Would Democrats embrace JFK now?

By Jeff Jacoby

http://www.bostonglobe.com

October 20, 2013

AS DEMOCRATS begin maneuvering for the 2016 presidential race, there isn’t one who would think of disparaging John F. Kennedy’s stature as a Democratic Party hero. Yet it’s a pretty safe bet that none would dream of running on Kennedy’s approach to government or embrace his political beliefs.

Today’s Democratic Party — the home of Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Al Gore — wouldn’t give the time of day to a candidate like JFK.

The 35th president was an ardent tax-cutter who championed across-the-board, top-to-bottom reductions in personal and corporate tax rates, slashed tariffs to promote free trade, and even spoke out against the “confiscatory” property taxes being levied in too many cities.

He was anything but a big-spending, welfare-state liberal. “I do not believe that Washington should do for the people what they can do for themselves through local and private effort,” Kennedy bluntly avowed during the 1960 campaign. One of his first acts as president was to institute a pay cut for top White House staffers, and that was only the start of his budgetary austerity. “To the surprise of many of his appointees,” longtime aide Ted Sorensen would later write, he “personally scrutinized every agency request with a cold eye and encouraged his budget director to say ‘no.’ ”

On the other hand, he was a Cold War anticommunist who aggressively increased military spending. He faulted his Republican predecessor for tailoring the nation’s military strategy to fit the budget, rather than the other way around. “We must refuse to accept a cheap, second-best defense,” JFK said during his run for the White House. He made good on that pledge, pushing defense spending to 50 percent of federal expenditures and 9 percent of GDP, both far higher than today’s levels. Speaking in Texas just hours before his death, he proudly took credit for building the US military into “a defense system second to none.”

Since that terrible day in Dallas 50 years ago, popular mythology has turned Kennedy into a liberal hero. Some of that mythmaking, as journalist and historian Ira Stoll argues in a new book, “JFK, Conservative,” was driven by Kennedy aides, such as Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who had always wanted their boss to be more left-leaning than he was. Some of it was fueled by the Democratic Party’s emotional connection to the memory of a martyred president, and its understandable desire to link their priorities to his legacy.

But Kennedy was no liberal. By any reasonable definition, he was a conservative — and not just by the standards of our era, but by those of his era as well.

Stoll draws on an embarrassment of riches to make his case.

When the young JFK launched his first political campaign for the US House in 1946, a profile in Look magazine homed in on his conservatism:

“When young, wealthy, and conservative John Fitzgerald Kennedy announced for Congress, many people wondered why,” it began. “Hardly a liberal even by his own standards, Kennedy is mainly concerned by what appears to him as the coming struggle between collectivism and capitalism. In speech after speech he charges his audience ‘to battle for the old ideas with the same enthusiasm that people have for new ideas.’ ”

He hadn’t changed his political stripes by the time he ran for the Senate in 1952, challenging incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. Stoll notes that Massachusetts newspapers wanting to back a liberal in that race came out for the Republican — the Berkshire Eagle, for example, endorsed Lodge as “an invaluable voice for liberalism.” When his reelection in 1958 made it clear that Kennedy would be running for the Democratic presidential nomination, Eleanor Roosevelt was asked in a TV interview whom she would support if forced to choose “between a conservative Democrat like Kennedy and a liberal Republican [like] Rockefeller.” FDR’s widow, then as now a progressive icon, answered that she would do all she could to make sure Kennedy wouldn’t be the party’s nominee.

Many on the left felt that way about JFK. When he decided to resume nuclear testing in 1962, Bertrand Russell attacked him as “much more wicked than Hitler,” and Linus Pauling, who would receive that year’s Nobel Peace Prize, predicted that he would “go down in history as . . . one of the greatest enemies of the human race.” Left-wing intellectuals raged against Kennedy’s failed attempt to topple Fidel Castro (the renowned sociologist C. Wright Mills said the administration had “returned us to barbarism”). Liberals within the administration expressed dismay for Kennedy’s unwavering support for tax cuts. Schlesinger called one of Kennedy’s exhortations “the worst speech the president had ever given.”

Nearly 30 years ago, an essay in Mother Jones magazine asked: “Would JFK Be a Hero Now?” If the answer wasn’t obvious then, it certainly is now. In today’s political environment, a candidate like JFK — a conservative champion of economic growth, tax cuts, limited government, peace through strength — plainly would be a hero. Whether he would be a Democrat is a different matter altogether.

Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jeff_jacoby.

The Maligned Tea Party

The Left’s characterizations just aren’t true. 

By Charles C. W. Cooke

http://www.nationalreview.com/

October 21, 2013

Even for the most cultivated people, the 19th-century humorist Josh Billings quipped, “it ain’t ignorance causes so much trouble; it’s folks knowing so much that ain’t so.”

Ideally, Plato’s promise that the process of learning would teach us how little we know would apply universally, thus encouraging not only humility but caution, too. Yet when politics is involved, the temptation toward calumny often proves too much.

There is almost certainly no more maligned group in American public life than the Tea Party. Progressives — and many of the Americans they have succeeding in influencing — just knowthat the movement is chock-full of Bible-thumping, racist, uncaring, poorly educated, narrow-minded, hypocritical, gun-toting, and scientifically illiterate know-nothings. And how do they know this? Well, because the Tea Party must be like this, right?

As it happens, to look more closely into the movement is to be disabused of almost all of the defamations. Facts are stubborn things and care little for partisan advantage, something that Yale law professor Dan Kahan discovered recently when he set out to examine the relationship “between a ‘science comprehension’ scale” he has been developing and the “political outlooks” of American citizens. Kahan’sreport is admirably honest. He had, he wrote candidly, expected to see “a modestnegative correlation between identifying with the Tea Party and science comprehension” (emphasis is his). Why had he expected this? Because he doesn’t “know a single person who identifies with the Tea Party.” All of his impressions, he conceded, came “from watching cable TV . . . and reading the ‘paper’ (New York Times daily, plus a variety of politics-focused internet sites like Huffington Post & Politico).”

Kahan was genuinely surprised by the results of his study. “Identifying with the Tea Party,” he concluded, “correlates positively (r = 0.05, p = 0.05) with scores on the science comprehension measure.”

Really, this should be no surprise. Study after study and survey after survey show that the favored slurs are, well, slurs. Salon’s Michael Lind — who is, to put it lightly, no fan of the Tea Party’s — allowed this month that the group’s leaders “tend to be highly educated and well-off,” and its members “tend to be more affluent and educated than the general public.” The group cannot, Lind continued, “be explained in terms of abstract ideological extremism, working-class populism or ignorance and stupidity.” Here Lind is merely echoing the data — or, rather, reflecting what the more insufferable among our progressive friends enjoy referring to as the “settled science.”

“Racism,” another preferred charge, is similarly ill-supported. In 2010, UCLA student Emily Ekins surveyed tea-party protest signs, an endeavor that revealed not racism but that

media coverage of tea party rallies over the past year have [sic] focused so heavily on the more controversial signs that it has contributed to the perception that such content dominates the tea party movement more than it actually does.

How many signs were beyond the pale? “5 percent of the total mentioned the president’s race or religion,” the Washington Post wrote in its story about Ekins’s survey, “and slightly more than 1 percent questioned his American citizenship.” A comparison study with some of the anti-Bush protests would be interesting here. 

Indeed, accusations of bigotry often reveal more about the accusers than the accusees. John McWhorter of Columbia University made the brilliant observation that “the idea that ‘racism’ is behind the Tea Partiers is based on a lazy and vain extension of the term ‘racism’ to meaning ‘that which many black people would not approve of.’” I would only add to McWhorter’s diagnosis — that some engaged in the slander are “lazy” and some are “vain” — that others, such as Victor Goode of the professional victimization website Colorlines and the endlessly boring and monomaniacal Joan Walsh of Salon are so desperate for the insult to be true that they are happy to beclown themselves awkwardly pretending that it is.

Wrapping up his findings, Yale’s Dan Kahan wrote:

I’m a little embarrassed, but mainly I’m just glad that I no longer hold this particular mistaken view.

For what it’s worth, I do not blame Kahan for holding this “mistaken view.” As he implies, all he ever hears is that tea partiers are “extreme,” “dangerous,” and “stupid” — even that they present an existential threat to the Republic.

If anyone doubts the frequency with which this slander is issued from on high, just look through theCongressional Record from the past few weeks. During this time, elected tea partiers were accused of “hostage-taking,” “arson,” “bomb-throwing,” “rebellion,” “nullification,” and evensedition — and all for having the temerity to use their constitutionally authorized control over the power of the purse as leverage in a related political fight. Indeed, the Democratic party has been so on-message with its melodramatic tales of zealotry and insurrection that I wouldn’t be surprised if more congressional speeches were made about the perils of the Defund Obamacare movement in the past fortnight than were delivered about the evils of the Japanese Empire in four long years.

Broadly speaking, tea-party hysteria seems to be originated and peddled by three factions. The first, and most cynical, is made up of perfidious progressives who, because they oppose the Tea Party’s economic agenda and fear its electoral and political clout, have set out with malice aforethought to destroy the group’s reputation. Into this bloc we can reliably throw almost everybody at MSNBC, the Democratic National Committee, the Obama administration, and the parade of political operatives who work around the clock to make politics intolerable for everyone. Given that these people are more committed than they are creative, you will notice that their preferred epithets for the Tea Party are the ones that they throw at everybody. Hence “racist,” “greedy,” and “stupid.”

The second faction consists of the genuinely dangerous Americans who do not grasp the nature, legitimacy, and vital role of vehement political opposition in a free republic. These are the people who, willfully or not, orchestrated and cheered on the IRS’s disgusting singling out of tea-party groups. Evidently, a number of people in America have managed to convince themselves that citizens who rail against taxes and debt and wish to see a reduction in regulation are more likely than most to break the laws they disdain — even though there is precisely no evidence for this. To propose that members of the Tea Party should be more closely monitored by the IRS because they advance an anti-tax message is akin to proposing that the advocates of drug legalization should be singled out for visits by the DEA or that opponents of wiretapping should be targeted for NSA surveillance. In other words, it is to say that there should be tangible consequences for speaking up against the status quo.

The third group is perhaps the most interesting, for it is full of people who have become precisely what they fear. When the history of this period in American life comes to be written, historians will almost certainly come to see the hysteria prompted by the rise of the Tea Party as akin to the “Red Scare” of the 1950s — except, that is, that there were actual Communist traitors in America. The New York Times’s Ross Douthat has observed that the more genuinely vexed among the movement’s detractors believe the group to be “an expression of crypto-fascist, crypto-racist rage, part Timothy McVeigh and part Bull Connor, potentially carrying a wave of terrorist violence in its wings.” Douthat correctly explains that “the historical term for this kind of anxiety is ‘Brown Scare’ — an inordinate fear of a vast far-right conspiracy, which resembles the anti-Communist panics of our past.”

One man on Twitter told me rather hilariously during the shutdown that the Tea Party was comparable to the secessionist movement in the run-up to the Civil War. Witlessly aping the argot of ostensibly detached science-is-settled utilitarians, he insisted that “all the metrics point to Neoconfederates showing themselves.”

In fact, the “metrics” show nothing of the sort. One can only suggest that those who find themselves in my interlocutor’s position, blindly spreading misinformation as if it were gospel truth, should follow the example of Professor Kahan, forming whatever “various political and moral assessments” they wish — but leaving the calumnies at home.

— Charles C. W. Cooke is a staff writer for National Review.

Book Review: 'Spirit of Steamboat' by Craig Johnson

"Spirit of Steamboat," a novella in the Walt Longmire series, is an uneventful visit with old friends

By D. Reed Eckhardt 
reckhardt@wyomingnews.com

http://www.wyomingnews.com/

October 17, 2013

It's always nice to spend time with old friends, even if their visits are uneventful. It doesn't have to be a lifetime moment; there is pleasure regardless.

That's how one feels after reading "Spirit of Steamboat" ($20, 146 pages, Viking Press/Penguin Group), a novella released today by Wyoming writer Craig Johnson.

The cover says it is "A Walt Longmire Story," and it is that -- sort of. The book contains some of the familiar Longmire characters, but it does not push that series forward. Rather, you might consider it a side dish to the main course.

In his introduction, Johnson writes that "Steamboat" grew out of an assignment for a short story. The best guess is that he set out to write a digital shorty, like "Messenger: A Walt Longmire Story" and "Christmas in Absoraka County: Walt Longmire Christmas Stories." Those are available only as downloads at Amazon.com. It grew to novella length.

"Steamboat" is essentially one long flashback as Walt recalls an extraordinary effort to save the life of a child burn victim.

It centers on Walt's predecessor as sheriff in Absaroka County, Lucian Connally. It turns out Lucian was part of Doolittle's Raiders during World War II. Those brave aviators flew B-52B Mitchell bombers off an aircraft carrier to attack Japan.

Lucian and Walt eventually find themselves piloting a broken-down B-52B that is named after Wyoming's famed bucking horse, racing time and a winter storm to save the child.

The problem is, the story never really develops the suspense that Johnson intends. There are several harrowing moments, but the reader knows how they turn out: After all, Walt is alive and remembering the story.

It is not as if Longmire is going to die, or fall out of the bomber or run out of fuel. That takes away some of the compelling nature of Johnson's usual powerful storytelling.

Also, "Steamboat" lacks some of the polish one expects from the author: He sets the standard for Wyoming mystery writers. Perhaps because "Steamboat" is more thriller than mystery, it lacks some of his familiar style and technique.

As for those readers who expect to find further development of Walt's relationship with his undersheriff, Victoria Moretti, she is absent here. So are most of the other main characters, like Henry Standing Bear.

Still, it is nice to check in with Walt more than once a year, and this novella permits that.

Fans of the series will appreciate these few moments with favorite sheriff (and author), even if they are under-whelmed by the story.

Sometimes just seeing old friends is enough. That certainly is the case with "Spirit of Steamboat."

IF YOU GO

Author Craig Johnson currently has no Wyoming book signings planned in the wake of the release of his new book, "Spirit of Steamboat." Nearby signings include:

Oct. 18 -- The Tattered Cover, 1628 16th Street Mall, Lodo, Denver, 7:30 p.m.

Oct. 19 -- Barnes and Noble, 2999 Pearl St., Boulder, Colo., 3 p.m.

Oct. 19 -- Fort Collins Library, Council Tree Branch, 2733 Council Tree Ave, Suite 200, Fort Collins, Colo., 7 p.m.

Nov. 1 -- Barnes and Noble, 8136 W. Bowles Ave., Littleton, Colo., 7 p.m.

Nov. 2 -- Farr Library, 1939 61st Ave., Greeley, Colo.,

6:30 p.m.

For more about the author and his books, visit www.craigallenjohnson.com.

Potemkin Parliament

Washington’s governing systems are in a bad way. 

By Mark Steyn

http://www.nationalreview.com/

October 18, 2013

The least dispiriting moment of another grim week in Washington was the sight of ornery veterans tearing down the Barrycades around the war memorials on the National Mall, dragging them up the street, and dumping them outside the White House. This was, as Kevin Williamson wrote at National Review, “as excellent a gesture of the American spirit as our increasingly docile nation has seen in years.” Indeed. The wounded vet with two artificial legs balancing the Barrycade on his Segway was especially impressive. It would have been even better had these disgruntled citizens neatly lined up the Barrycades across the front of the White House and round the sides, symbolically Barrycading him in as punishment for Barrycading them out. But, in a town where an unarmed woman can be left a bullet-riddled corpse merely for driving too near His Benign Majesty’s palace and nobody seems to care, one appreciates a certain caution.

By Wednesday, however, it was business as usual. Which is to say the usual last-minute deal just ahead of the usual make-or-break deadline to resume spending as usual. There was nothing surprising about this. Everyone knew the Republicans were going to fold. Folding is what Republicans do. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are so good at folding Obama should hire them as White House valets. So the only real question was when to fold. They could at least have left it for a day or two after the midnight chimes of October 17 had come and gone. It would have been useful to demonstrate that just as the sequester did not cause the sky to fall and the shutdown had zero impact on the life of the country so this latest phoney-baloney do-or-die date would not have led to the end of the world as we know it. If you’re going to place another trillion dollars of debt (or more than the entire national debts of Canada and Australia combined) on the backs of the American people in one grubby late-night deal, you might as well get a teachable moment out of it.

The GOP was concerned about polls showing their approval ratings somewhere between Bashar Assad and the ebola virus, but it’s hard to see why capitulation should command popularity: The late Osama bin Laden’s famous observation about the strong horse and the weak horse has some relevance to domestic politics, too. Republicans spent a lot of time whining that, if Obama was prepared to negotiate with the Iranians, the Syrians, and the Russians, why wouldn’t he negotiate with the GOP? Well, the obvious answer is Rouhani, Assad, and Putin don’t curl up in a fetal position at the first tut-tut from Bob Schieffer or Diane Sawyer.

The thesis of my recent book After America is stated on page six thereof — “that the prevailing political realities of the United States do not allow for any meaningful course correction.” That’s what the political class confirmed yet again this week. Which brings me to the sentence immediately following: “And, without meaningful course correction, America is doomed.”

Washington’s governing systems are in a bad way. Government by “continuing resolution,” a term foreign to most foreigners, ought to be embarrassing to any self-governing, not to say self-respecting, people. Instead, in the course of the “shutdown,” this repugnant phrase advanced to acronymic status — “CR,” as cable news had it, the pundit class lovingly caressing this latest insider jargon with their customary onanistic shiver. Presented as a resolution of the Obamacare/debt-ceiling standoff, the “CR” came, as the car dealers say, fully loaded — including a $174,000 payment to the widow of New Jersey’s multimillionaire senator Frank Lautenberg. Because, even when you’re saddling the next generation of Americans with another trillion bucks of debt, six-figure payouts to the relicts of the most exclusive rich man’s club in America is just the way it is.

How can you “control” spending under such a system? Congress has degenerated into a Potemkin parliament, its ersatz nature embodied by those magnificent speeches senators give to themselves, orating for the benefit of TV sound bites into the cavernous silence of an empty room, an upper chamber turned isolation chamber. The “law of the land” means machinations and procedural legerdemain culminating in a show vote on unread omnibus fill-in-the-blanks pseudo-legislation to be decided after the fact by the regulatory bureaucracy.

This structural degeneration is a big part of the problem. My friends on the American right fret that if we’re not careful we’ll end up like Europe. But we’re already worse than many parts of Europe, and certainly than the non-European West — by any measure you care to use. According to the IMF, the Danish government’s net debt is 10.3 percent of GDP, Australia’s is 12.7 percent, New Zealand’s 28.8 percent, the Netherlands’ 35.5 percent, Canada’s 35.9 percent, Germany’s 56.2 percent, France’s 86.5 percent — and the United States’ 89 percent. If you take America’s total indebtedness, it averages out to three-quarters of a million dollars per family: We are on course to becoming the first nation of negative-millionaires. But let’s just stick with the federal debt, the figure for which those bipartisan schmoozers are officially responsible: In Australia, each citizen’s share of the debt is $12,000; in New Zealand, it’s $15,000 per person; in Canada and Spain, $18,000; in the United Kingdom, $28,000; in Germany and France, $38,000; Italy, $44,000. And in the United States it’s $54,000 per person — twice as much as Britain, thrice as much as Canada, closing in on five times as much as Oz. On this trajectory, America is exiting the First World.

This structural degeneration is a big part of the problem. My friends on the American right fret that if we’re not careful we’ll end up like Europe. But we’re already worse than many parts of Europe, and certainly than the non-European West — by any measure you care to use. According to the IMF, the Danish government’s net debt is 10.3 percent of GDP, Australia’s is 12.7 percent, New Zealand’s 28.8 percent, the Netherlands’ 35.5 percent, Canada’s 35.9 percent, Germany’s 56.2 percent, France’s 86.5 percent — and the United States’ 89 percent. If you take America’s total indebtedness, it averages out to three-quarters of a million dollars per family: We are on course to becoming the first nation of negative-millionaires. But let’s just stick with the federal debt, the figure for which those bipartisan schmoozers are officially responsible: In Australia, each citizen’s share of the debt is $12,000; in New Zealand, it’s $15,000 per person; in Canada and Spain, $18,000; in the United Kingdom, $28,000; in Germany and France, $38,000; Italy, $44,000. And in the United States it’s $54,000 per person — twice as much as Britain, thrice as much as Canada, closing in on five times as much as Oz. On this trajectory, America is exiting the First World.

And that’s before counting the “unfunded liabilities” that Washington keeps off the books but which add another million bucks per taxpayer. Nor does it include Obamacare, with which the geniuses of the “technocracy” have managed to spend a fortune creating the Internet version of a Brezhnev-era Soviet supermarket.

I think of recent “left-wing” governments among our allies. Up north, Jean Chrétien was a thuggish wardheeler presiding over a regime of repellent industrial-scale cronyism; Down Under, Kevin Rudd was a uniquely loathsome specimen of a human being, who communicated through a blizzard of effing asterisks and in idle moments ate his ear wax live on camera. Yet Australia was the only Western nation not to go into recession in 2008, and Canada spent the “fat” years of the Nineties paying down the national debt. Imagine that! As my old comrade Kate O’Beirne put it, “If only we could get American conservatives to be as fiscally responsible as Canadian liberals.” 

When I met Kevin Rudd a few years ago, he said to me, “I’m part of the pro-American Left.” “Crikey,” I replied, “America doesn’t have a pro-American Left, and in Europe they don’t even have a pro-American Right.” I didn’t know the half of it: These days, it’s not clear to me that the Republican party functions as a pro-American Right. That’s to say, Chrétien and Rudd, ghastly as they were, not only did less damage to their national finances than Obama, Reid, and Pelosi but they also did less damage than the GOP. I’m sure they dreamed the usual crazy dreams of wild-eyed lefties, but the system imposed disciplines on them that Washington doesn’t — on left or right.

That’s the problem. Either you think those numbers above are serious or you don’t. And, if you do think they’re serious and you’re a “lawmaker” (as the New York Times quaintly insists on calling our rubber-stampers), when are you going to get serious? Next month? Next year? Or shall we all sportingly agree to leave it till 2015 after the bipartisan deal on a $20 trillion debt ceiling?

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2013 Mark Steyn

Remembering America

Posted By Roger Kimball On October 17, 2013 @ 8:33 am In Uncategorized | 37 Comments

http://pjmedia.com/


I was having lunch yesterday with a politically mature Democrat, one of those “Scoop Jackson” fellows you read about in books but — unless you are older than I am — have probably never met outside a book’s pages. These are the chaps who see a fairly large role for government but who are also unabashedly pro-American, favor a robust foreign policy, are allergic to political correctness in all its squalid manifestations, and accordingly are the friends, not the enemies, of meritocracy.

It was a convivial lunch, but with a certain melancholy creep around the edges.

Witnessing the unedifying spectacle put on by our masters in Washington this last week or so, we could only shake our heads sadly. And when we contemplated the action of ordinary citizens — those vets who disassembled the “Barrycades ^[1]” erected in front of national monuments by a punitive Obama administration — we couldn’t help wondering whether the country was teetering towards a pre-revolutionary state. Take a look at this video ^[2] showing hundreds of veterans confronting park police in riot gear — riot gear! — in front of the White House. How about this photo of a vet: he lost the bottom half of both legs fighting to protect us from foreign enemies, and here he is now, tearing down those Barrycades, fighting to protect our prerogatives as free citizens, protesting the arrogant, overweening actions of a political elite that more and more views us citizens as serfs:

 ^[3]

There is a lot more to be said about the events of the last couple of weeks: the pseudo-shutdown, the ham-handed and ineffectual pontifications of John Boehner, the punitive actions of the increasingly lawless Obama administration. Pundits and markets the world over heaved a collective sigh of relief when this circus of intransigence, stupidity, and preening brinksmanship collapsed on itself yesterday, but what happened is not behind us: it is prelude, not history. We are in the midst of political, social, and moral realignment, the lineaments of which no one’s crystal ball is sufficiently prescient to delineate with anything more than guess and possibilities.

This is a large subject, better suited to a book than a blog post. But let me draw on “The Obamacare Disaster ^[4],” an essay by Conrad Black at NRO, to highlight some of the headwinds we face. First, a few data points:

The United States has 5 percent of the world’s people, 25 percent of its incarcerated people, and half of its trained lawyers (who now take about 10 percent of the GDP); the legal system is an embarrassment, and the criminal-justice system is a disgrace, in which prosecutors win 99.5 percent of their cases, 97 percent of them without a trial. The legislators of the country are ultimately responsible for this corruption of what the Constitution and Bill of Rights set up as a just and merciful Society of Laws. The terminal cancer of legal paralysis spreads every week of every year.

Can you doubt that what Black says is true? But what are “we the people” going to do about this metastasizing pathology? Probably, what we have always done: nothing.

Consider the wickedly named “Affordable Care Act.” It owes its very existence, as Black points out, “to political treachery, electoral hijinks, and extreme prosecutorial misconduct”:

The 60-vote level in the Senate was obtained by the subornation of Arlen Specter in that tainted window between his rejection by his own party and his defeat by the Pennsylvania voters, and by Al Franken’s questionable win in the Senate election in Minnesota, where partisan, county-by-county recounts overturned the people’s choice. Also, most egregiously, Republican senator Ted Stevens of Alaska had been narrowly defeated in 2008 after being convicted of taking a bribe — a conviction that was subsequently thrown out because of the prosecutor’s completely improper suppression of exculpatory evidence.

Again, can any candid person cavil with these facts? Black focuses on the enormity that is Obamacare. But he also notes that that disastrous piece of legislation is a sort of synecdoche for a larger disaster: the eclipse of political legitimacy:

This is the governmental equivalent of congestive heart failure. It is the domestic-affairs equivalent of the Syrian policy: the moral imperatives, red lines, “moral obscenity,” punitive action that wouldn’t really be damaging (would, in fact, be “unbelievably small”), and the constitutional position of commander-in-chief devolving to Congress. This has all become surreal.

Indeed it has. But where do we go from here? Black conjured the specter of Cromwell storming Parliament and thundering out its dissolution (“in the name of God go!”). Perhaps it will come to something like that.

I am not sure whether Black’s concluding remarks count as consolatory, or the opposite:

The American people are the greatest talent pool in the world; this is a system that has always worked adequately and often well. It is a democracy, and in a democracy the people are always right and they get the government they deserve. I do not dare to believe that the people that deserved Washington, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Truman, Eisenhower, and Reagan (and chose them a total of 14 times) deserve this.

One question, I suppose, is where exactly are the successors of these titans? Not, I think, in Washington, D.C.

---

Article printed from Roger’s Rules: http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2013/10/17/remembering-america/
URLs in this post:

[1] Barrycades: http://www.wnd.com/2013/10/barrycades-torn-down-taken-to-white-house/

[2] this video: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/10/13/we-are-marching-to-the-white-house-to-return-the-barricades-million-vet-march-descends-on-washington/

[3] Image: http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/files/2013/10/joey_jones2.jpg

[4] The Obamacare Disaster: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/361351/obamacare-disaster-conrad-black

The Bothersome, Annoying Truth

By Caroline Glick
http://frontpagemag.com/
October 17, 2013




Ilan Pappe

A controversy is raging in the Washington, DC, Jewish community involving the local JCC (DCJCC) and its in-house Theater J. While a local tale, it is a distressing encapsulation of Israel’s predicament.

Israel’s rights and justness are grounded in truth. But today truth isn’t worth as much as it used to be. Those who fight for it find themselves routinely maligned as close-minded extremists. Those who trounce it are congratulated for being open-minded and fair.

Last month Theater J announced its Spring 2014 schedule.

The schedule includes a play called The Admission.

Authored by an Israeli named Motti Lerner, the play is a dramatization of what is euphemistically known as the “Tantura Affair.”

In 2000, Maariv published an article describing the Master’s thesis of a student at the University of Haifa named Teddy Katz. Teddy Katz’s thesis purported to document a previously unknown massacre during Israel’s War of Independence. He alleged that in May 1948 the IDF murdered 250 Arab civilians after winning a battle in the town of Tantura.

The article caused an uproar. Veterans of the battle sued Katz for libel. They won. Indeed, in testimony before the district court judge Katz admitted his thesis was a fabrication.

Katz later recanted his admission and appealed the decision to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court upheld the ruling that Katz had libeled the soldiers. The university appointed a panel of scholars to review his research materials. They found Katz had fabricated statements he alleged came from interviews with eyewitnesses.

The university cancelled its acceptance of Katz’s thesis.

Had that been the end of that, the “Tantura Affair” – that is, Katz’s blood libel against the IDF – would have been long forgotten. But Katz’s academic supervisor, then-senior lecturer at Haifa and celebrated anti-Israel propagandist Ilan Pappe, refused to let the truth get in his way.

Pappe rewrote the history of the “Tantura Affair.” In Pappe’s telling, Katz heroically revealed the truth about the evil core of the Jewish state, and was then persecuted for going against Zionist orthodoxy.

Pappe has won international acclaim and prestige by being among the most outspoken, virulent foes of Israel in academia with an Israeli passport. He has openly called for Israel’s destruction.

He is also an admitted liar.

Benny Morris wrote of Pappe that his “contempt for historical truth and factual accuracy is almost boundless.”

As Pappe sees it, truth is only important if it is aligned with his ideological goal. The French newspaper Le Soir quoted him saying, “The struggle is about ideology, not about facts. Who knows what facts are? We try to convince as many people as we can that our interpretation of the facts is the correct one, and we do it because of ideological reasons, not because we are truthseekers.”

For his part, Lerner, who has dramatized Katz’s blood libel, was quoted by The Washington Post saying that his purpose wasn’t to tell the truth, either. “The play is trying to suggest that these historical memories [of what happened at Tantura] have to be explored and revised continuously in order to create a solid basis for reconciliation between the two people.”

The “revised” – that is, false – memory Lerner seeks to create serves a clear purpose. By portraying the Jews as murderers and as the aggressors in 1948 and the Arabs as their victims, he wishes to convince everyone that it is okay for the Arabs to continue seeking Israel’s destruction, and for the world to keep pressuring the Jewish state for more unilateral concessions. Only if justice is solely on the side of the Arabs is it possible to promote “compromises” in which the Jewish state makes endless concessions to the Arabs, and in return receives terrorism, war and hatred.

The true history of Israel’s War of Independence in which local Arabs, assisted by invading Arab armies attacked the Jews of Israel with the declared purpose of annihilating them, is inconvenient for the likes of Lerner and Pappe. They have no use for the fact that every area conquered by the Arabs was rendered Jew-free, by massacre or expulsion. They certainly don’t want anyone to know about the heroism of Jews who defended themselves and their nascent state, and prevailed, albeit at great cost.

Recognizing the propaganda effort at play with The Admission, a group of local Washington, DC, activists launched a protest. Volunteers with a group called Citizens Opposed to Propaganda Masquerading as Art (COPMA) have demanded that the Jewish Federation of Washington, DC, defund Theater J and the DCJCC for spreading anti-Israel propaganda whose goal is to defame Israel and romanticize its enemies.

This is not COPMA’s first run-in with Theater J. COPMA was formed in 2009 following Theater J’s decision to produce the anti-Semitic diatribe Seven Jewish Children. The work portrays Jewish parents as monsters who train their children to become murderers. In a mere 1,300 words, it criminalizes as mass murderers the entire Jewish population of Israel for crimes that were never committed.

Ari Roth has served as the artistic director of Theater J for the past 17 years. He decided to produce Seven Jewish Children, and another libelous anti-Israel play written by a Palestinian terrorist in 2011. And he decided to produce The Admission.

From Roth’s statements since COPMA raised the current outcry, it is apparent that he holds truth in the same contempt as Pappe and Lerner. Roth wrote on Theater J’s website, “At least three Israeli historians wrote different versions of the conquest of Tantura: from the right, Yoav Gelber; from the center, Benny Morris, and from the left, Ilan Pappe.”

As COPMA pointed out, however, Pappe admits to prizing the cause of Israel’s destruction above truth, and Morris and Gelber have stated unequivocally that there was no massacre at Tantura.

Roth’s statement then is the equivalent of a person saying that since a dozen professors have written about the tooth fairy, she must exist, (even though they wrote that there is no tooth fairy).

Rather than weigh COPMA’s truthful claims against Roth’s obscene distortions and block the production of the play or fire Roth, the DCJCC’s leadership and the Federation have circled the wagons around Roth and Theater J.

Speaking to The Washington Post, DCJCC’s chief executive Carole R. Zawatsky defended Roth and attacked COPMA.

“COPMA,” she said, “would love to see us close down the conversation, and our intention is to open up a conversation.”

In other words, a blood libel depicting Israeli soldiers – and the society that supports them – as mass murderers, is not beyond the pale. It is the beginning of an important conversation regarding whether or not Israel is a criminal state born in war crimes.

From the perspective of those who place ideology over facts, this is the best of all possible outcomes. Supporters of Israel – and of truth – are forced to spend hours gathering evidence to prove that a lie is false. Meanwhile those who propagate it are free to play the victim of a McCarthyite attempt to silence them. And then, they can have a debate that places on Israel the burden of proving that the lie you just watched on stage is untrue and maliciously so.

The saga of The Admission is the saga of Israel in our upside down world today. Here we are, we truthtellers, maligned for our attachment to facts by those who in the service of their goal to destroy what is most important, have convinced themselves and their followers that truth is nothing special. Indeed, that it is bothersome and annoying.

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Child Marriage Comes to Australia

Posted By Robert Spencer
http://pjmedia.com/
October 14, 2013



The girl’s Muslim parents forced her into the marriage when she was fourteen. Her mother tried to put a good face on a bad situation, enticing the girl with a picture of marriage as a never-ending party: her husband, she said, would treat the girl to ice cream and lollipops and take her to movies and amusement parks. Reality turned out to be a bit different: her husband imprisoned her inside their home and forced her to watch violent videos featuring jihad attacks against soldiers from Western countries. He also raped her and beat her frequently.

The girl went to her father for help. But her father, as she recounted later, was completely unsympathetic, telling her: “So what if he raped you? So what if he bashed you? The only way you can come back to me is in a coffin.”

This didn’t happen in Pakistan, or Egypt, or Indonesia. This girl suffered in comfortable suburban Australia, where Western society failed her as thoroughly as did Islamic society: she went to a teacher and explained what was happening, but despite laws requiring teachers to report such incidents, nothing was done.

Perhaps the teacher was afraid that if she reported the girl’s husband, she’d be accused of “bigotry” and “hate.” The forces promoting multiculturalism are as strong and deeply entrenched in Australia as they are in Europe and the United States. But inevitably, the multiculturalist acceptance of all things Islamic and stigmatization of any and all opposition to Islamic law as “racist” and “bigoted” are going to come into conflict with core Western principles of human rights and human dignity. This Muslim teenager’s teacher apparently accepted child marriage and spousal abuse as the price of eschewing “Islamophobia.”

Last week I wrote that Western countries were soon “going to have to make a choice as to whether they’re going to affirm the human dignity of women and maintain the illegality of polygamy, or whether they’re going to allow them to become mere possessions and playthings, denizens of de facto harems.” The same choice is coming regarding child marriage. Australian society, along with European and American society as well, is before too long going to have to choose between protecting the rights of women and thus fighting against child marriage, or allowing it in the interests of marching together with Sharia adherents into the brave new multicultural future.

Most people don’t believe this choice will ever have to be made, because they don’t realize how entrenched child marriage is within Islamic law. Islamic tradition records that Muhammad’s favorite wife, Aisha, was six when Muhammad wedded her and nine when he consummated the marriage:

The Prophet wrote the (marriage contract) with Aisha while she was six years old and consummated his marriage with her while she was nine years old and she remained with him for nine years (i.e., till his death) (Bukhari 7.62.88).

Muhammad is an “excellent example” for Muslims (Qur’an 33:21), which in practice means that whatever Muhammad did is good, right, and to be emulated.

This girl in Australia is not a singular case: many other Muslims in the West are emulating Muhammad’s example in this. The Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation (IKWRO) has stated that in England in 2010, at least thirty girls in Islington, a neighborhood of greater London, were forced into marriage, and that some were as young as nine years old.
And just this month, an undercover investigation in Britain revealed eighteen mosques that agreed to perform child marriages. In Sweden, meanwhile, there are several hundred reported incidences of child marriage every year. And that’s just what gets reported. Anyone who thinks that all or most forced marriage and child marriage cases come to the attention of Western authorities is simply naïve.

Likewise naïve are those who believe that stopping child marriage in Western countries will be a simple matter of enforcing our own laws. The relentless campaigns against anti-Sharia legislation have already branded foes of Islamic law as “bigots.” What’s more, Islamic leaders in the West, since child marriage is endorsed by nothing less than the example of Muhammad himself, are certain eventually to begin to resist attempts to prosecute those who engage in it.

This is already happening in Muslim countries. In 2009, Muslim clerics in Yemen issued a fatwa declaring that opposition to child marriage makes one an apostate from Islam. A law raising the legal marriage age for girls to adult levels was nevertheless passed, but then almost immediately repealed after some Yemeni legislators argued that it was un-Islamic. In Malaysia in December 2010, a government minister, Nazri Aziz, said at a press conference that the Malaysian government had no plans to legislate against child marriage, because of Islam: “If the religion allows it, then we can’t legislate against it.”

In July 2013, a Muslim leader named Alhaji Mujahid Abubakar Dokubo-Asari warmly endorsed the Nigerian Senate’s approval of child marriage, and accused foes of child marriage of lacking respect for Muslims and their rights: “People should learn to respect other people’s sensibilities. … We Muslims have the right to marry when we want or give out our daughters at any age we want. It is not your business and the law must respect our right to do so. Anything short of that is an infringement on our rights.”

It will come to this in our countries: “respect” Muslim sensibilities, or stop child marriage. In Australia, in the case of this young victim of forced marriage, child marriage, and spousal abuse, it already should have.

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image courtesy shutterstock /  Smailhodzic

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Somalia and the Hyena Cure

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On October 16, 2013 @ 12:20 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 6 Comments

http://frontpagemag.com/

The World Health Organization estimates that 1 in 3 Somalis are mentally ill due to their country’s constant violence and abuse of the Khat narcotic. Somali science however came up with a surefire cure for the crazies. Lock the patient up in a room with a hyena and wait for the ugly beast to see the demons causing the madness and drive them out.

Somali medicine, like American medicine, however suffers from rising health care costs. A session with a trained psychiatric hyena costs 560 dollars in a country where the average national salary is 190 bucks putting a Mogadishu trained hyena on par with a Harvard trained psychiatrist.

Somalis who can’t afford to blow a three month salary to spend time on the couch with a hyena have a more practical solution. They tie the affected person to a tree and leave. The hyenas usually find the patient sooner or later and snack on him pro bono, while his kin head off to the welfare office in Lewiston, Maine.

Like the joke about the mental patient and the driver with the broken wheel, the Somalis may be nuts, but they aren’t stupid.

Somalia only has half the Somali population. Kenya has almost a million. The United Kingdom has over 100,000 and Canada may have as many as 150,000. The United States has quite a few and Minnesota alone has may have 80,000 to 125,000 of them.

American politicians, who can give any Khat-chewing Somali pirate a run for his money in the insanity department, dumped thousands of Somalis into Lewiston, Maine where they now make up a seventh of the population.

The average low in Lewiston in January is near zero. Meanwhile January in Mogadishu is a balmy 86 degrees with occasional flurries of machine gun fire.

Despite its chilly weather, Lewiston did have some warm welfare and the Somalis ignored the cold and flocked to the cold cash. The WHO may consider them crazy, but unlike the politicians who welcomed them in, they aren’t stupid.

The Somali gangs that tore apart their homeland have been reborn in the frigid Midwest. Ten percent of the gang members in the Minneapolis Police Department’s system are Somalis. The Somali Outlaws, the Somali Hot Boyz and the Somali Assault Unit go from welfare to crime. Like the gangs at home, Somali migrant gangs scale up from street crime, drug trafficking, robberies, sex trafficking and protection rackets to international terrorism.

Lewiston, Maine, a place as traditionally synonymous with gangs as Mogadishu is with snow, now has concerns about gang violence.

Maine has gone from having no gang members a few years ago to having 4,000 of them. Mainahs have gone from thinking of gang members as something they saw on COPS to something they see when they look out the window.

Vacationland now hosts the True Somali Bloods and the True Sudanese Bloods who spill each other’s blood to find out who has the truest blood of them all. In Lewiston, Somali flash mobs attack natives. In Bangor, a Somali gang is at the heart of local crime.

Gangs are still the closest thing to a rule of law in Somalia. There was every reason to expect the Somali migrants in the United States to fall back into that pattern, clusters of young men building families around gangs and making their own law the way they did back home.
Nietzsche said that when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you. When you stare at a hyena, the hyena stares back at you. When you stare into Somalia, Somalia stares back at you.

The Somali migrants are not becoming Americanized. Maine and Minneapolis are becoming Somalized.

The American hyena became extinct as the march of civilization drove it back. Where there is civilization, carrion eaters no longer eat well unless they learn to be small and quiet. In Somalia, hyenas thrive because there isn’t civilization and so there is good eating for their kind.

Hyenas don’t destroy civilization. They are a symptom of its collapse. They are a sign that the city is giving way to the desert, the town to the village and the village to a handful of burnt out shacks. Carrion eaters go where civilization falls, where men no longer work shoulder to shoulder and where nothing bigger than a gang can endure. They go where there are bodies and no one to bury them.

In Somalia, the hyenas that aren’t in private practice carry on a battle of wits with the Islamic terrorists of Al-Shabaab responsible for the Westgate Massacre in Kenya.

The hyenas have been known to taste the occasional Al-Shabaab fighter who falls asleep in a Khat induced trance in the sun. And Al-Shabaab hunts and kills hyenas and sells their meat to finance terrorism. Hyenas, like most dog-like animals, are considered unclean in Islam, but Al-Shabaab overcame its Islamic scruples to sell hyena flesh and even market its consumption as effective at fighting off evil spells.

Al-Shabaab, which keeps killing people in order to impose Islamic law on a country that already runs on Islamic law, has to use black magic to convince people to buy the meat of an animal that eats corpses.

Including human corpses.

The Islamic terrorist group is coming rather close to cannibalism in the name of imposing Islamic law. But American liberals are coming even closer to cannibalism in the name of imposing tolerance.

Somalia is what happens when a country goes mad. And it would be foolish to believe that the same thing couldn’t happen here.

If we could lock up the advocates of open borders in a room with a hyena for three days and hope the scavenger eats the evil spirits in their minds, it would be worth the 560 dollars.

But lock an American politician in a room with a hyena and the laughing beast will not see evil spirits in his eyes, just a weak creature waiting to be eaten. That is the same thing that Somali thugs and terrorists see when those cheerful politicians welcome them to America.

The Hyena Cure doesn’t work by eating evil spirits. Being locked in a room for three days with a predator that eats human flesh is the ultimate reality check. Either you put aside whatever illness has made it impossible for you to function in civilization. Or the hyena eats you.

America, Canada, Europe and Australia all face the Hyena Cure. Either being locked in cities and towns with migrating predators wakes them from their madness.

Or the hyenas eat them.

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Don’t miss Jamie Glazov’s video interview with Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield on  Obama’s Shutdown Strategy, The Administration’s Brotherhood Romance, Reading Al Qaeda Terrorists Their “Rights,” The Huma Abedin-Anthony Weiner Saga, The Unholy Alliance, and much, much more:



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A Return to Keynes?

By Thomas Sowell

http://townhall.com/

October 15, 2013

The nomination of Janet Yellen to become head of the Federal Reserve System has set off a flurry of media stories. Since she will be the first woman to occupy that position, we can only hope that this will not mean that any criticism of what she does will be attributed to sex bias or to a "war on women."

The Federal Reserve has become such a major player in the American economy that it needs far more scrutiny and criticism than it has received, regardless of who heads it.

Ms. Yellen, a former professor of economics at Berkeley, has openly proclaimed her views on economic policy, and those views deserve very careful scrutiny. She asks: "Will capitalist economies operate at full employment in the absence of routine intervention?" And she answers: "Certainly not."

Janet Yellen represents the Keynesian economics that once dominated economic theory and policy like a national religion -- until it encountered two things: Milton Friedman and the stagflation of the 1970s.

At the height of the Keynesian influence, it was widely believed that government policy-makers could choose a judicious trade-off between the inflation rate and the rate of unemployment. This trade-off was called the Phillips Curve, in honor of an economist at the London School of Economics.

Professor Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago attacked the Phillips Curve, both theoretically and empirically. When Professor Friedman received the Nobel Prize in economics -- the first of many to go to Chicago economists, who were the primary critics of Keynesian economics -- it seemed as if the idea of a trade-off between the inflation rate and the unemployment rate might be laid to rest.

The ultimate discrediting of this Phillips Curve theory was the rising inflation and unemployment, at the same time in the 1970s, in what came to be called "stagflation" -- a combination of rising inflation and a stagnant economy with high unemployment.

Nevertheless, the Keynesian economists have staged a political comeback during the Obama administration. Janet Yellen's nomination to head the Federal Reserve is the crowning example of that comeback.

Ms. Yellen asks: "Do policy-makers have the knowledge and ability to improve macroeconomic outcomes rather than making matters worse?" And she answers: "Yes."

The former economics professor is certainly asking the right questions -- and giving the wrong answers.

Her first question, whether free market economies can achieve full employment without government intervention, is a purely factual question that can be answered from history. For the first 150 years of the United States, there was no policy of federal intervention when the economy turned down.

No depression during all that time was as catastrophic as the Great Depression of the 1930s, when both the Federal Reserve System and Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt intervened in the economy on a massive and unprecedented scale.

Despite the myth that it was the stock market crash of 1929 that caused the double-digit unemployment of the 1930s, unemployment never reached double digits in any of the 12 months that followed the 1929 stock market crash.

Unemployment peaked at 9 percent in December 1929 and was back down to 6.3 percent by June 1930, when the first major federal intervention took place under Herbert Hoover. The unemployment decline then reversed, rising to hit double digits six months later. As Hoover and then FDR continued to intervene, double-digit unemployment persisted throughout the remainder of the 1930s.

Conversely, when President Warren G. Harding faced an annual unemployment rate of 11.7 percent in 1921, he did absolutely nothing, except for cutting government spending.

Keynesian economists would say that this was exactly the wrong thing to do. History, however, says that unemployment the following year went down to 6.7 percent -- and, in the year after that, 2.4 percent.

Under Calvin Coolidge, the ultimate in non-interventionist government, the annual unemployment rate got down to 1.8 percent. How does the track record of Keynesian intervention compare to that?