Terance's personal timeline, a place to collect and share things from Terance's life.
Created by trephann on Sep 16, 2009
Last updated: 11/06/09 at 12:27 AM
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My two earlier commentaries on resistance films—movies that portray the heroism of outnumbered people under brutal invasion by great powers—brought forth a good deal of attention and discussion. It might be worth continuing the theme a little longer. For me it is a high priority of faith that every genuine nation, no matter how small in size, has a right to its self-government. After all, every real people has come into existence for some reason by the workings of Providence in history. (I mean a genuine historical people—not, for instance, Chechens, who are not a nation but merely an arm of Dar-al-Islam. Nor cultureless Africans who are better off under Christian rule.)
The long-awaited Polish film Katyn (2007), about the Russian Communist massacre of more than 5,000 Polish officers during World War II, just recently became available in the U.S. The Katyn Forest massacre, long blamed on the Germans by the Soviets and Western liberals, is one of those episodes of history that should never be forgotten. The film is less about the event itself than about the long struggle against suppression of the truth. I was somewhat disappointed, finding the film uninvolving and sometimes hard to follow. But still worth watching compared to what comes from UnHolywood these days.
Rather better in my opinion is the 2002 Estonian film Names in Marble (Nimed Marmortahvlil). It is not available in the U.S. but I heard about it and was able to get a copy from Europe thanks to the good offices of Confederate expatriate and Chronicles contributor Brooke Cadwallader. It is the true story of six schoolboys who took part heroically in the Estonian defeat of Soviet invasion in 1918–1920. All but one died. It is not a simplistic story. We see fear, incompetence, and internal divisions within the country, but the characters and situations are convincing and absorbing. And the film ends with a tag line informing us that twenty years later the Soviets marched into Estonia unopposed.
Dr. Thomas Fleming is my authority on antiquity (and the authority of every other sensible person). I understand he does not care for the original film of the 300 Spartans (1962). Undoubtedly it is historically less than perfect, but I want to say a word in its defense. It is about one of the greatest events in the life of the West and is perhaps as good as an American audience today can hope to see and understand. My opinion of it has improved since seeing the abominable cartoonish 2007 version called 300. It resembles a video game, and video games are merely animated comic books. In the new version of Thermopyle the Spartans are unbelievable giants, Xerxes is portrayed as a weird monster, and in a ludicrous bit of PC anachronism, a black African is the commander of the Persian forces. This anachronism seems to be a major UnHolywood theme these days. Black actors pretty well dominate the action hero genre now. I recently saw a flick in which a black African led a peasants’ revolt in medieval Rumania.
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When America is about to throw an ally to the wolves, we follow an established ritual. We discover that the man we supported was never really morally fit to be a friend or partner of the United States.
When Chiang Kai-shek, who fought the Japanese for four years before Pearl Harbor, began losing to Mao’s Communists, we did not blame ourselves for being a faithless ally, we blamed him. He was incompetent; he was corrupt.
We did not lose China. He did.
When Buddhist monks began immolating themselves in South Vietnam, the cry went up: President Diem, once hailed as the “George Washington of his country,” was a dictator, a Catholic autocrat in a Buddhist nation, who had lost touch with his people.
And so, word went out from the White House to the generals. Get rid of Diem, and you get his power and U.S. support. Three weeks before JFK was assassinated, Diem and his brother met the same fate.
When the establishment wished to be rid of a war into which it had plunged this country, suddenly it was “the corrupt and dictatorial Thieu-Ky regime” in Saigon that was simply not worth defending.
Lon Nol, our man in Phnom Penh, got the same treatment.
“In this world it is often dangerous to be an enemy of the United States, but to be a friend is fatal,” said Henry Kissinger.
The army of South Vietnam and the Saigon government, the boat people of the South China Sea and the million victims of Pol Pot’s genocide can testify to that before the judgment seat of history.
Thus the daily attacks on Afghan President Hamid Karzai—who sat beside Laura Bush as guest of honor at the 2002 State of the Union and got a standing ovation—as the corrupt ruler of a corrupt regime, whose brother, a narcotics trafficker, has been on the CIA’s payroll, seems a signal that the ritual is about to begin. The Karzai brothers should probably read up on the fate of the Diem brothers.
Yet never has an ally been more egregiously insulted in wartime than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s insulting of the Pakistanis on her “fence-mending” trip last week. In a meeting with editors, Hillary was asked why the United States was focusing its Predator strikes in the war on terror so heavily upon Pakistan.
Said Hillary, “Al-Qaida has had safe haven in Pakistan since 2002. . . . I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to.”
This is charging the Pakistani government, army and intelligence services with cowardice or collusion with bin Laden and al-Qaida in the war on terror. That it was made within hours of the bloodiest in a long series of terror attacks that have killed hundreds of Pakistanis only magnifies the insult.
So, too, does the fact that the Pakistani army, after cleansing the Swat Valley of the Taliban, is now fighting in South Waziristan in the most critical battle of the war.
But, if this is what the Obama administration and the Congress believe, why are they sending $7.5 billion in new aid to such a regime?
Moreover, the charge is, on its face, demonstrably false.
If Pakistan’s intelligence services, army and government all knew the exact location of bin Laden, we would know it. For we have people inside sympathetic to us, just as some are sympathetic to al-Qaida.
And if people inside discovered the exact location of bin Laden or al-Qaida, they would leak it to us, if only because the money on the table for such intelligence is irresistible.
Is Secretary Clinton suggesting there are people throughout the Pakistani government who have information that could make them rich for life, but refuse to reveal it out of purest loyalty to a gang of terrorists who are massacring their countrymen as well as Americans?
That there are warlords who are war criminals, allied with the Afghan regime and us, that drug-traffickers are abetted by high officials, that Karzai stole the election, no one denies.
That the Pakistani intelligence services are shot through with elements loyal to a Taliban they helped bring to power in Kabul, that there are Pakistani army officers who believe they should be defending their country against India, not fighting America’s war in Waziristan, is also undeniable.
But what does it avail us to insult these people who have cast their lot with us, many of whom will, with famines and friends, pay a far more terrible price than we if we lose these wars.
And if we are going to abandon these people, as we have so many others in the past, let us at least tell them, and ourselves, the truth. We didn’t know what we were getting into. We don’t have the stomach for a long war. We’re sorry we got you into this. Your big mistake was in trusting us. You folks should have known better.
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Yes, yes, says White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. Congress has the power to make everyone buy health insurance. “I don’t believe there’s a lot of case law that would demonstrate the veracity” of comments to the contrary.
Thank you, Mr. Justice Gibbs. We’ll see about all that when—if —the matter of Congress’ power over private commercial judgments of this nature gets to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Meanwhile the knock-down, drag-out over health insurance “reform” shouldn’t be allowed to fuzz up another immensely vital question; to wit, how in James Madison’s name have we reached the point that Congress can so much as contemplate telling you, and you, and you, and all of us that we’ll buy health insurance, like it or not, Buster? Why do we have to? Because the government says so, isn’t that reason enough?
For Mr. Justice Gibbs, and the people who employ him, it is. Just about anything Congress decides to do in the name of uplift seems to be constitutional: In other words, in accord with written stipulations as to what the national government may and may not do.
Several problems arise concerning this fine theory:
—It’s nonsense. It contravenes the whole constitutional concept of divided powers: particular functions reserved to particular branches of government. And other powers divided between states and the national government.
—It threatens liberty. A government that knows no limits to its power can be counted on to step more and more heavily on citizens’ rights and privileges. All for the “general good” naturally!
—It divides the citizens. On the one hand, those who want particular favors from government; on the other hand, those who deny that government has the right to dispense such favors.
The Obama administration, which desperately wants health care to pass, brushes off such concerns as cranky and relevant mainly to wild-eyed Limbaugh and Palin fans, when in fact concerns about the rightful exercise of government power should inform every legislative debate. Those it doesn’t inform are likely to end badly.
Majority support of this or that initiative doesn’t legitimize the initiative. Wise or foolish, the thing can’t be done at all if doing it isn’t within the competency of the body making the effort. And that’s never mind how many people favor it
Naturally, reasonable people can disagree about the meaning of prohibitions or permissions written by men long dead. Can we have an Air Force if the Constitution doesn’t mention it? What does it mean, “equal protection of the laws”? Is there truly a right to “privacy”? We can argue such questions until the cows come home. Why not, then, some attention to the varied questions arising in the context of health insurance reform? To hear President Obama or Nancy Pelosi or Sen. Harry Reid, you’d imagine a big “Why, sure” succeeds the question, “Can the U.S. government run U.S. health care”? (It runs General Motors, doesn’t it? And a lot else since the financial mess began?)
The power to regulate commerce is the power most often invoked in support of the government’s right to tell you how and where you can get your health insurance. It’s a familiar if feeble stretch of the reasoning powers. Everything under the sun can be seen as affecting interstate commerce: a sneeze, as affecting Kleenex sales; what to order for lunch, if the plastic on the menus reached the restaurant via a truck on a federal highway.
Sure, on those terms, the government can make us buy health insurance. It can make us do anything it wants. That it hasn’t, so far, means only it hasn’t agreed on every idea designed to convert a free people into a nation of sheep, lolling in pastures supervised thoughtfully by agents of the government.
The health care debate is monumentally important on all possible grounds: not least on the question of what happens if Congress gets away with ordering the American people to buy health insurance—and if the American people knuckle under. Yes, what next for us, comrades?
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Why did Rome fall? To be more precise, why did the Western Empire collapse in the course of the fifth century? Gibbon and some later historians blamed Christianity, which, they allege, not only weakened the manly spirit that had sustained the Empire but also diverted manpower and resources away from the defense and administration of the secular establishment towards the Church.
In addressing this question, we should first eliminate two potential distractions. The first is the argument, increasingly popular among Medievalists, that the social and cultural changes that take place during the “Dark Age” (roughly the period beginning near the end of the fifth century and lasting roughly to Charlemagne’s time) represented less a violent upheaval than a mere gradual transformation into a higher civilization. Peter S. Wells’ recent book, Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered, is a cautionary example of this sort of reasoning. Aware of the evidence presented, for example by Brian Ward-Perkins, Wells puts the best face on the situation. We have no proof the population of Rome plunged in late antiquity, he says.
That may be true, but it shrank disastrously in the course of the 6th century. Charlemagne built an impressive palace at Aachen. Yes, but the building materials were looted from Ravenna. The plain truth is that for the most part Roman technology—the manufacture of bricks and pottery, tiled roofs and large stone buildings—collapsed, and along with the technology went Roman standards in law and literature. The ability to tell a good story with a beginning, middle, and end all but vanishes, and with it the writing of coherent history. He cites evidence from the City of London Museum to indicate some continuity of urban civilization, but neglects to mention the grisly facts stated in that museum, namely, that the health of Londoners reached a peak in the Roman period that was not to be regained until the 20th century.
The second distraction is a preoccupation with analogies and big-picture theories about recurring cycles. Third century Romans fornicated and exposed their babies and lost their empire; modern Americans fornicate and have abortions, so they are doomed. Naturally, there are common elements, e.g. the Romans tended to welcome barbarian immigrants as cheap labor and good soldiers, and this certainly contributed to the collapse, but before considering any comprehensive or universal theory, it is necessary to make sure of what one actually knows.
Why does any empire fall? Nearly everyone has a theory. Some theories focus on external challenges. For example, the USSR is said to have collapsed under the pressure of the arms race that Ronald Reagan heated up; while others seek the cause in the changing character of the people: The tired and cynical Soviet elite had lost the will to rule; still others look at economic factors: The Soviet empire strangled itself on economic inefficiency.
The fall of the Roman Empire in the West has been interpreted by every imaginable variety of theoretical approach, from Gibbon, who blamed the Christians, to A.H.M. Jones who attributed the empire’s collapse to inflation and economic deterioration, to Walter Goffart who imagined there was no real collapse but only a gentle transition. Gibbon’s thesis has been examined by non-Christian scholars many times, and it does not hold water. As Peter Heather (anything but a Christian apologist) has pointed out, the economic resources used to build churches were not transferred from the military budget but from money used to build and refurbish pagan temples. Gibbon’s other argument, that talented men devoted themselves to religion instead of the empire, would apply to only a tiny handful of men (who, in any case, might have entered the bureaucracy and not the army). Before returning to this subject, we should look at other possible causes
Economy
Socio-economic factors cannot be easily eliminated. If not the cause, they were certainly a cause in the Empire’s decline. Late antiquity witnessed a gradual socio-economic revolution in which the rich quickly became much richer and more powerful, and the poorer free classes went into a steep decline. Mere citizenship no longer counted for much, compared with the citizen’s class status: The equestrian order more or less disappeared at the bottom, and a series of honorific titles marked a man’s ascent from clarissimi to spectabiles, to illustres, as he rose up through the ranks of the imperial bureaucracy. The inevitable grade inflation set in to the point that it meant little even to be clarissimus, and the rank of gloriosi took precedence over the illustres. These titles were not for show but reflected real power. Ordinary citizens might be tortured, but not the honorati of the upper grades.
The widespread use of slaves is often cited as a factor, usually by high-minded people who think that only Romans and Southerners owned slaves. On the contrary, every advanced society depends upon some form of slavery, and some legally free workers can be worse off than the slave who can be bought and sold. In fact, slavery fell into decay, partly because their supply was diminished when the Empire ceased to expand, and in part because other forms of labor exploitation began to be more profitable. In fact, the condition and position of slaves began to converge on that of free tenant farmers. This class of adscripti were serfs bound to the land, and even the Emperor Justinian said there was no difference between them and slaves, though ordination and consecration as a bishop wiped out any claims a proprietor might have been able to make.
The decline in the number of freeholders, during this same period, led to a shortage of draftable young men. The empire was so desperate for farmers, it did not allow conscription of coloni, and an attempt to levy tenants aroused a successful protest from Roman senate in 397. Farmers were in such demand that the Empire preferred to establish captured barbarians as coloni rather than to sell them as slaves—much less conscript them into the army. This on the eve of the successful Barbarian final push.
Labor shortage was only one of many problems. Barbarian raids and economic insecurity led to depopulation of some areas, and agri deserti—untilled and uninhabited lands–were spreading, increased, though much of the lost acreage was probably in the form of unproductive or even waste lands. Some deforestation and overtillage had taken place, though there was more forest in 400 than later. The Christian rhetor Lactantius blamed Diocletian’s swelling state establishment and rapacious taxation. Owners of land or the local government–the curial class—were still responsible for taxes, though the laws were modified and moderated. Diocletian did his best to curb inflation, but he could no more control the future than he could control prices, and the devaluation of currency in the West gradually reduced the people of Gaul and much of Italy to barter. In the East, the Byzantine solidus became the standard currency used around the world.
Rome had survived crises before. Why did it not survive the crisis of the 5th century? The most obvious cause, as Peter Heather argues, is to be sought among the barbarians themselves. The revived Persian empire under the Sassanian dynasty put tremendous pressure on the empire to defend its Eastern frontier. At virtually the same time, German improvements in agriculture (which they learned from the Romans) enabled them to increase their population—as well as their pressure upon the frontier—and encouraged the formation of larger and more formidable confederations such as the Allemani, the Visigoths, and the Franks. To make matters worse, the Huns succeeded in uniting their divided tribes while coopting the fighting forces of the Germanic and Iranian peoples they subjugated.
As the Romans lost North Africa to the Vandals and Spain to the Visigoths and Burgundians, the decline in tax revenues limited the size of their field armies and the effectiveness of their military response to each to barbarian invasion. Some provincial Roman landowners were willing to make deals with the invaders so long as they could secure at least a good chunk of their holdings, while even the most patriotic Roman generals had to make deals with the enemy, hiring the Huns as mercenaries (as Aëtius, “the last of the Romans” did) or acknowledging the political pretensions of barbarian commanders who came to play a key role in settling the western empire.
So, to take a broad middle way, one might say that the Western Empire fell because of the growth of bureaucracy, the over-conetralization of power, and an economic crisis that included loss of tax revenues that might have stiffened Roman resistance to the unprecedented threats posed by the barbarian invasions. The brave Romans who did try to resist the barbarians were nearly all Christians, and a series of tough Byzantine emperors destroyed the Persian kingdom, reconquered the Balkan lands that had been occupied by Slavic and Bulgarian peoples, and fought off Muslim Arabs.
Gibbon was a great historian and one of a handful of masterful prose-writers in English. His Decline and Fall is one of the best books in our language, but his thesis amounts to little more than his dislike for Christianity. Over two centuries later, no one who pretends to be interested in the question has any business repeating Gibbon’s exploded argument. Those who do are motivated by anti-religious bigotry that has been nursed on ignorance.
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If we had it to do over, would we send an army into Afghanistan to build a nation?
Would we invade Iraq?
While these two wars have cost 5,200 dead, a trillion dollars and a divided America facing an endless war, what have we won?
Gen. Stanley McChrystal needs 40,000 to 80,000 more troops, or we risk “mission failure” in Afghanistan. At present casualty rates—October was the worst month of the war —thousands more Americans will die before we see any light at the end of this tunnel, if ever we do.
Pakistan, which aided us in Afghanistan, now has a war of its own to fight. Its army is in a battle in South Waziristan, while the country is wracked by terror bombings, the latest in a Peshawar bazaar that specialized in women’s clothing and jewelry and toys for kids. So horrific was the toll even the Taliban and al-Qaida denied any role in it.
The 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq are, after almost seven years, to begin pulling out two months after January’s election. But a hitch has developed. Iraq’s parliament missed the deadline for setting the rules. At issue: Will voters be allowed to choose individual candidates, or will they be allowed only to vote for slates of candidates?
Gen. Ray Odierno implies that postponement of the election may mean postponement of U.S. withdrawals.
Ominously, in August, terrorists bombed the foreign and finance ministries in Baghdad, and last week blew up the Justice Ministry and Baghdad Provincial Governorate. And the Kurds are now claiming their control of oil-rich Kirkuk is non-negotiable, which crosses a red line in Baghdad.
Next door, a terror attack by Jundallah (God’s Brigade) in Iran’s southern province of Sistan-Baluchistan killed 40, including two senior commanders of the Revolutionary Guard.
An enraged Tehran pointed the finger at the United States, as there have been charges the CIA has been in contact with Jundallah as part of President Bush’s destabilization program to effect “regime change.”
But Barack Obama has been in office for nine months—and he would never authorize such an attack on the eve of a critical meeting on Iran’s nuclear program. Moreover, the State Department condemned the Jundallah bombing as terrorism and offered public condolences to the families of the victims.
But if we didn’t authorize this, who did?
Was the timing of this attack coincidental? Were these just freelance secessionists on an operation unrelated to the U.S.-Iran talks? Or is someone trying to torpedo the talks and push Iran and the United States into military collision?
For this was a provocation. And whoever carried it out and whoever authorized or abetted it wishes to dynamite the U.S.-Iran negotiations, abort a rapprochement and put us on a road to war.
Speculation is focusing on the Saudis, the Gulf Arabs and the Israelis, who have been accused, as has the United States, of aiding PJAK, a Kurdish faction that has conducted raids in northern Iran.
If we have any control of these organizations, we should shut them down. With U.S. armies tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan, and America conducting Predator and cross-border attacks in Pakistan, provoking a war with Iran would be an act of madness.
Looking back, how has all this fighting advanced U.S. national interests? We have a “democratic” Iraq that is Shia-dominated and tilting to Iran. We have an open-ended war in Afghanistan that will likely do for Obama what Iraq did for Bush. But we can’t pull out, it is said, for if we do, Kabul falls and Afghanistan becomes the sanctuary for an Islamist war to take over Pakistan and its nuclear weapons.
And if that should happen, it would indeed be a crisis.
And so, how has all this intervention availed us?
We ran Saddam out of Kuwait and put U.S. troops into Saudi Arabia. And we got Osama bin Laden’s 9-11. We responded by taking down the Taliban and taking over Afghanistan. And we got an eight-year war with no victory and no end in sight. Now Pakistan is burning. We took down Saddam and got a seven-year war and an ungrateful Iraq.
Meanwhile, the Turks, who shared a border with Saddam, have done no fighting. Iran has watched as we destroyed its two greatest enemies, the Taliban and Saddam. China, which has a border with both Pakistan and Afghanistan, has sat back. India, which has a border with Pakistan and fought three wars with that country, has stayed aloof.
The United States, on the other side of the world, plunged in. And now we face an elongated military presence in Iraq, an escalating war in Afghanistan and potential disaster in Pakistan, and are being pushed from behind into a war with Iran.
“America rejects the false comfort of isolationism,” said George W. Bush in his 2006 State of the Union. And we did reject that false comfort. And now we can enjoy the fruits of interventionism.
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The basic themes of the Histories emerge in the First Book. The opening sentence and paragraphs give us a fairly clear idea of the author’s intentions.
“This is the exposition / setting-forth of the history of Herodotus of Halicarnassus…”
In other words, Herodotus’ book is not history itself, much less the events that took place—if the latter were the case then the history of Herodotus would be the story of his life. No, history is a process of going places to find things out. A histor is a wise man who has learned things by investigation. The root is the same as oida, I know and is related to verbs of seeing. So historia (or, in H’s Ionic dialect, historie) is the process of investigation. Since there were few written historical accounts to consult before Herodotus set forth his findings, his research was mainly a process of going to see people who knew something.
“so that the things done by human beings may not become in time become extinct, neither the great and wondrous things done, some by Greeks and others by barbarians, may not lose their fame, especially for what reason they fought each other.”
So, it is not the mere facts he wishes us to learn, but the point of the conflict, so that we too may become histores, if only passively through reading.
Herodotus then treats us to an absurdly fanciful account of girl-snatchings, which supposedly led to the East/West conflict. How seriously is this intended? I don’t know. Most obviously, it links his theme with the great tradition of Greek epic poetry and mythology: Europa, Io, and Medea echo the story of Helen, whose abduction of seduction by Paris brought on the Trojan War. Since, elsewhere, he shows himself a fairly shrewd judge of human motivations, this introduction may be in part a jeux d’esprit. At any rate, he would tell us that we don’t know any more about the story than he or the epic poets did, and we should be content with a good story.
Indeed, two of H’s strongest points are his narrative skill and his willingness to tell any traditional story, including stories that conflict, whether he believes them or not.
Because the first verifiable conflict between Greeks and barbarians was the result of the Lydian kingdom’s attempt to dominate the Greeks of Asia Minor and the Eastern Aegean, he begins with the Lydians. Before embarking on his narrative course, however, he reminds us not to judge by present appearances: Formerly great cities have become small and vice-versa. Human happiness/good fortune, he reminds for the first but by no means the last time, is highly unstable [I.5] This is a lesson that Americans refuse to learn, believing ourselves exempt from the historical process that created the Egyptian, Hittite, Assyrian, Greek, and Roman empires only to destroy them.
Within the Lydian logos, H. interweaves many charming Greek stories, but the key passage is probably the chronologically impossible meeting between Solon and Croesus. Croesus is a sympathetic tragic hero, but a barbarian. He puts his confidence in his power and wealth and is not a little nettled, when Solon answers his question about “Who is the happiest man,” with the obscure Tellus of Athens and the legendary figures of Cleobis and Biton. Solon’s warning to count no man happy until you know the manner of his death is often cited, but commentators neglect the context. Tellus and the Argive brothers are not happy as individuals but as family men and members of a community in which they have respect and honor. Croesus’ downfall involves not only the loss of wealth and power but the premature death of his unimpaired son. If any passage in Greek literature can warn us against the foolish mistake of regarding the Greeks as modern individualists, it is this.
It is impractical to summarize this great book, but I am happy to entertain questions to keep the ball rolling.
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“Sometimes party loyalty asks too much,” said JFK.
For Sarah Palin, party loyalty in New York’s 23rd congressional district asks too much. Going rogue, Palin endorsed Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman over Republican Dede Scozzafava.
On Oct. 1, Scozzafava was leading. Today, she trails Democrat Bill Owens and is only a few points ahead of Hoffman, as Empire State conservatives defect to vote their principles, not their party.
Newt Gingrich stayed on the reservation, endorsing Scozzafava, who is pro-choice and pro-gay rights, and hauls water for the unions.
Scourged by the right, Newt accused conservatives of going over the hill in the battle to save the republic, just to get a buzz on. “If we are in the business about feeling good about ourselves while our country gets crushed, then I probably made the wrong decision.” How Scozzafava would prevent America’s being “crushed” was unexplained.
The 23rd recalls a famous Senate race 40 years ago. Rep. Charles Goodell was picked by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller to fill the seat of Robert Kennedy in 1968. To hold onto it, Goodell swerved sharp left, emerging as an upstate Xerox copy of Jacob Javits, the most liberal Republican in the Senate.
In 1970, Goodell got both the GOP and Liberal Party nominations, and faced liberal Democrat Richard Ottinger. This left a huge vacuum into which Conservative Party candidate James Buckley, brother of William F., smartly moved.
Assessing the field, the Nixon White House concluded that, with liberals split, Goodell could not win. But Buckley might. Signals were flashed north that loyalty to the president was not inconsistent with voting for Buckley. To send the signal in the clear, Vice President Agnew described Charlie Goodell to a New Orleans newspaper as “the Christine Jorgensen of the Republican Party.”
The former George Jorgensen, Christine had undergone the most radical sex-change operation in recorded history.
Liberals went berserk, calling on New Yorkers to rally to Goodell, who began surging, at Ottinger’s expense. Buckley scooted between them both to win. Hoffman may also. But even if he does not, Palin, a conservative of the heart, did the right thing.
And the GOP has been sent a necessary message.
For, according to Gallup, 40 percent of Americans now identify as conservatives—only 20 percent as Republicans. If the GOP is not the conservative party, it will never be America’s Party.
But what does “conservative” mean in 2009? And where do conservatives come down on the great issues? For what the right is against—any repeal of the Bush tax cuts, the $787 billion stimulus, Obamacare—is much clearer than what the right stands for.
In 2010, this may not matter, as the Obamakins rule the roost and will be held accountable, and Republicans can unite around what they oppose. Year 2012, however, is problematic.
Then the party must declare itself. And the reality is that the GOP remains a house divided.
What, for example, is the conservative view of the war in Iraq and the Bush economic policies that cost the party both Houses of Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008?
Why did President Bush leave with 27 percent approval? Did Bush policies the GOP once applauded have anything to do with it?
Was Bush free trade responsible for the decline of the dollar and the loss of one in four manufacturing jobs? Is globalization still good for America and NAFTA the deal of the century?
What is the conservative position on reaching out to Russia, as Barack Obama has done, on bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, and on canceling that anti-missile system Bush planned in Poland?
“We’re all Georgians now!” John McCain declared. Are we?
What is the party position on a “long war” in Afghanistan?
For if America has soured on the war and opposes more troops today, will America be enthusiastic about soldiering on in 2012, after 1,000 or 2,000 more American dead have been shipped home?
Do Republicans support negotiating with Tehran, or cutting off gasoline and starting up the escalator to air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities that are today under U.N. inspection?
Will the GOP propose to stimulate the economy with tax cuts after four straight trillion-dollar deficits? Will the Bush line, “They’ll pay for themselves,” still be credible after Bush’s deficits?
If the largest federal outlays are for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, defense and interest on the debt, followed by education, housing, homeland security and transportation, where would the GOP use the knife to balance the budget?
According to Gallup, America is moving closer to the Republican position on regulations, abortion, guns and union power. But half of all Americans now favor cuts in legal immigration. Are Republicans willing to call for a moratorium on immigration to tighten the labor market and force wages up? Or does the Chamber of Commerce still call the tune?
Ronald Reagan arrived with new ideas that fit the needs of his time. Where are the Republican ideas that fit the needs of this time?
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The Holy Father—Pope Benedict XVI—offers to let Episcopalians and other Anglicans of Catholic disposition join the Roman Catholic Church, while retaining characteristics of their Anglican identity. And who in the booming pagan market cares a flying broomstick what the pope does about anything?
Not the Wiccans, an estimated 340,000 strong. Not the worshippers of Wotan or the fallen gods and spirits of the pre-Christian world. Not best-selling God revilers such as Richard Dawkins. Not secularist lawyers arguing in behalf of secularist clients against the display of religious symbols in public places.
The American Religious Identification Survey says the United States is home to 2.8 million members of “other religions” and of the New Religions Movement. Compare that with 2 million or so Episcopalians (versus the 3.6 million the church counted in 1965). Rome, Canterbury, Geneva; the Eastern Orthodox, the Lutherans, the Southern Baptists; the Trinity, the Sacraments, heaven—mere abstractions to the growing colony of secularists and neo-pagans hopeful of liberating America from God.
And likely to get away with it? The “redemption” of the world from Christianity and Judaism looks about as likely as a Presidential Medal of Freedom for Bernie Madoff. Still, the times are tough for traditional organized religions, not least because those who say they profess the faith seem sometimes to agree more with its antagonists than its defenders.
Odd as the idea might seem, secularism has a major constituency inside religion, including the Anglican expression of religion. The pope’s offer to Anglicans proceeds from internal warfare in Anglicanism between those who see feminism and gay rights as gospel causes and those who, shall we say, don’t.
Anglicans as a breed may be tolerant to a fault and disinclined to pick fights with one another. Nevertheless, the cultural strains and stresses of the 20th century have put increasing distance between so-called “liberals” and “conservatives,” the latter having come to fear that the former—who control most leadership posts—are tearing down all moral, scriptural and theological guardrails. (For more information, see, ahem, my Mortal Follies: Episcopalians and the Crisis of Mainline Christianity.)
The trouble with modern times, from the standpoint of the conservatives, is all the emphasis they place upon diversity and individual choice. A thing doesn’t have to be “true” or to suit a classically meditated set of beliefs; it merely has to catch the eye and interest of a few. We wouldn’t try to stifle individual viewpoints, would we? It wouldn’t be tolerant, would it? Tolerant of what? Tolerant of whatever turns you on. Such as Wicca. If it feels good, sounds good, looks good—well, do it, and bless you. Don’t you feel that 1960s spirit coming on?
The spirit of diversity, of course, implies a spirit of No Truth, rather than one of Truth, because, look, if we’re really open and accepting of everything, nothing binds, nothing restrains and anything goes. Witches, Jesus, Zeus, Moses, Baal—whatever turns you on, man.
Yet pushback inevitably comes. If Truth really is True, instead of merely relative to various perceptions, a strong coterie of believers is going to declare as much and insist Truth be maintained, just as conservative Anglicans do in their warfare with liberal leaders who seem to see them as a bunch of troublesome yahoos.
Parishes and whole dioceses have formally separated from the Episcopal Church, whose bad-tempered response involves suing for property and trying to strip departing priests and bishops of their authority so much as to minister the sacraments. This, while Wiccans and Druids multiply and scoffers such as Dawkins thumb their noses at the idea of a transcendent God.
Pope Benedict XVI has some idea of the stakes in the battle. Secularism, not to mention Islam, has thrown down the gauntlet to Christianity. The pope sees the world as ripe for intensive and faithful presentation of the Christian message; he wants all the allies he can get. The alliance he offers to Anglicans of like conviction is more than mere pushback. It’s comeback—on specifically Christian, specifically countercultural terms.
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If humility is the skandalon of Neopagans, they typically base their more pragamatic case against Christianity on its suppose opposition to what pagan cultures regarded as the legitimate use of violence: personal self-defense, defensive war, and the execution of murderers, rapists, traitors, and other serious malefactors. They are entirely wrong, as they are about most things.
The text most frequently cited is Matthew 5:38:
“Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.”
If the first recorded sin was Eve’s and Adam’s disobedience in the Garden, the second was Cain’s murder of his brother. In the Pentateuch, revenge (as we shall see later) was the only law on homicide. Now, that indulgence is being taken away (or at least turned over to the rulers of the commonwealth) and, along with it, even the desire to get even and the natural inclination to hate one’s enemy. Some pacifists, Christians among them, have construed this passage to imply an express condemnation of all forms of violence and all use of force whether in self-defense or national defense or criminal justice, but neither the context of the passage nor the wider context of the Scriptures and tradition would bear out this interpretation.
Jesus is primarily addressing his followers, the brethren he had assembled from the towns of Galilee. Like most Mediterranean peoples, the Jews were a fractious and litigious lot. In Greek, the enemy He refers to is an echthros, that is, a personal enemy, and not the foreign enemy who rides in to slay, rape, and pillage. A personal enemy is someone with whom you are having a dispute over a property line, an inheritance, or insults that may have been exchanged when the two parties were in their cups. Anyone who has lived in a small town, suburban neighborhood, or coop apartment building knows that man is not just wolf to man but also weasel and jackal, ready to start a lifelong quarrel over a loose dog, an unpainted fence, or a noisy party. What a waste of time and energy this can be, especially among the brothers who are told to love each other.
Modern Christian pacifism is less a product of the Scriptures and Tradition than it is of the Enlightenment. From the beginning, some eccentric early Christians (e.g., Tertullian) rejected legitimacy of the Roman Empire and, consequently, all forms of imperial service, including soldiering and serving in the bureaucracy, but they were for the most part extreme rigorists who withdrew from the Christian main stream. Early apologists, such as the author of the “Epistle to Diognetus” and Aristides the Athenian only distinguish Christians for their moral purity. Otherwise, “Christians are not distinguished from the rest of mankind by country, speech, or custom,” and, although they are treated as aliens, they shoulder the burdens of citizenship.[i]
St. Augustine, who argues strenuously against particular applications of the death penalty, did not repudiate the right of the ruler to inflict it. Christian pacifism, he insists, is a slander used to discredit Christians as loyal Roman citizens. In his letter to an imperial commissioner whose queries helped to prompt the writing of the City of God, Augustine argued that the admonitions to turn the other cheek and not repay evil with evil have to do with the Christian’s mental disposition and not with the need to correct, with charity, an erring son, a criminal, or an invader. As a provincial administrator and yet a Christian, Macedonius had asked Augustine to justify his pleas for clemency. The bishop began his response by conceding that the state has been given the power to correct wickedness:
“Surely, it is not without purpose that we have the institution of the power of kings, the death penalty of the judge, the barbed hooks of the executioner, the weapons of the soldier, the right of punishment of the overlord, even the severity of the good father….While these are feared, the wicked are kept within bounds and the good live more peacefully among the wicked.”
This is obviously a gloss on the text of St. Paul’s “Epistle to the Romans,” where Paul defends the sovereign power over life and death [Ro 13:1-4]
“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do tht which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.”
In appealing to the Roman officer’s mercy, Augustine goes on to say that while the Old Law did preach harsh justice, the New Testament urges us to pardon offenders either that we may be pardoned or as a means of commending gentleness. After surveying a number of arguments (not all of them convincing) for mercy, Augustine concludes that there is good both in the magistrate’s severity and in the bishop’s plea for mercy. “Do not be displeased at being petitioned by the good, because the good are not displeased that you are feared by the wicked.”
In calling for mercy in specific instances, Augustine has simply repeated Christ’s admonition to be merciful; he did not repudiate the death penalty itself or call for an unqualified defense of life for life’s sake, unlike the modern theologians who, in attempting to weave a seamless garment of life, are really swaddling unborn babies in the uniform of the death-row convict. If all human life is equally precious, then none can be very valuable. In most cases, perhaps, the proponents of a seamless garment have simply failed to understand the consequences of their reasoning. But in using the same language to defend the innocent unborn and the condemned murderer, they are equating innocence with guilt.
If the ruler is justified in executing domestic criminals, how much more is he justified in defending his people against a foreign enemy? John the Baptist, after all, did not tell the soldiers to lay down their weapons and desert but was content with instructing them to “do violence to no man, neither accuse any falsely; and be content with your wages.” [Luke 3:14] The barbs were aimed at soldiers who augmented their incomes by collaborating in the extortions of tax-collectors.
When a Christian engages in homicide, either as executioner or soldier, it is the ruler and not he who is morally responsible for the killing. The soldier is merely the instrument of a ruler whose power comes from God, as Christ informs Pilate during the interrogation. In Romans 13 (cited above), St. Paul sums up the Christian position succinctly, “Not in vain does he [the ruler] hold the sword.”
Vengeance belongs to God, who then delegates that power to the ruler. Christians, then, must foreswear the right to vengeance, though in exchange the ruler must protect the innocent from violence. The ruler must not only punish but defend his kingdom or empire against invaders. His subjects or citizens, correspondingly, have a duty to pay their taxes, obey the laws, and defend their country. This reasoning depends on an important premise, that a commonwealth—whether city republic or kingdom or empire—is a legitimate human institution that requires the power to defend itself. In the high Christian Age, Thomas Aquinas would make it clear that Christians owe a primary moral duty to their family and a civic duty to their commonwealth.
From the beginning, the adherents to the main current of Christianity acknowledged the duty to obey the laws and commands of the rulers. Christ did not resist Pilate, because Pilate, however badly, represented the sovereign authority of the Roman Emperor who did the Lord’s will on earth. Aha, says the pagan, this is pacifism. No, not at all, since Christians also obeyed the command to defend the empire. Jews were absolved from military service, because Sabbath observance conflicted with the duties of a soldier. Christians, as they came to be distinguished from Jews, were not absolved. Some radicals—and who knows how many of them were either Jewish or Judaizing Christians—misconstrued Christ’s teachings to be an exemption from all civic duties. The Apostolic writer known as the Disciple did not: “[Christians] obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives.”
A Postscript on Revenge
The Old Law, which has been fulfilled not overturned, was crystal-clear: Justice is vengeance, the retribution of tit for tat–[Exodus 21:24-25] “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, stripe for stripe.” When the first homicide is driven into exile, the Lord threatens seven-fold vengeance on anyone who kills Cain [Gen 4:15]. In homicide cases, the earliest justice was the blood-feud, and the family’s revenger of blood could hunt down and kill the killer without impunity. In time, apparently, restrictions were imposed, giving protection to both innocent men and men guilty only of accidental or justifiable homicide. [See chapter on Family Values].
As the society of the Israelites became more complicated–evolving from a loose federation of tribes into a more centralized kingdom–homicide law had became correspondingly less tribal and less passionate. Leviticus contains the remarkably Christian admonition: “Thou shalt not avenge nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” [19:18] However, this commandment is given not so much to inculcate mercy per se as to prevent the socially destructive blood-feuds that almost inevitably accompany the lex talionis. It may be no accident that it occurs in the context of prohibitions on tale-bearing and malice. It is followed, as if to clarify the point, by a chapter prescribing the death penalty for wizards, and not long afterward in the book, we are told that God himself will avenge transgressions. [Le 26:25]
This theme, that vengeance belongs to the Lord, recurrs frequently in both Testaments. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I shall repay.” [ ] Far from being a prohibtion on taking revenge, this declaration elevates vengeance to the divine plane. Although, it is true, the Lord may sometimes take matters into his own hands, punishing the Egyptians with plagues, more often it is human instruments that are used: Jepthah in Judges [11:36] and Jehu in 2nd Kings [9:7]. But, because Jehu is guilty of slaugheter in Jezreel, the Lord will “avenge the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu.”
Prophets and psalmists are continually invoking divine vengeance against their enemies–gentiles in particular–and it is a mark of his righteousness that Ahasuerus gives the people of Israel the right to take vengeance on their enemies by killing them. [Es 8:11-13] Psalm 58 is particularly striking, since it begins with a cry for justice and concludes:
“The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked. So that a man shall say, Verily there is a reward for the righteous: verily he is a God that judgeth in the earth.”
In the sublime vision of Isaiah, the good news includes “the day of the Lord’s vengeance,” when God will avenge his enemies.
Luke’s Gospel picks up the theme, and Jesus foretells first the sufferings his followers must undergo and then the despoliation of Jerusalem: “For these be the days of vengeance,” when the Lord will use gentiles to destroy his rebellious people. [21]. Luke also records Christ’s parable [18:1-9] of the unjust judge badgered by a woman to give her justice, saying: “Avenge me of mine adversary.” Fearing neither God nor man, the judge is worn down by the woman’s cries and grants her the vengeance she desires. “And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them?”
Vengeance belongs to the Lord, yes, but his instruments are often human. As Paul reminds us, in his long mediation on justice, God is righteous who exercises his wrath [Ro 3:5]; therefore, “Avenge not yourselves,” he says quoting the Old Law, “Vengeance is mine.” [12:19] Justice, in other words, is in the hands of the universal ruler. This is not a plea for non-resistance, of course, because in the same epistle, justice is to be exercised by the ruler appointed by God as “a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.”
It should be obvious that the modern “Christian” arguments against revenge and self-defense have been overstated and misunderstood. Jesus not only claimed not to have overturned the old law, but he even told his disciples to buy swords. His admonitions on forgiveness are addressed to his followers living in religious community and do not apply to alien aggressors. Even a “brother,” if he refuses to make restitution, is to be treated as a gentile.
In sum, the Scriptures teach that vengeance is the basis of justice, that within the community (whether of Jews or of Christian believers), personal vengeance should be foresworn, and that vengeance/justice on this earth is to be carried out by rulers who derive their power from God.
Throughout the stormy Middle Ages, Christians adhered to this conception of vengeance. Rulers had the duty of executing criminals and of inflicting national vengeance in a just war. Dante’s only word for justice is vendetta, a word that is now restricted to the meaning “blood feud.” The Church Fathers, in condemning personal revenge, were upholding the Roman view of punishment in which the state acted as intermediary between the criminal and the victim (and his family). In ruder times, hoever, the Roman law’s prohibitions on dueling and revenge killings broke down, and many a true man–including priests if they were gentle-born–took upon himself the duties of self-defense and revenge.
St Francis de Sales as a pious youth was studying in Padua, where his meekness and humility offended some dissolute young men who attributed his mildness to “cowardice and effeminacy.” Planning to waylay and beat the boy, they hid in a thicket near the path he would take on his way home. “They, knowing his habitual gentleness, imagined he would offer them no resistance….But in this they deceived themselves, for they had forgotten, or perhaps were not aware, that the virtue of religion which teaches meekness and humility of heart inspires also courage and intrepidity in the hour of need.
“When Francis had reached the spot where his assailants were waiting, they rushed out to attack him unawares, and began by trying to raise a quarrel without any cause; then they heaped upon him untold injurious words, and finiding all these of no avail to provoke him to anger, they prepared to inflict on him the bodily cruelties they had previously designed.
“But when the pious youth seeing that this ws an ocasion when duty to himself required him to resist these attacks, instantly drew his sword, brandishing it vigorously over his cowardly aggressors, instantly made them fly away in great haste….Francis pursued them for a time, but they, finding that they themselves were in danger, turned toward him trembling and full of confusion. They fell at his feet imploring his forgiveness.”
How many of our younger neopagans would ever dream of using their fists? By their photographs on the web, not many. When one young would-be pagan made what I regarded as impudent remarks, I warned him that he was making a mistake. When he asked, mockingly, what I intended to do, beat him up? I told him, as a joke, “Perhaps,” or, if I was afraid of hurting my 60+ fists, I could hire someone for a thousand dollars to break every bone in his body. As the blood drained from his face, I hastened to assure him I was jesting, but with a point. Like many troubled young men, the kid has good blood in him and probably just needs a little seasoning from raw experience, but some day he will have to learn the hard way, as I did, that it is best not to trifle with mean old men of an earlier generation. We may aspire to the meekness of St. Francis of Assisi, but our hearts are still with Beowulf and John Wesley Hardin. Wes Hardin was the son of a Methodist preacher but became the most notorious killer in Texas, which is quite a feat.
PPS To any impoverished student or teacher who would like to come to the John Randolph Club meeting to hear tales of those Christian cowards the Texas Rangers, it is not too late to apply for a partial scholarship.
[i] Epistle to Diognetus
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Four decades ago, Lamar Alexander worked in Richard Nixon’s White House. Sen. Alexander today says Barack Obama’s White House reminds him of that place, that time, that mindset and those people.
Intending no disrespect to my old colleague, these days are not at all like those days, and this president and White House are nothing like the White House in which this writer worked from Inauguration Day 1969 to August 1974, when Marine One lifted off the lawn.
Richard Nixon had been elected in the most turbulent year since the Civil War.
Between New Hampshire and November, there was the Tet Offensive, LBJ’s announcement he would not run again, the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, race riots in 100 cities and Washington, D.C., the takeover of Columbia University by radicals, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, a Democratic convention in Chicago marked by rancor inside the hall and police-radical confrontations outside, and a campaign in which Hubert Humphrey was shouted down at rallies until he agreed to a bombing halt in Vietnam.
No, these times are not those times.
Nixon took the oath as a minority president, 43 percent, in a hostile city, with both houses of Congress against him and a national press corps that had loathed him since he exposed the establishment golden boy Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy, 20 years before.
Obama took the oath with close to a filibuster-proof Senate, a near 80-seat majority in the House, the media at his feet, not his throat, and a city in adulation that had voted 93 to 7 for Barack Hussein Obama.
Not even JFK entered office with more goodwill.
While Obama inherited an economic situation far worse than did Nixon, Nixon inherited a war far more divisive and bloody than Iraq and Afghanistan combined, with 535,000 troops in Vietnam or on the way, and 200 soldiers coming home every week in caskets and body bags.
By October 1969, Nixon had ordered 100,000 troops home from Vietnam, proposed a Family Assistance Plan, enunciated a new Nixon Doctrine, welcomed the Apollo 11 astronauts home from the moon and become the first President to visit a communist country, Romania.
Obama has held a beer summit and won a Nobel Peace Prize.
In both October and November of 1969, 500,000 demonstrators marched on Washington to—in the words of David Broder—”break Richard Nixon” as they had broken Lyndon Johnson.
Wrote Broder, “The likelihood is great that they will succeed again.”
“Instead of making pronouncements about not being the first U.S. president to lose a war,” admonished Time, “Nixon would perform a better service by preparing the country for the trauma of distasteful reversal”—i.e, a U.S. defeat.
Nixon answered the demonstrators and their media auxiliaries with a Nov. 3. speech calling on “the Great Silent Majority” to stand with him and against those out to destroy his policy and presidency.
When the three networks—primary sources of news for two-thirds of the nation then—trashed his speech, Nixon authorized a counterattack by Vice President Agnew, which caused an avalanche of telegrams to pour into ABC, CBS and NBC denouncing them, in solidarity with the administration.
By December, it was not Nixon who was broken. Antiwar activists never mustered those numbers again, and the media had been exposed as out of touch with Middle America.
That month, Nixon rose to near 70 percent approval, and Agnew was the third most admired man in America, after Nixon and Billy Graham.
Nixon and Agnew had not wanted the fight, they had not started the fight, but they had not backed down —and they had won the fight.
What were they supposed to do, Lamar? And when has Obama encountered anything like that?
Lamar left the White House in mid-1970 and decries Agnew’s depiction of Albert Gore Sr., of his home state of Tennessee, as “the Southern regional chairman of the Eastern Liberal Establishment.”
But was that not true? Gore was defeated in 1970 because he had lost touch with Tennessee. And Lamar’s friend Bill Brook won.
They may have called us all paranoid, but as Henry Kissinger once mordantly observed, “Sometimes, even paranoids have real enemies.”
As for an “enemies list,” the only mistake was writing it down.
Does Lamar not think Nixon had enemies out to destroy him?
Does he not believe there was rejoicing in Washington when Nixon fell, or smug satisfaction when Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were lost—on the faces of those who persuaded themselves that America could not succeed in Vietnam because they had failed?
No one denies Nixon made mistakes. Even he conceded, “I gave them a sword, and they ran it through me.”
But those enemies were not a figment of his or our imagination. The Nixon-haters were real, and they were legion.
In 1969-1970, Nixon had a choice: capitulate or fight.
Compared with what he went through, Obama had a cakewalk.
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As the 20th century drew to a close lists of the century’s greatest figures in various fields of endeavor appeared regularly in newspapers and magazines. Revealing that memories were short, the lists tended to be dominated by figures of recent vintage, especially in the sports world. This is probably a consequence of the ephemeral nature of the contributions of athletes, unlike those of scientists or physicians or writers. I should think, though, that athletes should be judged by how they performed against their competition. By that standard, no running back in the history of college football outshines Glenn Davis of West Point fame. Yet, Glenn Davis was left off a few of the top-ten lists I saw for running backs.
When I was young, the two running backs most talked about in our family were Glenn Davis and Ernie Nevers, the latter because he played football with the McGrath boys at Central High in Superior, Wisconsin, and went on to become all-everything at Stanford, and the former because my big brother was a fan of Army football. My brother fed me Davis stories, statistics, and photos since I was four or five years old. Glenn Davis was the halfback I wanted to be. A decade earlier he was the halfback every aspiring football player wanted to be.
Davis was a Southern California boy who excelled in every sport his high school—Bonita in La Verne—offered. On the track the only thing other sprinters saw of him were his heels. In football he made cuts and accelerated like a cheetah. At the conclusion of his senior season in football during the fall of 1942, the still-16-year-old Davis was named CIF (California Interscholastic Federation) Player of the Year. Winter saw him star on the basketball team. During the spring of 1943 he made All-CIF in baseball and was named Southern California’s top track and field athlete.
When Davis arrived at West Point during the late summer of 1943, legendary football coach Red Blaik was certain the Southern California golden boy must have a big head. In practice Blaik immediately had Davis carry the ball against West Point’s first string—just to teach the kid a lesson. Davis bounced, squirmed, changed direction, and exploded for 80 yards and a touchdown. Blaik could now think of nothing to do but chew out Davis for imagined faults with the run. With the team watching, Blaik told Davis that he had missed the hole, cut the wrong way off blocks, changed direction at the wrong time, and extended a limp limb instead of a rigid stiff-arm at would-be tacklers. “What do you have to say for yourself, Davis?” a yelling Blaik concluded. Davis looked at the ground and pawed the turf. “Well, coach,” the 17-year-old plebe finally answered, “how was it for distance?”
For Army that first season Davis led the team to a 7-2-1 record and gained 1,028 yards on 144 carries, a 7.1 yard average, and scored 8 touchdowns. The legend was for real. The next season saw the arrival of fullback Felix “Doc” Blanchard, who would team with Davis to give Army the greatest backfield duo in the history of college football. At 6′1″ and 210 lbs.—about three inches taller and 35 lbs. heavier than Davis—Blanchard was the bruiser who could run through interior linemen. For a heavyweight he was exceptionally fast. He became known as “Mr. Inside,” and Davis as “Mr. Outside.” Together they were the “Touchdown Twins” and were both All-Americans three years in a row. During the years they played together West Point went undefeated, a perfect record marred only by a tie with Notre Dame in ’46.
In nine games during the 1944 season Davis set NCAA records by averaging 11.5 yards per carry and scoring 20 touchdowns. He won the Maxwell Award and the Walter Camp Trophy as the player of the year, and finished second in the Heisman balloting. Davis again averaged 11.5 yards per carry in 1945, scored 18 touchdowns in nine games, and finished second in the Heisman voting to his teammate, Doc Blanchard. Injuries to Blanchard in 1946, and to quarterback Arnold Tucker, allowed defenses to stack against Davis, but Mr. Outside still averaged 5.8 yards and scored 13 touchdowns. He had a record-setting game against Navy, accounting for 265 yards of total offense, including a 40-yard TD run, a 30-yard TD pass reception, and a 27-yard TD pass. Against Michigan, Davis ran for 105 yards and a touchdown, completed 7 of 8 passes for 160 yards and a TD, and intercepted two passes. He won the Heisman Trophy and was named Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press.
In his collegiate career Davis gained 6,494 yards on 637 carries for an average of 10.2 yards per carry. He scored 59 touchdowns and passed for 12 more. Several of these marks set NCAA records. His average yards per carry is still a record. At the academy Davis was also a guard on the basketball team, the star of the baseball team, and a record-setting sprinter on the track team; 62 years after his graduation he still holds the academy’s indoor 60 and outdoor 220 records. He also still holds the record point total for the Master of the Sword, a series of events testing speed, strength, spring, and agility. In 1987 West Point released a VHS tape of Army’s football games, including the ’45 and ’46 seasons. Watch it and you will see that Mr. Outside is Mr. Incomparable—of any era.
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The U.S. has every characteristic of a failed state.
The U.S. government’s current operating budget is dependent on foreign financing and money creation.
Too politically weak to be able to advance its interests through diplomacy, the U.S. relies on terrorism and military aggression.
Costs are out of control, and priorities are skewed in the interest of rich organized interest groups at the expense of the vast majority of citizens. For example, war at all cost—which enriches the armaments industry, the officer corps and the financial firms that handle the war’s financing—takes precedence over the needs of American citizens. There is no money to provide the uninsured with health care, but Pentagon officials have told the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee in the House that every gallon of gasoline delivered to U.S. troops in Afghanistan costs American taxpayers $400.
“It is a number that we were not aware of, and it is worrisome,” said Rep. John Murtha, chairman of the subcommittee.
According to reports, the U.S. Marines in Afghanistan use 800,000 gallons of gasoline per day. At $400 per gallon, that comes to a $320,000,000 daily fuel bill for the Marines alone. Only a country totally out of control would squander resources in this way.
While the U.S. government squanders $400 per gallon of gasoline in order to kill women and children in Afghanistan, many millions of Americans have lost their jobs and their homes and are experiencing the kind of misery that is the daily life of poor Third World peoples. Americans are living in their cars and in public parks. America’s cities, towns and states are suffering from the costs of economic dislocations and the reduction in tax revenues from the economy’s decline. Yet, Obama has sent more troops to Afghanistan, a country halfway around the world that is not a threat to America.
It costs $750,000 per year for each soldier we have in Afghanistan. The soldiers, who are at risk of life and limb, are paid a pittance, but all of the privatized services to the military are rolling in excess profits. One of the great frauds perpetuated on the American people was the privatization of services that the U.S. military traditionally performed for itself. “Our” elected leaders could not resist any opportunity to create at taxpayers’ expense private wealth that could be recycled to politicians in campaign contributions.
Republicans and Democrats on the take from the private insurance companies maintain that the U.S. cannot afford to provide Americans with health care and that cuts must be made even in Social Security and Medicare. So how can the U.S. afford bankrupting wars, much less totally pointless wars that serve no American interest?
The enormous scale of foreign borrowing and money creation necessary to finance Washington’s wars are sending the dollar to historic lows. The dollar has even experienced large declines relative to currencies of Third World countries such as Botswana and Brazil. The decline in the dollar’s value reduces the purchasing power of Americans’ already declining incomes.
Despite the lowest level of housing starts in 64 years, the U.S. housing market is flooded with unsold homes, and financial institutions have a huge and rising inventory of foreclosed homes not yet on the market.
Industrial production has collapsed to the level of 1999, wiping out a decade of growth in industrial output.
The enormous bank reserves created by the Federal Reserve are not finding their way into the economy. Instead, the banks are hoarding the reserves as insurance against the fraudulent derivatives that they purchased from the gangster Wall Street investment banks.
The regulatory agencies have been corrupted by private interests. “Frontline” reports that Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers blocked Brooksley Born, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, from regulating derivatives. President Obama rewarded Larry Summers for his idiocy by appointing him director of the National Economic Council. What this means is that profits for Wall Street will continue to be leeched from the diminishing blood supply of the American economy.
An unmistakable sign of Third World despotism is a police force that sees the pubic as the enemy. Thanks to the federal government, our local police forces are now militarized and imbued with hostile attitudes toward the public. SWAT teams have proliferated, and even small towns now have police forces with the firepower of U.S. Special Forces.
Summons are increasingly delivered by SWAT teams that tyrannize citizens with broken down doors, a $400 or $500 repair born by the tyrannized resident. Recently, a mayor and his family were the recipients of incompetence by the town’s local SWAT team, which mistakenly wrecked the mayor’s home, terrorized his family and killed the family’s two friendly Labrador dogs.
If a town’s mayor can be treated in this way, what do you think is the fate of the poor white or black? Or the idealistic student who protests his government’s inhumanity?
In any failed state, the greatest threat to the population comes from the government and the police. That is certainly the situation today in the U.S.A. Americans have no greater enemy than their own government. Washington is controlled by interest groups that enrich themselves at the expense of the American people.
The 1 percent that comprise the superrich are laughing as they say, “Let them eat cake.”
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM
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The Obama administration’s decision to pull the plug on the missile defense plan for Eastern Europe and the Republican response should provide hours of fun for political satirists. Both sides have agreed that the real issue is Iran. Can Iran rain nuclear death on the Poles and Czechs? Perhaps a better question is why Iran would choose the Poles. Perhaps as the newest incarnation of the Third Reich they just have to invade Poland and set up concentration camps.
This morning Don and Roma (on WLS radio Chicago) got the “real story” from John Bolton. You see, the Bush administration did not actually think that Iran currently has ICBMs, but they were anticipating the future. Boy, will we all be sorry when they do attack Warsaw, because it will be too late. Missile defense, he opined sagely in the precise tones and convoluted sentences of the megalomaniac impersonating an intellectual, is not a light switch that can be turned on and off.
Even John Bolton, I suppose, must know that this is a lie. Iran had nothing whatsoever to do with this program. The object—and it is more an object of aggression than defense—was always Russia. The US has been steadily expanding its sphere of influence at the expense of the former Soviet Empire, and under Bush II we were muscling into the Ukraine, Belorus, and Georgia. The Poles, God bless them, always knew, which is why they are so alarmed. As the AP reports this morning, the Polish newspaper Fakt ran a headline on the front page: “Betrayal! The U.S. sold us to Russia and stabbed us in the back.”
As Chronicles readers know, we never supported Bush’s imperial thrust into Eastern Europe, but once President Obama decided to back out, there were, certainly, a more graceful and less risky approach to selling out our naive and trusting allies. Allies, one might add, who out of gratitude joined the Coalition of the stupid and bought US, not European military hardware. We might have run into technical complications, aggravated by the current economic crisis, while protesting loudly our determination to put the system in place in a timely fashion. Why Obama did not stall he—or rather the advisors telling him what to do—alone knows. One guess is that the Russians have allowed us to transport materiel to Afghanistan, and this is part of the payback. Or—and this is never safe to rule out—they simply do not know what they are doing. This seems to me incredible, since the Bush policy was a multi-faceted attempt to cut off Eastern Europe from Russian influence and incorporate the former satellites, captive nations, and break-away regions into a US-NATO economic and military sphere.
It was an evil policy, in my view, but at least it was a policy. Like so many bad plans—colonizing Africa, invading Iraq, importing slaves—it is simply not possible to reverse course in mid-stream without grave consequences. Back in the 90’s I tried to explain to Poles and Czechs why it was not safe to rely on the US, because while one administration might have a plan that includes defense of Poland—or support for Marcos, the Somozas, or the Shah of Iran—some future leader with the inevitable mandate will feel no compunction about selling them out.
So-called democracies are incapable of coherent policies, because they are always at the whim of fleeting majorities or of whatever set of knaves lie, cheat, steal, and kill their way to power. America is not a real democracy or even a republic, but it is a a country run by demagogues who lack both comprehensive vision and the willpower to carry through, albeit with gritted teeth, a strategic plan that has been shaped by earlier demagogues. National security? National interest? Good faith? Forget about it, this is America we’re talking about.
Empires are tarbabies. The only way to get loose is to cut off your arms and legs.
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I was mighty proud of my Congressman Joe Wilson—until he apologised for telling the truth to our sacred Chief Magistrate. I have thought well of Mr. Wilson ever since he was one of the Magnificent Seven of South Carolina state senators who refused to be bribed or browbeaten by the big money men into supporting the removal of our Southern flag from the capitol. Though my esteem has declined some in the last few years when I thought he was a bit too ready to support the schemes of the previous Executive Mansion resident.
Our two most acute foreign observers, Tocqueville and Solzhenitsyn, as well as numerous native men of perception like Mencken, have observed that the most fundamental, pervasive, and powerful motive of Americans is to be a respectable member of the herd. This defect of national character in itself severely limits the process of debate and deliberation that is necessary for genuine democratic government. And it explains the course of the Wilson/Obama controversy.
The partisan interests of the Democrats were aroused, of course, by an opportunity to bash the opposition. This can only work because of the national character defect described above. Mr. Wilson did something that frightens the vast herd of pseudo-intellectual respectables that make up a large portion of the American population. It does not matter that the Democrats and the press routinely behave in the most brutally uncivil manner to everyone in public life to the right of William Kristol. That rather qualifies as respectable, while similar behaviour by the unrespectable is a scary thing that all good men deplore.
There is a substantial though outnumbered Republican expression of the national defect, as indicated by all the bleating one hears about “My President” when a Republican is in power. Southerners, because of our memory of conquest and “Reconstruction” and our relative poverty, have a higher quotient of skepticism about politicians, perhaps. But we are by no means immune, as witnessed by the many people who called me to task for criticising that “good Christian man George Bush.”
What all this reveals is that there is no democratic debate and deliberation—i.e., no democracy—in the United States. Our public discourse is dominated by public relations, advertising, pop culture, slogans, media-created celebrities posing as journalists, and vague emotions about what thoughts are acceptable and unacceptable. It has been that way for a long time—since at least the 1960s or perhaps earlier. Rudely disagreeing with a Democratic President, and a President who is a minority member at that, is just not done.
British Prime Ministers must defend themselves in the Commons with intelligence and expertise. They must answer questions and accept catcalls and raspberries as part of the give and take of debate. That should be normal for any head of a democratic government. U.S. Presidents, especially Democrats, are never really questioned about anything. The valiant representatives of the media never raise any really important challenge. Presidential candidates enjoy an orchestrated joint press conference that is called “a debate,” a deception that only works with a population that has no concept of what “debate” means. Obama is treated more like the Queen than the head of government. Obama is not the Queen. He is not even George Washington. Not by a long shot.
Nearly submerged in all the uproar was a basic point. Joe Wilson told the plain and simple truth. Obama lied about a matter of great importance. The people need to know that and there is no better way that they could have found out.
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It helps to read history. We know, or should, that American life shows us nothing like the social and political conniptions that Germany experienced in the 1920s, France in the 1790s and the United States in the 1850s.
But something is cooking. Indignant people—I’m sidestepping the adjective “angry” so as to avoid connotations—don’t mysteriously materialize in the capital city to fulminate and castigate on their own nickels. They have to want to. What might make them want to? I would venture, the sense that something’s badly, seriously, woefully out of joint in their beloved homeland.
Note that the “tens of thousands” (general media estimate) or the “million” (Daily Mail of London) demonstrators last weekend went to Washington, D.C., not to New York City. They went where they judged the problem to reside. That would make it a political, not an economic, problem—one arising from an accumulation of offenses and indignities peculiar to how their country is run.
We’ve seen it before, haven’t we—as far back as the gasoline lines and inflation of the ’70s, continuing through the movement that made Ross Perot a household name, with his pledge to look under the hood and fix the motor. Then there was last year’s thirst for “change.”
Do the monarchs of politics get the impression no one loves them, whatever their party? Whether they get it or not, it’s true.
“Congressional Job Approval” survey, Sept. 3-8, Associated Press: approve, 28 percent; disapprove, 69 percent. Neither political party creeps up even to 50 percent in terms of generic public approval. Democrats finish less than 3 percentage points ahead of Republicans.
For now the Democrats, who at least nominally rule the capital with a mailed fist, draw most of the hostility. Only a year ago, it was the Republicans who couldn’t turn a trick, what with moral scandals, Iraq, Katrina, etc. Next year at the midterm polls, Democrats will likely take a hit, not unlike the one Republicans took in 2006. So it goes.
The size of the political footprint on the public’s back is the main reason for public discouragement with the modern cult of politics. The bigger the footprint, the larger the likelihood of disrupting normal life.
Unfortunately, the sizing down of political expectations isn’t realistic: not when government has muscled into every known field of endeavor. We, the people (through our government apparatus) own General Motors? Incredible. We’re on the verge of committing control of health care policy to the government? Still more incredible. No constitutional lawyer blinks an eye at such assertions of authority over the private sector? That’s not incredible in the least. No one these days ever seems to doubt that Congress will do, and get away with doing, whatever it likes—permitted or not by the Constitution.
Up and down Washington the crowds may surge and surge again. It’s hard to see how things will basically change, inasmuch as the old-fashioned conviction that government has proper limits looks as durable as the seas and the mountains.
People who want Washington to change its ways are often on the right track—especially, now with the Democrats leering at unprecedented opportunities for controlling our lives through health care. It’s the whole “wanting” thing, for better or worse, that gets in the way of reform. We want, we want, we want—and, boy, do our leaders, and all aspiring to that dignity, want us to have it. Grateful voters make for long tenures and big government pensions, not to mention overseas travel, large staffs, chauffeured vehicles, and, oh, yes, constant access to microphones and cameras capable of making some essentially little people look very big indeed.
Here’s a problem harder to solve than health care: how to loosen voters’ grips on the idea that politics can be twisted productively to serve specified ends—my ends, of course, not yours, which aren’t half as good as mine. The Psalmist, all these centuries later, draws top honors for political advice: “O put not your trust in princes … for there is no help in them.”
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM
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The current health care “debate” shows how far gone representative government is in the United States. Members of Congress represent the powerful interest groups that fill their campaign coffers, not the people who vote for them.
The health care bill is not about health care. It is about protecting and increasing the profits of the insurance companies. The main feature of the health care bill is the “individual mandate,” which requires everyone in America to buy health insurance. Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., a recipient of millions in contributions over his career from the insurance industry, proposes to impose up to a $3,800 fine on Americans who fail to purchase health insurance.
The determination of “our” elected representatives to serve the insurance industry is so compelling that Congress is incapable of recognizing the absurdity of these proposals.
The reason there is a health care crisis in the U.S. is that the cumulative loss of jobs and benefits has swollen the uninsured to approximately 50 million Americans. They cannot afford health insurance any more than employers can afford to provide it.
It is absurd to mandate that people purchase what they cannot afford and to fine them for failing to do so. A person who cannot pay a health insurance premium cannot pay the fine.
These proposals are like solving the homeless problem by requiring the homeless to purchase a house.
In his speech, Obama said “we’ll provide tax credits” for “those individuals and small businesses who still can’t afford the lower-priced insurance available in the exchange,” and he said low-cost coverage will be offered to those with pre-existing medical conditions. A tax credit is useless to those without income unless the credit is refundable, and subsidized coverage doesn’t do much for those millions of Americans with no jobs.
Baucus masquerades as a defender of the health impaired with his proposal to require insurers to provide coverage to all comers, as if the problem of health care can be reduced to pre-existing conditions and cancelled policies. It was left to Rep. Dennis Kucinich to point out that the health care bill ponies up 30 million more customers for the private insurance companies.
The private sector is no longer the answer because the income levels of the vast majority of Americans are insufficient to bear the cost of health insurance today. To provide some perspective, the monthly premium for a 60-year-old female for a group policy (employer-provided) with Blue Cross Blue Shield in Florida is about $1,200. That comes to $14,400 per year. Only employees in high-productivity jobs that can provide both a livable salary and health care can expect to have employer-provided coverage.
If a 60-year-old female has to buy a non-group policy as an individual, the premium would be even higher. How, for example, is a Wal-Mart shelf-stocker or checkout clerk going to be able to pay a private insurance premium?
Even the present public option—Medicare—is very expensive to those covered. Basic Medicare is insufficient coverage. Part B has been added, for which about $100 per month is deducted from the covered person’s Social Security check. If the person is still earning or has other retirement income, an “income-related monthly adjustment” is also deducted as part of the Part B premium. And if the person is still working, his earnings are subject to the 2.9 percent Medicare tax.
Even with Part B, Medicare coverage is still insufficient except for the healthy. For many people, additional coverage from private supplementary policies, such as the ones sold by AARP, is necessary. These premiums can be as much as $277 per month. Deductibles remain, and prescriptions are only 50 percent covered. If the drug prescription policy is chosen, the premium is higher.
This leaves a retired person on Medicare who has no other retirement income of significance paying as much as $4,500 per year in premiums in order to create coverage under Medicare that still leaves half of his prescription medicines out-of-pocket. Considering the cost of some prescription medicines, a Medicare-covered person with Part B and a supplementary policy can still face bankruptcy.
Therefore, everyone should take note that a “public option” can leave people with large out-of-pocket costs. I know a professional who has chosen to continue working beyond retirement age. His Medicare coverage with supplemental coverage, Medicare tax and income-related monthly adjustment comes to $16,400 per year. Those people who want to deny Medicare to the rich will cost the system a lot of money.
What the U.S. needs is a single-payer not-for-profit health system that pays doctors and nurses sufficiently that they will undertake the arduous training and accept the stress and risks of dealing with illness and diseases.
A private health care system worked in the days before expensive medical technology, malpractice suits, high costs of bureaucracy associated with third-party payers, heavy investment in combating fraud and pressure on insurance companies from Wall Street to improve “shareholder returns.”
Despite the rise in premiums, payments to health care providers, such as doctors, appear to be falling along with coverage to policyholders. The system is no longer functional and no longer makes sense. Health care has become an incidental rather than primary purpose of the health care system. Health care plays second fiddle to insurance company profits and salaries to bureaucrats engaged in fraud prevention and discovery. There is no point in denying coverage to one-sixth of the population in the name of saving a nonexistent private free market health care system.
The only way to reduce the cost of health care is to take the profit and paperwork out of health care.
Nothing humans design will be perfect. However, Congress is making it clear to the public that the wrong issues are front and center, such as the belief of Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., and others that illegal aliens and abortions will be covered if government pays the bill.
Debate focuses on subsidiary issues because Congress no longer writes the bills it passes. As Theodore Lowi made clear in his book “The End of Liberalism,” the New Deal transferred lawmaking from the legislative to the executive branch. Executive branch agencies and departments write bills that they want and hand them off to sponsors in the House and Senate. Powerful interest groups took up the same practice.
The interest groups that finance political campaigns expect their bills to be sponsored and passed.
Thus, a health care reform bill based on forcing people to purchase private health insurance and fining them if they do not.
When bills become mired in ideological conflict, as has happened to the health care bill, something usually passes nevertheless. The president, his PR team and members of Congress want a health care bill on their resume and to be able to claim that they passed a health care bill, regardless of whether it provides any health care.
The cost of adding public expenditures for health care to a budget drowning in red ink from wars, bank bailouts and stimulus packages means that the most likely outcome of a health care bill will benefit insurance companies and use mandated private coverage to save public money by curtailing Medicare and Medicaid.
The public’s interest is not considered to be the important determinant. The politicians have to please the insurance companies and reduce health care expenditures in order to save money for another decade or two of war in the Middle East.
The telltale part of Obama’s speech was the applause in response to his pledge that “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits.” Yet, Obama and his fellow politicians have no hesitation to add trillions of dollars to the deficit in order to fund wars.
The profits of military-security companies are partly recycled into campaign contributions. To cut war spending in order to finance a public health care system would cost politicians campaign contributions from both the insurance industry and the military-security industry.
Politicians are not going to allow that to happen.
It was the war in Afghanistan, not health care, that President Obama declared to be a “necessity.”
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM
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Down at the Chinese outlet store in Albany known as Wal-Mart, Chinese tires have so successfully undercut U.S.-made tires that the Cooper Tire factory in that south Georgia town had to shut down.
Twenty-one hundred Georgians lost their jobs.
The tale of Cooper Tire and what it portends is told in last week’s Washington Post by Peter Whoriskey.
How could tires made on the other side of the world, then shipped to Albany, be sold for less than tires made in Albany?
Here’s how.
At Cooper Tire, the wages were $18 to $21 per hour. In China, they are a fraction of that. The Albany factory is subject to U.S. health-and-safety, wage-and-hour and civil rights laws from which Chinese plants are exempt. Environmental standards had to be met at Cooper Tire or the plant would have been closed. Chinese factories are notorious polluters.
China won the competition because the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection of the laws” does not apply to the People’s Republic. While free trade laws grant China free and equal access to the U.S. market, China can pay workers wages and force them to work hours that would violate U.S. law, and China can operate plants whose health, safety and environmental standards would have their U.S. competitors shut down as public nuisances.
Beijing also manipulates its currency to keep export prices low and grants a rebate on its value-added tax on exports to the U.S.A., while imposing a value-added tax on goods coming from the U.S.A.
Thus did China, from 2004 to 2008, triple her share of the U.S. tire market from 5 percent to 17 percent and take down Cooper Tire of Albany.
But not to worry. Cooper Tire has seen the light and is now opening and acquiring plants in China, and sending Albany workers over to train the Chinese who took their jobs.
Welcome to 21st century America, where globalism has replaced patriotism as the civil religion of our corporate elites. As Thomas Jefferson reminded us, “Merchants have no country.”
What has this meant to the republic that was once the most self-sufficient and independent in all of history?
Since 2001, when George Bush took the oath, the United States has run $3.8 trillion in trade deficits in manufactured goods, more than twice the $1.68 trillion in trade deficits we ran for imported oil and gas.
Our trade deficit with China in manufactured goods alone, $1.58 trillion over those eight years, roughly equals the entire U.S. trade deficit for oil and gas.
U.S. politicians never cease to wail of the need for “energy independence.” But why is our dependence on the oil of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, Nigeria, Canada, Mexico and Venezuela a greater concern than our dependence on a non-democratic rival great power for computers and vital components of our weapons systems and high-tech industries?
As Executive Director Auggie Tantillo of the American Manufacturing Trade Action Committee compellingly argues:
Running a trade deficit for natural resources that the United States lacks is something that cannot be helped, but running a massive deficit in manmade products that America easily could produce itself is a choice—a poor choice that is bankrupting the country and responsible for the loss of millions of jobs.
How many millions of jobs?
In the George W. Bush years, we lost 5.3 million manufacturing jobs, one-fourth to one-third of all we had in 2001.
And our dependence on China is growing.
Where Beijing was responsible for 60 percent of the U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods in 2008, in the first six months of 2009, China accounted for 79 percent of our trade deficit in manufactured goods.
How can we end this dependency and begin building factories and creating jobs here, rather than deepening our dependency on a China that seeks to take our place in the sun? The same way Alexander Hamilton did, when we Americans produced almost nothing and were even more dependent on Great Britain than we are on China today.
Let us do unto our trading partners as they have done unto us.
As they rebate value-added taxes on exports to us, and impose a value-added tax on our exports to them, let us reciprocate. Impose a border tax equal to a VAT on all their goods entering the United States, and use the hundreds of billions to cut corporate taxes on all manufacturing done here in the United States.
Where they have tilted the playing field against us, let us tilt it back again. Transnational companies are as amoral as sharks. What is needed is simply to cut their profits from moving factories and jobs abroad and increase their profits for bringing them back to the U.S.A.
It’s not rocket science. Hamilton, James Madison and Abraham Lincoln all did it. Obama’s tariffs on Chinese tires are a good start.
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM
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“You may all go to Hell; I will go to Texas,” said David Crockett to the voters before departing for San Antonio and the Alamo, where he, Jim Bowie, Buck Travis, and 186 other brave Americans gave their lives for liberty. As the entire United States seems bent on following Davy’s instructions, a few brave spirits are going to make their way, once again, to San Antonio to express their love of liberty, though this time the worst risk they will run will be to dine too well and drink too deep.
The John Randolph Club is going back to Texas to celebrate our 20th anniversary. But this is no exercise in nostalgia. Our speakers—Peter Brimelow, Tom Fleming, David Hartman, John Lukacs, Roger McGrath, Bill Murchison, James Patrick, Justin Raimondo, Taki Theodoracopulos, and Aaron Wolf, among others—will look ahead, beyond the current conservative traps (neocons and theocons and all the rest) to see how best to apply our enduring principles to a rapidly changing national and international scene that looks more and more like socialism without a human face. Where better to argue for liberty than in Texas, where men and women have always fiercely defended their property, their families, and independence? Please join us in San Antonio for
The 20th Annual Meeting of the John Randolph Club
“The Future of America: Hell or Texas”
November 13-14, 2009
The Saint Anthony Hotel
The meeting will open with a reception at 5:00 P.M. on Friday, November 13, followed by the opening address at 6:00 P.M. Saturday will feature two morning and two afternoon panels, each followed by spirited Q&A. An ample break for lunch will give you a chance to enjoy one of San Antonio’s many fine restaurants. We’ll wrap things up Saturday night with the traditional black-tie-optional banquet and debate. This year’s topic: “Resolved: Reagan conservatism is the model for the future of the conservative movement.”
I hope you will come early for a special pre-JRC cultural program, “Texas Grit.” You’ve been to the Alamo; now visit some of San Antonio’s other jewels. On Thursday, November 12, at 3:00 P.M., we’ll take a walking tour of downtown San Antonio to visit the Governor’s Palace, the Casa Navarro, and the magnificently restored San Fernando Cathedral, the oldest cathedral in the United States and the oldest continuously functioning church in Texas. A reception and dinner will feature a talk by Texas historian T.R. Fehrenbach, author of Lone Star, simply the best one-volume history of Texas ever written. On Friday, November 13, in the morning we will take a motorcoach excursion to the San Antonio missions to celebrate the courageous Spaniards who brought Christendom to the New World. Lunch and a talk on the Texas Rangers (the lawmen, not the baseball players) by Roger McGrath will follow.
The Saint Anthony Hotel has been beautifully restored, and the brand new lobby bar seems custom made for Randolphians. A limited number of rooms are available at the Saint Anthony at the special rate of $139.00, single or double occupancy, breakfast included. Reservations must be made no later than Monday, October 12, 2009. Call (210) 227-4392 and mention The Rockford Institute or The John Randolph Club to get the special rate.
You do not need to be a member of the John Randolph Club to attend. (In fact, if you want to become a member, you need to attend at least one meeting.)
We encourage tuxedos for the Saturday evening banquet (it is one way we strike a blow for civility and tradition), but if you do not have one, a suit is fine.
All prices increase $50.00 after September 15, 2009.
We always have full-time students seeking scholarships to the meeting. Please consider making a gift to our scholarship fund so that the next generation can continue to speak truth to power long after we have all gone to our rewards. If you make a gift of $500.00 or more to our scholarship fund, I’ll send you CD recordings of this year’s lectures. If you are, or know, a student interested in a scholarship, contact Adrienne Majewski at (815) 964-5811 to apply.
I hope you will join us for both the JRC meeting and the preceding cultural program. Rockford Institute conferences stand apart. The talks are intelligent and lively. The gatherings are convivial. Indeed, the Randolph Club is like a family reunion: So many come back year after year. If you are looking for an inspiring and educating getaway, in a lovely setting surrounded by good people who share your principles and interests, you cannot do better than this annual event. In the more than a decade of organizing this conference, I have never received a letter from someone who did not have a great time.
P.S. Our dear friends Ray and Clark Welder are holding two very special events following the Randolph Club. The Welder Brothers and their lovely wives are hosting a fundraising garden party and a dinner for Chronicles on Sunday, November 15. If you are interested in lingering an extra day in San Antonio with Taki, Peter Brimelow, and the Chronicles editors to help support your favorite magazine, contact Adrienne Majewski at (815) 964-5811 for more information.
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[Originally posted September 11, 2001, at 1:00 PM CDT.]
In the aftermath of the greatest loss of American life in a single attack since Pearl Harbor—and probably ever—our first thoughts must be for the victims of an attack that was neither cowardly nor senseless (as it is already being called), but a well-coordinated demonstration of American vulnerability. This is a time for prayer, not analysis. Unfortunately, even the chief executive of the United States—a professing Christian—could not find the courage to pray in front of the cameras. Faced with the evidence of a probable Islamic suicide attack carried out by men—perhaps Muslims—willing to die for their beliefs, the President could only ask for a moment of silence, a prayer to nothing. Score one for the terrorists.
The terrorists also defeated the Bush advisors who deflected his return flight and sent him into hiding. Of course the President’s life is potentially threatened; but thousands of lives that were lost in New York and Washington, while the CIA was asleep at the switch. This is the same CIA, remember, who helped to install the current Islamic terrorist regime in Afghanistan—the regime that ironically said, echoing Bill Clinton, that they “feel America’s pain,” and which has given asylum to Osama Bin Laden, who (although he is denying responsibility) has threatened such an attack repeatedly.
It would be wrong to blame President Bush for a decision clearly made by his top advisors, but he needs to be in the nation’s capitol, bravely defying the threats to our security. If he cannot go home, how can anyone feel secure in his home or office? A large part of the President’s responsibility is public relations, and this administration is so far flubbing its greatest challenge. As I write, the President has “gone down the rabbit hole” in hiding, according to ABC News reporter Ann Compton.
If Islamic extremists turn out to be behind these attacks, will anyone in Washington wake up to the danger they have created by humiliating Muslims in the Middle East and, simultaneously, giving them easy access to the United States, where they are building their mosques and agitating against any public expression of Christian faith? Such a response is unlikely.
What will our government do in the weeks to come? The decision to close the border is too little too late—closing the barn door once the horse thieves have got in. It is important to keep in mind that in America, every disaster will be used as a pretext for more stupid government programs. Despite the obvious fact that this kind of terrorist attack, which we have been predicting, could not have been stopped by the President’s Missile Defense program, the Republicans will certainly claim that American security interests demand immediate funding. Predictably, Democratic leftists will blame the openness of our society and call for more stringent controls on guns and travel. This attack should cinch the argument for national identity cards and strengthen the hand of those who don’t think we have enough police checkpoints. The already depressed stock markets may turn suicidal, the price of oil will soar; Arafat’s little rebellion has run out of steam, and President Bush will be blamed for not supporting Ariel Sharon with sufficient zeal.
Meanwhile, John McCain and Al Haig are calling for a declaration of war, only they won’t say against whom; but a permanent state of war, as Chronicles Executive Editor Scott P. Richert points out, is exactly what would suit the Washington hawks who pine for the good old days of the Cold War.
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Flying home from London, where the subject of formal debate on the 70th anniversary of World War II had been whether Winston Churchill was a liability or asset to the Free World, one arrives in the middle of a far more acrimonious national debate right here in the United States.
At issue: Should Barack Obama be allowed to address tens of millions of American children, inside their classrooms, during school hours?
Conservative talk-show hosts saw a White House scheme to turn public schools into indoctrination centers where the socialist ideology of Obama would be spoon-fed to captive audiences of children forced to listen to Big Brother—and then do assignments on his sermon.
The liberal commentariat raged about right-wing paranoia.
Yet Byron York of The Washington Examiner dug back to 1991 to discover that, when George H.W. Bush went to Alice Deal Junior High to speak to America’s school kids, the left lost it.
“The White House turned a Northwest Washington junior high classroom into a television studio and its students into props,” railed The Washington Post. Education Secretary Lamar Alexander was called before a House committee. The National Education Association denounced Bush. And Congress ordered the General Accounting Office to investigate.
Obama’s actual speech proved about as controversial as a Nancy Reagan appeal to eighth-graders to “Just say no!” to drugs.
Yet, the episode reveals the poisoned character of our politics.
We saw it earlier on display in August, when the crowds that came out for town hall meetings to oppose Obama’s health care plans were called “thugs,” “fascists,” “racists” and “evil-mongers” by national Democrats.
We see it as Rep. Joe Wilson shouts, “You lie!” at the president during his address to a joint session of Congress.
We seem not only to disagree with each other more than ever, but to have come almost to detest one another. Politically, culturally, racially, we seem ever ready to go for each others’ throats.
One half of America sees abortion as the annual slaughter of a million unborn. The other half regards the right-to-life movement as tyrannical and sexist.
Proponents of gay marriage see its adversaries as homophobic bigots. Opponents see its champions as seeking to elevate unnatural and immoral relationships to the sacred state of traditional marriage.
The question invites itself. In what sense are we one nation and one people anymore? For what is a nation if not a people of a common ancestry, faith, culture and language, who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays, and share the same music, poetry, art and literature?
Yet, today, Mexican-Americans celebrate Cinco de Mayo, a skirmish in a French-Mexican war about which most Americans know nothing, which took place the same year as two of the bloodiest battles of our own Civil War: Antietam and Fredericksburg.
Christmas and Easter, the great holidays of Christendom, once united Americans in joy. Now we fight over whether they should even be mentioned, let alone celebrated, in our public schools.
Where we used to have classical, pop, country & Western and jazz music, now we have varieties tailored to specific generations, races and ethnic groups. Even our music seems designed to subdivide us.
One part of America loves her history, another reviles it as racist, imperialist and genocidal. Old heroes like Columbus, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are replaced by Dr. King and Cesar Chavez.
But the old holidays, heroes and icons endure, as the new have yet to put down roots in a recalcitrant Middle America.
We are not only more divided than ever on politics, faith and morality, but along the lines of class and ethnicity. Those who opposed Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court and stood by Sgt. Crowley in the face-off with Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates were called racists. But this time they did not back down. They threw the same vile word right back in the face of their accusers, and Barack Obama.
Consider but a few issues on which Americans have lately been bitterly divided: school prayer, the Ten Commandments, evolution, the death penalty, abortion, homosexuality, assisted suicide, affirmative action, busing, the Confederate battle flag, the Duke rape case, Terri Schiavo, Iraq, amnesty, torture.
Now it is death panels, global warming, “birthers” and socialism. If a married couple disagreed as broadly and deeply as Americans do on such basic issues, they would have divorced and gone their separate ways long ago. What is it that still holds us together?
The European-Christian core of the country that once defined us is shrinking, as Christianity fades, the birth rate falls and Third World immigration surges. Globalism dissolves the economic bonds, while the cacophony of multiculturalism displaces the old American culture.
“E pluribus unum“—out of many, one—was the national motto the men of ‘76 settled upon. One sees the pluribus. But where is the unum? One sees the diversity. But where is the unity?
Is America, too, breaking up?
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Americans have lost their ability for introspection, thereby revealing their astounding hypocrisy to the world.
U.S. War Secretary Robert Gates has condemned The Associated Press and a reporter, Julie Jacobson, embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan, for taking and releasing a photo of a U.S. Marine who was wounded in action and died from his injury.
The photographer was on patrol with the Marines when they came under fire. She found the courage and presence of mind to do her job. Her reward is to be condemned by the warmonger Gates as “insensitive.” Gates says her employer, The Associated Press, lacks “judgment and common decency.”
The American Legion jumped in and denounced The Associated Press for a “stunning lack of compassion and common decency.”
To stem opposition to its wars, the War Department hides signs of American casualties from the public. Angry that evidence escaped the censor, the war secretary and the American Legion attacked with politically correct jargon: “insensitive,” “offended” and the “anguish,” “pain and suffering” inflicted upon the Marine’s family. The War Department sounds like it is preparing a harassment tort.
Isn’t this passing the buck? The Marine lost his life not because of The Associated Press and a photographer, but because of the war criminals—Gates, George Bush, Dick Cheney and Barack Obama—and the U.S. Congress that supports wars of naked aggression that serve no American purpose, but which keeps campaign coffers filled with contributions from the armaments companies.
Marine Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard is dead because the U.S. government and a significant percentage of the U.S. population believe that the U.S. has the right to invade, bomb and occupy other peoples who have raised no hand against us but are demonized with lies and propaganda.
For the American war secretary, it is a photo that is insensitive, not America’s assertion of the right to determine the fate of Afghanistan with bombs and soldiers.
The exceptional “virtuous nation” does not think it is insensitive for America’s bombs to blow innocent villagers to pieces. On Sept. 4, the day before Gates’ outburst over the “insensitive” photo, Agence France Presse reported from Afghanistan that a U.S.-NATO air strike had killed large numbers of villagers who had come to get fuel from two tankers that had been hijacked from negligent and inattentive occupation forces:
“Nobody was in one piece. Hands, legs and body parts were scattered everywhere. Those who were away from the fuel tanker were badly burnt,” said 32-year-old Mohammad Daud, depicting a scene from hell. The burned-out shells of the tankers, still smoking in marooned wrecks on the riverbank, were surrounded by the charred-meat remains of villagers from Chahar Dara district in Kunduz province, near the Tajik border. Dr. Farid Rahid, a spokesperson in Kabul for the ministry of health, said up to 250 villagers had been near the tankers when the air strike was called in.
What does the world think of the United States? The American war secretary and a U.S. military veterans association think a photo of an injured and dying American soldier is insensitive, but not the wipeout of an Afghan village that came to get needed fuel.
The U.S. government is like a criminal who accuses the police of his crime when he is arrested or a sociopathic abuser who blames the victim. It is a known fact that the CIA has violated U.S. law and international law with its assassinations, kidnappings and torture. But it is not this criminal agency that will be held accountable. Instead, those who will be punished will be those moral beings who, appalled at the illegality and inhumanity of the CIA, leaked the evidence of the agency’s crimes.
The CIA has asked the U.S. Justice (sic) Department to investigate what the CIA alleges is the “criminal disclosure” of its secret program to murder suspected foreign terrorist leaders abroad. As we learned from Gitmo, those suspected by America are overwhelmingly innocent.
The CIA program is so indefensible that when CIA Director Leon Panetta found out about it six months after being in office, he cancelled the program (assuming those running the program obeyed) and informed Congress.
Yet, the CIA wants the person who revealed its crime to be punished for revealing secret information. A secret agency this unmoored from moral and legal standards is a greater threat to our country than are terrorists. Who knows what false flag operation it will pull off in order to provide justification and support for its agenda. An agency that is more liability than benefit should be abolished.
The agency’s program of assassinating terrorist leaders is itself fraught with contradictions and dangers. The hatred created by the U.S. and Israel is independent of any leader. If one is killed, others take his place. The most likely outcome of the CIA assassination program is that the agency will be manipulated by rivals, just as the FBI was used by one mafia family to eliminate another. In order to establish credibility with groups that they are attempting to penetrate, CIA agents will be drawn into participating in violent acts against the U.S. and its allies.
Accusing the truth-teller instead of the evil-doer is the position that the neoconservatives took against the New York Times when, after one year’s delay, which gave George W. Bush time to get re-elected, the Times published the National Security Agency leak that revealed that the Bush administration was committing felonies by violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The neocons, especially those associated with Commentary magazine, wanted the New York Times indicted for treason. To the evil neocon mind, anything that interferes with their diabolical agenda is treason.
This is the way many Americans think. America uber alles! No one counts but us (and Israel). The deaths we inflict and the pain and suffering we bring to others are merely collateral damage on the bloody path to American hegemony.
The attitude of the “freedom and democracy” U.S. government is that anyone who complains of illegality or immorality or inhumanity is a traitor. Republican Sen. Christopher S. Bond of Missouri is a recent example. Bond got on his high horse about “irreparable damage” to the CIA from the disclosures of its criminal activities. Bond wants those “back-stabbers” who revealed the CIA’s wrongdoings to be held accountable.
Bond is unable to grasp that it is the criminal activities, not their disclosure, that is the source of the problem. Obviously, the whistleblower protection act has no support from Bond, who sees it as just another law to plough under.
This is where the U.S. government stands today: Ignoring and covering up government crimes is the patriotic thing to do. To reveal the government’s crimes is an act of treason. Many Americans on both sides of the aisle agree.
Yet, they still think that they are The Virtuous Nation, the exceptional nation, the salt of the earth.
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If the aphorism holds—the guerrilla wins if he does not lose—the Taliban are winning and America is losing the war in Afghanistan.
Well into the eighth year of war, the Taliban are more numerous than ever, inflicting more casualties than ever, operating in more provinces than ever and controlling more territory than ever. And their tactics are more sophisticated.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal calls the situation “serious.” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Michael Mullen calls it “serious” and “deteriorating.”
President Obama thus faces a decision that may decide the fate of his presidency. For if the situation is grave and deteriorating, he cannot do nothing. Inaction invites, if it does not assure, defeat.
Does he cut U.S. losses, write off Afghanistan as not worth any more American blood and treasure, and execute a strategic retreat?
Or does he become the war president who sends McChrystal the scores of thousands of U.S. troops necessary to stave off a defeat for all the years needed to conscript and train an Afghan army that can and will defend the Kabul regime and pacify the country?
Afghanistan is being called Obama’s Vietnam.
It could become that, and bring down his presidency as Vietnam brought down Lyndon Johnson’s. But Afghanistan is not yet Vietnam in terms either of troops committed or casualties taken.
The 68,000 Americans who will be in Afghanistan at year’s end are an eighth of the forces in Vietnam when Richard Nixon began to bring them home. Vietnam cost the lives of 58,000 Americans. The Afghan war has cost fewer than 1,000. U.S. casualties in Afghanistan are as yet only a fifth of the U.S. losses in the Philippine Insurrection of 1899-1902.
If we compare Afghanistan to Vietnam, we are about in 1964, when the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was passed and the bombing of the North began, or December 1965, when the Marines came ashore at Danang.
Obama can still choose not to fight this war.
But should he so choose, he will be charged by Republicans and neoconservatives with a loss of nerve, with having cut and run, with having lost what he himself has repeatedly called a “war of necessity,” with having abandoned the noble cause for which many of America’s best and bravest have already paid the ultimate price.
And it needs be said: The consequences of a U.S. withdrawal today would be far greater than if we had never gone in, or had gone in, knocked over the Taliban, run al-Qaida out of the country, gotten out and gone home.
Instead, we brought NATO in, put tens of thousands of troops in and declared our determination to build an Afghan democracy that would be a model for the Islamic world, where women’s rights were protected.
After inviting the world to observe how the superpower succeeds in taking down a tyranny and creating a democracy, we will have failed, and we will be perceived by the whole world to have failed.
While there was no vital U.S. interest in Afghanistan before we went in, we have invested so much blood, money and prestige that withdrawal now—which would entail a Taliban takeover of Kabul and the Pashtun south and east—would be a strategic debacle unprecedented since the fall of Saigon.
But what if Obama approves McChrystal’s request and puts another 20,000 to 40,000 U.S. troops into the war?
Certainly, that would stave off any defeat. But what is the assurance it would bring enduring victory closer? The Taliban have matched us escalation for escalation and are now militarily stronger than at any time since the Northern Alliance, with U.S. air support, ran them out of Kabul.
About the political consequences of escalation, there is no doubt.
Obama would divide his party and country. His support would steadily sink as the roll call of U.S. dead and wounded inexorably rose. He would watch as the NATO allies moved toward the exit and America was left alone to fight alongside the Afghans in a seemingly endless war.
Consider. If there were no Americans in Afghanistan today, and the Taliban were on the verge of victory, how many of us would demand the dispatch of 68,000 troops to fight to prevent it? Few, if any, one imagines.
What that answer suggests is that the principal reason for fighting on is not that Afghanistan is vital, but that we cannot accept the American defeat and humiliation that withdrawal would mean.
Thus Obama’s dilemma: Accept a longer, bloodier war with little hope of ultimate victory, a decision that could cost him his presidency. Or order a U.S. withdrawal and accept defeat, a decision that could cost him his presidency.
In such situations, presidents often decide not to decide.
Harry Truman could not decide in Korea. LBJ could not decide in Vietnam. Both lost their presidencies. Ike and Nixon came in, cut U.S. losses and got out. The country rewarded both with second terms.
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We should have “an honest debate” on health care, said Barack Obama in his Aug. 22 radio address, “not one dominated by willful misrepresentations and outright distortions.”
Among the “phony claims” made against the House bill, says the president, are that it provides funding for abortions, guarantees coverage for illegal aliens, contains “death panels” and represents a federal takeover of the health care system.
Is Obama right? Are critics misleading and frightening folks with falsehoods about Obamacare?
Well, let us inspect each of those “phony claims.”
Does the House bill fund abortions? No.
However, while the House Energy and Commerce Committee at first voted to exclude abortions from “essential” services, to the howls of NOW, Chairman Henry Waxman conducted a second vote, to drop the anti-abortion amendment. That vote carried.
In short, funding for abortions remains an open question.
And whether Obama agrees to drop it to assure passage, he supports the Freedom of Choice Act that would, opponents insist, overturn every state and federal restriction, including the Hyde Amendment, which forbids federal funding. Obama has already used his authority to lift the Reagan administration prohibition against using foreign aid funds to procure abortions abroad.
Obama is a pro-abortion absolutist. And if abortion-funding is not in the final health care bill, does anyone doubt that Democrats will move swiftly to incorporate it in future legislation?
As for illegal aliens, Obama is right again. They are not covered in any of the five bills. All their children are automatic citizens and are covered, however. And no illegal alien who comes to an emergency room can be denied care. And there is no eligibility verification screening provided for in any of the bills to sort out and exclude illegal aliens.
Obama said in Mexico City he is determined to put our 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens on a “path to citizenship.” That would make them legal immigrants. And legal immigrants are covered.
Moreover, a high percentage of all immigrants, legal and illegal, are poor, uneducated, unskilled and unable to find the kind of jobs that carry health insurance. We have some 40 million immigrants today, with another 100 million expected by 2050.
Any national health insurance system put in place today is going to be swamped if we do not close the borders and halt immigration.
Obama and the Democrats, who are almost all pro-abortion and pro-amnesty, are assuring us their health care bill will not advance these goals to which they are committed by ideology. This is disingenuous at best.
What about the “death panels.” No, they are not in the bill. Nor is there any doctor’s right to perform euthanasia or mercy-killing.
Obama’s resolve to cut health care costs, at the same time he repeatedly reminds us that half of all such costs are incurred in the last six months of life, however, points straight to rationed care for the elderly ill, where drugs, procedures and operations necessary to life are going to be curtailed or cut off. There is no other way to get there.
And if government bureaucrats are making those decisions, can they not fairly be called death panels, especially if the folks for whom they are deciding are suffering from such diseases as senility and Alzheimer’s?
How do you curtail or cut care for the elderly sick and terminally ill without advancing the date of their deaths? Sarah Palin may have been factually incorrect, but her instincts about what is coming were dead-on.
What of Obama’s dismissal as “phony” the claim that the “public option” for health insurance must lead to a government takeover?
But did not Barney Frank say the government option is the best way to a single-payer system—that is, a government monopoly? Barack says he wants competition. But in the past, he, too, has spoken of favoring a single-payer system and he, too, has said a public option is the first step on a 10- or 20-year march to single-payer.
Because Obama has ceased talking of a single-payer system and it is not in the bill does not mean that a public option will not put us on the road to government control.
Indeed, does anyone believe Barack has any objections to government-run universal health care? Does anyone think that a government-run insurance program, with access to tax revenues and the ability to undercut all competition, will not crowd out private insurance and take us to where Barney and Barack want to go?
Both Barney and Barack are pro-abortion and pro-amnesty. Both have spoken favorably of a single-payer system where Uncle Sam shoulders aside the insurance companies that Nancy Pelosi calls the “villains” in the health care system.
As a Fabian socialist, however, Obama will accept a small victory, if the road leads toward ultimate triumph and the alternative is a big defeat.
Thus, what the center-right needs to do is administer to this Fabian socialist a decisive defeat in a big battle—like this one we are in.
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The end of Ted Kennedy’s long sojourn among us, splendidly splashed by the media, opened the renewed discussion of whether it’s time that big government, in the Kennedy mode, came back.
The late senator’s eulogists—in politics and the media, not to mention at the funeral—tended to nod their heads enthusiastically. We needed the big ideas and projects of the senator’s legacy for the sake of justice and the future. It was time to get wealth controlled, poverty vanquished and health care extended to all. The latter we had to do (so West Virginia’s Sen. Robert Byrd assured us) as a memorial to the senator, who made universal health care the cause of causes.
Anyone in the mood for big, costly government is entitled under the First Amendment to talk it up, but they shouldn’t expect automatic rallying around just on account of Ted Kennedy’s election to another realm of existence. For that to happen, we’d have to conclude that big government, in the style laid out for our enthusiastic inspection of the Obama administration, has something to do with solving problems.
In the general understanding, big doesn’t always mean better. It means big. Big, in turn, can mean various things: costly, expensive, gaudy, efficient or powerful. That last one—powerful—is the attribute on which we might focus. How much power do we mean to concede to government, so that it might be beneficial?
The political motif from the Reagan years—running really through the ’90s (”The era of big government is over,” says W. J. Clinton)—was that government was as much hindrance as help. Often enough, government was less help than bother and mess. The Obama supporters want to wrench that formulation around: Make us see government as an undisguised blessing. Is it, though? It depends on what you want government to do. Fight wars? Yes. Regulate interstate commerce? Yes, mostly. Administer justice and contribute to the relief of misery? Yes, yes. Make and sell automobiles. No! No!
Now we work into another mode. Shall government equalize incomes? No! Define meticulously how business may operate? No! Control access to health care? Never! The Declaration of Independence breathes distrust of government. It’s in our DNA.
Americans don’t hate government, unless I’ve missed something. They desire that government should keep its voice down, wipe its shoes and control its diet. This is for substantial reasons. First, big government costs more than we can afford—$9 trillion is now the projected size of the Obama deficit, assuming voters stand by and let Congress enact the full, current Obama agenda. Second, he who pays the piper calls the tune. Big government begins by promising the good life and ends by defining that life. Is there anyone who hasn’t heard Lord Acton on the subject? Power tends to corrupt, and … you know the rest.
The debate over Ted Kennedy’s legacy, with Kennedy’s fine stentorian voice silenced, may be brief. Kennedy made the exercise of government power sound to many like a function of civic duty. “Liberty” wasn’t the senator’s favorite word. You never heard him suggest there was danger in government oversight of our lives. You never heard John F. Kennedy, a moderate Democrat, suggest it either, and certainly not the old buccaneer Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the tribe. The “liberal lion,” who was Ted Kennedy, roared proudly enough, but the generality of Americans don’t like lying down with lions, lest one morning they fail to wake up.
Government in the United States is bigger today than a century ago, bigger than during Reagan’s presidency, and likely to become larger. Its growth in America comes in fits and starts, as well as in proportion to the growth of the population and the economy. The love of government, though, for its own sake—faith in government’s purposes and methods—no lion can sell that stuff. When Americans think of government, they imagine a different beast entirely: large and lumbering, slow-witted and occasionally vengeful. The elephant—naturally.
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