If I were to craft a dark satire about moral inversion, cultural suicide and Orwellian disinformation I couldn't do much better than the plot summary below:

• Five members of a Jewish family in Israel -- including a three-month old baby-- are literally murdered in their beds, with psychopathic fury, by Islamic extremists.
• A British journalist takes the media to task for its minimal, tepid and equivocating coverage of these murders, referring in passing to the perpetrators -- and those who support and celebrate them -- as "savages."
• A sock-puppet Islamic organization complains to both the local media watchdog organization (the Press Complaints Commission - PCC) and the police that all Arabs have been defamed.
• Shortly thereafter the sock-puppet advises the usual media suspects (one of whom he works for) of his heroic j'accuse! moment and the airwaves are shortly vibrating with accounts of PCC and police investigations against the journalist and her newspaper.
• While everyone watches the attendant Kabuki theater the innocents in Israel are still very much dead and the forces that caused their deaths -- and the deaths and misery of countless others -- remain unexamined in any serious way.

There is of course nothing fictional, nor remotely funny, about this sequence of events. The recent murder of the Fogel family -- shrouded by the media in euphemism and attempted mitigation -- is described in much more clear-eyed fashion by Caroline Glick:

Ruth Fogel was in the bathroom when the Palestinian terrorists pounced on her husband Udi and their three-month-old daughter Hadas, slitting their throats as they lay in bed on Friday night in their home in Itamar. The terrorists stabbed Ruth to death as she came out of the bathroom. With both parents and the newborn dead, they moved on to the other children, going into a bedroom where Ruth and Udi’s sons Yoav (11) and Elad (four) were sleeping. They stabbed them through their hearts and slit their throats.

Glick goes on to describe the released photos of the victims:

They are shown as they were found by security forces. There was Hadas, dead on her parents’ bed, next to her dead father Udi. There was Elad, lying on a small throw rug wearing socks. His little hands were clenched into fists. What was a four-year-old to do against two grown men with knives? He clenched his fists. So did his big brother.

It has since emerged the baby was actually decapitated. "Savages" is the very least of terms that could be applied. "Savages" in relative terms, is a compliment. Having read the full account of this massacre and having forced myself to look at the pictures, my preferred term for these animals would be "targets acquired."

Enter journalist Melanie Phillips and her blog post Armchair barbarism. Like any other sane, rational and decent person Phillips sees the glaringly self-evident moral issues here and excoriates the media -- demonstrably deficient in all of these areas -- for ignoring them. The New York Times is only the first of several examples she cites:

Overwhelmingly, the media have either ignored or downplayed the atrocity – or worse, effectively blamed the victims for bringing it on themselves, describing them as ‘hard-line settlers’ or extremists. Given that three of the victims were children, one a baby of three months whose throat was cut, such a response is utterly degraded. The New York Times blamed Israeli ‘defiance’ over renewed ‘settlement’ building in the wake of the massacre for throwing

"already shaky peace efforts into a new tailspin."

So to the New York Times, it’s not the Arab massacre of a Jewish family which has jeopardised ‘peace prospects’ -- because the Israelis will quite rightly never trust any agreement with such savages -- but instead Israeli policy on building more homes, on land to which it is legally and morally entitled, which is responsible instead for making peace elusive. Twisted, and sick.

Uh-oh ... "savages."

Add to this the suggestion that people who hand out candy to celebrate the beheading of an infant might suffer from "moral depravity" and you know there's going to be righteous indignation.

Enter the sock-puppet, one Inayat Bunglawala, chair of Muslims4UK, an organization whose web site doesn't appear to have been updated since 2009 (of course nothing much has been happening with Muslims in Europe lately so that's understandable) and whose Facebook page has 713 members.

When not "chairing" this back-lot of an organization (and moving around to make it look like a crowd), Bunglawala is, more importantly, a contributor to The Guardian, one of the newspapers leading the charge against Phillips. Mention of this is noticeably absent from the PCC investigates Melanie Phillips' Spectator blog article in which he is quoted:

Inayat Bunglawala, chair of Muslims4UK, said: "Her words went far beyond just denouncing the killings. It was a far more generalised racist outburst against Arabs as a whole."

Perhaps, recalling William Randolph Hearst, The Guardian's editors may have suggested to Bunglawala "You furnish the complaint and the cardboard organization and we'll furnish the war." In any event, contrary to The Guardian's assertion, neither Phillips nor The Spectator (her paper) are currently under investigation by the PCC. There is likewise no indication the police have acted on the complaint, although given the UK's lattice-work of hate-speech regulations this one is more worrisome.

Perhaps the PCC and/or the police might decide their time would be more profitably spent investigating sites like Inayat's Corner, in which the eponymous Inayet (small world, how many people can there be with that same first name?) regales us with soothing, oil-on-troubled-waters pronouncements such as these:

(3/11) The Israel lobby views any progress made by UK Muslims in this country’s political life as being against their interests. The only permissible Muslims are those who are prepared to remain silent about the crimes perpetrated by the apartheid state of Israel.

(2/11) Robert Halfon [a British MP] – you are a total and utter coward, much like the members of the murderous Israeli Defence Forces. Whereas the IDF like to hide inside their tanks while firing shells at little children, you hide inside the House of Commons while making your libellous comments.

(10/10) David Cameron spoke out against any calls to punish Israel for its continuing occupation of Palestinian lands, its illegal Jewish settlements, its cruel and barbaric treatment of the besieged and repeatedly bombed people of Gaza and its known stockpile of nuclear weapons.

(HT: CiF Watch)

Nope, you're right. Not a chance. As Melanie Phillips, Caroline Glick and many others continue to make abundantly clear, the elites and their house organs have all read and memorized the same catechism: Palestinians good, Islam good -- Israelis bad. Bunglawala and his squalid little website are perfectly safe.

Glick puts it somewhat more bluntly:

As far as the opinion makers of Europe and much of America are concerned, the Yoavs and Hadases and Elads of Israel have no right to live if they live in “a settlement.” So too, they believe that Palestinians have a right to murder Israelis who serve in the IDF and who believe that Jews should be able to live freely wherever we want because this land belongs to us. Until these genteel Jew haters learn to think otherwise, Israel should neither seek nor care if they condemn this or any other act of Palestinian genocide. We shouldn’t care about them at all.

Melanie Phillips is one of a growing number of authors and journalists whose work is kryptonite to Islamofascists and their apologists. Unhappily she resides in a country somewhat further down the path than the United States in the legalized suppression of free speech through open-ended and deliberately vague "hate speech" legislation. (That is not to say we aren't doing our level best to catch up, but, as Cass Sunstein would doubtless attest to, nudging takes time.)

Time will tell if those instruments are brought to bear against Phillips. However it breaks, we owe her our support.

To say nothing of those children who died with their fists clenched. (Cross-posted at NewsReal Blog.

As part of the Left's ongoing quest to make every attempt at welfare reform look like the opening scene from Oliver Twist, Susie Madrak of Crooks and Liars has written a profoundly misleading and wrong-headed piece that might better have been entitled "Please Sir, Can I Have Some More Cash?"

Relying heavily on unimpeachable sources such as FightBack!News ("News and Views from the Peoples' Struggle") Ms. Madrak weaves a tale in which Minnesota has surpassed Fascist Arizona in sheer villainy with its now infamous "Show Me Your Paper Money" law.

On the off-chance you haven't heard of this law, and aren't already vibrating with outrage, Ms. Madrak is quick to enlighten you.

They're not just crazy, they're evil — and un-Christian, should they have the audacity to claim otherwise. If only we could force them to live like this, they wouldn't last a week:

"St. Paul, MN - Minnesota Republicans are pushing legislation that would make it a crime for people on public assistance to have more $20 in cash in their pockets any given month. This represents a change from their initial proposal, which banned them from having any money at all."

[From "Minnesota Republicans say: Poor people with money should be outlaws" — FightBack!News]

The apparent source of this whisper down the lane exercise was one Angel Buechner of the Welfare Rights Committee who testified on March 15 in front of the House Health and Human Services Reform Committee:

Buechner told committee members, “We would like to address the provision that makes it illegal for MFIP [one of Minnesota’s welfare programs] families to withdraw cash from the cash portion of the MFIP grant - and in fact, appears to make it illegal for MFIP families to have any type of money at all in their pockets. [Emphasis mine.]

It should be axiomatic by now that what appears to be true to groups like the Welfare Rights Committee isn't necessarily the reality of things, and that rhetorical flourishes — to put the most charitable face on Ms. Buechner's remarks — such as these should not be presented as undisputed fact, but I don't get the feeling Ms. Madrak and her comrades spend a whole lot of time pondering issues of logic.

Instead, like other such sober and measured assertions ("Republicans Want to Beat Poor People with Flat Stick!" comes to mind) this one predictably went viral more or less immediately. Unhappily for the Keebler cookie elves who dutifully reproduce such things the story is palpably false.

Not that a web site offering "News and Views from the Peoples' Struggle" shouldn't always be taken at face value, but perhaps if Ms. Madrak had taken a quick peek at the actual bill -- before picking up the cudgels -- it might have dawned on her that the chroniclers of the peoples' struggle had let her down this time.

Section 1. [256.9870] ELECTRONIC BENEFIT TRANSFER DEBIT CARD. Subdivision 1. Electronic benefit transfer or EBT debit card.

(a) Electronic benefit transfer (EBT) debit cardholders in the general assistance program and the Minnesota supplemental aid program under chapter 256D and programs under chapter 256J are prohibited from withdrawing cash from an automatic teller machine or receiving cash from vendors with the EBT debit card. The EBT debit card may only be used as a debit card.

Beginning July 1, 2011, cash benefits for programs listed under paragraph (a) must be issued on a separate EBT card with the head of household's name printed on the card. The card must also state that "It is unlawful to use this card to purchase tobacco products or alcoholic beverages." This card must be issued within 30 calendar days of an eligibility determination. During the initial 30 calendar days of eligibility, a recipient may have cash benefits issued on an EBT card without the recipient's name printed on the card. This card may be the same card on which food support is issued and does not need to meet the requirements of this section.

Notwithstanding paragraph (a), EBT cardholders may opt to have up to $20 per month accessible via automatic teller machine or receive up to $20 cash back from a vendor.

Please note the remarkable absence of references to grandpa shelling out $21 in crumpled one dollar bills for the kids' ice-cream (in the same imaginary Baskin Robbins where our president spends most of his time) and suffering a living hell of prosecution and public humiliation as a consequence.

In fact, you can examine this passage with any number of decryption algorithms and you won't find anything remotely resembling a penalty on how much cash a public assistance recipient can have on him at any given time. What you will find is an altogether sensible, and probably way overdue, prohibition against converting the electronic equivalent of food stamps into untraceable cash.

Put more bluntly, when abuses — like using the EBT card to get tattoos — are so flagrant that local news outlets are catching on, people's noses -- especially those people whose taxes are actually paying for those tattoos -- get out of joint. It's nothing personal, it's not about your body design decisions. It's just that if you want "Born to Raise Hell" carved into your arm you should pony up the cash yourself, as well as sufficient cash for whatever distilled beverage makes that seem like a good idea.

The fact that government stewards would actually want some accountability and control over how taxpayer money is spent exercises Ms. Madrak no end. How will these people pay their bills, ride the bus, live a LIFE for God's sake? Angel Buechner again:

How do you expect people to take care of business like paying bills such as lights, gas, water, trash and phone?”[...]

And Freakout Nation:

GOPers in Minnesota seem to be suffering from memory loss; an unemployed person has to utilize public transit to go out in the world and be proactive in seeking work. Instead, they present the poor with isolation, not letting them use their debit card, sit home and not seek employment. The poor can stay poor because they don’t give a damn.

Again, this is basically about food stamps – particular delivery system notwithstanding – and the wild and crazy notion that they should be used essentially for -- oh I don't know -- food. The idea that recipients have a God-given right to use the EBT card as a kind of rolling slush fund evinces a form of memory loss well in excess of anything the GOP is capable of. As these self-appointed defenders of the downtrodden well know -- even as they spin these Dickensian scenarios -- there is an array of other programs that the truly needy (and, unfortunately, some not so needy) can tap into that have nothing to do with the bill in question.

But that's not the most egregious falsehood. While this will doubtless come as a bolt out of the blue to Ms. Madrak and her ilk, people – even poor people – are not helpless. They are not merely passive receptacles of government largesse, and, given half a chance, will make economic decisions that will keep a roof over their head and the lights on. Someone who is truly looking for work will scare up the bus fare to go to an interview. Someone who needs to keep his telephone connected will cut the cable for a while. (Susie, I know it will come as a shock to you that the poorest among us have amenities unavailable to all but the wealthiest in truly poor nations, but cope.)

But inasmuch as this does not conform to the Left's default scenario of evil plutocrats in stove-pipe hats tying poor people to the railway tracks it will be largely ignored. Disinformation is a terrible thing to waste.

(Cross-posted at NewsReal Blog.)

Mr. President, This being a month with the letter "a" in it I am sure you will be taking another much-needed vacation soon. I note with interest that, along with the undersized girl's bike and sensible helmet, you have lately taken to bringing books as well. This is a welcome trend inasmuch as knowledge is power -- and your utterances of late have betrayed an energy crisis of an entirely different kind.

I am specifically referring to your many forays into history, economics and theology in your public pronouncements. These have some of us (primarily those who have studied history, economics and theology) scratching our heads like Inigo Montoya and muttering "I don't think that means what you think it means."

What I'm trying to say here is while you get full marks for reading books -- or at least carrying them around in plain sight for the cameras -- it is possible that your reading choices could benefit from a bit of a tweak. While I'm sure The Post American World by Fareed Zakaria is a stirring read, part of your job is to prove him wrong, and that probably won't happen if you are nodding and smiling at the bits where we are overtaken by China.

Accordingly, in the spirit of "better to light a candle than curse the darkness", and incidentally shore up a few areas where you might be a little behind the curve, herewith a few of my favorites for those lazy days when the bike has a flat tire and Michelle locks your golf-clubs in the closet.

7. The Forgotten Man -- Amity Shlaes

Your fondness for the New Deal as the paragon of successful government intervention is a matter of public record. In fact, in your very first press conference you expressed something approaching amused contempt for anyone who would doubt such a thing:

 

There are several who've suggested FDR was wrong to intervene in the New Deal. They're fighting battles I thought were resolved a pretty long time ago.

If the approach sounds familiar, it's because it's the same kind of peremptory dismissal others of your ilk have been using for years in defense of global warming. Substitute "settled history" for "settled science" and you pretty much arrive at the same place. The thing is, outside the progressive echo-chamber it isn't settled, and all the repetition and eye-rolling in the world won't make it so. Consider this opening passage from Amity Shlaes' marvelous The Forgotten Man.

ONE NOVEMBER EVENING LONG AGO in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a thirteen-year-old named William Troeller hanged himself from the transom in his bedroom. The boy had watched his family slide into an increasingly desperate situation. The gas for their five-room apartment on Driggs Avenue had been shut off since April. His father, Harold, had lost his job at Brooklyn Edison after suffering a “rupture”—a worker’s hernia, probably. ... Harold told a newspaper reporter that his brother “was sensitive and always felt embarrassed” about asking for his share at mealtime. ... “He Was Reluctant about Asking for Food,” read the headline in the New York Times. New York that year had a Dickensian feel—an un-American feel.

[...]

The story sounds familiar. It is something like the descriptions we hear of the Great Crash of 1929. But in fact these events took place in the autumn of 1937. This was a depression within the Depression. It was occurring five years after Franklin Roosevelt was first elected, and four and a half years after Roosevelt introduced the New Deal. It was taking place eight years after President Herbert Hoover first made his own rescue plans following the 1929 stock market crash. Washington had already made thousands of efforts to help the economy, yet those efforts had not brought prosperity.

Unlike the stories you like to recount in support of one social engineering boondoggle or another this one is understated, accurate and verifiable. It also isn't the main argument, which in this case extends another 500 heavily footnoted pages. With extensive use of statistics and original sources Shlaes builds a compelling case that the New Deal was a disastrous exercise in central planning driven more by tinkering and trial-and-error -- mostly error -- than anything else. Originating in all but name with Hoover, not Roosevelt, the New Deal prolonged what should have been one more cyclical depression into the Great Depression.

The term "The Forgotten Man" which FDR appropriated for his own purposes actually originated with William Graham Sumner and had a decidedly different meaning than the one imposed upon it later:

As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine that C shall do for X, or in the better case, what A, B and C shall do for X ... What I want to do is look up C. I want to show you what manner of man he is. I call him the Forgotten Man. Perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct. He is the man who never is thought of ... He works, he votes, generally he prays--but he always pays ... -- William Graham Sumner, Yale University, 1883

Inasmuch as you seem determined to take us there again, you might want to give this a read, with particular attention to the "votes" part of that above quote.

---

Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, Trade Paperback Edition. (Harper Perennial, 2008).

---

6. Economics in One Lesson -- Henry Hazlitt

In more ways than are generally understood Mr. President you had an impoverished upbringing. For most of your young life and well into adulthood you couldn't have swung a medium sized cat without hitting a Marxist (not that there's anything wrong with that). Mom, dad, Uncle Frank, even your grandparents were all in that club. As such, it wasn't surprising that once you struck out on your own you sought company that would provide a little taste of home. Accordingly, while you probably learned 101 different ways to intellectualize that chip on your shoulder, and 101 more to legitimize your determination to get some payback, it's painfully obvious you didn't learn much about economics.

This deficiency is made manifest with pretty much every public utterance you make. Consider this exercise in finger wagging directed at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the least of whom arguably forgot more about the workings of a modern economy than you will probably ever know -- absent serious remedial education at any rate.

If we're fighting to reform the tax code and increase exports to help you compete, the benefits can't just translate into greater profits and bonuses for those at the top. They have to be shared by American workers, who need to know that expanding trade and opening markets will lift their standards of living as well as your bottom line. -- President Obama's remarks at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Feb. 7, 2011

The stone-faced expressions in that terribly quiet room effectively masked what had to be a combination of dismay and incredulity that you actually have no clue what profits actually represent or what businesses do with them. Worse still, the larger context of this speech would have left them in no doubt that you have even less understanding of the complexity and interconnectedness of the system you are so eager to stick electric prods into.

Enter Henry Hazlitt, whose"Economics in One Lesson is an excellent primer in how free-market capitalism works, and by corollary, why government tinkering doesn't. Possibly anticipating a special needs reader such as yourself, he starts out very simply with the eponymous "one lesson":

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

One hypothetical example might be a government subsidy for trade-ins on purchases of new cars that was supposed to stimulate new automobile sales but didn't. What's worse, it created an artificial shortage of serviceable used cars, effectively denying people of modest means the inexpensive cars they had access to before all that government 'help' came along. Similarly, when you imply that profits in and of themselves are somehow ill-gotten and must be diminished or redistributed for the "sake of the workers", you either don't understand the big picture or don't care to understand it.

On the off-chance the latter isn't true Hazlitt can help you out:

Suppose a clothing manufacturer learns of a machine that will make men’s and women’s overcoats for half as much labor as previously. He installs the machines and drops half his labor force. This looks at first glance like a clear loss of employment. But the machine itself required labor to make it; so here, as one offset, are jobs that would not otherwise have existed.

[...]

After the machine has produced economies sufficient to offset its cost, the clothing manufacturer has more profits than before. ... The manufacturer must use these extra profits in at least one of three ways, and possibly he will use part of them in all three: (1) he will use the extra profits to expand his operations by buying more machines to make more coats; or (2) he will invest the extra profits in some other industry; or (3) he will spend the extra profits on increasing his own consumption. Whichever of these three courses he takes, he will increase employment.

On the subject of those evil profits themselves, he is equally direct:

The function of profits, finally, is to put constant and unremitting pressure on the head of every competitive business to introduce further economies and efficiencies, no matter to what stage these may already have been brought. ... Contrary to a popular impression, profits are achieved not by raising prices, but by introducing economies and efficiencies that cut costs of production. ... The price charged by all firms for the same commodity or service must be the same; those who try to charge a higher price do not find buyers. Therefore the largest profits go to the firms that have achieved the lowest costs of production. ... It is thus that the consumer and the public are served.

[...]

Profits, in short, resulting from the relationships of costs to prices, not only tell us which goods it is most economical to make, but which are the most economical ways to make them.

Hazlitt has a great deal more to say about profits, as well as many other fundamentals of economics generally ignored by well-meaning (and not so well-meaning) people such as yourself in their single-minded pursuit of Utopia. His exposition of the "broken window" fallacy alone -- a kill shot for every make-work/stimulus/dig-a-hole-fill-a-hole economic argument ever made -- is worth the asking price.

---

Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics (Three Rivers Press, 1988).

---

5. Basic Economics -- Thomas Sowell

Okay, now that you know what profit is, it's time to take your game to the next level. At 786 pages Thomas Sowell's (excuse me for a moment here while I take off my hat) Basic Economics is something of a door-stopper. It is also one the most -- if not the most -- lucid, comprehensive and eminently readable overviews of economics fundamentals you are ever likely to encounter. Given who you have chosen to surround yourself with I'm hardly going out on a limb here. I mean, has anyone in that gaggle of whiz-kids around you ever explained the economic facts of life to you as elegantly and persuasively as this?

Without scarcity, there is no need to economize—and therefore no economics. A distinguished British economist named Lionel Robbins gave the classic definition of economics:

"Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses."

[...] What does “scarce” mean? It means that what everybody wants adds up to more than there is. What this implies is that there are no easy “win-win” solutions but only serious and sometimes painful trade-offs. This may seem like a simple thing, but its implications are often grossly misunderstood, even by highly educated people.

One of those highly educated people is clearly you.

Using this recurring theme of using "scarce resources which have alternative uses" Sowell demonstrates how free markets invariably channel resources to their most valuable uses, using prices and profits as a constant feedback loop. What is remarkable about a capitalist economy -- as he demonstrates -- is that this system of stupefying complexity was built and is maintained by millions of individuals, none of whom understand more than their microscopic share of it. They operate on nothing more than profit-motive constrained by competition. What is also remarkable is that this system, which would appear to be driven solely by self-interest, reliably creates a far greater amount of wealth and well-being for its citizens than collectivist systems explicitly dedicated to their common welfare.

Your takeaway here, Mr. President, though I don't expect you to embrace it, is the system you are trying to bring down is historically the most successful at improving the lot of the people you claim to care about. It is by no means perfect, and it will never be "fair" (since that term is entirely irrelevant to economics anyway) but it produces by far the best results. (The next book I am going to suggest provides powerful arguments as to how much worse the second-best option is, but don't you dare read ahead.)

It all goes wrong when people of varying honesty and good-will decide to grab the controls in the name of "social justice" ,"equality" or whatever other buzz words are in vogue in the salons at the time. The fatal conceit here is that any group of central planners, no matter how bright and talented, can possibly understand every aspect of a modern economy, much less react to changes within it in a timely fashion.

When economic decisions are taken out of the hands of individuals operating in a market and put into the hands of experts on planning commissions and the like, this may be thought of as a transfer of decision-making power from those with less knowledge to those with more knowledge but it is far more likely to be a transfer of decision-making power to experts with less knowledge and more presumptions. The poor track record of central planning, which caused many nations to abandon it by the late twentieth century, is understandable in terms of the inherent difficulty of amassing the kind of knowledge that would have been required to make it work.

This was played out in endlessly in the old Soviet Union where artificially high prices resulted in products rotting in warehouses. At the same time artificially low prices created the shortages and serpentine waiting lines that became emblematic of the communist economy. All of this was the handiwork of central planners who had to keep track of 24 million prices.

Our attempts to out-Soviet the Soviets has included subsidies to grossly inefficient and uneconomical solutions such as ethanol, solar and wind power while inflicting punitive taxation and regulation on economic winners such as the nuclear and petroleum industries. It is somewhat more subtle than outright nationalization and central committees but the net effect is the same.

Sowell described it thus:

People who want special taxes or subsidies for particular things seem not to understand that what they are really asking for is for the prices to misstate the relative scarcities of things and the relative values that the users of these things put on them.

Denying reality is no way to go through life, since in this case it tends to bite you back with high food and oil prices -- the logical consequence of fueling our cars with corn and ceding oil drilling to China and Venezuela. I would recommend buying two copies of this book and giving one to Geitner. If he says he has already read it tell him to pay attention this time.

---

Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics 4th Ed: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy, Fourth Edition. (Basic Books, 2010).

---

4. The Road to Serfdom -- F.A. Hayek

It is now often said that democracy will not tolerate “capitalism.” If “capitalism” means here a competitive system based on free disposal over private property, it is far more important to realize that only within this system is democracy possible. When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.

[...]

There is no justification for the belief that, so long as power is conferred by democratic procedure, it cannot be arbitrary; the contrast suggested by this statement is altogether false: it is not the source but the limitation of power which prevents it from being arbitrary. Democratic control may prevent power from becoming arbitrary, but it does not do so by its mere existence. If democracy resolves on a task which necessarily involves the use of power which cannot be guided by fixed rules, it must become arbitrary power.

Mr. President, we have now looked at three books which each in their own way make powerful arguments that socialism doesn't work. In fact, it has failed everywhere it has been tried and will reliably fail in every future attempt with something approaching mathematical certainty. What disturbs many of us is not so much that it fails, but what it turns into after it has failed, which more often than not involves guns, loudspeakers and at least one guy with a title like "Great Leader".

Again, it is possible that you believe 1,543 is a charm and it will all turn out differently this time. It won't, and we do you no favors, to say nothing of ourselves, by allowing you to persist in this delusion.

There is perhaps no more powerful and persuasive work on the intellectual bankruptcy of socialism and its inevitable descent into some form of totalitarianism than F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. It is a measure of its power and influence in fact that many of your compatriots single it out for contempt and abuse to this very day.

One typical criticism was that he exaggerated the corrosive effects of socialism. What about western Europe, they asked, that had embraced a kinder, gentler form of socialism and had suffered none of the dire effects he described? Hayek's basic response was "it's early". The fact that the Greeks are now setting their own policemen on fire, to cite but one example, would seem to bear him out on this. In fact, this quote below could have been used as a crawl underneath the footage of any of the riots that have afflicted Europe of late.

These difficulties need not lead to open clashes so long as socialism is merely the aspiration of a limited and fairly homogeneous group. They come to the surface only when a socialist policy is actually attempted with the support of the many different groups which together compose the majority of a people. Then it soon becomes the one burning question which of the different sets of ideals shall be imposed upon all by making the whole resources of the country serve it.

Economic power is ultimate power. Hilaire Belloc puts it most succinctly:

The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.

Once this power is arrogated to any group of central planners, no matter how initially enlightened and well-meaning, economic failure ensues. This failure is always followed by the necessity of propping up "The Plan" through increasing control and coercion, making matters even worse.

We must here return for a moment to the position which precedes the suppression of democratic institutions and the creation of a totalitarian regime. In this stage it is the general demand for quick and determined government action that is the dominating element in the situation, dissatisfaction with the slow and cumbersome course of democratic procedure which makes action for action’s sake the goal. It is then the man or the party who seems strong and resolute enough “to get things done” who exercises the greatest appeal. “Strong” in this sense means not merely a numerical majority—it is the ineffectiveness of parliamentary majorities with which people are dissatisfied. What they will seek is somebody with such solid support as to inspire confidence that he can carry out whatever he wants. It is here that the new type of party, organized on military lines, comes in.

In first principles and final outcomes the differences between Communism and Fascism are thus largely academic.

The conflict between the Fascist or National Socialist and the older socialist parties must, indeed, very largely be regarded as the kind of conflict which is bound to arise between rival socialist factions. There was no difference between them about the question of its being the will of the state which should assign to each person his proper place in society. But there were, as there always will be, most profound differences about what are the proper places of the different classes and groups.

Now, it could be, that you fully appreciate the end game of socialism and are actively pursuing it -- in which case the subtext here should be "we're onto you." It could however be that you are one of the majority of the Left who really haven't thought this through or, more accurately, have willed themselves not to think it through. As Hayek describes below:

The effect of the people’s agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit themselves to take a journey together without agreeing where they want to go: with the result that they may all have to make a journey which most of them do not want at all.

If in fact you are one of those folks, I defy you to read this book with an open mind and not come away with profound second thoughts about the wisdom of riding this particular train.

---

F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition (University Of Chicago Press, 2007).

---

3. The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran -- Robert Spencer

For the record, Mr. President I don't think you're not a follower of Islam; if for no other reason than you don't seem to know very much about it. Now, as Robert Spencer explains in The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran that's not as unique even among believers. The words of the Koran and its supporting texts (the Hadith) are only considered authoritative in the original Arabic so non-Arab Muslims typically recite verses and prayers they don't understand. If anything though they have the advantage over you because at least they know they're taking somebody's word for it.

Spencer's book is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in what the Koran actually says, the role and importance of supporting texts, and the accepted theological resolutions for passages that often contradict each other. This latter element is especially important when, as you actually are wont to do, someone produces an isolated verse to prove the Koran counsels peace or tolerance. The principle of abrogation generally holds that later passages supersede earlier ones (to further muddy the waters this isn't necessarily in terms of where they occur in the book, which is not in chronological order).

Spencer writes:

Generally Muslim theologians follow the practice of Ibn Ishaq: they regard the Medinian suras -- which constitute the bulk of Koranic teaching on warfare against believers [and incidentally most of Shari'a] -- as taking precedence over the earlier Meccan ones. This effectively enshrines the validity of the Koran's most bellicose and supremacist injunctions.

It is unfortunate that you did not avail yourself of Spencer's book before charging off to make the Muslim waters recede in your Cairo speech, which demonstrated to at least two large groups, Muslims and historians, that you knew nothing about Islam or the history of western conflicts with it.

 

I know, too, that Islam has always been a part of America's story. The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco. In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, our second President John Adams wrote, "The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims."

After which Jefferson, tired of paying tribute to the Barbary Muslim pirates fought and won a war against them, from which the Marine Corps gets that "shores of Tripoli" line in its song, right? You have political boilerplate issued on the signing of a treaty, we have Jefferson, the war and the Marine Corps. So, your point?

There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other; to respect one another; and to seek common ground. As the Holy Koran tells us, "Be conscious of God and speak always the truth." That is what I will try to do – to speak the truth as best I can, humbled by the task before us, and firm in my belief that the interests we share as human beings are far more powerful than the forces that drive us apart.

The problem here that Spencer and others have pointed out is that this verse is actually a prelude to Muhammad scolding some of his followers to help him fight unbelievers. I can imagine that's possibly not the "oil on troubled waters" effect you were looking for. The rest of that passage reads in part:

It is not for the townsfolk of Al-Madinah and for those around them of the wandering Arabs to stay behind the messenger of Allah and prefer their lives to his life. ... O ye who believe! Fight those of the disbelievers who are near to you, and let them find harshness in you, and know that Allah is with those who keep their duty (unto Him). -- 9:120-123

Spencer points out a curious delusion that prompts these spasms of wishful thinking:

U.S. officials seem to believe if they act as if Islam is a religion of peace and the Koran is a book of peace, Muslims will feel themselves compelled to behave accordingly. An extreme example of this bizarre assumption can in President Obama's heralded speech to the Islamic world in Cairo in 2009. Obama was extremely anxious to appear sympathetic and accommodating to Muslim grievances — so much so that he not only quoted the Koran (and did so ham-handedly and out of context, as we have seen) but also signaled in several ways, whether by ignorance or by design, that he was Muslim himself. For example, Obama extended "a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my community: assalaamu alaykum" -- that is, peace be upon you. According to Islamic law, however, this is the greeting that a Muslim extends to a fellow Muslim. ... Islamic law is silent about what Muslims must do when naive, non-Muslim, Islamophilic presidents offer the greeting to Muslims. Obama also said the words that Muslims traditionally utter after mentioning the names of prophets -- "peace upon them" -- after mentioning Moses, Jesus and Muhammad. Does he then accept Muhammad as a prophet? No reporter has asked him, but that was decidedly the impression he gave, intentionally or not, to the Islamic world.

The people in charge in the Middle East know (if they had any doubts previously) that through either naivete or willful blindness you don't understand Islam and aren't interested in understanding it either. To such people this is a big fat green light to press their advantage, not that we've seen any evidence of that of late. Flipping through this book might be a good first start in turning that around.

---

Robert Spencer, The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran (Regnery Publishing, 2009).

---

2. Radical-in-Chief -- Stanley Kurtz

One of my fondest hopes is that Stanley Kurtz will never become an IRS auditor and I will never find myself staring across a desk at him trying to explain those undisclosed assets I thought were safely buried in a jar in Greenland.

I am sure Mr. President your fondest hope must have been that he would take the hint to back off looking into your past after his research efforts met unexpected roadblocks and after the piranhas of the media swarmed him like a severed limb.

Unhappily for you anyway it only appears to have steeled his resolve. The result is a masterpiece, written in careful, meticulous (some would say painful) detail that documents the cat's cradle of relationships with socialist individuals and organizations that characterized every step of your ascendancy from student to community organizer to president. More importantly Kurtz makes a compelling case that from the early 1980's onwards your own evolution and the metamorphosis of the Left were inextricably intertwined. It explains, as no other theory has adequately explained, why you became a community organizer in the first place.

The socialist community organizers who inspired and trained Obama openly embraced American democracy. Although they admired Marx, Lenin, and Mao—along with Obama’s idol, Saul Alinsky—in the medium term, at least, these organizers surrendered their revolutionary hopes and abandoned authoritarian ways. Some retained a soft spot for Third World Communist regimes in Cuba and Latin America. And surely the program favored by Obama’s organizing mentors could be seen as a subtle—and sometimes not so subtle—assault on traditional American freedoms. Yet this new stealth socialism, which Obama studied and absorbed as a community organizer in Chicago, became more sophisticated and transformed itself into the policies he is now enacting as president. ... The president has systematically disguised the truth about his socialist convictions, sometimes by directly misrepresenting his past and sometimes by omitting or parceling out damaging information to disguise its real importance. Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, and ACORN—all of Obama’s well-known radical ties are entry points into the much larger and still unknown socialist world where Obama’s career was nurtured.

As I alluded to above, this is a heavy read, only because Kurtz has a researcher's zeal for detail and exhaustive references. One can easily imagine that one of his motives for the elaborate t-crossing was to preempt any suggestion that this was just one more hyper-partisan screed playing fast and loose with the facts. The complete lack of sensationalism makes it all the more powerful. I recommend this one, not so much as a walk down memory lane as a reminder that even the best kept secrets have a much shorter shelf-life than most people imagine. You might want to ruminate on this, with possible reference to Lincoln's observations about fooling all of the people all of the time.

---

Stanley Kurtz, Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism (Threshold Editions, 2010).

---

1. The Roots of Obama's Rage -- Dinesh D'Souza

There is something deeply Freudian about this, and even Shakespearean. Obama never knew his father, who abandoned his mother and him shortly after he was born, and whom he met only once when he was a young boy. Even so, Obama identified more with his father than anyone else, and he undertook an intense psychological and ultimately actual journey to Africa in order to discover his dad and in the process to find himself. Unable to find his father, he did the next best thing: he embraced his father’s ideals and decided to live out the script of his father’s unfulfilled life. Obama ultimately recognized that his father was not the great romantic figure he had long envisioned him to be. But Obama concluded that despite his flaws, his father had great vision, great ideals, a great plan of reform. Since Obama Sr. was unable to achieve those ideals, Obama Jr. figured he would undertake this heroic mission. In changing the world into the image of his father, he would complete the task that his father couldn’t, and thus he would become worthy of his father, a real African and a real man.

Just so you don't think I am fixated on the socialist thing, let's conclude with a book by Dinesh D'Souza that takes an entirely different tack, identifying the prime motive in your life as not socialism at all but anti-colonialism fueled by the psychological dynamic described above.

I actually believe D'Souza uses an artificially narrow definition of socialism (the European version for instance is dismissed as "state capitalism") , to make a distinction that is ultimately unnecessary to his argument in any event. Socialism and anti-colonialism are by no means mutually exclusive (Obama's Marxist father being a prime example). Besides, the history of modern Africa is littered with movements and political figures who have embraced both more or less seamlessly (a point D'Souza himself makes later on in the book).

This is, however, more of a quibble than a serious objection. Although, as I have written before, others have made similar observations before there is no question that D'Souza is mining this subject more deeply and thoroughly than anyone before him. After carefully laying out the five tenets of anti-colonialism:

[1] ... that empires are produced by murderous conquest and sustained by unceasing terror and violence. [2] ... colonial regimes are racist—they systematically produce the dehumanization of the colonized. [3] ... colonialism is a system of piracy in which the wealth of the colonized countries is systematically stolen by the colonizers. [4] ... colonial powers have a new leader: the United States. [5] ...there is no end to this system of injustice without getting the colonizers out.

D'Souza applies it as a working hypothesis to explain decisions and behaviors that have hitherto defied analysis or yielded only partially plausible answers. This is particularly pronounced in the area of foreign relations -- think anything to do with England for instance. This is a fascinating and persuasive read by one of conservatism's best writers and thinkers. Small minds (many of them your fans) have dismissed it as closet racism -- by a person of color no less -- which, as we say on this side of the fence, is Libberish for "Help, help, we can't break his logic!"

Mr. President, I frankly see a self-help opportunity here. If in fact you are fighting your own personal demons -- and Dinesh sold me -- you need to remember the three hundred million people you have put in the cross-fire. Please stop doing things we will all be sorry for later.

---

Dinesh D'Souza, The Roots of Obama's Rage (Regnery Publishing, 2010).

---

So Mr. President, enjoy your time off. I hope my suggestions have been helpful. Just to summarize the gist of my recommendations:

• Roosevelt was wrong. The New Deal was a disaster. Please don't use it as a template.
• Economics is worth understanding, especially if you have the power to sandbag whole industries with the stroke of a pen.
• Socialism works well until it doesn't. When it doesn't ... guns, loudspeakers, "Great Leader"
• Islam is many things but warm and fuzzy isn't one of them, and it's best you look into that sooner than later. Otherwise .. guns, loudspeakers, "Great Prophet"
• Your socialist background is an open book -- literally. The days of stealth and misdirection are numbered. You might as well start retooling now.
• Sorry about your dad but you have a country to run. Get help.

I know you're a quick study so please let me know when you are finished with these books and I'll suggest others. For what it's worth many of us are working overtime to ensure you will have all the time you need to catch up on your reading after 2012. All the best, Mark

There was a piece last week in Rolling Stone entitled "Glenn Beck's Shtick? Alex Jones Got There First" that perfectly illustrates three home truths:

• People primarily motivated by self-promotion will get into bed with anybody.
• Lefties obsessed with the destruction of a viscerally feared and hated enemy -- and that's all of them -- are likewise not overly choosy.
• These two groups tend to cohabit a lot.

In this particular instance, the menage a deux is between Alex Jones, amiably described as:

The godfather of the 9/11 Truth Movement, [and] the most popular chronicler of what he believes is a New World Order plot to enslave the global population ... [until] recently ... a lonely and little-known voice in the short wave and Internet radio wilderness.

and Alexander Zaitchik of Rolling Stone. Their shared goal is a take-down of Glenn Beck. Jones attempts to do this by proving, between spasms of sputtering envy, that Beck has stolen his ideas and adulterated the message. Zaitchik does so by lumping Beck together with a 9/11 Truther smart enough to work with video equipment and dumb enough to cooperate with Rolling Stone - whose general regard for him is such that they described him thus in a separate piece:

The most paranoid man in America is trying to overthrow the 'global Stasi Borg state,' one conspiracy theory at a time

In fairness to both gentlemen, their case does seem airtight. Using seven — count 'em seven — examples provided by Jones, Zaitchik weaves a tale of industrial espionage not seen since Jonah Goldberg ripped off my original idea that communism and fascism are essentially the same. But my woes are inconsequential when compared to Jones, who evidently holds copyrights on:

• The notion that statism relies on manufactured crises and scapegoats.
• The concept of, and the exact term "New World Order".
• The fact that historical socialists, crypto-socialists and progressives like George Bernard Shaw (and H.G. Wells and Margaret Sanger — not mentioned but just to throw a few more in) were thoroughly unpleasant people obsessed with the selective breeding, and efficient disposal, of humans.
• The revelation that the Egyptian revolution might not be the Lexington and Concord moment the MSM was hoping for, and that outside interests would attempt to manipulate chaotic events to their own ends.
• The idea that Google is cooperating with government agencies in ways unhealthy to the Republic.
• The idea of the Google bomb.

In addition to suspiciously pursuing some of the same story ideas -- also known in some circles as "seeing the nose on your face" -- it emerges that Beck has interviewed some of the same guests on his show during which they talk more or less about the same things. As we all know, that's a phenomenon unprecedented in modern news cycles. Jones' amplified list of grievances can be viewed below.

You might want to grab a glass of water before you settle in.



In breaking news Jones was also the first person to discover blackboard chalk, but I digress.

Although Jones' imperviousness to the idea that anyone could ever have thought of anything before -- or apart from -- him is quite amusing, the piece is not without its unfunny parts. Notable among these are Zaitchik's clumsy and profoundly dishonest attempts to suggest that Beck agrees with Jones' position that the Obama Administration is attempting to engineer an "inside job" like Oklahoma City or 9/11:

Alex Jones was the first 9/11 Truther. ... More recently, Jones and his websites have been sounding the alarm, based on mainstream press clippings, that the Obama Administration might find political gain in the tragedy of a “new Oklahoma City Bombing” or a 9/11-style attack. Jones had been making this argument for several months when Beck began to hit a very similar note shortly after the midterms last year. “They are setting up an Oklahoma City. They are claiming that one is coming and they’re already marked the one who caused it,” Beck said in November, referring to himself.

The full transcript of Beck's remarks are here, in which he was clearly reacting to this clip:

MARK PENN, DEMOCRATIC POLLSTER: Cabinets don't really sell things. The president himself has to reconnect with the people. Remember, President Clinton reconnected through Oklahoma, right?

CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC: Yes, because the bombing was down there.

PENN: And the president right now, he seems removed. It wasn't until that speech that he really clicked with the American public. Obama needs a similar kind of event.

... and this letter to Beck's advertisers from the Tides Foundation, which read in part:

The next “assassin” may succeed, and if so, there will be blood on many hands. The choice is yours. Please join my call to do the right thing in this regard and put Fox News at arm’s length from your company by halting your advertising with them. (Full letter here.)

The assassin in question was one Byron Williams, whose bent-on-mayhem journey to the offices of the Tides Foundation and the ACLU came to an abrupt halt when the California Highway Patrol pulled him over for speeding and driving erratically. Media Matters got all sweaty over the possibility Williams might be a Beck aficionado only to suffer cruel disappointment when a subsequent interview clearly showed Williams' clear indifference to both Fox News and Beck.

As I wrote at the time:

It shouldn’t be necessary to say this but even if they found a little Glenn Beck shrine, complete with incense and a sacrificial Twinkie in Williams' home, it would prove only that he was a crazy person with a thing for overweight white guys. The operative term here is “crazy person.” And what is clear about this non-story is they don’t even have that.

All of this is to say that none of this deterred Tides Foundation CEO Drummond Pike from writing his "boycott Fox" letter three months later. Beck, noting his self-evident role as one the Left's favorite pinatas was referring to media spin and concerted attempts to drive him out of business. Words like "Obama", "cabal", "big building", "shape charges" and/or "boom ... winning" didn't come up.

It's easy to see how Jones and/or Zaitchik could have missed this -- since it was expressed in clear comprehensible English no mentally competent adult could possibly misunderstand -- but, again, it's probably a stretch to consider this proof of Beck's latent Truther envy.

I find it hard to believe that Zaitchik doesn't recognize these nonsensical and vaguely pathetic assertions for the negative attention seeking they are -- and doesn't care. The real purpose after all is to juxtapose Jones and Beck: any port in a storm will do.

Fact is, you don't even have to like or agree with Glenn Beck to recognize he and Jones are as different as chalk and cheese -- quite apart from the 9/11 Truther type issues and the sheer volume of conspiracies, where Jones enjoys a significant lead to put it mildly. What Jones dismisses as timidity on Beck's part more temperate minds might consider greater care and cost counting. Critics who regard Beck as shrill or over the top really do need to take in Jones' act on a moderately sustained basis to see the real thing at work (at last Jones and I agree on something).

On foreign policy, while Beck has certainly questioned U.S. global commitments, he is nowhere near Ron Paul territory, which is more or less where Jones lives.

Beck is pro-Israel -- Jones, not so much.

 

The most obvious and profound difference, however, is character. By helpfully providing grist for Rolling Stone to continue its "Beck-is-so-crazy" narrative the crafty and astute Jones has allowed himself to be played like a piano by the very people he claims to stand against. All this, of course, in the cause of massaging his ego and boosting his own viewership by using Beck as a chin-up bar.

I don't think even Beck's harshest critic would consider him capable of that.

(Cross-posted at NewsReal Blog.)

For reasons best known to his therapist, Karl Rove has decided -- yet again -- to poke a stick into the Sarah Palin hornet's nest and give it a good stir. In an interview with New York Magazine Rove briefly departed from the theme of escalating self-congratulation he was very much warming to long enough to try his hand at Tina Fey shtick.

... When I bring up his statements [last October] about Palin during our interview, Rove says only that he wished he’d made his comments on Fox News instead—before going into a withering impersonation of Palin, recalling a scene from her TV show in which she’s fishing. “Did you see that?” he says, adopting a high, sniveling Palin accent: “ ‘Holy crap! That fish hit my thigh! It hurts!’ ” “How does that make us comfortable seeing her in the Oval Office?” he asks, disgusted. “You know—‘Holy crap, Putin said something ugly!’ ”

There is no mention in the article of Rove donning little Sarah glasses or ripping off his tear-away suit to reveal a faux Sarah ensemble (for which, on behalf of a grateful nation, I am truly thankful) but he may have been battling time constraints. Again, no-one can know what's in another man's heart (although we can safely surmise there wasn't a whole lot going on in his head) but it's possible Karl felt there hadn't been quite enough friction and division among conservatives of late. Lord knows after the smooth ride that was CPAC, to say nothing of the Tea Party love currently being showered on House Republicans over the budget cuts (or is it now down to "cut"?) one can readily appreciate how Karl could have come to that conclusion.

Maybe Karl woke up the morning of the interview and said to himself "You know its been weeks since MSNBC has had a good sound byte of Republicans seal-clubbing one of their own. Quick, Karen, get me a notepad!" Perhaps after drawing and discarding several stick drawings of himself with attendant captions like "The comeback is now!" he remembered that nothing will get the factions chin-wagging at each other like some demented Gilbert and Sullivan patter-chorus faster than the specter of Sarah Palin.

If this was his intention, including feeding the insatiable maw that is MSNBC's obsession with Sarah Palin, he could have measured the time it took them to pick up the story with the sweep-hand on his watch.



As divisive (to finally use that term in its proper context) as Rove's utterances might be, and for all the aid and comfort they provide to those who do not wish us well, they're a mere by-product of his true intent, which is amply illustrated in the same New York Magazine article:

One week before the 2010 midterm elections, Rove took aim at Sarah Palin, questioning the wisdom of her appearance on a reality show, Sarah Palin’s Alaska, if she really wanted to be taken seriously as a presidential candidate. Palin lacked the “gravitas” to be president, went a subhead in the U.K.’s DailyTelegraph.

[...]

Rove was the first major Republican figure to take a swipe at Palin. But he knew he had to do it. A few months earlier, in Rove’s traditional seat of Texas, he had gotten an up-close view of the internal divisions threatening his place in the party’s firmament. Governor Rick Perry’s political machine was courting the new hard-right populists in tricornered hats, feeding rumors of presidential designs, and threatening to blot out Bush’s footprint on the state. The Bush family, for political and personal reasons, tried to unseat Perry, backing Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison in the Republican gubernatorial primary. Their best man was on the case: Karl Rove, who supported and reportedly advised Hutchison.

What resulted was a preview of the GOP–versus–tea party civil war. Dave ­Carney, Perry’s top strategist, attacked Rove as a “country club” Republican. Conversely, ­Sarah Palin, tea-party heroine, endorsed Rick Perry, calling him a “true conservative.”

Perry handily destroyed Hutchison in the primary.

It beats me how RINO Senator whose favorite color is plaid on most issues, benefiting from the counsel of a man who made squeakers out of two presidential elections that should have been walkovers, and whose tepid responses to the vicious slanders against his old boss effectively surrendered the narrative to the Left, could possibly have lost ... but that's politics I guess.

Of interest too is the enumeration of the Progressive policies he is credited with advancing in the Bush administration:

Rove is the embodiment of everything the tea party resents. He supported Bush’s decision to bail out the banks in 2008, a major bone of contention with deficit hawks. And it was Rove, as White House political adviser, who pushed for some of the most expensive Bush programs, like the ­Medicare-prescription-drug bill, the passage of which cornered the troublesome State of Florida for Bush in 2004 but has already cost more than $1 trillion. The national debt nearly doubled under Bush, from $5.7 trillion to $10.6 trillion.

The point is Karl Rove wants back in, he's "the architect" and he wants his old drafting table back. Once he and the Republican establishment are back in charge we can return to the sane universe of his remembrance in which the GOP's biggest selling point is they tax, spend and regulate a little less than the other guys. The Tea Party in general and Sarah Palin in particular stand in the way of this very necessary realignment.

So, for all the talk of uniting against a common enemy (with which I am in full agreement by the way) it's worth noting that the poniards always seem to come from the cool, rational, pragmatic Republican Old Guard. It wasn't the Tea Party in the immediate aftermath of the greatest electoral power shift in seventy-five years who started whining to any itinerant camera crew they could find about the ones that got away. I don't recall the Tea Party in 2010 slagging off any duly nominated Republican candidate, notwithstanding what would have been profound policy differences with at least some of them. I also fail to recall any Tea Party candidate who failed to honor the Republican nomination process by running as an independent or write-in after losing.

But no matter, Rove has obviously read his Milton and decided it's better to rule in hell than serve in Heaven. If he and his ilk succeed he will have ample opportunity to find out.

Because this particular strategy, which necessarily involves the marginalization and alienation of the Tea Party, is also known as the "Obama Elected By Acclamation 2012" gambit.

There is a classic Bob Newhart skit about a man visiting the home of a friend who has a large and vicious dog. After being intermittently dragged around the room and pinned to the furniture by the beast, Newhart's character manages to mollify it with handfuls of gumdrops out of a bowl. This works fine until he realizes he's running low on gumdrops and his host nonchalantly advises him that if you stop feeding the dog "he doesn't understand."

If there is a better analog to the current entitlement-withdrawal syndrome we are witnessing in Wisconsin and elsewhere — both in terms of the brute stupidity of its participants and the growing horror with which it's being observed — I am at a loss to find it.

In a period of less than a week union thugs have made their displeasure with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Fox News, Glenn Beck, FreedomWorks, various Tea Party representatives, and pretty much anyone else who can't sing "Joe Hill" from memory manifest by making sure the expression "when push comes to shove" is anything but figurative.

Consider this calorically challenged defender of the working man — who probably can't see his belt, much less tighten it — heroically blind-siding a Tea Party activist then waddling off at high speed (relatively speaking):



One of the more egregious incidents (though it's a highly competitive field) was the assault on FreedomWorks' Tabitha Hale — who as anyone will tell you is indistinguishable from Hulk Hogan — by one such irrigator of hydrants, who was obviously put out that someone would be filming him at a public event, or perhaps taken aback by the realization that modern mobile phones can actually do that. In any case, if the eloquence of his remarks wasn't sufficient to guarantee him immortality Mr. Sluggo can rest assured that whacking the smallest, least confrontational human within his reach will.

 

In the midst of all this, the speed with which the unions have been able to embrace their inner Cujo has been matched only by the rapid evaporation of crocodile tears in the mainstream media over the lack of civil discourse. Anyone surprised by either of these developments should eschew all games of chance right now.

I appreciate it might seem unnecessarily provocative to compare union thugs to dogs — especially to those in the moderate attack dog community — so let me offer a "scratch behind the ears" qualification. These aren't just any dogs, they're the ones out of "Animal Farm". These are the pack animals that are inevitably dispatched when socialists run out of other people's money, and those other people finally notice. Hayek had it about right when he wrote:

Once government has embarked upon planning for the sake of justice, it cannot refuse responsibility for anybody's fate or position. [...] These difficulties need not lead to open clashes so long as socialism is merely the aspiration of a limited and fairly homogeneous group. They come to the surface only when a socialist policy is actually attempted with the support of the many different groups which together compose the majority of a people. Then it soon becomes the one burning question which of the different sets of ideals shall be imposed upon all by making the whole resources of the country serve it. [Emphasis mine] -- The Road to Serfdom (F. A. Hayek and Bruce Caldwell)

Thus we have the public service unions — and teachers unions in particular — acting as perfect microcosms of the socialist dynamic. As beneficiaries of a redistributive scheme long on slogans and short on basic arithmetic they have a dizzying array of explanations as to why two plus two does in fact equal five. When THE PLAN fails -- and it always fails, for the same kinds of fixed and immutable reasons that planes fall out the sky when they lose power -- the planners must find a scapegoat.

Thus, the issue for them is not that governments, out of basic survival instinct, are being dragged kicking and screaming into fiscal responsibility -- and that one casualty will be the unsustainable lifestyle to which public sector unions would like to become accustomed. The real reason is oppression and union-busting ... and by the way 2+2 = 5. Therefore the pit-poodles must be dispatched to battle the oppressors. Older, smaller, weaker oppressors are definitely preferable.

Accordingly, Tabitha Hale and the growing throng of others who have been on the receiving end of that particular brand of attention unions reserve for anyone bright enough to understand the First Amendment, and unwise enough to actually apply it, should accordingly take solace that it isn't personal.

We're just out of gumdrops and they don't understand.

In the aftermath of this year's CPAC it would appear that to know-know-know GOProud isn't necessarily to love-love-love it. In fact, if you listen carefully you can almost hear the voice of the class monitor advising many of its erstwhile supporters to stay calm and move in an orderly fashion toward the fire exits. Tammy Bruce, in what can only be described as a terse statement, has resigned from their advisory board. Al Cardenas, the new chair of the American Conservative Union, which organizes CPAC, is publicly rethinking the wisdom of working with them in future:

I have been disappointed with their website and their quotes in the media, taunting organizations that are respected in our movement and part of our movement, and that’s not acceptable. And that puts them in a difficult light in terms of how I view things ... It’s going to be difficult to continue the relationship [with GOProud] because of their behavior and attitude ...

At issue have been a number of statements made by GOProud co-founders Christopher Barron and Jimmy LaSalvia in response to people and organizations who either stayed home this year or showed up expressing serious misgivings about GOProud's role and agenda. These exercises in spleen-venting have been remarkable not only for their impolitic petulance but the disturbing tendency to play the "bigot" card -- pretty much as a default -- in the face of legitimate disagreements.

Thus it is that in Barron's world, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council doesn't merely disagree with (or misunderstand) GOProud's stance on gay marriage, he is actually in the business of "demonizing gays":



In case this strikes you as too subtle to make a definitive call, Barron obligingly spells it out in a separate interview in Metro Weekly -- with bonus tracks: The Heritage Foundation and Jim DeMint:

If you're Tony Perkins, you're a bigot. You're against all of that stuff not because of any federalist reasons, but actually because you're just a nasty, anti-gay bigot. [...] ''I think there's a couple people in Heritage who, at the behest of Cleta Mitchell – who is just a nasty bigot … she got some of the people at Heritage early on fired up about this [...] They're all excited that Jim DeMint is boycotting. And that's fantastic. I'm glad that he's willing to be on the Island of Political Misfit Toys ...

Inexplicably, some "old school" conservatives take umbrage at newcomers -- especially those whose contributions to date couldn't be detected with an electron microscope -- taking a pole-axe to those who have been fighting, and winning, this bar fight for a very long time, and who by no stretch of anyone's febrile imagination can be considered bigots of any kind. In fairness Barron did apologize for the Cleta Mitchell remark.

For the past six months, we have watched as unfair and untrue attacks have been leveled against our organization, our allies, our friends and sometimes even their families. Everyone has their breaking point and clearly in my interview with Metro Weekly I had reached mine. I shouldn’t have used the language that I did to describe Cleta Mitchell and for that I apologize ...

No word on how the other retractions are coming. Perhaps what has exercised Barron has been the "unfair and untrue attacks" based largely on his own published words, GOProud website content (current and scrubbed -- although not quite scrubbed enough) and public pronouncements. GOProud's fundamental pitch is well encapsulated in its mission statement:

GOProud represents gay conservatives and their allies. GOProud is committed to a traditional conservative agenda that emphasizes limited government, individual liberty, free markets and a confident foreign policy. GOProud promotes our traditional conservative agenda by influencing politics and policy at the federal level. [Emphasis mine.]

Got it. GOProud is an organization comprised of fiscal conservatives, strong on defense, who just happen to be gay. What rational person -- even a social conservative like me heavily invested in ensuring that no-one has any fun -- could have a problem with that?

In fact, GOProud is so not into pushing a social agenda that they felt compelled to exhort Congressional Republic leaders to do likewise in an open letter:

On behalf of limited government conservatives everywhere we write to urge you and your colleagues in Washington to put forward a legislative agenda in the next Congress that reflects the principles of the Tea Party movement. [...] The Tea Party movement is a non-partisan movement, focused on issues of economic freedom and limited government, and a movement that will be as vigilant with a Republican-controlled Congress as we were with a Democratic-controlled Congress. This election was not a mandate for the Republican Party, nor was it a mandate to act on any social issue, nor should it be interpreted as a political blank check. [...] We urge you to stay focused on the issues that got you and your colleagues elected and to resist the urge to run down any social issue rabbit holes in order to appease the special interests.

One has to wonder how Jim DeMint -- who took time away from Island of Misfit Toys long enough to raise more money for conservative candidates than anyone else in the mid-terms -- felt about being lectured by GOProud and its gnat-sized cadre, in their self-appointed capacity as spokesmen for the entire Tea Party movement. I can't imagine it was pretty.

The problem is, for all their protestations to the contrary, GOProud has left a trail of evidence (which it has been only partially successful in expunging) to indicate that pushing a social agenda is exactly what they're up to. It is disquieting, for instance, that a "hands off the social issues" guy like Christopher Barron should have served as the "head of Republican outreach" for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, or that as Political Director of Log Cabin Republicans:

He coordinated Log Cabin’s lobbying efforts to defeat the anti-family Federal Marriage Amendment, ... implemented a GOP lobby strategy for HIV/AIDS funding, hate crimes legislation, federal employment non-discrimination legislation, and legislation repealing the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy.

One would almost think, given the lack of success in bringing conservatives to enlightenment by these means, better minds decided to shape-shift into something a bit more ... oblique. In examining their website content -- past and present -- however, it quickly becomes obvious that this is still a work in progress.

Compare, for instance the current preamble to their Federal Legislative Priorities with the same section last September:
Or other sections where clearly some softening of the prose has taken place:

One could argue -- as Barron has -- that there are perfectly good explanations for all of this. I'm actually waiting for a few that don't sound like spin-control. In the interim I hope we can minimally agree on the importance of getting past Kumbaya and doing a little due diligence before endorsing them. I am glad the ACU is reviewing their involvement. It might have been a good idea to think through some of these issues a year ago.

The GOProud debacle — and make no mistake Tammy Bruce and CPAC are just the beginning — contains a boatload of lessons for the Rodney King wing of the conservative movement. Two spring immediately to mind:

• "Can't we all get along?" is a noble sentiment, and a great Hallmark message, but like all such sentiments requires some examination of the details before wholesale adoption.
• All tents, even really big ones, will eventually collapse if you stretch the tent-pegs beyond their design limits. Try it if you don't believe me.

Those who insist on conflating tolerance with endorsement will insist this is proof of conservative homophobia, when actually its proof that conservatives — even after a period of muddled acquiescence — will eventually recognize a Trojan Horse when they see one.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(H/T: Michael Wolfe for helping me find the screen snaps of the September 2010 web site content. GOProud would appear to have blocked direct access by tools such as archive.org.)

IIt is the supreme irony that an outbreak of unusually cold weather has exposed ominous signs of weakness in an industry about to be further hobbled by regulations designed to combat global warming. It is doubly ironic that this should have occurred in a state whose name is more or less synonymous with energy production.

Texas, which produces and consumes more electricity than any other state, experienced power shortages last week sufficient to warrant rolling blackouts and an undertaking (subsequently reneged upon) to import power from Mexico. In fairness to operators such as the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) - who caught the brunt of the public wrath over the rolling blackouts, especially when critical care facilities also had their lights turned out - it is true that the power shortages were caused by failures of power plants not designed to withstand the cold.

All power plants are built to a certain standard based on the weather expected in their location. The plants in the northern parts of the United States are more weatherized than those in the South, according to electricity traders who used to work at power plants. In the North, plants have heaters and monitors on water pipes and other equipment outside in the cold that in the past may not have been needed on plants in the South. But in the South, where temperatures can top 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 Celsius) for several days in a row, plants are designed to take the heat much better than units in the North. More than 50 power units representing more than 7,000 megawatts of generating capacity were unable to run Wednesday when the mercury dropped and a fierce winter storm dropped snow and ice on several parts of Texas.

Fair enough, but the larger — and more interesting — question is why sufficient extra capacity wasn't available in the system to offset the shortfall. One would expect that Texas with a daily demand of around 60,000 MW should be able to withstand a 12% reduction in output without seeking help from another country or turning off the respirators at Parkland Hospital every 45 minutes. This would be the same "reserve margin" question ERCOT itself expressed concerns about back in late 2008:

ERCOT said in its annual report on electrical generation capacity and demand that the cushion of excess capacity in Texas could drop below the council's target in 2014 and 2015. That's because a natural gas power plant that was scheduled to begin operating in 2013 won't go online at that time. ERCOT aims to keep at least a 12.5 percent reserve margin to maintain reliability, even if several power plants go out at the same time. ERCOT estimates that the reserve margin will be 21.8 percent in 2010 and will drop to 12.3 percent in 2014 and 10.2 percent by 2015.

It would appear these projections were a little on the optimistic side. But who could have known — except anyone who listened to candidate Obama for five minutes — that the EPA would arrogate to itself massive new de facto regulatory powers and ensure that anyone still foolish enough to consider building anything that didn't have the words "green", "solar" or "wind" in it would come to understand his folly somewhere between the umpteenth delay and final bankruptcy?





Perhaps sensing that Obama might not have been kidding, ERCOT wisely hedged its bets at the conclusion of the report:

The reserve margin estimates are a moving target. Every time another power plant gets a permit or is delayed, the forecast changes. [...] Further, developers are considering building power plants amounting to more than 30,000 megawatts of capacity in the next five years. ERCOT doesn't include those plants in the report because they lack either agreements to interconnect to the power grid or air permits.

The words "air permits" here should probably be set off in huge granite letters like "Ben Hur", such is their importance and relative immovability. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration:

Natural gas-fired power plants typically account for about one-half of the electricity produced in Texas and coal-fired plants account for much of the remaining generation.

Please note the absence of the words "green", "solar" or "wind" in that sentence. If you're the State of Texas you've got to be basking in the EPA love as they glower over their bifocals in disapproval. Not that Texas didn't give it the old college try. Consider this unintentionally hilarious paean to wind-power of another kind:

Although renewable energy sources contribute minimally to the Texas power grid, Texas leads the Nation in wind-powered generation capacity, and substantial new wind generation capacity is under construction.

Got it. Texas has been browbeaten into constructing enough of these white elephants to surpass California in pouring money down this particular rat-hole and now leads the nation in wildly uneconomical and utterly insignificant alternative energy output. This has to be great comfort to the Texans as they freeze in the dark.

And in the end they needn't have bothered. An altogether unimpressed EPA has decided to make Texas — one of the few states to challenge its recent decision to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and oil refineries — its poster child by directly taking over its greenhouse gas permitting program.

The facts are painfully clear; because of the EPA's obsession with global warming, which has spawned the lunatic classification of carbon dioxide as a pollutant, an already onerous regulatory system is about to become much worse. We have already lost years in the struggle to keep our energy supply apace with growing demand by banning and/or over-regulating our most economical sources such as fossil fuels and nuclear while promoting "green" solutions, some of which may someday be economically viable but whose adoption can only be considered premature at this point.

Organizations like the Sierra Club, who have no idea how to change a lightbulb much less power one, may get positively giddy when announcing that 150 planned coal-fired plants have been canceled since 2001, but the Chinese, with whom we are presumably supposed to compete, have no such misgivings.

 

The net result of crippling energy solutions that work in favor of those that don't is progressive deindustrialization. If the EPA prevails in its attempt to micromanage power plants with an army of carbon-sniffing bureaucrats, long on ideology and short on industry experience and expertise, we will all look back on the rolling blackouts of 2011 with nostalgia.

(Cross-posted at NewsReal Blog.)

Scott Keyes at Think Progress (a distribution arm of the Center for American Progress, not that there's anything wrong with that) has written a thoughtful, well-researched and meticulously argued piece entitled Leading Neoconservative Frank Gaffney Argues Muslim Brotherhood Has ‘Infiltrated’ The Federal Government. Nah, just kidding. It's actually just another bungled ambush attempt by a junior ribbon-clerk whose patent inability to construct an argument is only rivaled by the leaden predictability of his prose. (Well golly, that was harsh. One might almost think that Mr. Keyes sand-bagging of a good, decent and thoughtful man had set me off.) But don't take my word for it, let's read together:

Amidst the political upheaval in Egypt, conservatives are scare-mongering about the possible Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt. But leading neoconservative Frank Gaffney is taking Muslim Brotherhood fearmongering [sic] to new heights. This past weekend, Gaffney was a featured speaker at the Educational Policy Conference in St. Louis, an annual gathering of social conservatives. Gaffney used the opportunity to discuss how the Muslim Brotherhood is not only poised to implement a new theocracy in Egypt, but is also operating in the United States under “front groups” like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil liberties group dedicated to “protecting the rights of all Americans, regardless of faith.”

Just to save us all some time let me see if I can respond in kind:

Amidst the political upheaval in Egypt, liberals are in deep denial about the possible Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt. But Progressive Media researcher and general non-entity Scott Keyes has taken this denial to new heights. Just yesterday, someone let him out of the microfiche library long enough to write a hit piece about Frank Gaffney. Keyes used the opportunity to mock Gaffney's utterly unrefuted argument that the Muslim Brotherhood is not only poised to implement a new theocracy in Egypt, but is also operating in the United States under “front groups” like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, whom Keyes characterizes as a "a civil liberties group dedicated to 'protecting the rights of all Americans, regardless of faith'" ... because they said so. Presumably Mr. Keyes plans to apply the same intellectual rigor to his next lunch hour special: "Joseph Stalin - Deeply Misunderstood Agrarian Reformer."

You see how easy this stuff is to write when you don't have to worry about supporting your assertions with facts or logic? In Keyes' world (and what a "dress to the Left" world it is) it's simple: Summarize your victim's arguments, liberally surround certain terms with quotation marks so your slower readers will know when to roll their eyes, and inject phrases like:

Echoing the McCarthyist anti-communist rhetoric of the 1950s ...

So even your catatonic readers will know when to throw rocks and garbage. There's no need to prove your opponent wrong, just imply that his positions are ridiculous on their face and trust your audience won't be churlish enough to ask "um, why is that?"

The odds of avoiding such questions however are not enhanced by the inclusion of a video and transcript of Gaffney's actual remarks. The difference between the soft-spoken and entirely reasonable sounding Gaffney and the "devil under every doily" conspiracy theorist described by Keyes is actually jarring:

TP: Do you think [Sharia law] has already infiltrated the federal government?

GAFFNEY: There are questionable people who are sympathetic to the program of the stealth jihadists who have influence with the United States government. Some I think are actually working for it, but for sure people who are persuaded that the folks that they need to work with to reach out to the Muslim-American community, for example, who incessantly turn to Muslim Brotherhood organizations for that purpose, are a very real problem.

TP: Can you name a few names, for instance in the federal government?

GAFFNEY: John Brennan. John Brennan is the Homeland Security Advisor for the President of the United States

TP: He’s complicit in this creep of Sharia law?

GAFFNEY: He’s absolutely daft on what the nature of the threat and is insistent upon using Brotherhood-front organizations as sources of information and as vehicles for reaching out to the Muslim-American community. Jim Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, has said that these sorts of groups are “sources of wisdom,” as he puts it, to the United States government. Janet Napolitano, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, is incessantly meeting with Muslim Brotherhood front organizations and I think has in the past, if not today, employed people who are associated with them.

Like you, I was waiting for the counter-argument that would knock the props out from underneath Gaffney and prove conclusively that CAIR and the Muslim Botherhood aren't front organizations, or if they are that John Brennan and/or Janet Napolitano don't consult with them. Maybe Keyes is saving it for the sequel because all we got this round was "Joseph McCarthy" and dark reminders that Gaffney has made similar statements before.

Which brings me to the next thing. While he in no way, shape or form addressed Gaffney's arguments Keyes did provide a powerful reminder of why it is a very bad idea to invoke the specter of Joseph McCarthy when slagging off an opponent.

First, like any other metaphor that's been used unto death, it has long since lost its impact - like those endless, moronic comparisons to Adolph Hitler that evoke spirited "ho-hums" in all but the truly demented of one's readers. (Having quickly perused the ThinkProgress comments section I appreciate that number may not be trivial, but you get my larger point.)

Secondly, if the point of this groundbreaking analogy is "like McCarthy, he's just making it up" you really, really need to consult another historical source apart from George Clooney. No-one seriously debates whether there were Communist spies in the federal government in the 1950's anymore. The Venona decrypts have put the matter irrevocably to rest. The major characters like Alger Hiss that so-called liberals were wetting themselves to defend were guilty as sin. So Tail-gunner Joe - for all his faults, real or imagined - probably isn't your best go-to guy to illustrate "non-existent" threats. (See how those quotes work?)

Thirdly, if your other point is "he's just a bullying demagogue like the worst caricature of McCarthy we can conjure up" it's probably best not to choose someone who looks and sounds like my family doctor. It's doubly inadvisable to showcase a video of him making perfectly reasonable points in an indoor voice while you fill the air with virtual exclamation points all around him.

Really, Scott, the general takeaway is know of that about which you speak, play fair and be prepared to defend your assertions. Who knows, someday you may want to write something that's isn't a glorified leftist pamphlet. (Cross-posted at NewsReal Blog)

Earlier this month Camden New Jersey laid off half its police officers and a third of its firefighters. Given Camden's dubious distinction as America's second most dangerous city – just narrowly edged out by St. Louis after years of occupying the top spot – this would seem a counter-intuitive move, but in the Bizarro world of wealth-through-debt, entitlements and outright denial of basic arithmetic, it makes perfect sense.

For Camden, as anyone with a calculator and/or a grasp of basic numeracy can tell you, is broke, to the tune of about $26 million. The police union – which appears to possess neither of these – refused outright to consider cuts in the form of unpaid leave days or any other adjustment to salaries that average $140,000 when benefits are factored in. This resulted in some protests, street theater …

Eighty-three laid-off police officers put their work boots along the sidewalk near police headquarters to symbolize the lost jobs.

… and a brief glimmer of hope that the city government would actually hold fast and do the responsible thing:



In the end of course the local government – using what is become a dreary template – capitulated "solved" the problem by effectively deferring some of the police officers income until retirement, thus making it someone else's problem in the future, and raising taxes. This last expedient more or less ensures that anybody remaining who actually contributes to the economy and can possibly leave Camden will. Presumably this in itself will ameliorate the crime problem inasmuch as criminals will have nobody to go after except each other.

The police union rep, whose people ultimately had to absorb the deferral of a week’s pay and some comp days until retirement, and a 10 month delay in their next 2.75% raise, remarked on his latest clean getaway with characteristic grace:

It would be "difficult" to ask union members to sacrifice any more, he said. "If they come knocking on our door next year, the door's shut," …

There's no question that the police do difficult and dangerous work and should be compensated accordingly, but as Chris Christie pointed out recently economic realities are economic realities and no one – certainly not public servants – should be immune to their effects.

Policeman: "With a 2% cap on a raise per year, how am I going to afford $8,000 to pay for medical benefits?"

Christie: "You're not. You're not gonna afford it. What's gonna to happen is you're gonna have to make choices among medical plans. And have more choices than just 3 choices which you have now, and only the Cadillac plan. You're going to have to make choices, like everybody else is making choices in this economy. [...] "A whole bunch of politicians who came before me on the local level and the state level made you promises that they couldn't keep. And they knew they couldn't keep them when they made them. So, I understand you being angry. But I suggest to you, respectfully, don't be angry at the first guy who told you the truth."

Jeff Jacoby in his post What public-sector unions have wrought enumerates four advantages public sector unions have over their private counterparts when it comes to negotiating salaries and benefits:

[1] unlike their counterparts in the private sector, government unions are largely free from market discipline … The government agencies they bargain with don't have to make a profit or retain customer loyalty; they can't go out of business or relocate to another state. And, of course, their revenue is acquired the old-fashioned way: through the compulsion of taxpayers. ... [2] [Strikes]: Because government services tend to be legal monopolies, a strike by police, garbage collectors, teachers, or air-traffic controllers inflicts pain on the public at large. ... [3] … in public-sector collective bargaining, labor and management frequently both stand to benefit from higher wages and more munificent retirement income. ...

[From the Sacramento Bee]: "Managers also dominate the $100,000 club list. … If rank-and-file workers get a wage or benefit boost, non-union managers get a commensurate hike and a matching pension benefit."

The absence of that check and balance in the public sector has often transformed collective bargaining into something closer to collusion than to hardheaded haggling. ... [4] more significant than any of these: government labor unions can reward politicians who give them what they want and punish those who don't. ...

The inevitable consequence of all of this is an escalating cycle of salaries and benefits completely detached from market realities or even common sense. Such a system begs to be abused, gamed and manipulated. What follows is an admittedly incomplete list of some standout games and gamers. Some of it is pretty amusing until you realize it's your money.


 

6. Is A City Manager Worth $800,000?

Last July the LA Times asked what one would hope would be a rhetorical question: Is A City Manager Worth $800,000? It would appear that Robert Rizzo, City Manager of Bell, California, certainly thought so. When it emerged that he was making $787,637 to manage a city of 37,000, described as "one of the poorest cities in Los Angeles County," his explanation was forthright:

"If that's a number people choke on, maybe I'm in the wrong business," he said. "I could go into private business and make that money. This council has compensated me for the job I've done."

He might have added, "and it's not like I'm all alone here at the trough!"

In addition to the $787,637 salary of Chief Administrative Officer Robert Rizzo, Bell pays Police Chief Randy Adams $457,000 a year, about 50% more than Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck or Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca and more than double New York City's police commissioner. Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia makes $376,288 annually, more than most city managers.

Unhappily for Mr. Rizzo's constituents agreed that perhaps he was in the wrong business and forced him to resign shortly thereafter. Bad news got worse when Los Angeles County filed charges against Rizzo and seven of his confederates, alleging that they misappropriated $5.5 million in public funds. In a masterpiece of understatement the Assistant District Attorney referred to it as "corruption on steroids."



When last seen, Robert Rizzo had just lost his volunteer parking lot attendant job at the International Surfing Museum in Huntington Beach, apparently lined up to earn community service hours for a DUI conviction. (There are some things you just can't make up.) No word if he'd suggested to the big Museum Kahuna that if he couldn't get a six figure raise he must be in the wrong business.

5. Triple Dipping – No Longer Just a First Lady Nutrition Issue

One of the great perks of having a government job is a retirement that isn't. Public servants can often retire at an early age on a pension representing up to 90% of their final salary:

Though the details of formulas differ, virtually all public employees receiving pensions in the state receive them on the basis of the number of years they worked, a certain retirement age, and a percentage of final or highest salary. For example, sworn police and fire officers often receive 3 percent of their final salary times the number of years they worked starting at age 50 up to a maximum of 90 percent of their salary. So, if an individual became a police officer at age 20, he or she would be eligible to retire at age 50 with an annual pension of 90 percent of final salary with annual cost of living adjustments thereafter. If the officer’s final salary were $100,000, the annual pension would start at $90,000. (From: Reforming Public Employee Compensation And Pensions - CALIFORNIA CENTER FOR PUBLIC POLICY)

Some of these employees return to government work – often in the same section or department they just retired from – and collect a second salary, usually for doing the same job or at least a variation of the same job. This is called "double dipping." Not to be outdone there are even some enterprising retirees who manage to triple dip:

[In 2008] George Philip has won the state's triple crown of compensation. The triple dipper took in $641,000 in 2008 from three state coffers: his $261,000 pension as the former chief of the teachers retirement fund, his $280,000 salary as president of SUNY-Albany and $100,000 as a consultant at his former workplace. Philip, 62, gets to live rent free in the "president's residence" on campus and to use a 2004 Toyota Avalon "for official university business." […] His huge pension stems from working 37 years for the state's other major pension fund, the New York State Teachers' Retirement System. Philip's salary at retirement was $379,600 a year, a combined paycheck for performing two jobs simultaneously for 12 years -- executive director and chief investment officer.

If anyone out there knows of gainful employment paying in the $180,000 range that only requires half my time please contact me at once.


 

4. Triple-dipping Deux: Throw In a Lump Sum

Just because there is no plausible opportunity (even by the highly relaxed standards of public employment) to leverage or invent three jobs doesn't mean you can't make the most of other options. Consider the former Phoenix chief of police Jack Harris. Some public service contracts provide for lump sum payouts on retirement to reimburse sick time, vacation and any other benefits. Harris received a one-time payment of $562,000 on retirement and an annual pension of $90,000.

MSNBC (I know, who woulda thunk it) picks up the narrative from there:

Two weeks later, the city rehired him as its “public safety manager” – critics say he’s doing exactly the same job -- at a base salary of $193,000 per year. While it’s common around the country for police officers and other government workers to retire, collect their pension and keep working, the state of Arizona passed a law specifically banning the practice earlier this decade. Conservative think tank Judicial Watch has filed a lawsuit in Maricopa County on behalf of a local resident, alleging the Harris is breaking this law. “It appears that the senior law enforcement official in the city is gaming the system,” said Judicial Watch’s Christopher Farrell. “That is deeply corrosive to the whole sense of the rule of law.” Farrell said he doesn’t spite Harris his pension, but both the end-run of state law and the high salary – particularly at a time when Phoenix police were threatened with hundreds of layoffs – are egregious, Farrell said. “It’s a gag reflex kind of thing.”

3. Rubber Roomie

Before unionization one of the great selling points of being employed in the public-sector was job security. The standard mantra was while salaries might be somewhat lower government jobs were insulated from the vicissitudes of the economy and sufficiently bureaucratized that the dismissal process was cumbersome, lengthy and rare.

Now that the unions have had an opportunity to work their will we have the best of both worlds: public-sector employees now enjoy salary and benefits well in excess of their private counterparts and it is well-nigh impossible to fire them. One of the most egregious outworkings of this are the now famous "rubber rooms" – more formally known as Temporary Reassignment Centers – in which teachers who have been accused of misconduct or incompetence, but cannot be fired (or whose cases have congealed somewhere in the system which is effectively the same thing), receive full salary for essentially doing nothing.

"To me the thing that's most shocking ... is how long people can spend there. You can spend five years or ten years-- a decade in the rubber room at full salary."

Well, more than 10 years as it turns out. Roland Pierre, a 75-year-old teacher (yeah I know, that's past the age of retirement) accused of sexual molestation of the pupil has spent 13 years in a rubber room at full pay.

Pierre was permanently removed from the classroom in 1997 after he was accused of sexually molesting a sixth-grade girl at PS 138 in Brooklyn. But since then, Pierre has continued to receive full pay and fringe benefits, including health, pension and vacation, officials said. He pulls down $97,101 a year. […] The DOE has no required retirement age. Hired in 1986, Pierre could have retired at age 62. At his age, he can collect Social Security as well as his full salary, so his income may be close to $125,000 a year, sources said.

 

2. Disability Leave – It Only Hurts When I Flex

Many jurisdictions provide for early retirement (sometimes with enhanced benefits) for public employees who have been injured on the job. Like many such provisions this sounds perfectly reasonable; what fair-minded person would deny a police officer wounded in the line of duty proper compensation for the rest of his life? The devil of course is in the details.

To be fairly and efficiently applied a rule like a disability provision requires a reasonable definition of "disability," and equally reasonable definition of "job-related" and adequate accountability and oversight. You would think such things would be self-evident to governments and administrators – and you would be wrong.

Often these "disabilities" have nothing to do with public service. In Nevada, for instance, state law decrees that heart disease among police officers and firefighters is to be considered a work-related disability—even if it is actually due to poor diet, lack of exercise, or genes. Loose disability rules are also an invitation to fraud. The Sacramento Bee reported a few years ago that as California Highway Patrol officers approached the end of their careers, they "routinely pursued disability claims" in order to qualify for fattened pensions—at one point, the share of CHP officers retiring as disabled was more than 80 percent—whereupon some of them "embarked on rigorous second careers."

My personal favorite in the "rigorous second career" category is the story of Albert Arroyo, a Boston firefighter who took disability leave after he tripped on a staircase.

He reported falling … and suffering a back injury so severe that, a few weeks later, his doctor wrote that Arroyo should be granted an accidental disability retirement because he is "totally and permanently disabled."

To be fair, the doctor didn't specify that this would prevent Arroyo from competing in bodybuilding events, although to a layman this would seem a reasonable assumption. Not so. Arroyo not only competed in the Pro Natural American Championships – that very same year – but he came in eighth! (Video here.) Arroyo’s lawyer, who presumably has the same doctor, offered the following insight in his defense:

A lawyer representing Arroyo has said that bodybuilding was good for his back injury.

Yup, I know what my back is out nothing is more helpful than bench pressing a small Buick. Arroyo, ordered back to work when this story broke, disappeared for a while. For a concise and almost poignant illustration of the term "befuddled" please see the video below.

There may actually be more cleverness in this than meets the eye. By virtue of thinking he would actually get away with this Arroyo may be eligible for early retirement on the grounds of mental incompetence.

 

 

1. Talking Trash – NYC Sanitation Workers, Quick to Anger, Slow to Remove Snow

Garbage collectors in New York City currently make $144,000 in salary and benefits.

Taxpayers in the Big Apple are forced to pay $144,000 a year for salary, health and pension benefits for garbage workers, who are unskilled but unionized laborers. Research by the Manhattan Institute, a think tank in New York, shows that when Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office after 9/11 the city increased spending on garbage workers' salaries by three and a half times the rate of inflation every year, growing the sanitation department budget from $1.3 billion a year to $2.2 billion.

Their boss, John Doherty, makes $205,180 plus benefits, which evidently includes having your street plowed while surrounding blocks remain untouched. And thereby hangs a tale. One of the biggest stories in the Northeast after unusually heavy snow falls in late December was the painfully slow pace of snow removal in New York City. It later emerged that this was the result of a deliberate slowdown in protest of 6 percent staff reduction in the past two years, along with demotions for 100 supervisors.

It never seems to have occurred to anyone that if you're paying garbage collectors just south of $150,000 a year, and you're unwilling or unable to bring salaries and benefits like that into some kind of rational alignment with the universe, the only solution in the face of shrinking revenues is just that kind of a staff reduction. Instead, these deep thinkers concluded that the solution was to inflict as much misery on New York City residents as possible.

Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts -- a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles,

[…]

"They sent a message to the rest of the city that these particular labor issues are more important," said City Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens), who was visited yesterday by a group of guilt-ridden sanitation workers who confessed the shameless plot.

[…] The snitches "didn't want to be identified because they were afraid of retaliation," ... "They were told [by supervisors] to take off routes [and] not do the plowing of some of the major arteries in a timely manner. They were told to make the mayor pay for the layoffs, the reductions in rank for the supervisors, shrinking the rolls of the rank-and-file." New York's Strongest used a variety of tactics to drag out the plowing process -- and pad overtime checks -- which included keeping plows slightly higher than the roadways and skipping over streets along their routes, the sources said. The snow-removal snitches said they were told to keep their plows off most streets and to wait for orders before attacking the accumulating piles of snow.

The "message" the federal and state governments might be sending back to the union is "you're under arrest" as they launch criminal probes into the role the slowdown may have had in deaths occurring when emergency vehicles could not reach people during the blizzard.

The US Attorney's Office in Brooklyn and the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office have each launched criminal probes focused in part on where people died in the massive blizzard -- and if they were along the routes of plowmen who allegedly were told to slow down the cleanup, several sources said. The feds "will examine the failure of the public safety and uniform [workers]. If any of the deaths are attributable to willful failure to perform their jobs, charges can be brought," said one source.

 

Conclusion: Maybe It Isn't So Darned Funny After All

It’s worth noting that the excesses of double-dipping, rubber rooms, disability claims and lavish (and often highly inventive) compensation schemes listed here are only a few examples of a much larger, and thoroughly systemic problem. There are whole websites (like the aptly named pensiontsunami.com) devoted to such abuses and the economic time-bomb they represent.

Even if we dismiss the Robert Rizzo’s and Roland Pierre’s as outliers (and I’m not sure even that would be an easy case to make) the larger problem persists. Local governments have been capitulating to, and colluding with, public service unions for decades. Salaries and pensions are out of line with any semblance of economic reality and, as we have seen in the Camden New Jersey exercise, the standard expedients of procrastination and/or punishing taxation won't work much longer as cities become insolvent.

Arguments from government workers – who are not the villains here – as to what’s “fair” yield little, since in the economic realm this quickly becomes subjective, emotional and ultimately intractable. Free markets, when not bound up in layers of complicated, expensive and wholly ineffective government regulation do quite well at setting the price of labor at any given time. As long as public sector compensation is politicized and detached from the very economic forces that make that happen we will continue to find ourselves scratching our heads and asking, quite unnecessarily, if a garbage collector is worth $144,000 a year.

(Cross-posted at NewsReal Blog.)

David Swindle wrote a great post recently about the importance of using the strongest arguments possible when defending a position. He went on to lament the tendency of some conservatives to employ “musket arguments” instead:

Just because an argument is correct it doesn’t mean that it’s the best one to use. A musket might be able to win in a fight but it’s hardly the most effective choice.

I would only add – because David’s overly generous view of humanity probably prevented him from stating what he thought was the obvious – that whatever weapon you finally decide on, it should probably be loaded. A weak argument is bad enough; a non-existent one is downright embarrassing. Consider for instance a post currently metastasizing across the internet warning darkly of an "FDA ban on injectable vitamin C." The use of the singular case here is not accidental; of the bazillion or so hits obtainable by Googling “fda injectable vitamin c” the vast majority are either wholesale copies or cosmetic rearrangements of a Jan 4 article by the Alliance for Natural Health, demurely entitled Action Alert—Now the FDA Is Going After Vitamin C!

The FDA has just notified one pharmacy that it will no longer be allowed to manufacture or distribute injectable vitamin C—despite its remarkable power to heal conditions that conventional medicine can’t touch. Please help reverse this outrageous decision! […] The government, instead of banning intravenous vitamin C, should instead be supporting research into it. […] Please take action immediately! Please contact the FDA, and tell them to take their job of protecting our health seriously—by allowing injectable vitamin C, magnesium chloride, and vitamin B-complex 100 to continue being manufactured and sold!

You can almost hear the many bloggers who immediately repackaged these assertions, without further investigation or scrutiny, sighing loudly: “You had me at ‘FDA’!” And why not? To any red-blooded conservative this is fresh meat. We have noted with alarm the over-reach of federal regulatory agencies (recent examples include the EPA’s de facto imposition of Cap and Trade and the FCC’s self-awarded authority to regulate the internet) and have no doubt the FDA is fully capable of similar arrogation of power. We want this story to be true.

But, there are a few problems.

We've already touched on the first point. This entire story seems to emanate from a single source, and within that source there are no specifics on the one incident with the one small pharmacy alluded to. Additionally the author never quite gets around to explaining how a single incident with a pharmacy he won't name, with circumstances he won't elaborate on, with references he doesn't provide, somehow becomes an actual or impending nationwide ban. Breathless announcements such as these -- light on references, long on exclamation marks -- should set off Klaxons in anyone's head. Unhappily there are hundreds of pages of Google links, again basically reprints of this article, pointing to people who clearly forgot to change the battery.

I am grateful that Robert Rister at SteadyHealth.com was not among them. I was well into my own due diligence bug-hunt -- searching the FDA web site for a document of unknown type, regarding an unnamed pharmacy, on an undisclosed date, occasionally checking my in-box for a response from either the FDA or ANH that I knew could only be moments away -- when I found his post in the haystack of ANH clones. Rister has written a response, with a link to the FDA letter in question, that completely debunks the ANH advisory.

Why on earth would the FDA want to stop a miracle drug? It doesn't. The warning letter didn't apply to all small pharmacies. It applied to just one small pharmacy, which was having problems with the possible microbial contamination of the intravenous solution. Stopping the sale of contaminated products is something the FDA is supposed to do. The FDA only sent the warning to the pharmacy after a bad batch of vitamin C was sold. The freedom to sell vitamin C and the freedom to sell bacteria-contaminated vitamin C are two different things.

Oh ... so no national conspiracy ... no clammy FDA operative squinting into the klieg lights resigning "for the good of the agency" ... no props from Glenn Beck ... no hat-tips from Drudge ... well that's boring!

And it’s precisely the kind of thing the Left will bring up the next time a legitimate issue regarding the FDA or any other regulator surfaces. It may never rival the birther canard but anything the Left can employ to depict its critics as irresponsible, bovine and/or mostly crazy serves the purpose.

This won’t work against people like Rister of course who seems to know his business and researches his subjects before holding forth on them. It’s possible he and I have nothing else in common politically, but on the basis of this piece at least he seems to care more about the truth than making a quick political point. This in turn affords him a measure of (now what’s the word I’m looking for) … credibility, and increases the likelihood that I will consider his remarks more carefully, perhaps on a future subject where we might not see eye to eye. Do you see how that works? Maybe more the model we should be pursuing?

To paraphrase Jack Tapper, there’s no trick to being wrong first. I would add there is even less distinction in being a human Xerox for such "firsts". This is probably something, by virtue of training and temperament, we should leave to our opponents. (Cross-posted at NewsReal Blog.)

Media Bias in 2010: A Top 7

Dear Scott Brown: Well, we’re almost here, aren’t we? The end of a long, arduous, four-month campaign for a Senate seat that you have approximately the same chance of filling as you did the pilot’s chair of the Starship Enterprise. … [The] notion that Massachusetts would elect a Republican to fill the seat left vacant by Edward Kennedy was the property of people who buy interesting mushrooms in interesting places. You might as well expect the House of Windsor to be succeeded on the British throne by the Kardashian sisters. … I would like to make you the permanent Republican candidate for US senator. Seriously, you’re good at the job of being a candidate, and it’s going to be hard enough for your party to groom another state legislator every six years. Think about it. It beats working for a living. ~ Charles P. Pierce of the Boston Globe in a January 10, 2010 piece taunting Scott Brown about his all but inevitable upcoming Senatorial defeat.

I can’t think of a better way to kick off a retrospective on the media follies of 2010 than the Pierce’s remarkable prognostication above. Apart from the fact it obligingly occurred at the beginning of the year, it contains most if not all of the major characteristics of any good leftist offering:

• Not only is it wrong, it is completely wrong. It is – to paraphrase Evan Sayet – 180 degrees from right.
• This completely, utterly, obviously wrong analysis is delivered with blithe self-assurance and a sneer.
• It is ideologically driven and thus completely impervious to fact. (At the time Pierce was playing Taps for Brown, the two candidates were virtually neck and neck in the polls.)
• It contains no logical arguments, as we understand the term, but a series of unsupported assertions presented as fact. (In fairness, more ambitious pieces of the Left do attempt to simulate logic with sophistry and fallacy, but they arrive at more or less the same place.)
• Despite self-conscious attempts at wit there is no evidence of a functioning sense of humor. Attempted zingers are artless, predictable and clumsy, rather like watching someone trying to dance by following the numbered feet on the floor. The author’s obvious tin ear is only a partial explanation – it is impossible to be dogmatic and funny at the same time.
• It contains at least one cheap popular culture reference to prove the author is a regular guy.
• It contains at least one reference to a Left icon (or appropriated historical event like the Civil Rights Movement) as if its very invocation should reduce the reader to reverent silence and foreclose all further debate.
• It is infused with a sense of denial and unreality that evokes in all but the most doctrinaire readers rapid head-shaking and exclamations of “huh?” and “what?”
• Above all, it tells us much more about the author than his subject.

There probably was a time when the Charles Pierce's of this world would have been consigned to some dank corner of the microfiche library to write obits and wedding announcements for more or less their entire careers, but these days we give them Pulitzers. And thereby hangs our tale. As a result of growing reversals of fortune and the undeniable devolution of the talent pool (which is what you get when you allow the Left to hollow you out), the media has progressively dropped all pretense of objectivity and exposed themselves in ways that would have horrified the more sophisticated and accomplished obfuscators that preceded them. This is never been more evident than it was in 2010. Accordingly, here is a list of some of last year's stories where the media dropped their masks and/or pants and revealed a great deal more about themselves than the subjects they were attacking.

7. Scott Brown -- the attack dogs really needn't have bothered.

As insufferable as Pierce is, one can only appreciate what a third-stringer he is by observing a true master at work. On the eve of the Massachusetts special election Keith Olbermann saw fit, in full view of hundreds of his viewers, to drain the festering wound that was his opinion of Scott Brown.

In Scott Brown, we have an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, teabagging supporter of violence against women and against politicians with whom he disagrees. In any other time in our history, this man would have been laughed off the stage as unqualified and a disaster in the making by the most conservative of conservatives.

Apart from the obvious neural malfunction that prompted this outburst, subsequent events have proven Olbermann wrong on even the modest assumption that Brown was a conservative of any kind, much less an uber-conservative. Brown, whose voting record and public statements have established him basically as a better looking Olympia Snowe, has been characterized as the best we could have hoped for in Massachusetts. This is akin to saying we elected the tallest Hobbit. Olbermann has to be regretting wasting all that perfectly good bile on someone he would probably now hail as the moderate future of the party – if in fact he was inclined to concede the irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, teabagging Republicans have a future at all.

6. HCR Passage -- In search of the “phantom spitter.”

The passage of the health-care reform bill, which the election of Scott Brown was supposed to prevent, proceeded apace anyway, propelled by a judicious mixture of procedural shell games, WWE level arm-twisting, outright bribes and deception. One would think the passage of a law nobody really understood, using methods usually associated with small tropical countries boasting "leaders-for-life" dressed like doormen, would have piqued the interest of our media sleuths, but as it happens they had no particular problem with any of that. What did exercise them mightily was the persistent and stubborn refusal of the hoi polloi to simply take it on faith that this swollen mutant was good for them and stop making such a fuss. Olbermann (if I promise this is the last you'll see of him will you keep reading? Okay, deal.), who can always be counted upon to bring measured and sober reflection to the table, poured oil on troubled waters by equating insurance companies and HCR opponents to terrorists:

What would you do, sir, if terrorists were killing 45,000 people every year in this country? Well, the current health care system, the insurance companies, and those who support them are doing just that....Because they die individually of disease and not disaster, Neal Boortz and those who ape him in office and out, approve their deaths, all 45,000 of them — a year — in America. Remind me again, who are the terrorists?

Keith's flourishes aside, The Left’s problem throughout the HCR debate was that Tea Party people refused not only to behave like terrorists, but to even behave like jaywalkers or litterbugs. This stunning lack of cooperation persisted right up to the day of passage, despite every provocation Nancy "I've heard this kind of rhetoric before" Pelosi could think of, including marching through the middle of the protest with an enormous gavel and a boatload of potential willing martyrs. When the protesters still wouldn't oblige the Left just shrugged their shoulders and made stuff up. It was thus perhaps fitting that the actual passage of a bill no one had read was marked with persistent accounts of racism and homophobia that nobody saw.

A year-long debate that’s been rancorous and mean from the start turned even nastier yesterday. Demonstrators protesting the bill poured into the halls of Congress shouting ‘Kill the bill!’ and ‘Made in the USSR.’ And as tempers rose, they hurled racial epithets, even at civil rights icon John Lewis of Georgia, and sexual slurs at Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank. Other legislators said the protesters spit on them, and one lawmaker said it was like a page out of a time machine.

Bob Schieffer made these assertions without a shred of supporting evidence. We know this because to this day there isn't a single sound or video clip to indicate anyone used the N-word once, much less the 15 times Lewis claimed. This despite the fact that camera-enabled mobile phones, Flip cameras and a host of other technologies have made impromptu recording virtually ubiquitous. Andrew Breitbart offered to reward of ten thousand dollars to anyone who could produce such a clip. At the time of this writing his money is still safe.

5. Media to Sarah Palin – "Okay no more Mr. Nice Guy!"

Throughout 2010 Sarah Palin continued to be the Left's piñata of first resort. It would've been bad enough if she'd just stood there in the corner and minded her own business, but she had the temerity to publish a book, host a TV series and intimate she might run for president in 2012. Any one of these would have been sufficient to drive the left's pit poodles into a lather but all three clearly made them apoplectic. For sheer venom, and incidentally putting the lie to the notion that brevity is necessarily the soul of wit, the ne plus ultra has to be Aaron Sorkin, TV producer and aspiring psychotic:

Sarah Palin’s an idiot. Come on. This is a remarkably, stunningly, jaw-droppingly incompetent and mean woman.

For me the highlight of this clip is watching Eliot Spitzer, who probably never heard a "jaw dropping woman" reference he didn't like, and Kathleen Parker, whose every utterance on Palin is really a riff on "I just want to scratch her eyes out," nod and smile. This of course is the same Sorkin who compared Palin's television series to a "snuff film." (Spitzer wasn't immediately available for comment.) Just a taste of his -- you should pardon the expression -- deathless prose:

I'm able to make a distinction between you and me without feeling the least bit hypocritical. I don't watch snuff films and you make them. You weren't killing that animal for food or shelter or even fashion, you were killing it for fun. You enjoy killing animals. I can make the distinction between the two of us but I've tried and tried and for the life of me, I can't make a distinction between what you get paid to do and what Michael Vick went to prison for doing. I'm able to make the distinction with no pangs of hypocrisy even though I get happy every time one of you faux-macho shitheads accidentally shoots another one of you in the face.

Is it just me or does this read like something you would find wrapped around a brick that just came through your front window? Yeah, thought so. M.Catherine Evans has an effective rebuttal here. Suffice it to say that Sorkin’s thoughts on this matter are a noxious cocktail of outright lies, inane analogies and a frightening lack of rudimentary knowledge as to how his dinner actually makes it to the table. I'll give you a hint Aaron, abattoir is not French for "lethal injection." For their part Richard Cohen of the Washington Post -- and Ed Schultz of "Out There On The Spiral Arm Somewhere" -- were so offended by Palin's more or less self-evident observations about Michelle Obama in her book that Richard had a flashback and Ed, as he is wont to do, melted into a pile of suet before our very eyes. Cohen writes:

When I was 11, my father thought it was time to show my sister and me the nation’s capital. … I do remember we took Route 1 through Baltimore (no I-95 yet) and it was there that I saw my first sign with the word “colored” on it – a rooming house, I think. This was 1952, and the United States was an apartheid nation. It is Sarah Palin who brings back these memories.

(Note to my editor: if I ever write anything this tunnelingly stupid please have someone take me out with a two by four. It will obviously be a kindness.) As I noted in a previous piece, the sheer porcine ranting of Ed Schultz puts him in a class, and a weight class for that matter, of his own. His ability to insinuate the words “race”, “racist”, “hate” and “hatred” early and often into a short segment, all the while leaping great logical chasms on those little stubby legs, mark him as one of the most accomplished blowhards in the MSNBC stable. As I've also noted before, the mere fact that such ghastly people despise her to the degree they do should be front and center on Palin's resume.

4. The Arizona immigration law -- militarizing Baskin-Robbins.

It takes a peculiar kind of ingenuity to take a modest and straightforward bill intended to help state officials enforce federal immigration laws and turn it into a Godwinian landscape of Latino grandfathers and doe eyed children being hauled out of ice cream parlors because their "papers aren't in order," but if there's one thing we've learned about the Left it's that it suffers no shortage of either peculiarity or ingenuity. The truth of the matter, to which the usual suspects are completely indifferent, is ably summarized by Rich Lowry:

The Arizona law makes it a state crime for aliens not to have immigration documents on their person. This sounds draconian, except it’s been a federal crime for more than half a century — U.S.C. 1304(e). Has the open-borders crowd forgotten that it calls illegal aliens “undocumented” for a reason?

Byron York adds to the Left’s "things I must willfully ignore" list with a great deal of unwelcome clarification:

The heart of the law is this provision: “For any lawful contact made by a law enforcement official or a law enforcement agency … where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States, a reasonable attempt shall be made, when practicable, to determine the immigration status of the person…” [...] What fewer people have noticed is the phrase “lawful contact,” which defines what must be going on before police even think about checking immigration status. “That means the officer is already engaged in some detention of an individual because he’s violated some other law,” says Kris Kobach, a University of Missouri Kansas City Law School professor who helped draft the measure. “The most likely context where this law would come into play is a traffic stop.” As far as “reasonable suspicion” is concerned, there is a great deal of case law dealing with the idea, but in immigration matters, it means a combination of circumstances that, taken together, cause the officer to suspect lawbreaking. It’s not race — Arizona’s new law specifically says race and ethnicity cannot be the sole factors in determining a reasonable suspicion.

None of this fazed demagogues like Luis Gutierrez who held forth with palpably false assertions about the law, interlaced with lengthy and pointless personal anecdotes just to get the human interest angle covered, while the media helpfully chimed in with prognostications of Arizona’s economic apocalypse and actually brainstormed with the likes of Gutierrez and Paul Rodriguez as to the best way to make that happen.

As I’ve pointed out before Rodriguez would do well to consider the observations of a younger Hispanic comedian offered a few years ago.

I feel that if you’re in America illegally, you’ve got two options: You fix your status and get legit, or leave. We should be more in favor of deportation than the non-Latinos, but my brothers don’t feel like that. What part of illegal don’t they understand? Think about it: Both political parties are talking about reform, but that’s just what it is – talk. We’re a nation of immigrants, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to do things. - Plain talk with comedian Paul Rodriguez – Dallas News – April 19, 2007

As a promising middle-aged blogger of my acquaintance once put it:

[This] demonstrates a couple of principles that drive arguments from the Left. First, there is no requirement that any part of an argument be consistent with any other part. The assumption seems to be the people listening to one sentence are incapable of remembering the sentence that preceded it. Call this the “Memento” principle. The second is that no argument is complete without a reference to at least one doe-eyed child, aging relative or miscellaneous victim of oppression to provide the necessary human touch in an otherwise incoherent assertion.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

3. Glenn Beck’s 8/28 Restoring Honor Rally -- Bund rally, race riot or pit of hatred? The media reports, you decide.

One of the great challenges that confront any self-respecting propaganda organ is the story that is so big, so unequivocal and so well-documented that normal attempts at disinformation run the risk of doing more damage to the authors than anyone else. Inasmuch as our media lost their self-respect years ago, taking on the 8/28 Restoring Honor Rally was perhaps less of a problem than it might once have been. So when Glenn Beck announced plans for a rally that would be explicitly and emphatically apolitical, for the purposes of restoring honor to the country, through a renewed understanding and adoption of the values of our Founding Fathers, including (make that “especially”) God … the media made the obvious logical leap that this was actually conservative racist demagoguery aimed at sullying the memory of Martin Luther King. No, seriously. That's what they came up with. The New Black Panthers, possibly mistaking the Lincoln Memorial for a polling station, threatened promised to show up:

For [Glenn Beck] to go and secure the Lincoln Memorial on Dr. King’s birthday will meet not only opposition from civil rights leaders but it’s going to meet direct opposition from the New Black Panther Party. Since the Tea Party loves Glenn Beck and will be there, the New Black Panther Party can easily find the Tea Party, right with Glenn Beck. And so, he can bring his Tea Party and we’ll bring our party, and we’ll see Glenn Beck … (Relevant portion starts at the 16:18 mark here– full Tommy Christopher interview here.)

Unhappily, it doesn’t appear the minions of Shabazz were able to attend, or at least they went unnoticed among the hundreds of thousands of people who chose to be there despite the threats, jeers and doomsaying the Panthers had so generously contributed to. (Full disclosure, that’s me in the yellow t-shirt on the right.) Of course, we can’t all be hulking and otherwise unemployable social misfits with a redeeming talent for violence, so NPR had to content itself with using, straight-faced, the expression “pit of hatred” in an article that didn’t also feature a character named “The Dread Pirate Roberts.”

Stoking even more suspicions is how secretive Beck is being. Little is known about the event except that there will be speeches by Beck and Sarah Palin, and attendees are prohibited from bringing signs. The fear, of course, is that it will turn into a pit of hatred a la the health-care town halls. But there may be a glimmer of hope.

The glimmer of hope for me is that someone someday will take the crayons away from such people, or make them pass a basic comprehension test, which would amount to the same thing. On the eve of the rally John Avlon of The Daily Beast achieved the remarkable feat of vilifying Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin as latter-day George Wallace’s in one breath then chastising them for their inflammatory rhetoric and divisiveness in the next.

Tomorrow on the site and anniversary of MLK's greatest speech, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and 100,000 friends will rally against everything the civil-rights leader stood for.

Now there's a statement with big shoulders if one ever existed. Typically one expects that such an assertion (roughly the equivalent of accusing someone of cheating at poker at three in the morning on the wrong side of town) will quickly be followed by a supporting argument that if not airtight is at least not embarrassing. Avlon, trying not to disappoint, offers us this Aristotelian gem:

1. George Wallace was a “constitutionalist” (in the narrow sense that he tried to invoke states’ rights in opposition of federally enforced desegregation, but let’s not get hung up on details).
2. Glenn Beck is a “constitutionalist”.
3. Therefore Glenn Beck is against everything Martin Luther King stood for.

I take it back, Miss Princess Bride at NPR made more sense. This isn't even passable sophistry; it's the kind of simplistic mangle liberals like Avlon used to find so amusing in people like Archie Bunker. If you doubt my interpretation, and I can fully appreciate why anyone would who expects something a little more advanced than "my first syllogism" from its authors, the article in its entirety can be read here. Perhaps sensing he hasn't quite made his case with his nimble construction, Avlon hedges his bets with the "they're so crazy, they're so fanatical, they're so God, guns and country…" line of attack with which he is obviously much more comfortable.

Time to suit up: Tomorrow, the 2010 Wingnut Super Bowl kicks off on the Washington Mall. Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and special guests like Ted Nugent will be entertaining at the "Restoring Honor" rally in front of an anticipated crowd of 100,000 true believers. It promises the politics of incitement wrapped up in the American flag and the Bible, offered from the national pulpit where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech exactly 47 years before—a coincidence Beck modestly chalks up to "divine providence."

There's much more of the same for those with the fortitude. I won't sport with your intelligence by quoting any further. To the palpable disappointment of the Greek chorus on the Left the 8/28 rally was massively well attended, completely apolitical as advertised and entirely peaceful. In the spirit of absolute fairness, I guess there could have been a "Hats Off to Hitler" banner somewhere ... but I didn't see it, and anyway we'd never know for sure because it would have been thrown away in the clearly marked receptacles like every other piece of trash after the rally. Accounts of the day can be found here and here.

2. Journolist – “What do you mean you didn’t delete the thread!”

It has been long observed that if the Left was merely stupid it would, by the simple law of averages, be right once in a while. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut occasionally; presumably Joe Scarborough (speaking of befuddled rodents) should be counted on to stumble onto a home truth himself now and again – maybe like, “Hey, I’m not a Conservative at all!” That this doesn’t happen is not surprising to anyone who can spell the word “agenda” but even the most jaundiced of us had to be taken aback by the Journolist story broken by The Daily Caller in July, not only for the clear evidence of collusion it contained, but also that the cream of our fourth estate had been dumb enough to leave evidence lying around. Clearly, while it’s not enough to be stupid, it’s a very big bullet on the resume.

Journolist [was] a listserv comprised of several hundred liberal journalists, as well as like-minded professors and activists. […] According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

Spencer Ackerman, only semi-accurately described as a “thinking man’s thug” in a previous piece of mine, was one member of that happy few with a particularly subtle and nuanced take on to how to engage the Right:

What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

Well, I mean, obviously. Given what we’ve already read from other paragons of the new enlightenment we can only imagine what would have befallen the “rightwinger” if he’d turned out to be a caribou hunter. Ackerman, whose tactical acumen clearly rivals his conservative-tossing ability, goes on to suggest an obscure and little-used gambit: protect candidate Obama by playing the race card! He isn’t clear whether this is supposed to happen before or after our guy goes through the window.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman … urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. […] Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.”

Here’s Ackerman attempting to use this one-shot-stop weapon. Quick tip Spencer, give someone else the gun. When not sounding … now what's the word I'm looking for … "faux-macho" the Journolist crowd flapped about like extras in "The Music Man" bemoaning trouble in River City. In retrospect, they needn't have gotten themselves into such a state; the fix was in, and although I'm sure their contributions were greatly appreciated, there were only a small piece of a much larger puzzle, mostly put in place by people smart enough not to leave tracks.

1. The Mid-Term Elections – “The people have spoken, the bastards!”

We have Democrats for one reason – to drag the ignorant hillbilly-half of this country into the next century, which in their case is the 19th.” […] [Americans] don’t understand the issues. They’re too stupid. They’re like a dog. They can understand inflection. They can understand fear. They can understand dominance. They don’t understand issues.”

Against the explicit instructions of the media – and I don't know why anybody wouldn't have been wooed by dyspeptic commentators comparing them to dogs – American voters visited upon its elected representatives the most dramatic and decisive shift of power since 1932. In the face of this obvious and quantifiable repudiation of the leftward lurch that had been inflicted on the nation, the media – who had long been lamenting the abysmal stupidity of their viewers – came to the obvious conclusion that they'd been right all along.

Just once — probably never get reelected if you ever said it — I would like to hear somebody say, ‘The voters have spoken, the bastards.’ Or, ‘The voters have spoken. What a bunch of idiots.’ ‘The voters have spoken. God, they’re dumb. Dumb as hell.’ I just wish I’d hear somebody say that, because I think that happens to be the case this particular midterm elections.” — Longtime CNN and MSNBC contributor Bill Press on his radio program, November 4.

Perhaps realizing they were into diminishing returns with the "you're so stupid" gambit (and one would think being reduced to a political grease spot would help drive that home) the media started trolling for signs of deep divisions within the Republican Party that would prove, some months before the 112th Congress even sat that, win or no win, the enterprise was doomed to failure. Accordingly there was breathless coverage (in outlets like Politico of all things) of how ticked off party stalwarts like Lindsey Graham were that the Tea Party had cost them Delaware. This was in addition to the more or less constant drumbeat of releases arguing the Tea Party – which even the media had to admit had been instrumental in the landslide – was either an inconsequential blip,

…the tea party might likely be seen as a passing summer storm — whose legacy is distinctly limited to what it accomplished in 2010.

Or the populist spawn of Huey Long and Father Coughlin poised to take over the GOP:

Seventy-six years ago, Franklin D. Roosevelt found himself confronted with a tea party of his own. […] Huey Long, the former governor of Louisiana and, by 1934, a senator, was leading an improbable movement to redistribute wealth. […] Long was not alone. Charles Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest in Detroit who had developed a vast audience for his weekly radio sermons, transformed his warm homilies into a passionate attack on “international bankers” and the gold standard.

Apart from the fact that both these gentlemen were somewhere to the left of Roosevelt (no mean feat in itself) and much closer in temperament to even a middling White House Czar than anyone in the Tea Party, this argument is airtight. But no matter, it serves the purpose of minimizing the importance and impact of the midterm gains and the role of the Tea Party in obtaining them. It also creates an artificial sense of "been there done that" so people will accept the inevitability of a return to normal (read "the Left") after this brief interruption. I can think of no better fate for such writers than to have to make the same dreary arguments 10 years from now. Speaking of dreary, the tenor of MSNBC's election night coverage, best characterized as equal parts mockery, doomsaying and incredulity, should leave no doubt in anyone's mind as to where they stand on the outcome in general and the Tea Party in particular -- and the basic themes they intend to pursue in 2011: I wish them the best of luck with that. I can appreciate it was a rough night for them. I hope they understand it's going to be a much rougher year. Because, with apologies to Bill Maher, “dog-stupid” Americans also understand what to do with a fire hydrant when they see one. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In considering the truly surreal cast of characters who populate much of the media -- none of whom I would let into my house much less trust to inform an unsuspecting public -- it is important to remember that they are only the latest point on a continuum that started long ago with names now regarded as journalistic icons. They are the logical end point of a philosophy that exalts "the greater good" over truth. As has been demonstrated with dreary regularity throughout history, once you take that fork in the road it's only a matter of time before the benevolent keepers of the flame are replaced by thugs and apparatchiks. The future is now folks. (Cross-posted at NewsReal Blog.)

Ron Radosh has written an excellent piece at Pajamas Media about a blatant, but drearily familiar, smear of Victor Davis Hanson by Jeffrey Sachs -- and Joe Scarborough's underwhelming response to same. Anyone still planning to run out and get his No Labels membership card (75% off all David Frum books -- act now) should watch the clip below then reconsider the wisdom of having Fifi the poodle guard the house.

Sachs I'm assured is "internationally known" – presumably by virtue of teaching at Columbia and being head of an organization with the name "Earth" in it. Hopefully he doesn't teach ethics or logic, because his remarks on the recent Morning Joe episode provided no evidence of even a tenuous grasp of either. In response to a question about President Obama’s recent policy about-faces -- in which an article of Hanson’s was quoted -- Sachs’ immediate and visceral reaction was, in effect, "never mind the facts, Hanson is a wild eyed extremist responsible for getting us into Iraq and Afghanistan."

This seems to have been enough to dazzle Joe Scarborough, who responded to Sachs’ repeated and baseless slanders with a few feeble attempts to change the subject, one lame joke, and that final redoubt of intellectual and moral courage, agreement with the slanderer to "put Victor Davis Hanson to the side."

Evidently the more sensible option of putting Jeffrey Sachs to the side didn't occur to him.

 

JEFFREY SACHS: Anything that Hanson says I’m likely to disagree with, cause no commentator has done more harm to the American people actually than that guy who led us into all these disastrous wars. But aside from that –

[…]

SACHS: No, that is real. Because this is an extremist. So quoting him doesn’t really make the point.

[…]

SCARBOROUGH: And I will put Victor Hanson –

SACHS: Sorry, that’s a side point, but that man – that guy’s done a lot of damage.

SCARBOROUGH: I will put Victor Davis Hanson to the side, you obviously, you guys aren’t on each other’s mailing lists, Christmas card lists. SACHS: That guy got us into more wars, and more militarism, than anybody.

Now, it's one thing to vilify someone, quite another to do so – to paraphrase the immortal Hannibal Lecter – with the ineptitude of a college freshman fumbling at a bra strap. One doesn't need to have read a line of Hanson's work to appreciate the absurdity of the notion that he or any other writer "got us into … wars," unless someone appointed him Commander-in-Chief one week while I was out fishing.
 
On reading Hanson – and I would invite the reader to do just that over at NRO – one finds a classicist and military historian with a wide range of interests and views including, but not limited to, national defense and America’s position in the world. One can agree or disagree with his many positions but it's doubtful the word "extremist" will come trippingly to anyone's tongue.

In a similar vein, Sachs’ use of "militarism" betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the term, explicable perhaps by the fact that "military historian" sounds similar if you say it fast, and Sachs is nothing if not easily confused. Anyone who has ventured beyond online dictionaries will understand that militarism is the imposition of military type authority and decision structures on society at large. (It's no coincidence that statist power grabs are frequently cloaked in militaristic language such as "the war on poverty.") It typically strives to supersede what is sees as slower, less efficient systems (you know, like a republic with checks and balances) in the interests of solving one or more urgent problems that, we are always assured, won't yield to the normal political apparatus.

In and of itself militarism has nothing to do with the desire for a strong and effective military to defend a nation. Davis supports the latter; he has been vocal in his opposition to the former. Somewhere in the bowels of Columbia there must be a class Sachs can take to help him understand this distinction.

Further response probably gives Sachs too much credit inasmuch as his gratuitous swipes contained no real arguments worth responding to. As David Horowitz points out in the comments section of Radosh’s article, Sachs has no intellectual argument. His stock in trade – like every other Left-wing talking head – is extreme and unsupportable assertions delivered in a peremptory, eye rolling manner that implies – to the gullible at least – that their truth is self-evident. Such people, as we've seen repeatedly, do not respond well to questions like, "can you prove that?" or "where are you getting your information?"

Not that any such unpleasantness is likely to occur on Morning Joe.

Such is the level of discourse that the "can't-we-all-get-along-while-we-reach-across-the-aisle-and-pick-the-labels-off-each-other" crowd would have us engage in. If this looks a lot like craven surrender to you, I'd go with my lying eyes on this one.

Perhaps the next time Scarborough needs to screw up his courage he should just pretend he's talking to Sarah Palin. He appears to have no problem standing on his chair and defending several past presidents – and most everyone living or dead in the Republican Party – against her imagined slights. Maybe he could just take this excerpt from a recent Politico piece and use it as a template:

And now a point of personal privilege. I work hard every day to assume the best of Americans who engage in public service. But I am offended by Palin’s attempt to build herself up by tearing down great men like Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

I appreciate that Victor Davis Hanson isn't Ronald Reagan, but the principle holds, and on the evidence I'm not sure Reagan would've fared any better on Morning Joe if some smirking Ivy Leaguer had decided to take an ax handle to him as well. Radosh has quite properly suggested that people register their complaints directly to MSNBC at the link below:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10285339 Scroll through the choices box and pick “Morning Joe.” If you do not do this it will not work.

I would counsel haste in conveying your thoughts to the network if the spirit so moves you. It's always a good idea to press an issue while it’s still current, especially since MSNBC -- or at least personalities like Scarborough who have consigned it to the ratings sub-basement -- are all but being read last rites as we speak. Any apology extracted would thus be more in the character of a deathbed confession.

(Cross-posted at NewsReal Blog.)

One of the drearier tasks in any Conservative blogger’s life is perusing the Left’s house organs (and that last term is pregnant with meaning) in search of grist for articles and posts. The musings of these strange, sad and palpably small people reliably evokes certain reactions – trending towards amused contempt and incredulity – but only rarely does one actually feel the urge to deliver a Moe Howard upside someone’s head.

With his execrable article in yesterday’s Washington Post -- Marine Corps commandant has to go -- Richard Cohen has achieved this rarified status.

Cohen, whose knowledge of the military appears limited to being “a fan of the old World War II movies,” has decided that Gen. James Amos, the Marine Corps Commandant, “must go” for having had the temerity to express misgivings over the repeal of DADT.

[Gen. Amos] was particularly concerned about combat situations where, he thought, gays might be "a distraction." "Mistakes and inattention or distractions cost Marines' lives," Amos said. This was not the first time the general had expressed his doubts. Earlier, he had talked about what might happen when his Marines were "laying out, sleeping alongside of one another and sharing death, fear and loss of brothers. I don't know what the effect of that will be on cohesion. I mean, that's what we're looking at. It's unit cohesion. It's combat effectiveness."

In an eye-popping, but unfortunately characteristic, spasm of illogic Cohen concedes the General’s point then attempts to make the case that he should be fired for making it.

It's easy to dismiss Amos, but his concerns fall within the realm of possibility. … Sooner or later, a certain amount of unacceptable harassment will occur, abuses will be committed and, more innocently, plain hooking up is going to happen. We know this. But we know also that this can be managed - contained, limited. It takes education. It takes training. It takes leadership. [Emphasis mine.]

So relax everyone, the decorated Marine Commandant with 40 years operational and staff experience is worried about the lives of the men and women under his command, but Cohen, who has seen The Sands of Iwo Jima fourteen times, assures us it can all be managed.

Amos, though, is the wrong man to deal with it. His subordinates know what he thinks of gays. They know he has not an iota of sympathy for what might be their difficulties or any tolerance for their lifestyle. If I were gay, I would not want to work for the man - or serve under him. He is one step short of being a bigot.

As an alternative explanation let me suggest that Cohen is at least one step past being an idiot. Having never served in the U.S. Military I do not – unlike Cohen – presume to speak for its members. I think however it is safe to assume that gay service people want to stay alive as much as their heterosexual counterparts and recognize that one good way to enhance the odds of doing so is serving under someone who cares about his people and knows his business. I would think that sensitivity to one’s lifestyle would come a distant second. The final paragraph of Cohen’s piece (which must be read in its entirety to get the full effect) is a masterpiece of stated and implied slander, visited upon multiple targets with the calm assurance of someone completely unaware or, indifferent to, the depth of his own ignorance.

The Marines of today know that virtually the entire Republican Party stood up for bigotry. The Corps knows that some important senators - John McCain and Jon Kyl, to name two - furiously fought to retain the status quo, always in the sainted cause of unit cohesion. (Kyl said repeal could "cost lives.") Marines know, too, that in surveys, those on the front lines are least supportive of having gays among them and they are also aware that their brass fought to keep "don't ask, don't tell." The issue for me, as for Gen. Amos, is unit cohesion. That's why he has to go.

With all due respect, Richard (no, strike that) you have no idea what the “Marines of today” know. That you presume to speak for them is as irrational as appointing yourself spokesman for (say) the Journalists of At Least Average Intelligence and Intellectual Honesty Society. Your clear implication is that combat Marines are inherently “bigoted” (to use your technique of encapsulating an idea you think is damn stupid in quotation marks) and it will take someone apart from that “bigoted” General Amos to whip them into shape over DADT. Not being someone who will ever find himself in a bunker in Baghdad – or Newark for that matter – you don’t particularly care about “unit cohesion” (which you neglected to put in quotes, but the sneer was palpable anyway) or that it will “cost lives” as long as this manifestly unworkable, expensive and dangerous piece of social engineering can be imposed on our military.

As NRB’s Cassy Fiano has pointed out in her own excellent post Hysterics Over DADT Repeal Are An Insult To The Military General Amos has already pledged to support the DADT repeal. The General, who along with the Marines he commands require no pontifical lectures from you about the importance of following orders, will do their duty.

General Amos has pledged to support the repeal, doing the honorable thing. (Funny how so many of our servicemen and women tend to do that, huh?) … This must be shocking to the people who think so little of our military that they won’t be able to survive serving alongside gay men and women. (Imagine how shocked they would be if they ever found out that many times service members already know who in their unit is gay, and don’t care.)

I know it's shocking to you Richard, but people who routinely charge up hills bristling with RPG's (sometimes to save sorry a*s journalists like you) whether they think it's a particularly good idea or not will not likely be daunted by this latest idiocy from our politicians – excuse me, the Constitutionally mandated civilian authority. They will adapt and overcome. Such men and women are the best we have, and are irreplaceable. You Richard, not so much. So, if anyone should go, it certainly shouldn't be General Amos.

I'll give you the rest of the day to figure out what I'm driving at.

Meanwhile, a short film that I found enormously therapeutic after reading your article.



(Cross-posted at NewsReal Blog.)

Anyone who thinks the recent re-enactment of the Little Big Horn – more popularly known as the mid-term elections – was a clarion call to the Republicans to lower their voices, surrender hard-won territory in the name of civility, and generally return to fighting the Left with Nerf guns and balled-up Kleenex, will find no greater friend and exponent than David Frum. In the wake of one of the most dramatic political victories in US history, won through the sweat-equity of people he openly contemns, and in which he himself played no discernible role, Frum has decided that the front-and-center issue now is finding some other way to surrender to Obama, and he for one is going to do something about it.

For those of you unfamiliar with Frum's Steward of Gondor "abandon-your-posts-we're-all-going-to-die" shtick, here's a quick refresher from his negative attention seeking tour after HCR:

 

More recently Frum has teamed up with William Galston (former deputy assistant to President Clinton for domestic policy and recognized expert at parting gullible conservative pundits from their change-purses) to flog a nascent organization called “No Labels” of which he is a co-founder.

Over the next 12 months, No Labels plans to organize citizens' groups in every state and congressional district. Among other activities, these citizens will carefully monitor the conduct of their elected representatives. They will highlight those officials who reach across the aisle to help solve the country's problems and criticize those who do not. They will call out politicians whose rhetoric exacerbates those problems, and they will establish lines that no one should cross. Politicians, media personalities and opinion leaders who recklessly demonize their opponents should be on notice that they can no longer do so with impunity.

Now what could possibly go wrong with establishing “lines that no one should cross”? I’m just thumbing through my pocket Constitution on the off-chance there might be a problem … Oh wait! An excellent example of Frum’s idea of “calling people out” is provided by Stanley Kurtz at NRO:

On July 27, 2010, I announced the forthcoming publication of my book [Radical-in-Chief] at National Review Online’s blog, the Corner. … [Frum] didn’t wait to consider my evidence or argument, or even bother to read my book. Instead, he invited a self-described Democratic activist who writes under the pseudonym “Eugene Victor Debs” to attack the very idea of my book — before either had read it. […] I did reply to Debs, after which, to my surprise, the attacks kept coming, both from Debs and from Frum himself. … Oddly, since the actual publication of Radical-in-Chief, there has been not a word about the book from either Frum or Debs. The announcement of the No Labels project by Galston and Frum makes perfect sense of all this. Given Frum’s response to the mere title and description of my book, it’s clear that the purpose of No Labels is not to engage those who call Obama socialist in a serious intellectual exchange, but rather to put their arguments beyond the pale of acceptable public debate.

One might be tempted to ask who died and made Frum the dowager empress in this matter, but anyone who has read his screeds against Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, Hugh Hewitt – and anyone else whose audience, unlike Frum’s, extends beyond immediate family and friends – will tell you he crowned himself in the crystal cathedral of his mind a very long time ago. The pressure point Frum seeks to exploit to enforce the civilized embrace of those who wish to destroy us is the hitherto undiscovered notion that independent voters are poised to punish anyone who doesn’t sell out his principals just to get something, anything done.

In another bipartisan post-election survey, fully 61 percent of independents - whose shifting preferences made much of the difference between the Democratic victory in 2006 and the Republican resurgence in 2010 - endorsed the proposition that "Governing is about compromise, and I want my elected officials to work with the other side to find common ground and pass legislation on important issues." Only 32 percent chose the contrary proposition that "Leadership is about taking principled stands, and I want my elected officials to stand up for what they believe in, even if it means that legislation on important issues does not pass." The majority of independents are calling for a new politics of problem-solving. Both political parties ignore this majority at their peril.

The survey to which Frum refers has of course more than one page – 34 of them in fact. For someone who prattles on more or less interminably about nuance, subtlety and context it is astounding that he missed the clear meaning of most of them while hurrying to cherry-pick that one stat. I would invite you to read the survey yourself and draw your own conclusions, but here is a list of some other pages and their summaries. Frum’s argument was based on Page 31.

Page 5: "Independents and Republicans feel strongly that the country is off on the wrong track, while Democrats are much more positive.” Page 7: "While Democrats blame former President Bush and Republicans in Congress for the country being on the wrong track, Republicans and Independents blame President Obama and Democrats in Congress." Page 12: "The primary motivation of Independents who supported Republican Congressional candidates was to check the Obama/Democratic agenda. . ." Page 16: "A majority of Independents and Republicans wants to extend the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for everyone." Page 18: "2010 voters want to repeal the health care reform law and replace it with other reforms, with strong support for repeal among both Independents and Republicans." Page 21: "The Tea Party movement is more popular among Independents than either the Republican or Democratic parties." Page 28: "Republicans are more adamant than Democrats that their party should stick to core principles." Page 29: "Not surprisingly, Independents believe both parties should move more to the center, especially Democrats." [Emphasis mine] Page 30: "Independents and Republicans overwhelmingly believe President Obama should work harder to find common ground with Republicans." Page 31: "A desire for compromise and working across party lines is one area where Independents think more like Democrats than like Republicans."

“Both political parties ignore this majority at their peril”? Really David? When you scan the totality of that document do you really come away with the conclusion that the independents really want, oh I don't know, semi-repeal of HCR – like perhaps only states east of the Mississippi compelled to purchase health care – or tax increases only for those rich enough to actually hire anybody? Do you really think, given the context of the other responses, and following two years of the most rigid, ideologically strident administration and Congress in living memory, the independents are looking for the Republicans to behave like Gumby?

Now, I know you and your compatriots over at "No Labels" are the closest thing to Jedi we have, but has it ever occurred to you that the only time we ever hear about this Marquis of Queensbury renaissance is when the Democrats have lost power? Does it not seem curious to you that false quid pro quo’s such as "MSNBC versus Fox", "racist tea baggers versus socialist Obama” etc. always seem to involve discredited and moribund instruments of the Left being offered up as a fair trade for effective and thriving weapons of the Right.

If none of these pique your interest, try this one. Have you ever wondered why that little pea never seems to be under the shell you choose, no matter how carefully you follow it?

You might want to ask your friends on the Left about that one some time.

(Cross-posted at NewsReal Blog)