Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Elliott Abrams notes that we have seen this type of disastrous foreign policy before, but reminds us that the American people see things differently than the White House.
The appearance in Washington last week of Iran’s foreign minister, while the blood is not yet dry from his government’s continuing suppression of student protests, is a reminder of the disastrous foreign policy path the Obama administration has chosen. Not so long ago, proponents of a stronger U.S. foreign policy faced a similar policy of weakness and accommodation. The 1970s saw some pretty dark days of “détente”–when Gerald Ford refused to see Alexander Solzhenitsyn; when the United States allowed Cuban troops to flow into Angola; and when, in the single year of 1979, Jimmy Carter watched a small band of would-be commies take Grenada, the Sandinistas take Nicaragua, and the Soviets go into Afghanistan–not to mention the shah’s fall and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s takeover of Iran.
One begins to wonder how far we will drift into a new period of generalized disaster. In Honduras, we back the Hugo Chávez acolyte and say we won’t respect November’s free elections. In Israel, we latch on to the bizarre theory that settlement growth is the key obstacle to Middle East peace and try to bludgeon a newly elected prime minister into a freeze that is politically impossible–and also useless in actually achieving a peace settlement. In Eastern Europe, we discard a missile defense agreement with Poland and the Czechs and leave them convinced we do not mean to fight off Russian hegemony in the former Soviet sphere.
Manouchehr Mottaki, foreign minister of Iran, visited Washington, as noted, after such visits had been forbidden for a decade. High-ranking American officials have made six visits to Syria, even while the government of Iraq and our commanding general there complain of Syrian support for murderous jihadists. The highest ranking U.S. official to visit Cuba in decades recently toured Castro’s tropical paradise. The president won’t see the Dalai Lama, however, for fear of offending the Chinese. …
…And that’s the final lesson, of Reagan as well as Scoop Jackson: Be of good cheer. No whining, no nasty personal attacks. It’s a political mistake, it’s unattractive, it’s self-defeating, and it’s unwarranted. The American people think our country is indeed “defined by our differences” with murderous Islamist groups and repressive regimes. They don’t agree that our “interests are shared” with such groups, and they believe friends deserve better treatment than enemies. We’re on the American people’s side, and they’re on ours in this struggle over our country’s relations with the world.
Today it’s Dana Milbank’s turn to be the media guy who turns on the new administration.
Helen Thomas is 89 years old and requires some assistance to get to and from the daily White House briefing. Yet her backbone has proved stronger than that of the president she covers.
On Thursday afternoon, Thomas gave a clinic in fortitude to President Obama’s spokesman, Robert Gibbs, during the briefing. “Has the president given up on the public option?” she inquired from her front-row-middle seat.
The press secretary laughed at this repetition of a common Thomas inquiry, but this questioner, who has covered every president since Kennedy, wasn’t about to be silenced. “I ask it day after day because it has great meaning in this country, and you never answer it,” she said. …
…”You’re not going to get it,” she advised.
“Then why do you keep asking me?” Gibbs inquired.
“Because I want your conscience to bother you,” Thomas replied. The room erupted; Gibbs reddened.
Actually, conscience isn’t the problem for Gibbs and his boss; it’s spine. Thomas’s question got at an Obama administration trait that is puzzling opponents and demoralizing supporters: Why isn’t the president more decisive and forceful? On many of the most pressing issues — the public option in health reform, troop levels in Afghanistan, sanctions against Iran — the administration has hewed to hemming and hawing. …
Frank Rich too. Lisa Schiffren posts at the Corner.
…And then I read Frank Rich’s column in today’s New York Times. I despise pretty much everything political I have ever read by Rich. He very sincerely seems to believe that weakness is powerful, that the U.S. should not win any conflicts, that there is no honest conservatism, only hatred of the world’s have-nots. Normally I don’t read him, but there the column was, posted on my favorite aggregator site. And whoa. What a column. Read it here.
Barack Obama promised a change from this revolving-door, behind-closed-doors collaboration between special interests and government. He vowed to “do our business in the light of day” — with health care negotiations broadcast on C-Span — and to “restore the vital trust between people and their government.” He said, “I intend to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over.” That those lobbyists would so extravagantly flaunt their undiminished role shows just how little they believe that a new sheriff has arrived in Dodge. . . .
Obama’s promise to make Americans trust the government again was not just another campaign bullet point; it’s the foundation of his brand of governance and essential to his success in office. At the first anniversary of the TARP bailout of the banks, we can see how far he has to go. Americans’ continued suspicion that Washington is in cahoots with powerful interests . . . is contributing to their confusion and skepticism about what’s happening out of view in the battle over health care reform.
The public is not wrong. The administration’s legislative deals with the pharmaceutical companies were made in back rooms. Business Week reported in early August that the UnitedHealth Group and its fellow insurance giants had already quietly rounded up moderate Democrats in the House to block any public health care option that would compete with them for business. …
…Got it? Frank Rich, of all people, concludes that ”the public is not wrong” to mistrust the intentions of an administration that wishes to revamp one-sixth of the economy, given the attendant realities, including serious corruption. This is actual progress in the debate, even if it doesn’t quite get to the libertarian understanding that when government controls the economy, precisely that sort of corruption is inevitable — even if the new president was serious about stopping it. Bravo, Frank.
There’s plenty of Olympicfreude to fill up a couple of days of Pickings. We’ll indulge ourselves with Jennifer Rubin.
As the media and political observers pick over the remains of the failed Olympics-bid debacle, the debate has boiled down to this: Will it be a temporary embarrassment for the president or a long-term problem, an emblem of overreach and underachievement? There is more to this than simply predicting the toll it will take on Obama. Both the rebuff and the Obama team’s stunned reaction have stripped the veneer from the Obama mystique. Suddenly, the entire country realizes that that there is no “master plan” behind what Obama does. In fact, there may be no plan at all….
…Could it be that there is less to Obama and his team of geniuses than we were led to believe? Maybe Obama’s domestic and foreign-policy agenda is all based on wishful thinking: a cost-neutral health-care plan will emerge from Congress, talks with Iran will produce results, sweet-talking the Russian bear will pan out, there is some magic pill to achieve victory in Afghanistan that has escaped the nation’s leading counterinsurgency gurus, and private-sector jobs will return despite the anti-employer policies flowing from Washington. …
…The IOU rebuff may turn out to be Obama’s man-behind-the-curtain moment, straight out of the Wizard of Oz. It may be that the whole Hope and Change routine has been little more than a lot of cheesy special effects—and a cynical game to convince the public that the great and powerful leader really is worthy of awe.
The people are finally figuring out the act.
Mark Steyn says that federal health care will be as good as federal bridge-building.
…Health care isn’t really that complicated, not for you and your dependents. To be sure, if you need a particular operation or course of treatment, it can require a four- or five-figure sum. But, in the course of his life, the average American makes many four-, five-, and even six-figure purchases: They’re called, just to cite the obvious examples, cars and homes. Very few of us stroll into the realtor’s with an attaché case containing a quarter-million dollars in small bills. Yet, remarkably, most of us manage to arrange the acquisition of houses and automobiles without routing the transaction through some vast federal bureaucracy. If you attempt to design a system for hundreds of millions of people, it’s bound to be complicated. Ask your nearest Soviet commissar, whose five-year plans we now seem to be emulating in both their boundless optimism and their entirely predictable consequences.
A few weeks back I mentioned a couple of bridges in a neighboring town of mine, both on dirt roads serving maybe a dozen houses. Bridge A: The town was prevailed upon to apply for some state/town 80/20 funding plan, which morphed under the stimulus into some fed/state 60/40 funding plan. Current estimated cost: $655,000. The town’s on the hook for 20 percent of the state’s 40 percent — or $52,400. There’s no estimated year of completion, or even of commencement, and the temporary bridge the town threw up has worn out.
Bridge B: Following their experience with Bridge A, the town replaced this one themselves, in a matter of weeks. Total cost: $30,000.
Government is simple provided two conditions are met: You do it locally, and you do it without unions. …
…Building a bridge is easy and affordable: America’s settlers did it all the time. What makes it complex and unaffordable is statism. A couple of seasons back, the preferred shorthand for government waste was “Bridge to Nowhere.” In fact, the bridge leads somewhere quite specific, and, if you don’t like where it’s headed, you’d better do something about it before we’re any farther across the river.
Veronique de Rugy looks at the growing federal deficit.
The Bush-era deficits were bad. I know. I spent eight years complaining about the president’s lack of fiscal responsibly (here and here for instance). I even wrote that Republicans during Bush’s time in office made French socialists look like Reagan. However, President Obama’s new projected deficits are truly frightening. And the worse part: we haven’t seen it all yet. …
…First, while President Obama is fond of promoting what he calls a “new ethic of responsibility”—in fact he named his first budget, for fiscal 2010, “A New Era of Responsibility”—that is a misrepresentation of his actual budget plan. For each of Obama’s years in office, the deficit is projected to be larger than any year during Bush’s terms.
Second, Obama is right to note that he inherited a large deficit in fiscal 2009. But as we can see here, he is responsible for growing the deficit beyond expectations in fiscal 2009 and thereafter. In fact, in its January 2009 projections, the CBO built in most of the Bush-era policy spending, including the TARP bailout (which President Obama voted for as a senator) and the takeovers of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In spite of his rhetoric, President Obama bears most of the responsibility for the red part of the bar in fiscal 2009, which includes, among other things, some auto bailouts and $31 billion of additional funding for the omnibus bill, the share of the stimulus funding spent in that fiscal year.
Third, Obama’s deficits are frightening but they promise to get worse. Each month that goes by the president adds spending to the deficit. The August 2009 projections for instance, do not include any of the president’s healthcare reform spending and they assume that the “temporary” stimulus spending will not be prolonged past fiscal 2011. Finally, they also assume that the economy will recover soon and that it will grow enough to generate increasing tax revenue, in spite of the president’s plan to impose new taxes and regulations on the private sector. In other words, the deficit will likely continue to deteriorate beyond the current projections. …
We have National Review shorts today. Here are two:
Chief Justice John Roberts was taking questions from students at the University of Michigan Law School. Someone asked him whether too many justices come from elite schools. Roberts, a graduate of Harvard College and Law School, said no: “Some went to Yale.”
The peak of William Safire’s early career is a twice-told tale, but it deserves one more telling: As a 29-year-old PR man, he lured Vice President Richard Nixon and Premier Nikita Khrushchev to an exhibit of a “typical American house” that he was tending in Moscow, then snapped them debating the merits of capitalism. The photo made instant history; the haunch-faced bureaucrat at Nixon’s side was a young Leonid Brezhnev. Safire wrote speeches for Nixon and Spiro Agnew, then in 1973 began a twice-weekly column for the New York Times. They billed him as their conservative voice, which he wasn’t, quite: Safire was an anti-Communist liberal Republican. He had a sprightly style, a big bag of tricks (year-end predictions, first-person forays into leaders’ thoughts), and a willingness to work the phones and to chase down malefactors of every stripe, including liberal Democrats. He was missed when he retired in 2005; is missed now that he has died, age 79. R.I.P.
The Economist reports on an amazing advancement in the field of medicine.
DIALYSIS is not as bad as dying, but it is pretty unpleasant, nonetheless. It involves being hooked up to a huge machine, three times a week, in order to have your blood cleansed of waste that would normally be voided, via the kidneys, as urine. To make matters worse, three times a week does not appear to be enough. Research now suggests that daily dialysis is better. But who wants to tied to a machine—often in a hospital or a clinic—for hours every day for the rest of his life?
Victor Gura, of the University of California, Los Angeles, hopes to solve this problem with an invention that is now undergoing clinical trials. By going back to basics, he has come up with a completely new sort of dialyser—one you can wear. …
William Amelia in the WSJ, writes about the author and the story that brought the short story to Russian literature.
In his short, tormented life, the Russian novelist Nikolai Vassilyevich Gogol (1809-1852) managed to write for the ages. His oeuvre is huge. Among the familiar masterworks are “Dead Souls,” the first great epic Russian novel; “The Inspector General,” a dramatic success; and volumes of Ukrainian and Petersburg tales, rich in folklore and culture with a froth of the supernatural. He is regarded as one of the major influences in the development of realism in Russian literature.
But it is “The Overcoat,” the last story that Gogol wrote—perhaps his finest and most famous—that particularly characterizes his legacy. It is a remarkable piece of literary art, displaying Gogol’s gift of caricature and imaginative invention. With “The Overcoat,” Gogol introduced the short story as a literary form in Russia, providing a new model for other writers of the time. No one said it better than Dostoevsky: “We all came out of Gogol’s overcoat.” …
…Vladimir Nabokov allowed that the real Gogol was found only in “The Overcoat.” “When he tried to write in the Russian tradition,” Nabokov said, “he lost all trace of talent. But in the immortal ‘The Overcoat’ he let himself go and became the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced.”