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For a long time it looked like the new administration would be Welcome Back Carter time. Read this from Spengler and see if you don’t agree with Pickerhead we are instead seeing Carter Lite. Amazing, the luck of Jimmy Carter; somebody worse than him. Think that’s unfair? Read next about Obama’s policy towards India. W’s policy there was a major American success. So, the petulant president ignores the country.
… Obama’s fecklessness has allowed the unimaginable to occur: Russia’s influence in the Middle East rivals that of the United States.
David Samuels wrote on November 13 in Slate magazine about “the elegant and brutal way that the Russians have leveraged their position as the arms supplier of last resort to Iran and Syria”. Russia feints towards Iran by offering to sell Tehran a top-of-the-line air-defense system, the S-300. It then extorts concessions from the West (or Israel) in return for delaying shipment of the system. One result of Russia’s rocket diplomacy, Samuels observes, is a three-way alliance between Russia, India and Israel to develop high-tech weapons, including a so-called fifth-generation fighter that may be able to challenge America’s F-35.
If Israel does attempt an air strike against Iran’s nuclear program, it will do so in response to the visible failure of American diplomacy, and with the tacit permission of Russia – which has the capacity to veto such a strike by giving Iran anti-aircraft missiles of sufficient capability (or by not giving Israel the key to the counter-measures, for Russia never sells a weapons system to another country that it cannot neutralize).
Obama’s foreign policy in every manifestation – Iran, Turkey, Palestine, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Russia – has come to grief, and the White House so far has shown no reaction except lockjaw. The great decisions of the world are being taken outside Washington. Too many things have gone wrong to secure the outcome. The game now is in the hands of the spoilers, the players who draw strength from chaos, and first among them is Russia. That creates positive feedback, for the powers who thrive on uncertainty will do their best to generate more
With India’s prime minister currently visiting the US, Tunku Varadarajan takes the opportunity to discuss the importance of India in US foreign relations.
…It doesn’t take a genius to recognize the political, strategic, and moral worth to America, the world’s most powerful democracy, of a strong alliance with India, the world’s largest. Mr. Obama, by no stretch a man of tepid intelligence, has calibrated things artfully: Not only is Mr. Singh the first state visitor to Washington since the president took office in January, his trip is the first time that India has headed an American president’s list for a state visit—ever. (Richard Nixon must be turning in his grave.) …
…Given all this swirl, Mr. Obama has had scant inclination to pay much attention to, let alone court, Delhi. This has not gone down well in India, a country surrounded by a wall of thin skin. India had grown used, under Mr. Obama’s predecessor, to alpha-dog treatment. George W. Bush was the best American president India ever had, and Mr. Obama’s ability to take India for granted is, in some measure, a tribute to the extent to which Mr. Bush locked the two countries into a presumptively inseparable alliance. But for all his emphasis on diplomacy in dealing with hostile states, like Iran, or inveterate competitor-states, like China, Mr. Obama has failed to grasp the diplomatic importance of tending to alliances, whether they be old and true ones, such as the one with Israel, or young and sensitive ones, such as the one with India. …
…Finally, a broader word about India and its relationship with America: Unlike China, which is inherently competitive for global leadership—and which will never accept American leadership or direction—India is a country that would, like Britain or Japan or Germany, settle for a partnership with the United States that guaranteed mutual benefit and respect. India’s natural state, if nations can be said to have such a thing, is neither triumphalist nor antagonist; it is cooperative and redemptive, much as America’s tends to be. One trusts that Mr. Obama will come to see these qualities as clearly as his predecessor did. If not, this could be one area in which history will judge Mr. Obama to have been “dumb,” and Mr. Bush to have been the “smart” one.
Pickerhead thinks that Beltway bias shows when discussing Palin’s supposed lack of qualifications to be president, considering the empty suit who currently occupies the position. Ilya Somin, in Volokh Conspiracy, posts his thoughts.
Longtime readers may recall that I was initially positive about Sarah Palin because her record was much more libertarian than that of most other major national politicians. Later, I had to reassess my view of Palin, as her ignorance of many important policy issues became apparent. But I also emphasized that ignorance is not the same thing as stupidity, and that in my view Palin suffers from the former, not the latter — a conclusion also reached by liberal Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson. I do a lot of research on political ignorance, and the distinction between ignorance and stupidity is one that I have often urged people to keep in mind. For reasons that I discuss here and here, even professional politicians often find it rational to devote their time to activities other than learning about major national issues.
Still, an ignorant but intelligent person is capable of remedying her ignorance to a greater extent than one who is both ignorant and stupid. In reading Palin’s recent memoir, Going Rogue, I wanted to see if there was any evidence that she has taken steps to address what many people see as her biggest weakness — myself included. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to say either way. As a sympathetic WSJ reviewer points out, the book devotes little attention to national policy issues. Palin does come across as knowledgeable about Alaska state issues, but her facility in that area was never seriously in question.
The book argues at length that the various gaffes that revealed Palin’s ignorance during the 2008 campaign were mostly the fault of McCain’s consultants and a biased media. I remain unpersuaded. Yes, many people in the media were biased against Palin, and perhaps the consultants made mistakes (it’s hard for me to assess that claim without knowing more about the consultants’ side of the story). Even so, there is no excuse for Palin’s inability to give competent answers to relatively simple questions about such things as which newspapers and magazines she read, which Supreme Court decisions she disagrees with, or describing the basics of her position on US policy towards Russia. If Katie Couric really was out to get Palin, as the book suggests, she could surely have asked tougher questions than these. In any event, a candidate facing a biased media should be all the more careful to avoid obvious mistakes. …
Ilya Somin also has optimistic comments about right-wing populism, despite his somewhat exaggerated concerns about the irrational fringe elements and their sway.
I am no fan of populism of either the left or right-wing variety. In my view, most populist movements exploit voter ignorance and irrationality to promote policies that tend to do far more harm than good. That said, I have been pleasantly surprised by the right-wing populist reaction to the economic crisis and Obama’s policies. With rare exceptions, right-wing populists such as Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and the Tea Party protesters, have advocated free market approaches to dealing with the crisis, and have attacked Obama and the Democratic Congress for seeking massive increases in government spending and regulation. They have not responded in any of several much worse ways that seemed like plausible alternatives a year ago, and may still be today.
True, much of their rhetoric is oversimplified, doesn’t take account of counterarguments, and is unfair to opponents. But the same can be said for nearly all political rhetoric directed at a popular audience made up of rationally ignorant voters who pay only very limited attention to politics and don’t understand the details of policy debates. On balance, however, the positions taken by the right-wing populists on these issues are basically simplified versions of those taken by the most sophisticated libertarian and limited-government conservative economists and policy scholars. There has been relatively little advocacy of strange, crackpot ideas or weird conspiracy theories. Indeed, efforts to paint the Tea Partiers and others as merely closet racists usually have to rely on unsupported claims about “unspoken” assumptions and subtexts. Most, if not all, of the right-wing populists would have reacted in much the same way if the policies advocated by Obama had instead been put forward by a hypothetical President Hillary Clinton or President John Edwards.
Things could have been a lot worse. For example, the right-wing populists could have reacted to Obama and the financial crisis by embracing the kind of big government social conservatism advocated by Mike Huckabee during the presidential campaign. Still worse, they could have flocked to the protectionism and nativism advocated by people like Pat Buchanan. This latter possibility would have been in line with the anti-illegal immigration hysteria that swept the populist right just two years ago. …
Thomas Sowell’s series on the housing bubble continues. Sowell explains how the government forced banks to meet racial quotas, rather than assessing loans on creditworthiness.
…Although the Community Reinvestment Act had no major immediate impact, over the years its underlying assumptions and provisions provided the basis for ever more insistent pressure on lenders from a variety of government officials and agencies to lend to those whom politicians and bureaucrats wanted them to lend to, rather than to those whom lenders would have chosen to lend to on the basis of the lenders’ own experience and expertise.
These pressures began to build in the 1990s and increased exponentially thereafter. Studies in the early 1990s, showing different mortgage-loan approval rates for blacks and whites, set off media sensations and denunciations, leading to both congressional and White House pressures on agencies regulating banks to impose new lending rules, and to monitor statistics on the loan approval rates by race, by community and by income, with penalties on banks and other lenders for failing to meet politically-imposed norms or quotas.
These stepped-up pressures began during the George H.W. Bush administration and escalated during the Clinton administration, when Attorney General Janet Reno threatened legal action against lenders whose racial statistics raised her suspicions.
It would be too much of a detour at this point to go into the details of these claims of racial discrimination by mortgage lenders. However, even at this point, the idea that lenders would be offended by receiving monthly mortgage payment checks in the mail from blacks should at least give us pause to assess whether or not it seems plausible — especially since a substantial majority of both blacks and whites had their mortgage-loan applications approved.
The issue has been about the statistical difference between these approval rates, not any claim that most blacks could not get mortgage loans. …
…For banks, simply proving that they were looking for qualified buyers wasn’t enough. Banks now had to show that they had actually made a requisite number of loans to low- and moderate-income (LMI) borrowers. The new regulations also required the use of “innovative or flexible” lending practices to address credit needs of LMI borrowers and neighborhoods.
In plain English, the regulators imposed quotas — and, if lenders had to resort to “innovative or flexible” standards and methods to meet those quotas, so be it. …
…These were not the only government pressures on banks to fulfill lending quotas. In 1993, the Department of Housing and Urban Development “began bringing legal actions against mortgage bankers that declined a higher percentage of minority applicants than white applicants.” Lenders then began lowering their down payment and income requirements. …