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Responsible governing means making tough choices. Obama has generals who give realistic assessments about Afghanistan. Obama also has advisers who promise everything can be won for one low price, or alternatively that promises can be broken, explains Charles Krauthammer.
…The White House began leaking an alternate strategy, apparently proposed (invented?) by Vice President Biden, for achieving immaculate victory with arm’s-length use of cruise missiles, Predator drones and special ops.
The irony is that no one knows more about this kind of warfare than Gen. McChrystal. He was in charge of exactly this kind of “counterterrorism” in Iraq for nearly five years, killing thousands of bad guys in hugely successful under-the-radar operations.
When the world’s expert on this type of counterterrorism warfare recommends precisely the opposite strategy — “counterinsurgency,” meaning a heavy-footprint, population-protecting troop surge — you have the most convincing of cases against counterterrorism by the man who most knows its potential and its limits. And McChrystal was emphatic in his recommendation: To go any other way than counterinsurgency would lose the war.
Yet his commander in chief, young Hamlet, frets, demurs, agonizes. His domestic advisers, led by Rahm Emanuel, tell him if he goes for victory, he’ll become LBJ, the domestic visionary destroyed by a foreign war. His vice president holds out the chimera of painless counterterrorism success.
Against Emanuel and Biden stand Gen. David Petraeus, the world’s foremost expert on counterinsurgency (he saved Iraq with it), and Stanley McChrystal, the world’s foremost expert on counterterrorism. Whose recommendation on how to fight would you rely on?
Less than two months ago — Aug. 17 in front of an audience of veterans — the president declared Afghanistan to be “a war of necessity.” Does anything he says remain operative beyond the fading of the audience applause?
NRO staff posted Krauthammer’s remarks on Afghanistan from Fox News All-Stars. Says Krauthammer, Obama’s Afghanistan rethink is all politics.
…Then he goes through all the people he consulted with [in that review]: the commanders on the ground, allies, NGOs and the governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan and members of Congress. It was a serious review in March.
He appoints his own general later and then he says two months ago it is a war of necessity. You would think he has thought it through.
And now all of a sudden he is rethinking it. It is because of the political pressure. The public opinion polls are going negative on him. He has gotten [resistance from] his left in the party, and it is all about the politics. It is not about the strategy. …
Congress is still hard at work trying to force socialized medicine down our throats, writes David Harsanyi. First, they beat the CBO into submission:
If you’ve been watching noted alchemist and Democratic Sen. Max Baucus conjure up health-care gold this week, you probably know what I mean. …
…Just think of legislation as abstract art. The Congressional Budget Office does.
The CBO’s new estimate, which magically meets every one of President Barack Obama’s preconditions, is based on “conceptual” language provided by Baucus rather than any of those maddeningly specific Arabic numerals.
That’s because the estimate isn’t rooted in an actual bill, per se . . . nor does it incorporate hundreds of amendments that will be part of any final product, well, not exactly . . . What we do have is a CBO that has been browbeaten long enough by the White House to finally summon the conviction to get a figure that so many wanted to hear.
It’s also, believe it or not, free. …
…How exactly does health care “reform” pay for itself in Wonderland? In this case, it pays for itself by charging taxpayers new “fees,” delivering new mandates and penalties, adding pass-through costs and cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare. …
Then they want to start taxing us in 2010 for their legislation that won’t be enacted in 2013:
…CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf had previously warned that Medicare Advantage payment cuts had the potential to hurt seniors’ private health plans, which, of course, is the point of “reform.”
The most exhilarating aspect of this plan, however, isn’t that it does nothing to contain costs for average consumers, it’s that the average consumer will help pay for it long before they fail to receive any tangible benefits.
According to Democrats, health care reform must be passed this very moment even though it would not kick in until 2013. But don’t worry, it would start taxing Americans in 2010, three years before you get nothing. …
Liberal speechwriter Wendy Button moved to Massachusetts, where many of the proposed healthcare reforms have been enacted. She can no longer afford health insurance. Her commentary is in Politics Daily.
…here’s how I lost my insurance: I moved. That’s right, I moved from Washington, D.C., back to Massachusetts, a state with universal health care.
In D.C., I had a policy with a national company, an HMO, and surprisingly I was very happy with it. I had a fantastic primary care doctor at Georgetown University Hospital. As a self-employed writer, my premium was $225 a month, plus $10 for a dental discount.
In Massachusetts, the cost for a similar plan is around $550, give or take a few dollars. My risk factors haven’t changed. I didn’t stop writing and become a stunt double. … There has been no change in the way I live my life except my zip code — to a state with universal health care.
Massachusetts has enacted many of the necessary reforms being talked about in Washington. There is a mandate for all residents to get insurance, a law to prevent insurance companies from denying coverage because of a pre-existing condition, an automatic enrollment requirement, and insurance companies are no longer allowed to cap coverage or drop people when they get sick because they forgot to include a sprained ankle back in 1989 on their application. …
…How could all of these weeks and months go by and no one is examining and talking about what has worked and what hasn’t worked in Massachusetts?
While the state has the lowest rate of uninsured, a report by the Commonwealth Fund states that Massachusetts has the highest premiums in the country. The state’s budget is a mess and lawmakers had to make deep cuts in services and increase the sales tax to close gaps. The number of people needing assistance has at times overwhelmed the state. The mandate means that some people who can’t afford insurance are now being slapped with a fine they also can’t afford. There is no “public option” in the way the president describes it, no inter-state competition, no pool for small businesses and self-employed individuals like me to buy into groups that negotiate cheaper rates. …
…What makes this a double blow is that my experience contradicts so much of what I wrote for political leaders over the last decade. That’s a terrible feeling, too. I typed line after line that said everything Massachusetts did would make health insurance more affordable. If I had a dollar for every time I typed, “universal coverage will lower premiums,” I could pay for my own health care at Massachusetts’s rates. …
John Stossel points out that paying Paul less means the government can rob Peter less.
“The government who robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul,” George Bernard Shaw once said.
For a socialist, Shaw demonstrated good sense with that quotation. Unfortunately, America has become a laboratory in which his hypothesis is being tested. …
…Frederic Bastiat, the great 19th-century French economist, defined the state as “that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” I don’t know if he envisioned one half of the population living off the other half. …
…The built-in unfairness of the tax system has prompted a range of tax-reform proposals, such as a flat tax and replacing the income tax with a sales tax. These alternatives are better, but they have their drawbacks, too. For that reason, there is something more urgent than tax reform: spending reform.
The true burden of government, the late Milton Friedman said, is not the tax level but the spending level. Taxation is just one way for the government to get money. The other ways — borrowing and inflation — are also burdens on the people. The best way to lighten the tax burden is to lessen the spending burden. If government spends less, it takes less. And if it takes less, the tax system will weigh less heavily on us all. …
Walter Williams gives different examples in which a society has allowed its government to increase in power and control, for the stated purpose of “social justice”. When a society starts accepting that the ends justify the means, ruthless leaders with murderous means have come to power.
…The most authoritative tally of history’s most murderous regimes is in a book by University of Hawaii’s Professor Rudolph J. Rummel, “Death by Government.” Statistics are provided at his website. The Nazis murdered 20 million of their own people and those in nations they captured. Between 1917 and 1987, Stalin and his successors murdered, or were otherwise responsible for the deaths of, 62 million of their own people. Between 1949 and 1987, Mao Tsetung and his successors were responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese.
Today’s leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from Nazism. However, there’s little or no distinction between Nazism and socialism. Even the word Nazi is short for National Socialist German Workers Party. The origins of the unspeakable horrors of Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism did not begin in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s. Those horrors were simply the end result of long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the quest for “social justice.” It was decent but misguided earlier generations of Germans, like many of today’s Americans, who would have cringed at the thought of genocide, who built the Trojan horse for Hitler to take over.
Few Americans have the stomach or ruthlessness to do what is necessary to make their governmental wishes come true. They are willing to abandon constitutional principles and rule of law so that the nation’s elite, who believe they are morally and intellectually superior to the rest of us, can have the tools to implement “social justice.” Those tools are massive centralized government power. It just turns out last century’s notables in acquiring powerful central government, in the name of social justice, were Hitler, Stalin, Mao, but the struggle for social justice isn’t over yet, and other suitors of this dubious distinction are waiting in the wings.
In the WSJ, Hannah Karp paints an enjoyable portrait of Joe Torre and his pre-game interviews.
The Los Angeles Dodgers limped disappointingly into the division series this week, but there’s still one record Joe Torre can boast about as he enters his 14th consecutive postseason: His pregame media sessions are, by a landslide, the longest and most honest in baseball.
Described by beat writers over the years as “a must-listen,” “a delight” and “baseball’s version of the sermon on the mount,” Mr. Torre’s daily meetings with the press have become the stuff of legend. For nearly an hour before every home game, the soft-spoken 69-year-old sits cross-legged like a Zen master in the Dodgers’ dugout, sipping green tea or chomping pink gum and gazing out toward the palm trees that surround the stadium as he waxes poetic about everything from players’ antics to his own days as a catcher to the time he took his daughter to a Jonas Brothers concert. On a slow day he might tell the one about the Boston fan he once met in an elevator who told him he’d rather see the Red Sox beat the Yankees than see the U.S. capture Saddam Hussein, or he might reminisce about how relievers were rumored to sneak out of Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia to a local bar through a secret passageway near the bullpen. …
…While the baseball world is salivating over the prospect of a World Series matchup between Mr. Torre’s Dodgers and his former team, the New York Yankees, the skipper’s sessions with the press rarely focus on such grandiose questions. Last week he regaled reporters with stories about his recent conversations with director Spike Lee, insisted that his players deserved to pop champagne even if they lost their last series with the Colorado Rockies, expressed relief that his 13-year-old daughter was now wearing Andre Ethier jerseys to games (she routinely sported Yankees attire to Dodgers Stadium last season) and joked about how Derek Jeter used to flex his muscles around the locker room.
“I like to humanize some of the players that people think are plastic,” says Mr. Torre. …