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David Harsanyi thinks we’re overdoing the obeisance to democracy.
… Don’t get me wrong, democracy is clearly a vast improvement over an autocracy. (Though, now that you bring it up, how many of you would choose to reside in one of those despotic Persian Gulf states with stipends, film festivals and casinos rather than a democratic Haiti?)
But democracy without a moral foundation, economic freedom, and a respect for individual and human rights has the potential not to be any kind of freedom at all. It takes more than democracy to be free.
We wish the Muslim world the best in shedding its dictatorships and theocracies and finding true liberty. But let’s not confuse two distinct ideas.
At the very least, not on television, a place where Americans can typically rely on pinpoint accuracy and untainted reporting. Not there.
David Warren notes the power and weakness of the net.
… We have read much about those twittering “social media,” which the younger generation of Islamists have mastered, along with everyone else. The demonstrations were certainly organized through them. They became possible because social media gave people the sense of strength in numbers — well before they actually had the numbers on the street. And al Jazeera leaped in quickly to spread the word and excitement from there. The Internet, in combination with partisan and sensationalized mass media, have rewritten many of the rules.
The mob is now electronically summoned and enhanced, but, to return to where I started, this does not make it any easier to argue with, nor contribute to the possibilities for mature and intelligent deliberation over the path ahead. It instead creates a new and much broader field for anarchy. From anarchy to totalitarianism is one Persian step. …
The next “David” up today is Goldman (AKA – Spengler). He continues the internet thought and proposes a solution too.
Once America had allies. Now it has Facebook friends.
Google News turns up more than 5,000 news reports including the search terms “Facebook“, “Egypt” and “revolution”. The same soap-bubble of global youth culture that gave us the Internet stock bubble in the 1990s has returned, this time as the solution to the problems of the Arab world. With the last bubble, people got poor. This time people will get killed.
As a reality check: the search terms “Egypt”, “revolution” and “genital mutilation” turn up just seven stories in Google News (including a previous essay by this writer). Many Egyptian women suffer genital mutilation, while fewer than 10% of Egyptians use Facebook. Before long we will see whether the “tech-savvy” revolutionaries (172 stories with the qualifier on Google news) are just benzine bubbles floating atop the viscous Nile mud.
Egypt churns out 700,000 university graduates a year qualified to stamp each other’s papers and not much else, and employs perhaps 200,000 of them, mostly in government bureaucracy.
As Egypt’s new Finance Minister Samir Radwan said of the young people who put him in power (to the Financial Times on February 13), “I’m generalizing, but a large number of the Egyptian labor force is unemployable. The products of the education system are unemployable.” …
… The Facebook friends of Tahrir Square will do nothing more than furrow the mud of Egypt’s traditional society. But they must be good for something. Here’s one idea: have the army draft them all, and send them to the villages to reach reading. The late Shah of Iran created a “Literacy Corps” that allowed any draftee with a high school diploma to perform military service in rural villages as teachers. In one generation, Iran raised its literacy rate to nearly 90%. If the university graduates are unemployable, at least they can do the same. That would really make a difference.
Today’s Pickings started out to be a reasonable length. But, the unions, and then our foolish president kept raising the stakes in Wisconsin. So we have a section devoted to events there. John Fund kicks it off in the WSJ.
This week President Obama was roundly criticized, even by many of his allies, for submitting a federal budget that actually increases our already crushing deficit. But that didn’t stop him Thursday from jumping into Wisconsin’s titanic budget battle. He accused the new Republican governor, Scott Walker, of launching an “assault” on unions with his emergency legislation aimed at cutting the state budget.
The real assault this week was led by Organizing for America, the successor to President’s Obama’s 2008 campaign organization. It helped fill buses of protesters who flooded the state capital of Madison and ran 15 phone banks urging people to call state legislators.
Mr. Walker’s proposals are hardly revolutionary. Facing a $137 million budget deficit, he has decided to try to avoid laying off 5,500 state workers by proposing that they contribute 5.8% of their income towards their pensions and 12.6% towards health insurance. That’s roughly the national average for public pension payments, and it is less than half the national average of what government workers contribute to health care. Mr. Walker also wants to limit the power of public-employee unions to negotiate contracts and work rules—something that 24 states already limit or ban. …
Peter Wehner is the first of three from Contentions.
Here are a couple of predictions related to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s relatively modest requests of government unions (asking many of the state’s public employees to start contributing to their own pension and health-care benefits and limiting their collective bargaining rights to negotiations over pay rather than benefits) and the massive, angry protests they have elicited.
First, Governor Walker — if he holds shape and doesn’t back down (and I rather doubt he will back down) — will eventually benefit from this collision. Government unions, on the other hand, will suffer badly. The hysterical reaction to Walker’s reforms — comparing the governor of Wisconsin to (take your pick) Mubarak, Mussolini, or Hitler — is going to go down very poorly with the citizens of Wisconsin. Many of the public-employee protesters come across as pampered, childish, selfish, and overwrought. …
Alana Goodman and Jonathan Tobin note the lack of “civility” coming from the left.
As Alana has noted, one of the interesting sidelights of the confrontation in Wisconsin is the way that, once again, liberal hypocrisy on hate speech has been exposed. The dispute between Governor Scott Walker and the Republican legislative majority intent on passing legislation that would limit collective bargaining by state-employee unions and force their members to pay for some of their health-care and pension costs and the Democrats and unions who oppose these measures illustrates the double standard by which our chattering classes view politics in this country.
Throughout 2009 and 2010, during the heated debate about President Obama’s health-care legislation, Americans were repeatedly told by the leaders of the Democratic Party, the mainstream media, and even supposedly nonpartisan groups like the Anti-Defamation League that there was something profoundly and uniquely troubling about the angry language and behavior of those who opposed ObamaCare and the stimulus spending bill. Conservative Tea Party activists were continuously slammed as a threat to democracy because of the way they spoke about Obama or characterized the Democratic majority in Congress. The fact that the political left had spent the previous eight years demonizing President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and the Republicans was ignored. The hue and cry over the need for more civility in politics was treated as an indication that there was something peculiarly unwholesome or even racist in the revulsion felt by a great many Americans toward the president’s policies. In November 2010, the idea that such sentiments were the preserve of a crackpot minority was exposed as a myth when the voters handed Obama a record midterm election defeat and sent scores of Tea Partiers to Washington. …
Jennifer Rubin closes this section.
E.J. Dionne decries Wisconsin GOP Gov. Scott Walker’s “overreach,” declaring the governor is “drumming up a crisis to change the very nature of the relationship between public workers and the government.”
Let’s talk about overreach. Here’s how the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s editorial board put it:
“Democrats in the state Senate threw a temper tantrum Thursday – essentially they took their ball and went home.
Actually, they didn’t go home. They apparently went to Illinois, just out of reach of their obligations.
By boycotting an expected vote on Gov. Scott Walker’s budget repair bill, they were able to prevent action on the measure. Twenty senators are required for a quorum; the Republicans have only 19. . . .
One leading Democrat – Obama was his name, as we recall – put it well after winning the White House in 2008: “Elections have consequences,” he told Republicans at the time. Indeed they do. The Democrats’ childish prank mocks the democratic process.”
Overreach would be choosing extra-legislative means (flight) to prevent the voters’ elected representatives from working their will. Overreach would be threatening Republican officials in their homes. Overreach would be a flurry of Hitlerian imagery (good for the National Jewish Democratic Council in denouncing the widespread signage, but where is the George Soros-backed Jewish Funds for Justice and the anti-Glenn Beck crowd when you need them?) Overreach would be a massive sick-out, in essence a dishonest strike. …
Before we get to the budget, W. W. in the Democracy in America Blog has a neat post demonstrating the dull formulaic groupthink of the American liberal.
… Mr Herbert wanted to say that American democracy is broken because it’s been hijacked by the rich. This is one of approximately five columns liberal pundits phone in when they are uninspired or feeling lazy. …
Turning to the budget, Tony Blankley says rather than saying “draconian cuts” how about saying “draconian deficits.”
… The thing to be condemned should be draconian deficits, not draconian deficit cuts.
From the early reports of the White House‘s proposed 2012 budget, they will be more subject to the former than the latter charge.
According to The Washington Post, quoting the administration (don’t take my word for it): “The White House proposal, outlined Friday by a senior administration official, would barely put a dent in deficits that congressional budget analysts say could approach $12 trillion through 2021. But the policies would stabilize borrowing, the administration official said, while reversing the trend of ramping up spending.”
When a ship is sinking, one might consider actually pumping out more water than is rushing in. But the White House is content to “stabilize” these draconian deficits it contributed to during the past two years. How nice the alliterative phrase “draconian deficits” sounds. …
Debra Saunders knows one place to start cutting.
The liberal group Moveon.org has been sending out e-mails to warn that Republicans are back in control of the House and to ask recipients to sign a petition that states, “Congress must protect NPR and PBS and guarantee them permanent funding, free from political meddling.”
Of course, the best way to guarantee no political meddling would be to eliminate some $500 million in federal funds allocated annually to these media’s parent organization, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Also of course, the fact that Moveon.org wants to keep federal tax dollars pouring into the public broadcasting bucket should end any question as to whether NPR and PBS news programs lean left. They do.
Yet for all his deficit-reduction talk in the face of America’s $14 trillion federal debt, President Obama wants to increase CPB’s funding by $6 million in 2014. …
WSJ reprints a City Journal article on the return of whooping cough in California where thoughtless people will surf most any silly trend.
Vaccines, which save millions of lives every year, are one of the most successful public-health interventions in the history of modern medicine. Among the diseases that they prevent is the whooping cough. Why, then, is that sickness making a scary comeback in California, which is currently weathering its largest whooping-cough epidemic since 1947, with over 7,800 cases and 10 deaths in 2010? Mainly because more and more parents, worried about the vaccine’s supposed side effects, are choosing to delay vaccinating their children—or not to do it at all. This public-health calamity, moreover, comes at a time when the Supreme Court is considering a lawsuit against whooping-cough vaccine manufacturer Wyeth; if successful, the suit would make epidemics much more likely and undermine public confidence in vaccines even further. …