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In the Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby reminds us of one of the most inspiring events we have witnessed – the fall of the wall.
…And yet, against all odds and to the astonishment of the world, it was communism that came to a close before our very eyes. Twenty years ago this season, Moscow’s Eastern European satellites threw off their chains. In a matter of months, the communist regimes in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania were consigned – as Ronald Reagan had foretold – to the ash heap of history. But not even Reagan had imagined that the dominoes would fall so quickly, or that Moscow would stand aside and let them fall.
“I learned in prison that everything is possible, so perhaps I should not be amazed,’’ said Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who became Czechoslovakia’s first post-Communist president. “But I am.’’
We all were. And some of us still are. The collapse of the Iron Curtain was the most remarkable political development of my lifetime. Even now, the images from those days can take the breath away: East German youths dancing and drinking atop the hated Berlin Wall. The reappearance of Alexander Dubcek, 21 years after he was exiled for flirting with reform during the Prague Spring. Romanians flooding the streets of Bucharest, waving flags with the Communist emblem torn out of the center.
1989 exemplified with rare power the resilience of Western civilization. In our time, too, there are brutal despots who imagine that their power is unassailable: that their tanks and torturers can keep them in power forever. But the message of 1989 is that tyranny is not forever – and that the downfall of tyrants end can come with world-changing speed.
In Contentions, Rick Richman explains why Obama should go to the commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
President Obama has reportedly informed the German government that he will not travel to Berlin on November 9 to participate in the 20th-anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is an unfortunate decision on multiple counts.
First, it is another slight to another European ally — one that is going all-out to celebrate the event. The invitation to Obama was extended personally by Chancellor Angela Merkel last June.
Second, it is a failure to correct the historical misstatement of his citizen-of-the-world address last year in Berlin, when he credited the fall of the wall to the “world standing as one” and failed even to mention the names of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.
Third, it is an embarrassment for the United States not to be represented at the highest level for the commemoration of an event of this magnitude. As Matt Welch writes in the November issue of Reason magazine, November 1989 was “the most liberating month of arguably the most liberating year in human history” — the end of the Soviet Union and communism in Europe and a 50-year Cold War that was a worldwide ideological battle. It was battle led by America. …
Jennifer Rubin also posts on the President’s unfortunate decision.
Rick, for the reasons you enumerate, it is almost unimaginable that Obama has chosen to absent himself from the Berlin Wall commemoration. It is disappointing — and telling — considering how much he has relied on presidential presence as a tool of foreign policy.
Recall his heartfelt desire to travel to the “Muslim World” as part of his Middle East outreach and embrace of the Palestinian-ized view of history (e.g., enslaved victimhood, Israel’s legitimacy rests on the Holocaust). However objectionable and counterproductive the strategy, he well understood the symbolism of a presidential appearance.
So too at the UN Security Council, where he became the first American president to chair the proceedings. His message again was clear — multilateralism is swell, the U.S. takes the UN very seriously, and our aim is to integrate America into that “international community,” whose institutions have become our institutions and whose goals (global warming, international wealth redistribution) have become ours. …
…So, Rick, the decision not to be present has superadded meaning: the triumph of the West and a reminder of Soviet imperialism are not part of the agenda. They are inconvenient truths that Obama would rather not dwell on. It is another in a series of unmistakable symbols that this president’s vision of America and its role in the world is radically different from that of his predecessors — and comes with potentially tragic consequences.
Abe Greenwald says that the commemoration doesn’t fit in the President’s global vision.
Rick and Jennifer, don’t hold your breath waiting for Barack Obama to change his mind and commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Obama sees it as his job to move us (as in the people of planet Earth) past the “the cleavages of a long gone Cold War.” That’s how he put it in his UN address a few weeks ago.
The Cold War is not merely ancient history to our president; its memory constitutes an obstacle to a “reset” with Russia and to his vision of a mutually collaborative future for all nations. Let’s not dwell on the past — too many skeletons in the imperial closet. A communist world versus a free one, you say? Don’t be so dramatic. Washington and Moscow were the Hatfields and McCoys, fighting so long they forgot what they were fighting about. No need to rub the Kremlin’s face in defeat. Putin might get sore and stop telling us what to do next.
As for Germany and Merkel, Obama covered that at the UN too: “alignments of nations” rooted in that same ancient Cold War “make no sense.” Why give a friendly European democracy the false impression that we’re on its side? What would all the unfriendly autocratic regimes think? …
David Warren tells us about the latest outrageous events at the UN.
…we watched the latest anti-Israel stunt unfold in the United Nations, whose corrupt Human Rights Council — loaded with some of the worst violators of real human rights on the planet — commissioned the Goldstone report to advance the international battle against Israel.
This investigation of “war crimes,” during the Israeli military campaign against Hamas in Gaza, was explicitly anti-Israel, for it began from the premise that a legitimate sovereign state, governing an open society, could be put on a level with a terrorist organization ruling a closed society.
The conclusion was cheaply, “both sides committed war crimes,” but the open celebration of the report by Hamas, and outrage even from liberal elements in Israeli society, tells us what we need to know about it.
David Harsanyi comments on the important work the White House is doing, bad-mouthing news organizations that don’t print what the White House wants.
…It’s about time someone charged the White House with the task of “making sure” news coverage is “fair.” It’s “important” work, you see. After all, who better than the executive branch — supposedly in the business of representing the entire nation — to decide whether a station qualifies as a legitimate news organization?
Then again, does biased political coverage disqualify one from reporting legitimate and useful news stories? Fox News may not be able to unsheathe the intellectual rigor of Obama favorites David Letterman and Jay Leno, but it has covered numerous stories in the past few months that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.
Remember that ACORN’s penchant for aiding the child-enslaving pimp set was a valid story. Uncovering the radical ramblings of Van Jones — a man tasked with creating “green” jobs, though he had never created a job for anyone but himself — was legitimate enough for the czar to abdicate his crown. The National Endowment for the Arts’ attempt to politicize art was genuine enough to elicit a White House apology.
And whatever its intent, Dunn’s inane admission that all-star mass murderer Mao Tse-tung was one of her “favorite political philosophers” (insert Hitler for Mao, a Bush administration figure for Dunn and stir) is a story worth hearing. …
Robert Tomsho, in the WSJ, has surprisingly good news from DC.
The District of Columbia’s embattled school-voucher program, which lawmakers appeared to have killed earlier this year, looks like it could still survive.
Congress voted in March not to fund the program, which provides certificates to pay for recipients’ private-school tuition, after the current school year. But after months of pro-voucher rallies, a television-advertising campaign and statements of support by local political leaders, backers say they are more confident about its prospects. Even some Democrats, many of whom have opposed voucher efforts, have been supportive. …
…The Opportunity Scholarship Program provides about 1,700 students from low-income families with annual scholarships of as much as $7,500 to attend private schools. It isn’t the largest voucher program in the country. But unlike similar efforts controlled at the state or local level, it was created and has been funded by Congress, which has broad authority over the District. That has kept the debate over vouchers percolating on Capitol Hill even though they have made relatively little political headway elsewhere. …
…Created as a five-year pilot project by a Republican-controlled Congress in early 2004, the Opportunity Scholarship Program is the nation’s only federally funded voucher program. It is open to students who live in the long-struggling Washington school district and whose families have incomes at or below 185% of the federal poverty level — about $40,000 for a family of four. Recipients are chosen by lottery, although preference is given to those attending traditional schools deemed to be in need of improvement under federal law. …
John Stossel writes about one Nobel prize that went to a worthy recipient.
Pundits and politicians act as if government can solve almost any problem. At the slightest hint of trouble, the ruling class reflexively assumes that knowledgeable, wise and public-spirited government regulators are capable of riding to the rescue. This certainly is the guiding philosophy of the Obama administration.
So how remarkable it is that this year’s Nobel Memorial Prize in economics was shared by Elinor Ostrom, whose life’s work demonstrates that politicians and bureaucrats are not nearly as good at solving problems as regular people. Ostrom, the first woman to win the prize (which she shared with Oliver Williamson of UC-Berkeley), is a political scientist at Indiana University. The selection committee said that she has “challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized. Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes and groundwater basins, Ostrom concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories. She observes that resource-users frequently develop sophisticated mechanisms for decision-making and rule enforcement to handle conflicts” …
Ostrom’s work concentrates on common-pool resources (CPR) like pastures and fisheries. Policymakers assume that such situations are plagued by free-rider problems, where all individuals have a strong incentive to use the resource to the fullest and no incentive to invest in order to enhance it. Analysts across the political spectrum theorize that only bureaucrats or owners of privatized units can efficiently manage such resources.
Few scholars actually venture into the field to see what people actually do when faced with free-rider problems. Ostrom did. It turns out that free people are not as helpless as the theorists believed.
She writes in her 1990 book, “Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action,” that there is no shortage of real-world examples of “a self-governed common-property arrangement in which the rules have been devised and modified by the participants themselves and also are monitored and enforced by them.”
In other words, free people work things out on their own.
Not only is government help often not needed, Ostrom says it usually screws things up because bureaucrats operate in an ivory tower ignorant of the local customs and the specific resource.
In Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft explains that Democrats are happy to force Obamacare on us, because they’ll have better.
Congress will keep their gold-plated insurance plans as they force the rest of the country into a rationed health care government plan.
Townhall reported, via Free Republic:‘Personal doctors on call 24/7. Coverage that knows no caps. No exemptions for pre-existing conditions.
Those are the sorts of benefits members of Congress currently enjoy on the taxpayer’s dime, and the kinds of benefits Americans on a government-run public health care plan will never see if Obamacare passes.
“One thing is certain: Congress will exempt itself from whatever lousy health care system it forces on we little people,” said Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute. “Congress will get better insurance than you do because politicians always get a better deal under government-run health care.” ’…
As if we need more reason to reject Obamacare: Marie Woolf in the Times, UK reports that British National Health Service staff get private healthcare.
The National Health Service has spent £1.5m paying for hundreds of its staff to have private health treatment so they can leapfrog their own waiting lists.
More than 3,000 staff, including doctors and nurses, have gone private at the taxpayers’ expense in the past three years because the queues at the clinics and hospitals where they work are too long.
Figures released under the Freedom of Information act show that NHS administrative staff, paramedics and ambulance drivers have also been given free private healthcare. This has covered physiotherapy, osteopathy, psychiatric care and counselling — all widely available on the NHS. …
News Biscuit says a new sat-nav system was introduced. It allows users to find themselves.