the United States can prevent the theocracy in Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, the Assad dictatorship from gassing its own people, or al Qaeda from staging another 9/11 attack.
The United States offered resistance to illiberal and autocratic regional powers that have at time challenged the protocols of the postwar order. And that pushback has allowed weaker nations—such as Poland or the Baltic States—to escape the orbit of post-Soviet Russia, while in the Pacific ensuring that an Australia, New Zealand, or the Philippines is not bullied into subservience by China
This strange postwar world ushered in the greatest advancement in prosperity amid the general absence of a cataclysmic world conflagration or continental war since the dawn of civilization. For the first time since the rise of the Greek city-state, most nations have been able both to prosper and to assume that their boundaries were inviolate and their populations mostly free from attack. A system of international communications, travel, commerce, and trade is predicated on the assumption that pirates cannot seize cargo ships, terrorists cannot hijack planes, and rogue nations cannot let off atomic bombs without a U.S. led coalition to stop them from threatening the international order.
For the U.S. to continue this exceptional role of preserving the postwar system in times of economic weakness and spiritual exhaustion, it is critical for the Obama administration to articulate to the American people exactly what the United States has accomplished, how the postwar order arose, and what precisely are the benefits that justify such enormous sacrifices in blood and treasure.
Unfortunately, it has not offered systematic defense of the world order it inherited. For all the grand talk of working with the United Nations, the Obama administration ignored it in Syria, vastly exceeded its no-fly-zone and humanitarian aid resolutions in Libya, and misled it when it asserted to the General Assembly that a video-maker had prompted the violence against U.S. facilities in Benghazi. Moreover, Obama’s foreign policy team has serially faulted the prior administration as unilateral, forgetting that it obtained UN resolutions to retaliate in Afghanistan, tried desperately to obtain them for the Iraq invasion, and then assembled a large and diverse group of allies.
The Obama administration’s reset with Russia paid no attention to our Eastern European friends, who were eager to work with America on missile defense and integration within the West. It also ignored that reset essentially undid the punishments accorded Vladimir Putin for his 2008 invasion of Georgia. Meanwhile, China is angry and confused that the U.S. suddenly warns it to behave in the Pacific, after turning a blind eye for five years as it bullied most of its neighbors.
After assembling a coalition to beef up sanctions again Iran, the U.S. eased them to begin new negotiations with the theocracy—without prior consultation with our allies. The Obama administration has gone after al Qaedists through drone attacks, but such terrorists have spread throughout the Mideast in the wake of U.S. retrenchment and a misguided and euphemistic outreach to radical Islam.
No one in Latin America knows to what degree, if any, the U.S. opposes the creeping spread of authoritarian Marxist governments. No one in the Middle East knows quite what the evolving American position is on Iranian nuclear proliferation. And no one quite knows whether the United States is distancing itself from Israel while gravitating toward its enemies.
The Obama administration declares climate change the chief global threat. That new inanimate target is welcome news to aggressive nations that had once feared that their own reckless behavior might have been so singled out.
Americans did not fully appreciate the costly postwar global order that the United States had established over the last seventy years. Maybe they will start to as they witness it vanish.
Deunionize the IRS
Deunionize the IRS
Posted By Roger Kimball On June 25, 2014 @ 5:55 am
Here’s a headline from Forbes that caught my eye:
“IRS Employees Union Is ‘Very Concerned’ About Being Required To Enroll In Obamacare’s Health Insurance Exchange [1]”
You can’t blame ’em. Workers in the private sector are also “very concerned” about getting dumped into Obamacare’s subsidized insurance exchanges as, one by one, employers are forced to give up providing health insurance for their employees.
It’s possible that, like me, you are entertaining an un-Christian feeling of Schadenfreude about this happening to a large, widely loathed, and deeply politicized government agency.
But thing thing that should really arrest your attention about this headline, and the story it introduces, is contained in the first three words: “IRS Employees Union.”
The government’s tax collecting agency is unionized? Think about that for a moment.
The union in question is The National Treasury Employees Union [2]. According to the web site of the NTEU [3], the mission of the union is “To organize federal employees to work together to ensure that every federal employee is treated with dignity and respect.”
That’s a tall order, in part because there are so very many federal employees. The NTEU’s web site includes a nifty interactive graphic that shows you just how many there are in each state: 279,622 in Texas, for example, 350,544 in California, 165,943 in New York, etc., etc. There are, in short, millions of them.
And what political party do you suppose they support? In the 2012 election cycle, 94% its PAC contributions went to Democrats [4], 4% to Republicans. That’s only one year, of course. How about 2010? That year 98% of its contributions went to Democrats, 2% went to Republicans. 2008 was a bit more balanced: that year only 96% went to Democrats. As Andrew Stiles pointed out at National Review, the NTEU is a “powerful, deeply partisan union whose boss has publicly disparaged the Tea Party and criticized the Republican party for having ties to it.”
As the example of Lois “I’ll-take-the-Fifth [5]” Lerner suggests, employees at the IRS support Democrat candidates by a huge margin. “The agency’s employees are heavily engaged in politics and lean considerably to the left,” Stiles reports. “Records show that IRS employees in 2012 donated more than twice as much to the Obama as to the Romney campaign. Nearly two-thirds of all employee contributions over the last three elections cycles have gone to Democrats.”
There are some critics who, faced with the overwhelming evidence of partisan corruption at the IRS, advocate abolishing the agency. That is a happy thought, but probably utopian. A possibly more achievable goal would be to deunionize the IRS, a first step in a process that should aim at deunionizing all federal agencies. Public-sector unions, as Daniel DiSalvo has pointed out in Government Unions and the Bankrupting of America [6], are a prescription for political corruption. The unions help elect politicians who in turn help the unions. The result is corruption and fiscal incontinence.
We may take government unions for granted as an inconvenient fact of life. But there is nothing inevitable about them. As DiSalvo notes,
That powerful government unions exist at all is a striking political development. The prevailing attitude among policymakers across the political spectrum was downright hostile well into the 1950s. President Franklin Roosevelt, one of labor’s best friends, wrote in 1937 that: “Meticulous attention should be paid to the special relations and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government. . . . The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.” Other champions of organized labor thought the same way. The first president of the AFL-CIO, George Meany, believed it was “impossible to bargain collectively with the government.” Their reasoning was that the elected representatives of the people would be forced to share their governing authority with unelected union officials whom voters could not hold accountable.
As the public watches IRS officials, from Commissioner John Koskinen on down, prevaricate, stonewall, and lie [7] to Congress, a groundswell of outrage and disgust is rising. Doubtless the IRS, its union, and the Obama administration hopes that if it can only string out the hearings long enough, the outrage will falter and the disgust will die down. That is certainly possible.
Another possibility is that the outrage and disgust will continue to grow and an impatient public will demand reform. Deunionizing the IRS would be a good place to start.
Article printed from Roger’s Rules: http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball
Posted By Roger Kimball On June 25, 2014 @ 5:55 am
Here’s a headline from Forbes that caught my eye:
“IRS Employees Union Is ‘Very Concerned’ About Being Required To Enroll In Obamacare’s Health Insurance Exchange [1]”
You can’t blame ’em. Workers in the private sector are also “very concerned” about getting dumped into Obamacare’s subsidized insurance exchanges as, one by one, employers are forced to give up providing health insurance for their employees.
It’s possible that, like me, you are entertaining an un-Christian feeling of Schadenfreude about this happening to a large, widely loathed, and deeply politicized government agency.
But thing thing that should really arrest your attention about this headline, and the story it introduces, is contained in the first three words: “IRS Employees Union.”
The government’s tax collecting agency is unionized? Think about that for a moment.
The union in question is The National Treasury Employees Union [2]. According to the web site of the NTEU [3], the mission of the union is “To organize federal employees to work together to ensure that every federal employee is treated with dignity and respect.”
That’s a tall order, in part because there are so very many federal employees. The NTEU’s web site includes a nifty interactive graphic that shows you just how many there are in each state: 279,622 in Texas, for example, 350,544 in California, 165,943 in New York, etc., etc. There are, in short, millions of them.
And what political party do you suppose they support? In the 2012 election cycle, 94% its PAC contributions went to Democrats [4], 4% to Republicans. That’s only one year, of course. How about 2010? That year 98% of its contributions went to Democrats, 2% went to Republicans. 2008 was a bit more balanced: that year only 96% went to Democrats. As Andrew Stiles pointed out at National Review, the NTEU is a “powerful, deeply partisan union whose boss has publicly disparaged the Tea Party and criticized the Republican party for having ties to it.”
As the example of Lois “I’ll-take-the-Fifth [5]” Lerner suggests, employees at the IRS support Democrat candidates by a huge margin. “The agency’s employees are heavily engaged in politics and lean considerably to the left,” Stiles reports. “Records show that IRS employees in 2012 donated more than twice as much to the Obama as to the Romney campaign. Nearly two-thirds of all employee contributions over the last three elections cycles have gone to Democrats.”
There are some critics who, faced with the overwhelming evidence of partisan corruption at the IRS, advocate abolishing the agency. That is a happy thought, but probably utopian. A possibly more achievable goal would be to deunionize the IRS, a first step in a process that should aim at deunionizing all federal agencies. Public-sector unions, as Daniel DiSalvo has pointed out in Government Unions and the Bankrupting of America [6], are a prescription for political corruption. The unions help elect politicians who in turn help the unions. The result is corruption and fiscal incontinence.
We may take government unions for granted as an inconvenient fact of life. But there is nothing inevitable about them. As DiSalvo notes,
That powerful government unions exist at all is a striking political development. The prevailing attitude among policymakers across the political spectrum was downright hostile well into the 1950s. President Franklin Roosevelt, one of labor’s best friends, wrote in 1937 that: “Meticulous attention should be paid to the special relations and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government. . . . The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.” Other champions of organized labor thought the same way. The first president of the AFL-CIO, George Meany, believed it was “impossible to bargain collectively with the government.” Their reasoning was that the elected representatives of the people would be forced to share their governing authority with unelected union officials whom voters could not hold accountable.
As the public watches IRS officials, from Commissioner John Koskinen on down, prevaricate, stonewall, and lie [7] to Congress, a groundswell of outrage and disgust is rising. Doubtless the IRS, its union, and the Obama administration hopes that if it can only string out the hearings long enough, the outrage will falter and the disgust will die down. That is certainly possible.
Another possibility is that the outrage and disgust will continue to grow and an impatient public will demand reform. Deunionizing the IRS would be a good place to start.
Article printed from Roger’s Rules: http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball
Obama & Crony Capitalism
'It stinks': Democrats criticize White House over meeting with billionaire Tom Steyer
Senior political officials on Wednesday are scheduled to host a mega-donor with plans of making a nine-figure investment in the 2014 midterm elections.
No, Washington Republicans aren't meeting with Charles and David Koch, the deep-pocketed energy titans -- and public enemy No. 1, according to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and many Democrats.
Instead, the White House, which has repeatedly bemoaned the influence of big money in politics, will open its doors to Tom Steyer, the environmental activist who has pledged to spend up to $100 million on November's elections to promote his climate-change agenda.
Steyer is also a high-profile opponent of the Keystone XL pipeline, a project the Obama administration is still reviewing.
Although progressives were unwillingly to publicly condemn the White House for the Steyer gathering, multiple Democratic sources on Capitol Hill privately said that President Obama looked like he was playing the same political game he so actively criticized.
"If a Republican president did the same thing with the Koch brothers, we would skewer them," a House Democratic lawmaker told the Washington Examiner. "If you're going to talk the talk, you have to walk the walk."
"That's probably the last person I'd like White House officials to meet with," added a senior aide for a centrist Senate Democrat in a tough re-election fight.
Republicans are hammering the Obama White House and Democrats for their approach to cutting carbon emissions, saying Environmental Protection Agency rules to limit greenhouse gases from power plants would hurt the economy.
In Steyer, conservatives see a figure they can frame in much the same way liberals dismiss the Kochs, as the figure calling the policy shots for politicians eager to raise campaign cash.
Steyer has dismissed the comparison with the Koch brothers, saying he is more motivated by environmental stewardship than lining his own pockets.
However, the White House embrace of the billionaire former hedge fund manager is problematic for Obama in that he once actively dismissed the growing influence of big donors in Washington.
"With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics," Obama said in 2010 after the court's landmark Citizens United ruling, which struck down key campaign finance restrictions. "It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans."
Obama's evolution on the issue came full circle earlier this year, when he agreed to headline fundraisers for super PACs, groups he once decried as corrosive to the political process -- and pledged to avoid them.
The White House on Tuesday defended its decision to host a meeting with Steyer.
"I have no misgivings about the individuals who are participating in that meeting, their political activities notwithstanding," White House press secretary Josh Earnest said. "The administration is committed to making progress in addressing the causes of climate change and reducing carbon pollution. That's something that Mr. Steyer has obviously well-known views on. But there are a lot of other
people with well-known views on this that the White House is consulting."
Also attending the meeting are former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry
Cisneros and Cargill CEO Greg Page. The group compiled a report on the economic consequences of climate change.
But even some of the president's congressional allies said that reasoning didn't excuse the White House meeting.
"I don't like it," said the House Democrat. "It stinks."
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
Cloward-Piven Everywhere And barely time to think.
Cloward-Piven Everywhere
And barely time to think.
Tom Blumer
June 24, 2014 - 12:13 am
The Obama administration-driven calamity at this nation’s southern border is no naiveté-caused accident. Instead, it’s the latest manifestation of what clear-eyed observers must recognize is just one of many concerted attempts to overwhelm this nation’s institutions and its social, psychological and physical infrastructure for the apparent purpose of leaving it permanently weakened and fundamentally changed.
Conscious or not — and I would argue in most cases that it is quite conscious — what we’re seeing is a comprehensive application of the left’s long-championed Cloward-Piven strategy.
The folklore behind the strategy claims that its enunciation by Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven “only” involved collapsing the welfare system to create a political climate receptive to the idea of a “guaranteed annual income,” and — presto! — “an end to poverty.”
The idea advanced in the couple’s May 1966 column in The Nation was to have those whom they saw as naively self-reliant recognize that they were legally entitled to receive benefits and to have them apply for public assistance en masse. This would “produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments,” thus requiring a federal solution which would, in their fevered minds, “eliminate poverty by the outright redistribution of income.”
The folklore also contends that the strategy didn’t work. That’s not really true. It really did collapse the system in one city, and it permanently changed national attitudes towards public assistance. As James Simpson observed at American Thinker in September 2008 (still-working links are in the original):
Capitalizing on the racial unrest of the 1960s, Cloward and Piven saw the welfare system as their first target.
… According to a City Journal article by Sol Stern, welfare rolls increased from 4.3 million to 10.8 million by the mid-1970s as a result, and in New York City, where the strategy had been particularly successful, “one person was on the welfare rolls … for every two working in the city’s private economy.”
… The vast expansion of welfare in New York City that came of … Cloward-Piven tactics sent the city into bankruptcy in 1975. Rudy Giuliani cited Cloward and Piven by name as being responsible for “an effort at economic sabotage.” He also credited Cloward-Piven with changing the cultural attitude toward welfare from that of a temporary expedient to a lifetime entitlement, an attitude which in-and-of-itself has caused perhaps the greatest damage of all.
That damage includes welfare-driven family breakups and sky-high out-of-wedlock birth rates.
Cloward and Piven targeted other applications from the very beginning. The authors telegraphed their broader intent in that infamous 1966 column (italics are theirs):
We tend to overlook the force of crisis in precipitating legislative reform, partly because we lack a theoretical framework by which to understand the impact of major disruptions.
By crisis, we mean a publicly visible disruption in some institutional sphere. Crisis can occur spontaneously (e.g., riots) or as the intended result of tactics of demonstration and protest which either generate institutional disruption or bring unrecognized disruption to public attention. Public trouble is a political liability, it calls for action by political leaders to stabilize the situation. Because crisis usually creates or exposes conflict, it threatens to produce cleavages in a political consensus which politicians will ordinarily act to avert.
Former Obama adviser and now Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s oft-cited statement that “you never let a serious crisis go to waste” is in no way an original thought.
The left has long since figured out that focusing Cloward-Piven on only one aspect of society at a time is nowhere near as effective as applying it on multiple fronts over time. The strategy’s specific applications arguably include at least the following:
•
• The 2008 financial meltdown. The run-up to the 2008 financial meltdown and the accompanying recession was driven by the Community Reinvestment Act, which was eventually toughened to the point of effectively compelling banks to make trillions of dollars in mortgage loans to objectively unqualified buyers. “Government-sponsored enterprises” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made the problem exponentially worse by systematically deceiving the securities markets and their shareholders about the underlying quality of loans they purchased from mortgage lenders. As a result, we now have Dodd-Frank, the completely unaccountable Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a mortgage lending market where even the simplest transaction takes several months to complete, and a homebuilding industry seemingly destined to indefinitely remain a shadow of its former self.
•
• Record deficits and national debt buildup. Despite the stock market arguing to the contrary, the roughly $6 trillion in deficits deliberately rung up during Obama’s presidency, along with a nearly $7 trillion increase in the national debt, have the financial system again on the verge of implosion. Will the Federal Reserve really ever be able to liquidate its over $4 trillion in holdings of government and mortgage securities without causing the economy to grind to a halt?
•
• Social Security and Medicare. Despite changing demographics, these programs have barely been touched since their inception. Their status quo is indisputably unsustainable in the long run. Leftist opposition to any change whatsoever to either is best seen as a slow-motion Cloward-Piven effort to guarantee their failure.
•
• Obamacare. The Affordable Care Act’s hopelessly incompetent rollout, ongoing management nightmares and constantly changing arbitrary rules appear to have been concocted to impose utter chaos on the health care system and ultimately to bring about a single-payer, i.e., government-run, system. If that’s really so, early returns indicate that it’s working, as the statist regime’s drag on the economy — and not this winter’s miserable weather — was a primary cause of the economy’s recently estimated 2 percent annualized first-quarter contraction.
•
• The IRS scandal. Cloward-Piven is now being used by those in power to destroy the opposition. The IRS scandal is best understood as a scheme to bulldoze opponents with time-consuming, burdensome bureaucratic barriers and harassment at the hands of an agency with apparently unlimited resources — at least for this priority.
•
• Regulation. Along those same lines, in recent years the federal government’s regulatory apparatus, whose employees were originally more interested in job preservation, now appear to have taken to rolling over their targets with costly, voluminous and virtually indecipherable rules restrictions, harassing litigation, and aggressive demonization. Post-recession start-up activity and new employment arising from those efforts are both at record lows. Who wants to get big enough to get noticed by the administration’s regulatory thugs?
•
• Scandal exhaustion. The sheer volume of serious Obama administration scandals seems to comprise a Cloward-Piven attempt to overwhelm opponents. With so many scandals out there, no single outrage can generate concerted, sufficiently visible opposition. Those who contend that this situation is not deliberate apparently expect us to believe that the original volunteered appearances on the same day in May 2013 of the IRS scandal and the Department of Justice’s admission that it monitored phone records at the Associated Press represented some kind of odd coincidence.
Not every Cloward-Piven attempt has been successful. In retrospect, the late-1990s Internet bubble, largely caused by a deliberately asleep at the switch Securities and Exchange Commission which allowed scores of companies with no history and no chance of success to go public, may have been designed to bring about a financial crisis. The trouble with that strategy is that “the wrong guy” won the 2000 election. Even so, that debacle helped give us the economy-stifling mountain of busywork known as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
For all practical purposes, Cloward-Piven is now a staple of leftist electoral campaign strategy. As one commenter recently noted (I unfortunately lost track of where it originated), the Obama reelection campaign’s 2012 strategy “wasn’t just to publish propaganda, but to publish (and) distribute propaganda in such magnitudes that that folks didn’t even have to think about it, they would just foam at the mouth at the mere mention of (Mitt) Romney’s name.”
As to the recent wave of “Unaccompanied Alien Children” — that’s the Department of Homeland Security’s term, not mine — make no mistake. President Barack Obama and his advisers had to know that hordes of unaccompanied children would be sent to cross our southern border when he unilaterally imposed “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” in June of 2012. Despite seeing its results, Homeland Security renewed DACA for two more years earlier this month. The default assumption simply must be that “Obama is using these children as pawns to implement his goal of universal citizenship for illegal immigrants.”
In other words, it’s Cloward-Piven, yet again.
And barely time to think.
Tom Blumer
June 24, 2014 - 12:13 am
The Obama administration-driven calamity at this nation’s southern border is no naiveté-caused accident. Instead, it’s the latest manifestation of what clear-eyed observers must recognize is just one of many concerted attempts to overwhelm this nation’s institutions and its social, psychological and physical infrastructure for the apparent purpose of leaving it permanently weakened and fundamentally changed.
Conscious or not — and I would argue in most cases that it is quite conscious — what we’re seeing is a comprehensive application of the left’s long-championed Cloward-Piven strategy.
The folklore behind the strategy claims that its enunciation by Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven “only” involved collapsing the welfare system to create a political climate receptive to the idea of a “guaranteed annual income,” and — presto! — “an end to poverty.”
The idea advanced in the couple’s May 1966 column in The Nation was to have those whom they saw as naively self-reliant recognize that they were legally entitled to receive benefits and to have them apply for public assistance en masse. This would “produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments,” thus requiring a federal solution which would, in their fevered minds, “eliminate poverty by the outright redistribution of income.”
The folklore also contends that the strategy didn’t work. That’s not really true. It really did collapse the system in one city, and it permanently changed national attitudes towards public assistance. As James Simpson observed at American Thinker in September 2008 (still-working links are in the original):
Capitalizing on the racial unrest of the 1960s, Cloward and Piven saw the welfare system as their first target.
… According to a City Journal article by Sol Stern, welfare rolls increased from 4.3 million to 10.8 million by the mid-1970s as a result, and in New York City, where the strategy had been particularly successful, “one person was on the welfare rolls … for every two working in the city’s private economy.”
… The vast expansion of welfare in New York City that came of … Cloward-Piven tactics sent the city into bankruptcy in 1975. Rudy Giuliani cited Cloward and Piven by name as being responsible for “an effort at economic sabotage.” He also credited Cloward-Piven with changing the cultural attitude toward welfare from that of a temporary expedient to a lifetime entitlement, an attitude which in-and-of-itself has caused perhaps the greatest damage of all.
That damage includes welfare-driven family breakups and sky-high out-of-wedlock birth rates.
Cloward and Piven targeted other applications from the very beginning. The authors telegraphed their broader intent in that infamous 1966 column (italics are theirs):
We tend to overlook the force of crisis in precipitating legislative reform, partly because we lack a theoretical framework by which to understand the impact of major disruptions.
By crisis, we mean a publicly visible disruption in some institutional sphere. Crisis can occur spontaneously (e.g., riots) or as the intended result of tactics of demonstration and protest which either generate institutional disruption or bring unrecognized disruption to public attention. Public trouble is a political liability, it calls for action by political leaders to stabilize the situation. Because crisis usually creates or exposes conflict, it threatens to produce cleavages in a political consensus which politicians will ordinarily act to avert.
Former Obama adviser and now Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s oft-cited statement that “you never let a serious crisis go to waste” is in no way an original thought.
The left has long since figured out that focusing Cloward-Piven on only one aspect of society at a time is nowhere near as effective as applying it on multiple fronts over time. The strategy’s specific applications arguably include at least the following:
•
• The 2008 financial meltdown. The run-up to the 2008 financial meltdown and the accompanying recession was driven by the Community Reinvestment Act, which was eventually toughened to the point of effectively compelling banks to make trillions of dollars in mortgage loans to objectively unqualified buyers. “Government-sponsored enterprises” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made the problem exponentially worse by systematically deceiving the securities markets and their shareholders about the underlying quality of loans they purchased from mortgage lenders. As a result, we now have Dodd-Frank, the completely unaccountable Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a mortgage lending market where even the simplest transaction takes several months to complete, and a homebuilding industry seemingly destined to indefinitely remain a shadow of its former self.
•
• Record deficits and national debt buildup. Despite the stock market arguing to the contrary, the roughly $6 trillion in deficits deliberately rung up during Obama’s presidency, along with a nearly $7 trillion increase in the national debt, have the financial system again on the verge of implosion. Will the Federal Reserve really ever be able to liquidate its over $4 trillion in holdings of government and mortgage securities without causing the economy to grind to a halt?
•
• Social Security and Medicare. Despite changing demographics, these programs have barely been touched since their inception. Their status quo is indisputably unsustainable in the long run. Leftist opposition to any change whatsoever to either is best seen as a slow-motion Cloward-Piven effort to guarantee their failure.
•
• Obamacare. The Affordable Care Act’s hopelessly incompetent rollout, ongoing management nightmares and constantly changing arbitrary rules appear to have been concocted to impose utter chaos on the health care system and ultimately to bring about a single-payer, i.e., government-run, system. If that’s really so, early returns indicate that it’s working, as the statist regime’s drag on the economy — and not this winter’s miserable weather — was a primary cause of the economy’s recently estimated 2 percent annualized first-quarter contraction.
•
• The IRS scandal. Cloward-Piven is now being used by those in power to destroy the opposition. The IRS scandal is best understood as a scheme to bulldoze opponents with time-consuming, burdensome bureaucratic barriers and harassment at the hands of an agency with apparently unlimited resources — at least for this priority.
•
• Regulation. Along those same lines, in recent years the federal government’s regulatory apparatus, whose employees were originally more interested in job preservation, now appear to have taken to rolling over their targets with costly, voluminous and virtually indecipherable rules restrictions, harassing litigation, and aggressive demonization. Post-recession start-up activity and new employment arising from those efforts are both at record lows. Who wants to get big enough to get noticed by the administration’s regulatory thugs?
•
• Scandal exhaustion. The sheer volume of serious Obama administration scandals seems to comprise a Cloward-Piven attempt to overwhelm opponents. With so many scandals out there, no single outrage can generate concerted, sufficiently visible opposition. Those who contend that this situation is not deliberate apparently expect us to believe that the original volunteered appearances on the same day in May 2013 of the IRS scandal and the Department of Justice’s admission that it monitored phone records at the Associated Press represented some kind of odd coincidence.
Not every Cloward-Piven attempt has been successful. In retrospect, the late-1990s Internet bubble, largely caused by a deliberately asleep at the switch Securities and Exchange Commission which allowed scores of companies with no history and no chance of success to go public, may have been designed to bring about a financial crisis. The trouble with that strategy is that “the wrong guy” won the 2000 election. Even so, that debacle helped give us the economy-stifling mountain of busywork known as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
For all practical purposes, Cloward-Piven is now a staple of leftist electoral campaign strategy. As one commenter recently noted (I unfortunately lost track of where it originated), the Obama reelection campaign’s 2012 strategy “wasn’t just to publish propaganda, but to publish (and) distribute propaganda in such magnitudes that that folks didn’t even have to think about it, they would just foam at the mouth at the mere mention of (Mitt) Romney’s name.”
As to the recent wave of “Unaccompanied Alien Children” — that’s the Department of Homeland Security’s term, not mine — make no mistake. President Barack Obama and his advisers had to know that hordes of unaccompanied children would be sent to cross our southern border when he unilaterally imposed “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” in June of 2012. Despite seeing its results, Homeland Security renewed DACA for two more years earlier this month. The default assumption simply must be that “Obama is using these children as pawns to implement his goal of universal citizenship for illegal immigrants.”
In other words, it’s Cloward-Piven, yet again.
Rage Against the Outrage Machine
Rage Against the Outrage Machine
The most searing critiques of George Will's much-maligned column on rape misrepresent his arguments, illustrating a common flaw in American public discourse.
Conor Friedersdorf Jun 23 2014, 4:02 PM ET
0
inSha
The scene is familiar to every soccer fan: An aggressive defender slightly bumps a striker, who reacts as if struck by a taser's barb. His arms flail. His legs crumple beneath him. He writhes on the turf, grabbing at indeterminate pain. And then, once the ref either does or does not call a penalty, he pops up, unharmed as ever, and plays on.
The Internet too often resembles that scene. Every week, a fraught subject is broached, usually imperfectly. Perhaps a wrongheaded or offensive claim is made. Plenty of thoughtful people offer smart, plausible rebuttals. But they're overshadowed by distortionists with practiced performances of exaggerated outrage. The object isn't a fair debate—it's to get the other guy ejected.
Last week, George Will was the focus of the umbrage-takers. His June 6 column, "Colleges become the victims of progressivism," isn't without flaws. The worst of them may deserve a yellow card for a careless, overaggressive tackling maneuver. But only by misrepresenting Will's argument can his least responsible critics insist that, after four decades and thousands of columns in the Washington Post, he ought to be fired from his twice-weekly perch for these 753 words.
The column is about higher education. Universities are learning "that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous ('micro-aggressions,' often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate," Will argues. "And academia’s progressivism has rendered it intellectually defenseless now that progressivism’s achievement, the regulatory state, has decided it is academia’s turn to be broken to government’s saddle."
That isn't the best beginning for a man whose prose is crystalline at its best. It's more difficult than it should be to discern that Will is distinguishing "the status of victimhood" from actual victimhood. When he says that colleges are causing "victims" to proliferate, he is referring to a category of people who he doesn't regard as actual victims but who have either declared themselves to be victims or have been declared victims by others within the subculture of elite academia.
The distinction is core to the column and consistent throughout.
In the section on sexual assault, for instance, he recounts a hotly debated incident at Swarthmore that many regard as rape and many others, like Will himself, characterize as embodying "the ambiguities of the hookup culture, this cocktail of hormones, alcohol and the faux sophistication of today’s prolonged adolescence of especially privileged young adults." Elsewhere, Will makes it abundantly clear that he is talking about people who are said to be victims but aren't actually victims by putting scare quotes around "sexual assault victims" and "survivors."
This did not stop his critics from eliding that core distinction. Anti-sexism group UltraViolet declared, "The Washington Post actually just published an opinion piece mocking sexual assault survivors and saying that women want to be raped." Actually, Will neither wrote nor believes that women "want to be raped," and mocked only false claims that sexual assault has occurred. At worst, Will implies many women want to be seen as having been sexually assaulted and fabricate such incidents. (More on that wrongheaded but distinct claim later.)
National Organization for Women President Terry O'Neill followed suit, citing Will's column, though not quoting it, while demanding that the Post fire him. "It is actively harmful for the victims of sexual assault when that kind of man writes a piece that says to assault victims, 'it didn't happen and if it did happen you deserve it,'" she stated. "That re-traumatizes victims. I can't believe that Mr. Will has had this experience if he would put out such a hateful message."
But Will did not say and almost certainly doesn't believe that sexual assault victims "deserve it"; nor does he intend to tell sexual assault victims "it didn't happen." His purpose and intention is to castigate people who see sexual assaults where none happened, not to behave hatefully toward actual victims of sexual assault. If he misjudges a situation and winds up doubting the veracity of an actual victim, it is perfectly fair to criticize him, but his transgression shouldn't be muddied.
Judd Legum wrote at ThinkProgress:
Washington Post columnist George Will wrote a column claiming that being a rape victim is now a “coveted status” that college women seek out. Will argued that complaints of rape and sexual assault on college campus were overblown. He also suggested that women claiming to be raped were “delusional.”
Here's what Will actually wrote, after a paragraph on trigger warnings and speech codes (my emphasis): "academia, with its adversarial stance toward limited government and cultural common sense, is making itself ludicrous. Academia is learning that its attempts to create victim-free campuses—by making everyone hypersensitive, even delusional, about victimizations—brings increasing supervision by the regulatory state that progressivism celebrates." He does not suggest that women claiming to be raped were delusional—he suggests attempts to create a victim-free campus makes everyone hypersensitive or "delusional" about victimizations.
Criticizing that argument is fair game. Summarizing it as "George Will says rape victims are delusional" is wildly unfair.
I emailed Legum about his piece:
You wrote, "George Will wrote a column claiming that being a rape victim is now a 'coveted status' that college women seek out." I'm writing about that column, and I may take issue with your characterization, but I wanted to reach out first. It seems to me that Will isn't arguing that women seek out being rape victims, but that they seek out victim status, which causes some to falsely claim that they've been sexually assaulted. That is obviously a highly controversial and arguably wrongheaded claim in itself. I certainly wouldn't make it. But it's a different claim than the one you characterize Will as having. Or so I think after reading both of your pieces. But I am open to being wrong. Am I?
Here's how he replied:
Thanks for reaching out.
I do think that is what Will was saying, based on this: "that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate." I base it on two things. First is the word "coveted" which means something that you hunger for. And second is the idea that that coveting makes victims "proliferate." He then tells a story of a woman who was raped as an example. So he's not limiting this to people falsely claiming they are raped. He's saying that women are actively putting themselves in positions to be raped to achieve this coveted status.
To me, this is a clear, if earnest, misreading. Whatever one thinks about the Swarthmore woman whose story Will relates, it's clear that the columnist himself does not believe that she was raped or sexually assaulted. This is arguably to his discredit, but if that is a shortcoming, it is different than him making the claim that women are going out and purposefully getting themselves raped.
Then there's the gig Will lost over this column. In a Wednesday editor's note, Tony Messenger, editorial-page editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, announced that his newspaper would no longer run Will's syndicated column and will instead publish Bush administration veteran Michael Gerson on Thursdays and Sundays. The "refreshing and revitalizing change" had been under consideration for some months, the editor's note explained, "but a column published June 5, in which Mr. Will suggested that sexual assault victims on college campuses enjoy a privileged status, made the decision easier. The column was offensive and inaccurate; we apologize for publishing it."
The note didn't include a link to the column, which I hadn't read at that point. Curious about what was inaccurate, I hunted around the website for a correction, but didn't find one. Then I found the column itself at the Washington Post, where it was originally published. As noted, it included a lot of contestable statements and analysis, some of which I disagree with. But there wasn't a correction there either. If something crossed the line from controversial, arguably wrongheaded opinion to clear factual error, I couldn't tell what that would be.
Messenger was nice enough to respond to an email seeking clarification. "We generally don't publish corrections on syndicated material unless one comes through from the syndication (or AP, as the case might be)," he explained. "However, it's our belief that the thought that sexual assault victims are seeking some kind of special victimhood on college campuses, or that the campuses are seeking to provide some privileged status, is wildly inaccurate and offensive." He further clarified that he wasn't quite saying that there was a correctable error in the offending column. "Yes, we were applying the term to an opinion, which differentiates it from something that is correctable per se," he wrote. "But we believe it was both inaccurate and offensive, and it's why we pulled the column from our site and apologized to our readers for not showing better judgment in printing it."
An editorial-page editor is perfectly within his rights to prefer one syndicated columnist to another, to refrain from publishing material he judges to be offensive, and even to treat certain contestable opinions as "beyond the pale" for purposes of the space he curates. As much as I appreciate Messenger's willingness to engage, I think that he's treated Will badly by going a step further and declaring his column to be inaccurate without citing the alleged inaccuracy and showing its wrongness by stating what is actually correct. As a columnist, I'd be very upset if an editor publicly levied an accusation of factual inaccuracy without the ability or the willingness to back it up. A vague accusation is unfalsifiable and robs one of the ability to defend oneself with reason. It is also abnormal. It's as if the usual process of argumentative rigor doesn't apply in cases when taboos around a sensitive subject have been broken and elicited offense.
As a columnist, I'd be particularly upset if my editor also misunderstood and publicly mischaracterized my column's argument, as happened here. Contra Messenger, Will does not argue that "sexual assault victims are seeking some kind of special victimhood on college campuses"; Will implies that women who are not, in fact, victims of sexual assault are claiming to be in order to attain some sort of victim status.
Jezebel's Erin Gloria Ryan wrote:
A major newspaper has kicked George Will to the curb over a recent column wherein the venerable conservative opinionator claimed that being a rape victim is a "coveted status" that comes with "privileges."
Again, this isn't quite right. Will is not talking to rape victims and saying, "Boy, are you guys lucky." Will's argument is that perceived victimhood of all sorts confers a coveted status on college campuses. In context, it is clear that Will only finds this unseemly in cases where the status afforded to victims winds up generating fake victims. It's hard to read the column and conclude that Will would have a problem with college students rallying around a classmate who'd been raped.
These commentators are doing Will and their own readers a disservice. At best, they are construing his argument in the least charitable way possible. More often, they're outright mischaracterizing Will's actual argument in a way certain to maximize the offense, outrage, and umbrage-taking from their readers. If I were a rape victim, and a writer I trusted informed me that a Washington Post columnist said people like me wanted to be raped, or that we deserved to be raped, or that being a rape victim makes one fortunate or privileged, I'd be upset. But it ought to be clear enough that Will isn't actually making those arguments. Upsetting rape victims by telling them otherwise doesn't help anyone.
* * *
What did Will actually get wrong? David Bernstein suggests the possibility that his column is guilty of "downplaying what really is an epidemic of sexual assault on campus." Without defining "epidemic," it seems to me that Will is dismissive of a widespread, serious problem (though he has since avowed that he takes sexual assault very seriously). Bernstein also raises the possibility that "rather than encouraging faux victimhood," federal attention paid to sexual assault "is encouraging real victims to come forward and universities to be more conscientious." The effort may be too recent to draw empirical conclusions just yet.
I'd argue Will is generally correct that:
1. Some social dynamics at U.S. colleges make victimhood a coveted status. For example, the particular way that the concept of "privilege" is invoked has led to what Phoebe Maltz Bovy calls "scrappiness one-upmanship," in which upper-middle-class white kids grasp at any hint of adversity in their past. Bernstein writes, "It’s notable that a recent well-circulated column by a Princeton student taking exception to the 'check your privilege' meme took pains to note that the author himself is the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, the quintessential victims."
2. That victim-status can confer privileges. This is often totally unobjectionable. Does anyone doubt, for example, that a college student whose mother or father was murdered would be excused from paper deadlines or the necessity of taking an awkwardly-timed
midterm with the rest of the class? Of course, Will was talking about "victim status," not victim status. But the point still holds. In interviewing a troubled student who faked a hate crime, for example, I learned that she was motivated in part by a desire to be the focus of attention and support on a campus she generally saw as hostile, as well as to get resources to combat racism that were unavailable in the ordinary course of things.
3) That people who self-identify as victims can proliferate as a result. For one example, consider the objectionable behavior of some men's-rights activists at Occidental College, as reported by ThinkProgress:
Occidental has been flooded with over 400 false rape reports this week as internet trolls have attempted to prove a point about the school’s anonymous reporting system, according to college officials. Now, administrators are being forced to weed through the barrage of reports to determine if any real sexual assaults were reported during that time. Members of the online communities Reddit and 4Chan, many of whom identify themselves as “men’s right activists,” started spamming Occidental after a user complained that it’s too easy to abuse the college’s anonymous reporting system.
“Feminists at Occidental College created an online form to anonymously report rape/sexual assault. You just fill out a form and the person is called into the office on a rape charge. The ‘victim’ never has to prove anything or reveal their identity,” a user in the “Men’s Rights” subreddit wrote, and provided a link to the school’s form.
The activists are disingenuously claiming victim status because Occidental set up a system where anyone who does so is afforded power over other individuals. For another example of self-proclaimed victims proliferating in response to incentives, consider the way high-school students understand college-admission essays.*
Even though Will's big-picture thoughts on victim-status are plausible and arguably correct, it is pundit malpractice to pivot from those defensible general claims to a discussion of sexual assault, where the general rule is perhaps weaker than anywhere else. A more inapt example would be difficult to find, because of the uniquely powerful aversion most people have to others thinking or knowing they were raped (anonymous reporting systems like the one at Occidental are the exception that proves the rule). Rape is something many victims don't share even with parents or a spouse. Even if the way victim status works on campus has caused some number of women to falsely tell others they were sexually assaulted (just as it's caused men and women to fabricate hate crimes against themselves) it's strange to treat the phenomenon as if it's common based on nothing more than the observation that incentivizing something gets you more of it.** There are much easier ways to attain victim status than falsely alleging rape, and surely there are numerous motives behind the rape accusations that are false (eight to 10 percent are false according to provisional academic estimates).
To sum up, the flaws in Will's column are real enough, or so it seems to me. But they're well within the normal range of wrongheaded things that newspaper columnists inevitably write if they do the job twice a week for years. What distinguishes Will's column is the fact that he addresses a sensitive, fraught topic. His critics' unstated belief is that because he dared to do so with inadequate sensitivity, they're justified in twisting his words in the most provocative way possible, all the while striking an exaggerated pose of righteous outrage. (Could it be that a curmudgeonly septuagenarian is both offensive to the sensibilities of his ideological opposites and has something valuable to contribute?) The perverse effect will be a broadened subset of cautious pundits who are less likely to write about rape or sexual assault at all (especially at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch!). Totally ignoring rape won't ever get a person fired. Writing about it might, especially if one's words aren't reliably conveyed. Public discourse is undermined by people whose focus is drawing red cards on their opponents.
* As a high-school junior, I was up very late for four or five nights in a row studying for finals in a semester when I had all honors and AP classes. I also had mock trial at night after school, and weightlifting for tennis in the early morning. School was a 30-minute drive away, most of it on the 405 freeway, and en route to tennis practice around 5 a.m., I fell asleep at the wheel, which I didn't then realize one could do. I drove off the freeway, hit a guardrail, flipped twice in the air longways, and skidded to an upside-down halt in a drainage ditch as the car burst into flames.
A day later I awoke in the hospital. A day after that I was back home in my room with nothing to do but sleep, recover, and talk on the phone. What did a close friend say first thing when I called her? "You're so lucky—now you have your college essay."
** Perhaps Will wrote sloppily and didn't intend that. It is implied, not stated outright, and the column seems to suffer from trying to shoehorn into it one too many ideas.
The most searing critiques of George Will's much-maligned column on rape misrepresent his arguments, illustrating a common flaw in American public discourse.
Conor Friedersdorf Jun 23 2014, 4:02 PM ET
0
inSha
The scene is familiar to every soccer fan: An aggressive defender slightly bumps a striker, who reacts as if struck by a taser's barb. His arms flail. His legs crumple beneath him. He writhes on the turf, grabbing at indeterminate pain. And then, once the ref either does or does not call a penalty, he pops up, unharmed as ever, and plays on.
The Internet too often resembles that scene. Every week, a fraught subject is broached, usually imperfectly. Perhaps a wrongheaded or offensive claim is made. Plenty of thoughtful people offer smart, plausible rebuttals. But they're overshadowed by distortionists with practiced performances of exaggerated outrage. The object isn't a fair debate—it's to get the other guy ejected.
Last week, George Will was the focus of the umbrage-takers. His June 6 column, "Colleges become the victims of progressivism," isn't without flaws. The worst of them may deserve a yellow card for a careless, overaggressive tackling maneuver. But only by misrepresenting Will's argument can his least responsible critics insist that, after four decades and thousands of columns in the Washington Post, he ought to be fired from his twice-weekly perch for these 753 words.
The column is about higher education. Universities are learning "that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous ('micro-aggressions,' often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate," Will argues. "And academia’s progressivism has rendered it intellectually defenseless now that progressivism’s achievement, the regulatory state, has decided it is academia’s turn to be broken to government’s saddle."
That isn't the best beginning for a man whose prose is crystalline at its best. It's more difficult than it should be to discern that Will is distinguishing "the status of victimhood" from actual victimhood. When he says that colleges are causing "victims" to proliferate, he is referring to a category of people who he doesn't regard as actual victims but who have either declared themselves to be victims or have been declared victims by others within the subculture of elite academia.
The distinction is core to the column and consistent throughout.
In the section on sexual assault, for instance, he recounts a hotly debated incident at Swarthmore that many regard as rape and many others, like Will himself, characterize as embodying "the ambiguities of the hookup culture, this cocktail of hormones, alcohol and the faux sophistication of today’s prolonged adolescence of especially privileged young adults." Elsewhere, Will makes it abundantly clear that he is talking about people who are said to be victims but aren't actually victims by putting scare quotes around "sexual assault victims" and "survivors."
This did not stop his critics from eliding that core distinction. Anti-sexism group UltraViolet declared, "The Washington Post actually just published an opinion piece mocking sexual assault survivors and saying that women want to be raped." Actually, Will neither wrote nor believes that women "want to be raped," and mocked only false claims that sexual assault has occurred. At worst, Will implies many women want to be seen as having been sexually assaulted and fabricate such incidents. (More on that wrongheaded but distinct claim later.)
National Organization for Women President Terry O'Neill followed suit, citing Will's column, though not quoting it, while demanding that the Post fire him. "It is actively harmful for the victims of sexual assault when that kind of man writes a piece that says to assault victims, 'it didn't happen and if it did happen you deserve it,'" she stated. "That re-traumatizes victims. I can't believe that Mr. Will has had this experience if he would put out such a hateful message."
But Will did not say and almost certainly doesn't believe that sexual assault victims "deserve it"; nor does he intend to tell sexual assault victims "it didn't happen." His purpose and intention is to castigate people who see sexual assaults where none happened, not to behave hatefully toward actual victims of sexual assault. If he misjudges a situation and winds up doubting the veracity of an actual victim, it is perfectly fair to criticize him, but his transgression shouldn't be muddied.
Judd Legum wrote at ThinkProgress:
Washington Post columnist George Will wrote a column claiming that being a rape victim is now a “coveted status” that college women seek out. Will argued that complaints of rape and sexual assault on college campus were overblown. He also suggested that women claiming to be raped were “delusional.”
Here's what Will actually wrote, after a paragraph on trigger warnings and speech codes (my emphasis): "academia, with its adversarial stance toward limited government and cultural common sense, is making itself ludicrous. Academia is learning that its attempts to create victim-free campuses—by making everyone hypersensitive, even delusional, about victimizations—brings increasing supervision by the regulatory state that progressivism celebrates." He does not suggest that women claiming to be raped were delusional—he suggests attempts to create a victim-free campus makes everyone hypersensitive or "delusional" about victimizations.
Criticizing that argument is fair game. Summarizing it as "George Will says rape victims are delusional" is wildly unfair.
I emailed Legum about his piece:
You wrote, "George Will wrote a column claiming that being a rape victim is now a 'coveted status' that college women seek out." I'm writing about that column, and I may take issue with your characterization, but I wanted to reach out first. It seems to me that Will isn't arguing that women seek out being rape victims, but that they seek out victim status, which causes some to falsely claim that they've been sexually assaulted. That is obviously a highly controversial and arguably wrongheaded claim in itself. I certainly wouldn't make it. But it's a different claim than the one you characterize Will as having. Or so I think after reading both of your pieces. But I am open to being wrong. Am I?
Here's how he replied:
Thanks for reaching out.
I do think that is what Will was saying, based on this: "that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate." I base it on two things. First is the word "coveted" which means something that you hunger for. And second is the idea that that coveting makes victims "proliferate." He then tells a story of a woman who was raped as an example. So he's not limiting this to people falsely claiming they are raped. He's saying that women are actively putting themselves in positions to be raped to achieve this coveted status.
To me, this is a clear, if earnest, misreading. Whatever one thinks about the Swarthmore woman whose story Will relates, it's clear that the columnist himself does not believe that she was raped or sexually assaulted. This is arguably to his discredit, but if that is a shortcoming, it is different than him making the claim that women are going out and purposefully getting themselves raped.
Then there's the gig Will lost over this column. In a Wednesday editor's note, Tony Messenger, editorial-page editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, announced that his newspaper would no longer run Will's syndicated column and will instead publish Bush administration veteran Michael Gerson on Thursdays and Sundays. The "refreshing and revitalizing change" had been under consideration for some months, the editor's note explained, "but a column published June 5, in which Mr. Will suggested that sexual assault victims on college campuses enjoy a privileged status, made the decision easier. The column was offensive and inaccurate; we apologize for publishing it."
The note didn't include a link to the column, which I hadn't read at that point. Curious about what was inaccurate, I hunted around the website for a correction, but didn't find one. Then I found the column itself at the Washington Post, where it was originally published. As noted, it included a lot of contestable statements and analysis, some of which I disagree with. But there wasn't a correction there either. If something crossed the line from controversial, arguably wrongheaded opinion to clear factual error, I couldn't tell what that would be.
Messenger was nice enough to respond to an email seeking clarification. "We generally don't publish corrections on syndicated material unless one comes through from the syndication (or AP, as the case might be)," he explained. "However, it's our belief that the thought that sexual assault victims are seeking some kind of special victimhood on college campuses, or that the campuses are seeking to provide some privileged status, is wildly inaccurate and offensive." He further clarified that he wasn't quite saying that there was a correctable error in the offending column. "Yes, we were applying the term to an opinion, which differentiates it from something that is correctable per se," he wrote. "But we believe it was both inaccurate and offensive, and it's why we pulled the column from our site and apologized to our readers for not showing better judgment in printing it."
An editorial-page editor is perfectly within his rights to prefer one syndicated columnist to another, to refrain from publishing material he judges to be offensive, and even to treat certain contestable opinions as "beyond the pale" for purposes of the space he curates. As much as I appreciate Messenger's willingness to engage, I think that he's treated Will badly by going a step further and declaring his column to be inaccurate without citing the alleged inaccuracy and showing its wrongness by stating what is actually correct. As a columnist, I'd be very upset if an editor publicly levied an accusation of factual inaccuracy without the ability or the willingness to back it up. A vague accusation is unfalsifiable and robs one of the ability to defend oneself with reason. It is also abnormal. It's as if the usual process of argumentative rigor doesn't apply in cases when taboos around a sensitive subject have been broken and elicited offense.
As a columnist, I'd be particularly upset if my editor also misunderstood and publicly mischaracterized my column's argument, as happened here. Contra Messenger, Will does not argue that "sexual assault victims are seeking some kind of special victimhood on college campuses"; Will implies that women who are not, in fact, victims of sexual assault are claiming to be in order to attain some sort of victim status.
Jezebel's Erin Gloria Ryan wrote:
A major newspaper has kicked George Will to the curb over a recent column wherein the venerable conservative opinionator claimed that being a rape victim is a "coveted status" that comes with "privileges."
Again, this isn't quite right. Will is not talking to rape victims and saying, "Boy, are you guys lucky." Will's argument is that perceived victimhood of all sorts confers a coveted status on college campuses. In context, it is clear that Will only finds this unseemly in cases where the status afforded to victims winds up generating fake victims. It's hard to read the column and conclude that Will would have a problem with college students rallying around a classmate who'd been raped.
These commentators are doing Will and their own readers a disservice. At best, they are construing his argument in the least charitable way possible. More often, they're outright mischaracterizing Will's actual argument in a way certain to maximize the offense, outrage, and umbrage-taking from their readers. If I were a rape victim, and a writer I trusted informed me that a Washington Post columnist said people like me wanted to be raped, or that we deserved to be raped, or that being a rape victim makes one fortunate or privileged, I'd be upset. But it ought to be clear enough that Will isn't actually making those arguments. Upsetting rape victims by telling them otherwise doesn't help anyone.
* * *
What did Will actually get wrong? David Bernstein suggests the possibility that his column is guilty of "downplaying what really is an epidemic of sexual assault on campus." Without defining "epidemic," it seems to me that Will is dismissive of a widespread, serious problem (though he has since avowed that he takes sexual assault very seriously). Bernstein also raises the possibility that "rather than encouraging faux victimhood," federal attention paid to sexual assault "is encouraging real victims to come forward and universities to be more conscientious." The effort may be too recent to draw empirical conclusions just yet.
I'd argue Will is generally correct that:
1. Some social dynamics at U.S. colleges make victimhood a coveted status. For example, the particular way that the concept of "privilege" is invoked has led to what Phoebe Maltz Bovy calls "scrappiness one-upmanship," in which upper-middle-class white kids grasp at any hint of adversity in their past. Bernstein writes, "It’s notable that a recent well-circulated column by a Princeton student taking exception to the 'check your privilege' meme took pains to note that the author himself is the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, the quintessential victims."
2. That victim-status can confer privileges. This is often totally unobjectionable. Does anyone doubt, for example, that a college student whose mother or father was murdered would be excused from paper deadlines or the necessity of taking an awkwardly-timed
midterm with the rest of the class? Of course, Will was talking about "victim status," not victim status. But the point still holds. In interviewing a troubled student who faked a hate crime, for example, I learned that she was motivated in part by a desire to be the focus of attention and support on a campus she generally saw as hostile, as well as to get resources to combat racism that were unavailable in the ordinary course of things.
3) That people who self-identify as victims can proliferate as a result. For one example, consider the objectionable behavior of some men's-rights activists at Occidental College, as reported by ThinkProgress:
Occidental has been flooded with over 400 false rape reports this week as internet trolls have attempted to prove a point about the school’s anonymous reporting system, according to college officials. Now, administrators are being forced to weed through the barrage of reports to determine if any real sexual assaults were reported during that time. Members of the online communities Reddit and 4Chan, many of whom identify themselves as “men’s right activists,” started spamming Occidental after a user complained that it’s too easy to abuse the college’s anonymous reporting system.
“Feminists at Occidental College created an online form to anonymously report rape/sexual assault. You just fill out a form and the person is called into the office on a rape charge. The ‘victim’ never has to prove anything or reveal their identity,” a user in the “Men’s Rights” subreddit wrote, and provided a link to the school’s form.
The activists are disingenuously claiming victim status because Occidental set up a system where anyone who does so is afforded power over other individuals. For another example of self-proclaimed victims proliferating in response to incentives, consider the way high-school students understand college-admission essays.*
Even though Will's big-picture thoughts on victim-status are plausible and arguably correct, it is pundit malpractice to pivot from those defensible general claims to a discussion of sexual assault, where the general rule is perhaps weaker than anywhere else. A more inapt example would be difficult to find, because of the uniquely powerful aversion most people have to others thinking or knowing they were raped (anonymous reporting systems like the one at Occidental are the exception that proves the rule). Rape is something many victims don't share even with parents or a spouse. Even if the way victim status works on campus has caused some number of women to falsely tell others they were sexually assaulted (just as it's caused men and women to fabricate hate crimes against themselves) it's strange to treat the phenomenon as if it's common based on nothing more than the observation that incentivizing something gets you more of it.** There are much easier ways to attain victim status than falsely alleging rape, and surely there are numerous motives behind the rape accusations that are false (eight to 10 percent are false according to provisional academic estimates).
To sum up, the flaws in Will's column are real enough, or so it seems to me. But they're well within the normal range of wrongheaded things that newspaper columnists inevitably write if they do the job twice a week for years. What distinguishes Will's column is the fact that he addresses a sensitive, fraught topic. His critics' unstated belief is that because he dared to do so with inadequate sensitivity, they're justified in twisting his words in the most provocative way possible, all the while striking an exaggerated pose of righteous outrage. (Could it be that a curmudgeonly septuagenarian is both offensive to the sensibilities of his ideological opposites and has something valuable to contribute?) The perverse effect will be a broadened subset of cautious pundits who are less likely to write about rape or sexual assault at all (especially at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch!). Totally ignoring rape won't ever get a person fired. Writing about it might, especially if one's words aren't reliably conveyed. Public discourse is undermined by people whose focus is drawing red cards on their opponents.
* As a high-school junior, I was up very late for four or five nights in a row studying for finals in a semester when I had all honors and AP classes. I also had mock trial at night after school, and weightlifting for tennis in the early morning. School was a 30-minute drive away, most of it on the 405 freeway, and en route to tennis practice around 5 a.m., I fell asleep at the wheel, which I didn't then realize one could do. I drove off the freeway, hit a guardrail, flipped twice in the air longways, and skidded to an upside-down halt in a drainage ditch as the car burst into flames.
A day later I awoke in the hospital. A day after that I was back home in my room with nothing to do but sleep, recover, and talk on the phone. What did a close friend say first thing when I called her? "You're so lucky—now you have your college essay."
** Perhaps Will wrote sloppily and didn't intend that. It is implied, not stated outright, and the column seems to suffer from trying to shoehorn into it one too many ideas.
Monday, June 23, 2014
Inside the vast liberal conspiracy - MONEY/ SOROS
Inside the vast liberal conspiracy
By KENNETH P. VOGEL | 6/23/14 5:01 AM EDT
Picture this: millionaires and billionaires gathering under tight security in fancy hotels with powerful politicians and operatives to plot how their network of secret-money groups can engineer a permanent realignment of American politics.
Only, it’s not the Koch brothers. It’s the liberal Democracy Alliance.
The 21 groups at the core of the Democracy Alliance’s portfolio intend to spend $374 million during the midterm election cycle — including nearly $200 million this year — to boost liberal candidates and causes in 2014 and beyond, according to internal documents obtained by POLITICO.
While growing sums of that cash are being spent vilifying the billionaire conservative industrialists Charles and David Koch over their own network’s political spending, the documents reveal the extent to which the Democracy Alliance network mirrors the Kochs’ — and is obsessed with it.
(Also on POLITICO: Kochs launch new super PAC for midterm fight)
“Conservatives, particularly the Koch Brothers, are playing for keeps with an even more pronounced financial advantages than in recent election cycles,” reads the introduction to a 62-page briefing book provided to donors ahead of April’s annual spring meeting of the DA, as the club is known, at Chicago’s tony Ritz-Carlton hotel.
The briefing book reveals a sort of DA-funded extra-party political machine that includes sophisticated voter databases and plans to mobilize pivotal Democratic voting blocs, air ads boosting Democratic candidates, while also — perhaps ironically — working to reduce the influence of money in politics.
Democracy Alliance officials did not dispute the authenticity of the document but declined to comment on it.
(Also on POLITICO: GOP plays Tom Steyer card against Democrats)
It makes public for the first time details of the complete organizational flowchart of the big-money left, including up-to-date budget figures and forecasts, program goals and performance assessments for the 21 core DA groups, including the Center for American Progress, Media Matters, America Votes and the Obama-linked Organizing for Action.
It also includes a “Progressive Infrastructure Map,” with 172 other groups to which the DA recommends that its rich liberal members — including billionaire financier George Soros and Houston trial lawyers Amber and Steve Mostyn — donate.
Private political networks like those backed by the DA and the Koch operation have become increasingly prominent in American politics. Over the past seven years, federal court decisions including the Supreme Court’s seminal 2010 Citizens United ruling have expanded megacheck spending in elections. Money and control have increasingly migrated from political parties and candidates’ campaigns, which still must abide by contribution limits and disclosure requirements, to outside groups like those in the DA that can accept unlimited — and mostly anonymous — contributions.
(Also on POLITICO: Reid, McConnell and Cruz spar over campaign finance amendment)
That heightened influence has brought increased criticism of donors, particularly directed at the Kochs by liberals — including multiple groups on the Democracy Alliance’s map. But the prospect of such scrutiny being directed back at the DA was enough of a concern that the group distributed a memo to board members ahead of its Chicago meeting including suggested responses to questions about the club’s secretive rules and closed-press policy, as well as photos of reporters who it was feared might crash the Ritz shindig.
“The truth is political strategists and funders frequently gather to discuss their plans without inviting reporters to listen in,” said DA spokeswoman Stephanie Mueller. “The Democracy Alliance was organized to provide a forum for people with a shared set of principles to coordinate their resources more efficiently and effectively to achieve their common goals – it doesn’t represent a single industry or family, and doesn’t give money directly to organizations.”
But when it comes to sheer volume of cash, the DA isn’t in the same league as the Koch network. While the DA takes credit for steering more than $500 million in donations to recommended groups since its creation in 2005, the Koch network spent more than $400 million in 2012 alone.
Koch network donors are expected to provide almost every penny of the Koch operation’s $290 million 2014 spending goal. By contrast, DA donors — or “partners,” in the club’s parlance — are projected to provide a maximum of $39 million toward the $200 million 2014 spending goal of the 21 core DA groups, according to the briefing booklet. That means most of the cash raised by DA-linked groups actually comes from donors, institutions or revenue streams outside the DA’s cloistered ranks. Another difference: While DA partners are required to donate at least $200,000 a year to recommended groups, they ultimately decide to which group their money goes. The Koch network, on the other hand, collects contributions in the nonprofit political hub Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, which then distributes the cash mostly as it sees fit to groups in the network.
But the DA document distributed in Chicago does call into question some of the plaintiff woe-is-us rhetoric bandied about by Democrats griping about the Koch brothers’ sophisticated efforts to use their checkbooks to manipulate American democracy.
Even though the DA’s cash projections pale in comparison to the Koch network, which is in a financial class by itself and rivals the official parties’ spending, they exceed those of most other outside spending operations on the right and left. And, perhaps more significantly, the briefing highlights what liberals believe is superior coordination between its deep-pocketed labor unions, outside groups and even the administration of President Barack Obama that has allowed their side to spend its big money more efficiently than conservatives.
An assessment of the Center for American Progress and its sister group the Center for American Progress Action Fund, which are projected to receive as much as $5.5 million from DA members this year, boasts of its work on gun control with the administration and other deep-pocketed groups in the DA’s infrastructure map.
“Last year, in the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy, American Progress accelerated the launch of its initiative to reduce gun violence, working closely with the White House to unveil policy solutions, and it collaborated with American for Responsible Solutions, ProgressNow, and others to establish networks of activists working to prevent gun violence in the United States,” read the briefing.
It credits other DA-backed groups with helping expand gay marriage in the states, boosting Obamacare, pushing through executive environmental actions and getting liberal judges appointed to the federal bench.
Those “victories and might of our infrastructure are strong evidence that we are more than capable of turning back the latest threats from the Right,” reads the briefing. “But to prevail in 2014 and beyond, progressives must invest significant resources in the Rising American Electorate (RAE) of unmarried women, young people and people of color.”
Liberals and conservatives have been jealously eyeing and trying to copy each others’ extraparty political and intellectual infrastructure since at least the early 1970s, when future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell encouraged the business community to build institutions to fight well-financed “Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries,” including Ralph Nader. The Powell Memo was cited approvingly by the liberal strategists who started the DA back in 2005, while Karl Rove and operatives associated with the Kochs pointed to the DA and the unions as a model for their side to replicate after Obama’s win in 2008.
An analysis of the DA briefing book and tax filings by the Koch network’s Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce and other Koch-linked nonprofits show that the key pieces of the networks also parallel one another. They include:
• Voter data: Soros and other DA backers laid the seed money in 2005 for the for-profit company Catalist, which pioneered the privatization of political data. Late last year, he committed an additional $2.25 million to Catalist, which is now seen within the tech community as lagging behind other Democratic outfits, though the DA briefing boasts that “conservatives are investing heavily to catch up in this area, using Catalist as a model.” Koch-related nonprofits have poured at least $24 million into Themis, a voter database now considered the class of the conservative data universe.
• Hispanic voter outreach: The DA in the 2014 cycle expects to steer $3.9 million from its donors (out of a total $6.2 million budget) to the Latino Engagement Fund, which is working with other groups to register 250,000 new voters in eight key states, while Freedom Partners in 2012 donated $3.1 million to the LIBRE Initiative, which has aired anti-Obamacare ads targeting Latino voters.
• Millennial outreach: The DA expects to steer $1.7 million to the Youth Engagement Fund, which aims to register 200,000 voters in nine key states and to “conduct millennial polling research to craft effective messaging that demonstrably improves organizations’ ability to engage and mobilize young people.” Freedom Partners in 2012 donated $5 million to Generation Opportunity, which has spent heavily on ads and other outreach urging young voters to oppose Democratic politicians and policies.
• Women voter outreach: The DA expects its donors to give $2 million to the Women’s Equality Center, which plans to push to “increase turnout among low-propensity women voters in the 2014 elections in 10 states,” according to the briefing, while Freedom Partners in 2012 gave $8.2 million to Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee, which pushes to elevate conservative social issues.
• Ground organizing: DA partners have donated at least $1.87 million to Organizing for Action, the nonprofit created to mobilize activists to support Obama’s agenda, which appears on pace to meet a $19 million 2014 fundraising goal. Americans for Prosperity, the most aggressive political group in the Koch network, plans a 2014 budget of more than $125 million, which will be spent on everything from ground organizing to television ads bashing Democrats.
• Judicial advocacy: The DA predicts its partners will provide $1.5 million of the projected $4.7 million 2014 budget of the American Constitution Society, which last year helped get “five members of ACS network confirmed to federal bench, including three of four new D.C. circuit members,” according to the DA briefing. The Federalist Society, which advocates on conservative judicial issues, since 2010 has received $3.4 million in grants from foundations associated with donors in the Koch network.
And the similarities extend to the secrecy that enshrouds both networks.
When Freedom Partners convened the Koch donor network for its semi-annual seminar last week at the St. Regis in Dana Point, California, it bought out all the rooms at the hotel, and security ushered reporters off the premises.
“High levels of security, concealment, deception and oaths of silence — that doesn’t sound anything like a typical conference,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Thursday in his latest speech from the Senate floor condemning the Kochs. “It sounds more like a cult. But instead of being a religious movement or a secret sect, this is a cult of money, influence and self-serving politics. This is the cult of Koch.”
Yet Reid’s colleagues and allies up to and including Vice President Joe Biden have attended DA meetings, which can be similarly secretive. Though reporters aren’t always barred from them entirely, they aren’t exactly made to feel welcome, either.
DA board members were warned before the meeting in Chicago that reporters might stake out the meeting and were given a list of about 20 journalists — including photos — to watch out for. POLITICO obtained the list, which included four of its own journalists, including this reporter, as well as Jennifer Haberkorn, Tarini Parti and Byron Tau.
Others identified included Huffington Post Washington bureau chief Ryan Grim, a trio of Chicago newspaper scribes and 11 reporters from the conservative Washington Free Beacon (two of whom made the trip to the Ritz-Carlton).
Told of the memo, Free Beacon editor-in-chief Matthew Continetti — who has repeatedly accused Democrats and the media of unfairly criticizing the Kochs and other conservative donors while ignoring liberal donors — positively kvelled.
“I couldn’t be prouder of my reporters for putting such fear into the hearts of secretive left-wing billionaires that they are awarded places on the Democracy Alliance’s BOLO list,” said Continetti, citing the small number of legacy media outlets on the list as evidence that the mainstream journalists were turning a blind eye to big liberal money.
Nonetheless, a memo accompanying the photos offered DA board members suggestions for fielding media inquiries about why the DA doesn’t disclose its donors or conference agendas and participants.
“As a matter of policy, we don’t make public the names of our members,” read the memo, which said the group “abide(s) by the preferences of our members. Many of our donors chose not to participate publicly, and we respect that. The DA exists to provide a comfortable environment for our partners to collectively make a real impact.”
Tarini Parti contributed to this report.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/inside-the-vast-liberal-conspiracy-108171_Page2.html#ixzz35SlSAtSj
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/inside-the-vast-liberal-conspiracy-108171.html#ixzz35SlEU0bC
By KENNETH P. VOGEL | 6/23/14 5:01 AM EDT
Picture this: millionaires and billionaires gathering under tight security in fancy hotels with powerful politicians and operatives to plot how their network of secret-money groups can engineer a permanent realignment of American politics.
Only, it’s not the Koch brothers. It’s the liberal Democracy Alliance.
The 21 groups at the core of the Democracy Alliance’s portfolio intend to spend $374 million during the midterm election cycle — including nearly $200 million this year — to boost liberal candidates and causes in 2014 and beyond, according to internal documents obtained by POLITICO.
While growing sums of that cash are being spent vilifying the billionaire conservative industrialists Charles and David Koch over their own network’s political spending, the documents reveal the extent to which the Democracy Alliance network mirrors the Kochs’ — and is obsessed with it.
(Also on POLITICO: Kochs launch new super PAC for midterm fight)
“Conservatives, particularly the Koch Brothers, are playing for keeps with an even more pronounced financial advantages than in recent election cycles,” reads the introduction to a 62-page briefing book provided to donors ahead of April’s annual spring meeting of the DA, as the club is known, at Chicago’s tony Ritz-Carlton hotel.
The briefing book reveals a sort of DA-funded extra-party political machine that includes sophisticated voter databases and plans to mobilize pivotal Democratic voting blocs, air ads boosting Democratic candidates, while also — perhaps ironically — working to reduce the influence of money in politics.
Democracy Alliance officials did not dispute the authenticity of the document but declined to comment on it.
(Also on POLITICO: GOP plays Tom Steyer card against Democrats)
It makes public for the first time details of the complete organizational flowchart of the big-money left, including up-to-date budget figures and forecasts, program goals and performance assessments for the 21 core DA groups, including the Center for American Progress, Media Matters, America Votes and the Obama-linked Organizing for Action.
It also includes a “Progressive Infrastructure Map,” with 172 other groups to which the DA recommends that its rich liberal members — including billionaire financier George Soros and Houston trial lawyers Amber and Steve Mostyn — donate.
Private political networks like those backed by the DA and the Koch operation have become increasingly prominent in American politics. Over the past seven years, federal court decisions including the Supreme Court’s seminal 2010 Citizens United ruling have expanded megacheck spending in elections. Money and control have increasingly migrated from political parties and candidates’ campaigns, which still must abide by contribution limits and disclosure requirements, to outside groups like those in the DA that can accept unlimited — and mostly anonymous — contributions.
(Also on POLITICO: Reid, McConnell and Cruz spar over campaign finance amendment)
That heightened influence has brought increased criticism of donors, particularly directed at the Kochs by liberals — including multiple groups on the Democracy Alliance’s map. But the prospect of such scrutiny being directed back at the DA was enough of a concern that the group distributed a memo to board members ahead of its Chicago meeting including suggested responses to questions about the club’s secretive rules and closed-press policy, as well as photos of reporters who it was feared might crash the Ritz shindig.
“The truth is political strategists and funders frequently gather to discuss their plans without inviting reporters to listen in,” said DA spokeswoman Stephanie Mueller. “The Democracy Alliance was organized to provide a forum for people with a shared set of principles to coordinate their resources more efficiently and effectively to achieve their common goals – it doesn’t represent a single industry or family, and doesn’t give money directly to organizations.”
But when it comes to sheer volume of cash, the DA isn’t in the same league as the Koch network. While the DA takes credit for steering more than $500 million in donations to recommended groups since its creation in 2005, the Koch network spent more than $400 million in 2012 alone.
Koch network donors are expected to provide almost every penny of the Koch operation’s $290 million 2014 spending goal. By contrast, DA donors — or “partners,” in the club’s parlance — are projected to provide a maximum of $39 million toward the $200 million 2014 spending goal of the 21 core DA groups, according to the briefing booklet. That means most of the cash raised by DA-linked groups actually comes from donors, institutions or revenue streams outside the DA’s cloistered ranks. Another difference: While DA partners are required to donate at least $200,000 a year to recommended groups, they ultimately decide to which group their money goes. The Koch network, on the other hand, collects contributions in the nonprofit political hub Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, which then distributes the cash mostly as it sees fit to groups in the network.
But the DA document distributed in Chicago does call into question some of the plaintiff woe-is-us rhetoric bandied about by Democrats griping about the Koch brothers’ sophisticated efforts to use their checkbooks to manipulate American democracy.
Even though the DA’s cash projections pale in comparison to the Koch network, which is in a financial class by itself and rivals the official parties’ spending, they exceed those of most other outside spending operations on the right and left. And, perhaps more significantly, the briefing highlights what liberals believe is superior coordination between its deep-pocketed labor unions, outside groups and even the administration of President Barack Obama that has allowed their side to spend its big money more efficiently than conservatives.
An assessment of the Center for American Progress and its sister group the Center for American Progress Action Fund, which are projected to receive as much as $5.5 million from DA members this year, boasts of its work on gun control with the administration and other deep-pocketed groups in the DA’s infrastructure map.
“Last year, in the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy, American Progress accelerated the launch of its initiative to reduce gun violence, working closely with the White House to unveil policy solutions, and it collaborated with American for Responsible Solutions, ProgressNow, and others to establish networks of activists working to prevent gun violence in the United States,” read the briefing.
It credits other DA-backed groups with helping expand gay marriage in the states, boosting Obamacare, pushing through executive environmental actions and getting liberal judges appointed to the federal bench.
Those “victories and might of our infrastructure are strong evidence that we are more than capable of turning back the latest threats from the Right,” reads the briefing. “But to prevail in 2014 and beyond, progressives must invest significant resources in the Rising American Electorate (RAE) of unmarried women, young people and people of color.”
Liberals and conservatives have been jealously eyeing and trying to copy each others’ extraparty political and intellectual infrastructure since at least the early 1970s, when future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell encouraged the business community to build institutions to fight well-financed “Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries,” including Ralph Nader. The Powell Memo was cited approvingly by the liberal strategists who started the DA back in 2005, while Karl Rove and operatives associated with the Kochs pointed to the DA and the unions as a model for their side to replicate after Obama’s win in 2008.
An analysis of the DA briefing book and tax filings by the Koch network’s Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce and other Koch-linked nonprofits show that the key pieces of the networks also parallel one another. They include:
• Voter data: Soros and other DA backers laid the seed money in 2005 for the for-profit company Catalist, which pioneered the privatization of political data. Late last year, he committed an additional $2.25 million to Catalist, which is now seen within the tech community as lagging behind other Democratic outfits, though the DA briefing boasts that “conservatives are investing heavily to catch up in this area, using Catalist as a model.” Koch-related nonprofits have poured at least $24 million into Themis, a voter database now considered the class of the conservative data universe.
• Hispanic voter outreach: The DA in the 2014 cycle expects to steer $3.9 million from its donors (out of a total $6.2 million budget) to the Latino Engagement Fund, which is working with other groups to register 250,000 new voters in eight key states, while Freedom Partners in 2012 donated $3.1 million to the LIBRE Initiative, which has aired anti-Obamacare ads targeting Latino voters.
• Millennial outreach: The DA expects to steer $1.7 million to the Youth Engagement Fund, which aims to register 200,000 voters in nine key states and to “conduct millennial polling research to craft effective messaging that demonstrably improves organizations’ ability to engage and mobilize young people.” Freedom Partners in 2012 donated $5 million to Generation Opportunity, which has spent heavily on ads and other outreach urging young voters to oppose Democratic politicians and policies.
• Women voter outreach: The DA expects its donors to give $2 million to the Women’s Equality Center, which plans to push to “increase turnout among low-propensity women voters in the 2014 elections in 10 states,” according to the briefing, while Freedom Partners in 2012 gave $8.2 million to Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee, which pushes to elevate conservative social issues.
• Ground organizing: DA partners have donated at least $1.87 million to Organizing for Action, the nonprofit created to mobilize activists to support Obama’s agenda, which appears on pace to meet a $19 million 2014 fundraising goal. Americans for Prosperity, the most aggressive political group in the Koch network, plans a 2014 budget of more than $125 million, which will be spent on everything from ground organizing to television ads bashing Democrats.
• Judicial advocacy: The DA predicts its partners will provide $1.5 million of the projected $4.7 million 2014 budget of the American Constitution Society, which last year helped get “five members of ACS network confirmed to federal bench, including three of four new D.C. circuit members,” according to the DA briefing. The Federalist Society, which advocates on conservative judicial issues, since 2010 has received $3.4 million in grants from foundations associated with donors in the Koch network.
And the similarities extend to the secrecy that enshrouds both networks.
When Freedom Partners convened the Koch donor network for its semi-annual seminar last week at the St. Regis in Dana Point, California, it bought out all the rooms at the hotel, and security ushered reporters off the premises.
“High levels of security, concealment, deception and oaths of silence — that doesn’t sound anything like a typical conference,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Thursday in his latest speech from the Senate floor condemning the Kochs. “It sounds more like a cult. But instead of being a religious movement or a secret sect, this is a cult of money, influence and self-serving politics. This is the cult of Koch.”
Yet Reid’s colleagues and allies up to and including Vice President Joe Biden have attended DA meetings, which can be similarly secretive. Though reporters aren’t always barred from them entirely, they aren’t exactly made to feel welcome, either.
DA board members were warned before the meeting in Chicago that reporters might stake out the meeting and were given a list of about 20 journalists — including photos — to watch out for. POLITICO obtained the list, which included four of its own journalists, including this reporter, as well as Jennifer Haberkorn, Tarini Parti and Byron Tau.
Others identified included Huffington Post Washington bureau chief Ryan Grim, a trio of Chicago newspaper scribes and 11 reporters from the conservative Washington Free Beacon (two of whom made the trip to the Ritz-Carlton).
Told of the memo, Free Beacon editor-in-chief Matthew Continetti — who has repeatedly accused Democrats and the media of unfairly criticizing the Kochs and other conservative donors while ignoring liberal donors — positively kvelled.
“I couldn’t be prouder of my reporters for putting such fear into the hearts of secretive left-wing billionaires that they are awarded places on the Democracy Alliance’s BOLO list,” said Continetti, citing the small number of legacy media outlets on the list as evidence that the mainstream journalists were turning a blind eye to big liberal money.
Nonetheless, a memo accompanying the photos offered DA board members suggestions for fielding media inquiries about why the DA doesn’t disclose its donors or conference agendas and participants.
“As a matter of policy, we don’t make public the names of our members,” read the memo, which said the group “abide(s) by the preferences of our members. Many of our donors chose not to participate publicly, and we respect that. The DA exists to provide a comfortable environment for our partners to collectively make a real impact.”
Tarini Parti contributed to this report.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/inside-the-vast-liberal-conspiracy-108171_Page2.html#ixzz35SlSAtSj
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/inside-the-vast-liberal-conspiracy-108171.html#ixzz35SlEU0bC
Is The Slaughter In Iraq George W. Bush's Fault?
June 20, 2014
Is The Slaughter In Iraq George W. Bush's Fault?
By LARRY ELDER
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Larry Elder
President Obama on Dec. 12, 2011, called Iraq "self-reliant and democratic." He praised that country, calling it a "new Iraq that's determining its own destiny — a country in which people from different religious sects and ethnicities can resolve their differences peacefully through the democratic process."
"I have no doubt," the president said, "that Iraq can succeed."
Obama campaigned to end the war in Iraq. He did — at least he ended America's military involvement in the war. He pulled out all the troops, without leaving a residual force behind as we did, for example, in South Korea, where we have stationed troops for over 50 years.
Iraq fell off the front pages. By 2008, even Sen. Obama, a harsh critic of the war and of the "surge" that turned it around, said:
"I think that, I did not anticipate, and I think that this is a fair characterization, the convergence of not only the surge but the Sunni awakening in which a whole host of Sunni tribal leaders decided that they had had enough with al-Qaida, in the Shia community the militias standing down to some degrees.
"So what you had is a combination of political factors inside of Iraq that then came right at the same time as terrific work by our troops. Had those political factors not occurred, I think that my assessment would have been correct."
The lack of media interest reflected, in part, their contempt for the war — why we fought it, why we were there. But another factor is this:
Iraq, as of 2011, was surprisingly calm — the opposite of what the George W. Bush-hating media predicted. Even those who opposed the Iraq War were surprised at the level of relative peace and security, after a decade of expending blood and treasure.
The relative calm in Iraq in 2010 and 2011 explains why Obama and Vice President Joe Biden decided to snatch some credit, with Biden calling Iraq "one of the great achievements of this administration."
Today YouTube shows videos of "infidel" Iraqis being beheaded and mowed down with automatic weapons. What went so horribly wrong?
Into 2007, then-President Bush talked about the importance of negotiating a long-term status-of-forces agreement that would allow U.S. troops to remain in Iraq to help with security. He warned that if the U.S. didn't stay the course in Iraq, the country could become a terror state or a recruiting ground for terrorists.
How much importance did candidate Obama place on obtaining a status-of-forces agreement? After his election, the "Office of the
President-Elect" website said:
"Obama and Biden believe it is vital that a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) be reached so our troops have the legal protections and immunities they need. Any SOFA should be subject to Congressional review to ensure it has bipartisan support here at home."
In the weeks following Obama's election, the Iraqis passed, and Bush signed, a SOFA agreement that would have American troops out of Iraq by December 2011.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blamed the Iraqis for refusing to negotiate a new, acceptable status-of-forces agreement that would have allowed U.S. forces to stay in Iraq past 2011. Former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, however, says the Obama administration wanted to walk away from Iraq — but didn't want it to look obvious. So they blamed it on supposedly "failed" SOFA negotiations.
Remember, Obama saw no national security interest in Iraq, even though Saddam Hussein:
•
Was presumed to have stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.
•
Was shooting at the British and American plane patrolling the southern and northern "no-fly" zones.
•
Was sending $25,000 to homicide bomber families in Israel.
•
Was stealing from the oil-for-food program.
•
Had used chemical weapons on his own neighbors and his own people.
•
Had attempted to assassinate President George H.W. Bush.
Still, Obama saw no national security interest in Iraq. Why would he now? Obama now says he is "looking at all the options ... I don't rule out anything" — short of combat. If, short of combat, we could have achieved our objectives in Iraq, we would not have sent in combat troops in the first place.
The Obama administration was caught flat-footed at the brutality and lethality of ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, a group of Islamic Sunni "extremists" said to be well-trained, well-equipped, well-financed and even more brutal than al-Qaida.
And now the administration is thinking of working with Iran to help the mostly Shiite Iraqi government survive?
This is, of course, the same Iran that helped kill and maim Americans soldiers with roadside bombs in Iraq? This is, of course, the same Iran that our intelligence community says is marching toward building a nuclear weapon?
Critics assailed Obama's recent West Point speech, pre-billed as a legacy-defining foreign policy doctrine. Some call the speech unclear, lacking in focus or conviction. But, no, there is , in fact, an Obama doctrine.
It can be explained this way: "The 'war on terror' is over because I said so — now go tell the enemy."
The Decline of Western Civilization in a Few Paragraphs
The Decline of Western Civilization in a Few Paragraphs
Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On June 22, 2014 @ 5:01 pm In Culture,Politics | 9 Comments
Every once in a while, a criminal case — consider the O.J. trial — reflects the immoral course of our current trajectory. Here is an ongoing local criminal case that pretty much sums up what is happening to our culture, laws, and society at large.
Perla Ibeth Vazquez, 27, is now on trial in these parts. On Oct. 21, 2011 (a mere two-and-a-half-years ago?), she was drunk, drove, and killed, according to the Fresno Bee [1], one “Frank Winslow, 54, a family man and truck driver for Foster Farms who was only a few miles from home when he was killed on Highway 168 near Ashlan Avenue.”
The Bee added that the local prosecutor, Steven Wright:
[L]aid the groundwork by telling the jury that Vazquez had pleaded guilty to drunken driving in Tulare County in 2006 and again in Fresno County in 2010. Each time, a judge warned her that if she got drunk and killed someone, she could be charged with murder, Wright said.Should we laugh or cry at those long-ago judicial “each time” warnings — given that they assumed that two felony drunk driving convictions were not necessarily reason to think there would be a fated third or fourth? A judge warns her about her own murdering to come? Might he have warned all of us about being her murdered victims to come? He is warning her of consequences, but not us of our shared danger of having her on the streets? Can we not have an Amber Alert when serial drunk drivers are cut loose?
Some of you are wondering how someone, who in the last eight years has been convicted of two DUIs, can still be on the road. Brace yourself. The truth gets worse in our current lawless society that has become a veritable Road Warrior apocalyptic nightmare.
The Bee account continues:
Wright also told the jury about another incident. In August 2010, just 11 days after she pleaded guilty to her second DUI, the California Highway Patrol caught Vazquez driving 120 mph on a local highway. Her breath smelled of alcohol, her speech was slurred, and she did poorly on a sobriety test, so the officer arrested her, Wright said. But she was never charged.At this point, I pose the following questions to readers. What would happen to any of you if you were pulled over going 120 mph, following two prior DUI convictions? And what would happen if you “did poorly on a sobriety test”? And what does that mush-mouth word “poorly” mean? Flunked? Sort of flunked? Kinda flunked? Jails are too crowded for those who don’t pass out?
So she was arrested on suspicion of her third DUI, and was let go after being arrested noticeably drunk and traveling 120 mph?
Whoever dropped the case should be summarily put on leave, given that he or she is directly responsible for the subsequent death of
Mr. Winslow — after Ms. Vazquez had been convicted of prior DUIs, warned by a judge, and then not charged after hitting 120 mph. (How does one manage to reach 120 mph with today’s cars on public roads while inebriated? How did the Highway Patrol catch her?)
Unfortunately, reader, it gets worse still, as every therapeutic trope of a sick society is soon invoked in her defense. The Bee story continues:
In defending Vazquez, DeOcampo told the jury that his client was a hard worker and had a job before her arrest in connection with Winslow’s death. He also said Vazquez was an alcoholic, an addiction that came from being molested as a child by a baby-sitter and a feeling of being unloved by a stepfather.So here is her defense against the charge of vehicular murder:
She had a job once. Apparently, being employed is now not normally expected, but so aberrant to the degree that it counts as a plus in our current culture where millions have ceased working.
Then we hear that she is an alcoholic. But what does “is an alcoholic” mean versus “drinks whenever she wishes and gets into a car”?
Apparently that fact of drinking alcohol to excess is not a personal pathology for which she is morally culpable, but more an “addiction.” But it is not even an addiction, given that she was not responsible for drinking herself into a stupor, getting into a car, and serially speeding, knocking cars about as she went.
Note: I forgot to mention that she was facing still more pending charges and apparently out on bail at the very moment when she killed Mr. Winslow. So to the Bee:
She also is charged with drunken driving, hit and run and driving on a suspended license for an incident that happened July 9, 2011, just three months before the fatal collision that claimed Winslow’s life. Wright contends Vazquez was drunk when she hit two parked cars on Maple Avenue near Herndon Avenue.Maple near Herndon is not far from where about 90 days later she killed Mr. Winslow.
I conclude that she had two DUIs (2006 and 2010), one let-go at 120 mph (2010), and got arrested in a fourth incident for hitting parked cars while drunk (2011). The prosecutor and/or judge in that latter case also should be held accountable, given that he let back onto the street a known DUI offender with two priors and a pending third.
Let us return to the extenuating circumstances: in addition to Ms. Vazquez’s addiction, you must understand that she was (a) molested and (b) suffered from a “feeling” of being unloved and (c) had a stepfather. Note that she and her attorney so far adduced no proof for any of these mea culpas, and her attorney seems to assume that millions of others likewise could claim in extremis that they were unloved and/or had stepfathers and thus have extenuating circumstances when they kill and maim others. It is now the sort of stock defense that at some point must have worked to be so frequently emulated.
I am afraid it gets still worse. She is supposedly not guilty of vehicular murder for another reason as well. The way in which her driving killed Mr. Winslow was, well, just “negligent.” Let her attorney, Mr. DeOcampo, best explain:
DeOcampo noted that it wasn’t a typical drunken-driving collision in which two motorists slam head-on into each other or one motorist “gets T-boned.” Instead, Vazquez’s car hit the driver’s side rear tire of the Jeep, causing Winslow to lose control.I am sure that Mr. Winslow’s family is relieved that he was not killed by a head-on or a “T-bone,” but merely rear-ended down a hill.
Do you doubt that fable that she was merely negligent? Here is her attorney’s final proof:
“She thought she was able to drive,” DeOcampo told the jury. “She wasn’t driving reckless. [sic -- VDH] She wasn’t running red lights or speeding.”
I accept that lawyers lie, fantasize, and deceive to help their clients; but DeOcampo’s arguments are insulting to any thinking person. Consider his perverse logic: Ms. Vazquez thinks she is sober; she thinks she is not driving “reckless” (sic); and proof of all that is she killed Winslow without running red lights or speeding (=120 mph as is her past custom).
Therefore Ms. Vasquez was merely “negligent” (= 2 past felony DUI convictions, plus 1 120-mph escapade for which she was not charged, plus another pending DUI count of ramming cars). I guess inattentiveness happens — despite the fact that when she killed Mr. Winslow her license was suspended, and despite the fact that she also just happened to leave the scene of the accident and worried little whether Mr. Winslow was dying or dead after his Jeep flipped down the embankment:
In opening statements, both sides agreed that Vazquez had a blood-alcohol of .13 — which is over the .08 legal limit to drive — when she rear-ended Winslow’s Jeep Wrangler. The Jeep ran down an embankment and rolled several times, causing Winslow to suffer fatal injuries. Vazquez left the scene before she was caught near the Shaw Avenue exit.Let me translate the journalese: Ms. Vazquez, without a valid driver’s license, drinks herself into a stupor, then, for the fourth time that law enforcement knows of, gets into a car drunk and drives (but not “reckless” (sic), because she avoids head-ons), then hits Mr. Winslow on his way home, sends him down an embankment to die, and flees the scene of an accident — and we are lectured about her unloving stepfather and an addiction.
I don’t know what or who is sicker, Ms. Vazquez, or the prosecutors who long ago let her off drunk after speeding at 120 mph, or the defense attorney who calls all this “negligence,” or the society that has created a host of extenuating circumstances that can be adduced on any occasion to nullify consequences of our behavior, or the general callousness and indifference we allow for such a repeat offender to be back on the streets to kill and maim.
I do know that this is not aberrant. For anyone who reads this: we all could become Mr. Winslows today with the full assurance that the capital and labor of our society will be heavily invested in seeing that the convicted DUI driver who kills us has had plenty of prior opportunity to practice his craft, that driving drunk at 120 mph is not necessarily reason to be charged with a crime, and that when our killers face possible consequences they will claim that their addictions were caused by unloving stepfathers and perverted babysitters, and will more likely have their personnel stories aired than will the deceased and innocent.
We live in a deeply diseased society in which we care little about the victim and a great deal about the perpetrators. As the trial continues, we no doubt will soon hear that somehow Mr. Winslow was at fault, that for all the past restrictions and punishments given
Ms. Vasquez she did not comply with many if any of them, and that there were probably even more drunk-driving incidents than the four reported. We are also going to hear all sorts of fables of what a good person she really is. Just wait.
In this regard, we are about to witness a legal circus, not a military tribunal, for a terrorist killer and Benghazi architect of the murders of four Americans.
We worry so much about poor Mr. Bergdahl, hardly at all about those lost or maimed trying to find him, or those who were similarly injured or killed trying to arrest the five Taliban killers we freed for Bergdahl, and nothing at all for the thousands that the five have killed or the myriads whom they may well kill again. Thinking of all of them wins us no psychological recompense in the way our cheap sympathy for Bergdahl does.
Ditto poor Lois Lerner, whom some on the left have portrayed as a victim. Not a word about the hundreds of lives made wretched by her imperious witch-hunts and audits.
Not a word about the legal immigrants who cannot enter the U.S., given the illegal aliens who cut in front of their line. We hear so much about the 90,000 children who were sent into the U.S., but nothing about the callousness of their parents, the conniving of their home governments, a deceitful Mexico that facilitated their transit, the Obama administration that vies for their political allegiance, or lots of killers and criminals who will enter the U.S. while the Border Patrol is distracted and busy as a social welfare agency.
A sign of a sick society is its cheap empathy and caring for the present, and its utter indifference to the past and future. We never much cared about the havoc that Ms. Vasquez did in the past and did not worry about the obvious trajectory of her future — so a judge lectured, a prosecutor dropped a case, and others let her out shortly before she did the same thing that she always had done.
We only know all that Ms. Vazquez is merely “negligent” because while being plagued with an addiction and still reeling from an unloving stepfather and a child molestation allegation, she killed a man with her car and fled the scene, though she only killed him by rear-ending him and thus was not “reckless” in doing so.
Anyone in law enforcement or the criminal justice bureaucracy could have long ago predicted Ms. Vazquez’s rendezvous with Mr. Winslow. He remains a forgotten victim that the state spent not a dime on, and who is now mute while Ms. Vazquez and her lawyer lecture us about “T-boning,” “addictions” and “stepfathers” — and slamming into and sending a Jeep down an embankment as proof of not being murderous.
(Artwork created using a modified Shutterstock.com [2] image.)
Article printed from Works and Days: http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/decline-of-western-civilization/
URLs in this post:
[1] according to the Fresno Bee: http://www.fresnobee.com/2014/06/18/3984325/trial-begins-for-clovis-woman.html
[2] Shutterstock.com: http://www.shutterstock.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)