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We enter the week with a downbeat. Norman Podhoretz calls for a strike on Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Since president ostrich will do nothing, it falls on Israel to defend civilization.
Not too many years ago, hardly anyone disagreed with John McCain when he first said that “the only thing worse than bombing Iran is letting Iran get the bomb.” Today hardly anyone disagrees with those who say that the only thing worse than letting Iran get the bomb is bombing Iran. And in this reversal hangs a tale.
The old consensus was shaped by three considerations, all of which seemed indisputable at the time.
The first was that Iran was lying when it denied that its nuclear facilities were working to build a bomb. After all, with its vast reserves of oil and gas, the country had no need for nuclear energy. Even according to the liberal Federation of American Scientists a decade ago, the work being done at the Iranian nuclear facilities was easily “applicable to a nuclear weapons development program.” Surprisingly, a similar judgment was made by Mohamed ElBaradei, the very dovish director of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The second consideration was that the prospect of being annihilated in a retaliatory nuclear strike, which had successfully deterred the Soviets and the Chinese from unleashing their own nuclear weapons during the Cold War, would be ineffective against an Iran ruled by fanatical Shiite mullahs. As Bernard Lewis, the leading contemporary authority on Islam, put it in 2007, to these fanatics “mutual assured destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement. …
… Given how very unlikely it is that President Obama, despite his all-options-on-the-table protestations to the contrary, would ever take military action, the only hope rests with Israel. If, then, Israel fails to strike now, Iran will get the bomb. And when it does, the Israelis will be forced to decide whether to wait for a nuclear attack and then to retaliate out of the rubble, or to pre-empt with a nuclear strike of their own. But the Iranians will be faced with the same dilemma. Under these unprecedentedly hair-trigger circumstances, it will take no time before one of them tries to beat the other to the punch.
And so my counsel to proponents of the new consensus is to consider the unspeakable horrors that would then be visited not just on Israel and Iran but on the entire region and beyond. The destruction would be far worse than any imaginable consequences of an Israeli conventional strike today when there is still a chance to put at least a temporary halt, and conceivably even a permanent one, to the relentless Iranian quest for the bomb.
Speaking of the slow learner, Charles Krauthammer says president bystander was really president oblivious.
In explaining the disastrous rollout of Obamacare, President Obama told Chris Matthews he had discovered that “we have these big agencies, some of which are outdated, some of which are not designed properly.”
An interesting discovery to make after having consigned the vast universe of American medicine, one-sixth of the U.S. economy, to the tender mercies of the agency bureaucrats at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Internal Revenue Service.
Most people become aware of the hopeless inefficiency of sclerotic government by, oh, age 17 at the department of motor vehicles. Obama’s late discovery is especially remarkable considering that he built his entire political philosophy on the rock of Big Government, on the fervent belief in the state as the very engine of collective action and the ultimate source of national greatness. (Indeed, of individual success as well, as in “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”)
This blinding revelation of the ponderous incompetence of bureaucratic government came just a few weeks after Obama confessed that “what we’re also discovering is that insurance is complicated to buy.” Another light bulb goes off, this one three years after passing a law designed to force millions of Americans to shop for new health plans via the maze of untried, untested, insecure, unreliable online “exchanges.”
This discovery joins a long list that includes Obama’s rueful admission that there really are no shovel-ready jobs. That one came after having passed his monstrous $830 billion stimulus on the argument that the weakened economy would be “jump-started” by a massive infusion of shovel-ready jobs. Now known to be fictional. …
Similar thoughts from George Will.
The education of Barack Obama is a protracted process as he repeatedly alights upon the obvious with a sense of original discovery. In a recent MSNBC interview, he restocked his pantry of excuses for his disappointing results, announcing that “we have these big agencies, some of which are outdated, some of which are not designed properly”:
“We’ve got, for example, 16 different agencies that have some responsibility to help businesses, large and small, in all kinds of ways, whether it’s helping to finance them, helping them to export. .So, we’ve proposed, let’s consolidate a bunch of that stuff. The challenge we’ve got is that that requires a law to pass. And, frankly, there are a lot of members of Congress who are chairmen of a particular committee. And they don’t want necessarily consolidations where they would lose jurisdiction over certain aspects of certain policies.”
The dawn is coming up like thunder as Obama notices the sociology of government. He shows no sign, however, of drawing appropriate lessons from it. …
Streetwise Professor noticed a White House tweet suggesting getting covered by the healthcare act will give your mother piece of mind.
The Fascism With A Smile campaign to fool suckers into signing up for Obamacare is in full swing. The White House is engaged in a flood-the-zone campaign to get people to Get Covered.
What a concept! Imagine if they had, I dunno, a website where people could sign up, send their information to an insurance company, pay their premium. That would be amazing!
But today this campaign surpassed the ability of even a Swift to satirize. The White House posted this on Twitter.
Peace. Piece. I know. I always have such a hard time knowing when to use which.
Perhaps this is a Freudian slip. The administration knows that the success of Obamacare depends on a lobotomized population. People who have lost a piece of their minds, if they had any to begin with. Or maybe it’s just that the creator of this propaganda has issues with Mom. S/he wants to give her a piece of her/his mind. But what about the “quality control”? The “editing” process? Does everyone at the WH have Mom issues?
Isn’t it grand? Turning over control of 1/6th of the US economy to people who don’t know the difference between “piece” and “peace”, or who don’t care enough to make the distinction when producing propaganda intended to gull the great unwashed.
The next challenge for the administration: to grasp the subtle differences between “there”, “their”, and “they’re”.
We are so screwed.
And Power Line is taking to calling her Queen Seeb since she appears to be writing laws on the fly. Can’t write code, but an edict without bothering with that congress thingy is no problem.
Bloomberg View columnist Megan McArdle summarizes the conference call for journalists yesterday afternoon with Kathleen Sebelius and other members of the Obamacare team in which the powers-that-be announced further decrees and encouragements to smooth the pending implementation of Obamacare on January 1:
· Insurers will be required to accept payment for policies beginning Jan. 1 as late as Dec. 31, and they will be “encouraged” to accept payment after that. In response to a question, HHS says that at least one insurer, Aetna Inc., has agreed to take payments as late as Jan. 8.
· The high-risk pools that were established to cover people with pre-existing conditions in the transition will be extended through the end of January for people who haven’t already selected a plan.
· Insurers are being “strongly encouraged” to treat out-of-network doctors as in-network doctors for acute-care episodes, or if the provider was listed in the plan’s provider directory when the patient enrolled.
· Insurers are also being “strongly encouraged” to refill prescriptions in the month of January, even if they aren’t covered under the new plan, if they were covered under the patient’s old plan.
The Hill’s Jonathan Easley also reports on the call here. HHS has posted an update here on what it modestly describes as its “steps to ensure Americans signing up through the Marketplace have coverage and access to the care they need on January 1.”
The times seem to call for resumption of my “Adventures in administrative law” series of posts, but I think I would be over my head. To borrow a phrase, this is banana republic stuff.
A Pickings reader wrote last week complaining about the lack of sick Mandela jokes. Mark Steyn found a good one by Neil Phillips from the English town of Rugeley. Ignoring, of course, that whole joke in South Africa.
Alas, far from the face-pulling selfies, Mandela jokes are no laughing matter. Simon Amstell (who appears to be a comedian in the same sense that Thamsanqa Jantjie is a sign-language interpreter) visited BBC Radio and quipped that “it’s so white in here Mandela would not approve.” Shortly thereafter, the host apologized on air lest anyone was offended. Which they were, because Mr. Amstell himself subsequently apologized on Twitter. Neil Phillips did not get off so lightly. During the final stages of the African leader’s slowly deteriorating health, Mr. Phillips, who runs the Crumbs sandwich shop in the English town of Rugeley, had gone online and complained: “My PC takes so long to shut down I’ve decided to call it Nelson Mandela.” The Staffordshire Constabulary arrested him, seized his computers, and, in the course of an eight-hour detention, fingerprinted and DNA-swabbed him.
“There are no jokes in Islam,” Ayatollah Khomeini sternly warned, and that’s true even for its “moderate” redoubts, where Shez Cassim, a U.S. citizen from Minnesota, has languished in a Dubai jail cell since April for making a video mildly parodic of United Arab Emirates youth. But, as Mr. Phillips discovered, there are fewer jokes outside Islam, too. Once upon a time, it was the communist Eastern Europe that policed gags, as captured in Milan Kundera’s first great novel. Now even in free societies an infelicitous jest can lead to a rap sheet. In such a world, we should treasure the hilarity of the Mandela service. “Nelson Mandela stood for freedom,” his successor Jacob Zuma said. “He wanted everyone to be free.” Unfortunately, some of the crowd booed Zuma, so he’s now having them investigated for embarrassing him.
Still, let’s take Zuma at his word: Mandela wanted everyone to be free. Free to sign-translate the U.N. secretary-general’s speech into total codswallop. Free to cop a feel from the Danish prime minister. And free, for all the loftiness of the forgettable rhetoric, to relish the low comedy all around it.
Power Line posts on the famous selfie.
There is a reason why the infamous selfie photo is the only significant news story to emerge from Nelson Mandela’s funeral. The shot, and the story, resonate with people because they express what we already knew about Barack Obama: he is a narcissist. Michael Ramirez puts the selfie into historical context:
How a man as temperamentally unsuited to any leadership position as Barack Obama managed to become President of the United States is a question that historians will debate for many years to come.