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The president said we’re not ”some banana republic.” Mark Steyn reacts.
This is the United States of America,” declared President Obama to the burghers of Liberty, Mo., on Friday. “We’re not some banana republic.”
He was talking about the Annual Raising of the Debt Ceiling, which glorious American tradition seems to come round earlier every year. “This is not a deadbeat nation,” President Obama continued. “We don’t run out on our tab.” True. But we don’t pay it off either. We just keep running it up, ever higher. And every time the bartender says, “Mebbe you’ve had enough, pal,” we protest, “Jush another couple trillion for the road. Set ’em up, Joe.” And he gives you that look that kinda says he wishes you’d run out on your tab back when it was $23.68.
Still, Obama is right. We’re not a banana republic, if only because the debt of banana republics is denominated in a currency other than their own — i.e., the U.S. dollar. When you’re the guys who print the global currency, you can run up debts undreamt of by your average generalissimo. As Obama explained in another of his recent speeches, “Raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times, does not increase our debt.” I won’t even pretend to know what he and his speechwriters meant by that one, but the fact that raising the debt ceiling “has been done over a hundred times” does suggest that spending more than it takes in is now a permanent feature of American government. And no one has plans to do anything about it. Which is certainly banana republic-esque. …
Joel Kotkin says there is bipartisan distrust of the government. Is this a glimmer of hope?
Much has been written and spoken about the deep divide between “red” and “blue” America, but the real chasm increasingly is between Washington and the rest of the country. This disconnect may increase as both conservatives and liberals outside the Beltway look with growing disdain upon their “leaders” inside the imperial capital. Indeed, according to Gallup, trust among Americans toward the federal government has sunk to historic lows, regarding both foreign and domestic policy.
The debate over Syria epitomizes this division. For the most part, Washington has been more than willing to entertain another military venture. This includes the Democratic policy establishment. You see notables like Anne Marie Slaughter and the New York Times’ Bill Keller join their onetime rivals among the neoconservative right in railing against resurgent “isolationism” on the Right.
Yet some people, like the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol, who pushed for our disaster in Iraq, now insist that turning away from a Syrian involvement would be “disastrous for the nation in very clear ways.”
Yet, out in the country, where people, even those who (like me) supported Iraq initially, know that that war was not worth the price, in blood, treasure or damage to national unity. The citizens are not remotely interested in getting a second shot of neoconservative disaster in Syria. A recent CNN poll found that seven in 10 would oppose attacking Bashar al-Assad’s regime without congressional approval, which about 60 percent think Congress should not give.
This is not a partisan consensus, but an outside-the-Beltway one. Liberals, who might be expected to rally behind their president, have remained deeply divided. At the grass-roots level, both left-wing groups, like Moveon.org, and those on the right, notably Tea Party factions, have opposed entering the Syrian quagmire. One liberal writer, utterly confused by the new alignment, admitted he was looking to the “far-right fringe” with its “abominable” nativist and racist views, to “salvage our Syria policy.” …
Juan Williams of Fox News asks why the administration wants to send poor black kids back to failing schools. Because they’re owned by the teachers’ unions, Juan. And the teachers unions have no interest in serving the students.
The Obama Justice Department filed a civil rights lawsuit last month to stop Louisiana from giving vouchers to poor students in failing schools. The Justice Department claims that the vouchers disrupt racial balance in schools.
School integration remains important. But the Justice Department’s argument is weak at best.
At the two schools cited in the Justice Department suit there is no evidence that racial diversity has been hurt because of the voucher plan.
One is a school in which a white majority school lost black students. In the other example, a black majority school lost white students. But in both schools the use of vouchers resulted in less than one percent difference in the racial make-up of the schools.
In addition, 90 percent of the students receiving the vouchers are black students from families with incomes less than 250 percent of the poverty line. The voucher plan is not a return to the days of white flight from public schools.
And there is an even more important issue than school integration at stake: How can the Justice Department justify denying poor black students, the people with the lowest achievement record in U.S. schools, the rare chance to get out of failing schools and go to better schools? More than 80 percent of students in the voucher plan had attended poorly performing schools, rated ‘D’ or ‘F.’ …