A Mind-Boggling Jobs Bill

There is a powerful op-ed (A Jobs Bill That Boggles the Mind) in the Sept 21 Wall Street Journal by Harvey Golub of the American Enterprise Institute in which he skewers President Obama’s jobs bill, perhaps better known as Stimulus 2. As a foretaste of what’s in store, Golub’s opening paragraph, in which he accuses the Obama administration of promoting antigrowth economic policies, contains the sentence:

He [Obama] apparently has not learned from the failure of his first trillion dollar stimulus package that no amount of government spending will achieve self-sustaining economic growth…”

There are a number of fiery sentences in the article – one of which I will supply momentarily – in which Golub lambasts Obama for economic malfeasance. However, I think the most valuable part of the essay is a specific example in which Golub illustrates the economic illiteracy of Obama and his advisors. Specifically, he points out that Obama’s plan is to allot approximately half of his nearly half-trillion Stimulus 2 package to projects that will aid States and localities. But the president and his henchmen seem to fail to understand that the $1.5 trillion increase in taxes will saddle those states and localities with a bill that exceeds the amount of stimulus largesse that Obama proposes to divert toward them. In short, when the “millionaires” find that the tax savings for municipal bonds is no longer available to them, they will quit buying those bonds unless the localities increase the rates to match what investors can earn in the corporate bond market. The extra interest the localities will have to pay will more than offset the “bonuses” they are to receive from Stimulus 2. The inability to understand simple economic lessons like this is rampant in the administration. Obama and his advisors are hypnotized by their misguided Keynesian tax and monetary policies, and by their blind ideological pursuit of a redistribution of wealth – no matter how badly those policies fly in the face of historical evidence.

By the way, here is one of those fiery passages:

And what exactly are those [antigrowth] policies [of the Obama administration]? First and foremost, the president has promised to raise taxes on the “millionaires”…Meanwhile he’s ignored entitlement reform, retarded the development of our energy resources, and added new layers to our regulatory burden. He’s also increased the uncertainty inherent in an already dysfunctional and perverse tax code, added trillions to our national debt, spent taxpayer money ineffectively and inefficiently, tried to micromanage the economy, and acted as an incompetent venture capitalist by investing in “green jobs” and high-speed rail….From green jobs to “cash for clunkers,” many of us have suspected that economic illiterates were setting the economic policy of this administration. The president’s jobs plan proves the point.
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This post also appeared in The American Thinker at:
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/09/a_mind-boggling_jobs_bill.html

Jimmy and Barack: Why Do We Torment Ourselves?

In a recent article, I placed Presidents Carter and Obama in the pantheon of our worst presidents; and then in a follow-up piece, I considered which of the two was worse. Because it has taken less time than usual for the opinion of history to congeal, Jimmy Carter is already widely acknowledged by historians and pundits to have been one of the most awful chief executives that our country has ever endured. I have absolutely no doubt that history will be equally unkind to the present occupant of the White House. Furthermore, Mr. Obama might break Carter’s speed record for the shortest time between inauguration of his successor and the widespread acknowledgment of his ignominy. Tangentially, Carter has gone on to be the absolute worst former president in our nation’s history. One wonders whether Obama will eclipse him there as well.

One would hope that the US will not similarly afflict itself again for a very long while – especially not in 2012. But if we are to spare ourselves the grief and damage of another wretched President, it behooves us to understand the reasons that the populace was foolish enough to freely select these two disasters.

Carter. A simplistic explanation is encapsulated in two words: Watergate and Vietnam. The American people were disgusted by the former and demoralized by the latter. Nixon’s resignation ameliorated the disgust to some extent, but Ford’s pardon reignited it. Augmenting the people’s dismay was the calamity of Vietnam. Yes, the Paris accords had allowed American troops to be evacuated – in less than glorious fashion. But the people seemed not to blame the subsequent North Vietnamese takeover of the South on the Democrats who cut off aid to the latter. And they forgot that the war was started originally by the Democrats. Their wrath was concentrated upon the Republicans. So, between Watergate and Vietnam, the people were thoroughly fed up with the Republicans and might have elected Mickey Mouse if he had garnered the Democratic nomination.

This explains the Dems’ victory in 1976, but not how the obscure, untested, small-minded and – as we eventually learned – thoroughly inept Jimmy Carter wrested the nomination from a large group of (seemingly) far more qualified candidates. The single word that explains this phenomenon is Washington. The American people were as disgusted with Washington in general as they were with the Republicans in particular. And Carter’s competitors were all Washington insiders. Carter was the fresh face, untainted by Washington politics, a new broom ready and eager to sweep clean the corruption, duplicity and improperly gained and deployed power that people saw as the hallmark of Washington politics. They envisioned Carter bringing forth a new tone of morality, equality and attention paid to the little guy trying to make a buck. How fortuitous for him – but not for the rest of us!

However, as I said, this is the simplistic explanation. There was something far deeper going on here, which I will explain after I supply a simplistic explanation for our latest presidential calamity.

Obama. There are three magic words in this case also. The first two are Iraq and spending. The casualty list in Iraq was a fraction of that in Vietnam, but the Left (and many others) despised Bush for the Iraq war as deeply as their parents had despised Nixon and Johnson for Vietnam. At the same time, there was profound disillusionment on the Right at the profligate spending by Bush and the Republican Congress. These factors combined to energize liberals and demoralize conservatives, and therefore set the stage for a victory by the Dems in 2008 – again, virtually independent of whom they nominated.

So why did an obscure, untested, small-minded and inept candidate get the nod? (That would be Barack Obama, folks – note the use of the same adjectives as in the case of the hapless Jimmy Carter.) Okay, here is the third magic word: Hillary. The Dems had been positioning themselves to nominate Hillary ever since Bill left the Oval Office. There was no one who was going to defeat her in 2008. Thus in some sense, Obama had only one competitor – the rest of the Democratic candidates for the nomination were irrelevant. Through a combination of brilliant strategy by his handlers, a surprisingly incompetent performance by Hillary’s handlers, and the key fact that her negatives (outside liberal bastions like NY) always exceeded her positives, BHO did the unimaginable and took down the Clinton machine.

Obama had something else going for him. This is delicate to discuss, but it seems clear in retrospect that his status as a black man helped – rather than hurt, as many initially expected – him among the electorate. There is no question that a large number of Americans saw the possibility of electing a black man to the presidency as an act of atonement and expiation – one that would settle the debt the country owed to black Americans whom it had oppressed for generations, and one that would finally turn the page on our nation’s sordid history of racial segregation and discrimination. Aided by a complicit media, the people willfully ignored the obvious inadequacies in the man: the nearly total lack of experience, the overwhelmingly left-wing record, his associations with radicals and racists, and his negative attitude toward the country that he sought to lead. He was charming, eloquent, charismatic and talked a great game of post-partisanship, not to mention “hope and change.” And to top it off, the Republicans nominated an old, confused, weak and unappealing opponent. It’s a wonder that the election was as close as it was.

Now to the deeper issue. It is that the fulcrum of the political spectrum in America has shifted so incredibly far to the left over the last 85 years that it has totally skewed the meanings of Left and Right, of Liberal and Conservative. As has been related by myself (see articles (1), (2) or (3), for example) and numerous other authors, the Left has conducted a long march through all branches of the media, the educational establishment (both higher and K-12), the legal profession, unions, libraries, foundations, the government bureaucracy and even the upper echelons of the corporate world. The march has been remarkably successful and the Left has taken control of virtually all the opinion-molding organs of American society. In so doing, it has completely changed the political/cultural/economic frame of reference in the United States. One crucial result is that what is patently leftist/statist/socialist thinking is viewed as mainstream, while traditional/conservative opinions are considered extreme and reactionary, and often racist, sexist, homophobic or xenophobic. To cite another manifestation of this massive change in our political center of gravity, since the election of 1924 – when both candidates were conservative (this is discussed in another article) – the political profile of every Democratic nominee for President has ranged somewhere from hard left to extreme left (except perhaps for JFK) and the profile of every Republican Presidential nominee (with the clear exception of Ronald Reagan) has ranged from squishy centrist to moderately liberal. It is not just in our presidential contests, but in essentially all aspects of American political/cultural life, the battle of ideas is contested between the lines demarcated by extreme left and moderate left – the Right, and certainly the hard Right, is implicitly ruled out of bounds of the American gestalt.

Now consider the selection of a President in this environment. Normal odds guarantee that in either party, a truly unsatisfactory and/or unqualified nominee will emerge on occasion. The Republicans have coughed up a few. To my mind none of Nixon, Dole or McCain should have been seriously considered and the latter two would have been as dreadful as the first had they been elected. But with their inherent advantage – because of the skewed political climate – when the Dems put up a clunker, that candidate is much more likely than a correspondingly woeful Republican to win the election. Thus Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.

Clearly the solution is to shift the aforementioned fulcrum back to geopolitical center. An enormous and existential challenge, to be sure! The country made a halting start in 2010. We shall see whether it can sustain and build on that momentum next fall.
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This post also appeared in The Intellectual Conservative at:

Morally Dubious Israelis on the Big Screen

The new Hollywood thriller, The Debt, is another exercise in one of tinseltown’s favorite themes – moral relativism. In this film, a group of three Israeli agents, infiltrated into East Berlin in the mid 1960s in order to capture a notorious Nazi concentration camp butcher, lie to the world for 30 years about the outcome of their inglorious adventure. Torn by guilt to various degrees (from none to overwhelming), they bask in undeserved glory for a lifetime until, in the mid 1990s, the specter of their horrible secret being revealed leads to a desperate attempt to cover up their moral misbehavior.

The movie is very well done. The acting is superb, the sets are graphic and seemingly authentic, the dialog crisp and the action scenes – at which Hollywood is so expert – are taut and exciting. The seamless weave of past and present is extremely clever. The moral quandary in which the agents find themselves when their extraction plans go awry is starkly drawn, compelling to contemplate and completely believable. Oh there is much in the movie that is not believable: the small size of the Israeli team; the aging Nazi butcher overpowering the female agent even though earlier in the film she is shown outdueling her fellow male agents in hand-to-hand combat; the same Nazi butcher, now 90-something, winning a strenuous knife fight; and the despicable narcissism of one of the male agents – now elderly and crippled – portrayed as an unspecified member of the Israeli cabinet, perhaps even the Prime Minister, plotting to silence the other agents when their moral consciences are about to burst after 30 years.

Overall though, from the point of view of entertainment, the film certainly delivers. What about the message? It is – as is often true of Hollywood exercises in relativism – ambiguous and uncertain. The Nazi butcher is portrayed as inherently evil, but at the same time he expresses concern for his devoted and innocent wife who will be devastated by his disappearance. The female Israeli agent – 30 years later – although increasingly troubled by her lie, is conflicted by the fact that her daughter’s life has been successfully constructed on the basis of that lie. And of course, the agents themselves, confronted by monstrous evil and the opportunity to help heal some of the wounds inflicted by that evil – alas, only at the cost of moral dishonor – spend their lives tormented by what should have been – and still can be – the right choice.

I believe the ultimate message from Hollywood is that there is NO absolute good and evil. It all depends on the circumstances, the quirks of fate and the humanity of the players. In an earlier era, Hollywood presented in the film Exodus the Israeli hero Ari Ben Canaan (Paul Newman) as purely good; as good as Audie Murphy in To Hell and Back or Gary Cooper in High Noon or Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. Hollywood – representative of the American Left – now believes that such portrayals were false and unjust. There are always shades of grey. The ending of The Debt is symbolic as it leaves partially unresolved the final battle between the 50-something former Israeli female agent and the 90-something Nazi. I yearn for the day when it was totally clear who was the good guy and who was the bad guy.
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This post also appeared in The American Thinker at:

I Took a Look at a Book on my Nook

I love books, always have. For most of my life I was a frequent patron of the local library. But some years ago, I started buying the books that I read – mostly from Amazon, but other online sites as well, e.g., the Conservative Book Club. In the last year, however, I have experienced various difficulties in the process: books sent to the wrong address, wrong book sent to the right address, or no book sent at all. Now I am a fairly tech savvy guy: cut my computing teeth on Unix systems in the 80s and 90s, have a laptop, use an iPhone, set up a wireless home environment. So I figured that I would try an e-reader. I bought the Nook instead of the Kindle or iPad because of cost, size and the fact that the Nook is touch-screen (like my iPhone) and the Kindle is not. This week I downloaded my first Nook book, Mark Steyn’s After America: Get Ready for Armageddon.

In his blockbuster predecessor, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, Steyn warned that Western Civilization, as embodied in the ancient countries of Europe, was in its death throes. He speculated about the nature of the world, and especially of our country, when America remained the last outpost of that glorious tradition. In the new book, Steyn says that we needn’t worry about being the last man standing. He argues that in the last decade, and especially since the advent of the Prophet Obama, we have caught up to Europe on the death march and that, unless present trends are sharply and quickly reversed, the US, like the European countries, will soon cease to exist as a free society. Armageddon will be upon the world.

I’m only about a third of the way through the book. It is a fascinating, if exceedingly depressing, read. I recommend it highly. If only the Prophet would read it. But to return to the e-theme of this piece, I want to explore a claim that Steyn makes. To bolster his argument, in fact to demonstrate that the decay of Western Civilization has been going on for a lot longer than we realize, Steyn posits a time traveler from 1890 who makes two stops at 60-year intervals – in 1950 and today. Upon his first stop, the traveler finds that the world has changed far beyond anything he could have conceived in 1890. The automobile and airplane have been invented and are in widespread use. Indoor plumbing is ubiquitous. Radio, TV and movies provide spectacular entertainment. Washing machines, dishwashers and refrigerators transform the meaning of what it means to be a housewife. Miracle drugs like penicillin and insulin have been discovered and previously fatal diseases like diabetes, diphtheria and tuberculosis have been tamed. People routinely communicate across great and small distances by telephone. Homes are both heated and cooled by central systems that seem to require no maintenance. By any measure, the advancements of the 60 year period are spectacular. But, Steyn continues, the traveler gets back in the time machine

And when he dismounts [in 2011] he wonders if he’s made a mistake. Because, aside from a few design adjustments, everything looks pretty much as it did in 1950: the layout of the kitchen, the washer, the telephone…Oh wait. It’s got buttons instead of a dial. And the station wagon in the front yard has dropped the woody look and seems boxier than it did. And the folks getting out seem … larger, and dressed like overgrown children. But other than that, and a few cosmetic changes, he might as well have stayed in 1950.

There is a great deal of truth in Steyn’s analysis. But I think that he underestimates two points and misses a third. The two points are computers and space travel. To be fair, Steyn does acknowledge computing as the one great leap forward in the last 60 years. But he downplays the advance by emphasizing the frivolous and wasteful use of the technology (primarily for individual entertainment) as its main consequence. I think that is unfair as the advent of ubiquitous, high-speed computing has also revolutionized society in countless ways: from manufacturing to sales to advertising, from design of vehicles to military hardware, from social networking to education, not to mention the personal work environment of virtually all Americans.

On the second point, Steyn also acknowledges the phenomenal achievement of sending men to the moon. But then he “proves his point” by remarking that in the last 40 years, we have not followed through on the achievement, much less matched it by any accomplishment in space that is remotely comparable to a moon shot. This illustrates the third point, which he misses – namely, the uneven march of human progress. Human advancement and achievement is not a linear process. Even during the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, the great achievements sometimes came in bunches with fallow periods in between. Are we in a fallow period or are we well along on the irreversible, slippery slope to death and decay? Steyn clearly thinks it is the latter. On the other hand, I have some hope that, even if Europe is doomed, the American people are resilient enough to right the ship.

I cannot deny that Steyn’s arguments are compelling. If he is indeed correct, the US of A is in for some very rough times ahead. Our freedoms will erode, our prosperity will wane and our time in the Sun will conclude after a mere two centuries. The prospect is devastating. But also fascinating – I expect to read all about it on my Nook.
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This article also appeared in The American Thinker at:

The American Train has Jumped the Tracks

Unlike virtually all other countries, the United States of America was founded upon a set of ideas. Its people did not coalesce around a religion, race, ethnic heritage, language or geographical area in order to form itself into a coherent, recognizable nation. Rather the US was constituted by an amazingly astute and prescient group of Founders who created an entity that would maximize individual liberty and endow the people with the greatest chance to have a life of freedom, justice and prosperity. The ideals that undergird this nation, unique in the annals of world history, are enshrined in its founding documents – the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. To be an American is to subscribe to and strive to embody these ideals.

The founding documents laid out the track that Americans were to follow in order to preserve our freedoms, our just society and our unparalleled prosperity. Alas, America has jumped the tracks. It is my purpose here to explain the derailment more concretely and to pose an overarching strategy for returning to the rails.

In fact the tracks have three sets of rails as the American experience is grounded in three fundamental strains, all of which are crucial to the ongoing success of our grand experiment. The strains are political, moral and idealistic.

Political. The Founders established an unprecedented political system that has retained its uniqueness to this day. The Constitution provides for a federal Republic, whose government derives its powers purely from the consent of the people; it is made up of distinct branches with carefully delineated, complementary powers, replete with checks and balances – between the branches and between the national and State governments. The system was designed to establish a national government of VERY limited powers that would maximize individual liberty, establish the rule of law and dispense equal an unbiased justice. Moreover, it was intended to do so in perpetuity.

Moral. By placing the onus for the continued success of the American experiment on the people’s shoulders, not the government’s, the Founders understood that the desired success would depend upon the maintenance of a high moral fabric among the people. The system would only work if the people were generally “good” – meaning that they had a clear understanding of and could distinguish between good and evil, just and unjust, honesty and dishonesty, responsibility and irresponsibility. If the people made the right choices when confronted with moral opposites, the system would work well and the nation would thrive; if not, then corruption, vice and malfeasance would surely follow, with tyranny the ultimate outcome. The people would learn to make the right choices because they were embedded in a society that prized strong families and communities, charity and good works, universal education, a powerful work ethic and the fear of God.

Idealistic. The Founders also understood that they were creating something unique and revolutionary. They expected that their descendants would guard it zealously and hold it up as a beacon for the peoples of the world to emulate. In short the Founders were the first believers in American exceptionalism. They saw the American people as the “new Hebrews,” a people chosen by God to provide, by their example, a light unto the nations in regard to how a just and free society should be organized and governed. Without that type of faith and pride to complement their upstanding morals, the Founders feared that it might prove difficult to sustain the experiment in limited government.

Americans rode those rails for more than a century. But beginning in the so-called Progressive Era a century ago, continuing through the New Deal and the Great Society, and culminating today under the Prophet Obama, the American people have been abandoning these tracks. In all three strains, the train has been diverted onto a route that bears less and less resemblance to the path laid out by the Founders. We might ask:

  1. How and why did this happen?
  2. The loss of which track poses the greatest danger to the Republic?
  3. How can we get back on the rails?

How and why? It didn’t happen by accident. Inspired by ideas imported from Europe, “social reformers” at the turn of the 20th century decided that America’s founding philosophy was flawed. These statist revolutionaries envisioned an America where: fairness trumped liberty; equality of result is more important than equality of opportunity; a benign yet powerful government could achieve more for the health and welfare of the people than individuals could achieve when left to their own devices; change and progress is more important than stability and tradition; order and security outweigh freedom; morals are relative, not absolute. They also argued that there was nothing wonderfully special about a nation that condoned slavery, practiced genocide against its Native inhabitants and imprisoned its own (Japanese-American) citizens in camps.

The progressives and their philosophical offspring, through a relentless assault on many fronts, captured the media, academia, the legal profession, foundations and libraries – indeed, almost all of the opinion-molding organs of American society. The result is a brainwashed electorate that willingly – and unwittingly – aids the progressives in their goal of remaking America into a society that would be anathema to our Founders.

Which track is most important? I warrant that if one queried a progressive in 1905 as to this question, his answer would have been unequivocally #1. He believed that the fundamental political structure of America was wrongly conceived and that it had to be radically altered. He probably felt that going to church was a waste of time and that pride in America was silly; thus he might not focus on the latter two tracks. It was the levers of American governmental power that he sought to control, not the inclinations of the American heart or mind. Alas, to the misfortune of our beloved Republic, there were more astute progressives who understood that the Left could never achieve the political power it sought unless it first undermined the moral and idealistic foundation that made possible the American experiment in freedom and limited government.

The bastards succeeded. Look around. The debauched American culture, the ruptured American family, the President who grovels before and apologizes to world tyrants and miscreants for American misbehavior; all these bear testimony to how far off the second and third rails we have fallen. It is not surprising then that the people are insecure and without confidence, and that they look to government – rather than themselves, their families and communities – for the succor that they seek.

In summary, the first track is the key to controlling society, but the Left realized and acted upon the fact that one had to subvert tracks two and three first in order to achieve their dastardly goal of derailing society from the first track.

Can we recover? This is a grave question with enormous consequences. (For a glimpse into what’s in store if we don’t, the reader might have a look at Mark Steyn’s dire predictions in his brand new book After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. It’s very scary.) In fact, there have been only three previous attempts at recovery in the last century that bear mentioning: Coolidge, Reagan, Gingrich. Coolidge focused almost exclusively on the economy – with great success. But actually, the nature of the nation’s economy is determined as a consequence of the three tracks. As long as America was steady on the rails, it was inconceivable that it would implement any economic system other than free market capitalism – an economy that is most compatible with the tents of the three tracks. Indeed I think that Coolidge had no inkling of the assault on tracks #2 and #3. He probably believed that he and Mellon had undone the damage of the Progressive Era, but he did not appreciate the magnitude of the assault that America faced.

Reagan understood. But he only engaged on tracks #1 & #3. Like Coolidge, he had significant success: restoring America’s pride and military strength, defeating Soviet Communism and jump starting the economy. But, perhaps because he didn’t address #2, and perhaps because too much of the country did not yet understand the extent of the nation’s surrender to the Progressive assault, his successes proved ephemeral. Gingrich was a total flop. He might have understood, but he and his minions were co-opted before they ever got out of the barracks.

The rise of the Tea Party movement shows that a significant portion – albeit still a minority – of the people is coming to understand the nature of the radical assault on America, and what its consequences will be. Is it too late? Can we reverse course – at least on some of the tracks? I believe that the experience of Reagan proves that we can recover only if we counterattack on all three tracks. That’s the overarching strategy promised at the beginning of the article. More concrete details will be presented on another occasion.
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This post also appeared in The Intellectual Conservative at: