tomllewis

Bernard Chapin:

Another neo-socialist, Representative Barney Frank, placed love for statism in the proper euphemistic context. He summarized the Byzantine and corrupt practices of the Leviathan with the mundane utterance: “Government is the name we give to the things we choose to do together.”

If you believe that, then you’ll buy that printing money results in economic stimulus. Rep. Frank is wrong, however. Government is the name for the things our elites do to us.

Thomas Sowell:

It is no coincidence that those who imagine themselves so much wiser and nobler than the rest of us should be in the forefront of those who seek to erode Constitutional restrictions on the arbitrary powers of government. How can our betters impose their superior wisdom and virtue on us, when the Constitution gets in the way at every turn, with all its provisions to safeguard a system based on a self-governing people? To get their way, the elites must erode or dismantle the Constitution, bit by bit, in one way or another. What that means is that they must dismantle America.

Wall Street Journal’s Notable & Quotable. – On the inherent unfairness in life.

I want to say something. I know this is not going to go down well among those who have knee-jerk reactions and I know this is not going to go down well among people who have this notion that fairness is the overriding objective of any society. I’ve made the point throughout my career, the undeniable truths of life, many monologues on this program, that life is not fair by definition. Life isn’t fair. I mean, it just isn’t, and there’s no way that you can change certain aspects that make life unfair to make them fair. Life is not equal. Sometimes people earn more than others. Some people have children when other people can’t. There’s nothing unfair about that. That’s just the way it is.

Unspeakable tragedies happen to some families; they don’t happen to others. Some people live a long time; some people don’t. There’s no explaining any of this. Nobody’s in charge of this. There’s no government that can change this . . . the vast majority of things that occur in the process of living life are unequal and unfair.

Victor Davis Hanson:

The wages of atheism and socialism that one sees in a shrinking, entitled, and static Europe so far have not taken over here. When people protest in the United States it is more often about too much federal spending, not too few entitlements, as is true in Europe.

Peter Berkowitz

It is always the task for conservatives to insist that money does not grow on trees, that government programs must be paid for, and that promising unaffordable benefits is reckless, unjust and a long-term threat to maintaining free institutions.

Warner Todd Huston:

As the 3,000 postal workers marched against proposed cuts in the U.S. Post office, tucked at the bottom of the Detroit Free Press piece was a quote by post office employee Kim Sauceda, of Tallevast, Florida.

People have gone from being very confident and sure that this is a lifetime career to now not being so sure.

Victor Davis Hanson: Obama: Not the Great Stone Face.

One might say the public has changed its opinion of Obama, but it seems more likely that the public is beginning to see Obama as it finally did Bush. The hard Right always felt about Obama as the hard Left did about Bush, but now independents seem simply to have rechanneled their Bush anger to Obama anger — something that has bewildered Team Obama, who cannot gain any traction by blaming the current malaise on the Bush legacy. Voters apparently don’t see the corrective to Bush’s deficit budgeting in Obama’s yet higher spending and larger government.

Update: A Rather Angry Man.

Victor Davis Hanson:

We know now there is no shelf life to “Bush Did It”. If unemployment hits 12% two years from now we will be told we are lucky to have Obama saving us from the 20% rate that would have otherwise followed from the Bush legacy. It will be as if in 2006 Bush was still blaming Clinton for eight years of appeasement that led to 9/11. It will never cease; we accept that now. In 1944, FDR was still running on the Hoover depression of 1929. So it shall be again.

Charles Krauthammer:

The Pentagon report on the Fort Hood shooter runs 86 pages with not a single mention of Hasan’s Islamism. It contains such politically correct inanities as “religious fundamentalism alone is not a risk factor.”

Of course it is. Indeed, Islamist fundamentalism is not only a risk factor. It is the risk factor, the common denominator linking all the great terror attacks of this century — from 9/11 to Mumbai, from Fort Hood to Times Square, from London to Madrid to Bali. The attackers were of various national origin, occupation, age, social class, native tongue, and race. The one thing that united them was the jihadist vision in whose name they acted.

Cynthia Tucker (at 5:15) – she seems to always, always and only, to see issues through race:

Michael Steele is a self-aggrandizing, gaffe-prone incompetent who would have been fired a long time ago were he not black. Of course the irony is he never would have been voted in as chairman of the Republican party were he not black.

Kyle Smith:

A leader is perhaps most impressive when he changes minds. NJ Governor Chris Christie may be the nation’s most prominent spokesman for an increasingly potent idea — that public-sector unions are ripping us off.

Shelby Steele:

One of the world’s oldest stories is playing out before our eyes: The Jews are being scapegoated again.

Allan Meltzer:

Two overarching reasons explain the failure of Obamanomics. First, administration economists and their outside supporters neglected the longer-term costs and consequences of their actions. Second, the administration and Congress have through their deeds and words heightened uncertainty about the economic future. High uncertainty is the enemy of investment and growth.

Even when the state tries to steer only part of the economy in the name of the “public good,” the power of the state corrupts those who wield that power. Hayek pointed out that powerful bureaucracies don’t attract angels—they attract people who enjoy running the lives of others. They tend to take care of their friends before taking care of others. And they find increasing that power attractive.

Victor Davis Hanson:

There is a general sense of satisfied accomplishment among European social democrats. They believe that finally a quiet sameness across their continent has replaced two millennia of constant European warring and revolution. Now, everybody seems to get an apartment, small car, state job, good pension and peace — and in exchange, all voice comfortable center-left consensus politics.

But beneath the genteel European Union veneer, few remembered that human nature remains constant and gives not even nice Europeans a pass from its harsh laws.

Europeans forgot that just because they are not looking for war, it doesn’t mean that war might not look for them.

In short, as a reaction to the self-destruction of Europe in World War II and the twin monsters of fascism and communism, Europeans thought they could change human nature itself through the creation of an all-caring, all-wise European Union uber-citizen.

But human-driven history is now roaring back with a fury in Europe — from Mediterranean insolvency, to the threat of radical Islam, to demographic decline, to new international dangers on the horizon.

Only one question remains: At a time when Europe is discovering that its democratic socialism does not work, why in the world is the United States doing its best to copy it?

Jonah Goldberg:

According to USA Today, “paychecks from private business shrank to their smallest share of personal income in U.S. history during the first quarter of this year,” while government benefits rose to a record high. In fact, government employment is becoming a method of redistributing wealth. In 2009, the federal payroll grew and the number of federal jobs paying over $100,000 a year doubled.

New York Times:

In an era of generous municipal salaries and union-friendly overtime rules, it may not come as a complete shock that there are thousands of Metropolitan Transportation Authority employees — 8,074, to be precise — who made $100,000 or more last year.

One of those workers, a Long Island Rail Road conductor who retired in April, made $239,148, about $4,000 more than the authority’s chief financial officer.

Ann Coulter:

The New York Times’ Linda Greenhouse recently compared the Arizona law to Hitler’s policies toward the Jews. You remember how Jews were constantly sneaking across the border into Nazi Germany?

Mark Steyn:

In 1933, Lord Melchett gave an interview to The Palestine Post reporting back on a recent visit to Europe. Among the insights:

It was his impression that anti-semitism in Germany was on the wane, as Hitler was beginning to realize that it was his anti-semitism that was keeping him out of power.

Two weeks after the interview, Hitler was in power. I guess that anti-semitism was waning even faster than Melchett reckoned.

Many of history’s greatest catastrophes arise from not taking people at their word, and, indeed, disbelieving well established patterns of behavior. Lord Melchett would have made a fine Secretary of State, Attorney-General or Director of National Intelligence in the present administration.

Unfortunately none of these are dated, but still, it’s a good sample of my second favorite columnist.

“Appeasement of (Islamic) fundamentalists is not appreciated as magnanimity, but ridiculed as weakness — and, in fact, encourages further killing.”

“The fact is, beneath the hype, Iraqis will soon appreciate American help and idealism far more than French perfidy. It is never wrong to be on the side of freedom — never.”

“This bloody past suggests to us that enemies cease hostilities only when they are battered enough to acknowledge that there is no hope in victory — and thus that further resistance means only useless sacrifice.”

See the rest here: From Self Help Quotes.

Vicor Davis Hanson:

The China Presidency

I have an heirloom china pitcher on my mantle that has dozens of glued cracks—so much so that it is now purely ornamental and will not hold water. When I was a boy I’d ask my mother when, and under what circumstances, did the china crack apart.

She would provide stories about each fissure and mend, many of the break narratives handed down to her from her own grandparents in the house. There wasn’t one single accident, but instead dozens that rendered a once useful pitcher into an non-functional art object.

Something of the same is happening with our President. He is experiencing the sharpest popularity decline in the history of first-year administrations. The problem is not just that he inherited a bad economy; Reagan did too. Or that the war in Afghanistan heats up, since it is not nearly as bad as the mess Nixon inherited in Vietnam.

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Now We Know Why He Passed on the Dalai Lama [Victor Davis Hanson]

I am not a big fan of saying that officials should resign for stupid remarks. But interim White House communications director Anita Dunn’s praise of Mao Zedong as a “political philosopher” is so unhinged and morally repugnant, that she should hang it up, pronto.

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Nemesis Everywhere

The Left and the MSM (is there a difference?) has made much of Rush’s statement last February that he “wanted Obama to fail.”

Naturally you know what he meant – we want his agenda to fail, because we believe that it will lead to failure for America.

In Victor Davis Hanson’s recent article Change And Hope, he writes:

I am not a fan of the Obama agenda. But I am don’t want an impotent Commander in Chief abroad for three very dangerous years to come. So I am worried that the U.S. will be crippled with a weak, unpopular executive, as happened to Bush (35% approvals) in 2007-8. Our currency is tanking. Our debts are climbing. Our energy needs are breaking us. Our borrowing is out of control. The country is divided in a 1859/1968 mode. And the world is smiling as Obama, now hesitant and without the old messianic confidence, presides over our accepted inevitable decline. The country needs to buck up and meet these challenges head on, since the world smells blood, whether in Iran, Russia, the Mideast, North Korea, or South America, and in a mere 9 months of the reset button.

and, in his usual constructive way he lists what needs to be done:

We Should Vote for Anyone . . .

Who offers a coherent systematic agenda of reform. What do most want? Not necessarily a Republican or Democrat, or at this 11^th hour to be mired in messy issues like gay marriage (I’m opposed to it), but rather fundamental matters of finance, investment, and defense. Here are ten random suggestions; dozens more could be adduced.

1)   Fiscal sanity that leads to federal spending freezes and a balanced budget that in turn soon allows a paying down of the debt.

2)   An oil/nuclear/coal/natural gas rapid development effort (again, to exploit especially new fields in Alaska, California, the Gulf, and North Dakota) to tide us over until alternate energy and new conservation lessen dependence. The alternative is to dream on about “green jobs” while we go broke trying to pay for scarcer imported oil, and lose our autonomy in the next price hike or Mideast crisis, even as we suffer amoral rants from oil-rich unhinged thugs like Ahmadinejad, Chavez, Gaddafi, and Putin.

3)   A new national consensus on security to decide that when and if we go to war, to see the effort through, on the principle that whatever the mistakes we commit in battle are far outweighed by the cost of defeat.

4)   A bad/worse choice gut check reform on entitlements, especially concerning those unsustainable like Social Security and Medicare, that calibrates payouts in terms of incoming capital—whether by raising age eligibilities or curbing automatic cost of living hikes.

5)   Clear, demarcated, and enforced national borders, and an end to illegal immigration through greater enforcement, employer sanction, border fortification, and a change in national attitudes about unlawful entry.

6)   Zero tolerance on government corruption. There is no reason why someone like a Charles Rangel is still the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

7)   Tort reform, including limits on personal injury settlements and loser-pays law suit reform.

8)   A renewed commitment to national and regional missile defense, on the expectation that the next two decades are going to be terribly dangerous, as lunatic regimes may well threaten to hold an American city or ally as nuclear hostage.

9)   Federal investment in hard infrastructure projects, not redistributive entitlements or Murtha-like earmarks, such as freeways, dams, water projects, electrical grids, ports, rail, etc., with regional needs adjudicated by national bipartisan boards.

10)       A move to lower taxes, preferably by alternatives to the present income tax system, whether by a consumption tax or flat taxes, calibrated to commensurate spending cuts.

Hanson gives us insight into why it was reasonable for the Japanese to believe it could defeat the U.S. in 1941, and what parallels there are for today and Obama’s actions.

Via Pajamas Media.

War II Thoughts

We can learn a lot about our present dilemmas through looking at the past. This month I’m teaching an intensive class on World War II, and again reminded how history is never really history. One lesson: do not judge past decisions by present considerations or postfacto wisdom from a Western point of view, but understand them given the knowledge and thinking of the times from an enemy perspective.

We ridicule the disastrous Japanese decision to go to war against the American colossus on December 7, 1941. But that correct analysis enjoys the benefit of hindsight, and does not explain why rather intelligent militarists for some reason believed that they could win, or at least within six months of aggrandizement obtain a truce. That they could not, and destroyed their country in the bargain is not the point.  Nor is “fanaticism” a completely adequate exegesis for Pearl Harbor; logic of a sort is.

Why Did Japan Attack (or Rather Why Not?)?

Let us count the ways: 1) The US had not intervened in Europe, despite over two years of seeing Nazi Germany overrun its democratic allies in Western Europe and blitz London. The Japanese were convinced that we simply could not be provoked, or did not have it in us to fight for long under any circumstances;

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The Lamentations of the Elite [Victor Davis Hanson]

Van Jones in his final communiqué says, “On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.” I have not watched the now supposedly infamous Beck exposures, but I am curious what exactly constitutes a “vicious smear campaign.” Did Jones or did not Jones in public and in interviews compare the president of the United States to a crack-cocaine addict, assert that white people are polluting the ghetto, that only white students commit mass murders in the public schools, that Republicans are a**holes, and sign a petition calling for an investigation of the Bush administration’s purported role in causing 9/11?

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Van Jones: Emblematic of the New Frontier

Obama’s Follies:

The Race Card Gets Trumped

I think almost everyone expected that once President Obama embarked on a highly partisan agenda at a time of record deficits in the midst of a recession, he was going to meet resistance. And I think almost everyone likewise expected that when he did, his supporters would cite racism, and angry white males, as the culprits for popular discontent (the most recent attempt at that is by Michael Crowley in the Guardian with the headline: “Barack Obama must beware the rise of the angry white man: Bill Clinton faced the sometime violent fury of middle America’s dispossessed. Now, the same ugly face confronts Barack Obama”).

Three observations:

(1) The Left needs to get its story straight. Most recently, the theme had been that the protesters were well-dressed elites and the upper privileged classes, who selfishly did not wish to imperil their own singular healthcare. Now, apparently, they have morphed into something like the Pennsylvania clingers, with Nazi-like, mob-like, and un-American-like tendencies.
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The endless hypocrisy of the left well forgotten by the MSM:

What is weird about the liberal hysteria to the obstreperous (and occasionally rude) town meetings is the complete amnesia about what constitutes reckless public discourse.

At one time not so long ago, those on the Left, and mainstream Democrats as well, apparently believed inflammatory language, Hitler parallels, and perverse expressions of real hatred were acceptable means to the noble end of discrediting the Bush presidency.

During the bleak days of Iraq, demonstrators carried swastikas and Hitler portraits of Bush habitually. Nicholson Baker wrote a novel in which characters are contemplating killing Bush. Films were praised imagining the assassination of the president. Michael Moore, courted by the Democratic elite, lamented that bin Laden on 9/11 had hit a blue state — and once compared the killers of Americans in Iraq to Minutemen.

Al Gore customarily used excessive language like “brown shirts.” Senators Durbin, Kennedy, and others compared our soldiers to Saddamites, Pol Pot’s killers, and Nazis. Ward Churchill compared the victims in the Twin Tower to “little Eichmanns.” Sen. Robert Byrd likened Pres. George W. Bush’s policies to what transpired in Nazi Germany. Linda Ronstadt, Harold Pinter, Scott Ritter, Ted Rall, and George Soros agreed with Fidel Castro, the Iranians, and North Koreans in comparing Bush to Hitler.

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The Obama Meltdown—Symptoms/Diagnosis/Prognosis

Here’s another example of what makes a great writer.

What is Wisdom?—Sarah Palin and Her Critics

I’ve been looking for articles, written by columnists that I have a good opinion of, on how they analyize “Palin hatred.” As happens so often, VDH has zeroed in on their pathologies.

1) She is oh so unsophisticated. The opposite of Maureen Dowd.

How infuriating to sit here in New York and think that a winking tart could ever be elected, when seasoned sophisticates like Joe Biden and cosmopolitan metrosexuals like Barack Obama, who see it all, might not have been.

2) She wasn’t drawn to “powerful” men. Men who wield real power.

If one were simply to draw up a list of the fiercest female critics of Palin and trace their own lineages, one would discover that they either are married to powerful insiders, dated powerful insiders, or are the daughters of powerful insiders. (some feminists these!) Who do this Wasilla PTA mom and her broken-arm, snow-mobiling wannabe think they are?

3) Way too many children.

Smart women do not get pregnant when it is inconvenient, especially when it interferes with one’s cursus honorum. Palin foolishly had a baby as governor, and waddled around with it the entire time-with other snotty kids in tow (just like those trashy folk at the mall who pile out of the Tahoe, in the way just as you are parking your Volvo)! And worse, in the age of sonograms and abortion, she delivered a mentally-challenged child. And worse still, the mom of five encouraged her daughter to deliver an out-of-wedlock child. (Is it in Oklahoma or Arkansas where moms and daughters have children about the same time?)

4) The Alaskan Clampetts (I loved that one – younger readers – the Clampetts were “real” country hicks in a 60′s TV show called the Beverly Hillbillies)

She shops like she walked out of Wal-Mart. She winks, and gestures as if she’s running a raffle stand at a PTA carnival and flirting with the local State Farm insurance agent. These Palins and their extended family, are, well, like the Clampetts who descend on Beverly Hills. (cf. “Trig”, “Piper” and “Bristol”-the Alaskan equivalents of “Jethro Bodine”, “Jed”, and “Granny”).

5) She just doesn’t have that “LOOK.”

There are looks and then there are looks. Brainless men without taste think Palin is “hot.” And she is in a sort of unsophisticated Carny way. But looks are really defined by an Audrey Hepburn/Jackie O understated grace, a slightly emaciated look with a grimace now and then… And then along comes “It Came From Wasilla”, who excited these Neanderthal males at NASCAR who know nothing of classical understated, real beauty, of real pillow talk.

Victor Davis Hanson is one of the rare writers that I  agree with almost 100% of the time (probably right after Thomas Sowell).

Here’s one of the most insightful quotes I’ve read in some time, from his latest Pajamas “Work and Days” column.

We are being run now by film critics, not directors, book reviewers not writers, music  columnists, not musicians. And it is far easier to fault than to birth, nuance rather than build.

And now god help us with what these non-doers are going to force the rest of us to live with.

Where Are We Going?

Abroad

I think the Europeans, who, remember, caught Obamania quite early, thought they were going to get more of the bipartisan American security shield, albeit with a charismatic multicultural veneer that would resonate with their citizens: no more Texas. No more Christianity. No more twang. No more nuclur. No more Iraq. But same old NATO. Same old bad cop to their good cop. Same old wide open Ami economy. Same old chance for triangulation.  And?

As we are seeing in the Middle East, in the case of Israel, with Turkey, on the recent Iranian upheaval, and during the South America visit, Obama is clearly to the left of Europe. He sees himself more as multicultural prophet born out of the Third World, foe of colonialism, angry at past imperialism, skeptical of capitalism, eager to showcase his non-traditional ancestry and tripartite nomenclature. By coming from the West, but separating himself from the history of his own country, Obama has become a citizen of the world, who polls far higher, as intended, in the Middle East, than does his own country.

At no point does he suggest that the fact his father left Kenya for the U.S. and fathered at least one son who would grow up American rather than Kenyan was a great gift, as we see with the ordeal of many of the Obama half-siblings in Africa. Yes, he talks about change in America, but never tells the world exactly how an America of many races and faiths never descends into the hatred and violence we see most elsewhere in diverse societies. How, after all, does one apologize for success? (”I am sorry we are not killing as in the Balkans; so sad we do not follow the Rwandan model; schucks, no Kurd-Shiite-Sunni troubles here.”)

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The Demise of David Letterman

I had a number of exchanges on the Palin-Letterman controversy (see below). Where to start on David Letterman’s attack on Palin on her visit to New York to do charitable work, accompanied by her 14-year-old daughter Willow?

The hypocrisy of the Left that used to monitor slurs about women’s appearances, sick jokes about statuary rape, demonization of women with charges of promiscuity-all this rightly was taboo? But now silence? (But then no one seemed bothered either by the rather shameless instance of plagiarism on the part of Maureen Dowd, the NY Times columnist, who habitually accuses Cheney/Bush/Rumsfeld of lying and other moral lapses.)

The metrosexual, hip David Letterman offered an apology I think that essentially was something along the following lines. Here’s my paraphrase: ‘Sorry, I confused the 14-year-old Willow Palin with the 18-year-old Bristol Plain, so I was wrong for suggesting the younger Palin girl would be “knocked up” during a baseball game with Alex Rodriguez, or draw in Eliot Spitzer for sex, when I really meant that Bristol certainly would.” (Note the silence about calling Governor Palin “slutty” looking. So if some right-wing nut says that Michelle Obama is “slutty” looking, are we to expect no consequences?)

Misopalinism

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