Well, assembled sophisticates, you’d better pull that extended arm back toward you and rescind the offer of the Martini, for I’m about to drop off society’s tightrope and out myself as one of those people naïve enough to advance a “slippery slope” argument in public. And about guns, no less.
Arguendo, let’s presume that the much-vaunted Toomey-Manchin “compromise” makes it out of the Senate unalloyed, and then that it then passes the House with nary a squeak from the right. Let’s then postulate that a majority agrees with the president that expanding background checks is a “reasonable” thing to do — redolent of “a commonsense approach” — and that those of us with the temerity to oppose it will be widely painted as “extremists.” Let’s allow, too, that, as promised, the law affords “exemptions” for in-person private transfers; that it “lets” family members lend or gift one other their firearms without inviting deleterious consequences; and that it stops happily short of imprisoning free American citizens for permitting others to shoot their guns on their land. For good measure, let’s also grant that the bill contains a couple of positive things, including that it would henceforth be legal for an American to buy a handgun outside of his state of residency providing that he underwent a background check. All in all, let’s admit that, in and of itself, this bill is not the end of the world.Does this mean that you should shrug your shoulders nonchalantly and turn to other things? Should you stay at home? Should we presume that qui tacet consentire videtur? Not on your life. Alas, there is peril ahead. Why? Because today’s “exemption” is tomorrow’s “loophole.” No sooner will the glorious presidential ink have dried on that abject page, than those provisions that were sold a few days earlier as commonsense exemptions — the product of “bipartisan compromise” and other media-tested platitudes — will become structural problems, ripe for “standardizing.” Sure, Congress wouldn’t be so gauche as to include A or B or C in their bill today. But have no doubt: Within a few weeks of the bill’s passage, the eerie progressive silence that has marked this tortured process will be broken, and when it is, legions of prominent gun controllers will take to their feet in order to argue that it makes “no sense” for there to be “exemptions” to the almost universal background-check system. They will cynically inquire as to whether keeping these loopholes open for the “industry” is more important than the lives of children, and they will profess that the existing system simply “can’t work” without them. Studies will be commissioned to demonstrate that tying off these “loose ends” is all that stands between the United States and broad sunlit uplands. And, while demonstrating not only that they don’t know the slightest thing about guns but that they don’t care that they don’t, ThinkProgress and Talking Points Memo and Salon will smirk and make oh-so-smug jokes about “black helicopters” and militias. After all, we already regulate commercial sales, Internet sales, and gun shows, right? This is just a baby step — nothing to worry about, wingnuts. We’ll be told condescendingly that, when you really think about it, these “loopholes” are a bigger problem than was the gun-show “loophole” because criminals aren’t stupid enough to try to buy their guns from gun shows but they do obtain them via private transfers elsewhere. Hyperventilating themselves onto the republic’s airwaves, someone will point out that it is downright absurd that it is illegal for a private individual to sell a gun without a background check inside a gun show but that it is fine to do so in the parking lot of the convention center. Ezra Klein will write a celebrated Wonkblog post on the topic. Others will ask why the NRA wants to make it easier for the mentally ill and the criminal to get hold of weapons, and they will insinuate that the country has been taken over by “special interests.” And then, when there is another mass shooting — which, tragically but certainly, there will be — the usual process will be repeated: Democrats will call for the kitchen-sink gun bill that they’ve wanted all along, Republicans will oppose it; and, in order to allow some form of “compromise” to placate a public that is absurdly turned on by craven accommodations, a couple of ostensibly roguish senators will hold a press conference and announce that their plan will plug the remaining gaps too. “Nobody is trying to take away your guns,” one of them will say, with a lupine smile. Our politicians will be able to announce that “something has been done,” the sine qua non of mindless politics. And what will they have done? They’ll have created a vast, murky, uncharted grey area, in which nobody is quite sure what is legal and what is not. Is it okay for me to lend my brother a rifle for more than a week? Not sure. Can I give the man down the street my gun if he spends half of his year in Florida? Not sure. Does advertising a weapon on the Internet but transferring it in person constitute a commercial transfer? Not sure. These rules will, if the past few years are anything to go by, be at the whim of so many “the secretary shall” clauses, and, inevitably, they will be differently enforced depending on where one lives in the country. This will suit many: Grey areas, as the Left knows full well, are utterly devastating to liberty because law-abiding people are scared of doing wrong. As a rule, if you aren’t sure and the price for being wrong is five years inside, you don’t do it. Despite the considerable progress at the state level — and in the Supreme Court — federal gun laws are slowly moving in the wrong direction. Marginally expanding something that shouldn’t be there in the first place is no reform at all. I, too, am in favor of “standardizing” the system: I’d like to extend the “gun-show loophole” to all commercial transactions and I’d like to get the federal government out of all gun regulation bar the basic import/export and trafficking provisions that apply to all commercially available products. Of course it should be illegal for felons and the mentally ill to buy weapons; but that is not an argument for the government’s regulating the point of sale any more than its being illegal for you to cheat on your taxes is an argument for universal audits or its being illegal for you to beat your wife is an argument for putting Telescreens in every bedroom. It is high time that those serious about the right to keep and bear arms demanded that impediments to its exercise be treated as serious as are obstacles to other rights. Will they? We’ll see. By all means back this bill if you believe that its consequences will be trivial. By all means note that “it could have been worse.” By all means console yourself that you are just “giving” the president something. But just remember that, tomorrow, it won’t be these changes they’re after; it’ll be the next bunch — and they have a very long list. — Charles C. W. Cooke is an editorial associate at National Review. |
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Toomey and Manchin's slippery slope
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Government plays favorites
By John Stossel
http://www.townhall.com
April 10, 2013
People say government must "help the little guy, promote equality, level the playing field."
People often go into government to do that. But even when people mean well, it's natural for them to help out their cronies.
David Stockman, who ran the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan, was criticized for saying the government's budget numbers didn't add up. But he was right.
Now, in his book "The Great Deformation," he says both major political parties failed ordinary Americans when the housing bubble burst, and they rushed to bail out cronies at big banks. Government continues to threaten our future by printing gobs of money and guaranteeing trillions in loans to banks, homeowners, students and other politically connected groups.
The political class claims the economy would have been destroyed in 2008 without a bailout of the big banks. Stockman says that's a myth: "The Main Street banks were not going to go into a huge retail bank run ... and (Fed chairman Ben) Bernanke is totally wrong when he says we were on the verge of Depression 2.0. We weren't close. We would have worked our way through it. We've done it many times in history."
Worked our way through it? Without the bailouts, there might have been a bigger stock market drop, and more businesses would have closed! But Stockman says, so what? It would have been worth it. And I agree with him.
Today, taxpayers would be $1 trillion richer and not on the hook for trillions in loan guarantees. Prices would now have found a natural floor, business would be eagerly hiring again, and America would be free of moral hazards like "too big to fail" banks.
What do I mean by "moral hazard"? I once built a beach house on the edge of the ocean -- a very risky place to build -- but I did so because federal flood insurance guaranteed my investment. Eventually, a storm swept away my house, but I didn't lose a penny. Government "insurance" covered my loss. Thanks, taxpayers!
Now that I'm wiser -- and more libertarian -- I'm ashamed that I took your money and understand that the whole program is a mistake. The same government that worries about global warming causing flooding spends billions to compensate risk-takers who live next to oceans. That's moral hazard.
But beachfront property owners have political connections. They make desperate calls to legislators. Politicians respond to whoever screams loudest.
When the housing bubble burst, politicians got panicked calls from their friends on Wall Street -- in many cases former colleagues. Instead of letting their old friends take big losses and trusting smaller banks to expand and take their customers, the political class propped up risk-takers who made bad bets.
It's not that those who move back and forth between Wall Street and government are evil. But when you are close to a problem, you are quicker to panic. A few years back, brilliant scientists who studied SARS or bird flu sincerely thought a mass epidemic was coming, and therefore government had to "do something." (It didn't hurt that "doing something" meant spending more on their area of research.)
In 1999, computer techs really believed computers would freeze when the calendar turned to 2000, causing planes to fall from the sky. Killer-bee researchers were convinced bees would sting us to death. Anti-pesticide environmentalists, flesh-eating bacteria researchers and today's global warming fanatics are all sincere in their fear.
But unlike Wall Street bankers, none could confiscate a trillion of your dollars and give them to their cronies. Believe me: If Al Gore could have done that, he would have.
Politicians accuse those of us who advocate limited government of being heartless when we say that government should not protect us against loss. But government efforts to "protect" us create a moral hazard that just makes our problems bigger over time.
Politicians say, "Yes, we can!" But don't be fooled: "No, They Can't."
John Stossel is host of "Stossel" on the Fox Business Network. He's the author of "No They Can't: Why Government Fails, but Individuals Succeed."
http://www.townhall.com
April 10, 2013
People say government must "help the little guy, promote equality, level the playing field."
People often go into government to do that. But even when people mean well, it's natural for them to help out their cronies.
David Stockman, who ran the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan, was criticized for saying the government's budget numbers didn't add up. But he was right.
Now, in his book "The Great Deformation," he says both major political parties failed ordinary Americans when the housing bubble burst, and they rushed to bail out cronies at big banks. Government continues to threaten our future by printing gobs of money and guaranteeing trillions in loans to banks, homeowners, students and other politically connected groups.
The political class claims the economy would have been destroyed in 2008 without a bailout of the big banks. Stockman says that's a myth: "The Main Street banks were not going to go into a huge retail bank run ... and (Fed chairman Ben) Bernanke is totally wrong when he says we were on the verge of Depression 2.0. We weren't close. We would have worked our way through it. We've done it many times in history."
Worked our way through it? Without the bailouts, there might have been a bigger stock market drop, and more businesses would have closed! But Stockman says, so what? It would have been worth it. And I agree with him.
Today, taxpayers would be $1 trillion richer and not on the hook for trillions in loan guarantees. Prices would now have found a natural floor, business would be eagerly hiring again, and America would be free of moral hazards like "too big to fail" banks.
What do I mean by "moral hazard"? I once built a beach house on the edge of the ocean -- a very risky place to build -- but I did so because federal flood insurance guaranteed my investment. Eventually, a storm swept away my house, but I didn't lose a penny. Government "insurance" covered my loss. Thanks, taxpayers!
Now that I'm wiser -- and more libertarian -- I'm ashamed that I took your money and understand that the whole program is a mistake. The same government that worries about global warming causing flooding spends billions to compensate risk-takers who live next to oceans. That's moral hazard.
But beachfront property owners have political connections. They make desperate calls to legislators. Politicians respond to whoever screams loudest.
When the housing bubble burst, politicians got panicked calls from their friends on Wall Street -- in many cases former colleagues. Instead of letting their old friends take big losses and trusting smaller banks to expand and take their customers, the political class propped up risk-takers who made bad bets.
It's not that those who move back and forth between Wall Street and government are evil. But when you are close to a problem, you are quicker to panic. A few years back, brilliant scientists who studied SARS or bird flu sincerely thought a mass epidemic was coming, and therefore government had to "do something." (It didn't hurt that "doing something" meant spending more on their area of research.)
In 1999, computer techs really believed computers would freeze when the calendar turned to 2000, causing planes to fall from the sky. Killer-bee researchers were convinced bees would sting us to death. Anti-pesticide environmentalists, flesh-eating bacteria researchers and today's global warming fanatics are all sincere in their fear.
But unlike Wall Street bankers, none could confiscate a trillion of your dollars and give them to their cronies. Believe me: If Al Gore could have done that, he would have.
Politicians accuse those of us who advocate limited government of being heartless when we say that government should not protect us against loss. But government efforts to "protect" us create a moral hazard that just makes our problems bigger over time.
Politicians say, "Yes, we can!" But don't be fooled: "No, They Can't."
John Stossel is host of "Stossel" on the Fox Business Network. He's the author of "No They Can't: Why Government Fails, but Individuals Succeed."
Rick Pitino makes sure to share spotlight with whole family after years of tragedy and scandal
By Dan Wetzel
Yahoo! Sports
April 9, 2013
Louisville head coach Rick Pitino with his wife Joanne as the Cardinals celebrate. (AP)Soon her lips were pressed tight as she fought back welling tears at the entire deal, the swings of emotion of a forever day for the family.
Rick Pitino cuts down the net after winning his second national title on Monday. (AP)Pitino could only shake his head at it all. He's 60 suddenly going on 20. They used to say that back when he was an actual college student at Massachusetts, he was so focused on maximizing his game and planning for his career that he barely took a second to soak in the fun of being young. And with the smiles and self-deprecating jokes of this championship run, he, at least from the outside, appears to be enjoying it more than that one with the loaded Kentucky team. Back then winning it all was expected and it was time for a coach of Pitino's ability to accomplish it.
More NCAA tournament coverage from Yahoo! Sports
• Bad call on Trey Burke block a turning point in title game
• Freshman's crazy alley-oop punctuates Cardinals' first-half comeback
• Louisville earns redemption, third national title
• Rick Pitino caught off guard by celebration fireworks
Yahoo! Sports
April 9, 2013
ATLANTA – The opening bars to One Shining Moment were echoing through the Georgia Dome, the first highlights kicking in on the huge screens in each end zone, and Joanne Pitino wasn't going to miss it without being by her husband's side.
So she ran through the Louisville Cardinals national championship confetti on the floor, took a spot next to Rick and threw her arms around him. Together, the two embraced, leaned on one another and looked up to enjoy the song. Thirty-seven years married and still celebrating the good times.
"I'm so proud of him," Joanne said. "Just so proud."
Louisville head coach Rick Pitino with his wife Joanne as the Cardinals celebrate. (AP)Soon her lips were pressed tight as she fought back welling tears at the entire deal, the swings of emotion of a forever day for the family.
Postgame, there was a bit of everything. There were moments of silliness and joy, such as Pitino laughing about how he was going to live up to a deal he made with his players about getting a tattoo if they won the national title. With an 82-76 victory over Michiganaccomplished, his fate was sealed.
Sixty years old and for decades the most polished and properly presented coach in America, one who never let a thread of an Armani get frayed, Pitino was going to get inked up. "He would've killed us if we had gotten a tattoo," his son Richard said before shaking his head at the thought of his dad, of all people, with art.
Then there were moments of profound respect. Pitino presented the Hall of Fame jersey he received that morning to signify his coming induction to Joanne's sister, Mary Minardi. He cited her strength in raising three children and defeating alcoholism after losing her husband to a New York City cab accident and a brother in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks – "she's the Hall of Famer in our family," Rick said.
Finally there was Pitino gathering everyone on a stage for a family photo. He and his wife in the middle, children and grandchildren, nieces and in-laws all gathered around, the whole clan smiling and making Louisville "L's" with their hands.
[Y! Sports Shop: Buy Louisville national champs merchandise]
The Pitino family has been through hell and back – deaths, including one of a child, that make no sense; scandal, including a highly-publicized one-night stand turned embarrassing extortion attempt, that were self-made.
Through it all, thick and thin, there they were … together.
There aren't any perfect families in America, and the Pitinos aren't claiming to come even close. They do carry on though, and for all those nights of heartbreak and humiliation, here they were going to take the chance to smile and hug and marvel at what staying the course can accomplish.
"We've had a rough go, our family," Pitino said. "We're a family that's had a lot of difficult times. That being said, no one celebrates like the Pitinos and the Minardis. No one. We celebrate together. My children, they have a lot of Irish in them the way they celebrate."
[Slideshow: Zany fans at the NCAA championship]
So yes, the family was probably off to try to drink Atlanta dry and why not? This entire magical run of a season was the cap of a rebirth of a career and a sporting personality who just a few years back was the punchline of a million jokes.
For a man who always sought the perfect look, the perfect suit, the precise appearance, the entire thing could've sent every part of his life reeling. Instead he buckled down and kept going, trying, he said, to be a better husband, a better father, a better coach and a better man each day. It's all he could do.
"We just said, 'we're going to put blinders on and go,' " said his friend and U of L athletic director Tom Jurich.
"I knew he could do this again," Joanne said of coaching another team to the title. "He has the capacity to nurture and love so much."
So here he was arm and arm with the family, and laughing and joking with his players, who were giddy over the coming trip to a tattoo parlor.
"He should get a lower-back tattoo," Cardinals guard Peyton Siva said before laughing at the absurdity. "He said, 'does it sting?' "
[Slideshow: Cardinals celebrate national championship]
"I don't think he knew what he was getting into when he signed up for that one," Final Four MOP Luke Hancock said, laughing as well.
Rick Pitino cuts down the net after winning his second national title on Monday. (AP)Pitino could only shake his head at it all. He's 60 suddenly going on 20. They used to say that back when he was an actual college student at Massachusetts, he was so focused on maximizing his game and planning for his career that he barely took a second to soak in the fun of being young. And with the smiles and self-deprecating jokes of this championship run, he, at least from the outside, appears to be enjoying it more than that one with the loaded Kentucky team. Back then winning it all was expected and it was time for a coach of Pitino's ability to accomplish it.
Even then, clipping the nets was just a step in the process. He was focused on trying to repeat [UK would lose, in overtime, in the title game a year later]. Then he was off to attempt to rescue the Boston Celtics. He was always climbing. Always looking for something else.
At that moment, he'd only known professional success. By now he's failed and fallen, been beaten up and kicked while he was down and is well aware that plenty of it was his own fault. So now, he was just reveling in the glory of this title, not taking a moment of the good times for granted.
So a tattoo? Ah, after all of this, why the heck not?
"I'm just very proud of him, what he was able to come back from is pretty remarkable," Richard Pitino said. "He's the best coach on the planet, he's proven that."
The Pitinos didn't need to win a basketball game Monday night to appreciate what they have, a big extended group that in the end loves each other desperately.
"We have tough moments like everybody has," Richard said. "To be able to share that type of moment on this stage is very special."
It hasn't always easy. It hasn't always been right. It may make that coming celebration even greater than ever.
NCAA tournament video from Yahoo! Sports
More NCAA tournament coverage from Yahoo! Sports
• Bad call on Trey Burke block a turning point in title game
• Freshman's crazy alley-oop punctuates Cardinals' first-half comeback
• Louisville earns redemption, third national title
• Rick Pitino caught off guard by celebration fireworks
Louisville’s Rick Pitino calls his team ‘the toughest guys I’ve ever coached’
By John Feinstein,
There were 12.9 seconds left. Trailing 80-76, Michigan had to foul right away and did, Nik Stauskas grabbing Peyton Siva as soon as he caught the inbounds pass in the corner. The instant Siva heard the whistle he turned and sprinted downcourt to get to the foul line. He wasn’t the least bit tired. Or the least bit nervous.
The Wolverines, who had given absolutely everything they had to give, were all bent over from exhaustion. The Cardinals looked like they could have played another 40 minutes if need be.
Siva calmly drained both free throws and a few seconds later, Louisville Coach Rick Pitino was celebrating his second national championship and Louisville was cutting down the season’s final net for the first time since 1986.
“These are the 13 toughest guys I’ve ever coached,” said Pitino, who won a national championship at Kentucky in 1996 and was announced as a new Hall of Fame member Monday morning. He didn’t have a bad night, either.
This was a national championship game best described by one word:
Wow.
At the end of an NCAA tournament that had few moments worth remembering, Louisville and Michigan produced a final full of “wow” moments and performances. In the end, the Cardinals’ ability to remain relentless for 40 minutes made them the national champions.
They wore down Michigan with their pressure and pounded the Wolverines on the boards in the second half, outrebounding them 20-10 in the final 20 minutes. Luke Hancock, the George Mason transfer who was named the most outstanding player of the Final Four, finished off his amazing story with 22 points.
So this NCAA title game became the story of Spike vs. Luke. Just like everyone figured in analyzing Louisville against Michigan for the national championship.
Sure, everyone figured two kids who needed a fifth year at a prep school just to find a Division I scholarship of some kind would square off in a first-half shootout with the national championship on the line.
Hancock, who went to Hargrave Academy after graduating from high school and got one scholarship offer — from George Mason — as a result, has been a key player off the bench for the Cardinals all season after transferring from George Mason two springs ago.
So the four-three point shots he hit in just less than two minutes, helping Louisville turn a 12-point deficit into a one-point lead, might have been remarkable but they weren’t completely shocking.
Spike Albrecht, on the other hand, was absolutely stunning. Or breathtaking. Almost any superlative fits. He did a prep year after high school, and Michigan Coach John Beilein decided to gamble and give him a scholarship — figuring the rest of his freshman class was so strong that Albrecht was worth a gamble as a backup.
Which is exactly what he had been all season—averaging seven minutes and 1.8 points per game. The freshman’s career high in Michigan’s prior 38 games was seven points — twice.
On Monday, Beilein put him into the game right after the first TV timeout, no doubt intending to give point guard Trey Burke a brief rest. Over the next 11 minutes 38 seconds Albrecht, looking every bit like a ballboy who had sneaked into a uniform, put on one of the most remarkable offensive displays in tournament history.
He hit a three the first time he touched the ball. Then he stepped out well beyond the NBA three-point line and hit another. Then he went through the entire Louisville defense for a scoop layup. Another three. And another. By the time the spree was over, Albrecht had scored 17 points and Michigan had a 33-21 lead.
He wouldn’t score again.
Hancock then took over, going on his three-point spree that jumped Louisville back into the game, although two Glenn Robinson free throws allowed Michigan to lead, 38-37, at halftime.
In the end, a team that began the season in November ranked No. 2 finished it in April as an emphatic No. 1. Pitino became the first coach to lead two schools to a national championship.
Louisville’s players beat a superb young team that never backed off until the final buzzer of the season finally sounded shortly before midnight.
As good as the Wolverines were, the Cardinals were better.
And they weren’t even breathing hard at the finish.
For more by John Feinstein, go to www.washingtonpost.com/feinstein.
What the 'Iron Lady' forged
Thatcher proved that the wave of the future is not so inevitable after all.
By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.nationalreview.com
April 10, 2013
In 1975, when asked to explain why Margaret Thatcher was poised to take over the Tory party, the irascible British satirist Malcolm Muggeridge replied that it was all due to television — and the fact that the telegenic Thatcher had a “certain imbecile charm.”
That was one of the nicer things said about an “imbecile” who earned a degree in chemistry from Oxford and became a lawyer while studying at home. (She sent her bar application from the maternity ward while recovering from delivering twins.)One lesson here is that being underestimated is a great gift in politics. Ronald Reagan was dubbed an “amiable dunce” before he was known as the “Teflon president,” and Thatcher had imbecile charm before she was dubbed — by the Soviets — the “Iron Lady.”
When the news of Thatcher’s death broke Monday, I went back to the archives of National Review to look at what William F. Buckley (my former boss) had to say about her when she was a fresh face. Dismissing the skeptics, Buckley was impressed by her personal story, given that she hailed from a “party that has tended, when looking for a leader, to thumb through lists of unemployed Etonians.” He concluded, “It is my guess she bears watching. Put me down as a fan.”
Just over four years later, Buckley penned a column with the headline: “Margaret Is My Darling.” The day before the elections, he had wired her (for you kids, that means he sent her a telegram. It’s like a paper text message. Google it): “I AND WHAT’S LEFT OF THE FREE WORLD ARE ROOTING FOR YOU, LOVE.”
Buckley rightly identified the importance of Thatcher’s victory. “For over a generation we have been assaulted — castrated is probably closer to the right word — by the notion that socialism is the wave of the future.” The arguments between the major parties in the West had almost invariably been disagreements over the pace of descent into one or another flavor of statism. It “has always been possible for the leftward party to say about the rightward party that its platform is roughly identical to the platform of the leftward party one or two elections back.”
This was certainly true in the U.S., though Buckley may have overstated things when he wrote that “Roosevelt would have considered the Republican Party platform of Richard Nixon as radical beyond the dreams of his brain-trusters.”
What’s indisputable, however, is that the Tories and the Republicans alike suffered from an excess of “me-tooism.” From Thomas Dewey through Gerald Ford — minus Barry Goldwater’s staggering (and staggeringly influential) defeat — Republicans put forward leaders who promised to do what liberals were doing, but in a more responsible way. The pattern was even worse in Britain, which had thrown out Winston Churchill, at least partly, for wanting to trim back the welfare state.
For decades, conservatism failed to offer an alternative. This was why economist Friedrich Hayek said he couldn’t call himself a conservative. It has, he wrote, “invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing.”
One reason for this tendency is that in democracies, politicians usually can’t withstand the short-term backlash that comes with meaningful long-term free-market reforms. Thatcher was expected to follow the pattern. When it became clear that Thatcher intended to actually practice what she’d been preaching, the press demanded she make a U-turn. She didn’t. She explained in a defining speech in 1980, “The lady’s not for turning.” She had promised voters, to borrow a phrase from Barry Goldwater, “a choice, not an echo.” She delivered on it, and Britain is immeasurably better for it.
It’s worth remembering that Thatcher did not destroy the British equivalent of what Americans call liberalism. She destroyed socialism, which was a thriving concern — at least intellectually — in Britain. When Labour decided to get serious about winning elections again, Tony Blair had to repudiate the party’s century-long support for doctrinaire socialism and embrace the market. Soon, Bill Clinton followed suit, bending his party to Reagan’s legacy. Suddenly, liberals were playing the “me-too” game.
That’s one reason the Left still hates her and Reagan so much. Thatcher and Reagan didn’t just force change on their societies, they forced change on their enemies, proving that the wave of the future is not so inevitable after all.
— Jonah Goldberg is the author of The Tyranny of Clichés. You can write to him at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
Tuesday, April 09, 2013
Planned Parenthood's defense of infanticide
By Marc A. Thiessen,
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
Testifying against a Florida bill that would require abortionists to provide emergency medical care to an infant who survives an abortion, Planned Parenthood lobbyist Alisa LaPolt Snow was asked point blank: “If a baby is born on a table as a result of a botched abortion, what would Planned Parenthood want to have happen to that child that is struggling for life?” She replied: “We believe that any decision that’s made should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician.”
Jaws in the committee room dropped. Asked again, she repeated her answer.
Only after a firestorm erupted in the conservative media did Planned Parenthood issued a statement that in the “extremely unlikely and highly unusual” event that a baby were born alive it would “provide appropriate care to both the woman and the infant.” That is debatable, since a Planned Parenthood counselor has been caught on tape admitting that the organization leaves infants born alive after an abortion to die. But if Planned Parenthood really does provide such care, why was it lobbying against a bill requiring such care in the first place?
The fact is, it is not as unusual for children to be left to die after a failed abortion as some might think. Right now in Philadelphia, abortionist Kermit Gosnell is on trial for the murder of seven infants who were born alive. According to District Attorney Seth Williams, Gosnell “induced labor, forced the live birth of viable babies in the sixth, seventh, eighth month of pregnancy and then killed those babies by cutting into the back of the neck with scissors and severing their spinal cord.” Prosecutors said that Gosnell ended hundreds of pregnancies in this way. “These killings became so routinethat no one could put an exact number on them. They were considered ‘standard procedure.’ ”
Across the border in Canada, the government reports that between 2000 and 2009, 491 babies were left to die after they were born alive during abortions. There are no similar statistics here in the United States, but according to the Abortion Survivors Network there are an estimated 44,000 abortion survivors living in the country today. How many more did not survive for lack of medical care?
Recently a major motion picture, October Baby, told the true story of one abortion survivor in search of her birth mother and of her struggle to forgive her. The woman depicted in the movie, Gianna Jessen, testified before Congress about why she lived after her mother underwent a saline abortion: “Fortunately for me the abortionist was not in the clinic when I arrived alive... I was early.... I am sure I would not be here today if the abortionist would have been in the clinic, as his job is to take life, not sustain it.”
Amazingly, some argue that killing babies like Gianna is morally permissible. Recently two bioethicists, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, published a paper in the peer-reviewed Journal of Medical Ethics entitled “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?” They wrote: “[W]hen circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible. … [W]e propose to call this practice ‘after-birth abortion’, rather than ‘infanticide,’ to emphasize that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus … rather than to that of a child. Therefore, we claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be. Such circumstances include cases where the newborn has the potential to have an (at least) acceptable life, but the well-being of the family is at risk.”
This is Orwellian. The term “after-birth abortion” is an oxymoron. You can’t kill an unborn child after it has been born.
The fact that Planned Parenthood aggressively lobbies against legislation requiring medical care for such children is appalling. The fact that a Planned Parenthood official testified that killing such children is permissible is shocking. And the fact that most major media outlets — including The Post —all but ignored her comments is distressing.
Our country is deeply divided over the question of abortion. But can we not all at least agree that killing a born child is murder — not a question that “should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician”?
Read more from Marc Thiessen’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
Read more from Opinions: George Will: Johns Hopkins’s and Planned Parenthood’s troubling extremism
The World-Changing Margaret Thatcher
Not since Catherine the Great has there been a woman of such consequence
By PAUL JOHNSON
The Wall Street Journal
online.wsj.com
April 9, 2013
Margaret Thatcher had more impact on the world than any woman ruler since Catherine the Great of Russia. Not only did she turn around—decisively—the British economy in the 1980s, she also saw her methods copied in more than 50 countries. "Thatcherism" was the most popular and successful way of running a country in the last quarter of the 20th century and into the 21st.
Her origins were humble. Born Oct. 13, 1925, she was the daughter of a grocer in the Lincolnshire town of Grantham. Alfred Roberts was no ordinary shopkeeper. He was prominent in local government and a man of decided economic and political views. Thatcher later claimed her views had been shaped by gurus like Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek, but these were clearly the icing on a cake baked in her childhood by Councillor Roberts. This was a blend of Adam Smith and the Ten Commandments, the three most important elements being hard work, telling the truth, and paying bills on time.
Hard work took Miss Roberts, via a series of scholarships, to Grantham Girls' School, Somerville College, Oxford, and two degrees, in chemistry and law. She practiced in both professions, first as a research chemist, then as a barrister from 1954. By temperament she was always a scholarship girl, always avid to learn, and even when prime minister still carried in her capacious handbag a notebook in which she wrote down anything you told her that she thought memorable.
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Editorial page editor Paul Gigot on Margaret Thatcher’s legacy. Photo: AP
At the same time, she was intensely feminine, loved buying and wearing smart clothes, had the best head of hair in British politics and spent a fortune keeping it well dressed. At Oxford, punting on the Isis and Cherwell rivers, she could be frivolous and flirtatious, and all her life she tended to prefer handsome men to plain ones. Her husband, Denis Thatcher, whom she married in 1951 and by whom she had a son and daughter, was not exactly dashing but he was rich (oil industry), a capable businessman, a rock on which she could always lean in bad times, and a source of funny 19th-hole sayings.
Denis was amenable (or resigned) to her pursuing a political career, and in 1959 she was elected MP for Finchley, a London suburb. She was exceptionally lucky to secure this rock-solid Tory seat, so conveniently placed near Westminster and her home. She held the seat without trouble until her retirement 33 years later. Indeed, Thatcher was always accounted a lucky politician. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan soon (in 1961) gave her a junior office at Pensions, and when the Conservatives returned to power in 1970, she was fortunate to be allotted to the one seat in the cabinet reserved for a woman, secretary of state for education.
There she kept her nose clean and was lucky not to be involved in the financial and economic wreckage of the disastrous Ted Heath government. The 1970s marked the climax of Britain's postwar decline, in which "the English disease"—overweening trade-union power—was undermining the economy by strikes and inflationary wage settlements. The Boilermakers Union had already smashed the shipbuilding industry. The Amalgamated Engineers Union was crushing what was left of the car industry. The print unions were imposing growing censorship on the press. Not least, the miners union, under the Stalinist Arthur Scargill, had invented new picketing strategies that enabled them to paralyze the country wherever they chose.
Attempts at reform had led to the overthrow of the Harold Wilson Labour government in 1970, and an anti-union bill put through by Heath led to the destruction of his majority in 1974 and its replacement by another weak Wilson government that tipped the balance of power still further in the direction of the unions. The general view was that Britain was "ungovernable."
Among Tory backbenchers there was a growing feeling that Heath must go. Thatcher was one of his critics, and she encouraged the leader of her wing of the party, Keith Joseph, to stand against him. However, at the last moment Joseph's nerve failed him and he refused to run. It was in these circumstances that Thatcher, who had never seen herself as a leader, let alone prime minister, put herself forward. As a matter of courtesy, she went to Heath's office to tell him that she was putting up for his job. He did not even look up from his desk, where he was writing, merely saying: "You'll lose, you know"—a characteristic combination of bad manners and bad judgment. In fact she won handsomely, thereby beginning one of the great romantic adventures of modern British politics.
The date was 1975, and four more terrible years were to pass before Thatcher had the opportunity to achieve power and come to Britain's rescue. In the end, it was the unions themselves who put her into office by smashing up the James Callaghan Labour government in the winter of 1978-79—the so-called Winter of Discontent—enabling the Tories to win the election the following May with a comfortable majority.
Thatcher's long ministry of nearly a dozen years is often mistakenly described as ideological in tone. In fact Thatcherism was (and is) essentially pragmatic and empirical. She tackled the unions not by producing, like Heath, a single comprehensive statute but by a series of measures, each dealing with a particular abuse, such as aggressive picketing. At the same time she, and the police, prepared for trouble by a number of ingenious administrative changes allowing the country's different police forces to concentrate large and mobile columns wherever needed. Then she calmly waited, relying on the stupidity of the union leaders to fall into the trap, which they duly did.
She fought and won two pitched battles with the two strongest unions, the miners and the printers. In both cases, victory came at the cost of weeks of fighting and some loss of life. After the hard men had been vanquished, the other unions surrendered, and the new legislation was meekly accepted, no attempt being made to repeal or change it when Labour eventually returned to power. Britain was transformed from the most strike-ridden country in Europe to a place where industrial action is a rarity. The effect on the freedom of managers to run their businesses and introduce innovations was almost miraculous and has continued.
Thatcher reinforced this essential improvement by a revolutionary simplification of the tax system, reducing a score or more "bands" to two and lowering the top rates from 83% (earned income) and 98% (unearned) to the single band of 40%.
She also reduced Britain's huge and loss-making state-owned industries, nearly a third of the economy, to less than one-tenth, by her new policy of privatization—inviting the public to buy from the state industries, such as coal, steel, utilities and transport by bargain share offers. Hence loss-makers, funded from taxes, became themselves profit-making and so massive tax contributors.
This transformation was soon imitated all over the world. More important than all these specific changes, however, was the feeling Thatcher engendered that Britain was again a country where enterprise was welcomed and rewarded, where businesses small and large had the benign blessing of government, and where investors would make money.
As a result Britain was soon absorbing more than 50% of all inward investment in Europe, the British economy rose from the sixth to the fourth largest in the world, and its production per capita, having been half that of Germany's in the 1970s, became, by the early years of the 21st century, one-third higher.
The kind of services that Thatcher rendered Britain in peace were of a magnitude equal to Winston Churchill's in war. She also gave indications that she might make a notable wartime leader, too. When she first took over, her knowledge of foreign affairs was negligible. Equally, foreigners did not at first appreciate that a new and stronger hand was now in control in London. There were exceptions. Ronald Reagan, right from the start, liked what he heard of her. He indicated that he regarded her as a fellow spirit, even while still running for president, with rhetoric that was consonant with her activities.
Once Reagan was installed in the White House, the pair immediately reinvigorated the "special relationship." It was just as well. Some foreigners did not appreciate the force of what the Kremlin was beginning to call the Iron Lady. In 1982, the military dictatorship in Argentina, misled by the British Foreign Offices's apathetic responses to threats, took the hazardous step of invading and occupying the British Falkland Islands. This unprovoked act of aggression caught Thatcher unprepared, and for 36 hours she was nonplused and uncertain: The military and logistical objections to launching a combined-forces counterattack from 8,000 miles away were formidable.
But reassured by her service chiefs that, given resolution, the thing could be done, she made up her mind: It would be done, and thereafter her will to victory and her disregard of losses and risks never wavered. She was also assured by her friend Reagan that, short of sending forces, America would do all in its considerable power to help—a promise kept. Thus began one of the most notable campaigns in modern military and moral history, brought to a splendid conclusion by the unconditional surrender of all the Argentine forces on the islands, followed shortly by the collapse of the military dictatorship in Buenos Aires.
This spectacular success, combined with Thatcher's revival of the U.K. economy, enabled her to win a resounding electoral victory in 1983, followed by a third term in 1987. Thatcher never had any real difficulty in persuading the British electorate to back her, and it is likely that, given the chance, she would have won her fourth election in a row.
But it was a different matter with the Conservative Party, not for nothing once categorized by one of its leaders as the "stupid party." Some prominent Tories were never reconciled to her leadership. They included in particular the supporters of European federation, to which she was implacably opposed, their numbers swollen by grandees who had held high office under her but whom she had dumped without ceremony as ministerial failures. It was, too, a melancholy fact that she had become more imperious during her years of triumph and that power had corrupted her judgment.
This was made clear when she embarked on a fundamental reform of local-government finance. The reform itself was sensible, even noble, but its presentation was lamentable and its numerous opponents won the propaganda battle hands down. In the midst of this disaster, her Europhile opponents within her party devised a plot in 1990 to overthrow her by putting up one of their number (sacked from the cabinet for inefficiency) in the annual leadership election. Thatcher failed to win outright and was persuaded by friends to stand down. Thus ended one of the most remarkable careers in British political history.
Thatcher's strongest characteristic was her courage, both physical and moral. She displayed this again and again, notably when the IRA tried to murder her during the Tory Party Conference in 1984, and nearly succeeded, blowing up her hotel in the middle of the night. She insisted on opening the next morning's session right on time and in grand style. Immediately after courage came industry. She must have been the hardest-working prime minister in history, often working a 16-hour day and sitting up all night to write a speech. Her much-tried husband once complained, "You're not writing the Bible, you know."
She was not a feminist, despising the genre as "fashionable rot," though she once made a feminist remark. At a dreary public dinner of 500 male economists, having had to listen to nine speeches before being called herself, she began, with understandable irritation: "As the 10th speaker, and the only woman, I wish to say this: the cock may crow but it's the hen who lays the eggs."
Her political success once again demonstrates the importance of holding two or three simple ideas with fervor and tenacity, a virtue she shared with Ronald Reagan. One of these ideas was that the "evil empire" of communism could be and would be destroyed, and together with Reagan and Pope John Paul II she must be given the credit for doing it.
Among the British public she aroused fervent admiration and intense dislike in almost equal proportions, but in the world beyond she was recognized for what she was: a great, creative stateswoman who left the world a better and more prosperous place, and whose influence will reverberate well into the 21st century.
Mr. Johnson is a historian.
A version of this article appeared April 9, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The World-Changing Margaret Thatcher.
Monday, April 08, 2013
Margaret Thatcher: The Fighter
Two words about Mrs. Thatcher: She fought. She fought them at every turn, with toughness and wit and steel and humor — by any means necessary. She never wavered from doing what she thought was right, never lost a moment of sleep over it, and never relented in her pursuit of her goals. She did not seek to reach across the aisle unless her enemies were already on their knees, disarmed, with their heads bowed in surrender. Her sudden fall in 1990, with victory in sight in the Cold War, was a disgrace to Britain and the Tory Party, and John Major an ultimately unworthy successor on the order of George H. W. Bush here in the States. We thus returned to Managed Decline, already in progress. What else are men with the souls of bureaucrats for?
The Least Interesting Fact about Margaret Thatcher
President Obama’s statement honoring Margaret Thatcher was an example of the chameleon-like nature of liberalism. Rewriting history is a liberal specialty. Just as the anti–Cold War liberals were miraculously transformed into cold warriors after the war had been won, yesterday’s anti-Thatcherites are today morphing into something else.
The president’s statement praises Thatcher as one of the “great champions of freedom and liberty” and goes on to observe that “she stands as an example to our daughters that there is no glass ceiling that can’t be shattered.”So today we all celebrate Margaret Thatcher as a feminist icon? This is revisionism of a high order.
Of course, she ought to have been a feminist heroine. Thatcher was one of the greatest statesmen of the 20th century and the greatest female leader of modern times. A woman of rare brilliance, grit, accomplishment, and determination, she won three national elections, helped to dismantle the Soviet empire, and transformed her nation and the world for the better.
But no, the feminists loathed her. During her first campaign for national office in 1979, the more polite noseholders said, “We want women’s rights, not a right-wing woman.” The less subtle circulated the slogan “Ditch the B****.” Following the release of the movie The Iron Lady, a feminist wailed on the Huffington Post that Thatcher was “the embodiment of everything that feminism is not: selfish, rigid, and intolerant.”
Ah, yes, the tolerant feminists! Thatcher understood them well enough, remarking, “I owe nothing to women’s lib.” Young women, we were told, required female role models. Thatcher’s hero was Winston Churchill. While at Oxford, the grocer’s daughter who grew up in a flat without running hot water majored in chemistry, not women’s studies (a curriculum that didn’t yet exist, but that she would definitely have despised). Her tutor, as it happens, was a female pioneer of X-ray crystallography, who had the effrontery to win a Nobel Prize before the Betty Friedans and Gloria Steinems of the world had supposedly paved the way.
Eschewing the usual female ghettos of health, education, and welfare policy, Thatcher the politician focused on economics and international affairs. At a Conservative-party congress, she responded to a fellow Tory’s temporizing about policy by pulling a volume from one of her famous handbags. Thumping her copy of F. A. Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty on the table, she declared, “This is what we believe.”
Unlike Hillary Clinton, who rode to power on her husband’s coattails, or world leaders like Benazir Bhutto and Indira Gandhi, whose powerful fathers blazed the trail, Thatcher was completely self-made. She never once complained, as Clinton has more than once, that she was unfairly treated because she was a woman. Many a male MP tangled with her to his cost. She never asked for a vote in the name of women’s empowerment. She had no use for such trivialities. She had a country to save.
The magnitude of Thatcher’s accomplishments as prime minister cannot be understood without reference to the depths into which Britain had fallen by 1979. Successive Labour (and spineless Tory) governments had delivered an economy close to collapse. During the “winter of discontent” in 1978–79, strikes by public employees had crippled public services. Pickets blocked the entrances to hospitals, and only those suffering emergencies were permitted entry. Railway workers and truck drivers disrupted transportation. Trash accumulated on the streets as sanitation workers walked off the job. Bodies accumulated in morgues as gravediggers joined the strikes, prompting officials to discuss burial at sea for the mounting piles of corpses.
Thatcher’s victory ushered in a period of difficult but necessary free-market reforms. As in the U.S. under Reagan, Britain endured a tough recession as Thatcher wrestled inflation down. But the economy then rebounded and grew dramatically. She privatized state-owned industries, cut taxes on investments, radically reduced the power of trade unions, and reduced government spending. “The trouble with socialism,” she said, “is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”
Britain’s economy grew, confidence was restored, and the Labour party was forced to abandon its soft Marxism and become “New Labour” under Tony Blair.
Contra President Obama, perhaps the least interesting fact about Margaret Thatcher is that she was a woman. Far more important were her dedication to liberty (economic, as well as political), her fierce opposition to tyranny of all sorts, her indomitable spirit, and this above all — that she was proven right. As she said, “The facts of life are conservative.”
— Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2013 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Margaret Thatcher's vigorous virtues
By George F. Will,
The Washington Posthttp://www.washingtonpost.com
She had the eyes of Caligula and the lips of Marilyn Monroe. So said Francois Mitterrand, the last serious socialist to lead a major European nation, speaking of Margaret Thatcher, who helped bury socialism as a doctrine of governance.
She had the smooth, cold surface of a porcelain figurine, but her decisiveness made her the most formidable woman in 20th-century politics and England’s most formidable woman since its greatest sovereign, Elizabeth I. The Argentine junta learned of her decisiveness when it seized the Falklands. The British, too, learned. A Tory MP said, “She cannot see an institution without hitting it with her handbag.”
She aimed to be the moral equivalent of military trauma, shaking her nation into vigor through rigor. As stable societies mature, they resemble long-simmering stews — viscous and lumpy with organizations resistant to change and hence inimical to dynamism. Her program was sound money, laissez faire, social fluidity and upward mobility through self-reliance and other “vigorous virtues.” She is the only prime minister whose name came to denote a doctrine — Thatcherism. (“Churchillian” denotes not a political philosophy but a leadership style.) When she left office in 1990, the trade unions had been tamed by democratizing them, the political argument was about how to achieve economic growth rather than redistribute wealth, and individualism and nationalism were revitalized.
And the Labor Party, shellacked three times, was ready for a post-socialist leader. Tony Blair was part of Thatcher’s legacy.
Time was, Labor considered itself the party of ideas and Tories preferred balancing interests to implementing political philosophy. But by the 1970s, Labor was a creature of a single interest group, the unions, and the Tories, who made Thatcher their leader in 1975, were becoming, as America’s Republicans were becoming, a party of ideas.
Britain has periodically been a laboratory for economic ideas — those of Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, the socialism of postwar Labor. Before the ascendancy of Thatcher — a disciple of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek — Tories tried to immunize Britain against socialism by administering prophylactic doses of the disease. But by 1979, Britain’s fundamental political arrangements were at issue: Such was the extortionate power of the unions to paralyze the nation that the writ of Parliament often seemed to run not beyond a few acres along the Thames.
In 1979, she won the most lopsided election since 1945, when there had not been an election for 10 years. In 1983, she became the first Tory since 1924 to win two consecutive elections. In 1987, she won a third. Her 12 consecutive years were an achievement without precedent since the 1832 Reform Act moved Britain, gingerly, toward mass democracy. The most consequential peacetime prime minister since Disraeli, by 1990 she had become the first prime minister to govern through an entire decade since the Earl of Liverpool from 1812 to 1827.
In Britain and America in the 1960s and 1970s, government’s hubris expanded as its competence shrank. Like her soul mate, Ronald Reagan, Thatcher practiced the politics of psychotherapy, giving her nation a pride transplant. Reagan was responding to 17 lacerating years — Dallas, Vietnam, Watergate, stagflation, the Iranian hostage crisis. She was sick and tired of three decades of Britain being described as the Ottoman Empire once was, as “the sick man of Europe.” She set about disrupting settled attitudes and arrangements by enlarging and energizing the middle class, the great engine of social change in every modern society.
Before Thatcher, Britain’s economic problems often were ascribed to national character and hence were thought immune to remediation. Thatcher thought national character was part of the problem, but that national character is malleable, given bracing economic medicine. Marx’s ghost, hovering over his grave in London’s Highgate Cemetery, must have marveled at this Tory variant of economic determinism.
When Nature was serving up charm and convictions, Thatcher took a double serving of the latter, leaving little room on her plate for the former. But by what has been called her “matriarchal machismo” she usefully demonstrated that a soothing personality is not always necessary in democracy.
Like de Gaulle, she was a charismatic conservative nationalist who was properly resistant to what she called the European federalists’ attempts to“suppress nationhood and concentrate power at the center of a European conglomerate.” She left the British this ongoing challenge: “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them reimposed at a European level.” As long as her brave heart beat, she knew there are no final victories.
Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.
Read more on Margaret Thatcher’s death: Five myths about Margaret Thatcher Eugene Robinson: Thatcher shattered the image of a female leader The Post’s View: In every sense, a leader Jennifer Rubin: A conservative heroine passes away
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