Views on the News
January 2, 2010
Views
on the News*
One of the biggest criticisms of Obama during the election
was that he prioritizes political power above the impact on the country, and
his performance seems to confirm this approach. What
we are seeing in Washington is the Democrats telling us on health care, and the
rest of the issues, are that they know what is best, and they are not the
slightest bit interested in what the people think. This is a complete abdication of democracy, or
rule by the people, displaced by a new elitism, or rule by elites, which is a
form of undemocratic authoritarianism. We
can't use phrases like "health care
debate" to discuss what has happened, because there has not been any
such debate. Ditto that for global
warming policy, where the EPA, following the lead of President Obama, insists
on plowing ahead regardless of what the public thinks, or what any dissenting
scientific authorities have to say. Debate
requires a willingness to listen to what others have to say, and to respond
with rational arguments. But Democrats
have refused even to hold hearings on their final health care proposals, which
were not even released to their Congressional colleagues until the last second,
and then rushed to a vote, without even full scoring of their implications. This spectacle is an abuse of office. From the polls, to phone calls and letters to
the Hill, to public protests, all signs indicate overwhelming and exploding
public opposition to the Democrats' government takeover of health care. There is a sense of déjà vu in the Obama
administration’s response to the attempted terrorist attack on Christmas Day. A familiar pattern has emerged how this
administration deals with unexpected problems. The first reaction to any incident is that it
is business as usual and not important enough for the administration to
address. Next White House aides deny
that anything is wrong on their part, so there is no action required. While staying out of the spotlight, the
President conveys his efforts to address the situation and his feelings about
it through administration officials. Then
after a few days, the White House concedes that there is an issue, and perhaps
Obama even steps out to address it. Considering
Obama’s tendency to seek out any and all opportunities for a teleprompter
driven address, his reluctance to address issues as they unfold is perceived as
a sign of weakness. Obama’s aides say
that a measured approach is Obama’s style.
Frequently Obama begins by trying to deflect any blame to the previous
administration and portray the situation as an unfortunate inherited problem
that only he can address adequately. The
most recent is the terrorist incident in Detroit - albeit an unsuccessful one -
makes the stakes much higher, and the White House’s usual approach more
questionable. Obama
has demonstrated that his first reaction to any issue is to try to spin it
politically to his advantage and the national impact is only a secondary
consideration… not the leadership style this country needs!
(“Dealing with unexpected problems the Obama
way” by Carol E. Lee dated December 29, 2009 published by Politico at http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/31021.html
“Washington Knows Best” by Peter Ferrara
dated December 30, 2009 published by The American Spectator at http://spectator.org/archives/2009/12/30/washington-knows-best
)
Obama's
policies are exceedingly unpopular: the public disapproves of the president's
bailouts, stimulus, health care reform, and cap and trade policies, not to
mention his decision to close the terrorist prison at Guantánamo Bay. Such disapproval, however, has led to a
paradox, because Democrats know they likely will suffer an electoral rebuke in
2010, they have moved even more quickly to enact their unwelcome agenda. In their view, 2009 could be the high-water
mark of the “New” New Deal; better
seize the moment. Democrats in Congress,
therefore, have passed major pieces of complex legislation, with significant
effects on the American economy, against public opinion and on party-line
votes. The democrats might as well be
lemmings, marching off a cliff. The
backlash against Obama's partisan liberal agenda has led to some surprising
numbers. The December NBC/Wall Street
Journal poll found the TEA Party movement has a higher approval rating than
either the Democrats or the GOP. A
recent Fox News poll found a majority of respondents preferred "doing nothing" to signing the
Democratic health care bills into law. In
another December survey, Public Policy Polling found that voters prefer Obama
to George W. Bush by only a six-point margin.
Liberals have dismissed these polls, and claim Obama's sagging
popularity has nothing to do with his liberalism. They say unemployment is the sole factor, and
it is a factor, but not the only one. The
rightward shift limited to issues related to the size of government. Public support for labor unions, for instance,
is also at an all-time low. Support for
gun control is declining, and so is support for abortion rights. The share of the public that believes there is
"solid evidence" of climate change has fallen from 70% to 57%. In an earlier survey, released in May, Pew
found that only 49% of Americans are willing to "pay higher prices in order to protect the environment." No wonder those who support putting a price on
carbon are downplaying the environmental angle and emphasizing "energy independence" instead. The story of 2009 was that a young,
attractive, post-partisan Presidential candidate decided to govern as a
partisan liberal. The results have been
declining public support, bad legislation, demoralized lefties, and a resurgent
conservative movement. The gap between
the American people and those who govern them from Washington, D.C., is
widening. It
turns out John Edwards had a point that there really are two Americas: there's
the America of the "expert" schemers, planners, and centralizers
inside the Beltway who think they know what's good for the people, whether the
people like it or not, and there's the America of just about everyone else.
(“The Two Americas” by Matthew Continetti dated January 4, 2010 published by The Weekly Standard
at http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/017/392wacus.asp
)
America is at a critical point in its history at the
confluence of the most leftist President in history, star-struck voters, and
supported by overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress. I do not think it will be easy to delay Obamism.
It is not just that both houses of
Congress are under liberal leadership with ample majorities, with a White House
and captive media egging them on. The
problem is that now the entire engine of the federal government is harnessed in
the most unapologetic way to pushing through a far left agenda. There is no shame, no hesitancy in using the
full powers of the state. Buyer’s
remorse has revealed a clear majority of Americans are opposed to almost
everything Obama has to offer; Congressional representatives know they are
acting against the will of the people, but know too that they are offered all
sorts of borrowed money for their districts to compensate for their unpopular
actions. Meanwhile our charismatic
commander-in-chief believes that he can charm even the angriest of critics, and
that anything he promises (Iran’s deadlines, closing of Guantanamo, new
transparency, no more lobbyists, etc) is meaningless and can be contextualized
by another “let me be perfectly clear”
speech.
I would not count Obama out, but what drives his agenda?
·
Equality of Result: Obama advocates a doctrine where the state can guarantee
equal results through the power of material redistribution. In its most benign form, we know this as
progressivism or communitarianism, a big government,
high tax philosophy that co-exists within democracy. Its more pernicious strains are socialist, in
which the state ensures, through bureaucratic fiat and a labyrinth of laws that
curb free expression, that redistribution is institutionalized. And the virulent form is a murderous
communism, in which any means necessary are justified to ensure the desire ends
and the rule of anointed apparat, doing it all “for the people.”
·
Multiculturalism: A number of contemporary –isms
and –ologies (multiculturalism, moral equivalence, utopian pacifism, post-modernism) also help to explain Obamism, especially in cultural terms. Our universities
subscribe to race/class/gender theory of exploitation, in which much of the
unhappiness of today’s women, of today’s nonwhite, and of today’s poor
originates with the privileges of the white Christian Western male that are
predicated on oppression. So Obama
combines the age-old belief that the state is there to level the playing field
(rather than protect the rights of the individual and secure the safety of the
people from foreign threats), with the postmodern notion that government must
re-compensate those by fiat on the basis on their race or class or gender.
·
The Chicago Way: A third and final ingredient to Obamism is the Chicago Way. Rahm
Emanuel threatens recalcitrant congressmen with reminders of the long Obama
memory. The Axelrod/Jarrett clique ensures that the government channels stimuli
to blue-states, that key Congress people are bought off with tens of millions
of government largess, that every campaign promise is simply cynical fluff that
no sane person would take seriously.
In
short, we have a traditional statist bent on redistribution (Obama’s words),
updated with the postmodern belief that race/class/gender oppressions require
government affirmative reactions (which also abroad explains why we reach out
to enemies and shun allies), all energized by an ends-justify-the-means Chicago
bare-knuckles apparat. The most blatant cynicism in recent American
political history - a man who ran as a bipartisan who is the most partisan
we’ve seen, a healer whose even flippant comments are designed to offend, a
statist who assumes that the sheared sheep cannot stampede somewhere else, a
reformer who trusts his honey-laced rhetoric can disguise Daley
style-corruption. It has taken messianic
narcissistic Barack Obama to expose the full extent of the mess that a once
noble tradition of 19th-century liberalism had devolved into, and a
compliant Congress to help ram it down the throats of the American people, and
when he is done the American people suffer but will eventually rebel against
its toxic policies.
(“Where Did These Guys Come From?” by
Victor Davis Hanson dated December 23, 2009 published by Pajamas Media at http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/where-did-these-guys-come-from/
)
It is clear that the “stimulus”
spending bill was a failure at its stated goal of jumpstarting the economy and
creating private sector jobs, and the only thing that it stimulated was government
spending. Last January, a report by White House economists predicted the $787
billion stimulus would create (not just save) 3.3 million net jobs. Since then,
3.4 million net jobs have been lost, pushing unemployment over 10%. Now the White House concedes that by next
summer the stimulus will be "contributing
little to further growth," and even by the White House's own
standards, the stimulus failed. Stimulus
advocates assert that government spending injects new dollars into the economy,
thereby increasing demand and spurring economic growth. Every dollar Congress "injects" into the economy must
first be taxed or borrowed from the economy. No new income, and therefore no new demand, is
created, since it is merely redistributed from one group of people to another. The government stimulus spending merely
displaced private spending dollar-for-dollar.
In reality, individuals and businesses drive economic and productivity
growth through work, investment, innovation and entrepreneurship. If we are serious about stimulating the
economy, we must unwind some recent errors:
·
Government
ownership of industrial assets is almost a guarantee that the painful decisions
required for international competitiveness will not be made. When it comes to
the auto industry, for instance, we need to take the loss and move on. Similarly, the federal government should
relinquish direct control of banks and insurance companies. Avoiding a
government takeover of health insurance would also help us avoid more unforced
errors.
·
The
financial crisis has demonstrated obvious systemic problems of poor regulation
and under-regulation of some aspects of the financial sector that must be
addressed. As we work to adapt our
regulatory structure to fit the 21st century, we should therefore
adopt a modernized version of a New Deal-era innovation: focus on creating
walls that contain busts, rather than on applying brakes that hold back the
entire system. Our reforms should establish "tiers" of financial activities of increasing risk, volatility,
and complexity that are open to any investor, and somewhere within this framework,
almost any non-coercive transaction should be legally permitted. The tiers
should then be compartmentalized, however, so that a bust in a higher-risk tier
doesn't propagate to lower-risk tiers. While the government should provide
guarantees such as deposit insurance in the low-risk tiers, it should
unsparingly permit failure in the higher-risk tiers.
·
We
should seek to deregulate public schools. We now need a new vision for schools
that looks a lot more like Silicon Valley than Detroit: decentralized, entrepreneurial,
and flexible. We should pursue the
creation of a real marketplace among ever more deregulated publicly financed
schools - a market in which funding follows students, and far broader
discretion is permitted to those who actually teach and manage in our schools.
·
We
should re-conceptualize immigration as recruiting. Assimilating immigrants is a
demonstrated core capability of America's political economy, and it is one we
should take advantage of. A robust-yet-reasonable amount of immigration is
healthy for America. We should think of immigration as an opportunity to
improve our stock of human capital. Always pick talent over skill, since it
would be great for America as a whole to have 500,000 smart, motivated people
move here each year with the intention of becoming citizens.
All these ideas require less government spending, taxes and budget
deficits - not more! The fragile economic recovery we are seeing has occurred
despite, not because of, the government “stimulus”
spending.
(“Failing at bailing” by Brian C. Riedl dated December 28, 2009 published by The Washington
Times at http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/28/failing-at-bailing/
“Keeping America’s Edge” by Jim Manzi dated December 28, 2009 published by National Affairs
at http://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/keeping-americas-edge
)
At this point in the health care discussion, the goal is
simply to pass something / anything to give the Obama administration a
political victory, despite any damage it may do to American health care. Politically, looking impotent is a formula for disaster at election
time. Far better to pass even bad
legislation that will not actually go into effect until after the 2012
presidential election, so that the public will not know whether it makes
medical care better or worse until it is too late for the voters to hold the
administration accountable. The utter
cynicism of this has been apparent from the outset, in the rush to pass a
health care bill in a hurry, in order to meet wholly arbitrary, self-imposed
deadlines:
·
First
it was supposed to be passed before the August 2009 Congressional recess.
·
Then it
was supposed to be passed before Labor Day.
·
When
that didn't happen, it was supposed to be rushed to passage before Christmas.
·
Why -
especially since the legislation would not take effect until years from now?
·
The
only rational explanation for such haste to pass a bill that will be slow to go
into effect is to prevent the public from knowing what is in this massive
legislation that even members of Congress are unlikely to have read.
·
That is
also the only reason that makes sense for postponing the time when ObamaCare goes into action after the next presidential
election.
This legislation is not about the public's health; it is about Obama's ego and his chance to impose his will and leave a legacy. This is not the only massive legislation to be rushed to passage in Congress and then left to go into effect slowly. The same political formula was used earlier, to pass the "stimulus" bill to spend hundreds of billions of dollars that the government doesn't have, and that may well amount to more than a trillion dollars when the interest on the debt it creates is added, for this and the next generation to pay off. Legislation is not the only sign of this administration's contempt for the intelligence of the public and for the safeguards of democratic government. A more fundamental debate is taking place over whether the Democrats’ healthcare overhaul is even constitutional:
·
The Supreme Court has rejected the notion that
the commerce clause allows Congress to regulate non-economic activities such as
health care insurance.
·
There is nothing in the Constitution that allows
the federal government to mandate each American to obtain health insurance or
pay a penalty.
·
The Supreme Court is still wrestling with
abortion but the requirement to subsidize other people’s abortions violates the
First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom.
·
Equal protection is also suspect when some
states are exempted from ObamaCare’s provisions.
·
Finally the current Health Care Reform bills
include un-Constitutional racial set asides in federal financial assistance to
medical schools and programs that serve “under-represented”
groups based on race, sex, religion and sexual orientation.
The States are
threatening to “nullify” the dictatorial mandates of the health legislation as
not applicable in their states. In a sense, this administration is only the end result of a
long social process that includes raising successive generations with dumbed-down education in schools and colleges that have
become indoctrination centers for the visions of the left.
(“Unhealthy Arrogance” by Thomas Sowell
dated December 29, 2009 published by Real Clear Politics at http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/12/29/unhealthy_arrogance_99710.html
“ObamaCare’s Fundamental Flaw” by Gary Bauer dated
January 1, 2009 published by Human Events at http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=35040
“Health Care and Our Unalienable Rights”
by Scott Lazarowitz dated January 2, 2009 published
by American Thinker at http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/01/health_care_and_our_inalienabl.html
)
The
Congressional Budget Office reported that Democrats are double-counting savings
in their so-called "reform"
bill, and has used Ponzi-like accounting to game the
CBO. Gamesmanship begins with
taxes and fees being collected immediately, but benefits would not begin until
2014. Senate Leader Harry Reid’s claims
of deficit reduction are based almost entirely on the money “saved” in Medicare reductions. Those Medicare cuts have yet to be made, and
Congress has routinely refused to do - not just once, but for decades. The deficit reductions are imaginary, but the
huge costs imposed by the bill, taxation of healthcare “Cadillac” plans and many other taxes, are entirely real. The sleight-of-hand, covering about $300
billion over 10 years, means that the Senate bill, even with its massive
up-front tax hikes and delayed “benefits”,
will add about $170 billion to the deficit (and that's accepting the Democrats'
unrealistic assumptions) rather than the initial claim that it will cut $130
billion. In all likelihood, the numbers will be much worse as consumers
and employers change their behavior to avoid costs or get their own free lunch. CBO Director Doug Elmendorf is tired of the
Democrats’ gaming CBO scores for political purposes. Senator Judd Gregg called the Democrats'
claims of savings "Madoff Accounting." Democrats allowed
themselves to be led down a path by Harry Reid to pass a bad bill and, to quote
Dick Armey, “they forgot that when you
make a deal with the devil, you’re the junior partner.”
(“Dems’ Chicago Accounting on Health Care” by
Ross Kaminsky dated December 28, 2009 published by Human
Events at http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=35001
)
President
Obama's mounting misadventures in foreign and security policy are the result of
nearly a year getting it wrong out of inexperience, naiveté, the distraction of
an aggressive domestic agenda and an inflated sense that he can charm our
adversaries into submission. What if we are witnessing the deliberate,
measured implementation of a deeply entrenched ideology? Americans have never elected a "Blame America First" President, and
they did not think they were doing so last November. The key elements of Obama's foreign and
defense policy are the belief that we must "engage" our adversaries and cultivate our allies. Now, there is nothing unusual about the idea
of engaging adversaries, and every American President has done so. The most fruitful and effective engagements
have been those in which diplomacy was conducted from a position of strength
and clear purpose. Nor is it unusual to
cultivate allies; indeed, it would be unusual not to. But Obama's approach to engaging adversaries
has none of the signs of operating from strength. On the contrary, he appears as an anxious
supplicant. In the case of Iran, the
Administration has been practically begging the Iranians to talk while
appeasing them with near indifference to the theft of an election, brutality
against the regime's opponents and continuing support for terrorism. Obama's approach to Moscow smacks of
appeasement, an eagerness to accommodate unreasonable Russian positions made
worse by an exaggerated focus on refurbishing the antique arms control
arrangements of the Cold War while embracing a utopian vision of a world
without nuclear weapons. While we are
busy engaging Moscow in arms control negotiations, Georgia, Ukraine, the Baltic
States and others are increasingly apprehensive that an American President is
oblivious to the danger a resurgent Russia poses to their freedom and
independence. As for working with allies,
Obama seems to think that his popularity with Europeans is not just the
beginning, but the end of the story. He
has managed in his first year to humiliate Gordon Brown, annoy Nicolas Sarkozy, offend Silvio
Berlusconi, and leave Angela Merkel lukewarm, at best. Obama's idea, trumpeted during the campaign,
that he would abandon his predecessor's "unilateralism," retrieve America's standing, and go on to
elicit the allied cooperation that eluded George W. Bush, was naive. As Obama is in the process of discovering,
allied support sometimes requires either abandoning or diluting American
security interests and there will be times when the price of that support is
prohibitive. The President's conceit, that
he can charm adversaries and mobilize allies, has so far proven empty. His belief that an open hand will be seen as
an expression of good will to be reciprocated is simply wrong. Unless it is part of a
larger foreign and defense policy strategy, Obama’s outstretched hand runs the
risk of conveying weakness to both adversaries and allies alike.
(“The Open Hand, Slapped” by Richard Perle dated January 1, 2010 published by http://www.aei.org/article/101469 )
Continued
adherence to a politically correct response to global terrorism will cost
American lives unless we wake up and preemptively plan to prevent these attacks
before they are occur. Homeland
Security Secretary Janet Napolitano spent Monday retracting her Sunday claim
that “the system worked” in the aftermath of Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab’s near
takedown of a jet ferrying nearly 300 people from Amsterdam to Detroit. A lot of people are saying that Abdulmutallab shouldn’t have been allowed to fly at all
since he was on a “watch list”; his
father had, reportedly, spoken to the US authorities in Nigeria about him; he
bought his ticket with cash and took no luggage (both
bad signs). The Fort Hood attack,
the D.C. Five and now the attempted attack on the plane in Detroit all
underscore the clear philosophical difference between the administration and the
last. Secretary Napolitano and the rest
of the Obama administration view their role as law enforcement, preferring the
role of first responders dealing with the aftermath of an attack. Senator Jim DeMint opined that the Christmas
attack proved President Obama’s talk-to-your-enemies approach might actually be
encouraging terrorists. A White House
spokesman says the administration wants to avoid making the national security
and terrorism a partisan issue. But there are other important things that
the Christmas Day incident reminds us about. The first is that successful suicide bombings
are still happening all the time in many different countries across the globe. The second is that there are still sufficient
numbers of Islamist jihadis who persist in trying to attack
non-believers in ever more creative ways.
The third is that real “grievance”
is not a measuring-stick for likelihood of attack, since the only common thread
has been belief in an ideology is perceived to reward terrorism. Fourth even if his actions were “out of character”, he was president of
the University College London Islamic Society that hosted a sequence of
meetings that were a clear and propagandistic attempt to cultivate Muslim anger
against the West. Fifth, Abdulmuttalab’s movements remind us of the interdependence
of our world, and reveal he had no interest whether most of the passengers were
American, Dutch or British. And sixth,
though the Christmas Day bomb could have originated in a number of places, it
is significant that it seems to have been made in Yemen, a failed state that
provided space and time for the training and experimentation needed for a plot
of this kind. In the downtime between
attacks liberals convince themselves that the “it’s all an exaggerated fuss” brigade have won the argument. It is amazing that when
an attack does takes place, we over-react even though
the objective truth hasn’t changed much at all.
(“Even failed terrorists spell serious trouble”
by David Aaronovitch dated December 29, 2009
published by The Times Online at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article6969881.ece
“GOP seizes on terror issue” by Glenn
Thrush and Martin Kady II dated December 29, 2009
published by Politico at http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/31016.html
)
Conservatives
need to insist that the Republicans (GOP) press its opposition to
big-government health care right through the 2010 elections. Months of public outcry at town hall
meetings since the summer, a one-million-man taxpayer march on Washington,
D.C., thousands of local protests and rallies in every city and town across
America, massive petitions, and thousands of calls and faxes have barely made
an impression on the sixty senators who control the destiny of our country. The
sneaking suspicion is that Republicans will make their peace with the Democrats
once the health care bills are reconciled in conference committee and receives
final passage. The argument will go that with government-run health care
a done deal, Republicans have a duty to be constructive, to dedicate themselves
to making the legislation better through amendments and whatever other tweaks
and nudges will "improve"
the measure. Inside every Republican moderate beats the heart not of a
warrior, but a bureaucrat who wishes to refine and manage programs. In 2010, Americans
need Republicans to be warriors for freedom, moderates be damned, or at least
pushed aside. The Democrats want a
fundamental change of the government's relationship with the people - the
socialization and Europeanization of America, with a concomitant loss of
liberties and a restructuring of the nation's economy profound enough to strip
its dynamism. 2009 has taught Republicans
that liberalism is a spent force, philosophically speaking. The left, here and abroad, lost the titanic
struggle for people's hearts and minds in the 20th century. What remains for liberals and their socialist
brethren in Copenhagen and elsewhere to achieve their ends is the dissemination
of lies, hectoring, and bullying. The Democrats do not have public support so
they resort to a legislative coup d'état to achieve landmark legislation.
They will further and more boldly "reinterpret"
the Constitution to permit a greater encroachment on and constriction of
liberty. Conservatives
and TEA Party Americans know better. Health
care is one battlefront, albeit a great one, in that struggle. It falls to conservatives and all Americans
who love liberty to rededicate the United States on the principles of the
founding. It's not good enough anymore
to slow or contain the growth of the national government. It's not enough to blunt intrusions into our
lives and enterprises by insatiable liberals. This new celebration of conservative
values may well be focused and directed by the Republican Party, reprising the
electoral destruction of the Democrats in the 1994 midterms. Democrats
are retooling and reprising their “Party of No” attack on Republicans in Congress
after they unanimously rejected financial reform and health care bills
in votes this month. Republicans should
vocally embrace this description as a party platform as the only
representatives listening to their constituents, since voting No on bad legislation is always better
than voting Yes
on further erosion of our personal freedom and liberty. It is imperative that the state be reclaimed, bad legislation
repealed and rolled back, and government returned to its proper, limited role
and Conservatives must lead the way to rejuvenate the suspect Republican Party.
(“Insist that GOP Make Repeal of
Government-Run Health Care a 2010 Issue” by J. Robert Smith dated December
27, 2009 published by American Thinker at http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/insist_gop_makes_repeal_of_gov.html
“Dems revive ‘Party of No’ attack” by Josh
Gerstein dated December 27, 2009 published by Politico at http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/30983.html
“Reading the Tea Party Leaves” by Michael
Munger dated December 31, 2009 published by Reason
Magazine at http://reason.com/archives/2009/12/31/reading-the-tea-party-leaves
)
* There is so much published each week that unless you search for it, you will miss important breaking news. I try to package the best of this information into my “Views on the News” each Saturday morning. Individual issue updates this week include:
· Elections at http://returntocommonsensesite.com/dp/elections.php
· Homeland Security at http://returntocommonsensesite.com/dp/homelandsecurity.php
David Coughlin
Hawthorne, NY