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John Fund sends off Bob Novak.
Robert Novak had planned to continue writing his three-times-a-week newspaper column and appearing on TV as an analyst until, as he told me, “the good Lord decides my time is up.” The discovery of a malignant brain tumor a year ago upset his plans and forced him into early retirement. But he continued writing occasional articles until late last year and was able to lucidly discuss current events after that as he battled the disease that claimed him yesterday at age 78. …
… When I joined Bob and Rowly as the first reporter ever hired to work with the duo back in 1982, I asked Bob what made him most proud about the column. He told me he was pleased that every column the pair wrote contained at least one nugget of news that hadn’t appeared elsewhere. …
Same from John Podhoretz.
… He was a difficult man in many ways, but I always found him interesting, lively, and friendly. And I have to say that, toward the end of his life, he wrote a riveting I-can’t-quite-believe-I’m-reading-this memoir entitled The Prince of Darkness, which may offer, in its unsparing portrait of his own character and how he maneuvered his way through a 50-year career, the most accurate (and most dispiriting) picture of life in Washington and the journalism game published in my lifetime. It was an unexpected achievement, because he surely knew he was leaving his readers with a bad taste in their mouths. But he was determined to get it all down and get it right, and he did.
Left libertarian, Nat Hentoff, formerly of the Village Voice, says now we have a White House that makes him fearful. He is reacting to the end of life possibilities of ObamaCare. Pickerhead thinks we’ll have “life scores” just as we have credit scores. We won’t even have death panels. Some government creep will create some scoring process that will total up what we’re worth.
I was not intimidated during J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI hunt for reporters like me who criticized him. I railed against the Bush-Cheney war on the Bill of Rights without blinking. But now I am finally scared of a White House administration. President Obama’s desired health care reform intends that a federal board (similar to the British model) — as in the Center for Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation in a current Democratic bill — decides whether your quality of life, regardless of your political party, merits government-controlled funds to keep you alive. Watch for that life-decider in the final bill. It’s already in the stimulus bill signed into law.
The members of that ultimate federal board will themselves not have examined or seen the patient in question. For another example of the growing, tumultuous resistance to “Dr. Obama,” particularly among seniors, there is a July 29 Washington Times editorial citing a line from a report written by a key adviser to Obama on cost-efficient health care, prominent bioethicist Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel (brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel).
Emanuel writes about rationing health care for older Americans that “allocation (of medical care) by age is not invidious discrimination.” (The Lancet, January 2009) He calls this form of rationing — which is fundamental to Obamacare goals — “the complete lives system.” You see, at 65 or older, you’ve had more life years than a 25-year-old. As such, the latter can be more deserving of cost-efficient health care than older folks. ..
Peter Wehner and Michael Gerson, former Bush W aides, have a lengthy and thoughtful piece on ideas and issues with which to rebuild the Republican Party.
Here are some excerpts:
…A moral component to our foreign policy is, moreover, part of the American DNA. It would have been impossible to maintain the seemingly endless exertions of the Cold War without the American people’s instinctual concern for those held captive and their no less instinctual abhorrence of oppression. The same is true in the conflict with Islamist extremism and other current global challenges. Americans have an interest in liberty and human rights because they are Americans—and because America’s safety is served by the hope and health of others. Republicans can be forthright about the foreign-policy tradition that mixes toughness with generosity, the willingness to confront threats forcefully with the active promotion of development, health, and human rights. Since the midpoint of the last century, this has been the GOP’s watchword. Among younger Americans focused on global issues like genocide, poverty, women’s rights, religious liberty, malaria, and HIV/AIDS, it can resonate loudly. …
…Republicans will also have to put forth a comprehensive reform agenda. There is no shortage of issues at the federal level: converting the labyrinthine U.S. tax code into something far less burdensome and far more family-friendly; repairing a budget process that is broken, corrupt, and inefficient; developing a modern-day regulatory system in the aftermath of the collapse of our financial institutions; remaking a tort system that imposes wholly unnecessary upward pressure on the costs of health care; insisting that foreign-aid expenditures are both generous and outcome-oriented; and so forth. …
…As it happens, the GOP has successful reformers to whom it can look to and learn from, including popular governors or former governors like Mitch Daniels, Tim Pawlenty, Bobby Jindal, and Jeb Bush. Daniels’s health-care plan in Indiana facilitated the transfer of money previously consigned to Medicaid into individual health-savings accounts and simultaneously extended coverage to more than 130,000 uninsured individuals. In a state carried by Obama last year, Daniels won re-election by 18 points. The Daniels plan is worth emulating on its own merits. Politically, it is worth studying as a case history in what the country cries out for: leadership dedicated to fixing what can be fixed at a cost that can be afforded and in a spirit of inclusiveness untainted by class resentment and a manipulated antipathy toward “the rich.” …
…It is, in, fact, vital for Republican leaders to press the case for economic growth in general. Americans achieve their dreams not through the redistribution of wealth but through the creation of wealth. As the late Jack Kemp never tired of stressing, growth-oriented economic policies are a simple matter of justice and equity. At the same time, they offer fertile opportunity for innovation by applying conservative and free-market ideas to the task of encouraging savings and wealth-building among the aspiring poor, rather than debt and dependency. Such innovative ideas can range from local efforts to nurture financial literacy to ambitious KidSave proposals that would create savings accounts for every child at birth, subsidized for low-income families. Whatever its particular expression in policy, asset-building should be a hallmark of the Republican party, on the sound theory that ownership encourages social mobility, community, and family stability. …
Thomas Sowell gives clarity to the government taking over our healthcare decisions. He ends with a discussion of the controversial ‘death panels’.
…As for a “death panel,” no politician would ever use that phrase when trying to get a piece of legislation passed. “End of life” care under the “guidance” of “some independent group” sounds so much nicer — and these are the terms President Obama used in an interview with the New York Times back on April 14th.
He said, “the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out there.” He added: “It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. That is why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance.” …
A Corner post suggests Cheney’s memoirs are widely anticipated within the beltway.
Summertime in Wyoming is usually quite pleasant for the Cheney family. Last Thursday, the day before Lynne Cheney’s 68th birthday party, the Washington Post soured spirits just a bit with this headline: “Cheney Uncloaks His Frustration With Bush.” The front-page story detailed, with the help of numerous unnamed “associates,” how former vice president Dick Cheney’s upcoming book will supposedly open a “second front” against “Cheney’s White House partner of eight years, George W. Bush.” Team Cheney was not amused.
“From the first sentence, the piece was clearly biased and inaccurate,” Mary Matalin, Cheney’s former White House counselor, told NRO. Matalin now works as editor-in-chief of Threshold Editions — the conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster — which will publish the former veep’s yet-to-be-titled memoir in spring 2011.
What irked Matalin was the Post’s reliance on whispers from sources alleged to have been present at the “informal conversations” Cheney is having with colleagues — where, the Post reports, the former vice president “broke form when asked about his regrets.” Matalin says “inaccuracies were evident since I was privy to what transpired at the book meetings. What was claimed to be said in them and about the vice president’s book was flatly and categorically untrue.”
Matalin, though miffed about the Post piece, admits it did get one thing right: Cheney’s book will uncloak many new things — just not a vendetta against George W. Bush. Cheney’s sense of humor, for starters, will be on full display. “He has some slap-your-mama funny tales from the around the world,” she says. …
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, for the WSJ, reviews The Anti-Communist Manifesto and gives a brief biography of each author who had a book selected for this work.
Although the Cold War was a “great game” played out on the field of diplomacy, a conflict between military superpowers that sometimes turned hot, it was also the 20th century’s war of religion: a clash of beliefs and a battle of the books. This mortal combat between Communism and liberal democracy produced a vast literature, some books famous in their day, some famous still.
Now John V. Fleming has had the excellent idea of telling the story of four of them, and the result is the readable and fascinating “The Anti-Communist Manifestos.” It may be all the better because Mr. Fleming, an emeritus professor at Princeton, isn’t a modern historian by trade but an authority on medieval literature who knows how to read a text and its context. His four manifestos are “Darkness at Noon,” Arthur Koestler’s novel about the Soviet show trials, and three memoirs: “Out of the Night,” by the pseudonymous “Jan Valtin,” a mysterious Communist agitator; “I Chose Freedom,” by the Soviet defector Victor Kravchenko; and “Witness,” by Whittaker Chambers, best known to history as the man who accused Alger Hiss of espionage.
These books are, of course, chosen from a long potential list that could include eyewitness accounts of the early Soviet regime—like Bertrand Russell’s “The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism” (1920) and Emma Goldman’s “My Disillusionment in Russia” (1923)—or George Orwell’s “1984.” Orwell’s book has just passed its 60th birthday and has been described as the most influential novel ever written.
But Mr. Fleming’s quartet has a linking theme. All his authors were anticommunists who had once been Communist activists. …