September 25, 2014

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Roger Simon posts on this president going to war.

“You may not be interested in war,”  Comrade Trotsky supposedly said (but probably didn’t), “but war is interested in you.”  And right he was, as Barack Hussein Obama, the American president least interested in war in most of our lifetimes, possibly ever, has found himself plunged half-heartedly in the middle of it,  going to war, bombing Islamic State territories within Syria, a country he at first warned would itself be bombed for its use of chemical weapons.

Now he’s bombing on that Syrian regime’s side and also acting in behalf of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a nation we are supposedly trying to prevent from obtaining nuclear weapons, but there you have it.  The brutalities of ISIS, ISIL, the Islamic State, call it what you will, trumped all.

Quelle ironie, mon vieux.

No doubt Obama would have rather been marching with “climate” demonstrators in New York, but that’s the way things turned out.  Trotsky’s curse prevailed. …

 

 

Bret Stephens says, “Every president gets things wrong. What sets Obama apart is his ideological rigidity and fathomless ignorance.” 

Serious people feel an obligation to listen whenever Barack Obama speaks. They furrow their brow and hold their chin and parse every word. They assume that most everything a president says is significant, which is true. They assume that what’s significant must also be well-informed. Not necessarily.

I’ve been thinking about this as it becomes clear that, even at an elementary level, Mr. Obama often doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It isn’t so much his analysis of global events that’s wrong, though it is. The deeper problem is the foundation of knowledge on which that analysis is built.

Here, for instance, is Mr. Obama answering a question posed in August by New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who wanted the president’s thoughts on the new global disorder.

“You can’t generalize across the globe,” the president replied. “Because there are a bunch of places where good news keeps on coming. Asia continues to grow . . . and not only is it growing but you’re starting to see democracies in places like Indonesia solidifying.”

“The trend lines in Latin America are good,” he added. “Overall, there’s still cause for optimism.”

Here, now, is reality: In Japan, the economy is contracting. China’s real-estate market is a bubble waiting to burst. Indonesia’s democracy may be solidifying, but so is Islamism and the persecution of religious minorities. Democracy has been overthrown in Thailand. The march toward freedom in Burma—supposedly one of Mr. Obama’s (and Hillary Clinton‘s ) signature diplomatic victories—has stalled. India may do better than before under its new prime minister, Narendra Modi, but gone are the days when serious people think of India as a future superpower. The government of Pakistan is, as ever, on the verge of collapse. …

 

 

Andrew Malcolm on the new tax inversion rules.

Lurching on to the new week’s next news diversion, the Obama administration announced new regulations Monday to punish U.S. businesses that employ Americans, make profits and seek to protect the gains for shareholders, as is their fiduciary responsibility.

The over-hyped administration moves came against so-called business inversions, a perfectly legal pro forma shift of corporate headquarters to a foreign country with corporate taxes lower than the United States’ confiscatory 35% rate. The goal was to crimp the economic appeal of such moves.

Although Russia and North Korea would not be recommended, the money-saving headquarters shift could actually go to any other country in the world because the United States’ corporate tax rate is the highest of any on the planet.

The new regulations, which take effect immediately and may be followed by others that are retroactive, have all the earmarks of a classic Barack Obama initiative: They’re late. They mean much less than they appear (think sanctions on Russia and Iran). They pit a faceless group of alleged wrongdoers against the middle class being defended by guess-who in the White House.

The entire problem is the fault of Congress, which happens to be out of session now. It suddenly requires urgent unilateral executive action by guess-who in the White House, who hasn’t done anything significant either about corporate tax reform during any of his 2,072 days in office. …

 

 

The following pull quote is from an address by Kevin Williamson to a meeting of the Heritage Foundation. It contains an erudite thought about the difficulty of controlling human behavior. It would be nice if there was a cogent essay around it, but there really was not. However, it provides food for thought.

… Aristotle believed that man is a “political animal,” while some market-oriented thinkers are criticized for reducing man to a profit-seeking animal, homo economicus. Kenneth Burke understood man as the language-using animal. It is perhaps better simply to begin with an understanding of man as animal. Even under the most exalted conceptions of man — as creature made in the image of God, as possessor of free will — man is nonetheless subject to the same animal pressures as is a kangaroo or a honeybee. Our bodies are the product of evolution, and so are our behaviors, including — especially — our social behaviors. Although it is dangerously easy to make too much of any specific body of work in fields such as psychiatric genetics and evolutionary psychology, they do point to a fact that is critical for understanding our public-policy discourse at something more than a white-hats/black-hats level: Culture is not outside of biology. Culture does not stand apart from biology, interacting with our evolved natures like an exasperated master trying to train an unruly pet. Perhaps Glenn Loury’s famous observation should be amended: Conservatives should not believe that human nature has no history — only that it has a very, very long one, one in which changes are not measured in lifetimes or generations but in eons. Human nature may be open to renegotiation, but not on any timeline that a politician or a philosopher could work with. For the purposes of politics, human nature is effectively immutable.

While the biologists are giving us good reason to be extremely modest in our expectations for the project of attempting to manage man, the mathematicians have done what seems to me irreparable damage to the belief that complex human systems can be managed, flown by remote control from Congress or the White House, a belief that is increasingly difficult to distinguish from a superstition. The scientific study of complex adaptive systems such as markets has taken Ludwig von Mises’s philosophical critique of central planning and developed a formidable body of knowledge that suggests a much more general and sweeping understanding of Mises’s underlying principle. Even a relatively simple economic activity — say, the cultivation and sale of wheat — is far too complex to be comprehended, anticipated, or managed by any bureaucracy, agency, or committee, no matter how intelligent and well-meaning its agents, no matter how well-equipped and incentivized they may be.

F. A. Hayek warned us against the “pretense of knowledge.” But the fact is that our public-policy debate is broadly organized around that very pretense, which is practically an article of faith.

Reality is remorselessly wearing away at the planners’ pretense. In 2008, the best and brightest in Washington, who believe themselves to be among the most intelligent and powerful men and women in the world, stood by helplessly as their ambitions were done in by the very houses in which we live, like cells turning against the body as cancer. Washington’s response was to apply to health care the same effective management it had brought to housing policy, executing its program with approximately the ineptitude that one might have expected. …

  

 

David Harsanyi reacts to Lois Lerner’s interview in Politico.

Lois Lerner. Hero. Servant. Brownie-baking puppy lover. Sister of the Blessed State.

This is about all a person reading Politico’s new exclusive “interview” with the former head of the I.R.S. division that oversees tax-exempt groups, might take away. “I didn’t do anything wrong” claims Lerner, who, like any innocent person, is flanked by a major law firm’s partner, two personal attorneys and her husband – a lawyer. “I’m proud of my career and the job I did for this country.” And in around 3,700 obsequious words, Politico seems to agree. …

… Remember: A U.S. District Court judge had to force the IRS to tell the court what happened to Lerner’s hard drive. It was only then that the IRS told investigators that Lerner’s hard drive – with most of her emails – had crashed in 2011. With no way to retrieve them. Then, only after the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and groups like Judicial Watch used FIOA were pushing to find Lerner’s emails – which we’re to believe are completely innocuous – a deputy associate chief counsel of the IRS, said (in an affidavit) that Lerner’s Blackberry had been “wiped clean” and thrown our as “scrap for disposal in June 2012.” This, after everyone knew what had happened.

Lerner scoffed at the notion that she would crash her own computer to hide emails: “How would I know two years ahead of time that it would be important for me to destroy emails, and if I did know that, why wouldn’t I have destroyed the other ones they keep releasing?”

Perhaps, and this is just a guess, being a lawyer you understood that illegal – or possibly just unprofessional and hyper-political – contents were in those emails. Why didn’t you destroy them all? Maybe you couldn’t destroy everything. Maybe you’re lazy about cover-ups. Maybe you missed some. Maybe you’re incompetent. Surely, Congress and media suspicious reporters could come up an array of questions that might illuminate the situation. The only conceivable reason, after all, that Lerner won’t talk to Congress or the media is because she is faced with the unenviable choice of lying or fessing up to something. Not that you’d know any of that reading Politico’s puff piece.

What I did learn, though, was that Lerner gets revolting emails from some random people. So please reserve your empathy for her, dog-lover and public servant, rather than groups that were denied the right to participate in the political process because of her actions.

 

 

Michael Barone with another example of IRS abuse of the public.

For those of you who thought the Internal Revenue Service was only interested in squelching the free speech rights of organizations supporting conservatives, here’s something even more disturbing.

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy blog, Georgetown law professor Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz reports that on Jan. 20, 2012, the IRS revised its BOLO (“Be On the Lookout”) list to include “political action type organizations involved in . . . educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights.” He notes that the targeted organizations included Linchpins of Liberty in Tennessee, the Spirit of Freedom Institute in Wyoming and the Constitutional Organization of Liberty in Pennsylvania.

“There may have been many more,” he adds.

The thinking at the IRS apparently is that we can’t have people educating others on inconvenient issues like the First Amendment’s freedom of political expression, the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms or Article II’s requirement that the president faithfully execute the laws. Pretty dangerous stuff!

This should, of course, generate intense interest in the mainstream media. Let’s see if it does.

 

 

The left media is pretending to find differences between this new bombing campaign and Bush’s. James Taranto catches their corrections and deletions.

Twitchy.com reports that Josh Lederman, a White House correspondent for the Associated Press, tweeted this bit of puffery last night: “Involvement of 5 Arab nations in Syria airstrikes a major foreign policy win for Obama. Also helps him distinguish from Bush’s Iraq War.” Lederman later deleted the tweet.

The New York Times went a step further, today publishing this fabulous correction:

An article on Sept. 11 about President Obama’s speech to the nation describing his plans for a military campaign against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, gave an incorrect comparison between efforts by the president to seek allies’ support for his plans and President George W. Bush’s efforts on such backing for the Iraq war. The approach Mr. Obama is taking is similar to the one Mr. Bush took; it is not the case that, “Unlike Mr. Bush in the Iraq war, Mr. Obama has sought to surround the United States with partners.”

The story, written by Mark Landler, now says only that “the president drew a distinction between the military action he was ordering and the two wars begun by his predecessor,” and it doesn’t quite spell out what the distinction was except to describe the current action as “selective airstrikes.”

How could it take the Times 12 days to formulate this correction? Presumably it’s not that the original story has been overtaken by events; you don’t run a correction unless the story was mistaken at the time. There must have been a lot of deliberation among the editors over just how to handle this.

The final correction is quite remarkable. The Times now asserts, as a simple matter of fact, that “the approach Mr. Obama is taking is similar to the one Mr. Bush took.” A corollary is that the distinction the story originally drew is simply wrong as a matter of fact. …

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