Click on WORD or PDF for full content
David Warren spots a politician with courage; in Spain.
Telling the truth is, in the best sense, a revolutionary act. It is disturbing, and divisive, and can be exceedingly unpopular – not only among those heavily invested in falsehoods, but also among those who want “peace in the family.” That is how various ridiculous lies acquire the politically-correct aura. It is because there will be no peace if they are contradicted.
And it is why, even though I am what could be called a “deficit hawk,” my hat goes off to the new Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, now disturbing the peace of the European Union by stating the truth about Spain’s budgetary intentions. This Galician gentleman, who commands the conservative People’s Party, came to power just before Christmas after nearly eight years’ opposition to the socialist prime minister, José Luis Zapatero.
It was an interesting election. (All Spanish elections are interesting.) Rajoy was thought, by the chattering classes, to have blown his prospects by hanging fiscally tough, and mentioning “social issues,” when there was a strong voice within his own party for tacking to the centre. By winning his landslide, Rajoy then became the media poster-boy for “meanness” – the man who threatens to break Spain’s unions, generally get a grip, and deliver obedience to the EU’s fiscal demands. (I have never understood how anyone could want to be a conservative politician.)
His country’s problems are not small. Zapatero blew the bank, as socialist premiers are inclined to do, and moreover delivered that most ecological of accomplishments: a shrinking economy. Such politicians walk the road to ruin, by consistently taking the easy way out. Zapatero could be counted on to sign any cheque, and capitulate before any other hard demand emanating from his party’s most “progressive” factions; though reversing course whenever the other side became louder. He kept “peace in a family” that is now tearing each others’ guts out in recriminations.
Rajoy inherits not only the mess, but a public sector now accustomed to getting whatever it wants, promptly. …
David Goldman pauses to consider the incompetence of this administration.
… Compared to the Carter cabinet, though, the Obamoids are a kids’ Purimspiel, a put-on by the peanut gallery masquerading as adults — a clown show, in plain English. Macbeth was never so beguiled by his witches as is McBama by the witches who surround him: Iran-raised Valerie Jarrett, human-rights mavens Susan Rice and Samantha Power, the resentful Michelle, and the Pink Pantsuit at the State Department. What’s her name again? She used to be somebody important.
I stand by my February 2008 profile of Obama as a sociopath dominated by strong women. Obama and his coven suffer from up-close-and-personal identification with the putatively oppressed peoples of the Third World. That goes far beyond the academic prejudices that liberal college students absorb from post-colonial theory. One has to live in the Third World, as Obama did during four of his formative years and Jarrett did in early childhood, to understand the rage and despair of the losers. Many times during visits to Third World countries, I sort of wished that I were a Communist. You see cruelty and indignity that shouldn’t be visited on a cockroach.
To round out the list, we have Leon Panetta at the Department of Defense, a political operator and accountant whose job is to cut the budget. Timothy Geithner? The Stan Laurel half of a duo with the departed Larry Summers. Tom Donilon as national security advisor? His biggest job was six years as chief lobbyist for bankrupt Fannie Mae.
There’s not a single member of the Obama cabinet with grown-up qualifications. …
Michael Barone says it is not just in foreign affairs that Obama kicks the can down the road.
… When the bipartisan commission headed by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson presented their recommendations for entitlement reform in December 2010, Obama ignored it. It seemed to end up in the White House’s round file.
When House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan put Medicare reform in his 2011 budget proposal, and all but four Republican House members voted for it, the Obama political operation ginned up attacks on Republicans for killing “Medicare as we know it.”
Last week at a Budget Committee hearing, Ryan chided Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner for not having proposed any solution to the looming entitlement problem.
Geithner’s reply: “You’re right when you say we’re not coming before you today to say ‘We have a definitive solution to that long-term problem.’ What we do know is we don’t like yours.”
In other words, campaign 2012 takes precedence over taking us off the trajectory that is heading us toward the fiscal condition of Greece. A Cabinet secretary able to draw on the policymaking expertise at Treasury and on his administration’s own Bowles-Simpson commission is unwilling to do so because his president is following the game plan of David Plouffe and David Axelrod.
The Treasury cannot be bothered even to draft the new alternative minimum tax that Obama keeps demanding Congress pass to make Warren Buffett pay a higher tax rate than his secretary.
The folks who hailed Obama as temperamentally bipartisan have given Ryan and House Republicans little credit for addressing a tough problem and will probably tell us Obama will be bipartisan in a second term. I think it’s more likely he’ll keep kicking the can down the road.
Mark Steyn is in Australia so he’s not sure this isn’t all a fluke.
I’m writing this from Australia, so, if I’m not quite up to speed on recent events in the United States, bear with me – the telegraph updates are a bit slow here in the bush. As I understand it, Sandra Fluke is a young coed who attends Georgetown Law and recently testified before Congress.
Oh, wait, no. Update: It wasn’t a congressional hearing; the Democrats just got it up to look like one, like summer stock, with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid doing the show right here in the barn and providing a cardboard set for the world premiere of “Miss Fluke Goes To Washington,” with full supporting cast led by Chuck Schumer strolling in through the French windows in tennis whites and drawling, “Anyone for bull****?”
Oh, and the “young coed” turns out to be 30, which is what less-evolved cultures refer to as early middle age. She’s a couple of years younger than Mozart was at the time he croaked but, if the Dems are to be believed, the plucky little Grade 24 schoolgirl has already made an even greater contribution to humanity.
She’s had the courage to stand up in public and demand that someone else (and this is where one is obliged to tiptoe cautiously, lest offense is given to gallant defenders of the good name of American maidenhood such as the many prestigious soon-to-be-former sponsors of this column who’ve booked Bill Maher for their corporate retreat with his amusing “Sarah Palin is a c***” routine …)
Where was I? Oh, yes. The brave middle-age schoolgirl had the courage to stand up in public and demand that someone else pay for her sex life.
Well, as noted above, she’s attending Georgetown, a nominally Catholic seat of learning, so how expensive can that be? Alas, Georgetown is so nominally Catholic that the cost of her sex life runs to three grand – and, according to the star witness, 40 percent of female students “struggle financially” because of the heavy burden of maintaining a respectable level of pre-marital sex at a Jesuit institution.
As I said, I’m on the other side of the planet, so maybe I’m not getting this. …
Contentions post tells a Romney story.
I don’t care how many Cadillacs Mitt Romney owns, how many earmarks he requested, or how many individual mandates he approved. This is an extraordinary man.
We first heard about it in the 2008 campaign: how Romney saved the teenaged daughter of a Bain Capital colleague in 1996. Here’s what Mitt did when he learned the girl had gone missing after sneaking from her home in Connecticut to a party in New York City: he shut down the whole office and flew the staff from Boston to New York; he had fliers printed up and got employees at Duane Reade (in which Bain invested) to stuff one into every customer’s bag; he set up a phone hotline; he personally, along with his Bain people and their New York accountants and lawyers, pounded the city’s pavements looking for the girl and asking teenagers if they’d seen her. After a few days of all this – and the publicity it generated – they traced the hotline call of someone asking for a reward and found the girl, who had overdosed on Ecstasy, in the basement of a New Jersey home. …
Corner post by Mario Loyola on the amount of oil production choked off by BO.
The news wires are reporting that President Obama actively lobbied Senate Democrats to defeat the Keystone pipeline yesterday. The effect of blocking the Keystone XL Pipeline is to defer 700,000 barrels of oil per day. And as I reported at The Weekly Standard recently, the president’s policy of choking off oil production under federal leases will prevent another 1 million barrels of oil per day this year, and even more next year.
Obama will soon be personally responsible for preventing some 2 million barrels per day of possible North American crude oil production from reaching the American economy. The U.S. currently produces only about 6 million barrels of domestic crude oil, so that would be more than a 30 percent increase in domestic production. …
Charles Lane says the Dem love affair with alternative power sources is anti-science.
… Democrats and liberals are fond of calling their conservative and Republican adversaries “anti-science.” To the extent that the right espouses “creation science,” or disputes established facts about environmental degradation, it’s an appropriate label.
But progressives’ fascination with electric cars and other alternative-energy schemes reflects their own refusal to face the practical limitations of alternative energy — limitations that themselves reflect stubborn scientific facts.
Stubborn Scientific Fact No. 1: Petroleum packs a lot of energy per unit of volume. (Each liter contains 34 megajoules.) Consequently, gasoline makes a cheap, portable and convenient motor fuel.
By contrast, even state-of-the-art batteries deliver far less energy than gas, in a far bigger package. A Volt can go 35 miles on a single charge of its 435-pound battery. This sounds like a big deal until you realize that a gas-engine Chevy Cruze gets 42 miles per gallon — and costs half as much as a Volt.
It costs a fortune to pump, refine and ship crude oil. Yet even accounting for all that, gas-powered cars are a better value than electric vehicles and will be for some time. Gas savings on the Volt would take nine years at $5 per gallon to offset its higher price over the Cruze, an Edmunds.com analysis found last month.
Gas consumption creates “negative externalities” — instability in the Middle East, carbon emissions — not fully reflected in its price. But another fact about electric vehicles is that their juice comes from the fossil-fuel-burning grid in the first place.
Oh, and how are you supposed to resell your electric vehicle once you’ve driven it five years and the battery is depleted? …