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OK, Pickerhead knows he’s supposed to heap opprobrium upon Obama for his missile defense decision. Mark Steyn does so in his weekly column as he surveys some of the people in charge of countries today.
…Some of them very strange. Kim Jong-il wouldn’t really let fly at South Korea or Japan, would he? Even if some quasi-Talibanny types wound up sitting on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, they wouldn’t really do anything with them, would they? OK, Putin can be a bit heavy-handed when dealing with Eastern Europe, and his definition of “Eastern” seems to stretch ever further west, but he’s not going to be sending the tanks back into Prague and Budapest, is he? I mean, c’mon …
Vladimir Putin is no longer president but he is de facto czar. And he thinks it’s past time to reconstitute the old empire – not formally (yet), but certainly as a sphere of influence from which the Yanks keep their distance. President Obama has just handed the Russians their biggest win since the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Indeed, in some ways it marks the restitching of the Iron Curtain. When the Czechs signed their end of the missile-defense deal in July, they found themselves afflicted by a sudden “technical difficulty” that halved their gas supply from Russia. The Europe Putin foresees will be one not only ever more energy-dependent on Moscow but security-dependent, too – in which every city is within range of missiles from Tehran and other crazies, and is, in effect, under the security umbrella of the new czar. As to whether such a Continent will be amicable to American interests, well, good luck with that, hopeychangers.
In a sense, the health care debate and the foreign policy debacle are two sides of the same coin: For Britain and other great powers, the decision to build a hugely expensive welfare state at home entailed inevitably a long retreat from responsibilities abroad, with a thousand small betrayals of peripheral allies along the way. A few years ago, the great scholar Bernard Lewis warned, during the debate on withdrawal from Iraq, that America risked being seen as “harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.” In Moscow and Tehran, on the one hand, and Warsaw and Prague, on the other, they’re drawing their own conclusions.
Mark confesses to getting his Mid East geography wrong.
I had a columnar senior moment today:
“Aside from a tiny strip of land on the east bank of the Jordan, every other advanced society on earth is content to depend for its security on the kindness of strangers.”
Er, I was referring to Israel, which isn’t on the east bank, or on much of the west these days. No one to blame but myself: I’ve been back and forth across the Allenby Bridge enough times to know which end leads where. I think I meant to say “the eastern shore of the Mediterranean”, but who knows? It’s Ahmadinejad who’s in favor of “relocating” the Zionist Entity, not me. Mea culpa.
In his First Things blog, Spengler has a more relaxed view of the decision.
… The one side of Obama’s foreign policy that made sense from the outset was to trade items that Russia considers of fundamental interest, e.g., its influence in former Soviet republics, for Russian cooperation in suppressing nuclear weapons development in Iran. That may be the positive outcome of the present switch in American policy on anti-missile systems in Eastern Europe. The Israeli spook site Debka reports today that “Barack Obama’s decision prompted Russian president Dmitry Medvedev’s surprise comment Monday, Sept. 14, that his government no longer rules out further sanctions against Iran – although the Kremlin has always denied its cooperation with the US on the Iranian nuclear issue was contingent on the removal of the US missile shield plan.”
The reflex reaction among American conservatives is to denounce Obama for selling out American interests to the Russians. That seems misguided to me. There are cases where appeasement is precisely the right policy, and it may be that Obama will obtain something of great value to the US — Russian cooperation in containing Iran — by forfeiting something of little value. I’ll do that trade all day.
Charles Krauthammer asks if we believe Congressman Wilson.
You lie? No. Barack Obama doesn’t lie. He’s too subtle for that. He . . . well, you judge.
Here with three examples within a single speech — the now-famous Obama-Wilson “you lie” address to Congress on health care — of Obama’s relationship with truth.
(1) “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits — either now or in the future,” he solemnly pledged. “I will not sign it if it adds one dime to the deficit, now or in the future. Period.”
Wonderful. The president seems serious, veto-ready, determined to hold the line. Until, notes Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, you get to Obama’s very next sentence: “And to prove that I’m serious, there will be a provision in this plan that requires us to come forward with more spending cuts if the savings we promised don’t materialize.”
This apparent strengthening of the pledge brilliantly and deceptively undermines it. What Obama suggests is that his plan will require mandatory spending cuts if the current rosy projections prove false. But there’s absolutely nothing automatic about such cuts. Every Congress is sovereign. Nothing enacted today will force a future Congress or a future president to make any cuts in any spending, mandatory or not.
Just look at the supposedly automatic Medicare cuts contained in the Sustainable Growth Rate formula enacted to constrain out-of-control Medicare spending. Every year since 2003, Congress has waived the cuts.
Mankiw puts the Obama bait-and-switch in plain language. “Translation: I promise to fix the problem. And if I do not fix the problem now, I will fix it later, or some future president will, after I am long gone. I promise he will. Absolutely, positively, I am committed to that future president fixing the problem. You can count on it. Would I lie to you?” …
Walter Williams addresses the abysmal performance of the DC school system.
Instead of President Obama addressing school students across the nation, he might have accomplished more by focusing his attention on the educational rot in schools in the nation’s capital. The American Legislative Exchange Council recently came out with their 15th edition of “Report Card on American Education: A State-by-State Analysis.” Academic achievement in no state is much to write home about but in Washington, D.C., by any measure, it approaches criminal fraud. Let’s look at the numbers.
Only 14 percent of Washington’s fourth-graders score at or above proficiency in the reading and math portions of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test. Their national rank of 51 makes them the nation’s worst. Eighth-graders are even further behind with only 12 percent scoring at or above proficiency in reading and 8 percent in math and again the worst performance in the nation. One shouldn’t be surprised by Washington student performance on college admissions tests. … In terms of national ranking, their SAT and ACT rankings are identical to their fourth- and eighth-grade rankings — dead last.
Washington’s political and education establishment might excuse these outcomes by arguing that because most students are black, the schools are underfunded and overcrowded. Let’s look at such a claim. During the 2006-07 academic year, expenditures per pupil averaged $13,848 compared to a national average of $9,389. That made Washington’s per pupil expenditures the third highest in the nation coming in behind New Jersey ($14,998) and New York ($14,747). Washington’s teacher-student ratio is 13.9 compared with the national average of 15.3 students per teacher, ranking 18th in the nation. What about teacher salaries? Washington’s teachers are the highest paid in the nation, having an average annual salary of $61,195 compared with the nation’s average $46,593. Despite the academic performance of Washington’s students, they have a graduation rate of 61 percent compared to the national average of 70 percent. …
…The staunchest opponents of school choice are hypocrites. They want, demand and can afford school choice for themselves but for others not so affluent school choice it is a different matter. President and Mrs. Barack Obama enrolled their two daughters in Washington’s most prestigious Sidwell Friends School, forking over $28,000 a year for each girl. Whilst senator from Illinois, the Obama’s enrolled their girls in the University of Chicago’s Laboratory School, a private school in Chicago charging almost $20,000 for each girl. A Heritage Foundation survey found that 37 percent of the members of the House of Representatives and 45 percent of senators in the 110th Congress sent their children to private schools. Public school teachers enroll their own children in nonpublic schools to a much greater extent than the general public, in some cases four and five times greater. In Cincinnati, about 41 percent of public school teachers send their children to nonpublic schools. In Chicago it is 38 percent, Los Angeles 24 percent, New York 32 percent, and Philadelphia 44 percent. The behavior of public school teachers is quite suggestive. It’s like my offering to take you to a restaurant and you find out that neither the chef nor the waiters eat there. That suggests they have some inside information from which you might benefit. …
We open a discussion of the racism charges thrown about lately with a Corner post by Abby Thernstrom. Abby points out this is getting seriously ugly. Pickerhead thinks one of our proudest moments as a nation is about to be hijacked in a way that will guarantee it will never happen again.
… It’s a sad and dangerous moment in American politics. As Stanford law professor Richard Thompson Ford has written, “self-serving individuals, rabble-rousers, and political hacks use accusations of racism . . . to advance their own ends.” Those accusations provoke “resentment rather than thoughtful reaction.”
Is that what Democrats want? The American public did not and would not have elected a Jesse Jackson figure. And yet the Jackson voice in the Congressional Black Caucus and some MSM circles is alive and well. Surely the president has to be thinking, with such friends, who needs enemies?
Disown them, Barack.
The editors at the National Review tear Jimmy Carter to shreds for his disrespectful attitude towards Americans who disagree with Carter’s views.
Jimmy Carter now has done to his ex-presidency what he did to his presidency, which is to say that he has, through his incessant moral preening, converted mere incompetence into something more unseemly. Mr. Carter thunders that those who oppose President Obama’s plans to nationalize the health-care industry, and those who oppose other elements of the president’s agenda, are doing so for reasons of racism. …
…“That racism inclination still exists,” Carter says, “And I think it’s bubbled up to the surface because of the belief among many white people, not just in the South but around the country, that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country. It’s an abominable circumstance, and it grieves me and concerns me very deeply.” We suspect it would grieve him more if he had no such abominable tactics of which to avail himself. And Carter of all people knows that racism does not explain Americans’ distaste for overweening liberalism: He’s the white guy who lost 44 states to Reagan. …
…The inescapable conclusion is that Mr. Carter has defective judgment. We already knew that: We’ve known it since he clenched his fist and proclaimed energy conservation the “moral equivalent of war” while clad in a sweater. We’ve known it since his disastrous economic policies further impoverished the poor while he smugly posed as their champion. And he has gone from hammering nails into Habitat for Humanity houses to hammering what remains of his reputation to smithereens. The nation was poorer for his presidency and is poorer still for his emeritus shenanigans
Peter Wehner describes what lies beneath the angry liberal mindset.
According to Jimmy Carter’s libel against opponents of Barack Obama, “an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is black man.” This reminds us once again of what a pathetic and mean-spirited figure Mr. Carter has become. But it is also evidence of how unhinged and desperate many liberals and some within the Democratic party are becoming. The hatred and fury that consumed them during the Bush years is returning with a vengeance. It turns out that the cause of their derangement during the Bush years may not have been Bush after all; he may simply have been the object of their crazed attacks. …
…They see support for Obama’s effort to nationalize our health-care system collapsing. They see the American people rising up against his brand of liberalism. They see Republicans with all the intensity on their side. They see GOP candidates leading in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races. They see the popularity of their majority leader, Harry Reid, cratering. They see the Republican party drawing almost even with Democrats on issues like health care—and surging ahead of Democrats on many other issues. They see a dangerous loss of support for Obama among independents and the elderly. They see, in short, what the respected political analyst Charlie Cook sees:
The president’s ratings plummet; his party loses its advantage on the generic congressional ballot test; the intensity of opposition-party voters skyrockets; his own party’s voters become complacent or even depressed; and independent voters move lopsidedly away. These were the early-warning signs of past wave elections. Seeing them now should terrify Democrats.
Many liberals simply cannot process this new data, this horrible turn of events. What we are seeing is the equivalent of a computer crash. As a result, they are returning to what has become for some liberals an emotional and psychological norm: anger and fury, overheated and reckless charges, bitterness and pettiness. …
Peter Wehner also posted a number of examples of disrespectful comments directed at Bush, and ends with these thoughts:
…There is a huge, glaring double standard that is at play here. It was open season on Bush when he was president—and the press uttered hardly a word of concern about incivility and, especially, about venomous charges directed against a sitting American president. Back then it was just the routine stuff of politics. And to the degree that anyone was responsible for the incivility, it was said to be Bush (who never, in my recollection, called his critics liars, as Obama has). Yet now that Barack Obama is in office, the press—many of whom have a deep, emotional attachment to Obama and his success—are outraged by incivility directed against a sitting American president.
Presidents should hardly be above criticism, and our public debate should be passionate, vigorous, rigorous, and engaged. It’s fine, and it can even be enlightening, to challenge the facts, interpretations, and premises of those with whom you disagree. But there are lines we ought not to cross, especially when it comes to the office of the presidency. It is an institution we Americans should treat with respect and not undermine. I believe that Representative Joe Wilson crossed that line and that what he did was wrong, and I’m glad he apologized. But many Democrats—far more prominent and influential than Joe Wilson—repeatedly crossed that line during the Bush years and went beyond what Wilson said, often in premeditated ways, and in almost every instance no apology was issued afterward. Yet the press did not much care about decorum during the pre-Obama presidency. It does now. I suspect most people understand why. For many, though certainly not all, journalists and commentators, it has little to do with the etiquette of democracy and a lot to do with political preferences and ideological predispositions. The fact that the media was so silent before makes their howls of protest now sound contrived. It is little wonder that the media as an institution is so deeply mistrusted.
Victor Davis Hanson predicts that using cries of racism to deflect reasonable opposition will have negative consequences for liberals.
In the wake of Joe Wilson’s crude outburst, many network commentators (and Jimmy Carter, of course) are weighing in on the new racism that supposedly explains 1) rising opposition to Obamacare and 2) the president’s sinking polls. I think this is a disastrous political move to save a health-care plan that simply has not appealed to a majority of Americans. I suspect it will result in another 5-point poll slide. …
How does this look to the left in England? Janet Daley posts in her blog at the Daily Telegraph site.
Jimmy Carter has made an outrageous, unfounded and potentially inflammatory remark about race. He has claimed that a great proportion of the vitriolic opposition to President Obama’s health reforms and spending plans are actually motivated by racial hatred: that this president is being attacked not for his policies but for his colour. He offers no evidence for this extraordinary assertion presumably because there is none. …
…George Bush was reviled in the most blood-curdling terms by large sections of the American population: did anyone ever claim that this was because he was a Texan? …Americans have profound fears about central government taking power away from individual citizens and those fears are legitimised by the Constitution. They have every right to express them without being smeared as “racists”.
Frank Fleming of Pajamas Media tries to understand why liberals are still so crazy angry.
The liberals were crazy angry while George W. Bush was president. Part of it was that for a time after 9/11, they were made completely irrelevant — when people are dying, who is going to listen to a liberal?
But another part of it is that it’s much easier to hate a person than to hate a concept — like conservatism. So they were able to channel all their hate into President Bush. And they were jumping-around-pooh-flinging-biting-each-other angry. I think a number of conservatives were secretly looking forward to the Obama presidency in hopes that liberals might just calm down a little. Maybe they’d even consider supporting the troops in their war efforts for a change. At least, maybe they would be a bit less angry.
Big miscalculation.
Now conservatives have more reason to be angry these days, with liberals in charge and all the spending and government takeovers. But with Democrats having complete control of the government, you’d think liberals could be dismissive of conservatives and be calm themselves. But no, they’re still crazy angry. Maybe even angrier than before. Biting-fingers-off angry. They’re screeching about how all the people opposed to Obama are racists and neo-Nazis and stupid, and they’re using sexual slurs against protesters and boycotting everyone who disagrees with them. They’re still nuts, but why? …