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Christopher Hitchens comments on a number of serious issues in Iraq.
…On the morning that I received that note, the Washington Post carried a brief and heart-breaking report. It described a lawsuit, brought to the Baghdad District Court by a coalition of “civil society and human rights organizations.” The suit demanded that elected Iraqi parliamentarians give back the salaries they have so far earned, and forego future payments, until they have overcome the paralyzing torpor that has deprived the country of the fruits of its hard-won right to vote. A short while ago, the same alliance of forces convinced the nation’s Supreme Court to order the lawmakers to resume their negotiations.
…There are still immense dangers facing any Iraqi who wants to express a democratic or nonsectarian opinion, but these dangers do not come so much from the state. They come from the prowling, sleepless murder-gangs who, almost every day, find ways of killing civilians either selectively or en masse. By some kind of convention, we still agree to refer to these people as insurgents. (In the recently fizzled debate over WikiLeaks, the hideous casualties the “insurgents” inflict were also described semi-neutrally in the press as coming from “other Iraqis,” though witnesses to the recent massacre of a Baghdad Christian congregation spoke of hearing foreign Arab accents among the assassins.) But in what possible sense can such actions be described as a rebellion or an insurgency, especially in a society that now offers its citizens at least some of the means of lawful dissent and redress?
This is the aspect of our intervention that is unquantifiable. As with Afghanistan, we cannot know the long-term effect of promulgating a federal constitution, holding elections, opening clinics and schools for women, and attempting to protect the rights of minorities. And the Afghan and Iraqi governments are such wretched simulacra of the principles they are supposed to embody that results are even harder to gauge. The principles may even be discredited by association with corruption. Still, we have to remain on the side of those Iraqis and Afghans who fight against such desperate odds to make these principles real and to carry them into the future. …
The nation has experienced a recession, but government has not. Mark Steyn writes about the unsustainability of the ever-growing government.
…In the year after the passage of Obama’s “stimulus”, the private sector lost 2.5 million jobs, but the federal government gained 416,000 jobs. Even if one accepts the government’s ludicrous concept of “creating or saving” jobs, by its own figures four out of every five jobs “created or saved” were government jobs. “Stimulus” stimulates government, not the economy.
…Jobs rarely “come back”. …After the recession of the early Nineties, America lost some three million jobs in manufacturing but gained a little under the same number in construction. Then the subprime hit the fan, and America now has more housing stock than it will need for a generation. So what replaces those three million lost construction jobs? What are all those carpenters, plasterers, excavators going to be doing? Not to mention the realtors, home-loan bankers, contract lawyers, rental-income accountants and other “professional service” cube people whose business also relies to one degree or another on a soaraway property market.
What if we’ve run out of “next”?
For the Obamatrons, government is what comes next. Government jobs, government “light rail” projects, government “green jobs” pork projects…Non-jobs for a Potemkin Main Street. …
…The new class war in the western world is between “public servants” and the rest of us. …To reprise my favorite Ronald Reagan line:
We are a nation that has a government — not the other way around.
…Alas, in Reagan’s own country, we are atrophying into a government that has a nation. That’s what November 2nd was about.
In the Telegraph, UK, Toby Harnden discusses Obama’s reaction to the elections, and gives an overview of where this may lead.
…It seems much more likely that Obama will double down on his strategy during his first two years, moving to the Left to appease his critics there and challenging Republicans, much as President Harry Truman did after 1946 when he railed against the “do-nothing” Republican-controlled Congress. Two years later, Republicans lost 75 House seats and Truman was returned to the White House.
This time, however, Republicans do not control Congress. They won back the House but fell short in the Senate.
Their failure to secure ascendancy in both chambers may be a blessing in disguise. The defeat of candidates like Christine O’Donnell of Delaware and Sharron Angle of Nevada has helped fuel a complacent Washington consensus that the Tea Party failed. Never mind that his grassroots anti-tax, small-government “constitutional conservatism” movement provided the energy and momentum behind the biggest congressional election victory in 62 years.
…Best of all for Republicans is that Democrat Senator Harry Reid will remain Senate Majority Leader after squeezing home against Angle, and Representative Nancy Pelosi, the ousted House Speaker, looks set to become House Minority Leader. This gives Republicans the opportunity to run against the Obama-Reid-Pelosi triumvirate again in 2012 – their very presence indicating that Democrats failed to learn from 2010. …
In NRO’s - The Feed, Greg Pollowitz posts a piece on Notre Dame’s karma.
After honoring President Barack Obama during last May’s commencement ceremonies, the University of Notre Dame has seen less contributions and is feeling financial heat. In May 2009, debate was heated over the fact that Notre Dame, a Catholic university, invited President Obama to speak at its graduation. It was controversial mainly because some of Obama’s policies are contrary to church doctrine. Katie Walker of American Life League (ALL) tells OneNewsNow the school has paid a price. “Notre Dame has come out $120 million short for the fiscal year in which President Obama spoke during commencement and received an honorary law degree,” she reports. She believes that staggering number is in direct response of alumni and others around the country who feel scandalized “that Notre Dame would host this man and give one of the most pro-abortion presidents in the nation’s history an honorary law degree.”
Jennifer Rubin discusses liberal reactions to the White House continuing to steer hard left.
…The less-deluded Democrats are furious now, convinced that the White House is on a political suicide mission. The defeated Democratic gubernatorial candidate Alex Sink is beside herself:
“They got a huge wake-up call [on election day], but unfortunately they took a lot of Democrats down with them,” said Sink of the White House.
…“I think they were tone-deaf,” she said. “They weren’t interested in hearing my opinion on what was happening on the ground with the oil spill. And they never acknowledged that they had problems with the acceptance of health care reform.”
The new law, she said, is “unpopular particularly among seniors” — a key voting bloc in the Sunshine State. …
In the Weekly Standard Blog, Victorino Matus highlights Charles Lane’s projections on how the Census will affect electoral votes.
As the Washington Post’s Charles Lane reminds us,
Since the U.S. population continues to flow South and West, reapportionment will probably add House seats in red states and subtract them in blue states. Thus, the Census looks like a setback for Democratic chances to win the 270 electoral votes necessary to become president.
…Take the 22 states that voted for John McCain as the GOP base in the 2012 presidential election. That base is about to grow from 173 electoral votes to 180. And if Republicans hold it, they could get to 271 by carrying just six more states—Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Indiana, Virginia and Nevada—each of which has voted GOP in a majority of the last ten elections.
As it happens, all six of these states, except for North Carolina, will have Republican governors next year, and all six, except for Nevada, will have Republican state legislatures. …
Indians are about to say to the president, “Ghandi, schmandi. Give it a rest please!” Jim Yardley in the NYTimes discusses Obama’s continual references to Gandhi, but then mentions a serious indication of Obama’s ignorance.
… India’s political establishment, if thrilled by the visit, is also withholding judgment. Mr. Obama was faulted in New Delhi for some early missteps, including his comment that China should play an active role in South Asia. His battering in the midterm elections has raised concerns about his political viability. And many Indian officials still hold a torch for former President George W. Bush, who was popular for pushing through a landmark civilian nuclear deal between the two countries.
Mr. Obama’s visit is intended to dispel those doubts and deepen a partnership rooted in shared democratic values. Since taking office, he has already met several times with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, as well as with other delegations of Indian officials. On several occasions, he has cited his deep admiration for Gandhi, perhaps as evidence of his fondness for India.
“The impression on the Indian side is every time you meet him, he talks about Gandhi,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express, a leading English-language newspaper, adding that the repeated references struck some officials as platitudinous. …
Marty Peretz has more on the one note president.
…as an eminent Indian journalist put it to Yardley, “…the impression on the Indian side is every time you meet him, he talks about Gandhi.” But, as Sheryl Stolberg also of the Times, points out this morning, all that students questioning him wanted to discuss was “jihad.” And he was ready with that bull-shitty quarter truth that “Well, the phrase jihad has a lot of meanings within Islam and is subject to a a lot of different interpretations.” …
…Obama continued: All of us recognize that this great religion in the hands of a few extremists has been distorted to justify violence towards innocent people that is never justified. So, I think, one of the challenges that we face is how do we isolate those who have distorted notions of religious war.
This does not sit well with the billion Indians, especially Hindu Indians, who are sitting ducks for jihadist terror. and it certainly did not sit well with the president’s listeners. (Not that the Hindus -or the Israelis- are completely free of their own fanatics.) But, believe me, what defines Islam these days is not the Sufis.
…Even among our “allies” in the Yemeni government, among our “fighting comrades” in Afghanistan, among our friends in the Pakistani sort-of state, there appears to be no anger at the debauchery of random liquidation. And not in the Sudan either. These are the countries of the salient jihad: Al-Qaeda plus the indifference of the rest. If the Israelis were to permit it they, too, would be the victims. …
Don Boudreaux makes a very important delineation about what it means for the government to be “pro-business”, in Cafe Hayek.
…There are two ways for a government to be ‘pro-business.’ The first way is to avoid interfering in capitalist acts among consenting adults – that is, to keep taxes low, regulations few, and subsidies non-existent. This ‘pro-business’ stance promotes widespread prosperity because in reality it isn’t so much pro-business as it is pro-consumer. When this way is pursued, businesses are rewarded for pleasing consumers, and only for pleasing consumers.
The second, and very different, way for government to be pro-business is to bestow favors and privileges on politically connected firms. These favors and privileges, such as tariffs and export subsidies, invariably oblige consumers to pay more – either directly in the form of higher prices, or indirectly in the form of higher taxes – for goods and services. This way of being pro-business reduces the nation’s prosperity by relieving businesses of the need to satisfy consumers. When this second way is pursued, businesses are rewarded for pleasing politicians. Competition for consumers’ dollars is replaced by competition for political favors.
The fact that more than 200 American business executives are in India with the President is cause to fear that any pro-business policies he might adopt will be of the second, impoverishing sort.