Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Taking some time out from contemplating our present predicaments, Victor Davis Hanson reminds us of last month’s 50 year anniversary of the death of Winston Churchill.
Fifty years ago this Saturday, (January 24, 1965) former British prime minister Winston Churchill died at age 90.
Churchill is remembered for his multiple nonstop careers as a statesman, cabinet minister, politician, journalist, Nobel laureate historian, and combat veteran. He began his career serving the British military as a Victorian-era mounted lancer and ended it as custodian of Britain’s nuclear deterrent.
But he is most renowned for an astounding five-year-tenure as Britain’s wartime prime minister from May 10, 1940, to June 26, 1945, when he was voted out of office not long after the surrender of Nazi Germany.
Churchill took over the day Hitler invaded Western Europe. Within six weeks, an isolated Great Britain was left alone facing the Third Reich. What is now the European Union was then either under Nazi occupation, allied with Germany, or ostensibly neutral while favoring Hitler.
The United States was not just neutral. It had no intention of entering another European war — at least not until after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor a year and half later.
From August 1939 to June 1941, the Soviet Union was an accomplice of the Third Reich. Russian leader Joseph Stalin was supplying Hitler with critical resources to help finish off Great Britain, the last obstacle in Germany’s path of European domination.
Some of the British elite wished to cut a peace deal with Hitler to save their empire and keep Britain from being bombed or invaded. They understandably argued that Britain could hardly hold out when Poland, Denmark, Norway the Netherlands, Belgium, and France all had not. Yet Churchill voiced defiance and vowed to keep on fighting. …
Back to the present predicament – the one where we have a rogue president. A president, incidentally, who on day one removed a bust of Winston Churchill from the oval office. City Journal with a good post on “faithful execution” of laws.
… Lots of debate will ensue over the extent to which the administration’s non-deportation policy finds support in the maze of statutes comprising American immigration laws. But stepping back from the minutiae, one is struck by the gulf between the legal arguments proffered by the administration and the substance of its policy. The OLC (Office of Legal Counsel of the Justice Department) memo asserts that the president’s policy of systematic nonenforcement, far from thwarting Congress, actually “is consistent with the removal priorities established by Congress,” in light of the scarcity of funds that Congress appropriates for deportations. Yet in his remarks announcing the policy, President Obama stressed that his action was necessary precisely because Congress had not passed legislation “fixing this broken immigration system.” Similarly, the OLC memo tries to downplay the impact of the administration’s action, asserting that it is not “an absolute, inflexible policy of not enforcing the immigration laws in certain categories of cases” but instead a general framework that “provides for case-by-case determinations” based on each “individual alien’s circumstances,” leaving “ample room for the exercise of individualized discretion by responsible officials.” Yet the documents make no serious attempt to explain how or why individuals meeting the policy’s broad standards would ever be singled out for harsher treatment—and Obama, to the contrary, announced to all illegal immigrants satisfying these conditions that “you’ll be able to apply to stay in this country temporarily without fear of deportation. You can come out of the shadows and get right with the law. That’s what this deal is.”
Most important, where OLC concludes that the president’s policy does not, “under the guise of exercising enforcement discretion, attempt to effectively rewrite the laws to match [his] policy preferences,” the president speaks to the contrary. “I just took an action to change the law,” he told an audience days after the OLC issued its analysis.
It is this unbridgeable gap between the president’s actions and the Justice Department’s rationalizations that reveals Obama’s failure to satisfy his constitutional obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Though a certain degree of statutory under-enforcement is tolerable (and often laudable) under our constitutional framework, the president is not “faithful” when his approach is fundamentally dishonest. “[T]he constitutional charge to the President to take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” wrote Attorney General William Wirt to President James Monroe in 1823, requires the president to see that each of his officers “performs his duty faithfully—that is, honestly: not with perfect correctness of judgment, but honestly.” The emphasis on the words “faithfully” and “honestly” in that quotation comes from Wirt himself. The current president and attorney general would do well to emphasize faithfulness and honesty, too.
We entered the 21st Century looking for better and better ways to store energy. Jeff Jacoby wrote a Valentine to the best way to store energy – a barrel of oil.
… Here on Planet Earth, the booming use of petroleum, coal, and natural gas has fueled an almost inconceivable amount of good. All human technologies generate costs as well as benefits, but the gains from the use of fossil fuels have been extraordinary. The energy derived from fossil fuels, economist Robert Bradley Jr. wrote last spring in Forbes, has “liberated mankind from wretched poverty; fueled millions of high-productivity jobs in nearly every business sector; been a feedstock for medicines that have saved countless lives; and led to the development of fertilizers that have greatly increased crop yields to feed the hungry.” Far from wrecking the planet, the harnessing of carbon-based energy makes it safer and more livable.
The rise of fossil fuels has led to dramatic gains in human progress — whether that progress is measured in terms of life expectancy, income, education, health, sanitation, transportation, or leisure. Nearly everything that is comfortable and convenient about modern civilization depends on the ready availability of energy, and nearly 90 percent of our energy comes from oil, gas, and coal. Pro-divestment activists know better than to push people to give up electricity, air travel, computers, or central heating — all of which would vanish without the fossil fuel industry. Instead they demonize the industry, reasoning that it will be easier to turn Big Oil into a pariah than to convince the public to abandon its cars and smartphones. …
Megan McArdle posts on Scott Walker’s college career.
The Washington Post has a lengthy article on Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s college career and his decision to drop out of MarquetteUniversity during his senior year. I read it carefully, and I think that this piece raises a pretty important question about Walker’s presidential campaign.
Namely: Who cares?
We’re talking about events that happened almost 30 years ago. None of them are illegal, or even, frankly, very interesting. (He got a D-minus in French!) So why are we talking about this? …
… The fact that we seem so fixated on events decades past is its own dire signal — of the way that America’s Mandarin class is starting to think about college education not merely as the basic credential required for many of the best-paying jobs, but also the basic credential required for being a worthy, capable person. This is not merely untrue, but also a giant middle finger raised to the majority of upstanding American citizens who also didn’t graduate from college. …
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has more on the subject we will explore often in the next year few years. Reynolds thinks the election of Walker “might bring reality back to an Ivy League-suffocated government.” It would be a refreshing change because only people who have sat in years of classes from this country’s professoriate could be as dumb as what we have running the government today.
A lot of people don’t know much about him yet, and he may not even be running, but if Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is elected president in 2016, he’ll immediately accomplish something that no other candidate being talked about can: He’ll lay to rest the absurd belief that you’re a nobody if you don’t have a college degree. And he might even cut into the surprisingly recent takeover of our institutions by an educated mandarin class, something that just might save the country.
Though Walker attended Marquette University, he left before graduating, which has caused some finger-wagging from the usual journalistic suspects. After all, they seem to believe, everyone they know has a college degree, so it must be essential to getting ahead. As the successful governor of an important state, you’d think that Walker’s subsequent career would make his college degree irrelevant, but you’d be wrong.
And that’s why a President Walker would accomplish something worthwhile the moment he took office. Over the past few years in America, a college degree has become something valued more as a class signifier than as a source of useful knowledge. When Democratic spokesman Howard Dean (who himself was born into wealth) suggested that Walker’s lack of a degree made him unsuitable for the White House, what he really meant was that Walker is “not our kind, dear” — lacking the credential that many elite Americans today regard as essential to respectable status.
Of course, some of our greatest presidents, from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to Harry S. Truman, never graduated from college. But the college degree as class-signifier is, as I note in my book, The New School, a rather recent phenomenon. …