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Many of our favorites write on expectations for an Obama administration. Pickerhead has grown very tired of the media’s over use of “team of rivals” suggesting there is some prairie wisdom in Obama’s picks. Seems like we will have chaos instead, since our new president is a rather unformed immature 46 years old. Is there any guiding thought or idea that lies behind his quest, other than narcissism and change?
We are likely to see a president who agrees with the person who last spoke to him. As a consequence Washington’s policies will be guided by those most skilled at leaking. The media will love this as they will be the conduit for all the back-biting.
Jennifer Rubin is first.
… we also know that throughout the campaign and transition he has been cautious to a fault, often declining to articulate a position (e.g. Gaza) or trying to delay as long as possible (e.g. the AIG bailout, Russia’s invasion of Georgia) offering an opinion on issues of great import. But that was then. What will happen when he is not critiquing, but deciding?
For the sake of the country we can hope that, like Harry Truman, he rises to the occasion once in office without the benefit of any prior executive training. And certainly we know executive experience didn’t do Jimmy Carter, for example, any good. We’ll have to see how it all works out — and pray for the best.
Then Tony Blankley.
As President-elect Obama vacations with his family in Hawaii and publicly complains about the intrusiveness of the press pool and the intense scrutiny of his Secret Service team, I suspect about now Obama may be recalling George Bernard Shaw’s heartless observation that: “There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.”
This last week of December 2008 is a strange moment for the country. It must be positively bizarre for our president-elect. It seems as if all the problems of the world are lining up and just waiting for our new president to handle. For every American but one, we are merely waiting to see what Obama will do in three weeks. For that one — Obama — he, presumably, is puzzling over finding the right policies — if there are any right policies. Probably there are only terrible and catastrophic policies to pick from.
There are media reports that he is smoking more than usual. Who could blame him? For many of the rest of us, we wake up at 2 in the morning worried about our family’s or our business’s finances. Obama has to worry about the nation’s and the world’s finances — and wars and threats of yet more wars.
Americans continue to not shop (until recently the world, including citizen of the world Obama, condemned Americans for shopping to the tune of 25 percent of world consumption. Now the whole world is begging us to buy more stuff to keep the world from going broke.) How long will it be before President Obama repeats Bush’s advice to Americans after September 11 to go shopping. …
Tom Elia of the New Editor.
Amity Shlaes in WaPo op-ed on the havoc caused by the New Deal.
… Many of FDR’s initial plans did bring stability: His first Treasury secretary worked to sort out banks with the outgoing Hoover administration in a fashion so fair that an observer noted that those present “had forgotten to be Republicans or Democrats.” By creating deposit insurance, FDR reduced bank runs. His Securities Act of 1933 laid the ground for a transparent national stock market. Equities shot up.
But other policies were more arbitrary. Using emergency powers, FDR yanked the country off the gold standard. Both American and international markets looked forward to a London conference at which a new monetary accord was to be struck among nations. Over the course of the conference, though, FDR changed orders to his emissaries multiple times. Some days he was the internationalist, sending wires about international currency coordination. Other days he was the cowboy, declaring that all that mattered was what the dollar bought in farm states. The conference foundered.
Some of the worst destruction came with FDR’s gold experiment. If he could drive up the price of gold by buying it, he reasoned, other prices would rise as well. Roosevelt was right to want to introduce more money into the economy (the United States was deflating). But his method was like trying to raise an ocean level by adding water by the thimbleful. What horrified markets even more was that FDR managed the operation personally, day by day, over a breakfast tray. No one ever knew what the increase would be. One Friday in November 1933, for example, Roosevelt told Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau that he thought the gold price ought to be raised 21 cents. Why that amount, Morgenthau asked. “Because it’s three times seven,” FDR replied.
Morgenthau later wrote that “if anybody knew how we set the gold price, through a combination of lucky numbers, etc., I think they would be frightened.” …
The terrible price paid by Cuba for Castro’s win. From the NY Times no less.
Four months after they appeared in the waters between Havana and Miami, the four dead men remain nameless. At a morgue in the Florida Keys, they lie on stretchers stacked like bunk beds, their bodies chewed by sharks, their faces too putrefied to be recognized.
The police suspect they were Cuban rafters. Nilda Garcia thinks one of them might be her son — and the thought makes her weep. Fourteen years after she left Cuba on her own makeshift boat, she finds herself wondering once again: When will it end?
“How many mothers are going through this?” Ms. Garcia said in an interview at her daughter’s apartment here as she awaited DNA results on the bodies. “How many more are crying for their losses? How many young people have drowned in this sea? How many?”
Fifty years ago today, many Cubans cheered when Fidel Castro seized power in Havana, and even now, the revolution attracts many fans — as evidenced by the Canadian tour agencies advertising trips “to celebrate five decades of resilience.”
But the bodies speak to a different legacy. …
And Minette Marrin of the London Times on the “useful idiots” that praise Cuba.
… It is a rule of thumb that anyone given to praising Cuba under Castro is a person of poor judgment. This has nothing to do with how much or how little Castro achieved; it has to do with what is necessary for good judgment. An essential part of good judgment is a respect for facts and, in the absence of many facts, a willingness to suspend judgment. It is an intellectual and a moral mistake to become cheerleaders in ignorance. It is the mark of a useful idiot, like those famous western cheerleaders for the communist USSR who were secretly despised by the Soviet leaders.
Useful idiots have always been a mystery to me. When I was an undergraduate in the late 1960s, student radicals would always proudly announce that although socialism might have failed in the USSR – it was never properly tried, they claimed – it worked in the People’s Republic of China. Then I went to live for several years in Hong Kong, off the coast of mainland China, and began to learn a few facts. It wasn’t easy to learn much, as China was a closed and paranoid society, difficult to visit and almost impossible for the Chinese to leave. But I couldn’t help noticing that almost every day bodies were washed up, mauled by sharks, of people who were prepared to brave the shark-infested waters, tied to air beds because they could not swim, in their desperate longing to escape the repression of communist China. This was in the early 1970s in the years following the horrors of the cultural revolution. …
Noemie Emery says the Kennedy legacy has lost some luster.
… Would Jack, who threatened pre-emptive war over missiles in Cuba, have really opposed a war with Iraq after Saddam defied U.N. resolutions? Would Bobby, who made his chops busting corrupt labor unions, have supported the end of the secret ballot in union elections? What would Jack and Bobby have said to the feminist social agenda, up to and including late-term abortion? And what would Bobby have said of gay marriage?
If Caroline wants to run as a legatee, she should explain which Kennedy legacy she supports, and why she supports it (including the tax cuts put in by her father.) She could start by reading her father’s inaugural and seeing if there are any parts she believes in. Would she “bear any burden and pay any price” to ensure the survival of liberty? If she wouldn’t, she should tell us why.
David Harsanyi rebels against the nanny state.
… Now, poor Barack Obama has been subjected to a thousand wagging fingers. Journalists have dug deep to uncover the president-elect’s nefarious three-cigarette-a-day habit. Quit, for your own good, Mr. Obama, because those ruthless Iranian mullahs are pussycats compared to these indefatigable health stormtroopers . . . I mean, “activists.”
Meanwhile, I’ll be making only one, completely horrifying resolution this year. Not only do I plan to regularly eat cheap, salt-infested, cheese- drenched meat products, but I also plan on washing them down with various brands of needlessly sugary beverages.
I may even drive my car an extra few miles when in Oregon, even after that state passes an Orwellian measure that tracks me with a GPS system to tax my mileage and induce me to take a train.
Or I may head to Massachusetts and try to find a blunt-tipped cigar, now banned. Maybe I’ll take a trip to Atlanta in some loose-fitting slacks. (There is talk that they may be banned there.) When in New York, I may have a soda pop before sin taxes put it out of my price range.
This year may be my last chance.
Northern Ireland’s Environmental Minister says it is globaloney.
… “I think in 20 years’ time we will look back at this whole climate change debate and ask ourselves how on earth were we ever conned into spending the billions of pounds which are going into this without any kind of rigorous examination of the background, the science, the implications of it all. Because there is now a degree of hysteria about it, fairly uninformed hysteria I’ve got to say as well. …
Starting off the humor section is a story from Religious Intelligence, UK reporting the Church of England has invested £150 million in Al Gore’s responsible investing scam.