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Karl Rove explains the special election loss in New York, and tells the Republicans how they can campaign effectively about budget issues.

…An earlier, more aggressive explanation and defense of the Ryan plan would have turned the issue: 55% in the Crossroads survey agreed with GOP arguments for the Ryan reforms while just 36% agreed with the Democrats’ arguments against it.

Next year, Republicans must describe their Medicare reforms plainly, set the record straight vigorously when Democrats demagogue, and go on the attack. Congressional Republicans—especially in the House—need a political war college that schools incumbents and challengers in the best way to explain, defend and attack on the issue of Medicare reform. They have to become as comfortable talking about Medicare in the coming year as they did in talking about health-care reform last year.

…Defense, no matter how robust, well-informed and persistent, is insufficient. Republicans must also go on offense. Democratic nonchalance towards Medicare’s bankruptcy in 2024 and the crushing debt it will leave for our children gives the GOP the chance to depict Democrats as tone deaf, irresponsible and reckless. The country can’t afford Democratic leaders who simply order the orchestra to play louder as the Titanic tilts and begins to slide under.

Michael Barone reviews what commentators are saying about that election, and adds his own thoughts.

…Many writers—both conservatives like my Examiner colleague Phil Klein, John McCormack of the Weekly Standard and Jim Geraghty of National Review and, writing before the election, non-conservatives like Charlie Cook of National Journal and Nate Silver of the New York Times—have been arguing that this race has little precedental value…Cook was more categorical and colorful. “[I]mplying that the outcome of this race portends anything about any conventional race next year amounts to cheap spin and drive-by ‘analysis’ of the most superficial kind, which is sadly becoming all too prevalent in Washington. There are a lot of folks in D.C. who would be well-served switching to decaf.” …

…I agree wholeheartedly with my Examiner colleague Conn Carroll, Republicans need to go on the offensive on Medicare. Or as the Washington Post’s Dan Balz wrote in his analysis: “Republican leaders believe in their agenda and are not likely to back away from it just because they lost one House seat, particularly one that they could very well win back in 2012. But they have not yet won the argument over how best to deal with the country’s fiscal problems. They have accepted the responsibility to propose. Now they will need to learn how to persuade.”

…Under New York law, candidates in special elections are nominated by county party leaders, and in all three recent New York special elections the party leaders chose a member of the New York Assembly. All three lost. …

Jonah Goldberg writes that Republicans will have to fight, if they want to win.

…The simple fact is that the Democrats have their battle plan. It’s going to be Medi-scare every day in every way for the next 17 months. They are on autopilot. They are committed. Their die is cast. They have crossed their Rubicon. They have no desire to defend Obamacare, high gas prices, high unemployment, and a third Middle East war. They want — no, need — to be on offense because they have so much they cannot defend.

…The battle-tested Republicans have the same suite of options. And they are battle-tested. Last November, they won sweeping victories in the midterm elections. How? By focusing first and foremost on the Democrats’ failures.

For instance, the Democrats have a plan too. It’s the Status Quo-Plus. It involves letting Medicare continue to spiral out of control, consuming our budget until it becomes necessary for an unelected chamber of health-care bureaucrats to impose draconian cuts. …

Peter Wehner gives kudos to Tim Pawlenty for being honest and direct.

…there was someone else who recently announced his candidacy with nearly flawless execution: Tim Pawlenty. In his announcement speech, Governor Pawlenty sought to create an appealing narrative: he is a truth teller who’s willing to make difficult but necessary decisions. But what made this storyline particularly effective was that he backed it up.

In Iowa, for example, Pawlenty said we couldn’t afford subsidies for ethanol. In senior-rich Florida earlier this week, he called for fundamental changes in Social Security and other entitlement programs. And when asked about the Paul Ryan budget plan, he gave this pitch-perfect response:

I applaud Congressman Ryan for his courage and his leadership in putting his plan forward. At least he has a plan. President Obama doesn’t have a plan. The Democrats don’t have a plan. And I really applaud his leadership and his courage in putting a plan on the table. Number two, we will have our own plan; it will have many similarities to Congressman Ryan’s plan, but it will have some differences, one of which will be we’ll address Social Security. …as president, I’ll have my own plan [but] if I can’t have that, and the bill came to my desk and I had to choose between signing or not Congressman Ryan’s plan, of course I would sign it. …

In The Hill, Jordan Fabian comments on how Mitt continues to sell his soul in hopes of winning the presidency. Isn’t it a little embarrassing to be more liberal than Al Gore?

…Likely GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Friday voiced his support for ethanol subsidies during his first visit of the year to Iowa.

…Romney’s stance puts him at odds with former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R), who is looking to cast himself as a Romney alternative.

 …“Conventional wisdom says you can’t talk about ethanol in Iowa or Social Security in Florida or financial reform on Wall Street,” Pawlenty said. “But someone has to say it. Someone has to finally stand up and level with the American people. Someone has to lead.”

Jonathan Tobin also takes Romney to task for his ethanol cave-in.

…The ethanol boondoggle is good for Iowans who grow corn but bad for America. The federal subsidy for the fuel additive is a long-running scandal that even those who benefit from it know must come to an end in an era of budget crises. Yet for decades, it has been an article of faith that those who wish to win the Iowa caucuses must pledge allegiance to ethanol.

Tim Pawlenty is betting that a refusal to play that game will help, not hurt his presidential candidacy. Pawlenty’s statement of opposition to the ethanol subsidy when he formally declared his intention to run earlier this week was a daring step but one that might prove to be good politics. Opposing ethanol allows the former Minnesota governor to establish himself as the mainstream candidate whose concern for the country’s future is such that he won’t go along with business as usual corruption…

Romney’s backing for ethanol calls into question his pose as the guy who can make the tough decisions to balance budgets and eliminate waste and fraud. Though he’d like to be the man he speaks about when he puff his presidential qualifications, he just can’t help being who he is: a weathervane who goes back and forth on the issues depending on where he is and whose votes he wants. Even in Iowa, a state that he may not even actively contest next winter, Romney can’t stop pandering.

Steve Huntley, in the Chicago Sun-Times, is optimistic about the Republican field.

…The spotlight is shifting to former governors with records of coping at the state level with fiscal issues not unlike those threatening the nation’s long-term economic health.

Tim Pawlenty, who declared his candidacy this week, won two terms in blue state Minnesota and earned plaudits for wrestling with a Democratic legislature to cut spending, lower taxes and achieve education and health-care reforms. …Jon Huntsman, the former governor of Utah, is a fresh face in national politics who impresses many voters with his gravitas in discussing the key issues of the day.

And there’s still time for other candidates to jump in if GOP voters continue to register dissatisfaction with their choices. High on the list is New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a YouTube sensation thanks to his willingness to confront public employee unions demanding a gold credit card from the taxpayers. The conservative commentariat sees U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin as a leader on fiscal issues who can explain in plain language the entitlement iceberg facing the nation while Democrats recklessly steer the Titanic ship of state full steam ahead. Christie and Ryan thus far are firmly resisting a draft, but who knows what may happen in this unpredictable political season? …

In the National Post, Conrad Black comments on various countries’ financial situations.

…When Barack Obama took office, the official normal money supply of the United States was about $1.1-trillion. The $3-trillion in federal budget deficits that have been run up since then have largely, technically, escaped the money supply, though accretions have almost doubled the official total, an unheard of rate of growth (about 40% annualized) in a hard-currency country. About 70% of this debt has been paid by the issuance of bonds to the central bank of the United States, the Federal Reserve, a subsidiary of the United States government. Whatever the balance sheets say, this has produced the effect of a money-supply increase…

…Unless the United States has the most spectacular cognitive awakening since Brunhilda, if not Lazarus, the laws of arithmetic are going to assert themselves in Zeus-like terms.

…If there are signs of hope, the place we might look is Britain. Unlike the United States, the European Union and Japan, the United Kingdom is making a respectable effort to reduce unsustainable debt rather than simply devaluing the currency in which the debt is denominated. Britain’s fiscal deficit is more than 10% of GDP, approximately twice Canada’s rate and slightly higher than that of the United States, but its government does have a somewhat believable plan for reducing it. …

David Harsanyi comments on Colorado giving the finger to the First Amendment.

Shane Boor, a Colorado man with no criminal record, could face up to six months in jail for giving a cop the Digitus Infamis.

“The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado has offered free legal aid to a man facing a criminal harassment charge for flipping off a state trooper, the organization announced today.

Shane Boor, 35, was driving to his work site in April when he saw a trooper pull over another car. When Boor drove past, he flipped the trooper the bird.

A second trooper tracked down Boor at his work site and questioned him about the incident, according to the ACLU.”

The ACLU claims that The Finger “quietly expressed Mr. Boor‘s disapproval of what he regarded as unjustified harassment by members of the trooper’s profession.” To be honest, I wouldn’t want to live in a world where everyone was flipping off the police — nor do I think that would happen – but I certainly don’t want to live in a world where a man can face jail time for extending that finger. …

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More on David Mamet in the WSJ’s Weekend Interview. He was asked what books he read.

… He starts, naturally, with the most famous political convert in modern American history: Whittaker Chambers, whose 1952 book, “Witness,” documented his turn from Communism. “I read it. It was miraculous. Extraordinary hero-journey of this fellow that had to examine everything he believed in at the great, great cost—which is a cost I’m not subject to—of abandoning his life, his sustenance, his friends, his associations, and his past. And I said, ‘Oh my God. . . . Perhaps it might be incumbent upon me to see if I could get my thought and my actions into line too.”

There were other books. Most were given to him by his rabbi in L.A., Mordecai Finley. Mr. Mamet rattles off the works that affected him most: “White Guilt” by Shelby Steele, “Ethnic America” by Thomas Sowell, “The Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War” by Wilfred Trotter, “The Road to Serfdom” by Friedrich Hayek, “Capitalism and Freedom” by Milton Friedman, and “On Liberty” by John Stuart Mill.

Before he moved to California, Mr. Mamet had never met a self-described conservative or read one’s writings. He’d never heard of Messrs. Sowell or Steele. “No one on the left has,” he tells me. “I realized I lived in this bubble.”  … 

Charles Krauthammer sums up the president’s latest attack on Israel.

Every Arab-Israeli negotiation contains a fundamental asymmetry: Israel gives up land, which is tangible; the Arabs make promises, which are ephemeral. The long-standing American solution has been to nonetheless urge Israel to take risks for peace while America balances things by giving assurances of U.S. support for Israel’s security and diplomatic needs.

It’s on the basis of such solemn assurances that Israel undertook, for example, the Gaza withdrawal. In order to mitigate this risk, President George W. Bush gave a written commitment that America supported Israel absorbing major settlement blocs in any peace agreement, opposed any return to the 1967 lines and stood firm against the so-called Palestinian right of return to Israel.

For 21 / 2 years, the Obama administration has refused to recognize and reaffirm these assurances. Then last week in his State Department speech, President Obama definitively trashed them. He declared that the Arab-Israeli conflict should indeed be resolved along “the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.”

Nothing new here, said Obama three days later. “By definition, it means that the parties themselves — Israelis and Palestinians — will negotiate a border that is different” from 1967.

It means nothing of the sort. …

Walter Russell Mead writes on Obama’s lack of success.

… the last few weeks have cast him as the least competent manager of America’s Middle East diplomatic portfolio in a very long time.  He has infuriated and frustrated long term friends, but made no headway in reconciling enemies.  He has strained our ties with the established regimes without winning new friends on the Arab Street.  He has committed our forces in the strategically irrelevant backwater of Libya not, as he originally told us, for “days, not weeks” but for months not days.

Where he has failed so dramatically is in the arena he himself has so frequently identified as vital: the search for peace between Palestinians and Israelis.  His record of grotesque, humiliating and total diplomatic failure in his dealings with Prime Minister Netanyahu has few parallels in American history.  Three times he has gone up against Netanyahu; three times he has ingloriously failed.  This last defeat — Netanyahu’s deadly, devastating speech to Congress in which he eviscerated President Obama’s foreign policy to prolonged and repeated standing ovations by members of both parties — may have been the single most stunning and effective public rebuke to an American President a foreign leader has ever delivered.

Netanyahu beat Obama like a red-headed stepchild; he played him like a fiddle; he pounded him like a big brass drum.  The Prime Minister of Israel danced rings around his arrogant, professorial opponent.  It was like watching the Harlem Globetrotters go up against the junior squad from Miss Porter’s School; like watching Harvard play Texas A&M, like watching Bambi meet Godzilla — or Bill Clinton run against Bob Dole.

The Prime Minister mopped the floor with our guy.  Obama made his ’67 speech; Bibi ripped him to shreds.  Obama goes to AIPAC, nervous, off-balance, backing and filling.  Then Bibi drops the C-Bomb, demonstrating to the whole world that the Prime Minister of Israel has substantially more support in both the House and the Senate than the President of the United States. …

Jennifer Rubin notes it was Canada that stood by Israel.  

… This is an exquisite statement of support for Israel: “When Israel, the only country in the world whose very existence is under attack, is consistently and conspicuously singled out for condemnation, I believe we are morally obligated to take a stand.” Too bad that came from the prime minister of Canada and not the U.S. president.

Marc Thiessen calls him Richard Milhous Obama.

In a television interview last October, President Obama accidentally let slip a key element of his political philosophy: “We’re gonna punish our enemies, and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.”

Obama later apologized — not for the underlying sentiment, mind you, but for his word choice. “I probably should have used the word ‘opponents’ instead of enemies,” the president declared.

This incident is worth remembering as the president prepares to issue a far-reaching executive order that would require the government to collect detailed information about the political activities of anyone applying for a federal contract. The proposed order would require businesses to furnish, with each contract proposal, a list not only of their contributions to political candidates and committees, but also their contributions to groups that do not under current law have to reveal their donors. The president’s order would force anyone seeking a federal contract to declare whether they are a friend or an enemy — excuse me, “opponent” — of the Obama White House. Worse still, it would set up a central database listing those contributions at a federal government Web site — creating what amounts to an electronic, searchable “enemies list.” …

James Delingpole welcomes the president to Ireland.

… Tony Blair used to do this trick too, his accent mutating from broad Glaswegian to genteel Edinburgh to Mummerset to Estuary to Richard E Grant to Sarf London Grime – often in the course of one Downing Street reception – the better to persuade his target audience that he was their kind of guy. And it is, of course, the hallmark of an unutterable charlatan.

I’ve argued before that Tony Blair and Barack Obama have an awful lot in common. Both are lawyers; both are snake-oil-salesman; both claim to be post-partisan, and Third Way and consensual; both play the acceptable, moderate-seeming public face of a regime chock full of Communists, class warriors, single issue rabble rousers, malcontents, communitarians and eco-loons hell bent on destroying every last vestige of what once made their country great. And both do (or did) the things dodgy political leaders always do when the going gets tough at home and their domestic audience finally wises up to how totally useless they are: they hop on the plane and pose as international statesman instead. …

Jonathan Tobin says, in regards to John Edwards, we should just let him slither away.

… The spectacle of Edwards’ prosecution may gladden the hearts of some conservatives who have seen similarly flimsy legal attacks on some of their former leaders like Tom DeLay succeed. But that doesn’t make what is happening to Edwards right.

Seeing John Edwards brought into court may satisfy a public that rightly thinks him deserving of some rough justice for the way he treated his wife. But however despicable he may be, putting him through the wringer for campaign finance violations is no triumph for American jurisprudence.

The chair on the Dem party was roasting The GOP a few days ago because they didn’t support the auto bailout. Andrew Malcolm has the story on the Japanese car she drives.

… “If it were up to the candidates for president on the Republican side,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, “we would be driving foreign cars. They would have let the auto industry in America go down the tubes.” …

Dilbert blogs from Heaven. He went there last week during the rapture.

Heaven is great! I came here unexpectedly at 6 PM on May 21st. One moment I was petting the dog, and the next I was ascending to Heaven without my fillings. As far as I can tell, I was the only person on Earth to qualify for the Rapture. My strategy of remaining a virgin is starting to look pretty smart. And I guess I can admit my other little secret: When you thought I was taking the Lord’s name in vain, I was really saying “gob.”  I know, right? It’s so clever. I totally beat the system.

Anyway, let me tell you what it’s like up here, since apparently you won’t be visiting. For starters, the Internet is blazing fast, and I’m typing this at 1,000 words per minute. No typos, ever! …

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It was our intention to leave the Middle East speeching for awhile, but John Podhoretz brings us back. We’ll move on next week. In the meantime, this is too much fun.

The score: Bibi 3, Barack 0.

In a demonstration of political and policy haplessness almost without precedent, the president of the United States decided last week for the third time in three years to go after a beloved ally of the United States with no practical goal and for no practical purpose.

And for the third time, he has had his hat handed to him.

President Obama put conflict with Israel front and center last week by including a new description of the borders of a future Palestinian state in his remarks on Thursday — an endorsement of boundaries for Israel based on the lines that preceded the Six Day War in 1967.

The president did this with deliberate aforethought, we are told by the reporting of New York Times White House correspondent Helene Cooper — precisely because he wanted to upstage and overshadow Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington.

Instead, he was upstaged and overshadowed.

It was Netanyahu, not Obama, who electrified Washington. …

If you missed a chance to hear or read Netanyahu’s speech, here it is.

… As the great English writer George Eliot predicted over a century ago, that once established, the Jewish state will “shine like a bright star of freedom amid the despotisms of the East.”  Well, she was right.  We have a free press, independent courts, an open economy, rambunctious parliamentary debates. You think you guys are tough on one another in Congress? Come spend a day in the Knesset. Be my guest.
 
Courageous Arab protesters, are now struggling to secure these very same rights for their peoples, for their societies. We’re proud that over one million Arab citizens of Israel have been enjoying these rights for decades. Of the 300 million Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, only Israel’s Arab citizens enjoy real democratic rights. I want you to stop for a second and think about that.  Of those 300 million Arabs, less than one-half of one-percent are truly free, and they’re all citizens of Israel!

This startling fact reveals a basic truth: Israel is not what is wrong about the Middle East. Israel is what is right about the Middle East. …

… I am willing to make painful compromises to achieve this historic peace. As the leader of Israel, it is my responsibility to lead my people to peace.

This is not easy for me. I recognize that in a genuine peace, we will be required to give up parts of the Jewish homeland.  In Judea and Samaria, the Jewish people are not foreign occupiers. We are not the British in India.  We are not the Belgians in the Congo. 

This is the land of our forefathers, the Land of Israel, to which Abraham brought the idea of one God, where David set out to confront Goliath, and where Isaiah saw a vision of eternal peace.  No distortion of history can deny the four thousand year old bond, between the Jewish people and the Jewish land.

But there is another truth: The Palestinians share this small land with us. We seek a peace in which they will be neither Israel’s subjects nor its citizens.  They should enjoy a national life of dignity as a free, viable and independent people in their own state.  They should enjoy a prosperous economy, where their creativity and initiative can flourish. …

Roger Simon reviews Mamet’s book.

With all the talk of Hollywood liberalism — the endless leftist blather from Sean Penn and Tim Robbins, the cozying up to Castro and Chavez by Oliver Stone and Danny Glover, the jejune Iranian peace-making by Annette Bening and Alfre Woodard, etc., etc — it’s fascinating that the two leading playwrights in the English language (the smart guys) — Tom Stoppard and David Mamet — identify as conservative/libertarians.

For Stoppard — born in Communist Czechoslovakia — this was natural, but for Mamet — a Chicago Jewish child of the sixties — it was a considerably longer slog. As he relates in his superb new book The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, “I had never knowingly talked with nor read the works of a Conservative before moving to Los Angeles, some eight years ago.”

Mamet certainly made up for lost time. Barely ten pages into his book, you know this man has read, and thoroughly digested, the major conservative works of our and recent times, from Friedrich Hayek to Milton Friedman and on to Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele. And he is able to explicate and elaborate on them as well as anybody. …

Paul Johnson says our debt has become a moral issue.

I wish people everywhere were encouraged by politicians, the media and their places of worship to see indebtedness in moral as well as economic terms.

There is nothing wrong with borrowing money. It’s a natural part of the capitalist system, whereby those who are frugal and have savings are enabled to use them to help those who wish to expand their businesses, receiving reasonable interest on the loans. But if you borrow, three conditions are necessary for your actions to be righteous:

- The money borrowed should be of reasonable size commensurate with your resources and prospects.

- From the outset a program of repayment should be in place.

- The repayment plan should have priority over any other commitment, especially any personal spending plans. …

David Harsanyi defends marriage.

When an actress — no, an artist — the caliber of Cameron Diaz weighs in on the future of social institutions, America has an obligation to listen.

And listen we did. In a widely discussed interview with Maxim magazine, Diaz offered America a peek at her body, her relationship with Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez (which, needless to say, is “awesome”) and her views on the future of matrimony. Does she think marriage is a dying institution? “I do,” she explained. “I think we have to make our own rules. I don’t think we should live our lives in relationships based off of old traditions that don’t suit our world any longer.”

Let’s for a moment pretend that we share a world with Cameron Diaz. Does marriage suit this domain? …

Shikha Damlia says there is no chance GM will pay back its loans. This inspite of the recent $3.2 billion quarter.

… No doubt, $3.2 billion is a big number. But an even bigger number is $60 billion. That’s what this administration and the last one together sank into GM (not to mention another $20 billion or so they dumped into Chrysler). When President Obama gave GM this money, he insisted that it was not a handout but an “investment” that would cost taxpayers “not a dime.”

But if there was ever any doubt that this wasn’t going to happen, this earning report dispels it.

For starters, included in the $3.2 billion figure is the net $1.5 billion that the company generated from the one-time sale of Delphi, its auto parts supplier, and Ally Financial, its financial arm. Subtract that, and its performance looks much less impressive, especially compared to its rival Ford that really didn’t receive a dime from taxpayers yet made $2.6 billion last quarter—or nearly a billion more than GM. …

The BizJournal tells us about the job engine that is Texas.

Texas added more jobs in the past 10 years than the total jobs of the 19 states, including the District of Columbia, that were positive for job growth.

Texas has enjoyed an unequaled economic boom the past 10 years.

The inventory of private-sector jobs in Texas increased by 732,800 between April 2001 and the same month this year, according to an On Numbers analysis of new federal employment data.

No other state registered an increase of more than 100,000 private-sector jobs during the decade. Only 19 states and the District of Columbia posted any gains at all. …

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We looked back to Pickings March 28th 2010 to find a post by Nile Gardiner about Obama’s insult to Netanyahu during his last visit to Washington. It is worth remembering this episode now as we watch our president again act in execrable fashion towards the Israeli Prime Minister.

I wrote recently about Barack Obama’s sneering contempt for both Israel and Great Britain. Further confirmation of this was provided today with new details emerging regarding the President’s appalling reception for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House earlier this week. As Adrian Blomfield reports for The Telegraph:

‘Benjamin Netanyahu was left to stew in a White House meeting room for over an hour after President Barack Obama abruptly walked out of tense talks to have supper with his family, it emerged on Thursday. The snub marked a fresh low in US-Israeli relations and appeared designed to show Mr Netanyahu how low his stock had fallen in Washington after he refused to back down in a row over Jewish construction in east Jerusalem.

… (Mr. Obama) immediately presented Mr Netanyahu with a list of 13 demands designed both to the end the feud with his administration and to build Palestinian confidence ahead of the resumption of peace talks. Key among those demands was a previously-made call to halt all new settlement construction in east Jerusalem.

When the Israeli prime minister stalled, Mr Obama rose from his seat declaring: “I’m going to the residential wing to have dinner with Michelle and the girls.” As he left, Mr Netanyahu was told to consider the error of his ways. “I’m still around,” Mr Obama is quoted by Israel’s Yediot Ahronot newspaper as having said. “Let me know if there is anything new.” ‘

This is no way to treat America’s closest ally in the Middle East, and a true friend of the United States. I very much doubt that even third world tyrants would be received in such a rude fashion by the president. In fact, they would probably be warmly welcomed by the Obama White House as part of its “engagement” strategy, while the leaders of Britain and Israel are frequently met with arrogant disdain.

The ritual humiliation of the Israelis is an absolute disgrace, and yet another example of how the Obama administration views its allies with indifference, contempt, and at times outright hostility. It is extraordinary how far the Obama team has gone out of its way to grovel to state sponsors of terrorism, such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Muammar Gaddafi, while kicking America’s friends in the teeth. …

Bret Stephens thinks all of this is fine as long as we understand the president is anti-Israel.

Say what you will about President Obama’s approach to Israel—or of his relationship with American Jews—he sure has mastered the concept of chutzpah.

On Thursday at the State Department, the president gave his big speech on the Middle East, in which he invoked the claims of friendship to tell Israelis “the truth,” which to his mind was that “the status quo is unsustainable, and Israel too must act boldly to advance a lasting peace.” On Friday in the Oval Office, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered his version of the truth, which was that the 1967 border proposed by Mr. Obama as a basis for negotiating the outlines of a Palestinian state was a nonstarter.

Administration reaction to this reciprocal act of friendly truth-telling? “That was Bibi over the top,” the New York Times quoted one senior U.S. official, using the prime minister’s nickname. “That’s not how you address the president of the United States.”

Maybe so. Then again, it isn’t often that this or any other U.S. president welcomes a foreign leader by sandbagging him with an adversarial policy speech a day before the visit. Remember when the Dalai Lama visited Mr. Obama last year? As a courtesy to Beijing, the president made sure to have the Tibetan spiritual leader exit by the door where the White House trash was piled up. And that was 11 months before Hu Jintao’s state visit to the U.S. …

Jennifer Rubin writes about AIPAC receptions for Harry Reid and Bibi Netanyahu.

Last night at AIPAC Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu delighted and engaged the crowd, while Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) raised some eyebrows. Reid made it perfectly clear, as House Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) did on Sunday, that he wanted nothing to do with President Obama’s formulation of U.S. policy toward Israel.

Reid, looking more rickety than usual, isn’t a fabulous public speaker. But what he said pleased the crowd immensely. He was emphatic that any peace deal will be decided “by the parties at the center of the conflict and nowhere else.” If that weren’t direct enough, he continued, “No one should set premature parameters about borders, about building or anything else.” Roaring ovation. And he assured the crowd, “The United States will not give money to terrorists bent on the destruction of the state of Israel.” Imagine if Obama had said all that — but then he’d have to believe all that and that the peace process is best served when America’s support for Israel is undiluted.

Netanyahu is quite a presence in a room. And the room last night was brimming with affection and enthusiasm. Let there be no doubt: If Obama’s reception was polite, Bibi’s was effusive. …

Even before Bibi’s speech yesterday before a joint session, Jonathan Tobin knew Netanyahu was going to go home a winner in the recent kerfuffle started by the kid president.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress today will illustrate a fact that was largely obscured by the controversy over President Obama’s Middle East policy speech. The Jewish state enjoys overwhelming and bipartisan support in this country.

Cynics will ascribe the support to the “Israel Lobby”—a.k.a. AIPAC—which has been holding its annual conference in the capital the last couple of days — or some other pro-Zionist force. But what conspiracy theorists like Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer (authors of The Israel Lobby) and their media ilk never seem to understand is that the cabal they believe manipulates U.S. policy is so large it encompasses both major political parties and an overwhelming majority of the American people. …

Jennifer Rubin was at the speech to Congress and says Bibi did not disappoint.

It was simply the most extraordinary and clever speech given by an Israeli prime minister. Bibi Netanyahu did several critical things: demonstrated that he and members of Congress from both parties are entirely in sync; refocused the world on Iran; publicly stated he would give up land considered by Jews to be part of their historic homeland; left no doubt that the Palestinians’ refusal to recognize a Jewish state is the sole reason there is no Palestinian state; and implicitly made a mockery of President Obama’s fixation on settlements. I will take each in order.

The genuine expression of warmth and respect, but more important, agreement from Congress was undeniable. On each key point, whether on Hamas or the right of return or the U.N., there was a full standing ovation from every attendee I could spot. Netanyahu is a uniter — is there ANY issue on which the Congress is so totally united? And Netanyahu made a key point to lawmakers weary about demands form unstable regimes. “No nation building is needed. Israel is already built. There is no need to export democracy.We already are one.” And there’s no need for U.S. troops because “we defend ourselves.”

When a single heckler interrupted, Congress stood in unison to show solidarity. In one of his best lines, Netanyahu said, “You can’t have these protests in the farcical parliaments of Tehran or Tripoli. This is real democracy.”

Jonathan Tobin posts again, after the joint session speech.

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu basks in the glory from his triumphant speech to a joint meeting of Congress, it’s a moment to consider that he is the only Israeli leader who could have pulled off such a tour de force. His eloquent summation of Israel’s case was not only to the point, it was delivered in a manner that was singularly insightful in its ability to speak straight to the concerns of Americans.

That is not to say that Netanyahu is the wisest or the most adroit of Israeli politicians. He isn’t. His is a flawed character that has often been rightly described as Nixonesque. He combines a simmering resentment against enemies with deep suspicion of his friends. No happy warrior, Netanyahu is a prickly and often unpleasant man. And yet it must be understood that, for all of his shortcomings, Netanyahu is uniquely equipped to handle what must be considered the most important task of any Israeli prime minister: the alliance with the United States. Having spent much of his childhood in the United States (he’s the second most famous graduate of Cheltenham High School in Pennsylvania after baseball Hall-of-Famer Reggie Jackson), he speaks fluent American English. More than that, unlike most Israelis, including many who have immigrated here, he has an intuitive understanding of American culture. …

Closing today’s coverage of the speech is Toby Harnden.

… It was also notable that Senator Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, a liberal Democrat and a Mormon, effectively slapped down Obama in a speech at AIPAC in which he said: “No one should set premature parameters about borders, about building or anything else.”

As Jennifer Rubin notes, Obama is out of step with his own party on Israel. To talk of his “growing irrelevancy”, as Rubin does, may be overstating things. But he is certainly beginning to look isolated.

Here’s 33 year old video of Netanyahu on a U. S. TV show The Advocate, For this he had anglicized his name to Benjamin Nitay.  

For a change of pace, John Steele Gordon writes on the future of the printed book.

Amazon, by far the largest bookseller in the country, reported on May 19 that it is now selling more books in its electronic Kindle format than in the old paper-and-ink format. That is remarkable, considering that the Kindle has only been around for four years. E-books now account for 14 percent of all book sales in this country and are increasing far faster than overall book sales. E-book sales are up 146 percent over last year, while hardback sales increased 6 percent and paperbacks decreased 8 percent.

Does this spell the doom of the physical book? Certainly not immediately, and perhaps not at all. What it does mean is that the book business will go through a transformation in the next decade or so more profound than any it has seen since Gutenberg introduced printing from moveable type in the 1450s.

Physical books will surely become much rarer in the marketplace. Mass market paperbacks, which have been declining for years anyway, will probably disappear, as will hardbacks for mysteries, thrillers, “romance fiction,” etc. Such books, which only rarely end up in permanent collections either private or public, will probably only be available as e-books within a few years. Hardback and trade paperbacks for “serious” nonfiction and fiction will surely last longer. Perhaps it will become the mark of an author to reckon with that he or she is still published in hard copy.

As for children’s books, who knows? Children’s books are like dog food in that the purchasers are not the consumers, so the market (and the marketing) is inherently strange. …

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Since he took office, Obama has tried to undermine Bibi Netanyahu’s hold on the leadership of Israel. But in fact, he has only undermined himself. Today we will explore the latest in a long line of the president’s MidEast foolishness. Toby Harnden starts it off.

… Some Israelis believe that Mr Obama hoped his words would destabilise Mr Netanyahu’s coalition government and bring in Tzipi Livni, the Kadima leader and head of the Israeli opposition, who is viewed in Washington as more flexible and realistic.

The result of the past few days, however, may well be that real Israeli-Palestinian talks have been made more elusive. Mr Netanyahu took a considerable risk in speaking so bluntly to an American head of state. The response from the staunchly pro-Israel American commentator Jeffrey Goldberg was a blog post headlined: “Dear Mr Netanyahu, Please Don’t Speak to My President That Way”.

But Mr Netanyahu’s coalition appears to be solid at the moment and he could emerge stronger from his spat with Mr Obama. …

… In 2008, 78 per cent of Jewish voters chose Mr Obama over Senator John McCain. That level of support could well ebb between now and 2012. More seriously, there are signs that donations from wealthy Jews, which played a key role in Mr Obama’s stratospheric fundraising totals in 2008, will fall off.

Ed Koch, the former New York mayor and a prominent Democrat and Obama donor in 2008, condemned the President for having “sought to reduce Israel’s negotiation power”, echoing what many other prominent Jewish Democrats have said.

Mr Obama has always made clear that he wants to be not merely an ordinary American president but one to rival Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and John F Kennedy.

In spelling out to Israel, as he did at Aipac, what he sees as “the facts we all must confront”, no one could accuse him of timidity. He may well, however, have made his own aim of being the great American peacemaker in the Middle East much more difficult to achieve.

Jennifer Rubin on the AIPAC speeches.

More so than the speech (which was vintage Barack Obama — self-pitying, defensive and internally inconsistent), the reaction of those inside the AIPAC conference and from those not in attendance reflected the extraordinary degree to which the president has fragmented the Jewish community. The story of the day was: Friends of Israel are divided over Obama’s motives, goals and feelings about the Jewish state.

The first reaction preceded the speech. Before the president spoke, House Minority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) delivered a rock-solid, pro-Israel speech that was in effect a poke in the eye of Obama. Hoyer went thorough nearly all of the problematic issues raised by Obama in his Thursday speech and — boom, boom, boom — then one by one, to the delight of the crowd, took positions contrary to or more clearly pro-Israel than Obama’s. It was a cathartic scene in which attendees reluctant to boo or hiss the president let it be known where they stood with loud and frequent standing ovations. Hoyer said that the United States should confirm the “memorandum of understanding” (the 2004 letters exchanged between President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon). Obama did not, although he borrowed one phrase referring to defensible borders. Hoyer announced that the parties should return to the bargaining table with no preconditions. Obama let it be known he’s certain where the border negotiations must start from. Hoyer was emphatic that the U.S. government will not fund a unity government with Hamas. Obama was silent on funding. Hoyer was the un-Obama — clear, unequivocally supportive of Israel and entirely within the mainstream, bipartisan pro-Israel tradition. No one I spoke to had a negative word to say of his address, and many attendees including Republicans were effusive in praise. …

Alana Goodman says the administration asked for this.

… But if Obama’s position was taken out of context, he’s the one to blame. It was his staffers who were telling the New York Times and other media outlets that there was going to be a major “surprise” in his Thursday address, and suggested that it was related to Israel. With literally nothing else newsworthy in the speech besides his 1967 border comments, obviously reporters were going to run with that story. …

Jonathan Tobin notes WaPo’s editorial criticizing the president’s efforts.

President Obama and his staff thought they were being very clever by throwing in the declaration that the 1967 borders were the baseline for future Middle East peace talks into his speech on the Arab Spring protests on the eve of a visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They calculated Netanyahu would have no choice but to accept this last-minute slap across the face from his country’s only ally. And if he did talk back, they figured he would find himself isolated without the backing of Israel’s allies in Congress and with most of the American media lined up solidly against him.

But Obama appears to have misread the situation. Netanyahu’s strong reply rightly declaring that the 1967 borders were indefensible may have infuriated the White House, but, contrary to their plan, not everybody is jeering his defiance.

The Washington Post editorial page took the president to school on Friday for injecting a counter-productive irritant into Middle East policy. As the Post wrote:

“Mr. Obama’s decision to confront [Netanyahu] with a formal U.S. embrace of the idea, with only a few hours’ warning, ensured a blowup. Israeli bad feeling was exacerbated by Mr. Obama’s failure to repeat past U.S. positions — in particular, an explicit stance against the return of Palestinian refugees to Israel.

Mr. Obama should have learned from his past diplomatic failures — including his attempt to force a freeze on Jewish settlements in the West Bank — that initiating a conflict with Israel will thwart rather than advance peace negotiations. He may also be giving short shrift to what Mr. Netanyahu called “some basic realities.” The president appears to assume that Mr. Abbas is open to a peace deal despite growing evidence to the contrary.” …

More on this from Omri Ceren. Also in Contentions.

… The Wiesenthal Center’s statement makes it clear that it’s not a case of people just not getting what Obama is suggesting. The widely recognized problem with Obama’s speech is that he adopted the final Palestinian negotiating position as the starting position for talks. That would leave Israel—now deprived of bargaining chips—in the position of trying to negotiate out of that position with nothing to trade. In the process the president abrogated any number of previous security guarantees to Israel, while asking them to have faith in future security guarantees. No wonder friends of Israel from across the political spectrum are labeling the President’s gambit a non-starter.

For completion’s sake, the Washington Times also just published a disbelieving editorial about Obama’s almost willfully created rift with Israel. Of the various permutations (was it a new policy? was it an existing stance? is it a coherent policy?) they settle basically on the combination suggested earlier on Contentions: it’s a break with previous administrations, but a culmination of this administration’s failed approaches. The question is why the White House would continue pushing failed initiatives based on flawed assumptions, and the editorial takes a detour through how the President has mishandled the issue of Jerusalem.

If its goal was to turn U.S. media outlets against Netanyahu and Israel, the administration’s lack of judgment went far beyond the speech itself.

Eric Cantor went to AIPAC too. Ron Radosh tells the story of his huge ovation from the conference.

… Undoubtedly, his most well-received moment was when he addressed the president’s own illusions. Cantor first noted that Palestinian culture — which Obama omitted criticizing — is laced with “resentment and hatred.” Cantor then shrewdly rebuked Obama:

[Palestinian culture is] the root of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. It is not about the ’67 lines. And until Israel’s enemies come to terms with this reality, a true peace will be impossible … If the Palestinians want to live in peace in a state of their own, they must demonstrate that they are worthy of a state.

He boldly laid out a challenge to Abbas, noting that his media and schools regularly preach hatred of Israel as well as Jews as a people. His following remarks received an ovation:

Stop naming public squares and athletic teams after suicide bombers. And come to the negotiating table when you have prepared your people to forego hatred and renounce terrorism — and Israel will embrace you. Until that day, there can be no peace with Hamas. Peace at any price isn’t peace; it’s surrender.

Clearly alluding to the president, Cantor then said that friendship between Israel and the U.S. has to be based on reality, “not just on rhetoric.” While words come and go, “only deeds count.”

And with another slap at the president, he remarked: “Now is the time to lead … from the front.”

Following up on the post yesterday about the disaster that is QE2, we have more from Market Watch.

It‘s cost $600 billion of your money. And it was supposed to rescue the economy. But has Ben Bernanke’s huge financial stimulus package, known as “Quantitative Easing 2,” actually worked as planned?

QE2 is being wound down in the next few weeks. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has said it has left the economy “moving in the right direction.”

But an analysis of the real numbers tells a very different story.

Turns out the program has created maybe 700,000 full-time jobs — at a cost of around $850,000 each.

House prices are lower than before QE2 was launched. Economic growth is slower. Inflation is higher. …

Need a break from bad news, Here’s Andrew Malcolm on the best of late-night humor.

Letterman: On Monday no more smoking in New York City public places. So after today if you’re holding something smoking in New York City, it better be a gun.

Leno: President Obama wants Israel to go back to pre-1967 borders. Now, Native Americans are demanding Obama go back to pre-1492 borders.

Leno: You heard about that whole world-coming-to-an-end thing, right? Look, I love Oprah too. But it was just a TV show.

Leno: President Obama’s approval rating went up after the SEALs got Osama Bin Laden. But now it’s back down. That’s bad news, not for Obama, for Kadafi. … 

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Mark Steyn is concerned about the type of people who manage the world’s economy.

… A man is innocent until proven guilty, and it will be for a New York court to determine what happened in M Strauss-Kahn’s suite at the Sofitel. It may well be that’s he the hapless victim of a black Muslim widowed penniless refugee maid – although, if that’s the defense my lawyer were proposing to put before a Manhattan jury, I’d be inclined to suggest he’s the one who needs to plead insanity. Whatever the head of the IMF did or didn’t do, the reaction of the French elites is most instructive. “We and the Americans do not belong to the same civilization,” sniffed Jean Daniel, editor of Le Nouvel Observateur, insisting that the police should have known that Strauss-Kahn was “not like other men” and wondering why “this chambermaid was regarded as worthy and beyond any suspicion.” Bernard-Henri Lévy, the open-shirted, hairy-chested Gallic intellectual who talked Sarkozy into talking Obama into launching the Libyan war, is furious at the lèse-majesté of this impertinent serving girl and the jackanapes of America’s “absurd” justice system, not to mention this ghastly “American judge who, by delivering him to the crowd of photo hounds, pretended to take him for a subject of justice like any other.”

Well, OK. Why shouldn’t DSK (as he’s known in France) be treated as “a subject of justice like any other”? Because, says BHL (as he’s known in France), of everything that Strauss-Kahn has done at the IMF to help the world “avoid the worst.” In particular, he has made the IMF “more favorable to proletarian nations and, among the latter, to the most fragile and vulnerable.” What is one fragile and vulnerable West African maid when weighed in the scales of history against entire fragile and vulnerable proletarian nations? Yes, he Kahn!

Before you scoff at Euro-lefties willing to argue for 21st century droit de seigneur, recall the grisly eulogies for the late Edward Kennedy. “At the end of the day,” said Sen. Evan Bayh, “he cared most about the things that matter to ordinary people.” The standard line of his obituarists was that this was Ted’s penance for Chappaquiddick and Mary Jo Kopechne – or, as the Aussie columnist Tim Blair put it, “She died so that the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act might live.” Great men who are prone to Big Government invariably have Big Appetites, and you comely serving wenches who catch the benign sovereign’s eye or anything else he’s shooting your way should keep in mind the Big Picture. Yes, Ted Ken!

Nor are such dispensations confined to Great Men’s trousers. Timothy Geithner failed to pay the taxes he owed the United States Treasury but that’s no reason not to make him head of the United States Treasury. His official explanation for this lapse was that, unlike losers like you, he was unable to follow the simple yes/no prompts of Turbo Tax: In that sense, unlike the Frenchman and the maid, Geithner’s defense is that she wasn’t asking for it – or, if she was, he couldn’t understand the question. Nevertheless, just as only Dominique could save the European economy, so only Timmy could save the U.S. economy. Yes, they Kahn!

How’s that working out? In the U.S., Geithner is currently running around bleating that we need to raise the $14 trillion debt ceiling another couple of trillion. On the Continent, the IMF, an institution most Westerners vaguely assume is there as a last resort for Third World basket cases, is intimately involved in the ever more frantic efforts to save the Euro from collapse. Good thing we had these two indispensable men on the case, or who knows how bad things would be. …

Christopher Caldwell writing for the Weekly Standard gives us a French view of the DSK affair.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was not just rich and powerful. He was also, until last Saturday, the likely next president of France. So commanding was his lead that rumors had been flying since April that Martine Aubry, his chief rival for the Socialist nomination, would soon drop out of the race. 

Even if the idea of Strauss-Kahn as their head of state is something the French were only trying on for size, no people can be comfortable seeing their potential leader marched around as an accused rapist, particularly under the customs of an alien legal system. The French are indignant at the “perp walk,” the tradition of marching an arrestee before the video cameras that is former U.S. attorney Rudolph Giuliani’s contribution to American show business. The French see it as an act of vanity by publicity-seeking prosecutors and a potential harm to the presumption of innocence. On both counts, they are correct. 

There are two ways to look at the anger that rose up in the French press after Strauss-Kahn, disheveled and humiliated, was photographed after his arrest. The first is to see an understandable discomfort with an act of lèse-majesté. The other is to see a public grown servile and sycophantic. The French press may have been worried about seeing Strauss-Kahn’s name dragged through the mud, but it was quite content to print the name of his alleged victim. …

John Hinderaker at PowerLine has a great post on the broken promise of the “stimulus.” 

I have been puzzled by the extent of the media coverage of some crank’s prediction that the world would come to an end today. People are always predicting the end of the world. So far they have always been wrong. Was there something about this particular prediction that was newsworthy? Did any significant number of people expect to wake up this morning and see graves opening and people ascending into Heaven? This morning, there were news stories to the effect that the world still exists. Really! Did reporters expect their readers to be surprised? Why, in short, was this silliness a major media event?

I wish reporters would pay as much attention to a more important failed prediction: the Obama administration’s assurance that its policies, including the “stimulus,” would foster job creation and prevent unemployment from reaching 8 percent.  …

… The Obama administration’s failed prediction of job growth has significant public policy implications. The most basic division between our political parties is their relative faith, or lack thereof, in the efficacy of federal spending. We are embarking on an election cycle in which Republicans will argue for reduced government spending, and Democrats will claim, against all the evidence, that cutting back on out-of-control spending will somehow be bad for the economy. But the Democrats’ theory has been tested. It flunked. It would be nice if reporters and editors would find that failed prediction as newsworthy as the latest end of the world calculation.

Houston Chronicle op-ed on the attack on Boeing and the implications for Texas. 

The Obama administration has launched a battle in South Carolina that is both a strike at Texas and an attack upon America’s free enterprise system.

Airplane manufacturer Boeing would like to expand its operations and create jobs with a new facility in North Charleston, but the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has taken legal action against the company because South Carolina, like Texas, is a right-to-work state. The NLRB says Boeing can’t expand into South Carolina. It must instead keep all its workers in Washington, where it already has facilities and faces a toxic business climate. Washington is a state with forced unionization, and Boeing has regularly confronted work stoppages by the unions.

If the Obama administration succeeds in this attempt to tell businesses where they’re allowed to set up shop and decide where workers can be employed, then it is not just South Carolina jobs that are in danger. Texas jobs are at stake as well, and the NLRB could soon be issuing rulings that companies cannot create jobs here in Texas. And, even further, this will have the unintended consequence of encouraging companies to locate facilities overseas just to be competitive in today’s global economy. …

George Will explains why California is singing the blues.

In 1967, five years after California became the most populous state, novelist Wallace Stegner said that California — energetic, innovative, hedonistic — was America, “only more so.” Today, this state’s budget crisis is like the nation’s, only more so. …

… “Californians already labor under sales-tax rates usually reserved for states without income taxes (at 8.25 percent, the nation’s highest) and sharply progressive income-tax rates usually reserved for states without sales taxes (the state’s top rate is 10.55 percent, and it doesn’t allow you to deduct your federal taxes, as some states with income taxes do).”

Those tax levels are surely related to these demographic facts: Between 2000 and 2010, Los Angeles gained fewer people than in any decade since the 1890s, and Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area have the slowest growth rates since the end of Spanish rule. For the first time since 1920, the Census did not award California even one additional congressional seat. …

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Marty Peretz is aghast at the president’s Mid-East advisors. 

Wowy, zowy, Obama is doing his own thinking on the Middle East and here’s the even worse news: He’s taking advice from Tom Friedman and Fareed Zakaria.

These pathetic tidings about the inner Barack Obama, who puts his very own twist on all things, particularly Arab and Muslim matters, and the other Barack Obama, who needs counsel from two political therapists, famous and even clever but not especially deep, come from the subtle and highly reliable journalist Mark Landler in The New York Times. These tidbits are not contradictory. Zakaria’s diagnosis, at least for the last few years, is that America is over, just plumb over. Or, to use the ill-omened word from his The Post-American World, “enfeebled,” which implies continuous decline. Enfeebled nations do not, after all, usually rise again. Zakaria was, however, more than a bit mortified by being called a presidential adviser, although it was he who labeled himself. He posted a statement on Saturday saying, well, that he didn’t really advise but spoke to Obama several times in face-to-face meeting about the Arab Spring (which, by the way, in my view is fast becoming Arab winter, like the east coast winter last season.) Anyway, if he is trying to establish a difference, it’s not a distinction. …

… In contrast to Zakaria, Friedman is not embarrassed by being seen as the president’s counselor. … Anyway, Tom’s lens for seeing contemporary America is through contemporary China. He wishes America were China, almost the way some native fascists like Charles Lindbergh wanted America to be like Germany and the way ignorant but “idealistic” oodles of American intellectuals and radical Jewish immigrants wanted the country to be like Soviet Russia. The Chinese can do everything. America can do nothing. Except push the peace process. Yet even Obama must grasp that there is no peace process to push. Mahmoud Abbas has dispatched those killed trying to invade Israel on Nakba Day to the heavens as “martyrs,” moral exemplars, indeed. …

… I wonder what Obama can really learn from Zakaria and Friedman, neither of whom know Arabic, neither of whom know the sources (arcane or simply erudite), both of whom jump from one fashionable topic to another. Today, it’s energy. No, that was yesterday. Wouldn’t the president have been better off and the country better off, too, if he had sat down with, say, Fouad Ajami, who doesn’t agree with him but has the learning to explain why. Maybe Obama should also sit down with Paul Berman, who has explored the ties between radical Arab politics and radical Muslim theology, a generally forbidden topic, especially in this White House. (Berman has done much of his essay writing in this magazine.) Or is it the president’s habit to talk only with people who agree with him? …

… And here’s one more suggestion for whom the president ought to meet: I don’t know Timur Kuran, a Turkish economic historian at Duke. But I did read his book, The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East. It will clarify why Obama is so wrong in insisting that Muslim religious principles are unrelated to the regressive politics and economics of countries under their sway. Obama should at least have a conversation with this man, especially since he can’t possibly have time to read a serious scholarly book.

Of course, it is not exactly the president’s lack of knowledge about the Arabs (and the Jews, for that matter) that has left his Middle East policy in shambles. It is the continuous Arab sandstorm of sanctimony and duplicity which has blinded him to the precise underlying realities the sandstorm was meant to conceal. He is a victim of their deceit and his own credulity. But it is even more than that: He believes in his own powers to discern and to persuade as a function of that discernment. Now that virtually every society in the region has upended Obama’s benign take of their reality, it remains to be seen whether he himself can adjust his inner lens to accommodate the brute bedrock. …

… Syria is where the new paradigms of Arab history will be made. The brutality of the Assad dictatorship is legendary, and it has gone over 40 years from father to son. No one is willing to predict whether the family will survive or be taken out. If it survives, it will be more dictatorial than anyone imagined possible. If it is overthrown, it will be replaced by a regime equally cruel but more pious, much more pious. It is not easy for outsiders to decide what they want.

But Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have already more than indicated that they prefer the continued dominion of Bashar Assad. You have to be pretty cold-blooded to make a choice like that. There are other consequences to this decision. Syrian dominion over Lebanon will continue. The Syrian alliance with Iran will continue. Syrian influence over Turkey will continue, perhaps intensify. Syrian intrusion in Iraq will continue. Syria might even get its chance to be on the U.N. Human Rights Council. Hey, and here’s a good thing: The Golan will remain a part of Israel.

Charles Krauthammer find’s Obama’s inner Bush.

Herewith President Obama’s Middle East speech , annotated:

“It will be the policy of the United States to promote reform across the region, and to support transitions to democracy.”

With this Barack Obama openly, unreservedly and without a trace of irony or self-reflection adopts the Bush Doctrine, which made the spread of democracy the key U.S. objective in the Middle East.

“Too many leaders in the region tried to direct their people’s grievances elsewhere. The West was blamed as the source of all ills.”

Note how even Obama’s rationale matches Bush’s. Bush argued that because the roots of 9/11 were to be found in the deflected anger of repressed Middle Eastern peoples, our response would require a democratic transformation of the region. …

Stephen Colbert decided to make fun of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision with a spoof. The tables were turned on Colbert when he ran afoul of the very laws the Court was attempting to control. The story comes from two Institute for Justice attorneys writing in the WSJ.

Comedy Central funnyman Stephen Colbert, like most of his friends and allies on the left, thinks that last year’s Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. FEC is, literally, ridiculous. To make his case that the ruling invites “unlimited corporate money” to dominate politics, Mr. Colbert decided to set up a political action committee (PAC) of his own. So far, though, the joke’s been on him.

The hilarity began last month, when Mr. Colbert began to have difficulty setting up his PAC, which is a group that can raise money to run political ads or make contributions to candidates. So he called in Trevor Potter, a former Federal Elections Commission (FEC) chairman who is now a high-powered Washington lawyer.

Mr. Potter delivered some unfunny news: Mr. Colbert couldn’t set up his PAC because his show airs on Comedy Central, which is owned by Viacom, and corporations like Viacom cannot make contributions to PACs that give money to candidates. As Mr. Potter pointed out, Mr. Colbert’s on-air discussions of the candidates he supports might count as an illegal “in-kind” contribution from Viacom to Mr. Colbert’s PAC. ..

Ed Morrissey picks up the thought.

Satire is notoriously difficult to do well.  If anyone doubts that, just ask Esquire, which might face a lawsuit for libel over its clumsy attempt to skewer WND this week on the birth-certificate controversy, although I share James Taranto’s skepticism that the case will succeed.  Even those who make a successful career out of satire, like Stephen Colbert, they eventually miss badly as well when their stunts backfire.  The Wall Street Journal explains how Colbert started off trying to skewer the Supreme Court over the Citizens United v FEC ruling, and ended up getting a lesson in its necessity: …

Richard Epstein too. 

The recent masterstroke by Steve Simpson and Paul Sherman in the Wall Street Journal offers yet another explanation as to the weird absurdity of the current campaign finance laws, whose complexity defies description, especially by folks like myself who think that the FEC has better things to do with its time.

Simpson and Sherman take the occasion to lampoon that master lampooner, Stephen Colbert, who makes his living by making other people look like fools when they crave center stage. But in this instance, he broke his own rules and decided to go solo, at which point his own actions became a delicious point of self-parody. …

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The Arab spring has brought tremendous upheavals in the Middle East, and the exciting possibility of freedom for many oppressed nations. Instead of addressing these changes and advocating for peaceful transitions and democratic governing, the president falls back on the same boring liberal position. David Harsanyi writes on Obama’s speech today.

…According to a Bloomberg report, Obama will urge Israel to halt West Bank settlement expansion and return to the 1967 “borders.” (There were never any 1967 borders, but that’s another story.) If this is true, the president of the United States will be asking an ally — though he probably bristles at such a narrow-minded concept — to accept a Judenfrei West Bank, washed of all aggressive settlers, prosperity and progress. The president, if the report is true, will be asking the Jews to surrender the old city of Jerusalem and place it under new management. Hamas-Fatah management.

…History moves on. The Arab world refuses. On al-Nakba day (belated greetings!) last week — a day on which Arabs mourn not the loss of West Bank or Gaza but the existence of a Jewish state in any configuration — the Syrian regime encouraged a few thousand Palestinian “refugees” to bum rush the border to deflect attention away from the ongoing brutalization of its own people. What’s another 12 lives?…

Caroline Glick gives us a thorough rundown of today’s White House attack on Israel.

…the Netanyahu government and Congress are calling for a US aid cutoff to the Palestinian Authority. With Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization, now partnering with Fatah in governing the PA, it is illegal for the US government to continue to have anything to do with the PA. Both the Netanyahu government and senior members of the House and Senate are arguing forcefully that there is no way for Israel to make peace with the Palestinians now, and that the US must abandon its efforts to force the sides to sign an agreement.

The Israeli and congressional arguments are certainly compelling. But the signals emanating from the White House and its allied media indicate that Obama is ready to plough forward in spite of them. With the new international security credibility he earned by overseeing the successful assassination of Osama bin Laden, Obama apparently believes that he can withstand congressional pressure and make the case for demanding that Israel surrender Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to Hamas and its partners in Fatah. …

…Unlike his predecessors, Obama’s interest in the Palestinians is not opportunistic. He is a true believer. And because of his deep-seated commitment to the Palestinians, his policies are even more radically anti-Israel than the PLO-Fatah’s. It was Obama, not Abbas, who demanded that Jews be barred from building anything in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. It is the Obama administration, not the PLO-Fatah, that is leading the charge to embrace the Muslim Brotherhood.

…But Netanyahu doesn’t have to give in. He can stick to his guns and defend the country. He can continue on the correct path he has forged of repeating the truth about Hamas. He can warn about the growing threat of Egypt. He can describe the Iranian-supported butchery Assad is carrying out against his own people and note that a regime that murders its own will not make peace with the Jewish state. And he can point out the fact that as a capitalist, liberal democracy which protects the lives and property of its citizens, Israel is the only stable country in the region and the US’s only reliable regional ally. …

In Contentions, Jonathan Tobin hears that some small measure of common sense may have gained a foothold at the White House.

President Obama’s speech about the Middle East, scheduled for Thursday at the State Department, has been the subject of constant speculation fueled by leaks from administration sources. Most of the speculation is over whether he will take the opportunity to spell out his ideas for a revival of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, improbably linking it to the Arab Spring protests that have inflamed the region. There have been leaks intended to make us think he was sensibly dropping the idea of promoting some sort of U.S. dictat and others that made it appear as if he would squeeze Israel.

…While Obama pledged America’s undying support for Israel’s existence yesterday while hosting a “Jewish Heritage” day at the White House at which the Marine Band played klezmer music, the debate over whether or not to heighten pressure on the Jewish state illustrates the double game the administration is playing on the Middle East. With the Palestinian Authority having embraced an alliance with Hamas and making it clearer than ever that their goal of an independent state is merely a way station on the road to future conflict with Israel (as PA head Mahmoud Abbas’s op-ed article in yesterday’s New York Times illustrated), the notion that more U.S. pressure will pave the way to peace makes no sense.

What Obama seems most interested in is a statement that will buttress his attempts at outreach to the Arab world. But what the president fails to understand is that his attempt to link the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians to the Arab Spring won’t increase his influence in the region. Israel and the United States are both irrelevant to the protests. And nothing Barack Obama does will change that.

Switching gears, but staying with the general foolishness of this administration, Steve Chapman, in the Chicago Tribune, has more on the NLRB.

…If the NLRB succeeds, a federal official will command a private corporation it may not produce in one place and must produce in another. Never mind what makes business sense.

This is a radical departure for the agency. “It is highly unusual,” noted The New York Times, “for the federal government to seek to reverse a corporate decision as important as the location of a plant.”

Boeing adamantly denies moving production because of strikes or unions. But even if it was doing something so vicious as to protect itself against recurring labor disruptions, it ought to have that right.

William Gould, a Stanford University law professor who was appointed to head the NLRB by President Bill Clinton, has his doubts about this complaint. “It’s perfectly reasonable for a company to want to avoid strikes,” he told me. …

Jennifer Rubin reports more stalling from the union owned president, on free-trade agreements that would help the economy.

The White House, to the dismay of members of both parties in Congress, has been foot-dragging on submission of the South Korea, Colombia and Panama free-trade deals. Yesterday, as the Daily Caller reported, the president came up with a new excuse:

White House officials announced . . . .they won’t send three pending trade pacts to Congress until they get a new package of aid-funding approved by Capitol Hill. …

House Republican Policy Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-Ga.) was not pleased, issuing this statement:

The Obama Administration has found every possible excuse to delay implementation of these trade deals despite agreement that they would help boost economic growth and make America more competitive. .?.?. At a time when our economy could use all the help it can get, these agreements would expand U.S. exports and grow jobs and investments here in America. Inaction only results in the U.S. losing market share and exports to competitors. It is irresponsible for the White House to be throwing up yet another barrier to stall movement. If the president believes trade is an important part of getting our country’s economy moving again, his administration should reassure our trade partners and the American people that our nation will uphold its commitment to these agreements and not continue to find reason to delay or dismantle them.”

Matthew Boyle, in the Daily Caller, looks at government by the Democrats, for their political friends.

Of the 204 new ObamaCare waivers President Barack Obama’s administration approved in April, 38 are for fancy eateries, hip nightclubs and decadent hotels in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Northern California district.

That’s in addition to the 27 new waivers for health care or drug companies and the 31 new union waivers Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services approved.

Pelosi’s district secured almost 20 percent of the latest issuance of waivers nationwide, and the companies that won them didn’t have much in common with companies throughout the rest of the country that have received Obamacare waivers. …

…Pelosi’s office did not respond to TheDC’s requests for comment either.

In Powerline, John Hinderaker posts on a study that the stimulus saved government jobs only. It figures that government would save itself, not the people it is supposed to serve.

Economists Timothy Conley and Bill Dupor have studied the effects of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the purported stimulus bill) with great rigor. Earlier this week, they reported their findings in a paper titled “The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: Public Sector Jobs Saved, Private Sector Jobs Forestalled.” The paper is dense and rather lengthy, and requires considerable study. Here, however, is the bottom line:

Our benchmark results suggest that the ARRA created/saved approximately 450 thousand state and local government jobs and destroyed/forestalled roughly one million private sector jobs. State and local government jobs were saved because ARRA funds were largely used to offset state revenue shortfalls and Medicaid increases rather than boost private sector employment. The majority of destroyed/forestalled jobs were in growth industries including health, education, professional and business services.

So the American people borrowed and spent close to a trillion dollars to destroy a net of more than one-half million jobs. Does President Obama understand this? I very much doubt it. When he expressed puzzlement at the idea that the stimulus money may not have been well-spent, and said that “spending equals stimulus,” he betrayed a shocking level of economic ignorance.

Andrew Malcolm looks at Obama’s poll numbers.

…Most obviously gasoline prices, which Americans always use as a key to how they feel about any White House administration. And a kind of general, pervasive unease and uncertainty that prompts pessimism and a hesitancy to spend or invest, reflected now in lowered estimates for this year’s economic growth.

The next big Washington fight will be over raising the national debt ceiling. Maybe you heard the thunk earlier Monday when the United States reached that limit. As a helpful reminder, Republican House Speaker John A. Boehner released a statement, including;

Americans understand we simply can’t keep spending money we don’t have. Spending-driven deficits, record debt, and the threat of tax hikes are smothering our economy with uncertainty and making it harder for small businesses to hire new workers. 

Recent polls indicate Americans are unhappy about raising the limit without significant spending cuts, despite the dire credit warnings.

Frank Donatelli, in Politico, thinks that Obama will have to campaign against difficult economic statistics.

…Four represents gasoline prices rising to $4 and beyond. Energy prices affect all economic activity and threaten to put a crimp in our stilted recovery.

The administration’s policies of rationing scarcity are largely to blame. We are not drilling offshore for new oil. We are only now taking advantage of new oil and gas deposits in the U.S., and the Environmental Protection Agency is hardly leading the way. We are not exploiting our vast reserves of coal and natural gas.

…Ten represents $10 trillion of additional debt that we will accumulate by the end of a second Obama administration. This is a national crisis that the president has chosen to ignore.

…He believes the public is so insistent on maintaining entitlement programs that began in the 1930s and 1960s, and remain unchanged, that people will overlook this systematic looting of our children’s future. …

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George Will adds his thoughts, and some excellent arguing points, to the discussion of the NLRB v. Boeing.

…The NLRB’s complaint is not a conscientious administration of the law; it is intimidation of business leaders who contemplate locating operations in right-to-work states. Labor loathes Section 14(b) of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which allows states to pass right-to-work laws that forbid compulsory unionization. But 11 Democratic senators represent 10 of the right-to-work states: Mark Pryor (Arkansas), Bill Nelson (Florida), Tom Harkin (Iowa), Mary Landrieu (Louisiana), Ben Nelson (Nebraska), Harry Reid (Nevada), Kay Hagan (North Carolina), Kent Conrad (North Dakota), Tim Johnson (South Dakota), and Jim Webb and Mark Warner (Virginia). Do they support the Obama administration’s attempt to cripple their states’ economic attractiveness?

The NLRB’s attack on Boeing illustrates the Obama administration’s penchant for lawlessness displayed when, disregarding bankruptcy law, it traduced the rights of Chrysler’s secured creditors. Now the NLRB is suing Arizona and South Dakota because they recently, and by large majorities, passed constitutional amendments guaranteeing the right to secret ballots in unionization elections — ballots that complicate coercion by union organizers.

Just as uncompetitive companies try to become wards of the government (beneficiaries of subsidies, tariffs, import quotas), unions unable to compete for workers’ allegiance solicit government compulsion to fill their ranks. The NLRB’s reckless attempt to break a great corporation, and by extension all businesses, to government’s saddle — never mind the collateral damage to the economy — is emblematic of the Obama administration’s willingness to sacrifice the economy on the altar of politics.

In Pajamas Media, Christian Adams fills us in on the senate committee hearing the GOP hijacked to cover the NLRB/Boeing flap.

…But Senator Mike Enzi outfoxed Harkin. He called — as his sole witness — Michael Luttig, general counsel for the Boeing Company and former justice of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

…Luttig emphasized that a union strike in 2008 in Washington shut down production of the 787, costing Boeing more than a billion dollars and “damaging Boeing’s reputation for reliability with its airline customers, suppliers, and investors.” Boeing took into account many different factors in making a major assembly investment decision, and the recurring strikes in Washington was just one of them.

…Harkin was clearly annoyed at the turn that the hearing took. He muttered about his coal mining father and the unfair attacks on unions and the NLRB.  But the political danger of the NLRB action was demonstrated by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), who given his background in suing corporations, is not generally seen as “pro-business.”

Blumenthal went out of his way to be nice to Luttig and Boeing, the biggest American export company with $29 billion in overseas sales in 2009. That might also be due to the fact that Boeing suppliers spend more than a billion dollars in Connecticut. …

The Investor’s Business Daily editors comment on how the priorities of the Obama administration are creating a hostile atmosphere for businesses.

…what sane company would invest at a time when it’s in the government’s greedy cross hairs? Or when both the White House and Congress repeatedly criticize “millionaires and billionaires,” and threaten to crush small businesses — the engines of job growth — with higher taxes and new regulations?

As Obama spoke about jobs Thursday, oil CEOs were being grilled by Senate Democrats at a hostile hearing. Their crime? They’re making fat profits. Time was, profits were a sign of success. Today, far-left Democrats think “profit” is a dirty word.

For the record, oil companies’ profits are up because oil prices have soared. This isn’t due to “speculators,” but to the White House’s foolish policy of keeping hundreds of millions of barrels of offshore oil off-limits — driving up prices and boosting foreign dependence.

Instead, the White House subsidizes money-losing alternative energy sources, none of which is ready to replace our current energy supply. Prices can only go up. …

David Harsanyi looks at oil profits from several angles.

…Sen. Claire McCaskill, one of the sponsors of the “Close Big Oil Tax Loopholes Act” in the Senate, says: “We’re going to face a lot of resistance when we try to take a few billion dollars in free taxpayer money away from them.” As is typical of the Left, McCaskill seems to believe that giving a company tax breaks is tantamount to giving that company taxpayer money. But who exactly does she believe is going to pay for a tax increase, anyway, if not consumers?

Granted, Republicans would do well to support removing — across the board — tax incentives that skew competition. Eliminating these subsidies is the consistent free-market position. And $18 billion is $18 billion — if it’s used to alleviate the debt crisis.

But it won’t be. Obama would rather divert “those dollars to invest in clean energy to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.” In other words, Obama plans to reroute the money to a clean-energy market that not only is already massively subsidized, but has increased the cost of power.

So, in the end, this ruse has nothing to do with savings, nothing to do with bringing down the price of gas, and everything to do with casting government as moral arbiter of energy.

John Steele Gordon comments on increasing federal power.

…What’s wrong with our current street signs? They’re in all capital letters and the geniuses at the Department of Transportation have determined that street signs in upper- and lower-case letters (and a particular typeface—“Clearview”) are fractionally easier to read and thus a driver’s attention is diverted by a few milliseconds less than with the older signs. Multiply that by the billions of miles American drive every day and there should be fewer accidents.

I’ll presume that that is true. My objection is with the fact that the Constitution does not give the federal government authority over highway signage. But because the federal government hands out money to the states for highway construction and maintenance, it can—and does—attach conditions, such as mandating the typeface of street signs and requiring a drinking age of 21.  These federal payments to states have been the royal road to ever-increasing federal control of American life and have gone a long way to reducing the once sovereign states to mere federal administrative districts. …

State politicians find federal money irresistible. After all, they get credit for building the new bridge or repaving the highway and Uncle Sam gets the bill. But every dollar of federal money is paid for in lost power and sovereignty. In the long run that makes the “free” federal money very expensive indeed.

The Economist Blogs – Schumpeter looks at how licensing cartels hurt entrepreneurs. And who fights for them? Our heroes at The Institute for Justice.

…Some occupations clearly need to be licensed. Nobody wants to unleash amateur doctors and dentists on the public, or untrained tattoo artists for that matter. But, as the Wall Street Journal has doggedly pointed out, America’s Licence Raj has extended its tentacles into occupations that pose no plausible threat to health or safety—occupations, moreover, that are governed by considerations of taste rather than anything that can be objectively measured by licensing authorities. The list of jobs that require licences in some states already sounds like something from Monty Python—florists, handymen, wrestlers, tour guides, frozen-dessert sellers, firework operatives, second-hand booksellers and, of course, interior designers—but it will become sillier still if ambitious cat-groomers and dog-walkers get their way.

Getting a licence can be time-consuming. Want to become a barber in California? That will require studying the art of cutting and blow-drying for almost a year. Want to work in the wig trade in Texas? You will need to take 300 hours of classes and pass both written and practical exams. Alabama obliges manicurists to sit through 750 hours of instruction before taking a practical exam. Florida will not let you work as an interior designer unless you complete a four-year university degree and a two-year apprenticeship and pass a two-day examination.

…You might imagine that Americans would be up in arms about all this. After all, the Licence Raj embodies the two things that Americans are supposed to be furious about: the rise of big government and the stalling of America’s job-creating machine. You would be wrong. Florida’s legislature recently debated a bill to remove licensing requirements from 20 occupations, including hair-braiding, interior design and teaching ballroom-dancing. For a while it looked as if the bill would sail through: Florida has been a centre of tea-party agitation and both chambers have Republican majorities. But the people who care most about this issue—the cartels of incumbents—lobbied the loudest. One predicted that unlicensed designers would use fabrics that might spread disease and cause 88,000 deaths a year. Another suggested, even more alarmingly, that clashing colour schemes might adversely affect “salivation”. In the early hours of May 7th the bill was defeated. If Republican majorities cannot pluck up the courage to challenge a cartel of interior designers when Florida’s unemployment rate is more than 10%, what hope has America? The Licence Raj may be here to stay.

In Popular Mechanics, Christopher Cox discusses the logistics of handling the Mississippi flood waters.

The devastation wrought by an epic Mississippi River flood nearly a century ago—more than 500 people dead, another 700,000 displaced and 26,000 square miles underwater…now, as the Mississippi River flirts with levels and flow rates not seen in decades, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will try to avoid any kind of encore of that long-ago flood as they rely on an enormous infrastructure system unknown to most Americans outside of southern Louisiana.

The Corps is pulling out the stops of its Mississippi River & Tributaries Project, a sprawling set of levees, revetments, spillways and floodways devised to control a restless river fed by the third-largest watershed in the world. Robert A. Thomas, director of the Center for Environmental Communications at Loyola University in New Orleans, says this federal flood-control plan was enacted after the 1927 catastrophe to protect the river and its communities. “It’s all pretty monumental,” he says. “It was foresight on their part, to look that far down the road. All it took was the 1927 flood.”

Now, though, the system is facing its toughest test in decades. Earlier this week, as the Mississippi was cresting in Memphis, Tenn., engineers opened the Bonnet Carre Spillway 30 miles above New Orleans for only the 10th time in its 80-year history.

Andrew Malcolm compiles some recent jokes, in the LA Times.

… Letterman: Osama bin Laden’s Diary: ‘April 12 – Dear Diary, Awful TV reception. Death to Time Warner!’ April 20 – Dear Diary, three wives and one bathroom. You do the math.’

…Conan: President Obama says the Bin Laden raid was the longest 40 minutes of his life. With the possible exception of every time he asks Joe Biden, ‘Hey, what’s up?’

…Letterman: We’re learning more about Osama Bin Laden’s plans. He wanted to create chaos in Washington. Well, thank God that didn’t happen! …

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We have a real treat today. In the past we have noted the restless mind of the playwright, David Mamet.  It seems it has settled down – on the side of those who believe in freedom, for people and markets.

Andrew Ferguson in the Weekly Standard tells us the story. It is a long piece and we devote much of today’s post to it. Previous Pickings with Mamet posts can be found March 19, 2008 and August 3, 2010.

Three decades ago David Mamet became known among the culture-consuming public for writing plays with lots of dirty words. “You’re f—ing f—ed” was a typically Mamet-like line, appearing without the prim dashes back in a day when playwrights were still struggling to get anything stronger than a damn on stage. Mamet’s profanity even became a popular joke: So there’s this panhandler who approaches a distinguished looking gentleman and asks for money. The man replies pompously: “‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’ —William Shakespeare.” The beggar looks at him. “‘F— you’ —David Mamet.” 

Some critics said his plays were pointlessly brutal. As a consequence he became famous and wealthy. It didn’t hurt when it dawned on people that many of his plays, for all the profanity and brutality, were works of great power and beauty, and often very funny to boot. When people began to say, as they increasingly did by the middle 1980s, that the author of Speed-the-Plow and American Buffalo and Lakeboat had earned a place in the top rank of the century’s dramatists, no one thought that was a joke. He took to writing for the movies (The Verdict, The Untouchables, Wag the Dog), won a Pulitzer Prize for one of his masterpieces (Glengarry Glen Ross), and moved to Holly-wood, where he became a respected and active player in the showbiz hustle.

His fame was enough to fill the stalls of Memorial Hall at Stanford University when he came to give a talk one evening a couple of years ago. About half the audience were students. The rest were aging faculty out on a cheap date with their wives or husbands. You could identify the male profs by the wispy beards and sandals-’n’-socks footwear. The wives were in wraparound skirts and had hair shorter than their husbands’.

Mamet had been brought to campus by Hillel, and the subject of his talk was “Art, Politics, Judaism, and the Mind of David Mamet.” There wasn’t much talk of Judaism, however, at least not explicitly. He arrived late and took the stage looking vaguely lost. He withdrew from his jacket a sheaf of papers that quickly became disarranged. He lost his place often. He stumbled over his sentences. But the unease that began to ripple through the audience had less to do with the speaker’s delivery than with his speech’s content. Mamet was delivering a frontal assault on American higher education, the provider of the livelihood of nearly everyone in his audience.

Higher ed, he said, was an elaborate scheme to deprive young people of their freedom of thought. He compared four years of college to a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food. A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom—“Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever”—and is rewarded with his pellet: a grade, a degree, and ultimately a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way.

“If we identify every interaction as having a victim and an oppressor, and we get a pellet when we find the victims, we’re training ourselves not to see cause and effect,” he said. Wasn’t there, he went on, a “much more interesting .. view of the world in which not everything can be reduced to victim and oppressor?”

This led to a full-throated defense of capitalism, a blast at high taxes and the redistribution of wealth, a denunciation of affirmative action, prolonged hymns to the greatness and wonder of the United States, and accusations of hypocrisy toward students and faculty who reviled business and capital even as they fed off the capital that the hard work and ingenuity of businessmen had made possible. The implicit conclusion was that the students in the audience should stop being lab rats and drop out at once, and the faculty should be ashamed of themselves for participating in a swindle—a “shuck,” as Mamet called it.

It was as nervy a speech as I’ve ever seen, and not quite rude—Mamet was too genial to be rude—but almost. The students in Memorial Hall seemed mostly unperturbed. The ripples of dissatisfaction issued from the older members of the crowd. Two couples in front of me shot looks to one another as Mamet went on—first the tight little smiles, then quick shakes of the head, after a few more minutes the eye-rolls, and finally a hitchhiking gesture that was the signal to walk out. Several others followed, with grim faces. 

It was too much, really. It’s one thing to titillate progressive theatergoers with scenes of physical abuse and psychological torture and lines like “You’re f—ing f—ed.” But David Mamet had at last gone too far. He’d turned into a f—ing Republican.

Next month a much larger number of liberals and leftists will have the opportunity to be appalled by Mamet’s Stanford speech. Passages from it form the bulk of a chapter in his new book of brief, punchy essays, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture. The book marks the terminal point of a years-long conversion from left to right that Mamet-watchers (there are quite a few of these) have long suspected but hadn’t quite confirmed. It’s part conversion memoir, part anthropology, part rant, part steel-trap argument—the testimony of a highly intelligent man who has wrenched himself from one sphere and is now declaring his citizenship in another, very loudly. 

Mamet himself has never been a political playwright or a dramatist of ideas, being concerned with earthier themes—how it is, for example, that everyday conflicts compound into catastrophe. His plays were heavy with a tragic view of human interaction. They depicted, as he put it, people doing despicable things to each other, moved by greed or power lust or some nameless craving. Still, politically minded critics were pleased to divine a political intent: American Buffalo, set in a junk shop, or Glengarry Glen Ross, set in a real estate office, were allegories of the heartlessness of a country (ours) ruled by markets and capital. Their invariably unhappy or unresolved endings drove the point home. And the critics had a point. The world Mamet created was one-half of the leftist view of life, anyway: the Hobbesian jungle that Utopians would rescue us from, liberal idealism with the sunny side down.  

The Secret Knowledge begins with a parricide—a verbal throat-slitting of the leftwing playwright Bertolt Brecht, father to three generations of dramatists, especially those who, like Tony Kushner or Anna Deavere Smith or Christopher Durang, make agitprop the primary purpose of their art. For most of his career Mamet revered Brecht too: It was the thing to do. The reverence came to an end when he finally noticed an incongruity between Brecht’s politics and his life. Although a cold-blooded—indeed bloody-minded—advocate for public ownership of the means of production and state confiscation of private wealth, he always took care to copyright his plays. More, he made sure the royalties were deposited in a Swiss bank account far from the clutches of East Germany, where he was nominally a citizen.

“His protestations [against capitalism] were not borne out by his actions, nor could they be,” Mamet writes. “Why, then, did he profess Communism? Because it sold. . The public’s endorsement of his plays kept him alive; as Marx was kept alive by the fortune Engels’s family had made selling furniture; as universities, established and funded by the Free Enterprise system . support and coddle generations of the young in their dissertations on the evils of America.”

As the accelerating sequence of that last sentence suggests—from Brecht to Marx to the entire system of American higher education—one wispy aha! leads the convert to a larger revelation and then to one even broader and more comprehensive. That’s the way it is with conversion experiences: The scales fall in a cascade. One light bulb tends to set off another, until it’s pop-pop-pop like paparazzi on Oscar night. 

And then Mamet thought some more, and looked in the mirror. 

“I never questioned my tribal assumption that Capitalism was bad,” he writes now, “although I, simultaneously, never acted upon these feelings.” He was always happy to cash a royalty check and made sure to insist on a licensing fee. “I supported myself, as do all those not on the government dole, through the operation of the Free Market.”

He saw he was Talking Left and Living Right, a condition common among American liberals, particularly the wealthy among them, who can, for instance, want to impose diversity requirements on private companies while living in monochromatic neighborhoods, or vote against school vouchers while sending their kids to prep school, or shelter their income while advocating higher tax rates. The widening gap between liberal politics and liberal life became real to him when, paradoxically enough, he decided at last to write a political play, or rather a play about politics. It was the first time he thought about partisan politics for any sustained period. …

… “I wondered, How did the system function so well? Because it does—the system functions beautifully.” How did the happiest, freest, and most prosperous country in history sprout from the Hobbesian jungle? 

“I realized it was because of this thing, this miracle, this U.S. Constitution.” The separation of powers, the guarantee of property, the freedoms of speech and religion meant that self-interested citizens had a system in which they could hammer out their differences without killing each other. Everyone who wanted to could get ahead. The Founders had accepted the tragic view of life and, as it were, made it pay. It’s a happy paradox: The gloomier one’s view of human nature—and Mamet’s was gloomy—the deeper one’s appreciation of the American miracle. …

Ed Morrissey notes the new crop of ObamaCare waivers. 200 of them. This is apropos since yesterday we had Richard Epstein on the continuing growth of executive power.

… Who gets waivers?  Who doesn’t?  What are the prerequisites for waivers?  Which conditions would require approval, and which would require rejection?  No one knows, and HHS isn’t saying.  And the rather strong tilt in waivers granted towards unions strongly suggests that politics and the Rule of Whim are very much part of the decision process.

That’s a lot of things, but transparent it isn’t.

Mark Hemingway in Weekly Standard says half of the waivers have been granted to unions. 

In what is fast becoming a weekly event, the Obama administration granted 200 more companies waivers from the Democrats’ sweeping health care law in the Friday night news dump. That brings the number of companies receiving waivers to 1,372. (You can get a full list of the companies exempted here.)

Not surprisingly, it helps to be a Democratic ally when seeking a waiver. The Republican Policy Committee reports that over half of the workers that have been exempted so far belong to unions: …

Speaking of unions, Megan McArdle in the Atlantic tells us how we are faring with our stake in GM.

… About $40 billion of the money that the government gave GM was converted to GM common stock. In the November IPO, the government made about $20 billion selling 478 million shares, leaving us with around $20 billion more to recoup on our remaining 26.5% stake in the company.  That means we need to sell the approximately 365 million shares we have left at about $55 per share, net of underwriting and legal costs.  At the current share price of $31, we’d be left with a loss somewhere north of $9 billion–plus the $1 billion we gave the “old GM” to wind things up, and the $2.1 billion worth of GM preferred stock we own.  Since I don’t know the details of the preferred transaction, I’ll leave that out, which gives us a loss after expenses of $10 to $11 billion on our investment in GM.  

But of course, that assumes that the current share price holds.  It could well fall over the next few months–or when the government dumps an enormous new supply of GM stock on a market that isn’t showing all that much enthusiasm for the product.  

It also leaves out a very important extra:  the $14 billion gift that the government seems to have handed the company, in the form of a special tax break: …What lesson, exactly, are we supposed to learn from this “success”?  What question did it answer? “Can the government keep companies operating if it is willing to give them a virtually interest free loan of $50 billion, and a tax-free gift of $20 billion or so?”  I don’t think that this was really in dispute. When all is said and done, we will probably have given them a sum equal to its 2007 market cap and roughly four times GM’s 2008 market capitalization.

… No, the question was not whether GM could make a profit after a bankruptcy that stiffed most of its creditors and shed the most grotesque burdens of its legacy costs, nor whether giving companies money will make them more profitable. The question is whether it was worth it to the taxpayer to burn $10-20 billion in order to give the company another shot at life. To put that in perspective, GM had about 75,000 hourly workers before the bankruptcy.  We could have given each of them a cool $250,000 and still come out well ahead compared to the ultimate cost of the bailout including the tax breaks–and over $100,000 a piece if we just wanted to break even against our losses on the common stock.  

And if we’d done that, we’d have saved ourselves in other ways.  We would have reduced some of the overcapacity that plagues the global industry.  We would not have seen the government throwing its weight into a bankruptcy proceeding in order to redistribute money from creditors to pensioners, which isn’t a good precedent.

But even if you still think that the bailout was a good idea, there’s something you should consider before we start celebrating the administration’s Solomonic wisdom: the Obama administration’s rush to dispose of its GM stake before the 2012 election is probably costing us billions.  No one I interviewed for my piece on GM was exactly enthusiastic about an early IPO; doing it so quickly meant that the company had very little to show in the way of earnings and stability.  Now the government may rush to sell all its remaining shares this summer even though this means locking in a substantial loss. …