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Michael Barone takes up India policy.
Last November 131, million Americans voted, and the whole world took notice. Over the last month, about 700 million Indians voted, and most Americans, like most of the world, didn’t much notice. To be sure, American elections are more important to people all over the world than those in any other country. But the election in India is more important to Americans than most of us realize. Including, perhaps, our president. …
… Obama has continued military operations in Iraq and stepped them up in Afghanistan, but otherwise he is banking heavily on the proposition that he can convince those who have been our sworn enemies that they should be our friends. Maybe that will work. But in the meantime, it would not hurt to show some solicitude for our friends in India, with whom we share strategic interests and moral principles. The 700 million voters of India have chosen to be our ally. We should take them up on it.
Karl Rove does a victory lap over Obama flip-flops on national security policies. Domestically though, we are watching Bush on steroids.
In both cases, though, we have learned something about Mr. Obama. What animated him during the campaign is what historian Forrest McDonald once called “the projection of appealing images.” All politicians want to project an appealing image. What Mr. McDonald warned against is focusing on this so much that an appealing image “becomes a self-sustaining end unto itself.” Such an approach can work in a campaign, as Mr. Obama discovered. But it can also complicate life once elected, as he is finding out.
Mr. Obama’s appealing campaign images turned out to have been fleeting. He ran hard to the left on national security to win the nomination, only to discover the campaign commitments he made were shallow and at odds with America’s security interests.
Mr. Obama ran hard to the center on economic issues to win the general election. He has since discovered his campaign commitments were obstacles to ramming through the most ideologically liberal economic agenda since the Great Society.
Mr. Obama either had very little grasp of what governing would involve or, if he did, he used words meant to mislead the public. Neither option is particularly encouraging. America now has a president quite different from the person who advertised himself for the job last year. Over time, those things can catch up to a politician.
Jennifer Rubin comments on the Gitmo two step.
Let’s see if we can figure this out. Before he knew much of anything about Guantanamo or had a plan for how to treat the detainees, Obama announced Guantanamo’s closing, hoping to impress his friends on the Left and overseas. But it’s hugely unpopular — so unpopular you have 90 senators (more than you usually get for tributes to National Girl Scout Day and the like) scrambling to get out of the way of the voters who would descend on their offices en masse if this ever resulted in terrorists coming to the U.S. The administration wants to strong-arm and pressure lawmakers into staying on board and, left to their own devices, liberal lawmakers would happily oblige. But they can’t — because, after all, the majority of voters in this country think this is nuts. But they still haven’t a clue what to do with these people. So you have a meandering, equivocating performance today as Democrats try to balance their loyalty to the president and their sense of self-preservation. In that fight, it’s easy to predict the winner.
David Warren returns from a holiday with a paean to the printed word.
The last five weeks I’ve been on holiday, getting as far away from it all as I could, mentally when not corporally. The reader may guess I am a news junkie; it would be a safe guess for anyone who works in newspapers. Being removed from the necessity of consulting the daily news does not cure one of the habit, however. And since a holiday isn’t Lent, I wasn’t planning to starve my curiosity about current events. But my wrists told me I needed a holiday from my laptop, and my eyes added that they were sick of being glared by backlit screens.
I, anyway, don’t watch television; succumbing to temptation not even on those rare occasions when I am myself being interviewed. For some reason I have never liked television — actually, “reasons” in the plural, and I could list them in a book. But the dislike extends to the irrational, and were I dictator of the universe the first three things I’d disinvent would be cars, and TV. (I know, that’s only two things, but as we learned from fairy tales, it is wise to reserve one’s third wish.)
Therefore I resolved to read only such news as I could find in print. …
David Harsanyi expects the U. S. will be invaded by Le Car imitations.
Finally, Americans can start moving forward — albeit in small, unsafe, state-mandated, subsidized pieces of junk.
We all remember a time when we drove around in nearly any variety of car or truck desired. Well, thank goodness we’re getting past that kind of anarchy.
Rejoice, my fellow citizens, in the forthcoming automobile emission and efficiency standards, even if they happen to add more than $1,000 to the cost of an average car.
Just consider it charity, or an “investment.” Because, needless to say, you might as well pony up the dough since your tax dollars already are keeping the auto industry afloat.
Then again, despite my profound appreciation for all the decency being showered upon me, it is difficult not to marvel at the demagoguery and corruption that’s employed to get it done.
Take the supposed coming together of California, the United Auto Workers, Washington and the auto industry, in support of stringent new standards that would cut an entire 0.05 percent of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. …
John Stossel thinks old folks are becoming “greedy geezers.”
Isn’t it high time America did less for the elderly? A politically incorrect question for sure. But Medicare has an astounding $34-trillion unfunded liability. And because of rising unemployment, its hospital-stay program will go broke two years earlier than previously predicted.
I spoke with residents of La Posada, a development in Florida that made Forbes’s list of top 10 “ritzy” retirement communities. These folks are well off. And they get a bonus: You pay for most of their health care under Medicare.
The retirees love it. Everyone likes getting free stuff. And Medicare often makes going to the doctor just about free.
Why is this a good thing?
“What about those young people [who pick up the tab]? What kind of legacy are we leaving for them?” asks Harvard Business School Professor Regina Herzlinger. “We’re really stealing from them.”
NY Times Art Review introduces us to the Storm King Wavefield in the Hudson River Valley. Perhaps because of spending so much time on the water, Pickerhead loves this work by Maya Lin, the creator of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in DC.
MOUNTAINVILLE, N.Y. — When the painter Winslow Homer left New York City for this Hudson Valley hamlet in the summer of 1878, he was reported to be “a little under the weather.” He was probably suffering a nervous breakdown. Whether the cause was a failed romance or despair at seeing the Gilded Age shatter around him, we don’t know. But he felt unmoored and clung to the natural world. The dozens of watercolors he did that summer were landscape-filled, with sloping pastures and wall-like mountains dwarfing human figures, idylls so perfect that they look unreal.
The New York State Thruway buzzes through that landscape now. Most of the pastures are gone, but the mountains are still here: Schunnemunk, behind a series of ridges; Storm King, running high and long before dropping into the Hudson. And recently, some new additions, baby mountains, have appeared: seven undulating, grass-covered ranges of them.
These mini-Catskills were conceived and built — molded is really the word — by the artist Maya Lin as a permanent installation at the Storm King Art Center, the 500-acre sculpture park that for almost half a century has been devoted to the display of outdoor works either designed for the location or too large or strange to fit comfortably elsewhere. …
Adam Smith gives us a picture of Zimbabwe’s One Hundred Trillion Dollar note.
In this case money tells us a little about Robert Mugabe and a lot about centrally planned economies. The hundred trillion dollar note is literally not worth the paper it’s printed on, and the city authorities in Harare had to put up notices in the loos forbidding people to use banknotes in the toilets.
Bjørn Lomborg warns about the climate-industrial complex.
Some business leaders are cozying up with politicians and scientists to demand swift, drastic action on global warming. This is a new twist on a very old practice: companies using public policy to line their own pockets.
The tight relationship between the groups echoes the relationship among weapons makers, researchers and the U.S. military during the Cold War. President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned about the might of the “military-industrial complex,” cautioning that “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” He worried that “there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.”
This is certainly true of climate change. We are told that very expensive carbon regulations are the only way to respond to global warming, despite ample evidence that this approach does not pass a basic cost-benefit test. We must ask whether a “climate-industrial complex” is emerging, pressing taxpayers to fork over money to please those who stand to gain. …
Scrappleface reports Pelosi first learned of 9/11 in late 2003.
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