Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Fouad Ajami writes that Obama has rushed into foreign policy issues where angels have feared to tread.

President Barack Obama did not “lose” Iran. This is not a Jimmy Carter moment. But the foreign-policy education of America’s 44th president has just begun. Hitherto, he had been cavalier about other lands, he had trusted in his own biography as a bridge to distant peoples, he had believed he could talk rogues and ideologues out of deeply held beliefs. His predecessor had drawn lines in the sand. He would look past them.

Thus a man who had been uneasy with his middle name (Hussein) during the presidential campaign would descend on Ankara and Cairo, inserting himself in a raging civil war over Islam itself. An Iranian theocratic regime had launched a bid for dominion in its region; Mr. Obama offered it an olive branch and waited for it to “unclench” its fist.

It was an odd, deeply conflicted message from Mr. Obama. He was at once a herald of change yet a practitioner of realpolitik. He would entice the crowds, yet assure the autocrats that the “diplomacy of freedom” that unsettled them during the presidency of George W. Bush is dead and buried. Grant the rulers in Tehran and Damascus their due: They were quick to take the measure of the new steward of American power. He had come to “engage” them. Gone was the hope of transforming these regimes or making them pay for their transgressions. The theocracy was said to be waiting on an American opening, and this new president would put an end to three decades of estrangement between the United States and Iran.

But in truth Iran had never wanted an opening to the U.S. For the length of three decades, the custodians of the theocracy have had precisely the level of enmity toward the U.S. they have wanted — just enough to be an ideological glue for the regime but not enough to be a threat to their power. Iran’s rulers have made their way in the world with relative ease. No White Army gathered to restore the dominion of the Pahlavis. The Cold War and oil bailed them out. So did the false hope that the revolution would mellow and make its peace with the world. …

David Warren says in Iran you win, or you die. We will root for the regime to lose, because many good things will come from that.

Everything is on the line in Iran, at present — not only the future of the Iranian regime, but also of the Middle East, and by extension, the most tangible western interests.

Consider: if the Iranian regime were to fall, by far the largest organized threat to peace in the region would be removed. This includes not only a fairly proximate nuclear threat to Israel (for all we know North Korea’s second nuclear test was actually Iran’s first), but sponsorship of the most efficient part of the world’s Islamist terror apparatus.

Hezbollah and Hamas are both, today, for all practical purposes, Iranian proxies. Through them, and through other channels, the regime of the ayatollahs makes money, materiel, and expertise available to terror cells as far away as Argentina, Sweden, the Philippines.

But more significantly, Hezbollah and Hamas together represent an Iranian veto on any Palestinian settlement, or any attempt to ameliorate that conflict, with all that that implies.

The Syrian regime, most dangerous of Israel’s neighbours, would, in the absence of Iranian support, have to make accommodations, indeed find new allies.

North Korea’s chief conduit into the illicit Middle Eastern arms trade would be lost.

The principal external threat to Iraq would be removed, along with sponsorship of Iraq’s own domestic insurgencies. Afghanistan would also be more secure.

In economic terms, the threat of a world crisis provoked by the interdiction of oil shipments from the Persian Gulf would disappear. …

Michael Gerson says Obama reminds of George Bush the elder. Can you say Chicken Kiev?

PRESIDENTS dealing with foreign uprisings are haunted by two historical precedents. The first is Hungary in 1956, in which Radio Free Europe encouraged an armed revolt against Soviet occupation, a revolt that the US had no capability or intention of materially supporting. In the contest of Molotov cocktails v tanks, about 2500 revolutionaries died; 1200 were later executed.

The second precedent is Ukraine in 1991, where the forces that eventually destroyed the Soviet Union were collecting. President George HW Bush visited that Soviet republic a month before its scheduled vote on independence. Instead of siding with Ukrainian aspirations, he gave a speech that warned against “suicidal nationalism” and a “hopeless course of isolation”.

William Safire dubbed it the “chicken Kiev” speech, which fit and stuck. The first Bush administration was so frightened of geopolitical instability that it managed to downplay American ideals while missing a strategic opportunity. Ukrainian independence passed overwhelmingly.

In President Barack Obama’s snail-mail response to Iran’s Twitter revolution, he has tended toward the chicken Kiev model, which should come as no surprise. During the presidential campaign, Obama summarised his approach to foreign affairs: “It’s an argument between ideology and foreign-policy realism. I have enormous sympathy for the foreign policy of George HWBush.” …

Samizdata notes bizarre happenings at Newsweek.

Unlike the dismal Economist, Newsweek magazine does not claim to be a free market supporting publication.

Henry Hazlitt stopped writing for Newsweek back in 1966 and his replacement, as a free market voice, Milton Friedman was fired (asked to stop writing for the magazine – which is being ‘fired’ as far as I am concerned) many years ago – which is the reason I stopped subscribing to Newsweek, which I had done as a youngster.

In recent years Newsweek magazine has been fairly openly socialist (although it does not formally admit this). …

Popular Mechanics says there are things in your back yard that want to have you for lunch.

… When Europeans settled the New World, they dealt with predators by showing them the business end of a gun. Wherever pioneers settled, populations of large predators—mountain lions, bears, wolves, alligators—plummeted or disappeared entirely. That search-and-destroy mission continued virtually unabated until the rise of the environmental movement in the 1960s and ’70s, when the national attitude began to evolve. People came to believe that what was left of wilderness and its inhabitants should be preserved for future generations.

This ideology has clearly worked: Since the passage of the Endangered Species Act of 1973, 14 species of animals that were on the brink of extinction have recovered. Alligators were removed from the list in 1987; gray wolves in 2009. The grizzly bear, confined mostly to Yellowstone National Park in the lower 48 states, was delisted in 2007. As for once heavily hunted mountain lions, some 50,000 of the big cats now inhabit North America, with populations in the United States as far east as North Dakota. Experts predict that lions eventually will reinhabit the Adirondacks in New York, the Maine woods and the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee.

Few people anticipated that rebounding populations would create a new problem: an increase in animal attacks as predators returned to former ranges now occupied by humans. In August 2002, a black bear killed a 5-month-old girl in the Catskills, a hundred miles northwest of New York City; the baby had been sleeping in a carriage on the porch. In January 2004, a mountain lion killed a male bicyclist in Whiting Ranch Wilderness Park in Orange County, Calif., then attacked a 31-year-old woman a few hours later. Other bicyclists managed to save the victim, but not before she sustained serious injuries. In October 2007, an alligator snatched and killed an 83-year-old woman outside her daughter’s home in Savannah, Ga. The next day, her body was found in a pond, hands and a foot missing. And, in May 2008, a coyote bit a 2-year-old girl playing in a Chino Hills, Calif., park and attempted to drag her off.

Though the trend is worrisome, the absolute number of attacks remains small. Fatal black bear attacks on humans have doubled since the late 1970s, increasing from one to just two incidents per year. (About six people are injured each year.) Between 1890 and 2008, there were 110 mountain lion attacks in North America; half of the 20 fatalities resulting from these attacks occurred in the past two decades. Despite an alligator population too large to count, the U.S. had just 391 attacks and 18 fatalities between 1948 and 2005. Coyotes have caused only one known fatality in the U.S.

Still, the relationship between animals and humans is proving to be more complex than simply kill ’em all or love ’em all—even though some of the old, romantic ideas about living at one with nature linger. …

The humor section starts with a review of a book about Jimmy Carter’s presidency. You know, the one the One is imitating.

On July 15, 1979, Jimmy Carter spoke to the nation from the Oval Office about the energy crisis then gripping America. The address has become known as “the malaise speech” even though Mr. Carter never once spoke the “m” word. It is now the subject of Ohio University history professor Kevin Mattson’s excellent “What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?”

Mr. Carter had already tried to raise consciousness about energy with a speech two years earlier, in April 1977. “This difficult effort,” he said then, “will be the moral equivalent of war.” Moral equivalent of war led to the unfortunate acronym MEOW, which seemed especially apt when neither congressional action nor ­public mobilization ensued. …

… Jimmy Carter was elected largely because he promised never to lie to the American people. Of all the ­un-Nixons on offer in 1976—the ­Democratic primary field included Sens. Frank Church and “Scoop” ­Jackson—Mr. Carter was the most convincing. But his administration never seemed to gel managerially; most of his programs went nowhere legislatively; and he turned out to be aloof and a little prickly. (He confided to his diary: “It’s not easy for me to accept criticism and to reassess my ways of doing things.”) Democratic leaders worried that Mr. Carter was turning into Nixon, but without the charm. By 1978, a movement to draft Ted Kennedy for the 1980 presidential race was flourishing. By May 1979, Vice President Walter Mondale was contemplating resigning. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content.

WORD

PDF

Mark Steyn’s weekly column deals with Iran events.

The polite explanation for Barack Obama’s diffidence on Iran is that he doesn’t want to give the mullahs the excuse to say the Great Satan is meddling in Tehran’s affairs. So the president’s official position is that he’s modestly encouraged by the regime’s supposed interest in investigating some of the allegations of fraud. Also, he’s heartened to hear that O.J. is looking for the real killers. “You’ve seen in Iran,” explained President Obama, “some initial reaction from the Supreme Leader that indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election.”

“Supreme Leader”? I thought that was official house style for Barack Obama at Newsweek and MSNBC. But no. It’s also the title held by Ayatollah Khamenei for the past couple of decades. If it sounds odd from the lips of an American president, that’s because none has ever been as deferential in observing the Islamic republic’s dictatorial protocol. Like President Obama’s deep, ostentatious bow to the king of Saudi Arabia, it signals a fresh start in our relations with the Muslim world, “mutually respectful” and unilaterally fawning.

And how did it go down? …

Marty Peretz at another way station in his growing understanding of the weakness of the kid president.

… To have crumbled precisely while the regime of the ayatollahs is facing a real crisis of confidence at home and something of a challenge to its legitimacy abroad is, well, just that: crumbling. It certainly does not testify to American resilience, even diplomatically. My instinct here is that the president and Mrs. Clinton are so eager to engage–engage even for its own sake–that they’ll do anything to please the other. This does not come as a result of analysis. It is, I am sorry to say, a predicated formula. …

Ed Morrissey notes the administration now thinks missile defense might be a good idea.

The Obama administration has decided that missile defense might come in handy after all.  Following reports that Kim Jong-Il might launch a Taepodong-2 missile at Hawaii for a Fourth of July message to the White House, the Pentagon has ordered missile-defense systems bolstered around the 50th state.  Those preparations include the deployment of a radar system that Obama strangely left in storage during the previous North Korean missile launch: …

… The last time Kim launched a T-2, in April of this year, the US had plenty of notice.  However, Obama and the Pentagon neglected to pull its most sophisticated missile-defense radar out of Pearl Harbor in time to at least exercise it under real-world conditions.  At that time, the White House didn’t want to “provoke” Kim by using our defense against the weapons with which Kim explicitly threatened us and our allies in April.

How did that strategy pay off?  Ask the people of Hawaii when Kim lights the candle on the next T-2, and see if they would have preferred a test run for those missile-defense systems when we had the chance.  We certainly now see why the US needs to keep funding those systems.

We get a preview of an upcoming Commentary piece by Joshua Muravchik on Obama’s abandonment of democracy.

Iranian exiles in the U.S. are receiving calls from back home asking why President Obama has “given Khamenei the green light” to crack down on the election protestors. To conspiracy-minded Middle Easterners, that is the obvious meaning of Obama’s equivocal response to the Iranian nation’s sudden and unexpected reach for freedom. How to explain that this interpretation is implausible? That the more likely reason for Obama’s behavior is that he is imprisoned in the ideology of loving your enemies and hating George W. Bush?

Whatever the reason, Obama’s failure may destroy his presidency. His betrayal of democracy and human rights through a series of pronouncements and small actions during his first months in office had been correctable until now. But the thousand daily decisions that usually make up policy are eclipsed by big-bang moments such as we are now witnessing. Failure to use the bully pulpit to give the Iranian people as much support as possible is morally reprehensible and a strategical blunder for which he will not be forgiven. …

The most surprising thing about the first half-year of Barack Obama’s presidency, at least in the realm of foreign policy, has been its indifference to the issues of human rights and democracy. No administration has ever made these its primary, much less its exclusive, goals overseas. But ever since Jimmy Carter spoke about human rights in his 1977 inaugural address and created a new infrastructure to give bureaucratic meaning to his words, the advancement of human rights has been one of the consistent objectives of America’s diplomats and an occasional one of its soldiers.

This tradition has been ruptured by the Obama administration. …

… Thus, the Cairo oration was a culmination of the themes of Obama’s early months. He had blamed America for the world financial crisis, global warming, Mexico’s drug wars, for “failure to appreciate Europe’s role in the world,” and in general for “all too often” trying “to dictate our terms.” He had reinforced all this by dispatching his Secretary of State on what the New York Times dubbed a “contrition tour” of Asia and Latin America. Now he added apologies for overthrowing the government of Iran in 1953, and for treating the Muslim countries as “proxies” in the Cold War “without regard to their own aspirations.”

Toward what end all these mea culpas? Perhaps it is a strategy designed, as he puts it, to “restor[e] America’s standing in the world.” Or perhaps he genuinely believes, as do many Muslims and Europeans, among others, that a great share of the world’s ills may be laid at the doorstep of the United States. Either way, he seems to hope that such self-criticism will open the way to talking through our frictions with Iran, Syria, China, Russia, Burma, Sudan, Cuba, Venezuela, and the “moderate” side of the Taliban.

This strategy might be called peace through moral equivalence, and it finally makes fully intelligible Obama’s resistance to advocating human rights and democracy. For as long as those issues are highlighted, the cultural relativism that laced his Cairo speech and similar pronouncements in other places is revealed to be absurd. Straining to find a deficiency of religious freedom in America, Obama came up with the claim that “in the United States, rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation.” He was referring, apparently, to the fact that donations to foreign entities are not tax deductible. This has, of course, nothing to do with religious freedom but with assuring that tax deductions are given only to legitimate charities and not, say, to “violent extremists,” as Obama calls them (eschewing the word “terrorist”).

Consider this alleged peccadillo of America’s in comparison to the state of religious freedom in Egypt, where Christians may not build, renovate or repair a church without written authorization from the President of the country or a provincial governor (and where Jews no longer find it safe to reside). Or compare it to the practices at the previous stop on Obama’s itinerary, Saudi Arabia, where no church may stand, where Jews were for a time not allowed to set foot, and where even Muslims of non-Sunni varieties are constrained from building places of worship. …

Roger Simon has part one of a series on the NY Times.

… it took me many years … until about the time I started blogging… to realize what a pernicious influence The Times had had and how no single media outlet ought to have that much power in a democracy… something, by the way, that its editor Bill Keller admitted to me, when we were still friends, back before I fully put on my pajamas… Even now, with its business model failing to the extent that it is selling off its own landmark building while borrowing millions at a usurious rate from a Mexican billionaire, the Times still has an excessive influence, still moves the agenda more than any other media outlet, defining itself with a slogan so cloaked in bogus objectivity – “All the News That’s Fit to Print” – that it might make a Pravda editor blush.

Because, as we know, no one is objective. I’m not, you’re not and certainly not the New York Times. We’re all biased. I could say bias is as American as apple pie, but this is far from just an American trait. It’s a global one. Bias is as human as bread.

But this is nothing new.

What surprised me when I finally woke up to the extreme bias of the New York Times was that it had had a long history – which is what I am going to deal with in the next episodes of this show in my own, and undoubtedly biased, way. …

David Harsanyi starts the humor section with thoughts on teaching his daughters about sex. He has a serious point too.

… In his thought-provoking book “Fooled by Randomness” Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes the case that we are constantly affixing deep meaning to meaningless statistics. Did you know, for instance, that as teen birth rates rise, there has also been a national trend of higher rates among women in their 20s, 30s and 40s? What does that tell us?

In this case, none of the numbers prove that kids are becoming more promiscuous or acting less safe than they did 5 or 10 years ago. There is also no proof that either abstinence or sex education programs have had a real effect on teen behavior.

Teen sexual behavior is driven by myriad social, demographic and economic factors (and, perhaps, most importantly: family.) As long we use the thin gruel of these kind of studies to hammer home some ideological point, parents aren’t being helped.

The best antidote is probably some hybrid of abstinence programs and others that teach about disease, pregnancy and birth control.

Certainly we shouldn’t dictate to parents (or, in my case, a wife) how they should teach their kids about sex. We should also avoid mass panic when it comes to teen sex.

Individual panic? Now, that’s a different story.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content.

WORD

PDF

Click on WORD or PDF for  full content

WORD

PDF

Good Corner post from Andrew McCarthy on whether to meddle or not.

As someone who has favored for years a policy of regime change in Iran (see, e.g., here, here, here, here and here), what stuns me about the commentary over the last couple of days is the perception that the regime has done something shocking with this election. The regime isn’t any different today than it was the day before the election, the days before it gave logistical assistance to the 9/11 suicide hijacking teams, the day before it took al-Qaeda in for harboring after the 9/11 attacks, the day before Khobar Towers, or every day of combat in Iraq. Throughout the last 30 years, this revolutionary regime has made war on America while it brutalized its own people. The latter brutalization has ebbed and flowed with circumstances, depending on how threatened (or at least vexed) the regime felt at any given time. …

Mort Zuckerman answers Cairo.

… Now comes President Obama to undermine a commitment made by the United States. To appreciate what is at stake, we have to look at the record. Israel of its own volition withdrew settlers and settlements from Gaza, though this evacuation was not required by the road map. The Bush administration acknowledged in return that settlement construction in the West Bank would be permitted within the existing construction line—not new settlement but building to cope with the growth of families. This understanding was confirmed by senior members of the National Security Council and in letters from the office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to Condoleezza Rice, who was then national security adviser. Among other things, the letters said, “In the framework of the agreed principles on settlement activity, we will shortly make an effort to better delineate the settlement construction line in Judea and Samaria.” Former Sharon aide Dov Weisglass wrote recently reaffirming “that the administration recognized Israel’s right under the road map to development from within the existing construction line.”

For years, Israel has relied on these understandings for developments of homes within the guidelines set down, without objection from the U.S. government and without denials when this policy was reported in the New York Times and in the Washington Post.

Repudiating these understandings is an extraordinary breach of the normal behavior of governments and stands in juxtaposition to U.S. demands that the Israeli government adhere to commitments made by its predecessors. …

Krauthammer’s Take has become one of the best features of the net.

… The president is also speaking in code. The Pope [John Paul II] spoke in a code which was implicit and understood support for the forces of freedom.

The code the administration is using is implicit support for this repressive, tyrannical regime.

We watched Gibbs say that what’s going on is vigorous debate. The shooting of eight demonstrators is not debate. The knocking of heads, bloodying of demonstrators by the Revolutionary Guards is not debate. The arbitrary arrest of journalists, political opposition, and students is not debate.

And to call it a debate and to use this neutral and denatured language is disgraceful. …

David Harsanyi asks, “What’s the big hurry?”

Weren’t we promised some methodical and deliberate governance from President Barack Obama? Where is it?

The president claims that we must pass a government-run health insurance program — possibly the most wide-ranging and intricate government undertaking in decades — yesterday or a “ticking time bomb” will explode.

If all this terrifying talk sounds familiar, it might be because the president applies the same fear-infused vocabulary to nearly all his hard-to-defend policy positions. You’ll remember the stimulus plan had to be passed without a second’s delay or we would see 8.7 percent unemployment. We’re almost at 10.

A commonly utilized Obama strawman states that “the cost of inaction” is unacceptable. “Action,” naturally, translates into whatever policy Obama happens to be peddling at the time. …

And Karl Rove says ObamaCare can be stopped.

… Republican efforts will be helped by a recent Congressional Budget Office report that found that Sen. Ted Kennedy’s health-care reform would cost at least $1 trillion over the next 10 years and still leave 36 million Americans uninsured (it may be slightly more once all the details are released). Estimates for the health-care bill that the Senate Finance Committee is drafting with help from the White House are coming in around $1.6 trillion over 10 years.

As the debate now shifts from broad generalities to the specifics of how health-care reform would work and how the government will pay for it, the GOP has an opportunity to stop the nationalization of the health-care industry. The more scrutiny it gets, the less appealing Obama-Care will become. And the more Democrats have to talk about creating a new value-added tax or junk food taxes to pay for it, the more Americans will recoil.

Republican credibility on health care depends on whether the party offers positive alternatives that build on the strengths of American medicine. As long as the choice was between reform and the status quo, the public was likely to go with the reformers. But if the debate is whether to go with costly, unnecessary reforms or with common-sense changes, then Republicans have a chance to appeal to fiscally conservative independents and Democrats and win this one. It is still possible to stop ObamaCare in its tracks. If Republicans can do that, they will win public confidence on an issue that will dominate politics for decades.

Ilya Somin reminds us there is a Supreme Court nominee out there somewhere.

… Indeed, Didden is probably even more telling than the cases Obama had in mind it was considerably easier than most cases in the 5 percent. It was precisely the kind of “pretextual” taking that even the Kelo majority considered to be unconstitutional.The “truly difficult” challenge here was justifying in favor of the government without even allowing the property owners to present their evidence of a pretextual taking before a jury; it would have been relatively easy to defend a decision going the other way. It is revealing that Sotomayor not only got the outcome wrong, but seemed to think it wasn’t even close. If Sotomayor didn’t believe that there was a serious property rights issue even in this extreme case, it is unlikely that she would protect property rights under the Takings Clause in any other situations likely to come before the Supreme Court.

UPDATE: Although less important, in my view, than Didden and Ricci, it’s also worth noting that Sotomayor made another dubious constitutional ruling in Doninger v. Niehof, an important free speech case where she upheld a public school’s decision to punish a student for an internet blog post that she wrote on her own time outside of school grounds. I briefly discussed Doninger in the first part of my LA Times debate with Erwin Chemerinsky. Liberal legal scholars Jonathan Turley and Paul Levinson have been even more critical of Sotomayor’s Doninger opinion than I was.

Since Sotomayor has made no more than a handful of important constitutional rulings in her judicial career, the fact that she got three of them badly wrong must be given great weight in assessing her nomination.

UPDATE #2: While I don’t want to comment extensively on Ricci v. DeStefano, I should perhaps point out that my disagreement with that decision does not rest on the view that affirmative action is categorically unconstitutional. To the contrary, I think it may well be both morally and legally defensible when used to provide genuine compensation for past racial discrimination. Ricci, however, did not involve any such effort at compensatory justice. For reasons elaborated in Jonathan Adler’s posts, Sotomayor’s ruling in the case raises many troubling questions even for people who believe, as I do, that the use of racial classifications for affirmative action is sometimes permissible.

John Derbyshire treats us to some of the public pensions in New York State.

… The two “Click here” links at the bottom of that story put names to the dollars.

•  James Hunderfund, an employee of Commack school district, will retire September 1 with a monthly pension of $26,353.75. (Nothing underfunded about his pension plan, ho ho.)

•  Richard Brande of Brookhaven-Comsewogue will also be heading for the golf course September 1 with a monthly pension of $24,222.43.

•  William Brosnan cleans out his desk at Northport-East Northport July 1, and for the rest of his life will trouser a monthly pension of $19,058.80.

No offense to these guys — well, not much offense — but they are small-town education bureaucrats. Not only will they be getting annual pensions in the quarter-million-dollar range for the rest of their naturals, they are getting these numbers by law. If New York State’s pension-fund managers goof on the investments, or the market craters, we taxpayers have to make up the difference.

It’s not just edbiz either, though of course edbiz exhibits the greatest outrages. (Can’t we please just GET RID OF PUBLIC EDUCATION?) Local-gummint seat-warmers are on the same gravy train.

•  Dvorah Balsam of Nassau [County] Health Care Corp., annual pension $191,380.32

•  Stanley Klimberg of Long Island Power Authority: $191,380.32.

•  Gerald Shaftan, Nassau Health Care Corp. again, $181,457.76. …

A Derbyshire reader puts those in perspective by comments on his navy retirement.

… I read your Corner post on local government pensions. Unbelievable. I work for the Navy, am on the old retirement system that was replaced by a less generous system 25 years ago, and there is no way I can come close to those numbers. At best, I can retire with 80 percent of my pay … after 42 years of service. And the base pay scale isn’t that impressive.

These local and state pensions are absurd. If Obama wants to appoint czars, let him appoint one to control local and state government pay. …

A New Republic blog post tells us what a bullet we dodged when John Edwards flamed out.

Click on WORD or PDF for  full content

WORD

PDF

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Spengler comments on events in Iran.

In Wonderland, Alice played croquet with hedgehogs and flamingos. In the Middle East, United States President Barack Obama is attempting the same thing, but with rats and cobras. Not only do they move at inconvenient times, but they bite the players. Iran’s presidential election on Friday underscores the Wonderland character of American policy in the region.

America’s proposed engagement of Iran has run up against the reality of the region, namely that Iran cannot “moderate” its support for its fractious Shi’ite allies from Beirut to Pakistan’s northwest frontier. It also shows how misguided Obama was to assume that progress on the Palestinian issue would help America solve more urgent strategic problems, such as Iran’s potential acquisition of nuclear weapons. …

… If Tehran were playing a two-sided chess game with Washington, a moderate face like that of Hossein Mousavi would have served Iranian interests better than Ahmadinejad, as Pipes suggests. But Tehran also has to send signals to the sidelines of the chess match. With the situation on its eastern border deteriorating and a serious threat emerging to the Shi’ites of Pakistan, Iran has to make its militancy clear to all the players in the region. Washington’s ill-considered attempts at coalition building are more a distraction than anything else.

Because Tehran’s credibility is continuously under test, it cannot hold its puppies of war on a tight leash. Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon will continue to nip at the Israelis and spoil the appearance of a prospective settlement. The louder Iran has to bark, the less credible its bite. Iran’s handling of last weekend’s presidential election results exposes the weakness of the country’s strategic position. That makes an Israeli strike against its alleged nuclear weapons facilities all the more likely – not because Tehran has shown greater militancy, but because it has committed the one sin that never is pardoned in the Middle East – vulnerability.

So does David Warren.

We could begin by blaming George W. Bush for what is now happening in Iran. Not for everything, of course — not even the crazy Left blames Bush for everything. But the whole intention of the U.S. invasion of Iraq was to shake up the Middle East, and introduce some “regime change” into its darkest, most fetid corners.

The broad picture of Saddam Hussein going down — available even to the audiences of tightly-regulated State media — remains, indelible. Precedent is the cutting edge in politics and life; the breaching of taboos. Nothing is possible until it is shown to be possible.

Barack Obama deserves some credit, too. If nothing else, his Cairo speech persuaded those who want an end to tyranny in Iran, as elsewhere in the region, that they are now on their own. The U.S. isn’t going to help them. Instead, as Obama said, the U.S. is going to negotiate in “good faith” — with just such despicable regimes as that of the ayatollahs in Iran.

Quite possibly, in the grander scheme of things, Bush, followed by Obama, will prove a good thing. But if it ends badly, it will end very badly, in Islamist triumph, and perhaps nuclear war. …

And the editors at WSJ.

The President yesterday denounced the “extent of the fraud” and the “shocking” and “brutal” response of the Iranian regime to public demonstrations in Tehran these past four days.

“These elections are an atrocity,” he said. “If [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad had made such progress since the last elections, if he won two-thirds of the vote, why such violence?” The statement named the regime as the cause of the outrage in Iran and, without meddling or picking favorites, stood up for Iranian democracy.

The President who spoke those words was France’s Nicolas Sarkozy.

The French are hardly known for their idealistic foreign policy and moral fortitude. Then again many global roles are reversing in the era of Obama. …

And Roger Simon.

To those who read this site, it’s no secret that I have never been a fan of Barack Obama’s. Ever since the revelation that the then candidate spent twenty years in the church of Jeremiah Wright, even choosing the title of his memoir from the words of the “Them Jews” reverend, I have had difficulty respecting Obama’s values or character. At best he seemed an opportunist. At worst… well, I don’t want to say. Since becoming President he has done little to reassure me. His principle contribution appears to have been nothing more than spending billions of dollars will-nilly in a manner no one seems to be able to comprehend or track.

So it will be no surprise to readers that I am similarly disturbed at his reaction to the current situation in Iran. …

John Podhoretz wonders if Obama wanted Ahmadinejad to win.

Jennifer Rubin has an answer.

… Get the sense he doesn’t give a fig about which way it turns out? Get the sense all he cares about is preserving the hope of dealing with the regime (a fascistic regime prepared to kill its own people to maintain a fraudulent election)?

No hope. No change.  It never dawns that this might be a game changer — either a regime change and/or a complete discrediting of the notion that these are people with whom one can do business. No sense that the American people and the world at large might, because of this, mount a credible series of sanctions and/or reject the notion of extended negotiations.

It is clear what’s up. All he wants to do is talk, so he can’t give offense.  Fine — he’ll deal with Ahmadinejad if the regime can crush the protesters. He is an enabler now, a cheerleader against regime change. Shameful.

Michael Ledeen posts on a hospital in Iran.

Debra Saunders has a good idea. Let’s get rid of Sarah Palin, the victim.

… These stories don’t tell voters that Palin has the smartest energy policy or that she’s been a more successful governor than California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger – they tell voters that Palin’s life is a nonstop soap opera.

Republicans who want to win back Washington would do well to look for a winner. Not a victim.

Speaking of too much drama: I wish Newt Gingrich would just go away, too. …

Great post from the blog Patriot Room on why Obama is “poor dad” and thus unable to lead the country out of a recession.

Last night, as I reread Robert Kiyosaki’s 1997 Bestseller Rich Dad Poor Dad, I realized why Barack Obama will be unable to do what is necessary to fix America’s economy. It’s not just that he believes in government intervention in business, although that’s a big part of it. But what makes it even worse is that President Obama is Poor Dad.

For those who haven’t read the book, let me give you the gist so you can follow along. The author uses a fable, loosely-based on his life growing up. The purpose is to compare and contrast the differences between his highly-educated and professional father (who he refers to as Poor Dad) and his best friend’s father, an informally educated, business savvy mentor (who he calls Rich Dad). I don’t wish to debate the merits of the book, which I believe are plenteous if you can distinguish the good advice from the bad. It’s irrelevant here, because I am only going to focus on the advice that is, in fact, generally good and true.

Let’s get into it… …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Christopher Hitchens writes on event in Iran.

For a flavor of the political atmosphere in Tehran, Iran, last week, I quote from a young Iranian comrade who furnishes me with regular updates:

“I went to the last major Ahmadinejad rally and got the whiff of what I imagine fascism to have been all about. Lots of splotchy boys who can’t get a date are given guns and told they’re special.”

It’s hard to better this, either as an evocation of the rancid sexual repression that lies at the nasty core of the “Islamic republic” or as a description of the reserve strength that the Iranian para-state, or state within a state, can bring to bear if it ever feels itself even slightly challenged. There is a theoretical reason why the events of the last month in Iran (I am sorry, but I resolutely decline to refer to them as elections) were a crudely stage-managed insult to those who took part in them and those who observed them. And then there is a practical reason. The theoretical reason, though less immediately dramatic and exciting, is the much more interesting and important one. …

A couple of items from WSJ editors. One on the firing of an inspector general who made trouble for an Obama friend, and another on a favored group of investors in the Delphi bankruptcy. You can tell Obama is from Chicago.

President Obama swept to office on the promise of a new kind of politics, but then how do you explain last week’s dismissal of federal Inspector General Gerald Walpin for the crime of trying to protect taxpayer dollars? This is a case that smells of political favoritism and Chicago rules.

A George W. Bush appointee, Mr. Walpin has since 2007 been the inspector general for the Corporation for National and Community Service, the federal agency that oversees such subsidized volunteer programs as AmeriCorps. In April 2008 the Corporation asked Mr. Walpin to investigate reports of irregularities at St. HOPE, a California nonprofit run by former NBA star and Obama supporter Kevin Johnson. St. HOPE had received an $850,000 AmeriCorps grant, which was supposed to go for three purposes: tutoring for Sacramento-area students; the redevelopment of several buildings; and theater and art programs.

Gerald Walpin, Inspector General of the Corporation For National and Community Service, was fired by President Barack Obama.

Mr. Walpin’s investigators discovered that the money had been used instead to pad staff salaries, meddle politically in a school-board election, and have AmeriCorps members perform personal services for Mr. Johnson, including washing his car. …

Robert Samuelson does not think much of the health plan.

It’s hard to know whether President Obama’s health-care “reform” is naive, hypocritical or simply dishonest. Probably all three. The president keeps saying it’s imperative to control runaway health spending. He’s right. The trouble is that what’s being promoted as health-care “reform” almost certainly won’t suppress spending and, quite probably, will do the opposite. …

Peter Wehner is figuring out the tricks.

In the course of only five months, President Obama has reached into his bag and pulled out a dazzling number of misleading rhetorical tricks.

Let’s begin with his much-touted claim that his Administration is responsible for having “saved or created” at least 150,000 American jobs, even though we have shed well over a million jobs since Obama took office. Jesus may have turned water into wine – but even He did not claim to have turned job losses into job gains. That is the picture Obama is trying to portray. Of course, to place an empirical figure on the number of jobs Obama has “saved” is risible; if Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush had tried to get away with such a stunt, they would have been ridiculed and criticized mercilessly. Among the largely supine and compliant Obama press corps, however, the claim is reported as if it were written on tablets of stone.

Obama’s “saved and created” claim is cousin to the contention by Obama that his Administration – you know, the one which would put an end to “phony accounting” – had identified $2 trillion in savings in his budget. It turns out, though, that $1.6 trillion of this amount qualifies as “savings” under the assumption that the surge in Iraq would have continued for 10 more years. The problem is that Obama made this savings claim despite having already declared that our combat mission in Iraq will end by August 31, 2010 – and despite the fact that the Status of Forces Agreement calls for all U.S. forces to be out of Iraq by December 2011. …

LA Times with the disturbing possibility that the recent Air France disaster could have been prevented.

On June 9, the front page of this newspaper carried a photograph of a red, white and blue object floating, like some sort of gaily colored raft, in a blue-black ocean. To pilots, it brought a chilling sense of deja vu. In November 2001, a similarly shaped and colored object floated in Jamaica Bay, just off Long Island. It was the vertical stabilizer — colloquially, the “tail fin” — of an American Airlines Airbus, Flight 587, that had broken up shortly after taking off from JFK. That fin was practically undamaged; it had parted at the root, each of the massive fittings that attach it to the fuselage torn neatly in half. Here was another such fin: seemingly intact, snapped cleanly from the vanished Air France Flight 447.

The National Transportation Safety Board took almost three years to untangle the mystery of the American Airlines crash. It eventually concluded that the first officer had caused the breakup by stepping too vigorously on the airplane’s rudder pedals, and that the rudder pedals of Airbus airplanes were more susceptible to over-control than those of rival Boeing’s jets.

The rudder is the movable portion of the vertical fin. Unlike the rudder of a boat, it is not used to turn. In fact, the rudders of jets are seldom used at all, except when landing in a strong crosswind or to hold the airplane straight after an engine failure. In this case, the NTSB thought, the pilot had tried to use the rudder to steady the plane in the wake of a 747 several miles ahead and had managed to break the vertical tail off instead.

Pilots were incredulous. The airplane had just taken off and was climbing; it was flying well under its “maneuvering speed,” the speed below which a pilot should be able to use the flight controls in any way without risk of damaging the airplane. How, then, could this pilot possibly have broken the airplane with its own controls? …

News Biscuit announced Windows 7 will be supplied pre-infected.

Software giant Microsoft announced that the long awaited Windows 7 will have all current spyware viruses already pre-installed to save consumers endless hours trawling porn sites to download them at home. The announcement was made live on-line today on both the official Windows site and www.chick-with-dicks.com.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Election commentary from David Warren.

The elections last week for the European Parliament were probably more open and less rigged than the election yesterday for the Iranian presidency, but we should not jump to any further conclusions. …

… In Iran, the nominal government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been supposedly under challenge from the more “moderate” (symbolic language) Mir Hossein Mousavi; but Ahmadinejad offered only a change of veneer from that of his “reforming” predecessor, Mohammad Khatami. The reality is that the Iranian president is subservient to Iran’s council of ayatollahs, as the European Parliament is to Europe’s technocratic ayatollahs. In both cases the vote is popular theatre.

We are going to return to the kid’s Cairo speech. Jennifer Rubin is first because she introduces Marty Peretz’ comments from The New Republic.

… It (the speech) seems more likely to be a grand effort not to bother his listeners with too many inconvenient facts which might suggest we’re not on the verge of a new Obama era of peaceful co-existence. If one tells the whole story – of Zionism, of wars, of efforts to give the Palestinians their state, of brutality toward women in Muslim countries, and of the impact of a nuclear-armed Iran on the region – then Obama might not be so successful in his charm offensive. And the people who were annoyed with past American administrations for bringing these things up would now be annoyed with him. Where’s the popularity boost in all that?

Moreover, people might scratch their heads, wondering why he persists in his pose of moral equivalence rather than dealing with the fundamental issues: the Palestinians’ refusal to recognize a Jewish state, the lack of a viable negotiator with whom Israel can engage, the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran which will blackmail its neighbors and the egregious violation of human (and specifically, women’s) rights by Israel’s neighbors. Come to think of it, why isn’t he?

Perhaps Martin Peretz has seen enough of Obama, just as he saw enough of Deval Patrick.

“I mean, in a way, Obama’s standing above the country, above–above the world, he’s sort of God.” These drug-addicted words come from Evan Thomas, a longtime editor at Newsweek. He uttered them on Chris Matthews’s MSNBC show. Such words would wreak havoc on any person’s ego, even Barack Obama’s. It also would enrage his enemies.

After all, the president has told us that he is a mere student of history, and that he is.

But history these days is no longer a discipline inclined to defend the truthfulness of its claims or the reasonableness of its arguments or the plausibility of its conclusions. More and more, history has become a competition between and among narratives, self-consciously disdainful of what we used to think of as fact. …

… So, in the end, the grand conciliator violated his own principle and spoke asymmetrically: He was very tough on Israel, but he was vague to the Palestinians and to the Arabs. The president was not at all specific about what he wished from people who are still enemies of the Jewish state. Every Israeli concession requires a reciprocal concession, and not just words. But even words are difficult to extract from the Palestinian Authority, the so-called moderates. Mahmoud Abbas said only a fortnight ago that he had only to wait on what Israel surrenders. No reproach from anybody in Washington, except a few honest journalists.

There was one startling passage in Obama’s speech that very few commentators have noticed, perhaps because they also don’t know their history. “Islam has always been a part of America’s story. The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco. In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, our second president, John Adams, wrote, ‘The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims.’” Now, as Michael Oren recounts in his magisterial history of America’s enmeshment in the region, Power, Faith, and Fantasy, the fact is that this treaty, which imposed a ransom of money and ships on the Americans, was a fraud. Moreover, within four years, Tripoli captured another U.S. ship and went on to take into captivity other American vessels and their crews. Suffice it to say that wars, declared by the Pasha of Tripoli and undeclared, continued with more death and more ransom, until 1815. Let it be hoped that the Treaty of Tripoli in which President Obama delights so much will not be a precedent for the agreement he wants to forge between Israel and the Palestinians or between the United States and Iran. It is also a scandal that no one on his intimate staff told him the facts–if, indeed, they knew them–about the settlements with the Barbary Pirates. They are a precedent for nothing, except cheap getting-to-yes ecumenicism.

Jennifer Rubin posts on Obama the Bully.

Peter Beinart pens a column in which he, I think inadvertently, suggests just how ill-conceived Obama’s overt hostility toward Israel is. Beinart suggests the president is doing it to show he’s a tough guy, and because he can get away with it. He writes:

By taking on the Israeli government over the issue of settlement growth, Obama is showing that he’s a gambler overseas as well. Despite the conventional wisdom that an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal is impossible anytime soon, he seems hell-bent on pursuing one. And if he breaks china in the process, so be it.

Had Obama disclosed during the campaign that “broken china” included the Israel-U.S. relationship, one wonders if he would have garnered much support from voters who think the U.S.-Israeli relationship is so precious and valuable that it shouldn’t be discarded in a macho display by a neophyte president who has no game-plan for dealing with real threats to American security. (No, not ad-ons to East Jerusalem settlements, but Russia, North Korea and Iran.) …

Ed Morrissey has noticed the same thing in the auto task force.

When we last left the negotiations between Chrysler’s senior bondholders and Barack Obama’s auto task force, Thomas Lauria and his clients alleged that the government used intimidation tactics and threatened to sic the White House press corps on individuals if they didn’t give up their rights to allow the unions to win in the bankruptcy. Congress took an interest in this”madman” theory of the Presidency and got access to some e-mails floating between the task force and an analyst.  Rep, Steven LaTourette (R-OH) reads from the e-mails, in which the auto task force calls Lauria — their attorney — a “terrorist” and refuses to negotiate after a Chrylser expert consulted him: …

Corner post says Obama Care is getting less inevitable day after day.

The administration and Democrats in Congress have been trying to cultivate the impression in the media that passage of an Obama-style, sweeping health-care reform bill is all but inevitable — the only questions are about details and when.

But Obamacare was never inevitable (see my post from April), and it is getting less so by the day.

The reason is simple: There is no coherent and credible plan to pay for it. Most observers expect the legislation will cost somewhere between $1.0 trillion and $1.5 trillion over ten years.

This week we got a glimpse into the challenge the Democrats are now facing. …

Yuval Levin and Bill Kristol expand on those thoughts in the Weekly Standard.

As long as the health care reform plan envisioned by the Obama administration and congressional Democrats was just a series of slogans, it was easy for the left to build support for it and difficult for the right to imagine how it could be stopped. It is hard, after all, to object to vague promises to cut health care costs and cover the uninsured and improve health outcomes. The brute fact of Democratic domination of Washington gave key health industry players an incentive to look as if they wanted to cooperate with the Obama administration. The whole affair began to assume an air of inevitability.

But as general slogans give way to particular plans, reality is setting in. Outlines and drafts of the key House and Senate bills began to emerge last week, and the grim reality of what the Democrats in fact have in mind has started to exercise an undeniable effect upon the politics of health care.

The fact is, the Democrats’ proposals are a liberal wish list of expansions of the role of government in health care, combining an array of taxes, regulations, incentives, and mandates aimed over time to create a massive and unfunded new entitlement that would limit patient choices, ration care, and bankrupt the Treasury. The Democrats’ plan would force everyone into the system through an individual mandate and lead employers to drop their health coverage; their new public insurance plan would then price private insurers out of the game and attract the refugees from private coverage into the public system. All of this would put us well on the road to government-run health care. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

More on Sotomayor and the New Haven decision from Stuart Taylor.

I admire many things about Judge Sonia Sotomayor, especially her deep compassion for underprivileged people. I may well support her confirmation to the Supreme Court if her testimony next month dispels my concern that her decisions may be biased by the grievance-focused mind-set and the “wise Latina woman” superiority complex displayed in some of her speeches.

But close study of her most famous case only enhances my concern. That’s the 2008 decision in which a panel composed of Sotomayor and two Appeals Court colleagues upheld New Haven’s race-based denial of promotions to white (and two Hispanic) fire-fighters because too few African-Americans had done well on the qualifying exams.

The panel’s decision to adopt as its own U.S. District Judge Janet Arterton’s opinion in the case looks much less defensible up close than it does in most media accounts. One reason is that the detailed factual record strongly suggests that — contrary to Sotomayor’s position — the Connecticut city’s decision to kill the promotions was driven less by its purported legal concerns than by raw racial politics.

Whichever way the Supreme Court rules in the case later this month, I will be surprised if a single justice explicitly approves the specific, quota-friendly logic of the Sotomayor-endorsed Arterton opinion.

Judge Jose Cabranes, Sotomayor’s onetime mentor, accurately described the implication of this logic in his dissent from a 7-6 vote in which the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit refused to reconsider the panel’s ruling. …

Jennifer Rubin expands on Taylor’s thoughts.

… What Taylor also makes clear is that the New Haven city officials knuckled into public pressure by “powerful African Americans” to throw out the test. What better example is there of the need for impartial justice to protect a politically unrepresented and  unpopular figure ( Frank Ricci) from the howls of the mob that would deny him the equal protection of law? Unfortunately Sotomayor didn’t grasp that. She condoned the mob’s bullying and was prepared to give those that caved to their pressure a legal stamp of approval.

The Senate must ask: is this what we want in a Supreme Court justice?

Mark Steyn says we cannot survive as a society of juveniles.

… When President Barack Obama tells you he’s “reforming” health care to “control costs,” the point to remember is that the only way to “control costs” in health care is to have less of it. In a government system, the doctor, the nurse, the janitor and the Assistant Deputy Associate Director of Cost-Control System Management all have to be paid every Friday, so the sole means of “controlling costs” is to restrict the patient’s access to treatment. In the Province of Quebec, patients with severe incontinence – i.e., they’re in the bathroom 12 times a night – wait three years for a simple 30-minute procedure. True, Quebeckers have a year or two on Americans in the life expectancy hit parade, but, if you’re making 12 trips a night to the john 365 times a year for three years, in terms of life-spent-outside-the-bathroom expectancy, an uninsured Vermonter may actually come out ahead.

As Louis XV is said to have predicted, “Après moi, le deluge” – which seems as incisive an observation as any on a world in which freeborn citizens of the wealthiest societies in human history are content to rise from their beds every half-hour every night and traipse to the toilet for yet another flush simply because a government bureaucracy orders them to do so. “Health” is potentially a big-ticket item, but so’s a house and a car, and most folks manage to handle those without a Government Accommodation Plan or a Government Motor Vehicles System – or, at any rate, they did in pre-bailout America. …

David Warren reexamines the Cairo speech in the light of the speech at the D-Day anniversary.

… When speaking to a western audience, Obama troubles to get his facts straight. When speaking to an eastern audience, he does not. This suggests a president who can see the difference between sugar and sludge; who was quite unlikely to have fooled himself by anything he said in Cairo. Also, a president comfortable with saying different things to different audiences: which all politicians do, though not always to an alarming degree.

Since Saturday, I have received several interesting communications from persons who know something about the Middle East, admitting that Obama was trawling a line, and yet defend him for doing so. Their argument is sufficiently compelling that I’m inclined to think it explains what Obama and advisers thought they were doing.

Let us assume that Obama’s speechwriting team thought very carefully about how his speech would go over in the Muslim world: not only tactically, but strategically. Moreover, Obama himself, from rather more extensive contact with Muslims in his earlier life than he condescended to explicate while running for president, is reasonably well acquainted with sometimes radical differences in outlook between East and West. And while my correspondents casually admit that the Cairo speech was full of what Churchill used to call “terminological inexactitudes,” they argue that these were “necessary” inexactitudes. …

The speech gets another look from Charles Krauthammer. And he will have none of David Warren’s left-handed compliments.

… Even on freedom of religion, Obama could not resist the compulsion to find fault with his own country: “For instance, in the United States, rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation” — disgracefully giving the impression to a foreign audience not versed in our laws that there is active discrimination against Muslims, when the only restriction, applied to all donors regardless of religion, is on funding charities that serve as fronts for terror.

For all of his philosophy, the philosopher-king protests too much. Obama undoubtedly thinks he is demonstrating historical magnanimity with all these moral equivalencies and self-flagellating apologetics. On the contrary. He’s showing cheap condescension, an unseemly hunger for applause and a willingness to distort history for political effect.

Distorting history is not truth-telling but the telling of soft lies. Creating false equivalencies is not moral leadership but moral abdication. And hovering above it all, above country and history, is a sign not of transcendence but of a disturbing ambivalence toward one’s own country.

Camille Paglia covers the speech and a few other topics.

… It was also puzzling how a major statement about religion could seem so detached from religion. Obama projected himself as a floating spectator of other people’s beliefs (as in his memory of hearing the call to prayer in Indonesia). Though he identified himself as a Christian, there was no sign that it goes very deep. Christianity seemed like a badge or school scarf, a testament of affiliation without spiritual convictions or constraints. This was one reason, perhaps, for the odd failure of the speech to acknowledge the common Middle Eastern roots of Judeo-Christianity and Islam, for both of whom the holy city of Jerusalem remains a hotly contested symbol.

Obama’s lack of fervor may be one reason he rejects and perhaps cannot comprehend the religious passions that perennially erupt around the globe and that will never be waved away by mere words. By approaching religion with the cool, neutral voice of the American professional elite, Obama was sometimes simplistic and even inadvertently condescending, as in his gift bag of educational perks like “scholarships,” “internships,” and “online learning” — as if any of these could checkmate the seething, hallucinatory obsessions of jihadism. …

… Within the U.S., the Obama presidency will be mainly measured by the success or failure of his economic policies. And here, I fear, the monstrous stimulus package with which this administration stumbled out of the gate will prove to be Obama’s Waterloo. All the backtracking and spin doctoring in the world will not erase that major blunder, which made the new president seem reckless, naive and out of control of his own party, which was in effect dictating to him from Capitol Hill. The GOP has failed thus far to gain traction only because it is trudging through a severe talent drought. But the moment is ripe for an experienced businessman to talk practical, prudent economics to the electorate — which is why Mitt Romney’s political fortunes are steadily being resurrected from the grave. …

With a few caveats, Samizdata calls our attention to an article in Forbes.

That piece by Joel Kotkin examines the misfortunes of Britain’s Labour Party and suggests the same thing might be in store for the Dems. We can only hope.

The thrashing of Britain’s New Labour Party–which came in a weak third in local and European Parliament elections this week–may seem a minor event compared to Barack Obama’s triumphal overseas tour. Yet in many ways the humiliation of New Labour should send some potential warning shots across the bow of the good ship Obama.

Labour’s defeat, of course, stemmed in part from local conditions, notably a cascading Parliamentary expense scandal that appears most damaging to the party in power. Yet beyond those sordid details lies a more grave tale–of the possible decline of the phenomenon I describe as gentry liberalism.

Gentry liberalism–which reached its height in Britain earlier this decade and is currently peaking in the U.S.–melded traditional left-of-center constituencies, such as organized labor and ethnic minorities, with an expanding class of upper-class professionals from field like media, finance and technology.

Under the telegenic Tony Blair, an Obama before his time, this coalition extended well into the middle-class suburbs. It made for an unbeatable electoral juggernaut.

But today, this broad coalition lies in ruins. An urban expert at the London School of Economics, Tony Travers, suggests that New Labour’s biggest loss is due to the erosion of middle-class suburban support. The party also appears to be shedding significant parts of its historic working-class base, particularly those constituents who aren’t members of the public employee unions. …

Borowitz reports Ahmadinejad won the Stanley Cup.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Mark Steyn was in the National Review.

A mere year ago the notion that the government would take over General Motors would have seemed incredible. Yet here we are, with the president of the United States firing the CEO and personally calling the mayor of Detroit to assure him he has no plans to move the head office out of the city. Not literally, not yet. But in any practical sense it’s now headquartered in Washington. In another twelve months, I wonder what currently unthinkable scenarios will have become faits accomplis.

For those of us who have lived under jurisdictions where the government builds your car, the Obama presidency is already a kind of epic tragedy — 1970s Britain but on a Heaven’s Gate budget. Not just grey, humdrum, second-tier industrial decline — the kind that made Dundee, Scotland, just a plausible stand-in for Brezhnev-era Moscow when the BBC came to make a film on the Soviet retirement of the traitor Guy Burgess. No, this is a fabulous money-no-object plummet on caviar-greased skids. Millions and billions and trillions are shoveled into the hole, and leave no trace.

President Obama, in that rhetorical tic that’s already become a bit of a bore, likes to position himself as a man who won’t duck the tough decisions. So, faced with a U.S. automobile industry that so overcompensates its workers it can’t make a car for a price anybody’s willing to pay for it, the president handed over control to the very unions whose demands are principally responsible for that irreconcilable arithmetic. Presented with a similar situation 30 years ago, Mrs. Thatcher took on the unions and, eventually, destroyed their power. That was a tough decision. …

And in The Corner. A couple of times.

Spengler thinks we will run out of credit soon.

… Just how does America finance a $1.8 trillion deficit? The most that overseas investors ever have invested in the US in a year is $400 billion, and it is unlikely that foreign governments will purchase this quantity of Treasury debt under present conditions. Assuming (optimistically) that foreigners buy $300 billion worth of Treasuries per year, that leaves $1.5 trillion to finance. For the American private sector to finance $1.5 trillion worth of Treasury debt, or about 11% of GDP, presumes a savings rate of 11% of GDP, something America has not seen since the early 1980s. The present recession has pushed the personal savings rate up to 6%, with painful economic consequences.

But even a return to the very high savings rates of the early 1980s would barely cover the Treasury’s financing needs. There would be nothing left over for corporate debt, mortgages, or any other financing requirements.

The economy, of course would crash under these circumstances. To make up the gap, the Federal Reserve has increased its balance sheet to provide credit to the economy by over $1 trillion since last August, including $600 billion of securities purchases.

The Federal Reserve can’t keep monetizing debt, that is, printing money in order to buy securities. The perception that it is coming close to the end of its tether is the proximate cause of the jump in interest rates. …

Power Line defends Obama against some of what Anne Bayefsky wrote two days ago. We’ll lead with that.

President Obama’s Cairo speech has drawn lots of criticism, some of it quite harsh. Anne Bayefsky’s post today on The Corner is among the harshest I’ve seen.

Obama deserves some of the criticism he has received. However, some of it is, I think, wide of the mark.

For example, Bayefsky says that “Obama equated the Holocaust to Palestinian ‘dislocation.’” But Obama did no such thing. Here is what he said: …

That said, we have David Warren’s view of the speech.

… Obama’s is a different, more insidious vanity. He acknowledges his rhetorical gift as a gift, but imagines the solutions to problems coalesce of their own accord in his presence. He is President Orpheus, the “poet king,” transforming nature with his music. The German weekly, Die Zeit, expressed this perfectly in a headline: “I am a dream!”

It is the failure to acknowledge hard realities that makes Obama dangerous. As a wise Texan of my acquaintance put it, “he is attempting to model himself on Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator. But, it’s with a twist. He sees himself as the Great Mediator — the One who will step into every conflict around the globe, bring to bear his superior intelligence and teleprompted eloquence, and leave the parties in a warm embrace.”

Another old friend, the errant “neocon” David Frum, explained what is shocking in that Cairo speech: to find an American president no longer mediating domestic American conflicts, but rather, those between his own country and some of her deadliest enemies. This may be presented as “reaching out” but, in practice, it leaves his own side unchampioned, unrepresented, and in the end, undefended.

Moreover, he is playing this game with a child’s understanding of the history and the stakes.

The Cairo speech is loaded with historical howlers. …

We were going to have Camille Paglia here who liked the speech but Salon loaded their site with a bug that so far Pickerhead has been unable to remove. When we figure that out, she’ll be here. In her place how ’bout Ann Coulter’s thoughts on Cairo?

Well, I’m glad that’s over! Now that our silver-tongued president has gone to Cairo to soothe Muslims’ hurt feelings, they love us again! Muslims in Pakistan expressed their appreciation for President Barack Obama’s speech by bombing a fancy hotel in Peshawar this week.

Operating on the liberal premise that what Arabs really respect is weakness, Obama listed, incorrectly, Muslims’ historical contributions to mankind, such as algebra (actually that was the ancient Babylonians), the compass (that was the Chinese), pens (the Chinese again) and medical discoveries (huh?).

But why be picky? All these inventions came in mighty handy on Sept. 11, 2001! Thanks, Muslims!!

Obama bravely told the Cairo audience that 9/11 was a very nasty thing for Muslims to do to us, but on the other hand, they are victims of colonization.

Except we didn’t colonize them. The French and the British did. So why are Arabs flying planes into our buildings and not the Arc de Triomphe? (And gosh, haven’t the Arabs done a lot with the Middle East since the French and the British left!)

In another sharks-to-kittens comparison, Obama said, “Now let me be clear, issues of women’s equality are by no means simply an issue for Islam.” No, he said, “the struggle for women’s equality continues in many aspects of American life.”

So on one hand, 12-year-old girls are stoned to death for the crime of being raped in Muslim countries. But on the other hand, we still don’t have enough female firefighters here in America. …

Thomas Sowell reviews “Character of Nations” by Angelo Codevilla.

In an age that values cleverness over wisdom, it is not surprising that many superficial but clever books get more attention than a wise book like “The Character of Nations” by Angelo Codevilla, even though the latter has far more serious implications for the changing character of our own nation.

The recently published second edition of Professor Codevilla’s book is remarkable just for its subject, quite aside from the impressive breadth of its scope and the depth of its insights. But clever people among today’s intelligentsia disdain the very idea that there is such a thing as “national character.”

Everything from punctuality to alcohol consumption may vary greatly from one country to another, but the “one world” ideology and the “multicultural” dogma make it obligatory for many among the intelligentsia to act as if none of this has anything to do with the poverty, corruption and violence of much of the Third World or with the low standard of living in the Soviet Union, one of the most richly endowed nations on earth, when it came to natural resources. …

Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism is out in paperback. Gives Jonah a chance for a victory lap.

In the greatest hoax of modern history, Russia’s ruling ‘socialist workers party,’ the Communists, established them selves as the polar opposites of their two socialist clones, the National Socialist German Workers Party (quicknamed ‘the Nazis’) and Italy’s Marxist-inspired Fascisti, by branding both as ‘the fascists,’” writes Tom Wolfe. “This spin of all spins,” he says, has played “havoc” upon Western political discourse ever since. I’m fond of that insight not only because I agree with it, or because it is from a blurb for my book Liberal Fascism, which has just come out in paperback (with a new afterword on Barack Obama, who fits so seamlessly into my thesis that he reminds me of the replacement shark in Jaws II). I repeat Wolfe’s pithy summation of the knot I tried to cut because it helps explain the liberal response to the book. The initial reaction — or pre-reaction, since Liberal Fascism was attacked several years before it came out — was simply to declare its thesis so absurd that no serious person should bother to crack its spine. The “spin of all spins” had solidified into conventional wisdom among mainstream liberals, and questioning it amounted to secular heresy.

Some liberals tried to debunk the book more systematically, but for the most part they just confirmed that the “spin of all spins” was exactly that. Consider University of Texas historian David Oshinsky’s review for the New York Times. He began by quickly summarizing the main points of my argument: The Left uses the term “fascist” to demonize its enemies; fascism was a left-wing phenomenon; Mussolini was a socialist; American Progressivism was disturbingly fascistic, and FDR’s New Deal had fascistic elements as well. Only when he reached this last point did Oshinsky offer a clear dissent, writing, “Goldberg is less convincing here because he can’t get a handle on Roosevelt’s admittedly elusive personality.” Well, okay. But I don’t get to Roosevelt for more than 130 pages, at which point I’ve already overturned the liberal applecart. It was a remarkable concession. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

During the debate over Hillary-Care, Phil Gramm was famous for his aside that if it passed, “We would never be able to unf**k it.” Mona Charen in National Review revives the thought, but more delicately, when writing about Obama’s health care plans.

You might suppose that President Obama has his hands full running two wars, administering General Motors, “rescuing” the banking system, attempting to empower unions over management, hushing up whispers about hypocrisy regarding Guantanamo detainees, managing the mortgage crisis, imposing “clean energy” on the nation, handling nuclear North Korea and nearly nuclear Iran, “stimulating” the economy, reviving the “peace process” between Palestinians and Israelis, inaugurating a new relationship with Russia and with the Muslim world, and reversing the rise of the world’s oceans, but no, he has one more agenda item — overhauling U.S. health care.

The administration is hoping that a health bill will be voted on by early August, which may be overly optimistic but still means that this summer will be dominated by the health-care debate. Its outcome will determine the overall success or failure of Obama’s effort to torque America toward the European model of statism. It isn’t just that the health-care sector accounts for 17 percent of the U.S. economy. It is also the case that, if enacted, a nationalized health service — no matter how crushingly expensive or bureaucratic — will vitiate arguments about the proper scope of government. All future pleas for reducing the size of the state will run into the accusation that the small-government advocate is eager to take antibiotics from the mouth of a child or insulin from a diabetic. …

In his blog, Keith Hennessey, former economic advisor to Bush 43 provides his understanding of the shape of the health care bill.

… Calling it the “Kennedy” bill is something of an overstatement.  Senator Kennedy chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee, and his staff wrote the draft.  By all reports, however, Chairman Kennedy’s health is preventing him from being heavily involved in the drafting.  Senator Reid has designated Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) to supervise the process, but as best I can tell, it’s really the Kennedy committee staff who are making most of the key decisions.  For now I will call it the Kennedy-Dodd bill.

As the committee staff emphasized to the press after the leak, this is an interim draft.  I assume things will move around over the next several weeks as discussions among Senators and their staffs continue.  This is therefore far from a final product, but it provides a useful insight into current thinking among some key Senate Democrats.

Here are 15 things to know about the draft Kennedy-Dodd health bill. …

Michael Barone wonders if socialized medicine will be an easy sell to Obama’s voters.

… the segment of the electorate that did most to produce the Obama victory and give the Democrats large majorities in Congress is the least concerned and least informed about health care. That segment is the 18 percent of voters under 30. Young voters preferred Obama to John McCain by a 66 to 32 percent margin, according to the exit poll. Voters 30 and over preferred Obama by only a 50 to 49 percent margin. Some 63 percent of the young voted Democratic for House of Representatives. Only 51 percent of the rest of Americans did so. Without the young, the votes would clearly not be there for what the Democrats are trying to force through.

But what do the young know or care about health insurance? They have the fewest medical problems of the whole population. Their image of health care, at least until they become pregnant and have babies, is university health services. …

John Stossel reminds us of the power of markets; even in the field of health care.

… the doctors have mastered the anti-free-market sneer: Markets are good for crass consumer goods like washing machines and computers, but health care is too complicated for people to understand.

But that’s nonsense. When you buy a car, must you be an expert on automotive engineering? No. And yet the worst you can buy in America is much better than the best that the Soviet bloc’s central planners could produce. Remember the Trabant? The Yugo? They disappeared along with the Berlin Wall because governments never serve consumers as well as market competitors do.

Maybe 2 percent of customers understand complex products like cars, but they guide the market — and the rest of us free-ride on their effort. When government stays out, good companies grow. Bad ones atrophy. Competition and cost-conscious buyers who spend their own money assure that all the popular cars, computers, etc. are pretty good.

The same would go for medicine — if only more of us were spending our own money for health care. We see quality rise and prices fall in the few areas where consumers are in control, like cosmetic and Lasik eye surgery. Doctors constantly make improvements because they must please their customers. They even give out their cell numbers. …

Byron York writes on Washington’s preparation for the health care debate.

It’s hard to tell whether this meeting, at a La Madeleine restaurant in a sprawling shopping-center complex just outside Washington, is the start of a historic movement or just a strangely wonkish group-therapy session.

About 20 people from Northern Virginia have come to this faux-rustic French café on a Saturday morning to discuss health care reform. That alone makes them unusual; after all, there are a lot of other things one could be doing to begin the weekend. But they have answered the call from Organizing for America (OFA), which is basically the 2008 Obama campaign operating under a new name.

“This is the political issue I care about most, apart from the war,” declares one woman, who says she was born and raised in Canada and favors a Canadian-style, single-payer health care system for the U.S. …

Jay Cost in Real Clear Politics Blog examines the possible DC reception for health care overhaul.

Like any theoretical model, this simplifies reality a great deal. The real world is much more complex (we’ll bring in some of these complexities tomorrow). Nevertheless – this model’s explanatory power is quite great.

First, it helps explain why major legislative overhauls often fail. You can appreciate this yourself by playing around with different status quos and alternatives. Generally speaking, when the status quo is somewhere in the middle of the policy spectrum, it is extremely difficult to defeat it. Somebody – be it the president, the veto pivot, the median voter, or the filibuster pivot – will usually prefer the status quo to a given alternative.

Second, it helps explain why policy changes – when they happen – tend to be incremental. Again return to the above graph and play around with different scenarios. When you find an alternative that can beat the status quo, you’ll probably note that it does not upend the world by that much.

Nevertheless, it does allow for major policy overhauls – like what we saw during the New Deal or the Great Society. What matters is the arrangement of the key players’ preferences relative to the status quo. When preferences are relatively homogenous, and there is enough distance between those preferences and the status quo – significant changes in public policy can occur.

Rich Lowry writes on the laughter greeting Geithner in China. If the health care bill passes, there will be lots more laughing at our credit throughout the world.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner wasn’t playing for yucks when he visited China last week. But when he told students at a Chinese university that China’s assets in the U.S. are “very safe,” the audience burst out in laughter.

The Chinese own so much of our debt, they have a keen interest in U.S. fiscal probity, and apparently they take a dim view of our ability to achieve it. The mandarins of a notionally communist government are now forced to harangue the world’s emblematic capitalist country about its ever-spiraling public debt. Mao Zedong and John D. Rockefeller must be spinning in their graves, at an equal rate though in different directions.

The students didn’t even titter at Geithner’s most hilarious line of all: that America is going to control the cost of government by creating an expansive new government health-care program. Heretofore, a Ted Kennedy–supported health-care reform that will cost at least $1.5 trillion over ten years would have been considered new spending, plain and simple. That was before the advent of Barack Obama and of fiscally prudent overspending. …

You can laugh more reading about late frosts in Canada and June snow in Western North Dakota.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Last week, Spengler suggested Obama’s Cairo speech should have been make in India. Now we can get his reactions to the speech from his blog.

Of many strange moments in President Obama’s Cairo speech, perhaps the strangest is the conclusion:

The Holy Quran tells us, Mankind, we have created you male and a female. And we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another.

The Talmud tells us, The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace.
The Holy Bible tells us, Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

What does the idea of gender and tribe distinction have to do with peace? The answer is nothing, except that Obama’s speechwriters felt compelled to drag out some Koranic quotation that sounded vaguely like the biblical and rabbinic concept of peace. The fact that this was the best they could do speaks volumes.

The first human vision of universal peace came from Isaiah, and all classic Jewish sources repeat this theme, as do Christian sources. The Koran, however, contains numerous warnings not to make peace with non-Muslims, but not a single statement comparable to those in Jewish and Christian sources. This may be verified by searching for the word, “peace,” in any of the several online versions of the Koran, including this one from the University of Michigan. …

In another post, Spengler deals with the moral equivalence arguments.

… Or equivalencies between perceived Muslim suffering and Jewish suffering. Israeli leaders noted with distaste Obama’s equation of the Holocaust with Palestinian suffering. The Jerusalem Post reported this morning:

“Obama shockingly equated the destruction of European Jewry to the suffering Arabs brought upon themselves when they declared war on the nascent state of Israel,” National Union MK Arye Eldad said. “If he doesn’t understand the difference, perhaps he will when he visits the Buchenwald camp [on Friday]. And if he still won’t get it then, the Muslims will teach him a painful lesson that his predecessor learned on September 11.”

Just what is the great “suffering” of the Palestinian people? Per capital income of Palestinian Arabs on the West Bank and Gaza strip is estimated at $2,900, or $8 a day. Half of Egyptians live on $2 a day or less. Living standards among Palestinian “refugees” (no where else in history have the great-great-grandchildren of refugees been classified as refugees) are somewhat better than those in Egypt and other Arab countries without substantial oil exports. Foreign aid per capita of $300 per year is the highest in the world. The Palestinians, to be sure, are subject to considerable annoyance and delays in movement due to Israeli counterterrorism controls, but that is another matter.

Nonetheless, the humiliation of the Palestinians — for it is humiliation rather than impoverishment — looms as large in Arab eyes as the extermination of European Jewry. Obama obliged by accommodating the linked megalomania and paranoia of his audience. …

If you think he is harsh, he’s just a warm-up for Anne Bayefsky in National Review.

President Obama’s Cairo speech was nothing short of an earthquake — a distortion of history, an insult to the Jewish people, and an abandonment of very real human-rights victims in the Arab and Muslim worlds. It is not surprising that Arabs and Muslims in a position to speak were enthusiastic. It is more surprising that American commentators are praising the speech for its political craftiness, rather than decrying its treachery of historic proportions.

Obama equated the Holocaust to Palestinian “dislocation.” In his words: “The Jewish people were persecuted. . . . anti-Semitism . . . culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. . . . Six million Jews were killed. . . . On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people — Muslims and Christians — have suffered in pursuit of a homeland.” This parallelism amounts to the fictitious Arab narrative that the deliberate mass murder of six million Jews for the crime of being Jewish is analogous to a Jewish-driven violation of Palestinian rights.

Speaking in an Arab country to Arabs and Muslims, Obama pointedly singled out European responsibility for the Holocaust — “anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust.” In other contexts, the European emphasis would be a curiosity. In Egypt, it was no accident. The Arab storyline has always been that Arabs have been forced to suffer the creation of Israel for a European crime.

In fact, Obama’s Egyptian hosts would have been only too familiar with Arab anti-Semitism during World War II (and beyond). After all, Obama was speaking in the country that schooled and later welcomed back Grand Mufti Haj Muhammed Amin al-Husseini as a national hero. This was the man who spent the war years in Berlin as Hitler’s guest facilitating the murder of Jews. …

You knew we were going to find our way to Evan Thomas’ Obama as ”sort of god” comment. Peter Wehner in Contentions leads the way.

On Friday evening Newsweek editor Evan Thomas had an extraordinary exchange with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. Thomas, commenting on Obama’s Cairo speech, said, “I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above — above the world, he’s sort of God.” And when Thomas was asked by Matthews, “Reagan and World War II and the sense of us as the good guys in the world, how are we doing?” Thomas replied:

Well, we were the good guys in 1984, it felt that way. It hasn’t felt that way in recent years. So Obama’s had, really, a different task. We’re seen too often as the bad guys. And he — he has a very different job from — Reagan was all about America, and you talked about it. Obama is “we are above that now.” We’re not just parochial, we’re not just chauvinistic, we’re not just provincial.

These comments reveal several notable things.

The first is that it is now impossible to mock the media’s adoration for Obama. In the past, if conservatives had said that MSM commentators viewed Obama as God, people would have assumed they were exaggerating in order to make a point. But in this instance, there is no exaggeration; Thomas stated that Obama is “sort of God.” It appears as if in their unguarded moments, Thomas and those like him really do view Obama as the Anointed One, a political Messiah, not only a gift from heaven but the Creator of Heaven and Earth. …

A Jim Manzi Corner post shows how ignorant Evan Thomas is about Reagan’s tributes to our allies.

I think Evan Thomas is pretty far off-base when says in reference to the symbolic meaning of various D-Day observances that:

…Reagan was all about America, and you talked about it. Obama is ‘we are above that now.’ We’re not just parochial, we’re not just chauvinistic, we’re not just provincial.”

Here are the first nine paragraphs of Reagan’s famous “Boys of Pointe du Hoc” speech given at Normandy on the 40th anniversary of D-Day (all bold added):

We’re here to mark that day in history when the Allied armies joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty. For four long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow. Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved and the world prayed for its rescue. Here, in Normandy, the rescue began. Here, the Allies stood and fought against tyranny, in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history.

We stand on a lonely, windswept point on the northern shore of France. The air is soft, but forty years ago at this moment, the air was dense with smoke and the cries of men, and the air was filled with the crack of rifle fire and the roar of cannon. At dawn, on the morning of the 6th of June, 1944, two hundred and twenty-five Rangers jumped off the British landing craft and ran to the bottom of these cliffs. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF