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Victor Davis Hanson posts in The Corner on the “threats” to Dems.
… write a book in which you muse about killing George Bush, and its Knopf imprint proves it is merely sophisticated literary speculation; do a docudrama about killing George Bush, and it will win a Toronto film prize for its artistic value rather than shock from the liberal community about over-the-top discourse.
Socialism and totalitarianism are tough charges from the hard right, but they seem to me about as (or as not) over-the-top as Al Gore screaming “digital brown-shirts” or John Glenn comparing the opposition to Nazis. When 3,000 were murdered in Manhattan, and Michael Moore suggested Bin Laden had wrongly targeted a blue state, I don’t think that repulsive remark prevented liberal politicians from attending his anti-Bush film premiere. Yes, let us have a tough debate over the role of government and the individual, but spare us the melodrama, the bottled piety, and the wounded-fawn hurt. …
Abe Greenwald comments on the sad events of the past few days.
…Additionally, for the media at large and for certain self-consciously moderate political analysts, some things are most dangerous when speculated upon. Once they are actually achieved, they are merely “historic.”
The Democrats are doing a lot of talking about history these days. “It is with great humility and great pride that tonight we will make history for this country,” said Nancy Pelosi, before the House passed the Senate’s tax and entitlement bill. “Tonight we answered the call of history,” said Barack Obama, after the deed was done. Not only does this crew refuse to be constrained by the false choice between great humility and great pride; they also reject the false choice between embracing history and ignoring it. For amid the symbolic fanfare of giant gavels and the tactical gravitas of deployed Lincoln quotes, one important fact is being swept aside: the state’s co-opting of the private sector never ends well. Every learned lesson about free markets and central planning, incentives, the allocation of scarce resources under competing systems, government incompetence, overall quality of life and freedom in socialist vs. capitalist states — in short, the reality of the Cold War — has been unlearned. Sunday night brought us the most ahistoric bit of history-making we’re likely to see in our lifetimes. …
Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post finally understands Obama and Israel.
… U.S. pressure on Netanyahu will be needed if the peace process ever reaches the point where the genuinely contentious issues, like Palestinian refugees or the exact territorial tradeoffs, are on the table. But instead of waiting for that moment and pushing Netanyahu on a point where he might be vulnerable to domestic challenge, Obama picked a fight over something that virtually all Israelis agree on, and before serious discussions have even begun. …
… A new administration can be excused for making such a mistake in the treacherous and complex theater of Middle East diplomacy. That’s why Obama was given a pass by many when he made exactly the same mistake last year. The second time around, the president doesn’t look naive. He appears ideological — and vindictive.
In GQ, Robert Baer has an excellent article about how seven CIA agents were killed in Afghanistan by an Al Qaeda double agent. Baer says it was the tragic result of the destruction of standards at the CIA. This does help explain how the national intelligence community has gotten some major things wrong, like the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons. Baer lays a lot of this on the doorstep of John Deutch. Pickerhead always knew he was a Deutch bag.
…It’s impossible to pinpoint exactly when the operatives’ sun started to set, but many CIA insiders would point to John Deutch, the former MIT provost and Bill Clinton’s second CIA director. From the moment Deutch set foot in Langley, he made it plain that he hated the operatives, their swagger and arrogance. …
…Deutch’s first shot at the operatives was his appointment of Dave Cohen as deputy director of operations, the CIA’s most senior operative. Cohen was an analyst who had never served overseas or run a foreign informant. Deutch’s message couldn’t be any clearer: Anyone can do an operative’s work.
The first thing Cohen did was order a “scrub” of every informant with dirty hands. Drug dealers, dictators’ minions, arms dealers, terrorists—Cohen ordered the operatives to sever ties with all of them. The only problem was, these were the people who mix well with our enemies—rogue regimes like Iran and North Korea and terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Al Qaeda. Deutch and Cohen didn’t care; they had a mandate to clean up the CIA, and that’s what they were going to do.
Headquarters officers started taking more and more of the important jobs in the field. For the first time in the CIA’s history, analysts, reports officers, and logistics officers were given stations and bases to run. … Field experience no longer mattered, either for assignments or promotions.
As the CIA purged informants, it leaned on allies to do our dirty work in the field. Friendly Muslim intelligence services, not CIA operatives, were asked to comb jihadi circles. All this only got worse after September 11. …
Mark Steyn posts about the Obamacare power grab and the Constitution.
Richard Esenberg at PointofLaw.com ponders the constitutional challenge to Obamacare and its likely outcome:
Were I to wager on the question (which may turn out to be an exercise in reading the mind of Anthony Kennedy), I would expect the Court to uphold the individual mandate. But the day that it does will be a tragic one for the Republic. . . .
It will be tragic because the notion of a Congress limited by the scope of its enumerated powers will have finally suffered the coup de grace. The Bill of Rights (once famously – and now ironically – thought to be unnecessary given the structural limits on the power of the national government) will become the only limitation on the power of Congress. If Congress can require you to buy health insurance because of the ways in which your uncovered existence effects interstate commerce or because it can tax you in an effort to force you to do any old thing it wants you to, it is hard to see what – save some other constitutional restriction – it cannot require you to do – or prohibit you from doing.
Every power grab is the new base camp for the next power grab. That’s another reason why it’s necessary to repeal or otherwise kill Obamacare — because its underlying assumptions about the power of the central government will not be confined to insurance mandates.
Karl Rove has suggestions for what the GOP should do now.
… Republicans have a powerful rallying cry in “repeal, replace and reform.” Few voters will want to keep onerous mandates that hit individuals and taxes that hobble economic growth. Rather than spending a trillion dollars on subsidies for insurance companies and Medicaid expansion, as ObamaCare does, Republicans should push for giving individuals the same health-insurance tax break businesses get, which would cost less.
Republicans must also continue to press for curbing junk lawsuits, enabling people to buy insurance across state lines, increasing the amount of money they can sock away tax free for medical expenses, and permitting small businesses to pool risk.
Opponents of ObamaCare have decisively won the battle for public opinion. As voters start to feel the pain of this new program, Republicans will be in a stronger position if they stay in the fight, make a principled case, and lay out a competing vision.
In the Washington Examiner, Byron York looks at one company that makes medical devices. Obamacare taxes are going to increase the cost of the devices, decrease jobs in the US, or stop innovation. Or all three. Most politicians refuse to acknowledge that increasing taxes hurts the economy and our standard of living.
…The company’s first option is to pass the increase on to customers like hospitals and ambulance companies. That might or might not work, given that they are coming under increasing pressure to cut their own costs.
The next option is to cut research and development — a short-term, money-saving move that will surely cost Zoll down the road. And a third option, says Packer, is to “look at trying to shift jobs to lower-cost places around the world.” That would be bad news for Massachusetts and the USA. …
…No matter what happens, the makers of the devices that save our lives are going to take a major hit.
Thomas Sowell points to this November as our last chance. If congress can take power without checks from other branches of the government, or from the American people, freedom will fall.
…The ruthless and corrupt way this bill was forced through Congress on a party-line vote, and in defiance of public opinion, provides a road map for how other “historic” changes can be imposed by Obama, Pelosi and Reid.
What will it matter if Obama’s current approval rating is below 50 percent among the current voting public, if he can ram through new legislation to create millions of new voters by granting citizenship to illegal immigrants? That can be enough to make him a two-term President, who can appoint enough Supreme Court justices to rubber-stamp further extensions of his power.
When all these newly minted citizens are rounded up on election night by ethnic organization activists and labor union supporters of the administration, that may be enough to salvage the Democrats’ control of Congress as well.
The last opportunity that current American citizens may have to determine who will control Congress may well be the election in November of this year. Off-year elections don’t usually bring out as many voters as Presidential election years. But the 2010 election may be the last chance to halt the dismantling of America. It can be the point of no return.
Even David Brooks, for all his Obama whorship, can see this will not end well.
… The second biggest threat to America’s vibrancy is the exploding federal debt. Again, Democrats can utter the words of fiscal restraint, but they don’t feel the passion. This bill is full of gimmicks designed to get a good score from the Congressional Budget Office but not to really balance the budget. Democrats did enough to solve their political problem (not looking fiscally reckless) but not enough to solve the genuine problem. …
… This country is in the position of a free-spending family careening toward bankruptcy that at the last moment announced that it was giving a gigantic new gift to charity. You admire the act of generosity, but you wish they had sold a few of the Mercedes to pay for it.