What price do we pay for entertainment in politics? While my liberal friends cringe with horrified fascination and my conservative friends snicker with glee, the eruption of claws between camps Clinton and Kennedy is indicative of the nefarious, and formerly exclusive, forces of apathy, neglect, and idolatry coalescing into a mighty sword of elitism that will cut through our republic much like it did to that of the mighty Romans. Certainly, my comparison will be mocked by the hubris of the present, but it is clear in more than one glaring warning, that politics and celebrity have overtaken our electoral system. It was not another great empire that erased Rome from the map, but internecine fighting, demigods, aristocrats, and a powerful vacuum filled by the Barbarians who sought Rome's vast wealth.
Though we Americans used to pride ourselves on being the less royally minded, if less sophisticated, yeomanry of political revolution, we now seem peculiarly obsessed with all things celebrity. From reality TV on primetime to questions about the candidates' leisure activities and favorite recipes, we are dangerously close to the outright abolition of traditional party structures. No longer is a candidate worth their salt for having climbed the long hard road of service and experience. Now the obstacle of incumbency and change seems more a matter of face recognition, exorbitant advertising costs, and "q-rating".
As Governor Patterson decides what he must do, and the nation takes sick pleasure in watching the melee, I fear that we are reinforcing a precedent of celebrity over merit, and drama over deliberation.
Dr. Jackson Parr
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Friday, September 5, 2008
Attack on Palin as a Woman
Twice in my political life, I have seen women take the political stage like "Cats" on Broadway. In both cases, politicians, pundits, professors and the people have gotten wholly engaged in a dialogue over the ever-evolving nature of femininity in our society. The first time women came to the forefront, dwarfing nearly every other issue, was during the Clinton presidential years.
During those battles, the nation was not only debating under the auspices of then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton but also was trying to rectify that conversation with the scandals of her husband, President Clinton. Feminists took sides, as did the nation. In the end, the bulk of influential feminists rested in the Clinton camp rather than on the side of the less cosmopolitan and less powerful ladies with whom Mr. Clinton had had relations. The long fight for equality and harassment-free lives was forgotten shortly for quaint and humorous use of the word "peccadilloes."
The second time gender flipped the political stage was this summer. Certainly, Mrs. Clinton took the first steps, but the great crescendo has been with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Once again, the forces of liberalism are turning their backs in the name of political expediency. Time and again, Mrs. Palin has brought out the most visceral reactions, and supporters of Sen. Barack Obama have not resisted the temptation to attack Mrs. Palin as a woman.
While watching the post-Palin-speech shows from the Republican National Convention, I have heard many dangerous words, as any progressive would know: "shrill"; "smug"; "motherly responsibilities"; "dangerous."
CNN host Anderson Cooper highlighted how Mrs. Palin could put in the knife with a great smile on her face. How much like the past are those words, seeing a competent woman as a scheming scoundrel - or dare I say the b-word?
I am astonished that so many women have fought so hard to give up so easily to the wanton blasphemies of an earlier day, a day when a single black mother could not raise a senator or a woman could not make it from the beauty stage to the world's largest stage by her own choice and capability.
JACKSON PARR
The Rearden Institute
of Government
Philadelphia
During those battles, the nation was not only debating under the auspices of then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton but also was trying to rectify that conversation with the scandals of her husband, President Clinton. Feminists took sides, as did the nation. In the end, the bulk of influential feminists rested in the Clinton camp rather than on the side of the less cosmopolitan and less powerful ladies with whom Mr. Clinton had had relations. The long fight for equality and harassment-free lives was forgotten shortly for quaint and humorous use of the word "peccadilloes."
The second time gender flipped the political stage was this summer. Certainly, Mrs. Clinton took the first steps, but the great crescendo has been with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Once again, the forces of liberalism are turning their backs in the name of political expediency. Time and again, Mrs. Palin has brought out the most visceral reactions, and supporters of Sen. Barack Obama have not resisted the temptation to attack Mrs. Palin as a woman.
While watching the post-Palin-speech shows from the Republican National Convention, I have heard many dangerous words, as any progressive would know: "shrill"; "smug"; "motherly responsibilities"; "dangerous."
CNN host Anderson Cooper highlighted how Mrs. Palin could put in the knife with a great smile on her face. How much like the past are those words, seeing a competent woman as a scheming scoundrel - or dare I say the b-word?
I am astonished that so many women have fought so hard to give up so easily to the wanton blasphemies of an earlier day, a day when a single black mother could not raise a senator or a woman could not make it from the beauty stage to the world's largest stage by her own choice and capability.
JACKSON PARR
The Rearden Institute
of Government
Philadelphia
Monday, August 25, 2008
Barack Obama, Shaman
By MICHAEL KNOX BERAN
July 30, 2008
In the patois of punditry, "charismatic" has come to mean little more than "like a rock star." But the striking thing about the charismatic leader is the extent to which his followers regard him as a healer of wounds, an alleviator of pain. In this sense, surely,Sen. Barack Obama is charismatic. The carefully knotted ties and the dark,conservatively tailored suits only accentuate the exoticness of his shamanism; he has entered the American psyche not as a hero but as a healer.
The country, or much of it, has longed for such a figure, a man from the once-oppressed race whose rise to power will atone for the sins of slavery and racial stigmatization. ButMr. Obama's rhetoric encompasses more than a promise of racial healing.
He is not the first politician to argue that politics can redeem us, but in posing as the Adonis who will turn winter into spring, he revives one of the more pernicious political swindles: the belief that a charismatic leader can ordain a civic happy hour and give a people a sense of community that will make them feel less bad.
In his unfinished treatise "Economy and Society," Max Weber defined charisma as "a
certain quality in an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from
ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least
specifically exceptional powers or qualities." Weber was able to do little more, before he died in 1920, than give a pseudo scientific élan to an idea that had been kicking around for centuries. Most of what he said about charismatic authority was stated more cogently in Book III of Aristotle's "Politics," which described the great-souled man who "may truly be deemed a God among men" and who, by virtue of his greatness, is exempt from ordinary laws.
What both Aristotle and Weber made too little of is the mentality of the charismatic
leader's followers, the disciples who discover in him, or delusively endow him with,
superhuman qualities. "Charisma" was originally a religious term signifying a gift of
God: it often denotes (according to the 17th-century scholar-physician John Bulwer) a
"miraculous gift of healing." James G. Frazer, in "The Golden Bough," demonstrated that the connection between charismatic leadership and the melioration of suffering was historically a close one: many primitive peoples believed that the magical virtues of a priest-king could guarantee the soil's fertility and that such a leader could therefore alleviate one of the most elementary forms of suffering, hunger. The identification of leadership with the mitigation of pain persists in folklore and myth. In the Arthurian legends, Percival possesses an extraordinary magic that enables him to heal the fisher king and redeem the waste land; in England, the touch of the monarch's hand was believed to cure scrofula.
It is a sign of growing maturity in a people when, laying aside these beliefs, it
acknowledges that suffering is an element of life that sympathetic magic cannot
eradicate, and recognizes a residue of pain in existence that even the application of
technical knowledge cannot assuage. Advances in knowledge may end particular kinds of
suffering, but these give way to new forms of hurt—milder, perhaps (one would rather be depressed than famished), yet not without their sting. We do not draw closer to a painless world. One of the objects of a mature political philosophy is to reconcile people to the painful limitations of their condition. The American Founders recognized this, as did the English statesmen who presided at the Revolution of 1688: they rejected utopianism. And yet, precisely because they knew that human beings are by nature far from perfect, they allowed a degree of scope, in their constitutional settlements, for the mysterious, quasimagical qualities that Weber associated with charisma—rather as an architect, as a concession to human frailty, might omit the number 13 when labeling the floors of a building. The "magic" of the post-1688 English constitution, Walter Bagehot observed,lay in the pageantry of the monarchy, a relic of the mysterious grace of the healer redeemer chiefs of old.
The American Founders, after experimenting with weaker forms of executive power, created the presidency, an office spacious enough for a charismatic leader to work his wizardry but narrow enough to prevent delusory overreaching. Unlike the English Whigs and the American Founders, the modern liberal regards suffering not as an unavoidable element of life but as an aberration to be corrected by up to-date political, economic, and hygienic arrangements. Rather than acknowledge the limitations of our condition, the liberal continually contrives panaceas that will enable us to transcend it.
Barack Obama, in taking up the part of regenerative healer, is the latest panacea. As a society, Mr. Obama says, we are hurting. Our schools are "crumbling." There are "lines in the emergency rooms" of the hospitals, and our corporate culture is "rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed." He points to the millions of Americans who, in struggling with life's difficulties ("high gas bills,insufficient health insurance and a pension that some bankruptcy court somewhere has rendered unenforceable"), have become bitter and unhappy. Mr. Obama finds a scapegoat for the present discontents in politics—a politics, he argues, that breeds "division, and conflict, and cynicism" and that has become a "dead zone" in which "narrow interests vie for advantage and ideological minorities seek to impose their own versions of absolute truth."
The solution, he says, lies in a political reformation. Unless we "begin the process of changing politics and our civic life," we will bequeath to our children "a weaker and more fractured America" than the one we inherited. Hence his mantra, "Change we can believe in." Like the Nicene Creed, Obama's doctrine begins in belief. Credo. Once we believe in the possibility of a transformative politics, "the perfection begins." The selfish politics of the present yields to the selfless politics of the future. We discover that "this nation is more than the sum of its parts—that out of many, we are truly one." So believing, we can replace a politics that breeds division, conflict and cynicism with a politics that fosters unity and peace. In Mr. Obama's "project of national renewal,"government can become an expression of "our communal values, our sense of mutual responsibility and social solidarity."
Even as Mr. Obama suggests that a new communitarianism can heal America's pain and
change American lives, radically and for the better, he is careful to anticipate the charge of utopian delusion. Government, he tells people, cannot "solve all their problems." But presumably it can solve most of them.
The danger of Mr. Obama's charismatic healer-redeemer fable lies in the hubris it
encourages, the belief that gifted politicians can engender a selfless communitarian
solidarity. Such a renovation of our national life would require not only a change in
constitutional structure—the current system having been geared to conflict by the
Founders, who believed that the clash of private interests helps preserve liberty—but also a change in human nature. Mr. Obama's conviction that it is possible to create a beautiful politics, one in which Americans will selflessly pursue a shared vision of the common good, recalls the belief that Dostoevsky attributed to the 19th-century Russian revolutionists: that, come the revolution, "all men will become righteous in one instant."
The perfection would begin. In rejecting the Anglo-American politics of limits, Obama revives a political tradition that derives ultimately from Niccolò Machiavelli. In the "Discourses on Livy" and "The Art of War," Machiavelli argued that it is possible to create a communitarian republic like the one whose outlines he glimpsed in Livy's (highly romanticized) version of Roman history—a polity in which citizens, forsaking their own swinish pursuits, would become happy in the pursuit of a common good. Wise laws, he maintained, would "make citizens love one another." The virtuous res publica of the Romans could be conjured anew.
To liberate a people from the bondage of pain and establish a new communal order, a
statesman must possess, Machiavelli argued, a kind of charisma he called virtù. He
described the most charismatic statesman with whom he was (personally) acquainted,
Cesare Borgia, in Weberian terms, as one who "exhibits a fortune unheard of, a virtù and confidence [so much] more than human that he can attain all he desires."
Jacob Burckhardt credited the luminaries of the Italian Renaissance with envisioning the state as a work of art. More tragically, they envisioned it as a machinery of redemption. Machiavelli's prince was the first intimation of a modern charismatic type, the demiurge who used a demonic virtù to overcome divisive self-seeking in the name of social solidarity. Self-interest led to market capitalism and alienation; civic selflessness led to public-spirited communitarianism and happiness. The "Machiavellian vocabulary," the historian J.G.A. Pocock argued in "The Machiavellian Moment," became the "vehicle of a basically hostile perception of early modern capitalism." Machiavelli rejected the commercial ethos (predicated on the pursuit of private interest) that the leading Anglo-
American statesmen sought to encourage. In doing so, he anticipated modernity's childish dream of an anodyne world. His communitarian state is the prototype of the workers' paradises of Marx and Lenin and the Nordic Valhallas of Hitler and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. His influence is evident in both the enlightened despot celebrated by the Continental philosophes and the socialist
wizard admired by intellectuals like Edmund Wilson, who hailed Marx as a mix of
"Prometheus and Lucifer," a heroically diabolic figure who could redeem the waste land of modern capitalism, the forerunner of Lenin and Stalin, Castro and Mao. The
Machiavellian ideal of a communitarian paradise haunts, too, the welfare-state
philosophy that Bismarck (for his own cynical reasons) promoted when he established the world's first Wohlfahrtsstaat, a model for socialists in Germany and welfare-state liberals in England and the United States.
In breathing fresh life into Machiavelli's communitarian daydream, Mr. Obama revives a style of charismatic leadership that fell out of favor in the United States after the death of FDR. Of the three presidents since 1945 most often regarded as possessing charismatic qualities, the first, Kennedy, was a tax cutter who questioned liberal utopianism when he said that "life is not fair," and the second, Reagan, sought to curb the hubris of New Deal étatisme. The third, Clinton, said that he could feel our pain but retreated from his pledge
to heal it when he scrapped a plan to nationalize medicine. Mr. Obama, by contrast, is faithful to the old-style charismatics, whose slogans ("social solidarity," for example) he has taken out of cold storage.
Of course, he would not have gotten far had he simply defrosted the ideas of Henry
Wallace and George McGovern. Mr. Obama's charisma is tuned to the mood of the
moment. The charisma of American political leaders has typically rested on images of
unflinching strength and masculine authority: Teddy Roosevelt in the North Dakota
Badlands; Kennedy, the naval hero whose sexual prowess was acknowledged even in his
Secret Service code name ("Lancer"); Reagan, the man on horseback whom the Secret
Service called "Rawhide." Mr. Obama's charisma, by contrast, is closer to what critic
Camille Paglia has identified with today's television talk-show culture, in which
admissions of weakness are offered as proof of empathetic qualities. Talk-show culture is occupied with the question of why we feel so bad, when it is our right under the liberal dispensation to feel eternally good. The man who would succeed in such a culture must appear to sympathize with these obscure hurts; he must take pains, Ms. Paglia writes in "Sexual Personae," to appear an "androgyne, the nurturant male or male mother." Mr. Obama, in gaming this culture, has figured out a new way to bottle old wine. He knows that experience has taught Americans to suspect the masculine healer-redeemer who bears collectivist gifts; no one wants to revive the caudillos of the 1930s.
Studiously avoiding the tough-hombre style of earlier charismatic figures, he phrases his vision in the tranquilizing accents of Oprah-land. His charisma is grounded in empathy rather than authority, confessional candor rather than muscular strength, metrosexual mildness rather than masculine testosterone. His power of sympathetic insight is said to be uncanny: "Everybody who's dealt with him," columnist David Brooks says, "has a story about a time when they felt Obama profoundly listened to them and understood them." His two books are written in the empathetic-confessional mode that his most prominent benefactress, Oprah, favors; he is her political healer in roughly the same way that Dr. Phil was once her pop-psychology one. The collectivist dream, Mr. Obama instinctively understands, is less scary, more sympathetic, when served up by mama (or by mama in drag).
With the triumph of Mr. Obama's post-masculine charisma, the patriarchal collectivism
of the New Deal has finally given way to a new vision of liberal community, the
empathetic mommy-state that Balzac prophesied in "La Comédie humaine." The leader
of the future, Balzac foresaw, would be a man who, like his diabolically charismatic
Jacques Collin, possesses a capacity for maternal love. When his protégé Lucien dies,
Collin exclaims: "This blow has been more than death to me, but you can't understand
what I'm saying. . . . If you're fathers, you're only that and no more. . . . I'm a mother, too!" Collin ends his career as a functionary of the state—and a policeman. The Grand Inquisitor of the future, Balzac intimates, will undertake his inquisitions in the name of matriarchal pity.
Yet if Mr. Obama has made redemptive communitarianism attractive in an age of sagging
sperm counts, he has done nothing to correct the underlying flaw of the collectivist ideal: its incompatibility with the older morality of limits. The politics of consensus that Mr. Obama favors is incompatible with the Founders' adversarial system, which permits those whom he disparages as "ideological minorities" to take stands on principle that, at times, frustrate the national consensus. Mr. Obama makes it clear that there is no place, in the politics he advocates, for those "absolutists" who would defy the community. The "ideological core of today's GOP," he writes, is "absolutism, not conservatism," an absolutism driven by those who prize "absolute truth" over "communal values." This commitment to absolute truth, he argues, stands in the way of a politics that can solve our problems and change our lives. Mr. Obama goes so far as to argue that the Constitution itself is "a rejection of absolute truth." His moral relativism is intimately bound up with his conviction that we can transcend those limitations in human nature that the Founders acknowledged when they drafted the Constitution. This rejection of older moral standards, Machiavelli observed, is a tactical necessity for the charismatic redeemer. It is not simply that adherence to the West's traditional morality would prevent such a leader from being properly ruthless in the pursuit of his ideal; it is that the old morality, with its emphasis on the limits of man's
fallen condition, makes his communitarian paradise seem quixotic—an instance of
utopian overreaching.
Machiavelli was ready with a solution. He helped prepare the way for the politics of
redemptive healing by working to overturn the older morality. In particular, he
undermined the West's most potent myth of diabolic amorality and delusory hubris. Two
years after he completed "The Prince," Machiavelli composed a fable, "Belfagor, or the Devil Who Took a Wife," in which he ridiculed the idea that the devil can take
possession of a man's mind and corrupt those around him. In assuming (correctly) that the diabolic qualities of his redemptive prince would be easier to swallow once the devil himself became a joke, Machiavelli blazed a path that Voltaire, Diderot, Goethe and Shaw afterward trod. No one fears the devil that Voltaire refused to renounce on his deathbed. ("This is no time to be making enemies," he jested.) Goethe's Mephistopheles is charming, as is Shaw's (in "Man and Superman"). Even those characters whom modern European artists have intended to be diabolic (such as Balzac's Collin) arouse sympathy in a way that older devil-characters (Shakespeare's Iago, for example) do not.
Dostoyevsky was among the few who grasped the momentousness of the change that
Machiavelli initiated in the West's conception of diablerie. Near the end of "The Brothers Karamazov," he describes an encounter between the devil and Ivan Karamazov. The devil appears, not with claws and horns, but in the guise of an elegant man of the world: he phrases his mordant taunts in French and laughs at modern intellectuals who believe that he doesn't exist or who worry that to admit his existence would harm their "progressive image." Dostoyevsky implied that it was precisely when the devil became a wit that the intellectual classes of the West succumbed to the most familiar form of diabolic temptation: the belief that men can transcend the limits of their condition and "be as gods"—demiurges with the power to heal the world's pain and reshape it in accordance with a beautiful idea.
Mr. Obama has revived a cruel mirage, but the good news is that the country has defenses against his brand of redemptive politics. Some of these defenses are constitutional, others cultural. The very strength of America's religious ideal of redemption has restrained, though it has not entirely forestalled, the development of alternative secular ideals of redemption. A religiously inspired belief in original sin has made Americans wary of succumbing to the Pelagian notion that a mere mortal, however charismatic, can build the New Jerusalem out of purely secular materials. The country's constitutional system, itself founded on the theory of original sin, has created a perpetual conflict of factions and interests that so far has prevented any single party from imposing a monolithic unity from above, such as Europe's collectivists were able to do.
And then there is Old Nick, the West's traditional symbol of evil, who has retained a
good deal more apotropaic power on these shores than in Europe. A 1991 survey by the
International Social Survey Programme found that 45.4% of Americans believed in the
devil (61%, according to a 2005 Harris poll), compared with 20.4% of Italians, 12.5% of Russians, 9.5% of West Germans, and 3.6% of East Germans. We often read about
differences between America and Europe with respect to belief in God, but differences
with respect to belief in diabolic evil may be even more revealing. It is significant that belief in the devil is lowest in those countries (Russia and Germany) that suffered, during the 20th century, most acutely from forms of evil that might without exaggeration be called diabolic. Europeans, it may be, have proved more susceptible to the element of diabolic temptation in charismatic leadership precisely because they are less likely to believe in the reality of diabolic evil.
Still, it's hard to deny that Mr. Obama has found a weakness in America's defenses. His post-masculine charisma is likely to flourish in a political environment that has come to resemble not only a TV talk show but a TV reality show, in which the candidate rarely escapes the camera's eye. The masculine leader of old had to conceal his weaknesses. "I rather tell thee what is to be feared," Shakespeare has Julius Caesar say, "than what I fear, for always I am Caesar." When scrutiny was less intense, the man on horseback could hope to get away with it. Shakespeare's Cassius laments that the public never knew howweak Caesar really was:
He had a fever when he was in Spain,
And when the fit was on him, I did mark
How he did shake; 'tis true, this god did shake . . .
Today a camera would capture the image of the shaking god. Superman, Norman Mailer
said in his famous essay on Kennedy, can thrive in the supermarket—but in cable TV andYouTube, the Übermensch may finally have met his match.
Meanwhile, the very images of frailty that undermine the masculine leader's pose of
s trength help the practitioner of the new post-masculine charisma, whose object is to appear human—all too human. Softness has become an asset for candidates who have
molded themselves on the exhibitionist model of the Oprah matriarchy.
Hence Mr. Obama's spectacular rise. But Obama-mania is bound in the end to disappoint. Not only does it teach us to despise our political system's wise recognition of human imperfection and the pursuit of private happiness; it encourages us to seek for perfection where we will not find it, in politics, in the hero worship of a charismatic shaman, in the speciousness of a secular millennium. Lacking the moral parables that made our ancestors wary of those delusions in which overweening pride is apt to involve us, we pursue false gods and turn away from traditions that really can help us make sense of ourcondition.
Mr. Beran is a contributing editor of City Journal. His most recent book is "Forge
of Empires 1861-1871: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made."
July 30, 2008
In the patois of punditry, "charismatic" has come to mean little more than "like a rock star." But the striking thing about the charismatic leader is the extent to which his followers regard him as a healer of wounds, an alleviator of pain. In this sense, surely,Sen. Barack Obama is charismatic. The carefully knotted ties and the dark,conservatively tailored suits only accentuate the exoticness of his shamanism; he has entered the American psyche not as a hero but as a healer.
The country, or much of it, has longed for such a figure, a man from the once-oppressed race whose rise to power will atone for the sins of slavery and racial stigmatization. ButMr. Obama's rhetoric encompasses more than a promise of racial healing.
He is not the first politician to argue that politics can redeem us, but in posing as the Adonis who will turn winter into spring, he revives one of the more pernicious political swindles: the belief that a charismatic leader can ordain a civic happy hour and give a people a sense of community that will make them feel less bad.
In his unfinished treatise "Economy and Society," Max Weber defined charisma as "a
certain quality in an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from
ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least
specifically exceptional powers or qualities." Weber was able to do little more, before he died in 1920, than give a pseudo scientific élan to an idea that had been kicking around for centuries. Most of what he said about charismatic authority was stated more cogently in Book III of Aristotle's "Politics," which described the great-souled man who "may truly be deemed a God among men" and who, by virtue of his greatness, is exempt from ordinary laws.
What both Aristotle and Weber made too little of is the mentality of the charismatic
leader's followers, the disciples who discover in him, or delusively endow him with,
superhuman qualities. "Charisma" was originally a religious term signifying a gift of
God: it often denotes (according to the 17th-century scholar-physician John Bulwer) a
"miraculous gift of healing." James G. Frazer, in "The Golden Bough," demonstrated that the connection between charismatic leadership and the melioration of suffering was historically a close one: many primitive peoples believed that the magical virtues of a priest-king could guarantee the soil's fertility and that such a leader could therefore alleviate one of the most elementary forms of suffering, hunger. The identification of leadership with the mitigation of pain persists in folklore and myth. In the Arthurian legends, Percival possesses an extraordinary magic that enables him to heal the fisher king and redeem the waste land; in England, the touch of the monarch's hand was believed to cure scrofula.
It is a sign of growing maturity in a people when, laying aside these beliefs, it
acknowledges that suffering is an element of life that sympathetic magic cannot
eradicate, and recognizes a residue of pain in existence that even the application of
technical knowledge cannot assuage. Advances in knowledge may end particular kinds of
suffering, but these give way to new forms of hurt—milder, perhaps (one would rather be depressed than famished), yet not without their sting. We do not draw closer to a painless world. One of the objects of a mature political philosophy is to reconcile people to the painful limitations of their condition. The American Founders recognized this, as did the English statesmen who presided at the Revolution of 1688: they rejected utopianism. And yet, precisely because they knew that human beings are by nature far from perfect, they allowed a degree of scope, in their constitutional settlements, for the mysterious, quasimagical qualities that Weber associated with charisma—rather as an architect, as a concession to human frailty, might omit the number 13 when labeling the floors of a building. The "magic" of the post-1688 English constitution, Walter Bagehot observed,lay in the pageantry of the monarchy, a relic of the mysterious grace of the healer redeemer chiefs of old.
The American Founders, after experimenting with weaker forms of executive power, created the presidency, an office spacious enough for a charismatic leader to work his wizardry but narrow enough to prevent delusory overreaching. Unlike the English Whigs and the American Founders, the modern liberal regards suffering not as an unavoidable element of life but as an aberration to be corrected by up to-date political, economic, and hygienic arrangements. Rather than acknowledge the limitations of our condition, the liberal continually contrives panaceas that will enable us to transcend it.
Barack Obama, in taking up the part of regenerative healer, is the latest panacea. As a society, Mr. Obama says, we are hurting. Our schools are "crumbling." There are "lines in the emergency rooms" of the hospitals, and our corporate culture is "rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed." He points to the millions of Americans who, in struggling with life's difficulties ("high gas bills,insufficient health insurance and a pension that some bankruptcy court somewhere has rendered unenforceable"), have become bitter and unhappy. Mr. Obama finds a scapegoat for the present discontents in politics—a politics, he argues, that breeds "division, and conflict, and cynicism" and that has become a "dead zone" in which "narrow interests vie for advantage and ideological minorities seek to impose their own versions of absolute truth."
The solution, he says, lies in a political reformation. Unless we "begin the process of changing politics and our civic life," we will bequeath to our children "a weaker and more fractured America" than the one we inherited. Hence his mantra, "Change we can believe in." Like the Nicene Creed, Obama's doctrine begins in belief. Credo. Once we believe in the possibility of a transformative politics, "the perfection begins." The selfish politics of the present yields to the selfless politics of the future. We discover that "this nation is more than the sum of its parts—that out of many, we are truly one." So believing, we can replace a politics that breeds division, conflict and cynicism with a politics that fosters unity and peace. In Mr. Obama's "project of national renewal,"government can become an expression of "our communal values, our sense of mutual responsibility and social solidarity."
Even as Mr. Obama suggests that a new communitarianism can heal America's pain and
change American lives, radically and for the better, he is careful to anticipate the charge of utopian delusion. Government, he tells people, cannot "solve all their problems." But presumably it can solve most of them.
The danger of Mr. Obama's charismatic healer-redeemer fable lies in the hubris it
encourages, the belief that gifted politicians can engender a selfless communitarian
solidarity. Such a renovation of our national life would require not only a change in
constitutional structure—the current system having been geared to conflict by the
Founders, who believed that the clash of private interests helps preserve liberty—but also a change in human nature. Mr. Obama's conviction that it is possible to create a beautiful politics, one in which Americans will selflessly pursue a shared vision of the common good, recalls the belief that Dostoevsky attributed to the 19th-century Russian revolutionists: that, come the revolution, "all men will become righteous in one instant."
The perfection would begin. In rejecting the Anglo-American politics of limits, Obama revives a political tradition that derives ultimately from Niccolò Machiavelli. In the "Discourses on Livy" and "The Art of War," Machiavelli argued that it is possible to create a communitarian republic like the one whose outlines he glimpsed in Livy's (highly romanticized) version of Roman history—a polity in which citizens, forsaking their own swinish pursuits, would become happy in the pursuit of a common good. Wise laws, he maintained, would "make citizens love one another." The virtuous res publica of the Romans could be conjured anew.
To liberate a people from the bondage of pain and establish a new communal order, a
statesman must possess, Machiavelli argued, a kind of charisma he called virtù. He
described the most charismatic statesman with whom he was (personally) acquainted,
Cesare Borgia, in Weberian terms, as one who "exhibits a fortune unheard of, a virtù and confidence [so much] more than human that he can attain all he desires."
Jacob Burckhardt credited the luminaries of the Italian Renaissance with envisioning the state as a work of art. More tragically, they envisioned it as a machinery of redemption. Machiavelli's prince was the first intimation of a modern charismatic type, the demiurge who used a demonic virtù to overcome divisive self-seeking in the name of social solidarity. Self-interest led to market capitalism and alienation; civic selflessness led to public-spirited communitarianism and happiness. The "Machiavellian vocabulary," the historian J.G.A. Pocock argued in "The Machiavellian Moment," became the "vehicle of a basically hostile perception of early modern capitalism." Machiavelli rejected the commercial ethos (predicated on the pursuit of private interest) that the leading Anglo-
American statesmen sought to encourage. In doing so, he anticipated modernity's childish dream of an anodyne world. His communitarian state is the prototype of the workers' paradises of Marx and Lenin and the Nordic Valhallas of Hitler and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. His influence is evident in both the enlightened despot celebrated by the Continental philosophes and the socialist
wizard admired by intellectuals like Edmund Wilson, who hailed Marx as a mix of
"Prometheus and Lucifer," a heroically diabolic figure who could redeem the waste land of modern capitalism, the forerunner of Lenin and Stalin, Castro and Mao. The
Machiavellian ideal of a communitarian paradise haunts, too, the welfare-state
philosophy that Bismarck (for his own cynical reasons) promoted when he established the world's first Wohlfahrtsstaat, a model for socialists in Germany and welfare-state liberals in England and the United States.
In breathing fresh life into Machiavelli's communitarian daydream, Mr. Obama revives a style of charismatic leadership that fell out of favor in the United States after the death of FDR. Of the three presidents since 1945 most often regarded as possessing charismatic qualities, the first, Kennedy, was a tax cutter who questioned liberal utopianism when he said that "life is not fair," and the second, Reagan, sought to curb the hubris of New Deal étatisme. The third, Clinton, said that he could feel our pain but retreated from his pledge
to heal it when he scrapped a plan to nationalize medicine. Mr. Obama, by contrast, is faithful to the old-style charismatics, whose slogans ("social solidarity," for example) he has taken out of cold storage.
Of course, he would not have gotten far had he simply defrosted the ideas of Henry
Wallace and George McGovern. Mr. Obama's charisma is tuned to the mood of the
moment. The charisma of American political leaders has typically rested on images of
unflinching strength and masculine authority: Teddy Roosevelt in the North Dakota
Badlands; Kennedy, the naval hero whose sexual prowess was acknowledged even in his
Secret Service code name ("Lancer"); Reagan, the man on horseback whom the Secret
Service called "Rawhide." Mr. Obama's charisma, by contrast, is closer to what critic
Camille Paglia has identified with today's television talk-show culture, in which
admissions of weakness are offered as proof of empathetic qualities. Talk-show culture is occupied with the question of why we feel so bad, when it is our right under the liberal dispensation to feel eternally good. The man who would succeed in such a culture must appear to sympathize with these obscure hurts; he must take pains, Ms. Paglia writes in "Sexual Personae," to appear an "androgyne, the nurturant male or male mother." Mr. Obama, in gaming this culture, has figured out a new way to bottle old wine. He knows that experience has taught Americans to suspect the masculine healer-redeemer who bears collectivist gifts; no one wants to revive the caudillos of the 1930s.
Studiously avoiding the tough-hombre style of earlier charismatic figures, he phrases his vision in the tranquilizing accents of Oprah-land. His charisma is grounded in empathy rather than authority, confessional candor rather than muscular strength, metrosexual mildness rather than masculine testosterone. His power of sympathetic insight is said to be uncanny: "Everybody who's dealt with him," columnist David Brooks says, "has a story about a time when they felt Obama profoundly listened to them and understood them." His two books are written in the empathetic-confessional mode that his most prominent benefactress, Oprah, favors; he is her political healer in roughly the same way that Dr. Phil was once her pop-psychology one. The collectivist dream, Mr. Obama instinctively understands, is less scary, more sympathetic, when served up by mama (or by mama in drag).
With the triumph of Mr. Obama's post-masculine charisma, the patriarchal collectivism
of the New Deal has finally given way to a new vision of liberal community, the
empathetic mommy-state that Balzac prophesied in "La Comédie humaine." The leader
of the future, Balzac foresaw, would be a man who, like his diabolically charismatic
Jacques Collin, possesses a capacity for maternal love. When his protégé Lucien dies,
Collin exclaims: "This blow has been more than death to me, but you can't understand
what I'm saying. . . . If you're fathers, you're only that and no more. . . . I'm a mother, too!" Collin ends his career as a functionary of the state—and a policeman. The Grand Inquisitor of the future, Balzac intimates, will undertake his inquisitions in the name of matriarchal pity.
Yet if Mr. Obama has made redemptive communitarianism attractive in an age of sagging
sperm counts, he has done nothing to correct the underlying flaw of the collectivist ideal: its incompatibility with the older morality of limits. The politics of consensus that Mr. Obama favors is incompatible with the Founders' adversarial system, which permits those whom he disparages as "ideological minorities" to take stands on principle that, at times, frustrate the national consensus. Mr. Obama makes it clear that there is no place, in the politics he advocates, for those "absolutists" who would defy the community. The "ideological core of today's GOP," he writes, is "absolutism, not conservatism," an absolutism driven by those who prize "absolute truth" over "communal values." This commitment to absolute truth, he argues, stands in the way of a politics that can solve our problems and change our lives. Mr. Obama goes so far as to argue that the Constitution itself is "a rejection of absolute truth." His moral relativism is intimately bound up with his conviction that we can transcend those limitations in human nature that the Founders acknowledged when they drafted the Constitution. This rejection of older moral standards, Machiavelli observed, is a tactical necessity for the charismatic redeemer. It is not simply that adherence to the West's traditional morality would prevent such a leader from being properly ruthless in the pursuit of his ideal; it is that the old morality, with its emphasis on the limits of man's
fallen condition, makes his communitarian paradise seem quixotic—an instance of
utopian overreaching.
Machiavelli was ready with a solution. He helped prepare the way for the politics of
redemptive healing by working to overturn the older morality. In particular, he
undermined the West's most potent myth of diabolic amorality and delusory hubris. Two
years after he completed "The Prince," Machiavelli composed a fable, "Belfagor, or the Devil Who Took a Wife," in which he ridiculed the idea that the devil can take
possession of a man's mind and corrupt those around him. In assuming (correctly) that the diabolic qualities of his redemptive prince would be easier to swallow once the devil himself became a joke, Machiavelli blazed a path that Voltaire, Diderot, Goethe and Shaw afterward trod. No one fears the devil that Voltaire refused to renounce on his deathbed. ("This is no time to be making enemies," he jested.) Goethe's Mephistopheles is charming, as is Shaw's (in "Man and Superman"). Even those characters whom modern European artists have intended to be diabolic (such as Balzac's Collin) arouse sympathy in a way that older devil-characters (Shakespeare's Iago, for example) do not.
Dostoyevsky was among the few who grasped the momentousness of the change that
Machiavelli initiated in the West's conception of diablerie. Near the end of "The Brothers Karamazov," he describes an encounter between the devil and Ivan Karamazov. The devil appears, not with claws and horns, but in the guise of an elegant man of the world: he phrases his mordant taunts in French and laughs at modern intellectuals who believe that he doesn't exist or who worry that to admit his existence would harm their "progressive image." Dostoyevsky implied that it was precisely when the devil became a wit that the intellectual classes of the West succumbed to the most familiar form of diabolic temptation: the belief that men can transcend the limits of their condition and "be as gods"—demiurges with the power to heal the world's pain and reshape it in accordance with a beautiful idea.
Mr. Obama has revived a cruel mirage, but the good news is that the country has defenses against his brand of redemptive politics. Some of these defenses are constitutional, others cultural. The very strength of America's religious ideal of redemption has restrained, though it has not entirely forestalled, the development of alternative secular ideals of redemption. A religiously inspired belief in original sin has made Americans wary of succumbing to the Pelagian notion that a mere mortal, however charismatic, can build the New Jerusalem out of purely secular materials. The country's constitutional system, itself founded on the theory of original sin, has created a perpetual conflict of factions and interests that so far has prevented any single party from imposing a monolithic unity from above, such as Europe's collectivists were able to do.
And then there is Old Nick, the West's traditional symbol of evil, who has retained a
good deal more apotropaic power on these shores than in Europe. A 1991 survey by the
International Social Survey Programme found that 45.4% of Americans believed in the
devil (61%, according to a 2005 Harris poll), compared with 20.4% of Italians, 12.5% of Russians, 9.5% of West Germans, and 3.6% of East Germans. We often read about
differences between America and Europe with respect to belief in God, but differences
with respect to belief in diabolic evil may be even more revealing. It is significant that belief in the devil is lowest in those countries (Russia and Germany) that suffered, during the 20th century, most acutely from forms of evil that might without exaggeration be called diabolic. Europeans, it may be, have proved more susceptible to the element of diabolic temptation in charismatic leadership precisely because they are less likely to believe in the reality of diabolic evil.
Still, it's hard to deny that Mr. Obama has found a weakness in America's defenses. His post-masculine charisma is likely to flourish in a political environment that has come to resemble not only a TV talk show but a TV reality show, in which the candidate rarely escapes the camera's eye. The masculine leader of old had to conceal his weaknesses. "I rather tell thee what is to be feared," Shakespeare has Julius Caesar say, "than what I fear, for always I am Caesar." When scrutiny was less intense, the man on horseback could hope to get away with it. Shakespeare's Cassius laments that the public never knew howweak Caesar really was:
He had a fever when he was in Spain,
And when the fit was on him, I did mark
How he did shake; 'tis true, this god did shake . . .
Today a camera would capture the image of the shaking god. Superman, Norman Mailer
said in his famous essay on Kennedy, can thrive in the supermarket—but in cable TV andYouTube, the Übermensch may finally have met his match.
Meanwhile, the very images of frailty that undermine the masculine leader's pose of
s trength help the practitioner of the new post-masculine charisma, whose object is to appear human—all too human. Softness has become an asset for candidates who have
molded themselves on the exhibitionist model of the Oprah matriarchy.
Hence Mr. Obama's spectacular rise. But Obama-mania is bound in the end to disappoint. Not only does it teach us to despise our political system's wise recognition of human imperfection and the pursuit of private happiness; it encourages us to seek for perfection where we will not find it, in politics, in the hero worship of a charismatic shaman, in the speciousness of a secular millennium. Lacking the moral parables that made our ancestors wary of those delusions in which overweening pride is apt to involve us, we pursue false gods and turn away from traditions that really can help us make sense of ourcondition.
Mr. Beran is a contributing editor of City Journal. His most recent book is "Forge
of Empires 1861-1871: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made."
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Publication:The Oklahoman; Date:Aug 20, 2008;
Veepstakes
Lots of buzz, limited impact
PERHAPS as early as today, Barack Obama’s biggest fans will get a text message or an e-mail telling them who the Democratic presidential nominee has selected as his running mate. The nation is electric with expectation.
OK, maybe electric isn’t the right word. While the crowd inside Washington’s Beltway is pretty charged up, the most that probably can be said about the rest of us is we’re mildly curious.
Every presidential year, political scientists and media pundits stress that the No. 2 person on the ticket has little impact on Americans’ choice for president. People vote the top of the ballot.
Historical evidence abounds. Attempts to win key states by tabbing a favorite son for vice president frequently fall flat. In 2004, John Edwards failed to deliver his state, North Carolina, for Democrat John Kerry. In 1988, Lloyd Bentsen couldn’t win Texas for Democrat Michael Dukakis.
Even a poor selection usually doesn’t matter. George H.W. Bush’s choice of Dan Quayle didn’t lose the ’88 election. Others were instantly forgettable.
Even so, a lot of oxygen is being consumed by people talking about who Obama will pick, as well as John McCain later this month.
Many think Obama will choose someone older with foreign policy expertise to balance his relative youth and thin international resume. If that’s Obama’s thinking, then Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware could get the call.
Yet such a move could backfire if voters see it as indicating Obama thinks he’s too young and lacks worldly knowledge. Same for McCain; choosing someone years his junior could tell voters the nominee thinks he has an age problem.
Soon we’ll be able to exhale, and after a blip of attention over the Veepstakes, voters will do as they usually do — return their focus to the men who would be president.
Veepstakes
Lots of buzz, limited impact
PERHAPS as early as today, Barack Obama’s biggest fans will get a text message or an e-mail telling them who the Democratic presidential nominee has selected as his running mate. The nation is electric with expectation.
OK, maybe electric isn’t the right word. While the crowd inside Washington’s Beltway is pretty charged up, the most that probably can be said about the rest of us is we’re mildly curious.
Every presidential year, political scientists and media pundits stress that the No. 2 person on the ticket has little impact on Americans’ choice for president. People vote the top of the ballot.
Historical evidence abounds. Attempts to win key states by tabbing a favorite son for vice president frequently fall flat. In 2004, John Edwards failed to deliver his state, North Carolina, for Democrat John Kerry. In 1988, Lloyd Bentsen couldn’t win Texas for Democrat Michael Dukakis.
Even a poor selection usually doesn’t matter. George H.W. Bush’s choice of Dan Quayle didn’t lose the ’88 election. Others were instantly forgettable.
Even so, a lot of oxygen is being consumed by people talking about who Obama will pick, as well as John McCain later this month.
Many think Obama will choose someone older with foreign policy expertise to balance his relative youth and thin international resume. If that’s Obama’s thinking, then Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware could get the call.
Yet such a move could backfire if voters see it as indicating Obama thinks he’s too young and lacks worldly knowledge. Same for McCain; choosing someone years his junior could tell voters the nominee thinks he has an age problem.
Soon we’ll be able to exhale, and after a blip of attention over the Veepstakes, voters will do as they usually do — return their focus to the men who would be president.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Mind Made Up
Iraq facts can’t sway Obama
TRY to imagine the conversation between Gen. David Petraeus, U.S. ground commander in Iraq, and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama when they meet in Baghdad this summer.
Obama plans some fact finding when he visits the combat zone. Why bother? This week Obama said he’ll withdraw U.S. troops within 16 months, apparently with little regard for conditions on the ground or Petraeus’ best military judgment. The puzzling sequence has a “Ready, fire, aim” quality to it.
Obama was adamant Tuesday — he can’t have MoveOn.org thinking he’s going back on promises to pull the troops out. No, he hasn’t been persuaded by the successes of last year’s troop surge, al-Qaida’s blunders and the Iraqis’ growing social and political confidence. “I will give our military a new mission my first day in office — ending this war,” Obama said.
His mind is made up. America must retreat from Iraq. And in response Gen. Petraeus is supposed to say what, exactly?
Maybe he’ll explain to the young senator that the war hasn’t been a “distraction,” as Obama puts it, and that even if the candidate doesn’t believe it, al-Qaida certainly has deemed Iraq the central front in the war with the United States. Maybe he’ll tell Obama, gingerly, that he’s wrong to create defeat where victory is so near.
Obama has been wrong about recent Iraq strategy — that the troop surge would fail and make things worse, that America must quit Iraq for Iraq’s leaders to get their act together. Now he’s wrong to set himself in concrete on withdrawal before talking to Petraeus.
“To say you’re going to get out on a certain schedule — regardless of what the Iraqis do, regardless of what our enemies do, regardless of what is happening on the ground — is the height of absurdity,” liberal Brookings Institute military expert Michael O’Hanlon told The Washington Post. Absurd indeed.
TRY to imagine the conversation between Gen. David Petraeus, U.S. ground commander in Iraq, and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama when they meet in Baghdad this summer.
Obama plans some fact finding when he visits the combat zone. Why bother? This week Obama said he’ll withdraw U.S. troops within 16 months, apparently with little regard for conditions on the ground or Petraeus’ best military judgment. The puzzling sequence has a “Ready, fire, aim” quality to it.
Obama was adamant Tuesday — he can’t have MoveOn.org thinking he’s going back on promises to pull the troops out. No, he hasn’t been persuaded by the successes of last year’s troop surge, al-Qaida’s blunders and the Iraqis’ growing social and political confidence. “I will give our military a new mission my first day in office — ending this war,” Obama said.
His mind is made up. America must retreat from Iraq. And in response Gen. Petraeus is supposed to say what, exactly?
Maybe he’ll explain to the young senator that the war hasn’t been a “distraction,” as Obama puts it, and that even if the candidate doesn’t believe it, al-Qaida certainly has deemed Iraq the central front in the war with the United States. Maybe he’ll tell Obama, gingerly, that he’s wrong to create defeat where victory is so near.
Obama has been wrong about recent Iraq strategy — that the troop surge would fail and make things worse, that America must quit Iraq for Iraq’s leaders to get their act together. Now he’s wrong to set himself in concrete on withdrawal before talking to Petraeus.
“To say you’re going to get out on a certain schedule — regardless of what the Iraqis do, regardless of what our enemies do, regardless of what is happening on the ground — is the height of absurdity,” liberal Brookings Institute military expert Michael O’Hanlon told The Washington Post. Absurd indeed.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Extremes
When the political extremes agree, danger lies ahead. Today the two extremes agree on two issues: they are against American military intervention and they are in favor of not only limiting free trade agreements, but even re-negotiating some existing agreements in order to limit their scope.
There has traditionally been a suspicion of trade. This was the appeal of Ross Perot in 1992. Today the trade issue on the left is concerned with the appeasement of labor unions, a diminishing but still powerful force in the Democrat Party.
Anti-war sentiment is a staple of the left’s ideology. The unpopularity of the war in Iraq has also riled up many on the right. Most importantly, the left will again use this sentiment as their avenue to overwhelming power and there are those on the right who ware aiding in this effort.
Pat Buchanan has just published a book that declares WWII a mistake and an unnecessary war. His thesis is that Britain lost their empire and the west lost the war. But, had America not intervened the British would have lost their country. And, though Europe would probably have been united as today, it would not have been an open democratic society. On June 26, 1948 the Berlin Airlift began as America intervened with massive economic aid in order to stop the communists from taking advantage of war torn Europe. It is beyond imagination to conceive what the world would be like without American power during this time.
This is also what the far left said about Vietnam and now says about Iraq. In 1996
leftist and Vietnam protester Michael Lind wrote Vietnam the Necessary War in which he looked back at the causes of the war and concluded that it had to be fought in the context of the Cold War. (He is currently
demonstrating against the war in Iraq—he
apparently does not learn his own lessons.)
If the political extremes are successful in electing Obama, the whole country loses.
The power of the Presidency will be greatly curtailed as who in the future would risk such opprobrium and punishment. The defense of the nation will be seen as too great an undertaking and for sure America’s enemies will understand and take advantage of this situation. Most of all truth as an objective entity will succumb to situational veracity, because in order to make the case they must convince voters that George W. Bush lied his way to war, Dick Cheney really is Darth Vadar, that John McCain wants to stay in Iraq 100 years, and that a McCain administration would be nothing more than a Bush third term. In truth, none of that is true, but the left is counting on lies told often enough becoming the truth.
Peter Schweizer wrote in the DC Examiner an article titled “Conservatives more honest than liberals?” in which he quotes the 60’s Chicago leftist, Saul Alinsky, who both Hillary R. Clinton and Barak H. Obama cite as a principle influence on their lives and their politics. (Alinsky was the subject of Hillary’s famous college thesis.) Alinsky said about truth and effective politicians, “...[he] doesn’t have a fixed truth; truth to him is relative and changing. He is the political relativist.” Situational ethics and relative truth essentially means there is no objective truth; truth is what you need to reach your goal or the ends justify the means. It isn’t just that “you can’t handle the truth,” it is that truth in the traditional sense does not exist. The latest effort from the right is Scott Mc McClellan's hit piece on the administration. It gives impetus to those with “Impeach Him” signs in their yards and to readers of Vincent Bugliosi’s latest book The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. This is not only extreme, it is dangerous
There has traditionally been a suspicion of trade. This was the appeal of Ross Perot in 1992. Today the trade issue on the left is concerned with the appeasement of labor unions, a diminishing but still powerful force in the Democrat Party.
Anti-war sentiment is a staple of the left’s ideology. The unpopularity of the war in Iraq has also riled up many on the right. Most importantly, the left will again use this sentiment as their avenue to overwhelming power and there are those on the right who ware aiding in this effort.
Pat Buchanan has just published a book that declares WWII a mistake and an unnecessary war. His thesis is that Britain lost their empire and the west lost the war. But, had America not intervened the British would have lost their country. And, though Europe would probably have been united as today, it would not have been an open democratic society. On June 26, 1948 the Berlin Airlift began as America intervened with massive economic aid in order to stop the communists from taking advantage of war torn Europe. It is beyond imagination to conceive what the world would be like without American power during this time.
This is also what the far left said about Vietnam and now says about Iraq. In 1996
leftist and Vietnam protester Michael Lind wrote Vietnam the Necessary War in which he looked back at the causes of the war and concluded that it had to be fought in the context of the Cold War. (He is currently
demonstrating against the war in Iraq—he
apparently does not learn his own lessons.)
If the political extremes are successful in electing Obama, the whole country loses.
The power of the Presidency will be greatly curtailed as who in the future would risk such opprobrium and punishment. The defense of the nation will be seen as too great an undertaking and for sure America’s enemies will understand and take advantage of this situation. Most of all truth as an objective entity will succumb to situational veracity, because in order to make the case they must convince voters that George W. Bush lied his way to war, Dick Cheney really is Darth Vadar, that John McCain wants to stay in Iraq 100 years, and that a McCain administration would be nothing more than a Bush third term. In truth, none of that is true, but the left is counting on lies told often enough becoming the truth.
Peter Schweizer wrote in the DC Examiner an article titled “Conservatives more honest than liberals?” in which he quotes the 60’s Chicago leftist, Saul Alinsky, who both Hillary R. Clinton and Barak H. Obama cite as a principle influence on their lives and their politics. (Alinsky was the subject of Hillary’s famous college thesis.) Alinsky said about truth and effective politicians, “...[he] doesn’t have a fixed truth; truth to him is relative and changing. He is the political relativist.” Situational ethics and relative truth essentially means there is no objective truth; truth is what you need to reach your goal or the ends justify the means. It isn’t just that “you can’t handle the truth,” it is that truth in the traditional sense does not exist. The latest effort from the right is Scott Mc McClellan's hit piece on the administration. It gives impetus to those with “Impeach Him” signs in their yards and to readers of Vincent Bugliosi’s latest book The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. This is not only extreme, it is dangerous
Monday, April 28, 2008
Wright's Philosphy is Obama's philosophy
I don't know why everyone-Joan Walsh at salon.com and John McCain and everyone first has to add the disclaimer that they do not believe Obama shares the view poiint of his pastor and mentor-the man who brought him to Jesus. Of course he does or he would not have stayed 20 years nor would he expose his children to such bigotry, hatred, anit-Americanism and down right lies. Do you think he takes his daughters to church and the goes home and says the Reverend was wrong. Obama is to practical a man to give himself that much trouble at home. When asked about Tony Rezko Obama said that he had no idea about Mr. Rezko's activities otherwise he would not have associated with him- that's almost the same answer he gave about Wright. So-he's not only in tune with those two, but also with the unrepentent terrorist Bill Ayres. If he did not reputdiate them we cannot have him and therefore them in the White House-for those who have regretted the image of the country in the world-give that some thought. If he did not know about any of the three-then he's just not smart enough to be a Senator let alone a President.
-- meadow18
[Read meadow18's
-- meadow18
[Read meadow18's
Friday, March 14, 2008
The Company You Keep
Mama always told me choose your friends wisely because you're known by the company you keep. We should begin to look at the Presidential candidates in these terms in order to anticipate who could be staffing their government and who would be reflecting the rest of us in the White House and representing America to the rest of the world. The following are some quotes from a sermon delivererd at Howard University on January 15, 2006 by Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., the spiritual advisor and pastor of candidate Barak Obama.
"We've got more black men in prison than there are in college...Racism is alive and well. Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run. No black man will ever be considered for president, no matter how hard you run Jesse [Jackson] and no black woman can ever be considered for anything outside what she can give with her body."
Mr. Obama has also used the statement about black men in prison-it is incorrect. The statement about black women is insulting, racisr, sexist, and ignores all the accomplished black women beginning with Condoleeza Rise.,
"America is still the No. 1 killer in the world. . . . We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns, and the training of professional killers . . . We bombed Cambodia, Iraq and Nicaragua, killing women and children while trying to get public opinion turned against Castro and Ghadhafi . . . We put [Nelson] Mandela in prison and supported apartheid the whole 27 years he was there. We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God."
Among ther things, this ignores the U.S. economic boycott of apartheid South Africa that eventually freed Mandella.
"We supported Zionism shamelessly while ignoring the Palestinians and branding anybody who spoke out against it as being anti-Semitic. . . . We care nothing about human life if the end justifies the means. . . ."
"We started the AIDS virus . . . We are only able to maintain our level of living by making sure that Third World people live in grinding poverty. . . ."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120545277093135111.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries
This man has been Obama's preacher for more than 20 years. He married Barak and Michelle and baptized their children. We have seen his views reflected in the attitude toward America of Michelle Obama and it simply cannot be that the Senator does not share them as well. You can read similar views on any radical Islamist web site and Osama couldn't have said it better.
"We've got more black men in prison than there are in college...Racism is alive and well. Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run. No black man will ever be considered for president, no matter how hard you run Jesse [Jackson] and no black woman can ever be considered for anything outside what she can give with her body."
Mr. Obama has also used the statement about black men in prison-it is incorrect. The statement about black women is insulting, racisr, sexist, and ignores all the accomplished black women beginning with Condoleeza Rise.,
"America is still the No. 1 killer in the world. . . . We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns, and the training of professional killers . . . We bombed Cambodia, Iraq and Nicaragua, killing women and children while trying to get public opinion turned against Castro and Ghadhafi . . . We put [Nelson] Mandela in prison and supported apartheid the whole 27 years he was there. We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God."
Among ther things, this ignores the U.S. economic boycott of apartheid South Africa that eventually freed Mandella.
"We supported Zionism shamelessly while ignoring the Palestinians and branding anybody who spoke out against it as being anti-Semitic. . . . We care nothing about human life if the end justifies the means. . . ."
"We started the AIDS virus . . . We are only able to maintain our level of living by making sure that Third World people live in grinding poverty. . . ."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120545277093135111.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries
This man has been Obama's preacher for more than 20 years. He married Barak and Michelle and baptized their children. We have seen his views reflected in the attitude toward America of Michelle Obama and it simply cannot be that the Senator does not share them as well. You can read similar views on any radical Islamist web site and Osama couldn't have said it better.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Lt. Gov. Bolling on Governor Kaine's Budget Mess-up
RICHMOND - Governor Tim Kaine released his revised budget forecast for the 2008 fiscal year and the 2008-2010 biennium. Because of declining revenue projections, the Governor has proposed making additional withdrawals from the Commonwealth’s Revenue Stabilization Fund (Rainy Day Fund) and scaling back previously proposed spending initiatives. In response to the Governor’s actions, Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling issued the following statement:
“When Governor Kaine released his proposed budget in December of 2007, I expressed concern over the huge increase in spending that he had proposed for the upcoming biennium, as well as the manner in which he proposed to balance the state budget. I warned at the time that the Governor’s revenue projections would ultimately have to be revised and that reductions in his proposed spending initiatives would have to be made. Unfortunately, those warnings have come true, and we are now left with a budgetary mess.
“I am confident that the members of the General Assembly will do what has to be done to bring the state budget into balance without raising taxes. However, to do this we will have to make many difficult budget decisions in the coming days, including significant reductions in the Governor’s proposed spending initiatives, as well as the adoption of a realistic revenue projection for the upcoming biennium. Unfortunately, we are placed in this position because of the Governor’s failure to bring us a realistic and structurally sound budget to begin with.
“This will not be an easy task, but we remain committed to balancing the budget without raising taxes, adopting a budget that directs as many resources as possible to the Commonwealth’s highest priorities, and scales back spending in other areas. We ask for the patience and support of the people of Virginia as we begin making these difficult decisions.”
According to earlier reports in the Washinton Post, Kaine also plans to take money out of the transportation fund to make up the deficit, which he failed to acknowledge two years ago. Promises for such funding and improvemnts in Northern Virginia and the Tidewater by the governor during his campaign and since were apparently meaningless.
“When Governor Kaine released his proposed budget in December of 2007, I expressed concern over the huge increase in spending that he had proposed for the upcoming biennium, as well as the manner in which he proposed to balance the state budget. I warned at the time that the Governor’s revenue projections would ultimately have to be revised and that reductions in his proposed spending initiatives would have to be made. Unfortunately, those warnings have come true, and we are now left with a budgetary mess.
“I am confident that the members of the General Assembly will do what has to be done to bring the state budget into balance without raising taxes. However, to do this we will have to make many difficult budget decisions in the coming days, including significant reductions in the Governor’s proposed spending initiatives, as well as the adoption of a realistic revenue projection for the upcoming biennium. Unfortunately, we are placed in this position because of the Governor’s failure to bring us a realistic and structurally sound budget to begin with.
“This will not be an easy task, but we remain committed to balancing the budget without raising taxes, adopting a budget that directs as many resources as possible to the Commonwealth’s highest priorities, and scales back spending in other areas. We ask for the patience and support of the people of Virginia as we begin making these difficult decisions.”
According to earlier reports in the Washinton Post, Kaine also plans to take money out of the transportation fund to make up the deficit, which he failed to acknowledge two years ago. Promises for such funding and improvemnts in Northern Virginia and the Tidewater by the governor during his campaign and since were apparently meaningless.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Budget Wonderland
Publication:The Oklahoman; Date:Feb 6, 2008; Section:Opinion; Page Number:10
OUR VIEWS
Federal spending avoids budget realities
SOMETIMES, Washington becomes Wonderland, with Alice and the Mad Hatter. Up is down, down is up. Someone’s always losing their head.
Money is spent like it grows on trees. Those elected to steward billions of taxpayer dollars go through it like there’s no tomorrow. There’s no shortage of illustrations. Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn’s list of wasteful spending earmarks will spin heads and turn stomachs.
Another example is this week’s convergence of President Bush’s fiscal 2009 budget and the economic stimulus package under consideration in Congress. The $3.1 trillion budget would add $407 billion to the federal debt, chiefly because of falling tax revenues in a slowing economy, increases in military spending — and about $160 billion to pay for the stimulus package.
That’s right, the cost of the stimulus stew now simmering on Capitol Hill — a hash of tax rebates, small-business incentives and other ingredients — would be added to the national debt.
We don’t lay all the blame on the green eyeshades at the White House. There’s no indication Congress has an alternative plan to pay for the stimulus package. Robbing Peter to pay Paul is part of Washington’s spending culture.
The stimulus isn’t the only problem. Bush proposes a 4.9 percent increase in domestic discretionary spending, mostly for defense, homeland security and veterans. Other programs are basically frozen, at less than 1 percent growth. The gorilla in the room is entitlement spending — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — whose long-term growth will dwarf projected deficits of $390 billion in 2012 and $788 billion in 2018. Bush’s budget almost certainly is dead on arrival with the Democrat-controlled Congress. Democrats aren’t more frugal, they just have different spending priorities. The insult to injury will come when Democrats argue the growing deficit, including the tab for the Bush-backed stimulus deal, argues for letting Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts expire. Ah, Wonderland.
OUR VIEWS
Federal spending avoids budget realities
SOMETIMES, Washington becomes Wonderland, with Alice and the Mad Hatter. Up is down, down is up. Someone’s always losing their head.
Money is spent like it grows on trees. Those elected to steward billions of taxpayer dollars go through it like there’s no tomorrow. There’s no shortage of illustrations. Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn’s list of wasteful spending earmarks will spin heads and turn stomachs.
Another example is this week’s convergence of President Bush’s fiscal 2009 budget and the economic stimulus package under consideration in Congress. The $3.1 trillion budget would add $407 billion to the federal debt, chiefly because of falling tax revenues in a slowing economy, increases in military spending — and about $160 billion to pay for the stimulus package.
That’s right, the cost of the stimulus stew now simmering on Capitol Hill — a hash of tax rebates, small-business incentives and other ingredients — would be added to the national debt.
We don’t lay all the blame on the green eyeshades at the White House. There’s no indication Congress has an alternative plan to pay for the stimulus package. Robbing Peter to pay Paul is part of Washington’s spending culture.
The stimulus isn’t the only problem. Bush proposes a 4.9 percent increase in domestic discretionary spending, mostly for defense, homeland security and veterans. Other programs are basically frozen, at less than 1 percent growth. The gorilla in the room is entitlement spending — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — whose long-term growth will dwarf projected deficits of $390 billion in 2012 and $788 billion in 2018. Bush’s budget almost certainly is dead on arrival with the Democrat-controlled Congress. Democrats aren’t more frugal, they just have different spending priorities. The insult to injury will come when Democrats argue the growing deficit, including the tab for the Bush-backed stimulus deal, argues for letting Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts expire. Ah, Wonderland.
Friday, February 1, 2008
Book Review "American Creation"
In his usual inimitable style Joseph Ellis lays out history for us so vividly that we see how it is repeating itself in our own world today. In his new book "American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic", Ellis writes that Thomas Paine was a “...revolutionary presence in the radical camp.” John Adams was radical in that he knew complete separation was inevitable and he believe, rightly, that the moderates, who were still hoping for reconciliation with Britain even into 1776, would eventually agree. But, Paine, who was speaking of democracy (a hated concept at the time) saw the “...American Revolution as the opening shot in a radical transformation of political institutions throughout the world.” At the end of Common Sense, published in January, 1776 Paine wrote, “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind...We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
Paine decried the fact that the Founders did not deal with slavery. But, perhaps Paine would have seen the Civil War as another step in his idea of political evolution. Certainly, Woodrow Wilson and his League of Nations followed by FDR and the United Nations would qualify. It is undeniable that this strain of the idealism of popular sovereignty world-wide is an essential part of the idea of America. It is, after all, that idea that has propelled millions to our shores. This idealism has often been denigrated, but it persists as an integral part of the fabric our of nation.
I highly recommend this book for Ellis’ keen historical insights.
Paine decried the fact that the Founders did not deal with slavery. But, perhaps Paine would have seen the Civil War as another step in his idea of political evolution. Certainly, Woodrow Wilson and his League of Nations followed by FDR and the United Nations would qualify. It is undeniable that this strain of the idealism of popular sovereignty world-wide is an essential part of the idea of America. It is, after all, that idea that has propelled millions to our shores. This idealism has often been denigrated, but it persists as an integral part of the fabric our of nation.
I highly recommend this book for Ellis’ keen historical insights.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Terrorism and the First Amendment
Saudi billionaire banker Khalid Salim Ben Mahfouz successfully sued in the London court system Israeli-American Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld for libel over her book "Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It," which was written, published, and distributed in the United States. The British judge, when he learned that ex-CIA Director James Woosley was involved in the production of the book, imposed a $225,000 fine, an obligation to apologize to Bin Mahfouz, and required that Dr. Ehrenfeld assure that no more of her books would be sold in Britain. The books that were bought in London, were purchased over the internet, and this judgment makes the American responsible for transactions on the Web.
Since Dr. Ehrenfeld could not afford to appear or defend herself in the London court, she appealed the decision to the New York Court of Appeals. This court ruled that it does not have the authority to protect American citizens on U.S. soil from suits filed in foreign countries.
In response to this situation, the bi-partisan "Libel Terrorism Protection Act" ( S.6687/A.9652), was introduced two weeks ago in the New York Assembly and Senate by Assembly Members, Rory Lancman (D) and Senator Dean Skelos (R). This bill would protect New York authors and journalists who expose terrorism and terror funding from libel lawsuits filed in foreign courts. The law would declare such suits unenforceable in New York unless the law in the foreign country provides the same free speech protection that is guaranteed by the First Amendment in the United States.
British courts have been the system of choice for the over forty such suits that have been filed since 9/11 because they posit that an author is guilty and must prove innocence. This is a nearly impossible task, particularly from long distance.
There is a call for the U.S. Congress to legislate a national response to this threat to the First Amendment, because it involves terrorists and their backers using western legal processes to create the same effect their own governments normally apply to any sort of defiance or protest. (www.standupamericausa.com) This brings up some questions about the role of our legal system and the protections our laws should afford in the War on Terror.
1. Given that several of our Supreme Court Justices believe international legal systems should inform the decisions they render on U.S. law, what would their opinions and recommendations be concerning a legal response to these suits.
2. Does this attempt to punish American citizens with the legal systems of other countries pose a significant obstacle to the prosecution of the war and the tactics used to do so?
3. Does this situation have anything to tell us about the possible chaos that could develop if Guantanamo is closed and anyone picked up off any battle field is required to be charged and prosecuted in the U.S. Court system, according to the Democrat Party platform?
3. How do these suits affect non-fiction about Islamists and the War on Terror?
4. How does this impact on the decision by Republicans not to join the World Court, which is a policy opposed by the Left. Do we want George W. Bush hauled into court in the Hague and tried for war crimes and is that the plan of the Democrats.
Just thinking!
Since Dr. Ehrenfeld could not afford to appear or defend herself in the London court, she appealed the decision to the New York Court of Appeals. This court ruled that it does not have the authority to protect American citizens on U.S. soil from suits filed in foreign countries.
In response to this situation, the bi-partisan "Libel Terrorism Protection Act" ( S.6687/A.9652), was introduced two weeks ago in the New York Assembly and Senate by Assembly Members, Rory Lancman (D) and Senator Dean Skelos (R). This bill would protect New York authors and journalists who expose terrorism and terror funding from libel lawsuits filed in foreign courts. The law would declare such suits unenforceable in New York unless the law in the foreign country provides the same free speech protection that is guaranteed by the First Amendment in the United States.
British courts have been the system of choice for the over forty such suits that have been filed since 9/11 because they posit that an author is guilty and must prove innocence. This is a nearly impossible task, particularly from long distance.
There is a call for the U.S. Congress to legislate a national response to this threat to the First Amendment, because it involves terrorists and their backers using western legal processes to create the same effect their own governments normally apply to any sort of defiance or protest. (www.standupamericausa.com) This brings up some questions about the role of our legal system and the protections our laws should afford in the War on Terror.
1. Given that several of our Supreme Court Justices believe international legal systems should inform the decisions they render on U.S. law, what would their opinions and recommendations be concerning a legal response to these suits.
2. Does this attempt to punish American citizens with the legal systems of other countries pose a significant obstacle to the prosecution of the war and the tactics used to do so?
3. Does this situation have anything to tell us about the possible chaos that could develop if Guantanamo is closed and anyone picked up off any battle field is required to be charged and prosecuted in the U.S. Court system, according to the Democrat Party platform?
3. How do these suits affect non-fiction about Islamists and the War on Terror?
4. How does this impact on the decision by Republicans not to join the World Court, which is a policy opposed by the Left. Do we want George W. Bush hauled into court in the Hague and tried for war crimes and is that the plan of the Democrats.
Just thinking!
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Transportation and the Governor
People in Northern Virginia and the Tidewater who elected Democrats to the state legislature with the thought that switching party control would facilitate solutions to their pressing problems have been mightily fooled. According to the Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/24/AR2008012403137.html) Governor Kaine thought he could kill a transportation bill in the legislature last year and when a House and Senate compromise surprised him, he signed the bill reluctantly after inserting what he thought would be a poison pill, abusive drive fees. He was right about the poison as all Democrats harped on the fees and were successful in taking the Senate. What an embarrassment for new Senate Majority Leader and Northern Virginian, Dick Saslaw. Not only did the Governor not intend to find any transportation fixes for the area, he even planned to take money out of the transportation fund to pay for his own pet projects. This is all complicated by the threat of recession and the certain economic slow down, which will produce much less revenue than Kaine needs for his proposed budget. "The stakes for Kaine are high because his budget has new money for many of his priorities, including education [universal pre-K], public health and the environment. Kaine wants to keep his budget balanced by diverting $261 million, the most allowed under the law, from the state's reserve fund and borrowing $180 million from a fund used to pay for highway construction." Now the Fed says the proposed rail line to Dulles Airport will probably not get federal funding because the cost is to high and the management structure is unworthy and unworkable. So, the only thing that will change with the new management team is that everyone's taxes will go up and, as has happened for the last 8 years in Fairfax County, the quality and quantity of services will go down.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Sages for the Ages
What do Abraham Lincoln and P.T. Barnum have in common? Together they explain the Clinton phenomenon in American politics. Barnum commented that a fool is born every minute. Lincoln talked about fooling people: who, how many, and for how long. The Clintons have fooled ALL Barnum's fools for ALL of the last 16 years and the magic is still working. Unfortunately for the rest of us, they vote. Some, like Hollywood mogul David Geffen, who said the Clintons are "exceptionally good liars," stopped drinking the Kool-Aid in '07. I'm part of the some who were never fooled. Not because I am prescient, but because I lived in Germany for eight years. When Bill Clinton said in the summer of 1992 that the United States could have universal health just like Germany, I knew that if that was to be his model then he or someone should explain to the American people that their federal taxes would at least have to double. (In my naiveté I thought it would be Tom Brokaw) In 1992 Germans paid 50% plus of their wages in taxes in addition to 15% Value Added Tax on practically everything they bought, and at that their economy was beginning to falter. So, either the Clintons didn't know what they were talking about, or worse they did and were deliberately lying. We all know now-lying was the answer, and lying with the complicity of Tom Brokow and all the mainstream media. We should have paid more attention to P. T. and Honest Abe in '92 and then we would not be discussing the same lies with the same people all these years later.
When your adversary is self-destructing.....Get out of the Way
There have been numerous articles written about the Obama-Clinton feud and how the "Party" is upset-James Clyburn,a black Dem from SC and number 3 in the House, told Bill to Chill. Bill says he is Chill and he likes it when Hill and Barak fight-no doubt because for a change he is not the target of her wrath.
It is incumbent upon the conservative opposition to GET OUT OF THE WAY and let the Dems destroy each other. That possible destruction is the subject of the article below and could be decisive in November if Conservatives do not cloud the election with a purging fight of their own.
Not a sermon, just a thought
http://washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080123/NATION/218849601/1001
It is incumbent upon the conservative opposition to GET OUT OF THE WAY and let the Dems destroy each other. That possible destruction is the subject of the article below and could be decisive in November if Conservatives do not cloud the election with a purging fight of their own.
Not a sermon, just a thought
http://washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080123/NATION/218849601/1001
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Success in Iraq
>The Surge A Once Forlorn hope Now a big success
>By Ralph Peters
>As you read these lines, our troops are in the midst of Operation Phantom
Phoenix, a "mini-surge" to squeeze al Qaeda and its fast-dwindling band of allies
out of their few remaining safe havens in Iraq.
>Iraqi troops fight beside us against a common enemy. Vast swaths of the country
enjoy a newborn peace. Commerce thrives again. At the provincial and local
levels, the political progress has been remarkable.
>As for Operation Phantom Phoenix, our commanders expected terrorist dead-enders
to put up a fight. Instead, they ran,leaving behind only booby traps and disgust
among the Iraqis they tormented far too long.
>Well, they can run, but they can't hide. We dropped 20 tons of bombs on 40
terrorist targets yesterday, including safe houses, weapons caches and IED
factories. In a late-afternoon exchange with The Post, Gen. David Petraeus
characterized our current ops as "executing aggressively, pursuing tenaciously."
>The headlines at home? "Nine American Soldiers Killed." No mention of progress
or a fleeing enemy on the front pages. Just dead soldiers.
>Determined to elect a Democrat president, the"mainstream" media simply won't
accept our success."Impartial" journalists find a dark cloud in every silver
lining in Iraq. And the would-be candidates themselves continue to insist that we
should abandon Iraq immediately - as if time had stood still for the past year -
while hoping desperately for a catastrophe in Baghdad before November.
>These are the pols who insisted that the surge didn't have a chance. And nobody
calls 'em on it.
>Meanwhile, "Happy Birthday, Surge!"
>One year ago, "the surge" kicked off as a forlorn hope, our last chance to get
it right.
>The odds were against us. Terrorist violence was out of control. Baghdad was a
toxic wreck. Militias ruled, with ethnic cleansing rampant. And Iraq's
leaders couldn't even agree about which day of the week it was.
>We had never applied a coherent military or political policy in Iraq.Dithering
leaders, civilian and in uniform, squandered American and Iraqi lives. A unique
opportunity to jump start change in the Middle East had collapsed amid ideological
fantasies, a looting orgy for well-connected contractors and Washington's simple
unwillingness to really fight.
>Even the new US jefe maximo for Iraq, Petraeus,was a dark horse. He'd just
signed off on a counterinsurgency manual suggesting that the key to defeating
terrorists is to learn to pronounce Salaam aleikum (Peace be with you)properly.
>And then it all went right. Confounding Dems who expected him to preside over a
retreat, Petraeus took the fight to the enemy like a rat terrier on meth.
Jettisoning all the p.c. dogma, he turned out to be the first true warrior we put
in command in Iraq.
>Luck turned our way, too - and luck matters in war. Al Qaeda had managed to
alienate its erstwhile Sunni Arab allies in record time. Former insurgents
decided that the Great Satan America made a better dancing partner than Osama &
Co.
>Although analysts have missed it completely,the execution of Saddam Hussein
helped, too: It took away the rallying figure for Sunni hardliners and made it
easier for former insurgents to switch allegiance. The shock of Saddam's hanging
jarred Iraq's Sunni Arabs back to reality:Big Daddy with the mustache wasn't
coming back.
>Meanwhile, the rest of the population was just sick of the violence. The
merchant class wanted to get back to business. Tribal sheiks felt betrayed by
foreign terrorists. And mashallah! We had veteran commanders on the ground who
recognized the shifts underway in Iraqi society and capitalized on them.
>Petraeus manifested two stages of military genius: 1) He recognized exactly what
had to be done. 2) He didn't imagine he could do it all himself.
>Our new man in Baghdad had the wisdom to give subordinate commanders a long
leash when they caught a good scent.
>Without in any way detracting from Petraeus, the indispensable man, our
success this past year rested heavily upon field commanders far from the
flagpole having the savvy to realize that the local sheik just needed one last
bit of encouragement to jump sides.
>Oh, and the left turned out to be dead wrong,as usual. We hadn't created
an unlimited supply of terrorists. In fact, the supply turned out to be
very finite, to al Qaeda's chagrin. And killing themworked.
(One of the great untold stories of 2007 was the number of al Qaeda corpses.)
>And our former enemies have been killing them for us.
>Iraq still faces massive problems, of course. Thirty years of murderous
tyranny under Saddam followed by four years of Coalition fumbling left the
country a shambles. But Iraqis want it to get better.
>The military situation is well on the way to being under control. Now the
question is whether Iraq's leaders, especially those from the newly empowered
Shia, can put their country above their personal and parochial interests
(something that we don't expect of our own politicians these days).
>On our side, the immediate problem is that we lack diplomats as visionary and
capable as our soldiers. After almost a century, the Foggy Bottom fops still
can't see beyond a world gerrymandered by their European idols at Versailles.
>So here we are: The surge worked. It achieved all that we can expect of our
military. 2008 will tell us whether the politicians and diplomats, US and Iraqi,
can do their part.
>And a final note: The Post had over a week's advance warning of Operation
Phantom Phoenix, but didn't publish it. We don't share our nation's secrets
with our enemies.
>Ralph Peters' latest book is"Wars Of Blood And Faith."
> Ralph Peters, a retired Army Lt. Col., writes for the New York Post
>By Ralph Peters
>As you read these lines, our troops are in the midst of Operation Phantom
Phoenix, a "mini-surge" to squeeze al Qaeda and its fast-dwindling band of allies
out of their few remaining safe havens in Iraq.
>Iraqi troops fight beside us against a common enemy. Vast swaths of the country
enjoy a newborn peace. Commerce thrives again. At the provincial and local
levels, the political progress has been remarkable.
>As for Operation Phantom Phoenix, our commanders expected terrorist dead-enders
to put up a fight. Instead, they ran,leaving behind only booby traps and disgust
among the Iraqis they tormented far too long.
>Well, they can run, but they can't hide. We dropped 20 tons of bombs on 40
terrorist targets yesterday, including safe houses, weapons caches and IED
factories. In a late-afternoon exchange with The Post, Gen. David Petraeus
characterized our current ops as "executing aggressively, pursuing tenaciously."
>The headlines at home? "Nine American Soldiers Killed." No mention of progress
or a fleeing enemy on the front pages. Just dead soldiers.
>Determined to elect a Democrat president, the"mainstream" media simply won't
accept our success."Impartial" journalists find a dark cloud in every silver
lining in Iraq. And the would-be candidates themselves continue to insist that we
should abandon Iraq immediately - as if time had stood still for the past year -
while hoping desperately for a catastrophe in Baghdad before November.
>These are the pols who insisted that the surge didn't have a chance. And nobody
calls 'em on it.
>Meanwhile, "Happy Birthday, Surge!"
>One year ago, "the surge" kicked off as a forlorn hope, our last chance to get
it right.
>The odds were against us. Terrorist violence was out of control. Baghdad was a
toxic wreck. Militias ruled, with ethnic cleansing rampant. And Iraq's
leaders couldn't even agree about which day of the week it was.
>We had never applied a coherent military or political policy in Iraq.Dithering
leaders, civilian and in uniform, squandered American and Iraqi lives. A unique
opportunity to jump start change in the Middle East had collapsed amid ideological
fantasies, a looting orgy for well-connected contractors and Washington's simple
unwillingness to really fight.
>Even the new US jefe maximo for Iraq, Petraeus,was a dark horse. He'd just
signed off on a counterinsurgency manual suggesting that the key to defeating
terrorists is to learn to pronounce Salaam aleikum (Peace be with you)properly.
>And then it all went right. Confounding Dems who expected him to preside over a
retreat, Petraeus took the fight to the enemy like a rat terrier on meth.
Jettisoning all the p.c. dogma, he turned out to be the first true warrior we put
in command in Iraq.
>Luck turned our way, too - and luck matters in war. Al Qaeda had managed to
alienate its erstwhile Sunni Arab allies in record time. Former insurgents
decided that the Great Satan America made a better dancing partner than Osama &
Co.
>Although analysts have missed it completely,the execution of Saddam Hussein
helped, too: It took away the rallying figure for Sunni hardliners and made it
easier for former insurgents to switch allegiance. The shock of Saddam's hanging
jarred Iraq's Sunni Arabs back to reality:Big Daddy with the mustache wasn't
coming back.
>Meanwhile, the rest of the population was just sick of the violence. The
merchant class wanted to get back to business. Tribal sheiks felt betrayed by
foreign terrorists. And mashallah! We had veteran commanders on the ground who
recognized the shifts underway in Iraqi society and capitalized on them.
>Petraeus manifested two stages of military genius: 1) He recognized exactly what
had to be done. 2) He didn't imagine he could do it all himself.
>Our new man in Baghdad had the wisdom to give subordinate commanders a long
leash when they caught a good scent.
>Without in any way detracting from Petraeus, the indispensable man, our
success this past year rested heavily upon field commanders far from the
flagpole having the savvy to realize that the local sheik just needed one last
bit of encouragement to jump sides.
>Oh, and the left turned out to be dead wrong,as usual. We hadn't created
an unlimited supply of terrorists. In fact, the supply turned out to be
very finite, to al Qaeda's chagrin. And killing themworked.
(One of the great untold stories of 2007 was the number of al Qaeda corpses.)
>And our former enemies have been killing them for us.
>Iraq still faces massive problems, of course. Thirty years of murderous
tyranny under Saddam followed by four years of Coalition fumbling left the
country a shambles. But Iraqis want it to get better.
>The military situation is well on the way to being under control. Now the
question is whether Iraq's leaders, especially those from the newly empowered
Shia, can put their country above their personal and parochial interests
(something that we don't expect of our own politicians these days).
>On our side, the immediate problem is that we lack diplomats as visionary and
capable as our soldiers. After almost a century, the Foggy Bottom fops still
can't see beyond a world gerrymandered by their European idols at Versailles.
>So here we are: The surge worked. It achieved all that we can expect of our
military. 2008 will tell us whether the politicians and diplomats, US and Iraqi,
can do their part.
>And a final note: The Post had over a week's advance warning of Operation
Phantom Phoenix, but didn't publish it. We don't share our nation's secrets
with our enemies.
>Ralph Peters' latest book is"Wars Of Blood And Faith."
> Ralph Peters, a retired Army Lt. Col., writes for the New York Post
Thursday, January 17, 2008
To Stimulate or Not
Stimulating Proposals unlikely to have much effect
TALK of a slowing economy is causing talk of a stimulus package in Washington. Congress and the White House are venting proposals to spend $100 billion or more in response to growing concern we’re headed for a recession.
Our hearts are warmed by Washington’s compassion. But facts caution against getting too excited over anything the federal government might do.
There’s the issue of size — of the U.S. economy. The total value of all goods and services produced last year probably will top $14 trillion. While $100 billion is a lot of money, compared with the overall economy it’s small. Any expectation that a $100 billion stimulus package will turn the economy is like saying a nuclear aircraft carrier can be turned by a solitary tugboat.
Government can and should foster a better economic environment. The Federal Reserve has been cutting interest rates and has indicated it will keep trimming them to help the troubled real estate and lending markets.
Tax cuts also help. Congress should make the Bush tax cuts permanent, sparing individual Americans and U.S. businesses anxiety over whether reductions in income tax and capital gains rates and other features will expire after 2010 as currently scheduled, resulting in the greatest tax increase in U.S. history. The mere mention of the possibility chills spending and investment.
Instead, the White House and Congress are looking at one-time tax rebates for middle- and lower-income brackets — not exactly the folks who’re generating the capital and jobs integral to sustainable growth.
Thankfully, no one’s talking about gimmicks like a jobs program. At least not yet. Democrats would extend unemployment benefits, home-heating subsidies and food stamps. While those may provide some localized relief, in general Washington’s horizon is too near and small, and the remedies it’s likely to craft won’t have much effect on the aircraft carrier.
Reprinted from The Oklahoman
TALK of a slowing economy is causing talk of a stimulus package in Washington. Congress and the White House are venting proposals to spend $100 billion or more in response to growing concern we’re headed for a recession.
Our hearts are warmed by Washington’s compassion. But facts caution against getting too excited over anything the federal government might do.
There’s the issue of size — of the U.S. economy. The total value of all goods and services produced last year probably will top $14 trillion. While $100 billion is a lot of money, compared with the overall economy it’s small. Any expectation that a $100 billion stimulus package will turn the economy is like saying a nuclear aircraft carrier can be turned by a solitary tugboat.
Government can and should foster a better economic environment. The Federal Reserve has been cutting interest rates and has indicated it will keep trimming them to help the troubled real estate and lending markets.
Tax cuts also help. Congress should make the Bush tax cuts permanent, sparing individual Americans and U.S. businesses anxiety over whether reductions in income tax and capital gains rates and other features will expire after 2010 as currently scheduled, resulting in the greatest tax increase in U.S. history. The mere mention of the possibility chills spending and investment.
Instead, the White House and Congress are looking at one-time tax rebates for middle- and lower-income brackets — not exactly the folks who’re generating the capital and jobs integral to sustainable growth.
Thankfully, no one’s talking about gimmicks like a jobs program. At least not yet. Democrats would extend unemployment benefits, home-heating subsidies and food stamps. While those may provide some localized relief, in general Washington’s horizon is too near and small, and the remedies it’s likely to craft won’t have much effect on the aircraft carrier.
Reprinted from The Oklahoman
Monday, January 14, 2008
Social Security Facts
Perhaps we should think about fixing this mess before we add to entitlements and the deficit as per Hillary's plan to keep us from "sliding into recession" by bailing out Wall Street.
Not a sermon, just a thought.
Not a sermon, just a thought.
FYI - Just in case some of you aren't aware of this! Its easy to check out if you don't believe it. Be sure and show it to your kids. They need a little history lesson on what's what regarding our Social Security.
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Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat, introduced the Social
Security (FICA) Program He promised:
1.) That participation in the Program would be
completely voluntary,
2.) That the participants would only have to pay
1% of the fir st $1,400 of their annual
incomes into the Program,
3.) That the money the participants elected to put
into the Program would be deductible from
their income for tax purposes each year,
4.) That the money the participants put into the
independent "Trust Fund" rather than into the
General operating fund, and therefore, would
only be used to fund the Social Security
Retirement Program, and no other
Government program, and,
5.) That the annuity payments to the retirees
would never be taxed as income.
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Since many of us have paid into FICA for years and are now receiving a Social Security check every month -- and then finding that we are getting taxed on 85% of the money we paid to the Federal government to "put away" -- you may be interested in the following:
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Q: Which Political Party took Social Security from the
independent "Trust Fund" and put it into the
General fund so that Congress could spend it?
A: It was Lyndon Johnson and the democratic
controlled House and Senate.
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Q: Which Political Party eliminated the income tax
deduction for Social Security (FICA) withholding?
A: The Democratic Party.
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Q: Which Political Party started taxing Social
Security annuities?
A: The Democratic Party, with Al Gore casting the
"tie-breaking" deciding vote as President of the
Senate, while he was Vice President of the US.
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Q: Which Political Party decided to start giving
annuity payments to immigrants?
AND MY FAVORITE:
A: That's right! Jimmy Carter and the Democratic Party.
Immigrants moved into this country, and at age 65,
began to receive Social Security payments! The
Democratic Party gave these payments to them,
even though they never paid a dime into it!
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Then, after doing all this lying and thieving and violating
of the original contract (FICA), the Democrats
turn around and tell you that the Republicans
want to take your Social Security away!
And the worst part about it is uninformed citizens believe it!
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If enough people receive this, maybe a seed of
awareness will be planted and maybe changes will
evolve Maybe not, some Democrats are awfully
sure of what isn't so.
Thursday, January 3, 2008
IOWA CAUCUS-WHO GOES, WHO STAYS
The Iowa Caucus is more a media event than an accurate predictor of presidential success. Since 1972 when George McGovern's campaign manager engineered the early January date for the caucus that was picked up and played up by the New York Times, the caucuses have been useful in determining who is competitive; that is who stays in and who drops out of the race. Since then for the Democrats on five occasions the winner of the caucus became the nominee for the party (1980, Carter; 1984, Mondale; 1996 Clinton; 2000 Gore; 2004 Kerry) Only once has that nominee won the Presidency. For the Republicans six winners became the nominee (1976 Ford; 1984 Reagan; 1992 HW Bush; 1996 Dole; 2000 and 2004 W. Bush). Three times the caucus has been predictive for the presidency on the Republican side: Reagan in 1984, and W. Bush in both his races. In fact, George W. Bush is the only non-incumbent to win the caucus, the nomination, and the Presidency. No incumbent has had opposition in the caucus except Jimmy Carter in 1980 (Ted Kennedy). With no incumbent in the caucus, winners only get the nomination half the time. In 1988 in both parties, it was the men in third place who went on to become the nominee.
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