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Victor Davis Hanson says this president’s mendacity and constant failures, mean nothing to the bien pensants as long as he says the right things.
Losing a job is freedom from job lock. A budget deficit larger than in any previous administration is austerity. A mean right-wing video caused the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi. Al-Qaeda was long ago washed up. The Muslim Brotherhood is secular. Jihad is a personal journey. Shooting people while screaming Allahu akbar! is workplace violence. Unaffordable higher premiums and deductibles are the result of an Affordable Care Act. Losing your doctor and your health-insurance plan prove you will never lose your doctor and your health-insurance plan — period! Being a constitutional lawyer means you know how to turn the IRS and the FCC on your enemies. Failure is success; lies are truth.
President Obama’s polls are creeping back up again. They do that every time the latest in the series of scandals — the IRS, AP, NSA, Benghazi, and Obamacare messes — recedes into the media memory hole. The once-outrageous IRS scandal was rebranded as psychodramatic journalists being outraged. The monitoring of AP reporters and of James Rosen is mostly “Stuff happens.” The NSA octopus was Bush’s creation. You can keep your doctor and your health plan — period — begat liberation from “job lock” and the ability to write poetry because you don’t have to work.
There will be more momentary outrages on the horizon, as a president who would fundamentally transform America continues to circumvent the Constitution to do it. The latest are the failed efforts of acting FCC director Mignon Clyburn — daughter of a Democratic stalwart, Representative James Clyburn. She dreamed about monitoring news outlets to ensure that they prove themselves correct in matters of race/class/gender thinking.
Yet after all the 24-hour outrages, and all the op-eds pointing out that a self-described constitutional-law professor has been the worst adversary of the Constitution since Richard Nixon, and after perhaps even a slide in the polls of a point or two, we will soon forget Ms. Clyburn and her idiotic attempts to diversify the news by seeking uniform expression in the media. …
One of the tribe though, in the person of WaPo’s Richard Cohen, seems to have had enough as he writes on Susan Rice and the retreat of American power.
Susan Rice ought to stay off “Meet the Press.” The last time she was on, she misrepresented what led to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya. On Sunday she was back, this time misrepresenting critics of the Obama administration’s Syria policy. Last time her misrepresentation was unintentional. This time it wasn’t. I prefer it, though, when she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
In a frustrating colloquy with host David Gregory, Rice initially said all the right things about Syria. She called the war there “horrific,” which indeed it is. She said it had “spilled over and infused the neighboring states,” which indeed it has. And she said the United States had “every interest in trying to bring this conflict to a conclusion.” Yes. Yes, indeed.
“But if the alternative here is to intervene with American boots on the ground, as some have argued, I think that the judgment the United States has made and the president of the United States has made is that is not in the United States’ interests,” she continued.
Gregory, usually as alert and twitchy as a squirrel, flat-lined. He did not ask Rice who, precisely, advocated boots on the ground. He did not ask her to name just one prominent critic or to wonder why this is “the alternative” when there are so many others. He just pushed on, leaving this straw man to crinkle and crackle under the hot TV lights and allowing Rice, who is the president’s national security adviser, to get away with rebutting an argument that has not been made. She did, though, exhibit an administration mind-set — all or nothing — that, in practice, amounts to nothing.
Rice’s was a splendid performance, characteristic of an administration that values the sound of policy over its implementation. …
Jennifer Rubin says the administration’s foreign policy needs a reset.
The American people may not follow foreign policy regularly, but they know failure when they see it. They know when the wheels are coming off the bus. Gallup reports: “For the first time, more Americans think President Barack Obama is not respected by other world leaders than believe he is. Americans’ opinions have shifted dramatically in the past year, after being relatively stable from 2010 to 2013.”
It is not hard to see why. Around the world the president has generated contempt, dismay, or disappointment — but rarely respect. He has shied from enforcing his own red line. He has failed to articulate a U.S. policy toward the countries undergoing turmoil in the Middle East. He’s pushing a rotten deal with Iran. He bugged out of Iraq entirely, and now an al-Qaeda flag flies over Fallujah, where just a few years ago Americans lost their lives by the dozens to turn back jihadists.
Perhaps the president needs to do his own reset. A speech would be in order to try to recalibrate his foreign policy and halt the slide into chaos and irrelevancy. …
For those mystified by the continued opposition to the healthcare act, Noemie Emery reminds us of its illegitimate birth in 2009.
… Whenever it could, the public went out of its way to express its displeasure: voting for Republican governors in Virginia and New Jersey, states won by Obama, a “go slow” sign which was wholly ignored by the president’s party, as it plunged ahead, pushing the bill through the Senate the day before Christmas, after the last two reluctant red-state dissenters had been showered with millions of dollars in favors. This wasn’t what voters wanted to find under the tree, but Democrats still had their 60 votes in the Senate, or would have again in January when Martha Coakley won the special election in Massachusetts to fill the seat of Edward M. Kennedy, who had died in August. Massachusetts would never send a non-Democrat to fill “the Kennedy seat,” as David Gergen had put it. But then Massachusetts did.
The gubernatorial elections in November 2009 had been taken as proxies for health care reform, but the December special election in Massachusetts was the third kick of the mule, and by far the most telling. Symbolically, it was held for the seat of the Father of Health Care, and one of the bill’s most conspicuous backers. The governors of two big states couldn’t do much to stop health care reform, but a single vote in the Senate was critical. Newly elected Senator Scott Brown had run as the “41st vote” against Obamacare. There were many reasons for people in Virginia and New Jersey to vote for (or against) their new governors. There was only one reason for people in Massachusetts to be voting for Brown.
“Elections have consequences” is a prime rule in politics, but Democrats went out of their way to make sure that this one would be the exception, as their first move after the results in Massachusetts became evident was not to rework the bill to bring it in line with the will of the public, but to game the system to close off the need for a second vote in the Senate, the will of the public be damned.
Medicare, Social Security, and the Civil Rights Act all passed by huge and bipartisan margins, with public opinion strongly in favor. Health care reform passed by 7 votes in the House, losing the votes of 34 Democrats (and all the Republicans), with a strong tide of public opinion running against it. Had there been a Senator Coakley, Republicans would have groaned, but accepted the bill as having been passed by the regular order of business. As it was, they loathed it almost as much for the way it was passed as for what was in it, and never accepted its moral authority. A Gallup poll taken on March 30, 2010, found that 53 percent of Americans considered the way the bill passed an “abuse of power” by Democrats as against 40 percent who found it “appropriate,” with 86 percent of Republicans and 58 percent of independents concurring in this negative judgment. Time has done nothing to soften these views.
Ultimately, acts of Congress gain their legitimacy in the way they win or reflect the will of the public, as expressed in the way they are passed. The Civil Rights Act, as Michael Barone reminds us, took place against a background of violence, but the careful and orderly way it was passed helped defuse opposition, and the much-feared resistance to it would never materialize. Full compliance, he notes, was not immediate, “[b]ut after Congress acted in such a deliberate fashion . . . white southerners largely acquiesced.” No such deliberation was ever to be seen in the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and acquiescence eludes it, as does the conviction that it is legitimate. It isn’t—and never will be.
Thomas Sowell on fairness.
It seems as if, everywhere you turn these days, there are studies claiming to show that America has lost its upward mobility for people born in the lower socioeconomic levels. But there is a sharp difference between upward “mobility,” defined as an opportunity to rise, and mobility defined as actually having risen.
That distinction is seldom even mentioned in most of the studies. It is as if everybody is chomping at the bit to get ahead, and the ones that don’t rise have been stopped by “barriers” created by “society.”
When statistics show that sons of high school dropouts don’t become doctors or scientists nearly as often as the sons of Ph.D.s, that is taken as a sign that American society is not “fair.”
If equal probabilities of achieving some goal is your definition of fairness, then we should all get together — people of every race, color, creed, national origin, political ideology and sexual preference — and stipulate that life has never been fair, anywhere or any time in all the millennia of recorded history.
Then we can begin at last to talk sense. …
Late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.
Conan: Two ex-Pussy Riot punk rock members were detained by Russian police. If convicted, they could face two weeks in a Sochi hotel room.
Letterman: Charlie Sheen is marrying an adult film star. Not only is he marrying her, but she’ll be working the bachelor party.
Conan: President Obama has apologized for saying an art history degree holder doesn’t earn a lot. Then Obama turned to an art history major and ordered a tall frappucino with soy.
SethMyers: The brassiere turns 100 years old this week. And so does everyone who still calls it a brassiere.