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It is the day before we honor our war dead, citizens who died in wars that were the failures of our politicians. Today much of our content is comments on the remarkable dueling Cheney/Obama speeches at the end of last week. First though let’s have Mark Steyn’s weekly Orange County Register column which is a peek into the language of govspeech.
I was in Vermont the other day and made the mistake of picking up the local paper. Impressively, it contained a quarter-page ad, a rare sight these days. The rest of the page was made up by in-house promotions for the advertising department’s special offer on yard-sale announcements, etc. But the one real advertisement was from something called SEVCA. SEVCA is a “nonprofit agency,” just like The New York Times, General Motors and the state of California. And it stands for “South-Eastern Vermont Community Action.”
Why, they’re “community organizers,” just like the president! The designated “anti-poverty agency” is taking out quarter-page ads in every local paper because they’re “seeking applicants for several positions funded in full or part by the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA)” – that’s the “stimulus” to you and me. Isn’t it great to see those bazillions of stimulus dollars already out there stimulating the economy? Creating lots of new jobs at SEVCA, in order to fulfill the president’s promise to “create or keep” 2.5 million jobs. At SEVCA, he’s not just keeping all the existing ones, but creating new ones, too. Of the eight new positions advertised, the first is:
“ARRA Projects Coordinator.”
Gotcha. So the first new job created by the stimulus is a job “coordinating” other programs funded by the stimulus. What’s next?
“Grantwriter.”
That’s how they spell it. Like in “Star Wars” – Luke Grantwriter waving his hope saber as instructed by his mentor Obi-Bam Baracki (“May the Funds be with you!”). The Grantwriter will be responsible for writing grant applications “to augment ARRA funds.” So the second new job created by stimulus funding funds someone to petition for additional funding for projects funded by the stimulus. …
David Harsanyi is the first to comment on the speeches. He columns on Obama’s assertion that Bush policies were rooted in “fear.”
… Obama, after all, has been as masterful as anyone in using dread to ram through ideology-driven legislation and silencing political opposition.
During the “debate” over the government’s “stimulus” plan, the president claimed that the consequences of not passing his plan would mean the “recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.”
To contend that a country that survived the Great Depression, world wars, a Civil War and the social upheavals of the past century could not reverse a recession without an immense government bailout is farcical. (Moreover, almost nothing the president’s economists predicted has come to fruition; the opposite has. We are still approaching double-digit unemployment and sinking deeper into crisis, despite the passage of the “stimulus” plan.)
How many times did proponents of the “recovery” package or other recent spending plans dispatch the bromide “something needs to be done,” or claim that choosing “inaction” was tantamount to national suicide? Those aren’t exactly arguments drenched in reason. Panic, maybe.
But the most common brand of public policy that relies on scary talk is environmental. We need not catalog the endless end-of-days scenarios that environmentalists have been laying on us for more than three decades to understand how intrinsically they rely on fear. …
Now some of our Corner favorites. Ramesh Ponnuru.
… President Obama and former Vice President Cheney weren’t so much a study in contrast today as a portrait of harmony. Both men agree that the Bush administration’s anti-terrorist policies were largely correct. Cheney signaled his acceptance of this view by vigorously defending those policies. Obama signaled it by largely adopting those same policies and emitting a fog of words to cover up the fact. …
… President Obama’s speech is the September 10th mindset trying to come to grips with September 11th reality. It is excruciating to watch as the brute facts of life under a jihadist threat, which the president is now accountable for confronting, compel him forever to climb out of holes dug by his high-minded campaign rhetoric — the reversals on military detention, commission trials, prisoner-abuse photos, and the like.
The need to castigate his predecessor, even as he substantially adopts the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policy, is especially unbecoming in a president who purports to transcend our ideological divisions. …
… The president’s juggling-act stands in stark contrast to former Vice President Cheney’s grown-up speech at AEI. After hearing President Obama literally call the Bush approach “a misguided experiment” and “a mess,” Cheney calmly dispelled the caricature of the big bad Bush administration.
His defense of doing what it takes — within the law and under the Constitution — struck me as the kind of gutsy, straightforward, and yet sophisticated approach our country needs from the White House. Cheney underscored the continued threat we face, and the need to support our war-fighters — and intelligence operatives — as they do the dirty work of defending the Constitution. He also emphasized that a) they must have all the tools they need (within the law); b) we can’t afford to start releasing terrorists, thereby putting our troops in more danger; and c) who cares what Europe thinks, American security is at stake here. …
There are, of course, 10,000 things to say about President Obama’s national-security speech today, and I said just a few below. Once you start, it’s kind of hard to stop — sort of like eating potato chips. But let me offer just one more point — a somewhat offbeat one.
Obama said, “The Supreme Court that invalidated the system of prosecution at Guantanamo in 2006 was overwhelmingly appointed by Republican presidents.”
I don’t remember a president’s talking this way: about the party affiliations of presidents who appointed Supreme Court justices. I don’t recall a president’s describing a Court that way. Been following politics for a while. And I’ve never heard an important presidential national-security speech that sounded so much like a campaign speech — even in the midst of an actual campaign. …
… When businesses fail, we have a framework, an institution, and a set of values that are triggered: The framework is called bankruptcy, the institution is the United States Bankruptcy Court, and the applicable values are found in the corpus known as federal bankruptcy law, which prescribe bedrock principles like: secured creditors take priority over unsecured creditors. Rather than trusting in those things and using settled law as a compass, Obama has adopted an ad hoc approach which has proved grossly ineffective and — given the moral hazard it infuses in the entire financial system — unsustainable.
Why isn’t the GM debacle a violation of the “rule of law” that Pres. Obama and Attorney General Holder are so fond of lecturing us about?
Now, to favorites from Contentions. John Podhoretz.
There is much to say about President Obama’s speech today, but one thing especially jumped out at me—his accusation that the Bush administration’s post-9/11 response was the result of an excess of fear: “Our government made decisions based upon fear rather than foresight,” he said.
Speaking dismissively of “fear,” conceiving of it as a bad thing, is an old trope, dating back to FDR’s notion that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” It has within it, this idea, the adult’s condescending and loving laugh when a child is afraid of the vacuum cleaner or of an ant. Fear, from this perspective, is unreasoning and based on ignorance, a misunderstanding of what is and what is not a true threat.
But fear was an entirely responsible response to September 11. …
… One final thought: Obama has placed his presidency in the hands of America’s enemies. Should they succeed in any significant operation, his words disparaging his predecessors’ efforts will come crashing down on him and his party. In politics, as in life, you never want to give over control of your destiny to others. But in a shocking way the President of the United States did just that today.
One is hard pressed to think of a more unlikely and more lopsided competition for public approval than a debate between Barack Obama and Dick Cheney. The president’s charisma and virtues as a public speaker are no secret. And whether it is entirely deserved or not, Cheney’s reputation as Washington’s prince of darkness is established in the public imagination of the republic. Obama’s easy popularity is matched only by Cheney’s lack of appeal.
And yet if the speeches the two gave this morning on national security and the record of the Bush administration are heard or read alongside each-other, there is no escaping the conclusion that the former vice president got the better of the current resident of the White House. Cheney’s speech was straightforward. He addressed the accusations that have been leveled at the record of the government he served and he calmly and methodically debunked them. …
… Obama’s address was full of good sound bytes. But in terms of substance, it was nothing but moral preening, condescension and self-congratulation. …
Closing the section is an impressive Peter Wehner blog post that puts all of this in historical perspective.
… if Mr. Obama wants to tear into past presidents for violations of the Constitution and basic human rights during war time, perhaps he should start with those whom he must surely consider the worst violators of our Constitution and our values: Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman.
Harvard Professor Jack Goldsmith — who worked in the Bush Justice Department and who opposed waterboarding — has written that
in response to the secession crisis that began when Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, Lincoln raised armies and borrowed money on the credit of the United States, both powers that the Constitution gave to Congress; he suspended the writ of habeas corpus in many places even though most constitutional scholars, then and now, believed that only Congress could do this; he imposed a blockade on the South without specific congressional approval; he imprisoned thousands of southern sympathizers and war agitators without any charge or due process; and he ignored a judicial order from the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to release a prisoner detained illegally.
“No president before or since Lincoln,” Goldsmith has written, “has acted in such disregard of constitutional traditions.” Perhaps President Obama can therefore devote an entire speech to what he must consider to be the awful and unforgivable assault on the Constitution by Lincoln, his purported hero.
After that, President Obama might want to devote an entire speech — or perhaps several speeches — to FDR. After all, President Roosevelt gave order for the mass internment of Japanese-Americans and people of Japanese descent during World War II, a violation of rights President Bush has never approached. All told, around 110,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals were forcibly relocated and interned in “War Relocation Camps.” …
For the next few decades, there will be many who say our present economic unpleasantness was caused by capitalism. Steve Malanga puts the lie to some of that in an essay about lying as antithetical to the function of markets.
The further we get from the housing bubble that helped to prompt our current financial meltdown, the less we seem bothered by the decline in trustworthiness and the rise in cheating that fueled the irrational exuberance of the home mortgage market. And then along comes New York Times reporter Edmund Andrews to remind us of that era via his own personal story of attempted mortgage deception and borrowing irresponsibility. If you want to understand how individual wrongs by seemingly upstanding members of society piled up and helped fuel our national ruin, read Andrews’ piece, My Personal Credit Crisis, in last Sunday’s Times.
As an economics reporter for the Times, Andrews analyzed and described the frothy housing market before he made his own unwise plunge. In a story he published in June of 2004 he explained the growing risk that home borrowers were taking on, including those who used “innovations” in the market, like no-documentation mortgages that were nicknamed “liar’s loans,” which didn’t require income verification. In the story, Andrews noted that their growing use alarmed housing experts. …
… Is there a larger consequence to such shifts in attitudes? Adam Smith would certainly have thought so. A moral philosopher, Smith laid the groundwork for his ideas on trade and commerce in his first book, Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which he traced the evolution of mankind’s ethics from our nature as social beings who feel bad if we do something that we believe an imagined impartial observe would consider improper. Out of this basic mechanism for making judgments, what Smith called sympathy and modern psychology calls empathy, we create civilizing institutions, like courts of law, to help us govern our economy as it becomes more complex. Over time a society relies on these institutions to reinforce our individual values. …
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