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Ronald Reagan comments on the fall of the wall.
For the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Rich Noyes, at Newsbusters.com, posts an interview with Ronald Reagan and footage of Germans celebrating at the Wall. Follow the link above to see the video.
On June 12, 1987, as the liberal media elite were toasting the leader of the Soviet Union as a great champion of progress, President Ronald Reagan stood at the Berlin Wall and challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to put his money where his mouth was: “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
Gorbachev did not open the gate or tear down the Berlin Wall, but two years later the people of East Germany did. News broke in the U.S. late in the afternoon (Eastern Time) on November 9, 1989 that the communist government would no longer restrict travel to West Berlin. Just a few hours later, ABC’s PrimeTime Live hosted former President Ronald Reagan to celebrate what would turn out to be the death blow against communism in Eastern Europe. We found the tape in our archives, and posted a video …
Looking back at communism in WaPo, Paul Hollander explains how the supposedly noble ends justified murderous means in the eyes of many idealists.
…While greatly concerned with communism in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Americans — hostile or sympathetic — actually knew little about communism, and little is said here today about the unraveling of the Soviet empire. The media’s fleeting attention to the momentous events of the late 1980s and early 1990s matched their earlier indifference to communist systems. There is little public awareness of the large-scale atrocities, killings and human rights violations that occurred in communist states, especially compared with awareness of the Holocaust and Nazism (which led to to far fewer deaths). The number of documentaries, feature films or television programs about communist societies is minuscule compared with those on Nazi Germany and/or the Holocaust, and few universities offer courses on the remaining or former communist states. For most Americans, communism and its various incarnations remained an abstraction.
The different moral responses to Nazism and communism in the West can be interpreted as a result of the perception of communist atrocities as byproducts of noble intentions that were hard to realize without resorting to harsh measures. The Nazi outrages, by contrast, are perceived as unmitigated evil lacking in any lofty justification and unsupported by an attractive ideology. There is far more physical evidence and information about the Nazi mass murders, and Nazi methods of extermination were highly premeditated and repugnant, whereas many victims of communist systems died because of lethal living conditions in their places of detention. Most of the victims of communism were not killed by advanced industrial techniques. …
…The failure of Soviet communism confirms that humans motivated by lofty ideals are capable of inflicting great suffering with a clear conscience. But communism’s collapse also suggests that under certain conditions people can tell the difference between right and wrong. The embrace and rejection of communism correspond to the spectrum of attitudes ranging from deluded and destructive idealism to the realization that human nature precludes utopian social arrangements and that the careful balancing of ends and means is the essential precondition of creating and preserving a decent society.
Ilya Somin, in Volokh Conspiracy, posts on Paul Hollander’s article.
…As he points out, communist atrocities have not received their full due in the West, despite the fact that the victims of communism (including some 100 million dead) far outnumber even those of the Nazis. Part of the reason is that the communists, unlike the Nazis, were perceived as having noble motives. However, this is a poor distinction. After all, Hitler and his supporters also believed they were doing the right thing, every bit as strongly as Lenin or Stalin did.
The second distinction often drawn between the two is that the Nazis killed people because of immutable characteristics such as race and ethnicity, while the communists did not. This argument also fails, for two reasons that I discussed in greater detail in this series of posts. First, Communist regimes often did kill people based on immutable characteristics. For instance, they often murdered people because of their class origins; no one could help being born a “Kulak” or a “bourgeois.” Also, Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin, and several other communist rulers targeted various ethnic minorities for deportation and extermination. Second, it is not clear that the distinction between killing innocent people for immutable characteristics and killing them because of mutable ones carries any moral weight. In my view, the case for distinguishing them falls apart on close inspection (see here and here).
Yet even if one ultimately concludes that the Nazis were somewhat worse than the communists, that still does not justify the massive size of the disparity between the enormous attention paid to the crimes of the former and the relative neglect of the latter. …
Mark Steyn sees balloon boy as a metaphor for something else full of gas.
…Thus, Frank Rich of the New York Times decided to treat his readers to a dissertation of “what ‘balloon boy’ says about 2009.” So off trots Frank Rich, marveling at “how practised we are at suspending disbelief when watching anything labelled news,” whether it’s a balloon drifting “buoyantly through the skies for hours with a six-year-old boy hidden within its contours” or “WMDs in Iraq.” “The Colorado balloon may have led to the rerouting of flights and the wasteful deployment of law enforcement resources,” observed Rich. “But at least it didn’t lead the country into fiasco the way George W. Bush’s flyboy spectacle on an aircraft carrier helped beguile most of the Beltway press and too much of the public into believing that the mission had been accomplished in Iraq.”
…Democrats run everything—the presidency, the House, the Senate, the media, the movies, the lot. Yet, “George W. Bush” remains the only answer on the liberal Rorschach test: whatever ink blot you lay before them, it’s Bush’s fault. …
…Any self-respecting cultural critic not trapped in the spring of ’03 ought to be able to do this in his sleep: there he was, Barack the Balloon Boy, wafted ever upwards on great gaseous clouds of hope and change, only to have his approval numbers crash farther faster than any president of the last 60 years. He found the reality TV show of campaigning more congenial than the reality of governing. He thought his multi-trillion-dollar ballooning debt could defy the laws of economic gravity …
In the LA Times, Peter Nicholas reports that the Obama administration has changed strategies for attacking Fox News.
…One Democratic strategist said that shortly after an appearance on Fox, he got a phone call from a White House official telling him not to be a guest on the show again. The call had an intimidating tone, he said.
The message was, ” ‘We better not see you on again,’ ” said the strategist, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to run afoul of the White House. An implicit suggestion, he said, was that “clients might stop using you if you continue.” …
…White House Communications Director Anita Dunn said Thursday night that she had checked with colleagues who “deal with TV issues” and they had not told people to avoid Fox. On the contrary, they had urged people to appear on the network, Dunn wrote in an e-mail.
But Patrick Caddell, a Fox News contributor and a former pollster for President Carter, said he has spoken to Democratic consultants who have been told by the White House to avoid appearances on Fox. He declined to give their names. …
Ann Coulter uses the election night results to set up lots of zingers, from the title to the end. Democrats, please skip to the next article.
…At 49 percent for Republican Chris Christie versus 44 percent for Corzine, the election wasn’t even close enough to be stolen by ACORN. (Although Corzine did extremely well among underaged Salvadoran prostitutes living in government housing.) …
… the problem is that voting for Obama a year ago was a fashion statement, much like it was once a fad to buy Beanie Babies, pet rocks and Cabbage Patch Kids. But instead of ending up with a ridiculous dust-collector at the bottom of your closet, the Obama fad leaves you with higher taxes, a reduced retirement fund, no job and a one-year wait for an MRI. …
…The good news: Next time Corzine is in a major car accident after speeding on the New Jersey Turnpike, he’ll be able to see a doctor right away.
The media will try to rescue health care by talking about nothing but the 23rd district of New York, where the Democrat won Tuesday night. Congratulations, Democrats — you won a congressional seat in New York! Next up: A Catholic elected pope! …
Clive Crook, in the Atlantic, posts on liberal pundits’ comments on the elections. Says if he was a Dem, he wouldn’t be smiling.
…Even Charlie Cook, doyen of poll-gazers and a reliably informative commentator, comes off a little blase in this piece for National Journal. He says Tuesday did not tell us anything we didn’t already know. (Maybe he meant anything he didn’t already know.) We already knew that independents were turning in droves against the Democratic party. We already knew that Jon Corzine was so unpopular he would lose even to a divided opposition. We already knew that a staunchly conservative Republican could win a purple state by a big margin if he “projects a moderate, mainstream, nonthreatening, tolerant image”. Did we really know all those things? If I were a Republican, I’d still be pleased to have them confirmed, and if I were a Democrat I definitely wouldn’t be smiling.
Veronique de Rugy posts on the Corner about the negative effect of the homebuyers’ tax credit.
…Here the president identifies several state actions that caused or enabled the financial meltdown, ranging from problems in the financial sector to the collapse of housing prices. He noted both monetary and fiscal policy that made money incredibly cheap, thus incentivizing anybody who could to borrow more and more money. The government spent too much money AND he tips his hat to government programs designed to increase the percentage of people who owned homes.
Yet, all he has done since he took office is to do more of the same things that got us in this mess in the first place — just at a bigger scale. The extension and expansion of the $8,000 tax credit is a good example of that. The cost of the whole thing is $11 billion. And who wants to bet it will be more, not to mention the terrible distortions such a program introduces to the economy?
This morning, even the Washington Post and the New York Times editorialized against the tax credit.
Here is the Post:
The credit is a bad idea. It merely shifts demand from elsewhere in the economy to one sector government has chosen to help — having been urged to do so by a powerful lobby — and from the future to the present. …
de Rugy also comments on the jobless numbers in the context of other economic indicators.
One of the obvious implications is that the stimulus spending is far from having the impact promised by the administration back in February. It is also a rather burning indictment of Christina Romer’s ability to predict job-creation numbers. Remember that the statement about unemployment reaching 8.8 percent next year without the stimulus?
Here is something intriguing: According to this piece in yesterday’s New York Times, worker productivity in the U.S. has surged in the third quarter:
In the first report, the Labor Department says productivity, the amount of output per hour of work, was rising at an annual rate of 9.5 percent in the third quarter, much better than the 6.4 percent gain economists had expected. Unit labor costs fell at a 5.2 percent rate.
Usually, a productivity surge is the sign of looming recovery. In this case, it isn’t. Are we about to become like Europe, where many economies have high productivity and high unemployment? Or are we entering a lost decade, as the Japanese did in the 1990s?
Thomas Sowell clarifies several important points about Obamacare. First, he explains health care in economic terms:
…There is no question that you can reduce the payments for medical care by having either a lower quantity or a lower quality of medical care. That has already been done in countries with government-run medical systems.
In the United States, the government has already reduced payments for patients on Medicare and Medicaid, with the result that some doctors no longer accept new patients with Medicare or Medicaid. That has not reduced the cost of medical care. It has reduced the availability of medical care…
…You can even save money by cutting down on medications to relieve pain, as is already being done in Britain’s government-run medical system. You can save money by not having as many high-tech medical devices like CAT scans or MRIs, and not using the latest medications. Countries with government-run medical systems have less of all these things than the United States has.
But reducing these things is not “bringing down the cost of medical care.” It is simply refusing to pay those costs — and taking the consequences. …
He then explains the difference between health care and medical care, and comments on the higher US rates of cancer survival:
For those who live by talking points, one of their biggest talking points is that Americans do not get any longer life span than people in other Western nations by all the additional money we spend on medical care.
Like so many clever things that are said, this argument depends on confusing very different things — namely, “health care” and “medical care.” Medical care is a limited part of health care. What we do and don’t do in the way we live our lives affects our health and our longevity, in many cases more so than what doctors can do to provide medical care.
Americans have higher rates of obesity, homicide and narcotics addiction than people in many other Western nations. There are severe limits on what doctors and medical care can do about that.
…If we want to compare the effects of medical care, as such, in the United States with that in other countries with government-run medical systems, then we need to compare things where medical care is what matters most, such as survival rates of people with cancer. The United States has one of the highest rates of cancer survival in the world — and for some cancers, the number one rate of survival. …
In Forbes, Diana Furchtgott-Roth shreds the medical bankruptcy argument, and also backs up the higher rates of cancer survival in the US.
…Some proponents support a public option on the grounds that 62% of personal bankruptcies are due to high medical expenses. They contend that even Americans with health insurance are being bankrupted by health care costs.
This argument for a larger government role ignores data from the Federal Reserve showing that debt from buying goods and services, including medical care, rose from only 5.5% of all debt in 2001 to 5.8% in 2007, and that less than 1% of Americans enter bankruptcy each year. …
…In fact, the cancers are survivable precisely because we find them early. Study after study has shown that cancer patients live longer in America than in Europe. …
…Evidence shows that more advanced technology and drugs result in longer life even across different states in the United States. Columbia Business School professor Frank Lichtenberg has examined the effects on life expectancy in the 50 states of diagnostic imaging procedures, drugs and physician quality. Not surprisingly, he found that “our indicators of the quality of diagnostic imaging procedures, drugs and physicians almost always had positive and statistically significant effects on life expectancy.” …