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Mark Steyn says it is the GOP that is diverse.
In fact, the GOP’s tent has many poles: It has social conservatives, libertarians, fiscal conservatives, national-security hawks. These groups do not always agree: The so-cons resent the libertarians’ insouciance on gay marriage and abortion. The libertarians don’t get the warhawks’ obsession with thankless nation-building in Islamist hellholes. A lot of the hawks can’t see why the fiscal cons are so hung up on footling matters like bloated government spending at a time of war. It requires a lot of effort to align these various poles sufficiently to hold up the big tent. And by the 2006 electoral cycle, between the money-no-object Congress at home and a war that seemed to have dwindled down to an endless half-hearted semicolonial policing operation, the GOP poles were tilting badly. The Republican coalition is like a permanent loveless marriage: There are bad times and worse times. And, while social conservatism and libertarianism can be principled to a fault, the vagaries of electoral politics mean they often wind up being represented in office by either unprincipled opportunists like Arlen Specter or unprincipled squishes like Lincoln Chafee.
Meanwhile, over in the other tent, they celebrate diversity with ruthless singlemindedness: in the Democrat parade, whatever your bugbear government is the answer. Government is the means, government is the end, government is the whole magilla. That gives them a unity of purpose the GOP can never match.
And yet and yet… Last November, even with the GOP’s fiscal profligacy, even with the financial sector’s “October surprise,” even with a cranky old coot of a nominee unable to articulate any rationale for his candidacy or even string together a coherent thought on the economy, even with a running mate subjected to brutal character assassination in nothing flat, even running against a charming, charismatic media darling of historic significance, even facing the natural cycle of a two-party system the washed-up loser no-hoper side managed to get 46 percent of the vote.
OK, it’s not 51 percent. But still: Obama’s 53 percent isn’t a big transformative landslide just because he behaves as if it is.
Since we’ve elected these people for four years we need a lexicon to decode the speeches. David Harsanyi has just the thing.
Washington has always been a thermonuclear cliché generator. But the Obama administration, with all its super smarts, has taken the exploitation of the euphemism to spectacular new heights.
This week, we learned a bit more about what words like “sacrifice” (do what we want, you filthy, unpatriotic swine), “era of responsibility” (double the “sacrifice,” half the prosperity), and “investments” (we squander money so you don’t have to) really mean.
“Transparency” is when Barack Obama promises that the enterprising citizen will be able to track “every dime” of the $787 billion forever-government stimulus bill via a nifty website called Recovery.gov (sic).
Reality is when that much-heralded site won’t be complete until next spring, when half the stimulus money will have been wasted and, well, it probably won’t be especially helpful.
Earl Devaney, the chairman of the “Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board” — who, to absolutely no one’s surprise, admitted this week that fraud is a distinct possibility — claims the site won’t be ready for five months because there isn’t enough data storage capacity to hold it all.
“Stimulus”: Too big for cyberspace. …
… When it comes to “investments,” the general idea is this: Every unproductive and superfluous job or project that an army of pencil-pushers and special interest groups have conjured up needs someone to fund it. And since you won’t do it voluntarily, the administration will do it for you in the name of “community.”
After all, what other than a top-down economic model could sustain a place called the John Murtha-Johnstown Cambria County Airport in Pennsylvania, which services an average of 20 passengers a day? …
Krauthammer’s take.
… Again, you know, if he is going to spend billions everywhere on everything, why would he shut down the assembly line for an F-22, which is already ongoing. Talk about shovel ready, it is ready and going.
So his priority is cut defense and spend everything on anything everywhere else. And that, I think, tells us a lot about what he wants to accomplish.
John Fund notes the 30th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s election as prime minister.
… It’s important to remember just how much Mrs. Thatcher’s election changed the tone of the debate both in Britain and later in the U.S. As British writer Arthur Seldon noted, “Back then, government was of the busy, by the bossy and for the bully.” …
More on Thatcher from the Weekly Standard.
Thirty years ago this week, Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in the UK, promising a new future of growth and prosperity. She ushered in an era in which policymakers took for granted their role not as managers not of the economy, but as custodians of the conditions in which economic prosperity could occur. Shortly after her ascendancy to the top spot in British government, she was joined by Ronald Reagan in the United States, and the rest is history.
In almost no time at all, however, the Anglosphere has changed dramatically. Two months ago, President Obama and current UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown met in Washington to showcase a united commitment to combat the global economic crisis. Brown spoke of a “global New Deal,” and Obama said the “special relationship” was strong. Since then, the UK has marched in step with Obama’s cadence-call to spend its way out of the crisis. While other European leaders have expressed reservations about increased public spending, Brown has joined Obama in an all-out attempt to redefine how the world views the two historic (and possibly erstwhile) defenders of economic liberalization. …
Manny Lopez of the Detroit News has bailout thoughts.
President Barack Obama insists he doesn’t want to run the domestic auto industry — and we should all be thankful for that.
But his actions speak differently — and we should all be worried.
“… I rejected the original restructuring plan” that Chrysler LLC submitted for government loans, he said April 30 in announcing his decision to force Chrysler into bankruptcy. “… And the standard I set was high — I challenged them to design a plan …”
That’s a lot of self promotion and involvement from a guy who doesn’t want to control the companies. …
… The president found a scapegoat in the hedge funds that balked at the government’s “offer” to take pennies on the dollar for their secured investment
“… It was unacceptable to let a small group of speculators endanger Chrysler’s future by refusing to sacrifice like everyone else,” he said.
Pardon me while I puke. …
You can learn a lot by digging around. BBC News reports a tsunami visited New York 2,300 years ago.
Sedimentary deposits from more than 20 cores in New York and New Jersey indicate that some sort of violent force swept the Northeast coastal region in 300BC.
It may have been a large storm, but evidence is increasingly pointing to a rare Atlantic Ocean tsunami.
Steven Goodbred, an Earth scientist at Vanderbilt University, said large gravel, marine fossils and other unusual deposits found in sediment cores across the area date to 2,300 years ago.
The size and distribution of material would require a high velocity wave and strong currents to move it, he said, and it is unlikely that short bursts produced in a storm would suffice. …
Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, is the subject of a new book. Talk about a crossroads of history!
THE choice of name for the capital of present-day Lithuania—Wilno, Vilna, Vilne, Wilda, Vilnia or now Vilnius—shows who you are, or were. In the 20th century alone, it has been occupied or claimed by Germany, Russia, Poland and the Soviet Union, with only brief periods of Lithuanian autonomy.
Vilne, in Yiddish, was home to one of Judaism’s greatest rabbis, a saintly brainbox known as the Gaon (Genius) who gave his first sermon aged seven and kick-started the great Jewish intellectual revival in the 18th century. “Vilna is not simply a city, it is an idea,” said a speaker at a Yiddish conference in 1930. It was the virtual capital of what some call Yiddishland, a borderless realm of east European Jewish life and letters in the inter-war era. At times, the majority of the city’s population was Jewish. Their murder and the deportation of many Poles by Stalin meant that the city lost 90% of its population during the second world war. Present-day inhabitants of Vilnius may find much they did not know in Laimonas Briedis’s subtle and evocative book about their city’s history. …
John Fund starts the humor section with the Specter’s seniority stripping story.
… Not so fast. Resentful Democrats went on the warpath against Mr. Reid’s offer to treat Mr. Specter as if he had been a Democrat since 1980 — an arrangement that could make Mr. Specter a committee chairman if he wins re-election next year. Senate Democrats effectively agreed by voice vote last night to strip Mr. Specter of his seniority — avoiding a roll-call vote that would have revealed exactly who his adversaries inside the Democratic caucus are. Mr. Specter will now be listed as the most junior member on the Judiciary Committee, meaning he’ll be last in line for questioning whomever President Obama appoints to fill the Supreme Court vacancy. That’s a big comedown from his role as chairman during the confirmation battles surrounding John Roberts and Sam Alito in 2005. …
A Contentions post with more on Specter’s seniority disappointment and the problems for Reid.
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