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Go figure! Gallop releases a poll that says we’re becoming more conservative. Peter Wehner comments.
… This is part of a broader movement we’re seeing since Obama was elected president. The country, by about a two-to-one margin, sees itself moving more toward conservatism than liberalism. And even in the Age of Obama, the tide seems to be with rather than against conservatism. If an ideological realignment is going on, it seems to be somewhat in the opposite direction of what Obama and his supporters had hoped for.
It’s much too early to make any definitive judgments about things at this point; the significance of Obamaism to American conservatism depends on what happens once the effects of his actions hit shore. But I think it’s fair to say that at this point, the public’s wariness about the course the president has set us on is growing and resistance to his policies is increasing. …
Mark Steyn repeats his warning about state health care. This is the ball game.
Health care is a game-changer. The permanent game-changer. The pendulum will swing, and one day, despite their best efforts, the Republicans will return to power, and, in the right circumstances, the bailouts and cap-and-trade and Government Motors and much of the rest can be reversed. But the government annexation of health care will prove impossible to roll back. It alters the relationship between the citizen and the state and, once that transformation is effected, you can click your ruby slippers all you want but you’ll never get back to Kansas. …
… Government-directed health care is a profound assault on the concept of citizenship. It deforms national politics very quickly, and ensures that henceforth elections will always be fought on the Left’s terms. I find it hard to believe President Obama and his chums haven’t looked at Canada and Europe and concluded that health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. He doesn’t say that, of course. He says his objective is to “control costs.” Which is the one thing that won’t happen. Even now, health-care costs rise far faster under Medicare than in the private sector. …
… “Morality” is always the justification. Inaugurating Britain’s National Health Service on July 5, 1948, the health minister, Nye Bevan, crowed: “We now have the moral leadership of the world.” That’s how Obamacare is being sold: Even the New York Times reports (in paragraph 38) that 77 percent of Americans are content with their health care. But they feel bad about all those poor uninsured waifs earning 75 grand a year. So it will make us all feel better if the government “does something.” Not literally “feel better”: We’ll be feeling sicker, longer, in dirtier waiting rooms. But our disease-ridden bodies will be warmed by the glow of knowing we did the right thing. …
… the acceptance of the principle that individual health is so complex its management can only be outsourced to the state is a concession no conservative should make. More than any other factor, it dramatically advances the statist logic for remorseless encroachments on self-determination. It’s incompatible with a republic of self-governing citizens. The state cannot guarantee against every adversity and, if it attempts to, it can do so only at an enormous cost to liberty. A society in which you’re free to choose your cable package, your iTunes downloads, and who ululates the best on American Idol but in which the government takes care of peripheral stuff like your body is a society no longer truly free.
In a nanny state, big government becomes a kind of religion: the church as state. Tommy Douglas, the driving force behind Canadian health care, tops polls of all-time greatest Canadians. In Britain, after the Tube bombings, Gordon Brown began mulling over the creation of what he called a “British equivalent of the U.S. Fourth of July,” a new national holiday to bolster British identity. The Labour party think-tank, the Fabian Society, proposed that the new “British Day” be July 5, the day the National Health Service was created. Because the essence of contemporary British identity is waiting two years for a hip operation.
They can call it Dependence Day.
Robert Samuelson asks if economists are so smart, how come they missed the freight train bearing down on us in the last few years?
… One intriguing subplot of the economic crisis is the failure of most economists to predict it. Here we have the most spectacular economic and financial crisis in decades — possibly since the Great Depression — and the one group that spends most of its waking hours analyzing the economy basically missed it. Oh, a few economists can legitimately claim some foresight. But they are a handful. Most were as surprised as the rest of us.
Why? This is a compelling question without, as yet, a compelling answer. Indeed, so far as I can tell, economists have not engaged in rigorous self-criticism to explain their lapse. We’ve had some casual theories and some partisan recriminations: “Free-market ideology” is a standard scapegoat on the assumption that most economists are “free-market ideologues.” But that’s not true. In any case, the crisis surprised liberal and conservative economists, Republicans and Democrats alike. …
Bret Stephens on the wise fool, Robert McNamara. He compares him to another wise fool. Guess who?
Dwight D. Eisenhower famously said that “in preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable.” Robert S. McNamara, who spent many years thinking about the Vietnam War, first as an architect and then as a critic (and getting it wrong on both ends), was a man who believed mainly in plans.
McNamara, who died yesterday at 93, will go down as a cautionary tale for the ages, and perhaps none more than for the Age of Obama. Whatever else distinguishes JFK’s New Frontier or LBJ’s Great Society from Barack Obama’s “New Foundation,” this too is an era of soaring rhetoric, big plans and boundless self-regard, issued by an administration convinced it can apply technocratic, top-down solutions to huge and unpredictable systems — the banking, auto and health-care industries, for instance, or the climate. These are people deeply impressed by their own smarts, the ones for whom the phrase “the best and the brightest” has been scrubbed of its intended irony.
When McNamara — the “Whiz Kid” from Ford — was first named defense secretary, in December 1960, Time magazine gushed that he “reads widely and well (current choices: The Phenomenon of Man, W.W. Rostow’s The Stages of Growth). . . . His mind, says a friend who has seen him in Ann Arbor discussions, ‘is a beautiful instrument, free from leanings and adhesions, calm and analytical.’” …
Jonathan Tobin gives McNamara a once over.
… It would have been far better for McNamara to spend more time apologizing for his inept micromanaging of the war effort that squandered American and Vietnamese lives on a massive scale. It was ironic that in his later years he curried favor among the liberal intellectuals by calling Curtis LeMay a “war criminal” for the massive bombing of Japanese cities in 1945. While in control of the effort in Vietnam, he attempted the opposite strategy, employing American air power in minute pinprick attacks on selected targets in North Vietnam rather than using an overwhelming conventional attack. His tactic of gradual escalation only convinced the North Vietnamese that the Americans were not serious about winning the war and inflicted no serious damage. The lives lost in this campaign were simply thrown away. The North was not brought to the negotiating table until McNamara’s flawed ideas were discarded. …
… McNamara would have also done better to think again about the consequences of his 11 years at the head of the World Bank and its massive building projects in the Third World. Though it would be wrong to dismiss everything that institution has accomplished as meaningless, the truth is, most of the investments it made around the globe during his time as its head served more to reinforce the control of corrupt local elites than to aid the poor. …
Kimberley Strassel follows up on the EPA’s silencing of Alan Carlin, a man-made global warming skeptic.
… Mr. Carlin and a colleague presented a 98-page analysis arguing the agency should take another look, as the science behind man-made global warming is inconclusive at best. The analysis noted that global temperatures were on a downward trend. It pointed out problems with climate models. It highlighted new research that contradicts apocalyptic scenarios. “We believe our concerns and reservations are sufficiently important to warrant a serious review of the science by EPA,” the report read.
The response to Mr. Carlin was an email from his boss, Al McGartland, forbidding him from “any direct communication” with anyone outside of his office with regard to his analysis. When Mr. Carlin tried again to disseminate his analysis, Mr. McGartland decreed: “The administrator and the administration have decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. . . . I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.” (Emphasis added.)
Mr. McGartland blasted yet another email: “With the endangerment finding nearly final, you need to move on to other issues and subjects. I don’t want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research etc, at least until we see what EPA is going to do with Climate.” Ideology? Nope, not here. Just us science folk. Honest.
The emails were unearthed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. …
Turns out this summer’s heat wave in Europe has created havoc with France’s river-based nuclear generating capacity. London Times has the story.
France is being forced to import electricity from Britain to cope with a summer heatwave that has helped to put a third of its nuclear power stations out of action.
With temperatures across much of France surging above 30C this week, EDF’s reactors are generating the lowest level of electricity in six years, forcing the state-owned utility to turn to Britain for additional capacity.
Fourteen of France’s 19 nuclear power stations are located inland and use river water rather than seawater for cooling. When water temperatures rise, EDF is forced to shut down the reactors to prevent their casings from exceeding 50C. …