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Interesting day here because Pickings is totally composed of blog posts.
Mark Steyn blogs about having confidence in America.
Ever since this health care “debate” got going, I’ve worried that American conservatives underestimate the ability of Big Government to transform the character of a people. After all, the Euro-weenies weren’t always Euro-weenies – else how would they have conquered the entire planet? Readers who think I’m just a mopey downer loser (as not a few do) might prefer this alternative take from Hillsdale’s Paul Rahe. While “agreeing with almost every word” of mine, he has an entirely different conclusion:
We are not yet a people apt to acquiesce in dictates handed down by our lords and masters. When Britain and Canada drifted into socialism, there were no tea parties spontaneously formed by ordinary citizens to buck the trend. …
…In my view, [Barack Obama] and today’s Democratic Party represent the last gasp of the Progressive impulse. The tyrannical ambition hidden at the heart of Progressivism’s quest… has made manifest …the danger that we have temporized with for nearly a century … What is required in what he calls “this defining moment” is what Abraham Lincoln once called “a new birth of freedom.” The period we just entered could be our finest hour.
The Streetwise Professor explains that Obamacare steals the standard of living from the upcoming generation.
Here, the government uses its coercive powers to force the young to consume a service at an above market rate (in order to subsidize consumption by others). We again hear the high-sounding rhetoric to cover this outright theft from one cohort of the population. … The indirect effects will also affect the young disproportionately; the inevitable tax burden will slow economic growth, dramatically reducing the lifetime incomes of those just entering the labor force. …
In the Weekly Standard blogs, Gabriel Schoenfeld delivers a devastating and well-deserved critique of the national intelligence community. We quote his review of the 2007 NIE and its consequences. The full post includes the latest comment that calls the word “intelligence” into question.
Back in November 2007, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) released a declassified summary of an authoritative National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) declaring with “high confidence” that four years earlier “Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” Buried in a footnote was the fact that the summary was only referring to one—and far from the most important—component of Iran’s nuclear project. The other portions of the Iranian bomb effort—most significantly, uranium enrichment—were continuing apace.
The damage caused by the misleading document was immense, and traveled in two directions. On one side, it had the political effect of removing any possibility of public support for a Bush administration military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. It also undermined the case for economic sanctions. What would be the point, after all, of targeting a weapons project that our intelligence agencies were declaring had already been halted?
On the other side, there was a boomerang effect on the Intelligence Community itself. By issuing an NIE that, at least in its publicly released form, was transparently flawed and also blatantly political in its construction, the NIC inflicted severe damage to its own reputation for integrity. …
In the Corner, Robert Costa posts excerpts of a speech given by Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan.
Earlier this week, Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) traveled to the Sooner State to address the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs. Much of his speech focused on progressivism…
…Early Progressives wanted to empower and engage the people. They fought for populist reforms like initiative and referendum, recalls, judicial elections, the breakup of monopoly corporations, and the elimination of vote buying and urban patronage. But Progressivism turned away from popular control toward central government planning. It lost most Americans and consumed itself in paternalism, arrogance, and snobbish condescension. “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson would have scorned the self-proclaimed “Progressives” of our day for handing out bailout checks to giant corporations, corrupting the Congress to purchase votes for government controlled health care, and funneling billions in Jobs Stimulus money to local politicians to pay for make-work patronage. That’s not “Progressivism,” that’s what real Progressives fought against!
Since America began, the timid have feared the Founding Fathers’ ideas of individual freedom, so they yearn for Old World class models. Our Progressivists are the latest iteration of that same fear of the people. In unprecedented numbers, Americans are speaking out against the intolerable Health Care bill and irresponsible debt-ridden spending.
Does anyone recall Norman Rockwell’s famous “Freedom of Speech” painting of an average working Joe standing and speaking his mind at a town hall meeting? Today’s Progressivists ridicule average Americans speaking out at tea parties across the nation and denounce their criticisms as “un-American.” Millions of average Americans reject their big government solutions, and that scares them. …
John Fund relates a recent exchange between President Obama and Doris the factory worker. We don’t know whether the president ever looked Doris in the eye.
President Obama prefers to interact with questioners on his own terms. That means almost no prime-time news conferences — he hasn’t given one for more than nine months. Instead, he obviously favors any forum that allows him to give long, discursive answers without being subjected to follow-up questions.
A prime example came last Friday during his appearance at a North Carolina battery manufacturer. A woman named Doris asked the president during a Q&A session whether it was a “wise decision to add more taxes to us with the health care” package. “We are overtaxed as it is,” she concluded.
That set President Obama off on a 17-minute and 12-second riff that must have put the crowd into a stupor. …
…As was apparent to all who listened, his filibuster had only served to avoid addressing her concern. He never explained why his health care bill ended up raising taxes on those making under $200,000 a year — a violation of his explicit 2008 campaign pledge. …
Jennifer Rubin comments on the same exchange.
The mainstream media is slowly waking up to the fact that Obama is a bore. No, really. He’s long since stopped saying anything new or interesting, and he talks constantly, at great length. So when he went into a mind-numbing filibuster to a perfectly reasonable question from a woman at a Q&A session in Charlotte as to whether it was smart to throw a load of new taxes into health-care “reform,” not even the Washington Post’s Anne Kornblut could conceal her — and the audience’s — disdain for the Condescender in Chief…
…And, of course, he never answered the lady’s question. Why is it we are raising taxes for those making less than $200,000? Why are we raising $52.3 billion in new taxes over 10 years? Obama has no response, or no effective one, to these queries; so he vamps and bloviates, as he did in the health-care summit when confronted with troublesome facts to which he had no adequate response (e.g., Rep.Paul Ryan’s list of fiscal tricks). Just as he failed to keep the attention of the Charlotte crowd, he’s long since lost the American people who now tune him out. Eloquent? Hardly. Persuasive? Not in the least, as evidenced by multiple polls showing that a large majority of Americans aren’t buying his health-care arguments. (And he’s eroding his party’s credibility on issues over which they previously held a commanding advantage. Rasmussen reports, for example: “Following the passage of the health care bill, 53% now say they trust Republicans on the issue of health care. Thirty-seven percent (37%) place their trust in Democrats.”) …
In Contentions, Max Boot highlights good news in Iraq.
Terrible violence continues to upset Iraq — at least 35 dead from suicide bombings in Baghdad, 25 Sunni family members slain south of Baghdad. But this Rod Nordland article buried deep in the New York Times presents a glowing account of the last election — and appropriately so. He notes that voters made discerning decisions. The outcome reveals some notable trends …
…A lot of bad things can — and probably will — still happen in Iraq but the election outcome, at least so far, hardly validates overblown fears that Iraq is “falling apart.” If anything it shows that, in one place at least, Arabs are taking to the democratic process with heartening enthusiasm.
Jennifer Rubin discusses the consequences of the Obami not having principles guiding their foreign policy.
The Obami are promising another round of sanctions aimed at Iran. This will be the fourth round, and we should not, judging from press reports, expect them to be “crippling.” As Bill Kristol noted on Fox News Sunday:
The only things that can stop the Iranian nuclear program are — would be the success of the green movement in Iran, which the Obama administration has done nothing to help and remains incredibly indifferent to and standoffish to on the one hand, or military action on the other, which the Obama administration seems uninterested in doing and I’m afraid is setting up a situation where Israel will feel it has to act.
The abject lack of seriousness from the Obama administration — its disinclination to even suggest the use of force or to aid the Green Movement in any meaningful way — has not gone unnoticed either here or in Israel. …
In Reason’s blog, Nick Gillespie relates some of the analysis of stimulus distribution by Veronique De Rugy.
…But more to the point, I think it’s worth focusing on something else that de Rugy has written about for Reason: Stimulus spending has been done without any consideration of unemployment or other economic factors. If the government seriously believes it can create jobs via public spending, she wrote last fall, then
We should expect the government to invest relatively more money in the states that have the highest unemployment rates and less money in the states with lower unemployment rates….
Yet, with a few exceptions, the data show that this is not the case. Many higher-unemployment states are getting far fewer stimulus dollars than lower-unemployment states. …
… if you’re spending money that’s supposed to get the economy going again without any thought for what spots need it most, you’re thoroughly incompetent on top of misguided. …
Some people only know how to play the victims. Mark Steyn explains the fake hate crimes. The upside of the story is the demonstration of integrity by the Tea Partiers.
On March 20th, something truly extraordinary happened. On the eve of the health care vote, a group of black Democrat Congressmen (eschewing the private tunnels they usually use to cross from their offices to the Capitol) chose to walk en masse through a crowd of protesters, confident that the knuckledragging Tea Party goons they and their media pals have reviled for a year now would respond with racial epithets.
And then, when the crowd didn’t, the black Congressmen made it up anyway. Representative Andre Carson (Democrat, Indiana) insisted he heard the N-word 15 times. He’s either suffering from the same condition as that Guam-flipper from Georgia, or he’s a liar. At a scene packed not only with crews from the Dem poodle media but with a gazillion cellphone cameras, not one single N-word has been caught on audio. …
I disagree with John Lewis (Democrat, Georgia) politically but I have always respected him as a genuine civil rights warrior. And I feel slightly queasy at the thought that he would dishonor both the movement and his own part in it for the cheapest of partisan points …
But that’s what the Democratic Party has been reduced to – faking hate crimes as pathetically as any lonely, mentally ill college student. …
In WSJ, James Taranto laughs at a liberal blog trying to play gotcha. Maybe they should stick to playing the victims.
It’s been a grimly serious few weeks, so we thought we’d open today’s column with a bit of levity, courtesy of the folks at the liberal Web site TalkingPointsMemo.com. They think they have caught a Republican politician in an embarrassing goof:
California Senate candidate Carly Fiorina (R) sent a letter to her supporters [Monday] in honor of the first night of the Jewish holiday of Passover, which she described as a time where [sic] “we break bread and spend time with our families and friends.” …
…Have any of the editors at TPM, or Smith and Frum for that matter, ever actually had matzoh? It is a flat bread that is rigid and brittle like a cracker. It is usually produced in sheets several inches square, considerably bigger than bite size. So whereas one obtains an individual serving of, say, challah by cutting or ripping a piece from the loaf, it is pretty much impossible to eat matzoh without breaking it first. A Passover Seder is one of the few occasions on which people literally, not just figuratively, break bread.
Claudia Rosett will miss Jack Bauer.
After eight seasons, the Fox series 24, starring Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer, America’s one-man do-or-die counterterrorism force–is due to go off the air when the current season wraps up on May 24.
I’ll miss Jack. It’s only television, but I think he’s summed up something important about the American spirit: a will to defend his country, against all attackers, no matter what the odds. That fighting spirit is still evident among American troops on the battlefield. But in Washington’s political quagmires, over the nine years since Sept. 11, it’s been substantially snuffed out. Instead, policy revolves endlessly around denial of real threats and the impulse to Mirandize enemies on foreign fields of war and bestow upon them the rights of U.S. citizens at home–even if that means releasing them to kill Americans again. …
…He is the only man who can stop the next attack. Except after May he will be gone. It seems there are plans for a Jack Bauer movie to follow, also starring Sutherland. But that won’t be the same as that weekly hour of escape that since Sept. 11 has allowed us to forget the endless absurdities of real-world politics and watch a guy whose mission in life is to protect us, no matter what obstacles the bureaucrats and politicians–not to mention the terrorists–throw in his way. That might just be the definition of a modern hero.