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James Kirchick has interesting thoughts about American hegemony.
… What’s clear is that without the United States serving as a benevolent regional hegemon, Honduras would be in a far worse place than the fraught standoff that characterizes the situation today. Whatever America’s history in the region, we have a far better chance of resolving the crisis than do any of the other nations vying for the role of referee. Honduras’s interim government rightly feels bullied by a bloc of left-wing Latin American populists, namely Chavez, who has threatened to invade Honduras if the interim government does not reinstate his ally. Micheletti accused neighboring Nicaragua (led by the former Sandinista rebel Daniel Ortega) of amassing troops on the border. For all we know, a small-scale war could have erupted without American intervention.
As for the regional organization that prophets of American decline would point to as the natural and rightful arbitrator, the OAS has largely discredited itself over the past few years by becoming the plaything of left-wing populists like Chavez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales. Ostensibly meant to promote democracy and good governance, it has recently made way for the readmission of Cuba, which it banned nearly five decades ago after Fidel Castro turned the country into a communist dictatorship.
From the Taiwan Strait to the Persian Gulf to Eastern Europe, the projection of American power keeps the world safe, allows for free commercial exchange, and protects global liberty. …
Theodore Dalrymple, who is a British doctor, tells us a few things we should know about government health care.
… The question of health care is not one of rights but of how best in practice to organize it. America is certainly not a perfect model in this regard. But neither is Britain, where a universal right to health care has been recognized longest in the Western world.
Not coincidentally, the U.K. is by far the most unpleasant country in which to be ill in the Western world. Even Greeks living in Britain return home for medical treatment if they are physically able to do so. …
The National Review Online has a number of interesting posts. One post was on the capture of an al-Qaeda member.
“Not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions.” …
… two Washington Post reporters boldly declared on March 29. The problem with this assertion? It’s simply untrue, as Marc Thiessen explained on National Review Online’s blog The Corner — and as the reporters themselves conceded (without actually admitting they’d gotten anything wrong) in a second story. According to that story, Zubaida became a “font of information” after the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, and only then provided the information that led to the capture of al-Qaeda’s José Padilla — who was apprehended in Chicago on a mission to carry out attacks in the U.S. This brings the tradeoff we face into sharp relief: Sometimes it takes harsh treatment to elicit information about mortal threats. It would be easy if enhanced interrogation didn’t work; we could simply end it without consequence. But the world is not so simple. …
Thomas Sowell brings concise clarity to a number of race-related issues.
Many people hoped that the election of a black President of the United States would mark our entering a “post-racial” era, when we could finally put some ugly aspects of our history behind us.
That is quite understandable. But it takes two to tango. Those of us who want to see racism on its way out need to realize that others benefit greatly from crying racism. They benefit politically, financially, and socially.
Barack Obama has been allied with such people for decades. He found it expedient to appeal to a wider electorate as a post-racial candidate, just as he has found it expedient to say a lot of other popular things– about campaign finance, about transparency in government, about not rushing legislation through Congress without having it first posted on the Internet long enough to be studied– all of which turned to be the direct opposite of what he actually did after getting elected. …
… What does a community organizer do? What he does not do is organize a community. What he organizes are the resentments and paranoia within a community, directing those feelings against other communities, from whom either benefits or revenge are to be gotten, using whatever rhetoric or tactics will accomplish that purpose.
To think that someone who has spent years promoting grievance and polarization was going to bring us all together as president is a triumph of wishful thinking over reality.
Not only Barack Obama’s past, but his present, tell the same story. His appointment of an attorney general who called America “a nation of cowards” for not dialoguing about race was a foretaste of what to expect from Eric Holder.
The way Attorney General Holder has refused to prosecute young black thugs who gathered at a voting site with menacing clubs, in blatant violation of federal laws against intimidating voters, speaks louder than any words from him or his president. …
Roger L. Simon looks at victim-mentality in a post-racial world.
…But when the rules change, when values change, not everyone can adjust with it — not only the racist, but also those who depended on being victims of racism. For all his brilliance, Henry Lewis Gates is evidently such a man. Otherwise, why cry out about being victimized as a “black man in America” before there is any evidence that that is the case? …
…Our universities are havens for this form of nostalgia, so it is not amazing that Gates would suffer from it. You don’t get a job in our academic world by saying America has conquered racism, even to a small degree, even after it has elected an African-American president. You don’t get a job with an NGO either by making such an “outrageous statement.” Large sectors of our society are dependent on an increasingly non-existent racism, not just obvious parties like Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright. We have a whole fabric of our culture endlessly clamoring for a “diversity” that is already accepted. Every business and social activity I have been involved with has for decades been desperate to enlist people-of-color and yet many insist it is not happening and demand more. There is something self-defeating in that, like a societal jack story. The secret wish of these people, buried not far from the surface, is for things not to have changed. They have a nostalgia for an evil past when they could feel self-righteous and victimized. …
A Bill Kristol post suggests this is not a black/white thing, but just “Gates is an insufferable snob thing”.
… In a short note in the August 2007 Travel and Leisure magazine, Gates explains why Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard is his favorite place:
“I started going to Oak Bluffs in 1981 and fell in love with the light. It reminded me of the light in the south of France, near St.-Paul-de-Vence, which for me was a déjà vu experience—it evoked the summer of 1973, when I spent a wonderful time in France with James Baldwin and Josephine Baker. …
Power Line sees the same thing.
A Minneapolis attorney writes to add a note in the matter of Harvard Professor Henry Gates. When asked to come out of his house to talk to the police in connection with the report of a possible break-in, Gates exclaimed: “Why, because I’m a black man in America?” Our correspondent suggests otherwise. He writes:
I know that this Gates incident is getting plenty of play in all quarters right now, but I have yet to see the proper context set out for the police response. In a past life (both before and during law school), I was a Minneapolis cop for eight years. I left in 2002 as a Sergeant supervising a dogwatch shift (9:00 pm -7:00 am), to take my first legal job at a Minneapolis firm. …
…In the Gates incident, the police were not dispatched to simply “check on a couple of guys acting suspiciously around a home.” They were almost certainly responding to a report of a “burglary of dwelling in progress.” This is typically one of the highest-priority calls that an officer will encounter during a shift.
Let me explain, and I know this will require a huge leap of faith for certain segments of the population. The vast majority of police officers are deeply, deeply committed to protecting the public from the type of criminal that would force their way into someone else’s home. When a “burglary of dwelling in progress” call comes over the radio, officers literally drop everything (yes friends, even doughnuts . . .) and risk life-and-limb driving as fast as possible to get to the scene as quickly as possible.
Cops don’t do this simply out of desire to catch “bad-guys.” They do it because — due to prior experience — they assume that the “dwelling” in issue is occupied, and they have seen first-hand the devastation left behind when an innocent family is confronted with a violent home-invasion, burglary/rape scenario, or something similar.
Sergeant Crowley responded out a desire to ensure the safety of Gates’s home and its inhabitants without regard to the race of the homeowner. Period. In return, he was subjected to abusive race-baiting from a purported “scholar” that apparently didn’t rise above the intellectual level of a playground taunt. Gates is, quite simply, a jerk. …
Michael Barone says, beyond the aura, there isn’t much to Obama.
…Obama is not so good at argument. Inspiration is one thing, persuasion another. He created the impression on the campaign trail that he was familiar with major issues and readily ticked off his positions on them. But he has not proved so good at legislating.
One reason, perhaps, is that he has had little practice. He served as a legislator for a dozen years before becoming president, but was only rarely an active one. He spent one of his eight years as an Illinois state senator running unsuccessfully for Congress and two of them running successfully for U.S. senator. He spent two of his years in the U.S. Senate running for president. During all of his seven non-campaign years as a legislator, he was in the minority party.
In other words, he’s never done much work putting legislation together — especially legislation that channels vast flows of money and affects the workings of parts of the economy that deeply affect people’s lives. This lack of experience is starting to show. On the major legislation considered this year — the stimulus, cap and trade, health care — the Obama White House has done little or nothing to set down markers, to provide guidance, to establish boundaries and no-go areas. …
Scrappleface says that Obamacare will cover Blue Dog Syndrome.