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In Forbes, Paul Johnson discusses the moral obligation of being a superpower.
… Poor Mr. Obama! So eager to show himself as totally different from George W. Bush. He has now landed in the same sort of warlike commitment–but with the disadvantage of having been dragged into it. One feels like asking Mr. Obama if, when he decided to run for President, he didn’t realize that this is exactly the kind of geopolitical hardship a U.S. President has to accept and then get his countrymen to rally behind. Has he not studied any history or absorbed any of its painful lessons?
There are two fundamental truths that any American taking over the White House and beginning his watch in the Oval Office has to accept–one moral, the other physical. The moral point can be briefly stated. No country–not even the U.S.–is obliged to try to make the world perfect. It will always be imperfect, with most of its ills beyond remedy or mitigation (witness the appalling earthquake/ tsunami disaster in Japan).
But if a great nation such as the U.S. believes in freedom, practices democracy, accepts a Judeo-Christian sense of morality as an ideal, honors human rights, and deplores and denounces all the evils of the totalitarian state…then that nation cannot allow a dictator, before the eyes of the world, to violate all the principles of justice and humanity if said nation has the means to prevent it.
Which brings us to the second point. President Obama, in the recesses of his curious worldview, may not like the fact, but America is a great power and is likely to remain the only superpower for some time. …These forces are provided at huge expense by the American taxpayer and are staffed by thousands of dedicated young American men and women whose express purpose is to protect civilization from barbarism. That, as they see it and have been taught to see it, is precisely what America stands for. ….
The President wants you to deal with the rising price of gas by buying a new car. Mark Steyn has this response.
…America, 2011: A man gets driven in a motorcade to sneer at a man who has to drive himself to work. A guy who has never generated a dime of wealth, never had to make payroll, never worked at any job other than his own tireless self-promotion literally cannot comprehend that out there, beyond the far fringes of the motorcade outriders, are people who drive a long distance to jobs whose economic viability is greatly diminished when getting there costs twice as much as the buck-eighty-per-gallon it cost back at the dawn of the Hopeychangey Era.
So what? Your fault. Should have gone to Columbia and Harvard and become a community organizer.
Another 10 years of this, and large tracts of America will be Third World. Not Somalia-scale Third World, but certainly the more decrepit parts of Latin America. There will still be men with motorcades, but they’ll have heavier security and the compounds they shuttle between will be more heavily protected. For them and their cronies, the guys plugged in…life will be manageable, and they’ll still be wondering why you loser schlubs are forever whining about gas prices, and electricity prices and food prices. …
David Warren tells us a little about a tax code issue in Canada. He starts off by making a great point.
Should the government be telling us how to live? Or should we be telling the government?
Expressed baldly like that, I dare say many of my gentle readers would opt for, “We tell the government.” And according to the older school of constitutional thought, we have elections in which our instructions are made known. This is indeed what the Tea Party is all about, south of the border: “Now we will speak, and you will listen.” …
Michael Barone reviews recent events related to budget battles.
…Democrats and public employee unions rallied against the bill sponsored by Republican Gov. Scott Walker and passed by the legislature scaling back public employee unions’ bargaining privileges and stopping the automatic flow of dues money from the state treasury to the unions and their allies in the Democratic Party.
The public employee unions hoped to defeat a Republican Supreme Court justice and create an activist liberal majority that might overturn the law. Turnout increased from 793,000 in April 2009 to 837,000 in the February 2011 primary to 1,494,000 last week, and examination of the returns shows big increases where unions are strong.
But the anti-spending enthusiasm that brought so many conservatives to the polls in November was still operative in April, and the Republican seems to have won by 7,000 votes. And Democrats’ efforts to recall Republican state senators seem unlikely to net them the three seats they need for a majority. …
In Newsbusters, Noel Sheppard catches Andrew Sullivan acting like his old self.
Bill Maher and Eliot Spitzer on Friday’s “Real Time” not surprisingly attacked Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) for his 2012 budget proposal.
Showing glimpses of the conservative that used to occupy his body many years ago, the Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan not only defended the Republican as deserving a lot of credit for his bold plan, but also exposed Maher and Spitzer as ignorant hypocrites when it comes to the nation’s fiscal policy…
Rick Richman has more thoughts on Obama’s “Let them drive hybrids” comment.
…Some might be tempted to shrug this off as an anecdote about a clueless ruler…unsympathetic to people clinging to their vans and religion. But we all occasionally say silly things—we’re only human, not sort of a deity—and it would be unfair to equate the president’s response with Marie Antoinette’s “let them eat cake” remark, because Marie Antoinette did not actually say that.
The phrase is commonly misascribed to Marie Antoinette, but there is no record of her ever saying it; it may have originated in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, completed in 1769 when Marie Antoinette was only 13, attributed to a “great princess” who may have been a fictional character. The misattribution came later…
So Marie Antoinette was the victim of the tea partiers of the day, who attributed to her a remark she never made. Monsieur Le Deficit, on the other hand, actually made the remark that historians will not be able to find in the Associated Press. …
In the San Francisco Chronicle, Debra Saunders comments on one of Obama’s butt-boys.
The New York Times reported last month that General Electric earned $14.2 billion in international profits, including, $5.1 billion in the United States. Yet GE did not pay a dime in federal income taxes last year. Oddly, President Obama chose GE Chairman and Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt to head his President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.
According to the Associated Press, Immelt’s compensation package doubled to $15.2 million last year, while this year GE is seeking major concessions from the unions that represent its shrinking American workforce. That makes Immelt the wrong guy for the job of jobs czar.
Or as former Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold wrote, “Someone like Immelt, who has helped his company evade taxes on its huge profits – and is now looking to workers to take major pay cuts after his compensation was doubled – should not lead the administration’s effort to create jobs.” …