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The Reform Conservatism movement gets a three part look from Jennifer Rubin. In the first part she asks the authors why they are making the effort now.

Bits and pieces of reform conservatism have been around since the original neo-cons of the 1950, and we’ve had compassionate conservatism. But it seems you are talking about a more fundamental revision in how the right looks at government. What prompted you to put it all together in a cohesive way? GOP political defeat? Obamacare?

 

Yuval Levin: The context for this is really not so much a failure of conservatism as the failure of liberalism. The liberal welfare state has never been a very good match for the realities of American life, and that problem is getting worse and worse all the time as our economy and our society are increasingly moving away from a consolidated, centralized, “big institution” way of life. Americans understand that our institutions of government are not functioning well in the 21st century, and that the country’s economic performance and the prospects of the middle class and of those who want to join the middle class are held back by these failures. We’re not living in a situation in which the left has a winning formula and the right has to learn from it (or vice versa). Both parties have been somewhat intellectually exhausted, but conservatives are in a far better position to recover from that and to offer the public an agenda that applies conservative principles to today’s problems in ways very well suited to the concerns and anxieties of working families. The idea behind this book is really to put in one place some of the key conservative policy ideas that form the backbone of that kind of middle-class agenda.

Ramesh Ponnuru: Every generation of conservatives has to apply conservative principles to the circumstances in which they find themselves, and I don’t think we are trying to change those principles so much as do that work for our generation. I do think that Republicans’ failure to make conservatism relevant to today—to supply a compelling answer to the question, how would a conservative agenda make life better for my family and my country—has contributed to their recent defeats.

Peter Wehner: Republican defeats aren’t the sole reason I think this effort is necessary, but it’s part of the reason. The Republican Party is the political home of the conservative movement, and so when it fails, conservatism is set back. The GOP needs a better, more comprehensive and more modern governing vision. “Room To Grow” is our effort to meet that need. I’d add that there’s a tendency among some on the right to simply disparage government rather than to put forward ideas to improve (and responsibly re-limit) it; to speak only about its size and to ignore its purposes; to talk about abstract theories at the expense of practical solutions to problems facing middle-class Americans. We’re offering a conservative alternative to the failures of liberalism and doing so in a way that’s both principled and potentially popular, that’s consistent with our tradition and relevant to the challenges of our times. …

For the next part, Rubin asks about differences with Libertarians.

The reform conservative idea makes a break with libertarians insofar as you recognize a large but limited government is here to stay and government does have a role in setting the ground rules for people to succeed. Is that inevitable, and, as an electoral matter, do Republicans still come out ahead?

Levin: The role for government envisioned in these proposals is certainly an important role, but it is far more limited than the government we have now. It’s about helping people succeed, rather than doing everything for them. Many libertarians would probably agree that this is the sort of role government should play, and it’s certainly a set of policy proposals that’s closer to where a lot of libertarians are than much of what the Republican Party has offered and done in the past few decades. But it’s not based in a radically individualist notion of society. It’s based in something more like Mike Lee’s idea of the rugged American community — an idea with real liberty at its core. A lot of Americans can relate to that way of thinking about how our society works, so the politics of it do look more promising than the politics of the Republican agenda of the last few years.

Ponnuru: Libertarians come in many varieties, and I would think this agenda would have some appeal to the more practically minded among them. The government has done quite a lot to cartelize higher education, and libertarians have been among those most keen on pointing this out. As Andrew Kelly’s chapter points out, there are a lot of ways to start breaking up that cartel — ways that don’t pretend that we’re going to just get rid of federal support for higher education.

Wehner: Our agenda isn’t a libertarian ideal of course – there are, after all, intrinsic tensions that exists between conservatism and libertarianism – but if its policies were enacted into law most libertarians would, I think, be rather pleased; and they’d certainly be happier with what government would be doing than is now the case. Libertarians would be supportive, I should think, of our efforts to offer a different way of thinking about government, to move from administering large systems of service provision to empowering people to address the problems they confront on their own terms; to provide people with the resources and skills they need to address the challenges they face rather than to try to manage their decisions from on high. …

In the third and final part Jennifer Rubin asks about the “other” marriage debate.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) talks about the “other” marriage debate. How does government and should government work to promote marriage, delayed childbearing and other behaviors that keep people out of poverty? 

Levin: Obviously the role and the potential of public policy is always going to be very limited when it comes to these kinds of issues, but there are ways that government could do far less damage and some modest ways of making it easier for people to make constructive choices. Several of the chapters of this book address those kinds of questions, and in particular the chapters by Brad Wilcox and Scott Winship. You can read summaries and the full chapters here.

Ponnuru: It might be helpful merely to publicize the “success sequence”: Your odds of living in poverty are pretty low if you complete high school, get married and have children in that order. Policy might be able to help at the margin, by ending the marriage penalties that are implicit in various government programs — including Obamacare — and by lowering the tax burden on parents.

Wehner: This is an area where the government’s capacity to improve things is especially limited. The truth is we don’t really know what government can do to strengthen the institution of marriage and a marriage culture. As the marriage scholar Ron Haskins has pointed out, as the rates of single parenthood have risen and the consequences have become clear, all levels of government from local to federal have attempted to implement policies to address the problem — and all have met with very limited success. I agree with Ramesh; good policies might make some difference on the margins. But we’re dealing with something extraordinary and unprecedented. In 2000, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was asked to identify the biggest change he had seen in his 40-year political career. He responded that it was that the family structure had come apart all over the North Atlantic world, that it had happened in a historical instant, and that something that was not even imaginable in 1960 has now happened. What we have learned is that wise public policies in areas like crime, drug use, welfare and education can limit some of the damaging effects from the collapse of marriage. But that is quite a different matter from government being able to rebuild the institution of marriage. …

At the end of last week we spent some time with India’s election. This week another major electoral turnaround was registered in Europe. John Fund calls it a “European Earthquake.” 

How big was the “Euroskeptic” uprising in the elections for the European Parliament on Sunday? Martin Schulz of Germany, who is the left-wing candidate to become the next president of the European Commission, admitted that the results across the 28 member countries showed voters’ “total loss of trust” in pro-Europe parties. Guy Verhofstadt, a former Belgian prime minister who heads a centrist bloc of deputies in the Parliament, told a reporter that he, too, is now a Euroskeptic who wants reform in Brussels.

But the reality is that most committed supporters of an ever more powerful European Union will be tempted to ignore Sunday’s results, hoping that public dissatisfaction with bailouts and bureaucrats will abate. But the public might not play along. The best economic estimates are that Europe is facing another “lost decade” of economic growth — stagnant economies will do nothing to reduce sky-high unemployment among young people, and the need for more Eurocrisis bailouts will keep taxes high.

In Britain, the political earthquake was huge as the United Kingdom Independence Party, an avowedly Euroskeptic party, won 29 percent of the vote and became the first party other than the Conservatives and Labor to place first in a nationwide election in 108 years. Graham Watson, a defeated Liberal Democratic member of the European Parliament from Cornwall, told the BBC, “Britain is now more anti-European-integration than at any time since Napoleon.” Daniel Hannan, a National Review contributor and Conservative member of the European Parliament, told me last month that “the elites who promised us that greater centralization of power in Brussels would lead to peace have instead delivered what I warned against: animosity between nations and the rise of extremists.” …

Bret Stephens has more.

… When a political genius named Jean Monnet began the work of creating the European Economic Community in the 1950s, he understood, as the historian Brendan Simms notes, that “unity could only be achieved through stealthy cooperation between the major European governments, beginning with the economy.”

The best achievements of European institutions have all stemmed from removing restrictions—to trade, travel, residency and financial transactions. But for at least 30 years, the EU has mainly been in the business of imposing restrictions on everything from the judicial sentences that national courts can impose to the shape of the vegetables that Europeans get to eat. Stealth Europe transmogrified into Busybody Europe.

A decade ago it was conventional wisdom to observe that Europe had become a zone of perpetual peace, an agent of soft power and international law, Venus to America’s Mars. But history is coming back to Europe, and not just at the far margin in places like Donetsk. The European Parliament may be mostly toothless as a political institution. But now there’s no blinking at the fact that fascism is no longer just a piece of Europe’s past but also a realistic possibility for its future.

There will be a temptation to bury the implications of this vote for another five years. But if youth unemployment remains at 25% in France and 57% in Spain, these elections will only be the beginning of another ugly chapter in European civilization. Mr. Putin can sense that the ghosts hovering over the continent work in his favor.

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May 25th Pickings featured a long article by Kevin Williamson seeking to answer the question of why the government always screws up. Now Noemie Emery has an essay that could be a companion piece as she traces all the bien pensants, convinced of their wisdom, who erect an edifice of government coercion.

They had a dream. For almost a hundred years now, the famed academic-artistic-and-punditry industrial complex has dreamed of a government run by their kind of people (i.e., nature’s noblemen), whose intelligence, wit, and refined sensibilities would bring us a heaven on earth. Their keen intellects would cut through the clutter as mere mortals’ couldn’t. They would lift up the wretched, oppressed by cruel forces. Above all, they would counter the greed of the merchants, the limited views of the business community, and the ignorance of the conformist and dim middle class. 

Out of sorts and out of office after 1828, when power passed from the Adamses to the children of burghers and immigrants, they had begun to strike back by the 1920s, led by the likes of George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, H. L. Mencken, Herbert Croly, and Sinclair Lewis. Their stock in trade was their belief in themselves, and their contempt for the way the middle class thought, lived, and made and spent money: Commerce was crude, consumption was vulgar, and industry, which employed millions and improved the lives of many more people, too gross and/or grubby for words. “For the American critics of mass culture, it was the good times of the 1920s, not the depression of the 1930s, that proved terrifying,” says Fred Siegel, whose book The Revolt Against the Masses describes and eviscerates this group and its aspirations. In their dream world, “intellectuals, as well as poet-leaders, experts, and social scientists such as themselves would lead the regime,” as Siegel tells us. “It was thus a crucial imperative to constrain the conventional and often corrupt politics of middle-class capitalists so that these far-seeing leaders might obtain the recognition and power that was only their due.”

Attitudinal rather than doctrinaire in their judgments, they leaned Democratic because of their loathing of business, but they judged people largely by mores and manners, and men in both parties would earn their contempt. Harry Truman, as Siegel notes, “had triumphed not only over Republicans and business, but also over Henry Wallace and the supporters of the Soviet Union on the left, and Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrat segregationists of the right.” Truman was also a businessman whose small men’s-wear store had gone bankrupt, and for this Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a solon whose influence would span half a century, called him “a man of mediocre and limited capacity.” Schlesinger, who also complained about the “Eisenhower trance” and described the race between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter as “Babbitt vs. Elmer Gantry,” would find his true soulmate in Adlai E. Stevenson, a fellow snob and two-time loser in the race for the White House, whom Michael Barone has described as “the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle class American culture.” Schlesinger famously fell for John Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt, less for their politics, which were in the end not too different from Truman’s, than for their personal glamour and aura of privilege, which set them apart from the multitude. But even those two, and their successors, fell short. Kennedy shunned Schlesinger’s counsel. Bill Clinton was a wonk but also a Bubba, who never completely outgrew the Hot Springs experience. All three had middlebrow tastes when it came to the culture, sympathized with the middle class, and tried to promote and not stifle prosperity and upward mobility. And thus the elites had to wait for the man of their dreams.

When they found him, he was a rare breed: a genuine African American (his father was Kenyan) who thought  and talked like the academics on both sides of his family, a product of the faculty lounge who dabbled in urban/race politics, a man who could speak to both ends of the liberals’ up-and-down coalition, and a would-be transformer of our public life whose quiet voice and low-key demeanor conveyed “moderation” in all that he spoke and did. Best of all, he was the person whom the two branches of the liberal kingdom—the academics and journalists—wanted to be, a man who shared their sensibilities and their views of the good and the beautiful. This was the chance of a lifetime to shape the world to their measure. He and they were the ones they were waiting for, and with him, they longed for transcendent achievements. But in the event they were undone by the three things Siegel had pegged as their signature weaknesses: They had too much belief in the brilliance of experts, they were completely dismissive of public opinion, and they had a contempt for the great middle class. …

 

… the NewRepublic admitted, the launch (of the health care act) was “a fiasco that could haunt progressives for years to come.” Also, “Liberalism has spent the better part of the past century attempting to prove that it could competently and responsibly extend the state into new reaches of American life. With the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, the administration has badly injured that cause.” One could say also that for the better part of the past century intellectual liberals had been attempting to prove they had superior judgment, and that hadn’t gone too well, either. But to note that it was a setback for their belief in themselves and their wisdom might have been a little too much to expect.

But that doesn’t mean that we cannot draw some conclusions about them and their class and their kind. One is that they were perhaps not as good as they thought they were, and perhaps deserved to be not that much listened to. Another is that the people who shine in the faculty lounge ought to stay in it, that novelists have not been good judges of political horseflesh, and that if you really believe you belong to an aristocracy of the intellect, you most likely do not. The intellectual salons include a whole lot of windbags, and would have excluded a number of very effective real-world practitioners, such as Truman and Reagan and Ike. 

“It is actually harder to do some of these things in reality than we thought when we put it down on paper,” a book review in the Washington Post quoted a former Obama health care adviser as saying. This can stand as the last word for the great aspiration, and the people who held it. They wanted their chance, and they got it. They had it. They blew it. They’re done.

James Geraghty posts on one of these bien pensants, Michelle Nunn who is running on the Dem ticket for Georgia’s senate seat. Michelle has spent her whole life in non-profits. She merged the one she started into G. H Bush’s Points of Light Foundation and in four years her pay went from $120,000 to $322,000. At the same time the number of employees dropped from 180 to 70. Another demonstration of how you can get well by doing good.

Georgia Democrats are quite excited about their candidate for Senate, Michelle Nunn.

Here’s how her campaign describes her work in the nonprofit sector:

“Seeing a need in Atlanta for a vehicle by which young people could engage in service to solve problems in their own communities, Michelle and a group of friends got together to create Hands On Atlanta, with Michelle as its first Executive Director. Over the next decade, Michelle grew volunteerism across Georgia, and eventually throughout the country, through Hands On Network, a national outreach of volunteer-service organizations. Michelle was selected for a three year Kellogg Foundation Fellowship that gave her an opportunity to travel the globe and work with civic and religious leaders to help them translate the common ground of their faith and ideals into building better, more productive communities and services.

In 2007, Hands On Network merged with the Points of Light Foundation, President George H.W. Bush’s organization and legacy. After leading a successful merger, Michelle became the CEO and President of Points of Light, now the largest organization in the country devoted to volunteer service.”

Sounds good, right? When Nunn was running Hands on Network, she was making $120,000 — a lot of money to most folks, but not that much more than the average of a CEO or executive director of a nonprofit in the Southeast. (In 2012, the average was $111,693.) …

Huffington Post has a bit on another fraud hoisted on the public – barefoot shoes.

From snake oil to supplements, Americans keep falling for shaky claims about health products. Blame our obsession with finding shortcuts to better health and fitness, and the many companies ready to take advantage of it.

In the latest example, Vibram, the maker of those $100 running shoes that look like feet, recently said it would settle a multimillion-dollar lawsuit alleging it made baseless claims that its FiveFingers shoes improve foot health, balance and muscles. Vibram is the latest in a line of shoemakers and other purveyors accused of hawking products with questionable health claims. It likely won’t be the last.

“Everyone is looking for that magic bullet that’s going to give them that extra edge,” said Cedric Bryant, the chief science officer at the American Exercise Council. “In most cases, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t [true].”

Companies make billions capitalizing on our desires for quick fixes and improved athletic performance. The Federal Trade Commission has accused at least four companies just this year of marketing “unfounded promises” of weight loss simply by using a cream or food additive. Weight-loss products accounted for the largest share of fraud claims submitted to the FTC in 2011, according to The New York Times. …

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Mark Steyn treats us to the history of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

… when Julia Ward Howe heard the song for the first time that fall day, “John Brown’s Body” was already famous. She loved the martial vigor of the music, but knew the words were “inadequate for a lasting hymn”. So her minister, Dr Clark, suggested she write some new ones. And early the following morning at her Washington hotel she rose before dawn and on a piece of Sanitary Commission paper wrote the words we sing today, casting the war as a conflict in which one side has the advantage of God’s “terrible swift sword”:

I have seen Him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps…

She finished the words and went back to bed. It was published in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1862. They didn’t credit Mrs Howe and they paid her only four dollars.

Julia Ward Howe came from a distinguished lineage. Her forebear Richard Ward was Royal Governor of the British colony of Rhode Island and his son Samuel Ward was Governor of the AmericanState of Rhode Island. Her husband, like his friend, the poet Lord Byron, had played an important role in helping the Greeks win independence from the Turks. Mrs Howe herself wrote many poems, Broadway plays and newspaper columns. But “The Battle Hymn Of The Republic” is her greatest achievement. Henry Steele Commager called it “the one great song to come out of the Civil War, the one great song ever written in America”.

Whether or not that’s true, most of us understand it has a depth and a power beyond most formal national songs. When John F Kennedy was assassinated, Judy Garland insisted on singing it on her TV show – the producers weren’t happy about it, and one sneered that nobody would give a damn about Kennedy in a month’s time. But it’s an extraordinary performance. Little more than a year later, it was played at the state funeral of Winston Churchill at St Paul’s Cathedral. Among those singing it was the Queen. She sang it again in public, again at St Paul’s, for the second time in her life at the service of remembrance in London three days after September 11th 2001. That day, she also broke with precedent and for the first time sang another country’s national anthem – “The Star-Spangled Banner”. But it was Julia Ward Howe’s words that echoed most powerfully that morning as they have done since she wrote them in her bedroom in Washington 140 years earlier:

As He died to make men holy
Let us die to make men free
While God is marching on.

Charles Krauthammer says someone knows geopolitical stategy.

On Wednesday, it finally happened — the pivot to Asia. No, not the United States. It was Russia that turned East.

In Shanghai, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping signed a spectacular energy deal — $400 billion of Siberian natural gas to be exported to China over 30 years.

This is huge. By indelibly linking producer and consumer — the pipeline alone is a $70 billion infrastructure project — it deflates the post-Ukraine Western threat (mostly empty, but still very loud) to cut European imports of Russian gas. Putin has just defiantly demonstrated that he has other places to go.

The Russia-China deal also makes a mockery of U.S. boasts to have isolated Russia because of Ukraine. Not even Germany wants to risk a serious rupture with Russia (hence the absence of significant sanctions). And now Putin has just ostentatiously unveiled a signal 30-year energy partnership with the world’s second-largest economy. Some isolation.

The contrast with President Obama’s own vaunted pivot to Asia is embarrassing (to say nothing of the Keystone pipeline with Canada). He went to Japan last month also seeking a major trade agreement that would symbolize and cement a pivotal strategic alliance. He came home empty-handed. …

Phillip Howard on what broke Washington.

… The main culprit, ironically, is law. Generations of lawmakers and regulators have written so much law, in such detail, that officials are barred from acting sensibly. Like sediment in the harbor, law has piled up until it is almost impossible — indeed, illegal — for officials to make choices needed for government to get where it needs to go.

The most rudimentary decisions of government require moving mountains. Approving new infrastructure projects takes a decade or longer. Failures of implementation become failures of policy. Recently the White House issued a five-year report on the $800 billion stimulus plan from 2009. Part of the original goal, as President Obama announced then, was to “rebuild America’s infrastructure.” So how much of that huge stimulus went to this worthwhile goal? Buried in the fine print of the report is this fact — barely 3 percent went to transportation infrastructure.

Why? The president of the United States lacks the power to approve the rebuilding of decrepit bridges and roads. In the New Deal, by contrast, Harry Hopkins had employed 2.6 million people two months after he was named head of the new Civilian Works Administration.

An aging democracy is part of the problem. Each law gets piled on top of the last one. Special education, for example, now consumes about 25 percent of the total K-12 expenditures. There’s almost no funding for gifted programs or early childhood education. Is this the right balance? No one is even asking the question. The law just evolved this way.

Reviews for highway projects took an average of two years in the 1970s; by 2011, they were up to eight years. The 1956 law authorizing the interstate highway system was 29 pages. The law remaking the welfare system in 1996 was 251 pages. In this new century, statutes run a thousand pages or longer. The Volcker Rule to regulate proprietary trading — just one part of the massive Dodd-Frank law — is more than 950 pages. …

As if Matthew Continetti knows the previous item makes us think of the reform conservative movement, he posts on what that movement lacks.

An intellectually stimulating and potentially historic event was held at the American Enterprise Institute on Thursday. House majority leader Eric Cantor, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, and Senators Mike Lee and Tim Scott appeared alongside conservative thinkers and journalists such as Arthur Brooks, Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam, Ramesh Ponnuru, Peter Wehner, Yuval Levin, and Kate O’Beirne to discuss “solutions for the middle class.” The AEI panel was noteworthy not only for its content but also for the presence of Republican elected officials. It was the debut, however modest, of “reform conservatism” as a political force.

Plenty has been written about the need for the GOP to adopt economic policies that help middle-class families, and Room to Grow, the book put together by event co-sponsor YG Network, is the best primer I have seen on the various proposals that constitute reform conservatism. I do not doubt for a moment that if the Republican Party adopted Room to Grow as its platform tomorrow, then both the GOP and the country would enjoy a better future.

But that is the problem. Close to six years after Barack Obama’s election, the party as an institution is no closer to embracing the ideas of Salam, Douthat, Ponnuru, and Levin than it was when we celebrated the publication of Grand New Party at the Watergate in 2008. For reform conservatism to have any real-world application, it needs to find a presidential champion. And the prospects of that happening are not what you would call overwhelming. …

Does immigration reform become part of reform conservatism? Asked and answered by Jennifer Rubin.

Among conservatives, there is, quite obviously, disagreement on how comprehensive immigration reform fits into a forward-looking agenda. Opponents of comprehensive immigration reform are certain this is a zero risk game — newcomers will push out lower- and middle-class workers, thereby harming the same people Republicans are trying to help with the rest of their agenda. Proponents of immigration reform as part of a pro-growth, pro-reform agenda look at things from a different economic and cultural perspective.

The economic data, to be generous to opponents, is mixed as to immigrants’ short-term effect on current workers. But wait. The workers in question are already here. And, in many cases, they are working off the books, undercutting the wages and working conditions of Americans born here. Unless we want to kick all of the illegal immigrants out, the damage, so to speak, has been done at the low end of the wage scale. And reform offers the realistic possibility for establishing border security and visa overstay solutions to control the flow of immigrants. Moreover, reams of data show that all classes benefit over the long term, revenues rise and the economic pie gets bigger — provided other policies are sound. (The great example of this is Texas.)

But in focusing purely on wage data, conservatives who oppose immigration reform depart, I think, from the spirit of modern conservative movement, exemplified by Jack Kemp and Ronald Reagan. Conservatives  who argue for limited government postulate that America is a diverse, boisterous place in which communal, nongovernmental action matters a great deal. Whenever possible we should encourage economic growth and vibrant social and cultural institutions, not top-down directives. …

The rise of the master’s degree examined by the American Interest.

Eight percent of the population now holds Master’s degrees, the same percentage that held bachelor’s degrees (or higher) in the 1960s, reports Vox. Master’s degrees in education were by far the most popular, holding at around a third to a quarter of all such degrees from 1971 to 2012, though MBAs had taken the top spot by 2010. In fact, the increase in the number of MBA degrees is astonishing: Only 11.2 percent of master’s degrees were in business in 1971, but in 2012, they were a whopping 25.4 percent.

The rise of the master’s degree is likely a product of credential inflation. As more and more people acquire bachelor’s degrees, those who wish to make themselves stand out go on to get the MA. And as Vox points out, while a Master’s degree does have a positive impact on earnings, the overall debt of people with undergraduate and Master’s degrees has grown markedly in the past decade. In fact, as we recently noted, graduate student debt is in large part driving the student loan crisis.

Employers are also likely to use degrees as screening tools, eliminating people who don’t have a certain level of education in order to expedite the selection process—regardless of whether the advanced degree is really necessary for the job. But we shouldn’t want an economy that favors people with polished résumés over people with good ideas. This data is not a good sign for our economic health.

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The Veterans Dept. failures have more of the liberal press turning on president bystander. Ron Fournier of the National Journal writes on how he became the “superhero of excuses.” Ezra Klein mounts a defense and Fournier says;

… The inconvenient truth is that Klein’s kind of thinking lets the president off the hook, unaccountable for promises broken and opportunities lost. Rather than change Washington’s culture of polarization, zero-sum game politics, and spin, Obama surrendered to it almost immediately. On health insurance reform, government debt, and loosening immigration laws, Obama shares blame with obstinate House Republicans for fumbling potential compromise. On climate change and gun control, Obama knew (or should have known) his rhetoric was setting up voters for disappointment. Rather than roll back Bush-era terrorism programs that curb civil liberties, Obama deepened them.

The launch of the Affordable Care Act and the worsening of conditions at the Veterans Affairs Department are emblematic of Obama’s inattention to the hard work of governing. He is slow to fire poor-serving Cabinet members and quick to dismiss controversies as “phony scandals.” To the Obama administration, transparency is a mere talking point. The great irony of his progressive presidency: Democrats privately admit that Obama has done as much to undermine the public’s faith in government as his GOP predecessor. The Green Lantern Theory is an excuse for failure.

Dana Milbank of WaPo calls him president passive.

… Obama said Wednesday that he doesn’t want the matter to become “another political football,” and that’s understandable. But his response to the scandal has created an inherent contradiction: He can’t be “madder than hell” about something if he won’t acknowledge that the thing actually occurred. This would be a good time for Obama to knock heads and to get in front of the story. But, frustratingly, he’s playing President Passive, insisting on waiting for the VA’s inspector general to complete yet another investigation, this one looking into the Phoenix deaths.

While declaring that “we have to let the investigators do their job,” Obama wasn’t waiting. “The IG indicated that he did not see a link between the wait and them actually dying,” the president told reporters, referring to the 40 veterans in Phoenix.

Few had thought Obama would take a bolder stand on Wednesday, as indicated by the network reporters doing their stand-ups in the briefing room before he walked in.

“The first thing we expect to hear from the president is no announcement about Eric Shinseki having to resign,” said CBS News’s Major Garrett.

“There will be no personnel announcements,” said ABC’s Jonathan Karl.

Said NBC’s Peter Alexander, “We don’t expect any dramatic new information coming out of the president’s mouth.”

Obama met these expectations. …

Back to some of our favorites as Peter Wehner posts on the narrative of epic incompetence. 

The last eight months have battered the Obama administration. From the botched rollout of the health-care website to the VA scandal, events are now cementing certain impressions about Mr. Obama. Among the most damaging is this: He is unusually, even epically, incompetent. That is not news to some of us, but it seems to be a conclusion more and more people are drawing.

The emerging narrative of Barack Obama, the one that actually comports to reality, is that he is a rare political talent but a disaster when it comes to actually governing. The list of his failures is nothing short of staggering, from shovel-ready jobs that weren’t so shovel ready to the failures of healthcare.gov to the VA debacle. But it also includes the president’s failure to tame the debt, lower poverty, decrease income inequality, and increase job creation. He promised to close GuantanamoBay and didn’t. His administration promised to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed before a civilian jury in New York but they were forced to retreat because of outrage in his own party. Early on in his administration Mr. Obama put his prestige on the line to secure the Olympics for Chicago in 2016 and he failed. 

Overseas the range of Obama’s failures include the Russian “reset” and Syrian “red lines” to Iran’s Green Revolution, the Egyptian overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, and Libya post-Gaddafi. The first American ambassador since the 1970s was murdered after requests for greater security for the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi were denied. …

More from Wehner.

… There is something oddly impressive when it comes to the sheer scope of this administration’s failures. To have gone more than five years as president and to have almost no governing successes to point to is a standard most people, and most politicians, could not hope to attain. Yet Mr. Obama, being the historic figure that he is, decided to enter previously uncharted territory.

At some point I suppose it was inevitable that Jimmy Carter would be pushed aside when it came to incompetence. Now he has.

Another answer to Ezra Klein from Jonathan Tobin.

… according to liberal blogger Ezra Klein, the fault lies not with Obama but with his office. In a piece published on his Vox site, Klein makes the argument that it is unfair to expect Obama to succeed when the presidency is designed to be ineffective. In Klein’s view, instead of blaming Obama for being an absentee president, we should be scolding James Madison and Alexander Hamilton for crafting a Constitution that didn’t provide a president with the ability to govern because of the checks and balances incorporated into the system. Those who differ with this view are, he wrote, subscribing to a “Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency” in which the commander-in-chief is invested with magical powers.

This is, to put it mildly, bunk. No American president who respects the Constitution (a dubious proposition when applied to Obama) can be a dictator. But the presidency has evolved from its bare-bones origins at the Federal Convention of 1787 into one that both liberals and conservatives have often dubbed an “imperial” institution. To say that Obama hasn’t the power to succeed is to engage in denial of both history and logic.

Were we having this discussion in the 19th century rather than the 21st century, Klein might have a point. Up until the Civil War, American presidents had only a tiny federal bureaucracy to rule and lacked the ability to influence many domestic issues, though even then some larger-than-life characters like Andrew Jackson were able to wield enormous power by both constitutional and unconstitutional means. The vast expansion of the national budget and its consequent expansion of federal power that the Civil War helped create changed that. But even in the late 19th century, presidents had but a fraction of the ability to influence events that they do today.

However, in the 20th century, the quaint notions of the early republic with its part-time Congress (meeting only a few months out of each year) and tiny federal payrolls were forgotten as the presidency grew along with the country and the government. …

Abe Greenwald penned an extensive review of five years of disasters in Middle East policy. We have here only the introduction and closing paragraphs. (The whole piece is 10,000 words.) Follow this link if you want to read about the obama foolishness and mistakes blow by blow and country by country.

… The most tangible change brought on by Bush’s foreign policy was its domestic impact. By 2008, Americans were sick of war and tired of the Middle East altogether. Thus, one of Barack Obama’s biggest selling points was his promise to end the war in Iraq, extricate the country from the region, and pursue a more contrite foreign policy. Once elected, President Obama set out to honor his campaign pledge. The question of his ideological disposition can be debated endlessly, but whatever its precise contours, it translated into policies that largely reversed Bush positions in the Middle East. Where Bush was particularly supportive of our closest regional ally, Obama pressured Israel for concessions. Where Bush reached out to the Iranian people in solidarity against the regime that was our chief antagonist, Obama rebuffed ordinary Iranians and offered an “open hand” to the regime itself.

Between the two poles of Israel and Iran, Obama made clear to other Middle East leaders that his main concern was staying out of their affairs. As he told the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya news station soon after taking office: “Too often the United States starts by dictating.” Unlike Bush, Obama implied, he would stand back and “listen.” And he has made good on his word to shrink American influence and undo the disruptive excesses of the Bush years.

What have we gotten in return for our more humble posture in the Middle East? The answer, as a case-by-case examination of the most important examples reveals, is this: a new age of great peril. Under Barack Obama’s leadership, in almost every square inch of the Middle East, the strategic position of the United States has decayed. And the region itself is far worse off than it was when he took office. …

 

… It would be the height of unfairness to blame the Obama administration outright for everything that’s happened in the Middle East in the past five years. The region’s bad actors and cultural disorders are often well beyond the reach of the United States, regardless of who’s in office. But limitations are one thing—ineptitude another. It’s simply hard to find a single instance of President Obama responding to recent regional events in a way that has paid off either for the United States or its allies. At the same time, America’s antagonists—chiefly Iran and its enablers—have been emboldened and are now ascendant.

If this is what the Obama administration has gotten in return for a more humble American posture, then it’s time to drop that posture. Dangers like rolling civil wars, a near-nuclear Iran, a re-Talibanized Afghanistan, and a resurgent al-Qaeda will not vanish on their own. This administration has three years to reduce the damage that’s been done. The challenge is enormous, but, despite all these setbacks, the United States remains the strongest power in world history. And, as we’ve seen, a lot can happen in a short amount of time.

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Kevin Williamson has written a long essay that seeks to answer a question raised by the Veterans Administration’s failures. It is a question everyone should ask. But, it is a most important question for liberals who believe in using government force to address problems. (Problems most likely caused by earlier state compulsions.). Here’s the question; “How is it possible that the government of the United States of America — arguably the most powerful organization of any sort in the history of the human race, in possession of a navy, a nuclear arsenal, and a vast police apparatus — cannot ensure that its own employees and contractors do not negligently kill its other employees and former employees? Never mind providing veterans with world-class medical care — the federal government cannot even prevent bureaucratic homicide.”

Politics is not always about somebody getting his way and somebody else failing to get his way. Consider the case of the Veterans Affairs hospitals: Nobody wanted this outcome. That outcome, recall, is a great many dead veterans, the result of medical and managerial malpractice. Democrats did not want the hospitals that care for our veterans to be catastrophically mismanaged while administrators set about systematically destroying the evidence of their incompetence, and Republicans did not want that, either. Independents are firmly opposed to negligently killing veterans. It doesn’t poll well. Everybody is so opposed to that outcome that we created a cabinet-level secretariat to prevent it and installed as its boss Eric Shinseki, a highly regarded former Army general. We spent very large sums of money, billions of dollars, to prevent this outcome, almost trebling VA spending from 2000 to 2013 even as the total number of veterans declined by several million.

Nobody wanted these veterans dead, but dead they are. …

… There will be plenty of personal culpability to go around as this mess all comes to light, beginning with President Obama, who offered himself to the American people as, among other things, a competent authority on the management of health care. He promised the country openness and transparency but has worked assiduously against those qualities, which carry not only ethical weight but practical value as well: Open and transparent arrangements are much less prone to abuse, especially abuse of the sort that results in death, because observation is linked to accountability, which is why police officers make so many wrongful arrests and destroy so much evidence in response to the perfectly legal act of videotaping them at work. (E.g.) The right thing to do, in response to 40 and counting veterans killed through negligence on his watch, is for President Obama to resign. A man with any self-respect would do it; a country with any self-respect would demand it. But that of course is not what is going to happen. …

 

 

… Politics is mostly words about words, but it has real-world consequences, and death is not an uncommon one. The truth, which in Washington is an unspeakable truth, is that almost the entirety of our conversation about politics is predicated on a fundamental error in our understanding of reality. Unlike a certain Entity with Whom presidents and senators sometimes seem to confuse themselves, politicians cannot speak reality into being. (“Let there be . . . health care.”) The situation at the VA should not surprise us; what did we expect, having no way of even knowing what we should have expected? This outcome was at least as likely as any other, and certainly more likely than one in which reality matched policy through some obscure divine office unknown to us.

 

If you want to blame somebody, blame Democritus.

 

Democritus was the Greek philosopher who first imagined the atom, some time around 460 b.c. He thought that if you broke a rock in half, broke one of those halves into even smaller pieces, and kept on going, eventually you would arrive at an indivisible unit of matter, which he called the atom (ἄτομος, “indivisible”). He had a great many ideas about atoms: They are everywhere, eternal, indivisible, always in motion, etc. And the Greek world yawned, and the entire world continued yawning for about 2,000 years. Nobody gave a fig about his atoms.

 

Then, in the 19th century, a couple of Englishmen went hunting for them. …

 

 

… most of us, when we think of an atom, think of Rutherford’s miniature solar system. The macro-micro universe is interesting to the philosophically inclined and deeply compelling to a certain class of stoner. It is very appealing, this infinitely scalable model of the universe. In the false belief that we can comprehend it all at once, we feel a little like that Entity with Whom politicians confuse themselves. There is a reason that the orrery (scale model of the solar system) is so arresting to the imagination of a certain kind of man — it is the very image of what the politician imagines the universe to be like:

 

The unspoken promise is that of reduction: To understand the whole, understand its parts. Understand the atom and you can build an explanation of the universe. Those ideas could be seductive to scientists, but they were practically opiates for politicians. We still hear the unhappy echo of the early-20th-century hymns to totalitarianism in our political campaigns — “How shall we govern? With science!” Copernicus’s neat solar system, Rutherford’s neat atom — with a world that simple, how difficult could it be to shape it to our own desires? …

 

… How confident should we be that our policies will produce the desired outcomes? That will depend in some part on how complex the system is that you are attempting to influence. Housing and mortgage markets are very complex, and politicians’ efforts to turn them to their own ends went very badly in 2008, and will go very badly again in the future. Health-insurance markets and medicine are both very complex, and we see how political efforts to manage those have been going.

 

Operating hospitals is a complex business, too. Consider a counterexample: Our food-stamp program has many problems, but imagine what a Hieronymus Bosch nightmare it would be if, instead of the current practice of giving poor people vouchers for food, we applied the VA model and attempted to have the government deliver the service itself rather than simply paying for it. That would mean federally operated farms, ranches, and slaughterhouses, government grocery stores, warehouses, distribution centers, transportation networks, etc., all managed with the competence and decency exhibited by the VA. Rather than trying to politically steer the extraordinarily complex system of producing and distributing food — rather than biting off way more than we can cognitively chew — we instead chose the relatively simple method, giving poor people vouchers for food. Of course that has its problems and unintended consequences, but they are milder than, say, national famine, which is probably what would come of government-run agriculture. We let the complex problem of food production meet the complex solution of the market.

Not every regulation or government program is doomed to fail. But we might consider the slightly terrifying possibility that when government does get something right, it does so by accident, temporarily, and for reasons that it cannot understand or replicate. …

 

… Another feature of complex systems is that some of them are very sensitive to initial conditions, as expressed by the butterfly effect. It may be the case that things have gone as well as they have for us in the United States not because of any current policy or because of the unique genius and saintliness of our national leadership as currently constituted, but simply because the right people with the right prejudices did the right things for a relatively short period of time in the 18th century, and what we have now is very little more than the compounded returns on that cultural windfall. That seems to me a more likely explanation for our relatively happy and secure place in the world than that we were led to this point by the kind of thinking, and the kind of men, who brought us the VA hospitals and those dead veterans.

Roger Simon posts on the VA scandal. 

Many have wondered about Barack Obama’s prolonged silence concerning the disastrous situation at the Veterans Administration hospitals and then his odd detached demeanor (well, maybe not that odd for him) when he finally did discuss it at a press conference.

The answer is simple.  His lifetime dream of a free public (single payer) healthcare system for all just disintegrated in front of him. Forget the wildly ambitious and pervasive “Affordable Care Act,” the government couldn’t even handle the health of our wounded servicemen, acknowledged for years to be by far the group most deserving of medical attention in our country.  With veterans dying while waiting lists are falsified, it’s hard to see government healthcare as anything but incompetent, disgraceful and quite possibly criminal.

Government has failed utterly.  Does anyone have any doubt that Halliburton or even the dreaded Koch brothers could have better handled the health of our wounded warriors? …

Ben Shapiro asks why the left is no longer claiming the VA is proof government run health care will be so wonderful.

As the fallout from the Veterans Administration cooking of the books and the related deaths of over three dozen veterans continues, President Obama took to the podium on Wednesday to explain that problems at the VA are nothing new. On Wednesday, President Obama took to the podium to first express his tremendous anger – VA Secretary Eric Shinseki was “mad as hell” but President Obama was “madder than hell,” thus winning the rage sweepstakes – and then explained that the VA’s issues go back years:

[A]ll of us, whether here in Washington or all across the country, have to stay focused on the larger mission, which is upholding our sacred trust to all of our veterans, bringing the VA system into the 21st century, which is not an easy task….  caring for our veterans is not an issue that popped up in recent weeks. Some of the problems with respect to how veterans are able to access the benefits that they’ve earned, that’s not a new issue.

Obama’s statement, however, was remarkably short on actual solutions for the VA. Throwing money at the problem hasn’t fixed it: using 2011 dollars, America spent $88.8 billion on the VA in 2007, and $125.3 billion on the VA in 2012.

And herein lies the problem for the left: the failures at the VA, including its bureaucratic incompetence, its waiting lists, and its deaths, all debunk the notion that a government-run healthcare system will work. It’s a fresh slap in the face to all those commentators who, in pushing Obamacare, endorsed the VA as a model.

There are some pretty big names on that list. Paul Krugman in 2011 wrote of the VA’s “huge success story”: …

Power Line has more in this vein. As you can see, Paul Krugman has been a flack for left wing causes for a long time.

At the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto pulls together liberals’ endorsements of Veterans Administration health care. It goes beyond just claiming that VA medicine was top notch; liberals often claimed that the supposed success of the VA is proof that government is superior to the private sector. Taranto titles his post “Socialist Supermodel.” You should read it all, but here are a few highlights:

[I]n January 2006, … former Enron adviser Paul Krugman wrote this:

I know about a health care system that has been highly successful in containing costs, yet provides excellent care. And the story of this system’s success provides a helpful corrective to anti-government ideology. For the government doesn’t just pay the bills in this system–it runs the hospitals and clinics.

No, I’m not talking about some faraway country. The system in question is our very own Veterans Health Administration, whose success story is one of the best-kept secrets in the American policy debate. …

Jonathan Tobin notes the faux outrage of the president.

… Nor is there any indication that Obama or anyone else in this administration is capable of seeing that perhaps the reason for the systemic problems at the VA is the reliance on government health-care institutions burdened by bloated bureaucracies. Given Obama’s almost religious devotion to big government, don’t expect that this president can wrap his brain around the right fix to a problem that may require a complete reform of this system and a switch to a vouchers scheme that would end the spectacle of veterans waiting weeks or months for the health care they need.

For the president to emerge from a meeting about this controversy praising the good services millions get from the VA and speaking of how much Shinseki cares about veterans does nothing to divert the American people from understanding how much Obama has failed as a leader. Nothing said today will enhance the confidence of the public or of veterans that this situation is being handled properly or that the president has the ability to act to stem a crisis in the making. It took him five and a half years to realize that he had to do something more than talk about the need to help veterans. In the meantime, more than 40 died. There’s no telling how many more will suffer and how many other scandals will pop up in the two and a half years he has left in office. But no matter what the total turns out to be, no one should expect anything more than lip service and belated concern from an absentee president.

Jennifer Rubin speculates on what conservative reform of the failed liberal state might look like.

Whether it is the Department of Veterans Affairs, Medicaid, student loans or any other mismanaged and excessively expensive aspect of the liberal welfare state, the left’s answer to any reform proposal is invariably, “No, you’re trying to destroy it!” To try to reform these programs is, in the left’s eyes, an attempt to hurt the poor, sick, disadvantaged and powerless. The recipients in the current system may not get good care or students may be weighed down with huge debt and no useful degree, but liberals are content so long as more and more taxpayer money is poured into failing programs. Likewise, Medicare and Social Security can crowd out all other domestic programs and be on the road to bankruptcy, but reformers who attempt to make it sustainable for the long haul are accused of throwing Granny over the cliff.

The collapse of the welfare state and the instinctive liberal reaction to defend ferociously the status quo are part of the motivation for the reform conservative movement that is shifting the GOP’s agenda from indiscriminately cutting government to rethinking government. At a panel at the American Enterprise Institute (a prior panel and speech by the Senate minority leader are described here), a set of conservative scholars discussed a new policy initiative, “Room to Grow: Conservative Reforms for Limited Government and a Thriving Middle Class.”

One of its authors, Yuval Levin, explains in the book’s introduction: “The fundamentally prescriptive, technocratic approach to American society inherent in the logic of the Left’s policy thinking is a poor fit for American life at any scale. The liberal welfare state ultimately cannot be had at an affordable price. It is not the architecture of one or another particular program that makes it unsustainable. It is unsustainable because the system as a whole must feed off of the innovative, decentralized vitality of American life, yet it undermines both the moral and the economic foundations of that vitality.” In other words, it’s bound to fail. …

Victor Davis Hanson posts on the ethically challenged administration.

Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki cannot get a handle on the recent scandalous treatment of veterans in VA hospitals, where more than 40 sick men were allowed to die without proper follow-up treatment. A cover-up allegedly followed. When the Walter Reed Army Medical Center scandal broke under the George W. Bush administration, heads rolled. So far, Shinseki seems immune from similar accountability.

Almost nothing that former secretary of health and human services Kathleen Sebelius promised before, during, or after the implementation of the ill-starred Affordable Care Act came true. She was also cited by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel for violating the Hatch Act, as she improperly campaigned for Obama’s reelection while serving as a cabinet secretary.

Former IRS official Lois Lerner used the federal tax-collection agency to go after groups deemed too conservative. She invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid telling Congress the whole truth.

Susan Rice, former U.N. ambassador and now national-security adviser, flat-out deceived the public in five television appearances about the Benghazi catastrophe. She insisted that the deaths of four Americans were due to a spontaneous riot induced by a reactionary video maker — even though she had access to intelligence fingering al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists as the culprits who planned the attack on the anniversary of 9/11. …

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It’s time for a look at India’s elections. Tunku Varadarajan is first.

When Barack Obama was made aware that Narendra Modi would be India’s next prime minister, the chances are that he moaned softly to himself…and cringed. 

India’s voters had brought to power a man who is not permitted to visit the United States, having been denied a U.S. visa in 2005 on account of a State Department determination that he had violated religious freedoms in the Indian state of Gujarat. (Some 2,000 Muslims had died in riots that scarred Gujarat in 2002. Modi was the state’s chief minister at the time, and his critics hold him responsible for the deaths.) The visa ban was still in place when Modi was nominated last September to lead theBharatiya Janata [Indian People’s] Party into the elections; and most awkwardly for Obama, the ban was still technically in place on the day of his victory. American diplomacy has been decidedly maladroit.

As if jolted awake by the obtuseness of his own State Department, Obama invited Modi to visit the U.S. “at a mutually agreeable time” when he called the Indian on Saturday to congratulate him on his triumph.

A meeting between the two men, when it occurs, could be fascinating to observe. Obama and Modi are from two different planets, and each, in his heart, is likely to have vigorous contempt for the other. The former is an exquisitely calibrated product of American liberalism, ever attentive to such notions as “inclusiveness.” He is the acme of political correctness (notwithstanding the odd drone directed at “AfPak”). Modi, by contrast, is a blunt-spoken nationalist, opposed to welfare, and to the “appeasement” of minorities. …

With a bit of hyperbole, Kevin Williamson calls Modi the “leader of the free world” and has a nice send off for Manhohan Singh.

… as Manmohan Singh steps off the stage, take a moment to appreciate what he managed. Political careers end either in death or disappointment, and Dr. Singh’s is no different — the corruption and incompetence that his government slid into in its last years brought India to a virtual standstill. But before that, his policies, from his time as finance minister forward, were the proximate cause of hundreds of millions of people rising out of poverty. There are very few world leaders who can say as much, and Nobel prizes have been awarded for less — much, much less, within recent memory. …

WSJ Editors celebrate the election.

… Mr. Modi’s record offers reason for optimism. As governor for 13 years of Gujarat state, he was the archetypal energetic executive, forcing through approvals of new projects and welcoming foreign investment. Gujarat now accounts for 25% of India’s exports, and the poverty rate has plunged. As the son of a tea-seller, Mr. Modi also has a gut sense of the economic aspirations of ordinary Indians.

That’s more than can be said for the losing Congress Party. Under Sonia Gandhi —scion of the family that has ruled India for the better part of its 67 years—Congress reverted to its old political strategy of doling out benefits to the poor and discouraging foreign investment. The result was growth below 5%, which to most Indians felt like a recession. With a work force growing by 12 million a year but only two million new jobs being created, it effectively was.

The best news from the BJP’s landslide is that welfare-state promises didn’t work with Indians who began to taste the fruits of reform and faster growth in the 1990s and 2000s. The country’s burgeoning middle class has been exposed to the broader world and wants more opportunities. Mr. Modi appealed to this new class of Indians in his campaign. He emphasized the difference between an older generation who died “for independence” and a younger India that “will live for good governance.” …

More from the Christian Science Monitor.

Right-wing Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi swept to power in a historic landslide victory in Indian elections, official results released on Friday showed.

Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won an outright victory, the first single party to do so for 30 years, with at least 279 of the 543 parliament seats up for grabs. The ruling Congress party, which has dominated Indian politics for the last 65 years under the Gandhi family, was humiliated, reduced to its worst showing ever.

The results were a stunning personal triumph for Modi, who ran a presidential-style election campaign promising development and economic growth that would bring jobs and services after several years of slowing growth and nearly double-digit inflation.

“This is the end of the ice age in Indian politics,” BJP spokesman Sambit Para told CNN-IBN TV.

“This is a huge meltdown for Congress,” agreed Yashwant Deshmukh, a pollster and political analyst. “The BJP has replaced Congress across the country as the dominant national party.”

Indian stock markets hit record highs on news of Modi’s victory, and the rupee rose on currency markets. Outgoing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh congratulated Modi; he will resign tomorrow. …

And Kevin Williamson with another note of optimism.

The loser was Rahul Gandhi. The Gandhi political dynasty descends not from Mohandas K. Gandhi, who is not related, but from India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, whose daughter, Indira Gandhi, served as prime minister, and was succeeded by her son, Rajiv. Rajiv’s wife, Sonia, became head of the Congress party, and Rahul is her son. A member of the family occupied the Indian premiership for 40 of the country’s first 60 years of independence. 

I note the defeat of the Gandhi scion mainly to hearten those who fear that the 2016 U.S. presidential ballot will read “Bush/Clinton.” Dynasties are not invincible. 

Faux commencement address from P. J. O’Rourke delivered to Rutgers, the university that kicked Condi to the curb.

Here Is What I Would Tell the Rutgers Graduating Class of 2014…

I hear Condoleezza Rice stood you up. You may think it was because about 50 students—.09 percent of your student body—held a “sit-in” at the university president’s office to protest the selection of Secretary Rice as commencement speaker. You may think it was because a few of your faculty—stale flakes from the crust of the turkey pot pie that was the New Left—threatened a “teach-in” to protest the selection of Secretary Rice.

“Sit-in”? “Teach-in”? What century is this?

I think Secretary Rice forgot she had a yoga session scheduled for today.

It’s shame she was busy. You might have heard something useful from a person who grew up poor in Jim Crow Alabama. Who lost a friend and playmate in 1963 when white supremacists bombed Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Who became an accomplished concert pianist before she tuned her ear to the more dissonant chords of international relations.

Secretary Rice was Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Denver and received a B.A. cum laude in political science—back before the worst grade a student had ever heard of was a B-.

The professor who influenced her most was Josef Korbel, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s father.

Secretary Albright and Secretary Rice don’t agree on much about international relations. But they don’t sit-in or teach-in at each other’s public appearances.

Secretary Rice got a master’s in political science from Notre Dame, a Ph.D. in political science from Denver and, in the meantime, was an intern at the Carter administration State Department and the Rand Corporation and studied Russian at Moscow State University.

She rose from assistant professor to provost at Stanford. (Ranked fifth-best university in America by U.S. News & World Report. You’re ranked 69th.) While she was doing that, she also served, from 1989 to 1991, as the Soviet expert on the White House National Security Council under President George H. W. Bush. …

Late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

SethMeyers: A new study claims that one-in-10 Americans no longer carries cash. They’re called ‘English majors.’

Conan: There is now an app that will choose something random for you to watch on Netflix. The app is called ‘Your Girlfriend.’

Fallon: A Texas town plans to recycle toilet water and use it for drinking water. Dogs said, “How are you only thinking of this now?”

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Joel Kotkin thinks our country is in decline and suggests we need to grow our way out of it.

Across broad ideological lines, Americans now foresee a dismal, downwardly mobile future for the country’s middle and working classes. While previous generations generally did far better than their predecessors, those in the current one, outside the very rich, are locked in a struggle to carve out the economic opportunities and access to property that had become accepted norms here over the past century.

This deep-seated social change raises a profound dilemma for business: Either the private sector must find a way to boost economic opportunity, or political pressure seems likely to impose policies that will order redistribution from above. It is doubtful the majority of Americans will continue to support an economic system that seems to benefit only a relative few. Looking at our unequal landscape, one journalist recently asked: “Are the bread riots finally coming?”

By 2020, according to the Economic Policy Institute, almost 30% of American workers are expected to hold low-wage jobs, with earnings that would put them below the poverty line to support a family of four. The combination of high debt and low wages has some projections suggesting millennials may have to work until their early 70s.

But our new pessimism and widening class divide stems not only from the concentration of wealth and power, but from the persistence of weak economic growth. …

More from Michael Goodwin who says the American spirit is breaking.

The official opening of the 9/11 museum brought President Obama to New York and sparked fresh reminders of the horror of that awful day. The president called the site ­“sacred” and gave a moving speech about the American spirit, saying, “Like the great wall and bedrock that embrace us today, nothing can ever break us.”

It is the right thing to say and the right place to say it. But is it true? Is the American spirit really unbreakable?

I have my doubts.

There are many examples that say our spirit is breaking if not already broken. One involves a Wall Street Journal report that, six years after the housing bubble popped and sank the economy, federal officials want to lower mortgage standards again so more people can buy houses that they can’t afford. Been there, done that would seem to be the logical response, but the idea is gaining momentum because so few people can legitimately qualify for credit that the only way to spur housing growth is to junk the standards.

The same thing is happening in schools. Americans overwhelmingly agree that our educational system, once the envy of the world, is now lagging. …

Ron Christie says the VA scandal is real and the president is hiding from it.

Up to now, President Obama and congressional Democrats had thought “so-called” scandals involving Benghazi, the IRS, and Operation Fast and Furious were largely behind them. Nothing to see, just Republican witch hunts designed to embarrass the president and perhaps land blows against Hillary Clinton. But recent revelations about shoddy care at Veterans Affairs (VA) facilities across the country have brought bipartisan condemnation from Capitol Hill that should worry a commander in chief whose reaction to the brewing tempest has been muted at best.

What is most surprising about the present controversy surrounding the substandard treatment at the VA, in which at least 40 veterans lost their lives while awaiting treatment, is that House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller (R-FL) had alerted the president to trouble nearly a year ago. In a letter dated May 21, 2013, Miller began:

Dear Mr. President: I am writing to bring to your attention an alarming pattern of serious and significant patient care issues at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Centers (VAMCs) across the country. Recent events at the Atlanta, Georgia, VAMC provide a perfect illustration of the management failures, deceptions, and lack of accountability permeating VA’s healthcare system…I believe your direct involvement and leadership is required.

A year on from Chairman Miller’s letter, the revelations of substandard care, neglect, and waste seem to have magnified, rather than been reduced. For a president who seems to have endless amounts of time to talk about the miseries of those living on the minimum wage, Obama’s seeming indifference to the severity of the problems faced by our returning veterans seeking care at VA facilities is shocking. …

Ron Fournier wonders how dumb the administration thinks we are.

News quiz: President Obama and his communications team hope that Americans are: 1) Dumb; 2) Distracted; 3) Numb to government inefficiency; 4) All of above.

Answer: 4, all of the above.

That answer along with utter incompetence are the best explanations for why the White House thought it could get away with claiming that the departure of Veterans Affairs official Robert Petzel was a step toward accountability for its scandalous treatment of war veterans.

Fact is, the department announced in 2013 that Dr. Petzel would retire this year.

“Well, Secretary Shinseki accepted Dr. Petzel’s resignation this afternoon. He was due to retire early next month, and obviously there has been a nomination made for his replacement,” White House Chief of Staff Dennis McDonough told CBS’s Major Garrett last week. “I leave to Rick the explanation of his decision, but there is no question that this is a termination of his job there before he was planning to go.”

No. This was neither a termination nor a housecleaning. It was a scapegoating. …

Jim Geraghty says the president is madder than anybody.

The Obama administration is dangerously depleting our nation’s reserves of speechwriting clichés.

For example, when some terrible mess blows up on the president’s watch, what does he say? Come on. You know it.

No one is madder than him.

After White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough assured the public, “nobody is more outraged about this problem right now” than President Obama — an outrage that has yet to be expressed in anything more than pro forma public statements — Reid Epstein decided to look up how often the president assured all of us he was angry — or perhaps more angry than anyone else! — about failures of his administration or other setbacks.

It’s quite a list:

October 2013: “Nobody’s madder than me about the fact that the website isn’t working as well as it should.”

The IRS scandal, May 2013: “Americans are right to be angry about it, and I am angry about it.”

April 2012, the Secret Service prostitution scandal: “If it turns out that some of the allegations that have been made in the press are confirmed, then of course I’ll be angry.”  …

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Matthew Continetti brings us back to Abramson v. NYTimes. This piece is a hoot.

Reading the New York Times’ report on the defenestration of the paper’s executive editor, Jill Abramson, and the coronation, at a hastily arranged meeting Wednesday, of her replacement Dean Baquet, I could not escape the feeling that the Soviet press must have covered the comings and goings of Politburo members in much the same way.

There was the strange construction of the headline, “Times Ousts Jill Abramson as Executive Editor, Elevating Dean Baquet,” in which the identity of the man behind the ouster, Times owner Arthur Sulzberger Jr., was masked by his institutional affiliation, and in which Baquet was not promoted but—and here the metaphysical tone is intentional—“elevated” to his new position. There were the plodding, ceremonial, and forced statements for public consumption: “I will listen hard, I will be hands on, I will be engaged,” Baquet was quoted as telling his new underlings. “I’ve loved my run at the Times,” Abramson was allowed to reveal in a prepared statement.

There was political criticism of the outgoing commissar, made by anonymous sources using the passive voice: “As a leader of the newsroom, she was accused by some of divisiveness and criticized for several of her personnel choices.” And there was a hint of samizdat irony smuggled into the article via the closing sentences: “An annual meeting for senior executives at the newspaper had been planned for Thursday and Friday. Ms. Abramson was scheduled to be one its leaders and to deliver a talk Thursday morning, titled ‘Our Evolving Newsroom.’ The meeting has been canceled.” With that Jill Abramson joined the ranks of Zinoviev and Kamenev, becoming, as far as the New York Times is concerned, a nonperson.

But still a dangerous one. …

… What makes the story so enjoyable, on the most superficial level, is its lurid combination of identity politics—Abramson was the first female editor of the Times, and Baquet is its first African-American editor—and liberal hypocrisy. Equal pay has been one of the rallying cries of the American left, a category that very much includes the New York Times, and the possibility of sexism at the paper is rich indeed. But I have to say I am less interested in equal wages, in comparable worth, and in what the New Yorker calls the “inescapably gendered aspect” of the Times’ latest scandal than I am in how that scandal confirms one of my pet theories. The theory is this: The men and women who own and operate and produce every day the world’s most important newspaper are basically children. …

,,, Nor is it exactly common for 60-year-olds to get tattoos. Abramson has three: one of a subway token, one of an “H” to represent both Harvard and her husband, and one of her former newspaper’s famous gothic “T.” Somewhere in Manhattan, a tattoo-removal parlor is about to get a customer. …

… Not even identity politics can withstand the crush of money, the global flow of capital. Leave it to Sulzberger, though, to execute that firing in a haphazard and immature and rather embarrassing way.

“This is incredibly un-Times-ian,” one female staffer told Gabe Sherman. Really? She must not get into the office much.

Jennifer Rubin calls it “conservative schadenfreude.”

… there is much for conservatives to enjoy as the liberal media thrash  and squirm, caught on the hook of identity politics. Whatever you believe and whichever telling is the truth, it should be a lesson for reporters who reflexively side with everyone with a good yarn about victimhood, for liberals who confuse the Times for their religion and for those who reduce every human encounter to race, gender or sexual orientation. (As an aside the Times recently ran a piece bemoaning the lack of openly gay CEOs at big companies. Before leading a new diversity quest, maybe the Times should see how many openly gay people run media outlets and if there are none, consider if this factual nugget is meaningful.)

Conservatives can enjoy this comedy while it lasts. After they finish ripping each other’s reputations to shreds, the liberal media will be back to attacking conservatives in the “war on women,” running interference for Democrats and pursuing the next quest to show Justice Sonia Sotomayor had it right in the recent affirmative action case (i.e., American rubes are hopeless bigots). But their pristine image of moral superiority will be a bit blemished and their knee-jerk accusations of bias might just be met met with a tad more skepticism.

One of the world’s leading climate scientists has gone over to the dark side and become a warming skeptic. And Der Spiegel, who you would have thought would savage him, has a fair interview. 

The debate over climate change is often a contentious one, and key players in the discussion only rarely switch sides. But late last month, Lennart Bengtsson, the former director of the Hamburg-based Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, one of the world’s leading climate research centers, announced he would join the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).

GWPF, based in Britain, is a non-profit organization and self-described think tank. Conservative politician Nigel Lawson founded the organization in 2009 in order to counteract what he considered to be an exaggerated concern about global warming. The organization uses aggressive information campaigns to pursue its goals.

The lobby group’s views markedly differ from those of the UN climate panel, the IPCC, whose reports are the products of the work of hundreds of scientists who classify and analyze vast amounts of climate knowledge accumulated through years of research. The most recent IPCC report states that man-made emissions of greenhouse gases are leading to significant global warming, with serious environmental consequences.

Bengtsson was known for maintaining moderate positions even during the most vitriolic debates over global warming during the 1990s. In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, he discusses why he made the shift to the skeptics’ camp. …

However, Human Events reports Dr. Bengtsson is getting slammed elsewhere.

… The climate change cult is so important to socialist politicians, and so protected by the media, that it survived the massive Climategate scandal, which featured the publication of emails that demonstrated climate scientists were conspiring to suppress inconvenient data.  The dirty little secret of the Church of Global Warming is that its apocalyptic warnings are based entirely on computer models that can supposedly predict the future.  There is very little empirical evidence to support the notion of man-made climate change, few experiments that claim to prove out any of the key hypotheses linking human activity to disastrous changes in the global environment.  Not even the shibboleths taught to schoolchildren about carbon emissions and “greenhouse gas” rest on any conclusive experimental proof.  Efforts to “prove” a climate surge due to Twentieth Century industrial technology, such as the famous “hockey stick” graph, have utterly collapsed under sustained inquiry.  Everything else is just conjecture based on computer models, which include a variety of assumptions about the interaction of complex forces… and as the intensive data-mining of the past half century moves forward, it becomes increasingly clear that many of those assumptions are dubious, because the climate models have been almost entirely wrong.  Nothing predicted in 1980 or 1990 has come to pass.  The actual behavior of the real world is overwhelmingly different from what it was supposed to do.

It would be fair to say that the idea of human industrial activity having minimal impact on the planetary climate (or maybe even beneficial impact, if we really are fated for a new Ice Age, which human activity is holding at bay) is also a hypothesis.  The issue is whether people should allow themselves to be dominated by politicians and robbed of their livelihoods on the basis of apocalyptic theories that get repeated more loudly and insistently as the science behind them grows weaker.  Nobody’s calling for an end to climate science… except for the Church of Global Warming, that is.

Which brings us to ClimateGate 2, the new scandal about climate-change cultists using Stalinist tactics to suppress inconvenient data and destroy a “denier,” in this case Swedish climatologist Dr. Lennart Bengtsson.  Bengtsson declared himself skeptical of climate change dogma and joined a London-based think tank called the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which is not explicitly dedicated to denying either natural or man-made climate change – they’re concerned with exaggerated alarmism for political gain.

All hell broke loose as fanatics from the Church of Global Warming came after Bengtsson with a zeal that would make any old-time Inquisitor proud. …

Steve Hayward of Power Line does a neat job on the “97% climate consensus” canard.

… Where did this 97 percent figure come from?  This story has become interesting over the last few days.  The most prominent form of it comes from Prof. John Cook of the University of Queensland in a paper published last year that purported to have reviewed over 11,000 climate science articles.  Does anyone really believe that Cook and his eight co-authors actually read through all 11,000 articles?  Actually, the abstract of the paper supports the point I made above that most papers don’t actually deal with what the Climatistas say:

We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW [Anthropogenic Global Warming], 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. [Emphasis added.]

Pause here and note that it is odd to see that some folks apparently haven’t gotten the memo that you’re not supposed to call it “global warming”—“climate change” is the term of art now.  Anyway, to continue, read this slowly and carefully:

Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus.

Let’s translate: Among the one-third of papers that “endorse” the “consensus,” there is near unanimity.  In other words, among people who agree with the consensus, nearly all of them agree with the consensus.  Again—the only mystery here is that the number isn’t 100 percent.  Perhaps this would have been too embarrassing to report, like a North Korean election.  For this exercise all climate scientists may as well be called named Kim Jong Il. …

Bad news. A study shows there are no health benefits from consuming red wine and chocolate. However, Instapundit says until confirmed by more studies, he’ll keep drinking lots of red wine. The story comes from HNGN News. No, never heard of them. You figure it out. We report. You decide.

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We spend time on Ukraine and Russia today. Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands; Europe between Hitler and Stalin, writes on the history of Ukraine.

… Ukraine was at the center of the policy that Stalin called “internal colonization,” the exploitation of peasants within the Soviet Union rather than distant colonial peoples; it was also at the center of Hitler’s plans for an external colonization. The Nazi Lebensraum was, above all, Ukraine. Its fertile soil was to be cleared of Soviet power and exploited for Germany. The plan was to continue the use of Stalin’s collective farms, but to divert the food from east to west. Along the way German planners expected that some 30 million inhabitants of the Soviet Union would starve to death. In this style of thinking, Ukrainians were of course subhumans, incapable of normal political life. No European country was subject to such intense colonization as Ukraine, and no European country suffered more: It was the deadliest place on Earth between 1933 and 1945. …

… Although Hitler’s main war aim was the destruction of the Soviet Union, he found himself needing an alliance with the Soviet Union to begin armed conflict. In 1939, after it became clear that Poland would fight, Hitler recruited Stalin for a double invasion. Stalin had been hoping for years for such an invitation. Soviet policy had been aiming at the destruction of Poland for a long time already. Moreover, Stalin thought that an alliance with Hitler, in other words cooperation with the European far right, was the key to destroying Europe. A German-Soviet alliance would turn Germany, he expected, against its western neighbors and lead to the weakening or even the destruction of European capitalism. This is not so different from a certain calculation made by Putin today. …

… More Ukrainians were killed fighting the Wehrmacht than American, British, and French soldiers—combined. …

… The greatest threat to a distinct Ukrainian identity came perhaps from the Brezhnev period. Rather than subordinating Ukraine by hunger or blaming Ukrainians for war, the Brezhnev policy was to absorb the Ukrainian educated classes into the Soviet humanist and technical intelligentsias. As a result, the Ukrainian language was driven from schools, and especially from higher education. Ukrainians who insisted on human rights were still punished in prison or in the hideous psychiatric hospitals. In this atmosphere, Ukrainian patriots, and even Ukrainian nationalists, embraced a civic understanding of Ukrainian identity, downplaying older arguments about ancestry and history in favor of a more pragmatic approach to common political interests. …

… Putin now presents himself as the leader of the far right in Europe, and the leaders of Europe’s right-wing parties pledge their allegiance. There is an obvious contradiction here: Russian propaganda insists to Westerners that the problem with Ukraine is that its government is too far to the right, even as Russia builds a coalition with the European far right. Extremist, populist, and neo-Nazi party members went to Crimea and praised the electoral farce as a model for Europe. As Anton Shekhovtsov, a researcher of the European far right, has pointed out, the leader of the Bulgarian extreme right launched his party’s campaign for the European parliament in Moscow. The Italian Fronte Nazionale praises Putin for his “courageous position against the powerful gay lobby.” The neo-Nazis of the Greek Golden Dawn see Russia as Ukraine’s defender against “the ravens of international usury.” Heinz-Christian Strache of the Austrian FPÖ chimes in, surreally, that Putin is a “pure democrat.” Even Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party, recently shared Putin’s propaganda on Ukraine with millions of British viewers in a televised debate, claiming absurdly that the European Union has “blood on its hands” in Ukraine.

Presidential elections in Ukraine are to be held on May 25, which by no coincidence is also the last day of elections to the European parliament. A vote for Strache in Austria or Le Pen in France or even Farage in Britain is now a vote for Putin, and a defeat for Europe is a victory for Eurasia. This is the simple objective reality: A united Europe can and most likely will respond adequately to an aggressive Russian petro-state with a common energy policy, whereas a collection of quarrelling nation-states will not. Of course, the return to the nation-state is a populist fantasy, so integration will continue in one form or another; all that can be decided is the form. Politicians and intellectuals used to say that there was no alternative to the European project, but now there is—Eurasia.

Ukraine has no history without Europe, but Europe also has no history without Ukraine. Ukraine has no future without Europe, but Europe also has no future without Ukraine. Throughout the centuries, the history of Ukraine has revealed the turning points in the history of Europe. This seems still to be true today. Of course, which way things will turn still depends, at least for a little while, on the Europeans.

Craig Pirrong posts on a farce created by Russian agitprop.

… “American mercenaries in Ukraine” is a major Russian propaganda theme.  Lavrov reiterated it only yesterday, in his long interview with Bloomberg. He did it in his characteristically oily way, saying that Russian questions about American mercenaries had not been answered. In fact, they have been, rather emphatically.  It’s just that Lavrov is not willing to acknowledge this, wanting to keep the story going.

Given the impossibility of proving the negative, the mercenary story cannot be disproved. But everything about the story undermines its plausibility, not least its all too convenient echoing of Russian propaganda.

No. This has every sign of being a specialty of Russian information operations: a laundered story, originating from Russian sources and then put through several spin cycles involving western publications, emerging clean enough to convince those who want to believe that the US is the malign actor in this drama.

It cannot be emphasized enough that information warfare has been a central part of Russian operations in Ukraine. It also cannot be emphasized enough that the Ukrainians, but also the Americans, have been woefully overmatched in this war.

And speaking of overmatched, there is no doubt that Lavrov overmatches Kerry, and ridiculously so. Although every word out of Lavrov’s mouth was more mendacious than the one that preceded it, he is a far more impressive figure than Kerry. Whereas Kerry comes off as a posing, bloviating, superficial grandstander (probably because he is  a posing, bloviating, superficial grandstander), Lavrov comes off as a formidable and focused foe, and one who speaks English impeccably. No wonder he pwns Kerry every time they meet in Geneva.

Or to put it another way: it’s no wonder Lavrov takes Kerry to the cleaners. Just like he launders agitprop like the US mercenaries in Ukraine story.

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Charles Krauthammer says some tweets are better than others. When the administration tweets on Ukraine it is nothing but “preening.”

Mass schoolgirl kidnapping in Nigeria — to tweet or not to tweet? Is hashtagging one’s indignation about some outrage abroad an exercise in moral narcissism or a worthy new way of standing up to bad guys?

The answer seems rather simple. It depends on whether you have the power to do something about the outrage in question. If you do, as in the case of the Obama administration watching Russia’s slow-motion dismemberment of Ukraine, it’s simply embarrassing when the State Department spokeswoman tweets the hashtag #UnitedForUkraine.

That is nothing but preening, a visual recapitulation of her boss’s rhetorical fatuousness when he sternly warns that if the rape of this U.S. friend continues, we are prepared to consider standing together with the “international community” to decry such indecorous behavior — or some such.

When a superpower, with multiple means at its disposal, reverts to rhetorical emptiness and hashtag activism, it has betrayed both its impotence and indifference. But if you’re an individual citizen without power, if you lack access to media, drones or special forces, then hashtagging your solidarity with the aggrieved is a fine gesture and perhaps even more. …

Peter Wehner says our foreign policy is now farce. Kerry said something that could have been in The Onion. 

According to the Washington Post

‘Secretary of State John F. Kerry said Thursday that he has seen “raw data” indicating that the Syrian government
has used chlorine gas as a chemical weapon in a “number of ­instances” in recent months.

“There will be consequences” if evidence of new chemical use is confirmed, Kerry said, but “we’re not going to pin ourselves down to a precise date, time, manner of action.”

Speaking after a meeting here of the Syrian opposition’s principal international backers, he also said they had agreed to expand humanitarian, diplomatic and military aid to the rebels.

“I’m not going to discuss what specific weapons or what country may . . . be providing or not providing” the arms, he said. “I will say that out of today’s meeting, every facet of what can be done is going to be ramped up. Every facet.” ‘

We have now reached the farcical stage in the Obama presidency. …

Now we get to look at the NY Times/Abramson kerfuffle. Jonathan Tobin is first.

Love it or hate it, the New York Times remains one of the principal institutions of American journalism. So when its executive editor is abruptly and publicly fired with none of the usual platitudes or polite white lies about the victim deciding to explore other opportunities or spend more time with their families and with the process not dragged out to ensure a smooth and seemingly orderly transition, it is big news in the world of journalism. But the decision of Times publisher Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr. to “oust”—to use the word used by the newspaper in the headline of its own story about the firing—Jill Abramson seems more like a public hanging than a routine replacement of a top editor. Abramson is a deeply repellent figure in many ways, but her treatment is shocking not because it might be undeserved but because it is highly unusual for someone at this level to walk the plank in such a manner. …

The New Yorker says Abramson had lawyered up after discovering her pay was less than males who preceded her.

At the annual CityUniversityJournalismSchool dinner, on Monday, Dean Baquet, the managing editor of the New York Times, was seated with Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the paper’s publisher. At the time, I did not give a moment’s thought to why Jill Abramson, the paper’s executive editor, was not at their table. Then, at 2:36 P.M. on Wednesday, an announcement from the Times hit my e-mail, saying that Baquet would replace Abramson, less than three years after she was appointed the first woman in the top job. Baquet will be the first African-American to lead the Times.

Fellow-journalists and others scrambled to find out what had happened. Sulzberger had fired Abramson, and he did not try to hide that. In a speech to the newsroom on Wednesday afternoon, he said, “I chose to appoint a new leader of our newsroom because I believe that new leadership will improve some aspects …” Abramson chose not to attend the announcement, and not to pretend that she had volunteered to step down.

As with any such upheaval, there’s a history behind it. Several weeks ago, I’m told, Abramson discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs. …

 

Kevin Williamson posts.

… A few thoughts: The first is that I would not be at all surprised if Ms. Abramson’s compensation were less than she expected compared to what her predecessors had earned. Though my own experience as a newspaper editor has been considerably less rarefied than hers, I do recall that some years ago I was offered a job as editor of a daily newspaper at a salary that was less than half of what a previous, long-serving editor had earned. Declining margins have put a great deal of pressure on executive compensation at media companies. The phenomenon no doubt is more extreme outside the lofty heights of the New York Times, but the dynamic probably is the same throughout the industry. I suspect that if I were to return to an editor’s position comparable to any I have held in the past, I would be paid less not only in real terms but in absolute terms than I was. The numbers are just sort of ugly.

As for her allegedly condescending management habits, I have never had any dealings with Ms. Abramson, but such dealings as I have had with the New York Times suggest to me very strongly that condescending is the house style. …

Lots of knives are out. Here’s WaPo’s Erik Wemple.

In accepting his new job as executive editor of the New York Times after the ouster of Jill Abramson, Dean Baquet told his colleagues:

“It is humbling to be asked to lead the only newsroom in the country that is actually better than it was a generation ago, a newsroom that approaches the world with wonder and ambition every day.”

How clever to mix the word “humbling” into an affirmation of such bare arrogance.

To disassemble Baquet’s statement requires a look at what a “generation” means. One definition reads, “the number of years that usually pass between the birth of a person and the birth of that person’s children.” For some folks, that could be as few as 20 years and perhaps much more. Let’s just place it at 30 years, meaning that Baquet is saying that the New York Times is the only newsroom that is better than it was in 1984.

That means Baquet dissed not only the late A.M. Rosenthal, who served as executive editor of the New York Times from 1977 to 1986, but all manner of rival news organizations, including the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and so on.

Jill Abramson has the most suffocating affectation of a voice. Here’s a video.