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The new president pays tribute to George W. Bush; according to Charles Krauthammer anyway.
… If hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue, then the flip-flops on previously denounced anti-terror measures are the homage that Barack Obama pays to George Bush. Within 125 days, Obama has adopted with only minor modifications huge swaths of the entire, allegedly lawless Bush program.
The latest flip-flop is the restoration of military tribunals. During the 2008 campaign, Obama denounced them repeatedly, calling them an “enormous failure.” Obama suspended them upon his swearing-in. Now they’re back.
Of course, Obama will never admit in word what he’s doing in deed. As in his rhetorically brilliant national-security speech yesterday claiming to have undone Bush’s moral travesties, the military commissions flip-flop is accompanied by the usual Obama three-step: (a) excoriate the Bush policy, (b) ostentatiously unveil cosmetic changes, (c) adopt the Bush policy.
Cosmetic changes such as Obama’s declaration that “we will give detainees greater latitude in selecting their own counsel.” Laughable. High-toned liberal law firms are climbing over each other for the frisson of representing these miscreants in court. …
In his second effort upon return, David Warren writes about his fears for the new administration.
… I think Barack Obama came quite well out of his first 100 days. The personal qualities that got him elected do transfer to elected office, in his case. He is eloquent and unflappable; he is unreadable yet outwardly consistently charming; he looks close up when at a distance, and at a distance when close up; he is smooth and ruthless in the pursuit of his political goals. He has, as we already knew, the gift of charisma with crowds, the seemingly magical ability to embody sweet reason even when making statements entirely hollow of substance. There is something very presidential in that.
I was especially impressed with the way he remained “above the fray” when one cabinet appointment after another proved to be a dog. Somehow it wasn’t Obama’s mistake; somehow it became the fault of the person he had appointed. The new president had the gift of making himself invisible at will; though it should be said that he depends on supine mass media to accomplish this trick. …
Noemie Emery reminds us of the bleak GOP year of 1977 and how Reagan built the opposition to Jimmy Carter, the first incarnation of Obama.
In 1977, as in 2009, the future seemed dark for the country’s conservatives, shut out of all of the conduits to power, with nary a bright spot in sight. “The result of the 1976 election was Democrats in power as far as the eye could see,” wrote Michael Barone in Our Country (1992). “It was almost universally expected that the Democrats would hold on to the executive branch for eight years; it was considered unthinkable that they could lose either house of Congress.” “Once again, the death knell of the Republican Party was being sounded,” added Steven F. Hayward, in his two volume study of Reagan. Notes historian John J. Pitney Jr., “The hot bet of the moment was not whether the Republican Party could reshape politics, but whether it could survive at all.”
At the time, the New York Times said the party was “closer to extinction than ever before in its 122 year history.” House minority leader John Rhodes thought it could go the way of the Whigs and vanish completely. Robert Novak said the election showed the “long descent of the Republican Party into irrelevance, defeat, and perhaps eventual disappearance.”
Gerald Ford had just lost to Jimmy Carter. Republicans held 38 seats in the Senate, and just 143 seats in the House. According to a Gallup poll, more than twice as many Americans identified with the Democrats as with the Republicans. In Fortune magazine, election scholar Everett Carll Ladd pronounced that the GOP was “in a weaker position than any major party of the United States since the Civil War.” Jimmy Carter, the incoming president, was widely regarded as the cure-all for what ailed the Democrats, a social conservative who had been a career Navy officer before coming home to take over the family business (a peanut farm in Plains, Georgia), and who planned to restore simple and homespun American virtue to a scandal-wracked land.
If the GOP seemed washed up, so did Ronald Reagan, who had led a conservative revolt inside the party and then lost to Gerald Ford, who would lose in November. ..
Mark Steyn Corner posts on Government Motors.
… Under traditional bankruptcy restructuring, the various GM/Chrysler brands — Chevy, Dodge, etc — would have wound up in the hands of new owners, domestic and foreign, willing to make a go of them. Instead, Obama and his car czars have delivered these marques into the formal control of the unions (the ones who got the companies into this mess) and of the government — which cannot run a car company. Why? Because it will make decisions for political rather than business reasons. And unions will make decisions for the “workforce” rather than the market. At the moment the GM/Chrysler unions cannot make a car at a price anyone is willing to pay for it. Why give them the companies?
Those of us who’ve lived with government car companies know how this story ends: see Iain Murray’s column today — and, for a precis of life under a union/government alliance, ask Iain to explain the British expression “Beer and sandwiches at Number Ten.”
I love American cars. I have a Chevy truck, Chevy SUV, the whole Steyn fleet. But I will never buy another Chevy until it is restored to private ownership. When GM sneezes, America catches a cold. When GM is put on government life-support, it’s America — and the American idea — that’s dying.
Ross Mackenzie of the Richmond Times-Dispatch has interesting health care proposal.
Our fabulous president said the other day, “I will not rest until the dream of health-care reform is achieved in the United States of America.” What do you think about that?
As we all know, he’s a dreamer, and on this one he’s dreaming big time – or smoking something. His is a protracted exercise in wishful thinking.
You don’t believe in reform? You don’t believe our health-care system needs reforming?
Reform means change, presumably for the better. But not all change is prudent or good. Going to hell is a form of change too, yet hell is not somewhere many want to be.
Does the quality of care the nation’s health system provides need improving?
Not much. Americans receive the highest quality health care in the world – bar none. What does need major improving is the nearly dysfunctional system that finances this outstanding care. …
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