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Election commentary from David Warren.
The elections last week for the European Parliament were probably more open and less rigged than the election yesterday for the Iranian presidency, but we should not jump to any further conclusions. …
… In Iran, the nominal government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been supposedly under challenge from the more “moderate” (symbolic language) Mir Hossein Mousavi; but Ahmadinejad offered only a change of veneer from that of his “reforming” predecessor, Mohammad Khatami. The reality is that the Iranian president is subservient to Iran’s council of ayatollahs, as the European Parliament is to Europe’s technocratic ayatollahs. In both cases the vote is popular theatre.
We are going to return to the kid’s Cairo speech. Jennifer Rubin is first because she introduces Marty Peretz’ comments from The New Republic.
… It (the speech) seems more likely to be a grand effort not to bother his listeners with too many inconvenient facts which might suggest we’re not on the verge of a new Obama era of peaceful co-existence. If one tells the whole story – of Zionism, of wars, of efforts to give the Palestinians their state, of brutality toward women in Muslim countries, and of the impact of a nuclear-armed Iran on the region – then Obama might not be so successful in his charm offensive. And the people who were annoyed with past American administrations for bringing these things up would now be annoyed with him. Where’s the popularity boost in all that?
Moreover, people might scratch their heads, wondering why he persists in his pose of moral equivalence rather than dealing with the fundamental issues: the Palestinians’ refusal to recognize a Jewish state, the lack of a viable negotiator with whom Israel can engage, the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran which will blackmail its neighbors and the egregious violation of human (and specifically, women’s) rights by Israel’s neighbors. Come to think of it, why isn’t he?
Perhaps Martin Peretz has seen enough of Obama, just as he saw enough of Deval Patrick.
“I mean, in a way, Obama’s standing above the country, above–above the world, he’s sort of God.” These drug-addicted words come from Evan Thomas, a longtime editor at Newsweek. He uttered them on Chris Matthews’s MSNBC show. Such words would wreak havoc on any person’s ego, even Barack Obama’s. It also would enrage his enemies.
After all, the president has told us that he is a mere student of history, and that he is.
But history these days is no longer a discipline inclined to defend the truthfulness of its claims or the reasonableness of its arguments or the plausibility of its conclusions. More and more, history has become a competition between and among narratives, self-consciously disdainful of what we used to think of as fact. …
… So, in the end, the grand conciliator violated his own principle and spoke asymmetrically: He was very tough on Israel, but he was vague to the Palestinians and to the Arabs. The president was not at all specific about what he wished from people who are still enemies of the Jewish state. Every Israeli concession requires a reciprocal concession, and not just words. But even words are difficult to extract from the Palestinian Authority, the so-called moderates. Mahmoud Abbas said only a fortnight ago that he had only to wait on what Israel surrenders. No reproach from anybody in Washington, except a few honest journalists.
There was one startling passage in Obama’s speech that very few commentators have noticed, perhaps because they also don’t know their history. “Islam has always been a part of America’s story. The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco. In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, our second president, John Adams, wrote, ‘The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims.’” Now, as Michael Oren recounts in his magisterial history of America’s enmeshment in the region, Power, Faith, and Fantasy, the fact is that this treaty, which imposed a ransom of money and ships on the Americans, was a fraud. Moreover, within four years, Tripoli captured another U.S. ship and went on to take into captivity other American vessels and their crews. Suffice it to say that wars, declared by the Pasha of Tripoli and undeclared, continued with more death and more ransom, until 1815. Let it be hoped that the Treaty of Tripoli in which President Obama delights so much will not be a precedent for the agreement he wants to forge between Israel and the Palestinians or between the United States and Iran. It is also a scandal that no one on his intimate staff told him the facts–if, indeed, they knew them–about the settlements with the Barbary Pirates. They are a precedent for nothing, except cheap getting-to-yes ecumenicism.
Jennifer Rubin posts on Obama the Bully.
Peter Beinart pens a column in which he, I think inadvertently, suggests just how ill-conceived Obama’s overt hostility toward Israel is. Beinart suggests the president is doing it to show he’s a tough guy, and because he can get away with it. He writes:
By taking on the Israeli government over the issue of settlement growth, Obama is showing that he’s a gambler overseas as well. Despite the conventional wisdom that an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal is impossible anytime soon, he seems hell-bent on pursuing one. And if he breaks china in the process, so be it.
Had Obama disclosed during the campaign that “broken china” included the Israel-U.S. relationship, one wonders if he would have garnered much support from voters who think the U.S.-Israeli relationship is so precious and valuable that it shouldn’t be discarded in a macho display by a neophyte president who has no game-plan for dealing with real threats to American security. (No, not ad-ons to East Jerusalem settlements, but Russia, North Korea and Iran.) …
Ed Morrissey has noticed the same thing in the auto task force.
When we last left the negotiations between Chrysler’s senior bondholders and Barack Obama’s auto task force, Thomas Lauria and his clients alleged that the government used intimidation tactics and threatened to sic the White House press corps on individuals if they didn’t give up their rights to allow the unions to win in the bankruptcy. Congress took an interest in this”madman” theory of the Presidency and got access to some e-mails floating between the task force and an analyst. Rep, Steven LaTourette (R-OH) reads from the e-mails, in which the auto task force calls Lauria — their attorney — a “terrorist” and refuses to negotiate after a Chrylser expert consulted him: …
Corner post says Obama Care is getting less inevitable day after day.
The administration and Democrats in Congress have been trying to cultivate the impression in the media that passage of an Obama-style, sweeping health-care reform bill is all but inevitable — the only questions are about details and when.
But Obamacare was never inevitable (see my post from April), and it is getting less so by the day.
The reason is simple: There is no coherent and credible plan to pay for it. Most observers expect the legislation will cost somewhere between $1.0 trillion and $1.5 trillion over ten years.
This week we got a glimpse into the challenge the Democrats are now facing. …
Yuval Levin and Bill Kristol expand on those thoughts in the Weekly Standard.
As long as the health care reform plan envisioned by the Obama administration and congressional Democrats was just a series of slogans, it was easy for the left to build support for it and difficult for the right to imagine how it could be stopped. It is hard, after all, to object to vague promises to cut health care costs and cover the uninsured and improve health outcomes. The brute fact of Democratic domination of Washington gave key health industry players an incentive to look as if they wanted to cooperate with the Obama administration. The whole affair began to assume an air of inevitability.
But as general slogans give way to particular plans, reality is setting in. Outlines and drafts of the key House and Senate bills began to emerge last week, and the grim reality of what the Democrats in fact have in mind has started to exercise an undeniable effect upon the politics of health care.
The fact is, the Democrats’ proposals are a liberal wish list of expansions of the role of government in health care, combining an array of taxes, regulations, incentives, and mandates aimed over time to create a massive and unfunded new entitlement that would limit patient choices, ration care, and bankrupt the Treasury. The Democrats’ plan would force everyone into the system through an individual mandate and lead employers to drop their health coverage; their new public insurance plan would then price private insurers out of the game and attract the refugees from private coverage into the public system. All of this would put us well on the road to government-run health care. …
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