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We start with a replay of the lead in November 1, 2004 Pickings.
Pickerhead’s Iron Law of Voting
Pickerhead wants to say if you don’t feel like voting – good for you. The more people who don’t vote, then the freer the country. I know that is counterintuitive, but think about it. If a citizen is not concerned who wins, it means the government is not much of a factor in that voter’s life.
So, the lower the voting percentage, the more freedom in the country. That is Pickerhead’s Iron Law of Voting. The law was, of course, proved by the astronomically high voting percentage in the late communist countries.
And, as Prof. Robert Anderson once said, “Don’t vote. It only encourages the bastards!”
The balance of Pickings today comes from foreign sources. Before current political events, we have a treat; Spengler’s obit for Ronald Reagan from the June 8, 2004 Asia Times. Seems like today we might need some proof that sometimes it goes our way. And reminders that good things happen when we have leaders with the courage to go against the bien pensants of the world.
For his lonely stand against the forces of barbarism, I rate Winston Churchill the greatest statesman of the 20th century. Ronald Reagan, though, arguably was the greater commander in chief. Decisiveness (translating Clausewitz’s term Entschlossenheit) depends in turn upon strategic vision. But a commander requires not only vision, but also the intestinal fortitude to endure uncertainty, and the will to force the burden of uncertainty onto his opponent. Borrowing from the language of economics, one might call this a predilection for creative destruction.
Whatever his other faults, Reagan possessed the great attributes of command. Bush’s war cabinet is of a lesser ilk. Consider their CIA chiefs: the oily George Tenet and the gruff William Casey, who personally planted a listening device in office of a Middle Eastern leader during a courtesy call. Tenet is a flatterer and politician; Casey was a warrior and adventurer.
To a generation that has come of age after the fall of the Soviet Empire, it is hard to imagine that the smart money in Europe wagered on Russian dominance when Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. I can attest that the closest advisors of French President Francois Mitterrand and German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt thought NATO would lose the Cold War. So humiliating was the later collapse of the communist regimes that the pundits could argue credibly that it had fallen of its own weight. No such thing happened. Reagan took office at a dark hour for the West, and did things that the elite of Europe had deemed impossible. …
… When Reagan made clear his intention to bury the “evil empire” (as he characterized it before the Commons in 1982), a wave of shock and indignation spread among the Atlantic elite unimaginable to those who where not there at the time. Europe’s disgust at George W Bush is a gentle June shower compared to the tempests of 1982. Whereas Europe thinks that the younger Bush is crude and ideological, it thought Reagan barking mad. …
David Warren cautions against seeking heaven on earth.
… In the religious view, which is sometimes indistinguishable from what we now call the “conservative” view (though with a very small “c”) politics are merely of this world. We must live in this world, and make the best of it, and we may take considerable latitude in arguing about the best that is achievable.
But for the irreligious — the people for whom this world is all there is — politics can easily become everything. The very human instincts that turn towards prayer, towards heaven, towards God, turn easily instead towards human idols, towards the contemplation of a heaven on earth, towards utopian hopes and aspirations — and finally, towards demonizing all those who appear to be getting in the way of “progress.” As they inevitably must: for the definition of the “good” which progress seeks comes into dispute, between those whose futurity is here, or elsewhere.
Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of The Australian gives his take on our election.
The politics of the world’s greatest democracy has taken something weird in its Kool-Aid.
How can I say this when both candidates are so attractive and so articulate?
There is your first clue. The quality of a politician is frequently in inverse proportion to their good looks. Give me John Howard’s baldness, Paul Keating’s hatchet face, Kevin Rudd’s Harry Potter tonsure. The greatest US president of all, Abraham Lincoln, proves the point. He once remarked that he could not possibly be two-faced: “If I had another face, do you think I’d wear this one?”
This election marks the triumph of celebrity as the essential organising principle of US politics. There were presentiments of this in John F. Kennedy and even Ronald Reagan. But Bill Clinton was the critical transitional figure who morphed from a traditional politician into a pure soap opera celebrity, with all the baroque plot twists and personal dysfunction.
George W. Bush was a kind of anti-celebrity and a very flawed politician. But he was an example of the evil twin of celebrity, namely dynasty. US politics is now dominated by celebrities and dynasties. This represents a fantastic regression. There are other countries where celebrities and dynasties dominate: The Philippines, Argentina, much of Latin America. Their politics is authentic in the postmodern sense; they connect with people’s emotions. Movie stars and presidents’ wives and offspring regularly attain the highest office. They are also some of the worst governed nations in the world, certainly compared with the traditional mean in the US. …
Adam Smith.org says Tom Wolfe warned us about community organizers.
… The best description was published by Tom Wolfe in his once famous book Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. Wolfe depicted inner city community organizers as radical agitators who managed to blackmail city magistrates into expanding social programmes, the proceeds of which often didn’t reach the intended recipients. This later became the blueprint for third world development aid. …
Melanie Phillips, from her Spectator, UK blog.
So, what if The One should actually lose next week? The brainwashed hysteria whipped up on his behalf is, to put it mildly, dangerous. The media proclaims daily that Obama has already won. He cannot lose. He is the Saviour of the Planet. McCain is a mumbling senile idiot. Palin is evil incarnate. The polls show an Obama landslide. So if the world should revolve backwards on its axis next Tuesday and people wake up and find he has lost, then either the election will have been stolen in the way we all know evil Republicans always steal elections – or the American public will be proved to be, as we all know they are, irredeemably racist. Accordingly, we are warned that there would then be riots on the streets.
Those who see a racist in every non-Obama voter are themselves the people for whom Obama’s race is his defining characteristic. They say in terms that his race is the reason we must vote for him. They are the people who, by smearing every conceivable criticism of Obama or revelation of his unsavoury associations as ‘racist’, have emptied the term of its meaning. They are the people who, posing as ‘progressive’, display daily their utter contempt for their fellow human beings who are apparently incapable of voting against Obama on the rational grounds of the disturbing information they have learned about him, because by definition such information is just a load of racist smears. It cannot be true because there cannot be any dissent.
The same media which is whipping up this hysteria has failed to tell people that some polls are telling a different story – that the gap between the candidates is closing. The same media have either failed to tell the American public about Obama’s deeply questionable record, influences, sayings or associations, or the fact that it is the Obama campaign which has tried to steal the vote by delivering more than a million fraudulent voter registrations, or its systematic lies about all of the above, the equivalent of any one of which affronts would have instantly sunk a Republican candidate — or else have trivialised and dismissed them. …
In the Guardian, UK, former editor of the London Times describes how the American media went in the tank for Obama.
… But the press bias towards Obama doesn’t represent a simple revulsion for the Republican party. It was on display in the Democratic primaries with the persecution of Hillary Clinton. Worst of all, in the primaries, the press let the Obama campaign get away with continuous insinuations below the radar that the Clintons were race-baiters. Instead of exposing that absurd defamation for what it was – a nasty smear – the media sedulously propagated it.
Clinton made the historically correct and uncontroversial remark that civil rights legislation came about from a fusion of the dreams of Dr Martin Luther King and the legislative follow-through by President Lyndon Johnson. The New York Times misrepresented that as a disparagement of King, twisting her remarks to imply that “a black man needed the help of a white man to effect change”. This was one of a number of manipulations on race by the Obama campaign, amply documented by the leading Democratic historian, Princeton’s Sean Wilentz. Clinton came close to tears in a coffee shop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which many thought helped her to win an upset victory there. MSNBC television gave a platform to the Chicago congressmen, Jesse Jackson Jr, where he questioned her tears and claimed that she’d not shed any tears for the black victims of Katrina, and that she’d pay for that in the South Carolina primary, where 45% of the electorate would be African-Americans.
In fact, MSNBC ran a non-stop campaign for Obama propelled by the misogyny of its anchors, Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and David Shuster. Chelsea Clinton joining Clinton’s campaign prompted Shuster to report she was “pimping” for her mother. …
Samizdata has the story of Barclay’s Bank spurning funds offered by the government.
… If its refusal to eat from the state table annoys BBC journalists – who of course are paid out of a tax – then the bank must have done something very right. One cannot exactly say that of a lot of banks these days.
Samizdata also notes London’s October snowfall.
Which brings us our second David Warren column today as he asks for us to be saved from those who are going to save the earth.
Our last item is a Philippine report on a cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe. This is here as a reminder of what it was like when last we had a wise fool for president. Without Jimmy Carter and Andrew Young’s intervention, Mugabe might never have come to power. We are about to elect someone as ignorant as Jimmy.