Health Care
The Speaker of the House takes the living constitution idea to its logical limit: "Since virtually every aspect of the heath care system has an effect on interstate commerce, the power of Congress to regulate health care is essentially unlimited."
If we follow a long line of cases dating back to the New Deal era, I fear that she is not entirely wrong. In effect, the Constitution now gives the U.S. government the right to regulate all commerce, and not merely interestate commerce, as the government has defined non-interstate commerce out of existence.
On the other hand, just because our national government no longer is restrained by any limits with regard to what problems it may tackle, that does not mean there are no limits to the means it might use. I am fairly certain the Speaker would object to racial discrimination in the provision of health care. In that sense the right of the U.S. government to regulate health care is limited. That leaves the constitutionality of an individual mandate to buy health insurance an open question, at least in principle. Is such a mandate a constitutional means to what is now, for all practical constitutional purposes, a legal end?
(H/T: Mary Katherine Ham)
Politics
Is an old problem, says Angelo Codevilla in a recent article on American foreign policy:
The East European system that Obama scrapped was not terribly valuable militarily because its components, high-tech ground-based radars, computers, and optically guided interceptors, had been crippled congenitally to provide strictly marginal protection against just a few medium-range Iranian missiles. Had the radar not had its field of view restricted, and had the system used the long-range interceptors now deployed in Alaska, in meaningful numbers instead of a token 10 newly developed shorter-range ones, it would have been able to defend America as well as Europe against missiles from anywhere in Eurasia, including Iran. But because using the technology to its proper effect would have defended against Russia as well, the Bush administration crippled it at conception and Obama aborted it.
For the same reason, the system that Obama proposed substituting, based on the Navy's excellent AEGIS computers and interceptors, is similarly crippled. It has always been clear that were the AEGIS interceptors programmed and launched on the basis of information from satellites, they could easily defend against warheads in late midcourse coming from anywhere. But, to make sure AEGIS cannot possibly defend America against Russia, administration after administration has restricted AEGIS interceptors to information (except for terminal homing) provided by the ship's radar. . . .
These are but the least examples of how the U.S. government, whose ideology is set by the left and whose practices are shaped by bureaucratic self-interest, has trumped technology by distorting its applications. Defending against ballistic missiles existing at any given time is not now and has not been a technical mystery since 1958, when the U.S. Army accompanied its first IRBM test with a mock intercept by the rudimentary Nike system . . . But while technology can overcome missiles and warheads, it cannot dent the "scientific technological elite's" (recall Eisenhower's warning) self-interest in current programs. Nor can it affect the left's proclivities. And so billions of dollars plus wonders in computers, miniaturization, infrared sensors, optics, and lasers have produced only devices such as our Alaska-based radars and interceptors that apply new technology to 1950s notions of missile defense and are deployed in token quantities, or in devices conceived for exemplary impotence.
For an example of technical crippling, look at something originally called THEL (Tactical High Energy Laser) and later Skyguard, intended to defend northern Galilee against terrorist Katyusha rockets. Cobbled together starting in 1996 from parts of the U.S. space laser program, by 1998 the prototype was blowing up Katyushas, in flight at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico. Building the ground-based version involved far more technical complications than developing the space version in the first place: while the space version needed to move only a few degrees to track distant ICBMs, the ground version's pointer-tracker had to move fast and far to deal with nearby Katyushas, and while the space version used the negative pressures of space to turn chemical combustion into light, the ground version had to produce vacuum exhausts for each shot. It took a lot of work to turn a weapon capable of defending against ballistic missiles from anywhere to anywhere into one that serves very limited purposes.
Literature, Poetry, and Books
Political Philosophy
Politics
Has anyone seen a good article about the relative safety of government and private sector jobs in the recent economic umpleasantness? I found on for the United Kingdom indicating, "The number of people signing on for unemployment benefits rose by 138,000 last month - the fastest rate since 1971. Meanwhile, jobs and pay are still rising in the public sector."
I assume that the situation is similar in the U.S., as this graph suggests, but don't recall any good stories. A cynic would say that the stimulus package was designed primarily to save the jobs of unionized, government eployees. But how sustainable can that model be?
P.S. Is this connected to the he-session, as some are starting to call it. Men are more likely to have lost their jobs of late than have women.
Men and Women
Politics
Journalism
About a year ago I was lunching with a friend who works for the New York Times, we were discussing blogs and newspapers. I said that there's much good information avialable on the web if one knows where to look. He said that there are hundreds of thousands of blogs (or some such large number). There's good information out there, but it's hard to find. By contrast, he implied, the Times brings "all the news that's fit to print" into one place. I didn't want to get into an argument, so I didn't bring up the question of whether his paper, in fact, does a fair job selecting and followig stories.
What was interesting to me was his attitude toward blogs. To him, they're all one, big, undifferentiated lump. Given that bloggers run from highly regarded, even nobel-prize winning economists to hardly educated people, that did not seem like an informed vew to me. After all, there are thousands of newspapers in the country. And we all know some are better than others. Why blogs should be any different, I have no idea.
I wonder the Times are feeling squeezed by the decline in circulation and the rise of a new medium. Beyond that, there's the loss of power and influence, about which I have blogged before.
All that was brought to mind by the revelation that someone or several people at the Times has been trolling blogs such as instapundit (and others) and leaving nasty comments. A sample (which I edit for family viewing):
OBAMA HASN'T EVEN RAISED TAXES YET YOU DUMB MOTHERF---
suddenly all these people are feeling persecuted by taxes. 'cause the money is all being handed out to black people by the black president. can we have more of them drowning their kids and trying to make it look like murder, plz?
I suppose if I were working a business that was doing great until a few years ago, but now is in decline, particuarly if it were a business that demanded much education but, as a rule, paid less than other elite jobs, I'd be rather angry too.
Presidency
Political Philosophy
"If you give them scope with the people at large or their representatives, they will destroy all equality and liberty, with the consent andacclamations of the people themselves." John Adams, 1787.
Pop Culture
The trend in elite circles. Parents who are disappointed when they have a son:
Gender disappointment is not an official psychiatric diagnosis. It's an Internet-era label, an appellation coined by women who are bitterly unhappy about their baby's gender and who can't get over it, even after their child is born. It's also a subculture, or, as Lewis says, a club. There are books on GD (Altered Dreams: Living With Gender Disappointment), herbal tonics and tablets intended to influence a child's sex, and a handful of fertility specialists who have no qualms about taking all the guesswork out of baby making. "Why not?" asks Jeffery Steinberg, MD, an Encino, California-based reproductive endocrinologist who specializes in the use of in vitro fertilization for sex selection. "We're not producing monsters; we're producing healthy babies."
Much of the talk on the GD message boards revolves around sex selection methods, ranging from various folk remedies to sperm-sorting and spinning methods (MicroSort, Ericsson) to the holy grail: in vitro fertilization with preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), a technique in which a doctor determines the gender of the embryos and transfers only those that fit the parents' request. The most popular at-home option is the Shettles method, named after the doctor who developed it and involving the exquisite timing of intercourse relative to ovulation. . . .
Some women go as far as to label their own boys as "failed sways" or "Shettles Opposites." The mother of little Caleb, writing on In-Gender, wants it known that her apple-cheeked son is "living as a MicroSort statistic": He is the unexpected result of a 92.9 percent girl sort probability that doctors gave her. The mom of three-year-old Isaac and two-year-old Isaiah, who's expecting another boy on December 15, has put a frowny-face icon next to her due date. "I hate my life," she writes. "My family is complete in reality but not in my heart." She is considering giving all three of her boys up for adoption: "I want to give them to someone who can actually love them."
P.S. I chose the label, "Pop Culture" for this one. It should be "mom and pop culture."
Presidency
Literature, Poetry, and Books
Environment
Military
Bioethics
History
That is among George Washington's pleas in the first Thanksgiving proclamation (coincidentally, also for Thursday, Nov. 26). We should thank Almighty God for, among several other carefully chosen blessings, "the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted...." That would include the Federalist Papers. Read President Lincoln's proclamation as well. We should not forget that our now traditional Thanksgiving holiday as the last Thursday in November was finally set during the Civil War. These proclamations constitute core elements of the American civil religion, which reflects and enhances our religious liberty.
UPDATE:
Here's President Obama's proclamation. It presents a misleading view of Lincoln's proclamation. Obama claims that "President Abraham Lincoln ... established our annual Thanksgiving Day to help mend a fractured Nation in the midst of civil war." Actually, the mending to be done was through a Union victory--the statesmanlike application of military force to suppress the unconstitutional rebellion. For example, the proclamation recognized the temptations a divided nation offered to ambitious foreign powers. I'm thankful he didn't change the tradition of Presidential Proclamations' echoing of the last words of the Constitution, specifying the date in Declaration of Independence years as well as in the Christian calendar.
Environment
By now, I assume everyone has read about the leaked emails showing that some scientists pressing the cause of global warming have acted more like advocates than like scientists.
I thought it would be worth linking to this piece which brings into question the famous "hockey stick" graph showing warming increasing over time. A sample:
Literature, Poetry, and Books
Men and Women
Political Philosophy
Health Care
The latest poll saying that on 38% of Americans like the bill that the Democrats leadership is pushing through Congress has generated much discssion.
Question: How popular would tort reform be? How popular would it be to allow citizens of one state to purchase their health insurance in another state?
Some key provisions of the pending legislation are probably popular, too. Why not pass a minimalist improvement instead of a comprehensive change that the people don't want? It could even have the virtue of being truly bipartisan.
Health Care
Mickey Kaus criticizes those who say health reform has to save money. Nonsense, Kaus, a rare, honest liberal on this question, says. We should willingly pay more to provide a genuing public good:
An alternative argument for health reform would say: extending generous health coverage to all citizens is part of America's social equality. We don't deny people what they need to regain their health. We don't decide that some people are worth care and others aren't, British-style. We can pay for it--it's expensive, it certainly doesn't help the deficit picture, but it's not that expensive at the moment, maybe a hundred or two extra billion a year. It's worth raising some taxes and maybe denying the affluent government retirement checks (which is not such a necessary part of social equality). If we can do some reasonable curve-bending in the long-run to bring down the cost, even better. But we're not counting on it, since so far nobody's been able to do it.
Question: do most Americans see it that way? What percentage of us agree that " extending generous health coverage to all citizens is part of America's social equality." I am fairly certain that the vast majority of Americans agree that people who really need medicine ought to get it. Do they agree that the government ought to provide it? Which level of government? And in what cases? Do most Americans think government should provide "generous health coverage" or do they think it should provide only the necessities, and think that anything above that ought to be provide for by our own savings, by insurance, and by private charity? I am not sure there is as much consensus on these issues as Kaus would like to think, especially when one puts it in a real-world framwork. How much more should we pay in taxes to provide generous health coverage, as opposed to the emergecy service we now provide? Etc. No one, and not country, can afford everything, however nice it sounds.
Presidency
Pop Culture
Foreign Affairs
Perhaps this use of Major Hasan, MD, is a satire on liberalism, but it likely is not. A few thoughts from liberal pundit Robert Wright, who argues that Hasan's behavior shows why our wars abroad will lead to more violence on our soil:
"The Fort Hood shooting, then, is an example of Islamist terrorism being spread partly by the war on terrorism."
"The American right and left reacted to 9/11 differently. Their respective responses were, to oversimplify a bit: 'kill the terrorists' and 'kill the terrorism meme.'" [Wright plays off the notion of an Internet meme, while preserving the notion of a belief system.]
"It's true that Major Hasan was unbalanced and alienated -- and, by my lights, crazy. But what kind of people did conservatives think were susceptible to the terrorism meme?"
"That's a reminder that, contrary to right-wing stereotype, Islam isn't an intrinsically belligerent religion."
"The more Americans denigrate Islam and view Muslims in the workplace with suspicion, the more likely the virus is to spread...."
He's partly right on the last point, but the rest is beyond satire. According to Wright, we're in a war against a "meme." In such a struggle, it should please Wright no end that an Internet-savvy post-modern author is our Commander-in-Chief. (Incidentally, that's pronounced "meem"--not "me-me.") The liberal foreign policy chant (or meme) is to think the enemy may be crazy (and therefore unstoppable but not "intrinsically belligerent"). Does Wright stop to think that maybe 9/11 occurred because the terrorists thought we would be psychologically incapable of defending ourselves?
Environment
Foreign Affairs
Journalism
I understand, indeed share, conservative frustration about the reluctance of Attorney General Holder to investigate Acorn and other supporters of the Democratic Party, but Andrew Breibart goes too far when he says Holder must investiage them or else:
Not only are there more tapes, it's not just ACORN. And this message is to Attorney General Holder: I want you to know that we have more tapes, it's not just ACORN, and we're going to hold out until the next election cycle, or else if you want to do a clean investigation, we will give you the rest of what we have, we will comply with you, we will give you the documentation we have from countless ACORN whistleblowers who want to come forward but are fearful of this organization and the retribution that they fear that this is a dangerous organization. So if you get into an investigation, we will give you the tapes; if you don't give us the tapes, we will revisit these tapes come election time.
It's not the place of a private citizen, even a combative, guerilla journalist, to talk like that.
Health Care
Charles Krauthammer asks what's the big deal about the possibility that the new national health pannel will recommend not paying for mammograms for women under fifty. They might be right on the science, he notes:
And the problem here is a mammogram is extremely inaccurate. One in ten tests which are returned as cancer are not, so you have a 10 percent false positive, which causes not just anxiety and suffering, but new tests, more [diagnostic] radiation, even a [surgical] procedure, and perhaps other harms.
I won't debate science with Dr. Krauthammer. More interesting to me is his belief that the creation of such a pannel is no big deal:
People are reacting as if we never had a panel or a recommendation before. Years before, we had a recommendation from a panel like this who said start at age 40. Every day the FDA is deciding this new drug is a good one or not -- and if it's not, you don't ever see it.
So it is not as if these kinds of independent commissions don't exist and determine what we get and what we don't. So the issue here is not panels in general or recommendations in general, it's the recommendation in and of itself.
Perhaps. I suspect, however, that Krauthammer is only half correct. On one hand, such independent agencies have become relatively common in the U.S., at all levels of government. Even so, Americans still find them frustrating and often chafe against them. (I would even suggest that part of the frustration we saw in the elections of 2006 and 2008 was due to frustration at such extra-democratic agencies). I would also suggest that was still don't have a constitutional theory, other than the vague idea that the constitution "evolves" which justifies such agencies. Americans still don't like the delegation of legislative power, even if it has, in fact, become part of our government.
Health Care
Foreign Affairs
Regarding the major global security decision before the two countries today, Kissinger said that troop levels in Afghanistan needed to reflect the conditions on the ground and what is at stake. We must act before we are confronted with far greater challenges. We must not allow Pakistan to become a failed state. If Pakistan should become a failed state, the crisis will quickly spread to India, with its large Muslim population and history of conflicts among groups.
Health Care
Mickey Kaus, who seems to like the idea, alerts us to the extreme delegations of legislaive authority in the latest health care bills:
In general, there is an independent panel ("IMAB"), and if Congress does nothing, its cost-cutting rules take effect. Indeed, its rules take effect unless Congress acts to repudiate it and the President signs on to that repudiation. If that doesn't happen--if Congress doesn't pass what is in effect a new piece of legislation--the panel's rules are implemented, just like the Fed's rules
Kaus points us to a column by David Broder from last summer complaining about such a panel.
If President Obama has his way, another such unelected authority will be created -- a manager and monitor for the vast and expensive American health-care system. As part of his health-reform effort, he is seeking to launch the Independent Medicare Advisory Council, or IMAC, a bland title for a body that could become as much an arbiter of medicine as the Fed is of the economy or the Supreme Court of the law. . . .
But Congress will have to decide if it is willing to yield that degree of control to five unelected IMAC commissioners. And Americans will have to decide if they are comfortable having those commissioners determine how they will be treated when they are ill.
Such is the poverty of our constitutinal discourse that the "dean of the Washington press corps" does not even consider whether such a delegation is constituional. Of course, as I have noted before, once one says that the constitution is a living document, anything might be constitutional.
Politics
While he was abroad, there was a palpable sense at home of something gone wrong. A critical mass of influential people who once held big hopes for his presidency began to wonder whether they had misjudged the man. Most significant, these doubters now find themselves with a new reluctance to defend Obama at a phase of his presidency when he needs defenders more urgently than ever.
Drew goes on to say many more harsh things related to what we can learn by the cashiering of White House counsel Greg Craig. This comes on the heels of a similarly harsh judgment from another establishment oracle, David Gergen, a couple days ago. Gergen compares Obama's trip to China to JFK's weak performance in the 1961 Vienna summit with Khrushchev, which had disastrous results:
Why bring up that story now, as President Obama comes home from Asia? Because it has considerable relevance to his meetings in China with President Hu. Obama went into those sessions like Kennedy: with great hope that his charm and appeal to reason - qualities so admired in the United States - would work well with Hu. By numerous accounts, that is not at all what happened: reports from correspondents on the scene are replete with statements that Hu stiffed the President, that he rejected arguments about Chinese human rights and currency behavior while scolding the U.S. for its trade policies, and that he stage-managed the visit so that Obama - unlike Clinton and Bush before him - was unable to reach a large Chinese audience through television.
UPDATE: Oops! I see Peter is on to the same Gergen story below, with much the same point. But wait! My time-stamp is earlier than his. Another internet mystery.
Presidency
Politics
Politics
Pop Culture
Journalism
From the first page of today's Wall Street Journal: "The U.S. lags far behind other nations in paid leave and other work benefits, a study at Harvard and McGill found."
Would it not be more objective to say: "The U.S. has different laws than other nations about paid leave and other work benefits," or even, "U.S. policymakers disagree with ther counterparts in other nations about what paid leave and other work benefits ought to be."
The Journal's version is only fair and balanced if one believes that "progress" is always in the direction of socialism.
Elections
Literature, Poetry, and Books
James Collins makes the case that "[T]o write brilliant novels was not Jane Austen's foremost goal: What was most important to her was to provide moral instruction." He concludes, "Jane Austen's principles are of transcendent value, they are not 'priggish,' and her novels illustrate and advocate a way of being in the world that is ethical, sensitive and practical."
Education
Pop Culture
Elections
Health Care
Over in England, the government is taking children away from their parents and putting them in foster care because, the government says, allowing children to be obese is a form of child abuse.
Overweight children are being placed in foster care on the grounds that they are victims of child abuse.
Experts have warned that feeding youngsters an endless diet of junk food causes serious health problems ? and should be treated in the same way as physical or sexual assault.
Dr Russell Viner, a consultant paediatrician at Great Ormond Street and University College London hospitals, said he knew of 15 cases where children had been taken from their parents because of obesity.
Environment
Politics
Education
Environment
Politics
Health Care
Ashbrook Center
Congratulations to this month's winners of a No Left Turns mug! The winners are as follows:
Robert Cunningham
Elizabeth Garvey
Dan Rosenburg
Corinne Sammartino
James Clark
Thanks to all who entered. An email has been sent to the winners. If you are listed as a winner and did not receive an email, contact Ben Kunkel. If you didn't win this month, enter November's drawing.
Pop Culture
Prior to last evening I thought Andy Ferguson's recent characterization of Bob Dylan fans as "the battered wives of the music industry" might have been over the top.
His voice gets worse with every track. You wonder whether someone left the karaoke machine on in the emphysema ward at the old folks' home. He doesn't sing notes so much as make exhausted gestures in their general direction, until at a break he falls silent and is rescued by the backup singers, who reestablish the melody in the proper key. But then he starts singing again.
I had just read his Chronicles and thought his remarks on Thucydides and Machiavelli, and his praise of Barry Goldwater might reflect deeper strains in his many marvelous lyrics. And so they may. But the Dylan I heard last night at George Mason University was a caricature of himself at his best (nothing up yet on Youtube).
The evening's consolation was my Beatrice (an ex-rock music journalist who is now an aspiring theologian) who led me through the Night of Hell with her witty commentary. She thought he was imitating Maurice Chevalier.
I thought he sounded like John Belushi's Samurai grunting out barely recognizable lyrics from his past. In this apotheosis Dylan was the Unreal Presence--someone who looked like the 20-year old named Dylan plus about 50 years (grinning all the way) but sounded nothing like him.
We heard none of his new Christmas album. But Ferguson is likely right about it too:
It's not a misstep. It's not a gag. It's an affront, a taunt. He's giving us a choice. He's saying, Okay, this is what it's come to: You've got two options. You can cover your ears and go running from the room in horror, or you can call me an enigmatic genius who's daring to plumb heretofore unexplored archetypes of the American imagination. But you can't do both.
Addendum: Here's a clip from the November 11 concert. The WaPo's description of his concert is as reliable as Pravda's Cold-War reporting on the West: Reading between the lines brings the truth to light, for example:
Dylan tours endlessly, turning up at a half-full arena or a minor league ballpark near you again and again, as if to prove he's no sage, just an itinerant song-and-dance-man. Though late-period albums like "Time Out of Mind" and "Love and Theft" have evinced a creative renewal, he's often been erratic, even indifferent onstage. Still, there's something noble in his doggedness, singing on even though thousands of shows have curdled his voice into a viscous, gut-shot croak.
Politics
Scott Johnson of Powerline recently reminded us that "Bill Buckley used to characterize a liberal as someone who wanted to reach into your shower and adjust the temperature of the water."
Today's Wall Street Journal reminds us that they also want to adjust the water. Since the 1990s, the federal government, under what provision of the constitution I'm not sure, has claimed the right to regulate our showers. "Tthe 2.5-gallon-per-minute shower head remains the legal standard." Having lived in Southern California, I can understand the need to manage the water supply. The question is how. Should it be a one-size-fits-all regulation like this? How about (in those communities where there's a shortage) charging a fixed price for the first x gallons, and then y for every gallon above that. That way each of us can decide for himself. Those who want large lawns can pay for watering them. Those who wish to take longer, stronger showers may do so. Those who wish to save money by doing one, but not the other, may do so. Etc.
Some of us may recall that Dave Barry got angry when Congress reached not only into our showers, but into our toilets as well. (The follow up column is available here).
What happened was, in 1992, Congress passed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, which declared that, to save water, all U.S. consumer toilets would henceforth use 1.6 gallons of water per flush. That is WAY less water than was used by the older 3.5-gallon models -- the toilets that made this nation great; the toilets that our Founding Fathers fought and died for -- which are now prohibited for new installations.
As Mr. Barry notes, the result has not been pretty:
Unfortunately, the new toilets have a problem. They work fine for one type of bodily function, which, in the interest of decency, I will refer to here only by the euphemistic term "No. 1." But many of the new toilets do a very poor job of handling "acts of Congress," if you get my drift.
All kidding aside, there's a political cost to such regulations teach us to have contempt for the law. "I checked this out with my local plumber, who told me that people are always asking him for 3.5-gallon toilets, but he refuses to provide them, because of the law." I know many people who quite willingly pay cleaning people cash and don't report social security. I know others who have simply ignored building codes, or, worse, filed false renovation plans for their homes when they deemed the regulations to be unreasonable. When regulations get out of hand, more and more of us become criminals because they start to force us to choose between cowing before petty authority and living comfortably. The more regulations we have, the more citizens will ignore them. (Part of the reason why President Clinton got sympathy during the impeachment trial, I suspect, is that many Americans thought he was being pursued under an unreasonable law. That he signed the very sexual harassment law that made the case possible into effect only compounds the irony).
Finally, as Philip Howard notes in his latest work, the excess of law keeps us from being free, responsible adults.
P.S. Would it be fun to create a list of things the government won't let us do in our own homes?
Foreign Affairs
Shameless Self-Promotion
Elections
Elections
Shameless Self-Promotion
Politics
Politics
Military
Conservatism
Politics
Politics
Politics
Courts
Professor Bainbridge alerts us to the latest development in the Kelo case. Pfizer is abandoning the property that the City of New London, CT took from Suzette Kelo and others and gave it to develop. Bainbriadge provides excellent analysis, including a surprise appearance by Russell Kirk. Liberal jurisprudence in action.
Politics
Pop Culture
Conservatism
Literature, Poetry, and Books
A scholar got the clever idea of collecting Alexis de Tocqueville's letters home from his nine-month stay in the U.S. Here's a sample that will make you want the whole volume.
I'd like to see someone turn Democracy in America into an opera. And evidently Tocqueville was quite a dancer, too. (No, I don't think the late Michael Jackson would have made the best Tocqueville.) But shouldn't this description of his shipboard amusement, from the new collection, be put into song?
One moonless night, for example, water began to sparkle like an electrifying machine. It was pitch black outside, and the ship's prow slicing through the sea spewed fiery foam twenty feet in either direction. To get a better view, I shimmied onto the bowsprit. From that vantage point, the prow looked as if it were leaping at me with a forward wall of glittering waves; it was sublime and admirable beyond my ability to evoke it. The solitude that reigns in the middle of the ocean is something formidable.
And like foreign visitors today, Tocqueville marveled at the huge amount of food Americans consume and complained about the lack of wine at meals. Toward the end of his journey he writes to his future wife: "If ever I become Christian, I believe that it will be through you. What I write here, Marie, is not an improvisation; these are thoughts long harbored " Did this English woman read Jane Austen?
Concluding his love letter, the Frenchman presents himself as more a man of Mars and thus a better man of Venus:
I don't know why, Marie, men are fashioned after such different models. Some foresee only pleasures in life, others only pain. There are those who see the world as a ballroom. I, on the other hand, am always disposed to view it as a battlefield on which each of us in turn presents himself for combatto receive wounds and die. This somber imagination of mine is home to violent passions that often knock me about. It has sowed unhappiness, in myself no less than in others. But I truly believe that it gives me more energy for love than other men possess.
Politics
Shameless Self-Promotion
History
The
abrupt fall of the Berlin Wall caught the West by surprise. At the White House, President George
H.W. Bush was wary of inflaming a potentially unstable situation and issued a
statement so low-key it made people wonder if he was on valium. "You don't seem elated," Leslie Stahl
said to Bush. "I'm not an
emotional kind of guy," Bush replied.
With the time difference between Europe and the U.S., the American news
media scrambled to catch up to the story.
Naturally the TV news shows began looping Reagan's call to "tear down
this wall!" ABC News reached
Ronald Reagan at home in Los Angeles, and he agreed to go on ABC's PrimeTime Live, where he appeared to be
as astonished as everyone else.
Sam Donaldson asked Reagan, "Did you think it would come this
soon?" Reagan, subdued throughout
the interview, replied, "I didn't know when it would come, but I'm an eternal
optimist, and I believed with all my heart that it was in the future." Like Bush, Reagan didn't wish to
embarrass or humiliate Gorbachev, so Reagan denied to Donaldson that he'd ever
directly spoken to Gorbachev about the Wall, though we know from subsequent
transcripts that he had.
Mostly
Reagan repeated some of his better known public themes from his Cold War
diplomacy ("trust, but verify"), but he did take a mild shot at his critics:
"Contrary to what some critics have said, I never believed that we should just
assume that everything was going to be all right." Asked to revisit his "evil empire" comment, Reagan said," I
have to tell you--I said that on purpose. . . I believe the Soviet Union needed to see and hear what we
felt about them. They needed to be
aware that we were realists." A
nice turn, suggesting that it was the anti-Communist "ideologues" who were the
true realists all along. Prompted
to revisit his 1982 prediction that Communism was headed to the "ash heap of
history," Reagan ended the interview with the short observation: "People have
had time in some 70-odd years since the Communist revolution to see that
Communism has had its chance, and it doesn't work."
But
it was the end of more than a 20th century story. Some of the East German protestors in
the streets of Leipzig in early November carried banners that read,
"1789-1989." The storming of the
Bastille in 1789 could be said to have marked the beginning of utopian
revolutionary politics; now the storming of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked its
end. As Timothy Garton Ash
observed, "Nineteen eighty-nine also caused, throughout the world, a profound
crisis of identity on what had been known since the French revolution of 1789
as 'the left.'" The deep
unpopularity of the Communist regimes revealed by the peoples of Eastern Europe
in 1989 was an embarrassment to moderate liberals and value-free social
scientists who regarded these nations as stable and legitimate forms of
governance, and it was a source of faith-shaking crisis for the far left that
openly sympathized with these regimes.
On the intellectual level the death of revolutionary socialism has found
a successor in "post-modern" philosophy that preserves some aspects of decayed
Marxism. But its obscurity limits
its power to convince, and as such is unlikely to advance beyond the barricades
of academic English departments.
Those artificial intellectual walls will take longer to come down.
Education
Health Care
Why did House Democrats approve an unpopular health care bill? Rich Lowry reports that it is because they think it was the right thing to do: "it was clear that Democrats considered it a moral and ideological obligation to pass this bill -- consequences be damned."
The real question is why they think that way. The main arguments against the bill seem to be that it expands government control over our lives, that we can't afford it, and that it quite probably will slow down medical innovation. Some also note that it's probably unconstitutional (or would be if our governing class believed in the constitution and not a "living constitution"--i.e: whatever they want it to be).
The reason why this bill cleared the House, in other words, is the same reason why our national government has been creating new hand outs since the 1930s: there does not seem to be a moral argument on the other side. Unless and until that changes, Washington will continue to grow, at ever-rising cost to our liberties.
What might such an argument look like? It would probably emphasize liberty and responsibility. When President Obama speaks about responsibility, he seems to mean the responsibility of the rich, the connected, and the well educated for the rest of us. (Our friends in Washington no longer want to make laws that allow and encourage us to be free. On the contrary, they want to take care of us. All the name of a redefined liberty--liberty from responsibility). That's not the only way to think about it. On the contrary, I would suggest that by taking away from citizens the obligation to care for their necessities, the government encourages us to be irresponsible. That has been the tragedy of Washington hand outs since the New Deal.
Cass Sunstein, President Obama's regulatory czar, suggests that government ought to nudge people to do the right thing. But what incentive do people have to be responsible when Washington takes away from the people the obligation to care for themselves? Charity ought to be as local as possible--that way it can be specific, and, hopefully, reduce the "narcotic" effects of it (to use FDR's term for the dangers of hand outs by government). When our national government (it is hardly a federal government any more) pays our medical bills, it almost inevitably will encourage us to exercise and eat right by law. That's not something I'm looking forward to.
Politics
The best news about the health care bill is that only one Republican voted for it and most moderate Democrats voted against it. Even the few moderate Democrats who were persuaded to push it over the top are saying apologetically that, of course, compromise with the Senate is bound to improve it. It's also good, of course, to see Speaker Pelosi, someone most Americans deeply distrust, gushing about her personal triumph.
What we have here, as with the stimulus package, is a failure of presidential leadership. Obama's deference to Congress has pushed his party too far to the left for its own good, united the Republicans, and pushed independents and moderates in the GOP direction. As Yuval Levin pointed out in NEWSWEEK, the Republicans are now far more united against the president than are the Democrats united with him. The moderates from the swing districts fear losing their jobs. The unapologetic liberals from the safe districts are complaining loudly that our liberal president ain't boldly liberal enough when it comes to both social issues and additional stimulation.
Now the Republicans clearly don't need to moderate themselves to get with the tide of History. They need to distinguish themselves clearly to give a real choice to voters anxious about a tide they don't really remember voting for (although in a way they did). Even genuinely left-of-center moderates don't fear right-of-center, socially conservative candidates at this point. The point now is to elect savvy antidotes to the president and especially Pelosi. Let's hope that this great opportunity--partly the result of unforced errors by our president--brings forward Republican leaders worthy of it.
Politics
Health Care
Betsy McCaughey points to some of the lowlights in the House health care bill. I was particularly struck by this bit:
Sec. 224 (p. 118) provides that 18 months after the bill becomes law, the Secretary of Health and Human Services will decide what a "qualified plan" covers and how much you'll be legally required to pay for it.
In the days before the idea of a living constitution was taken to constitutionalize whatever liberals wanted (one can always say that in light of historical changes, x must now be constitutional), there was an understanding that Congress may not delegate so much legislative power. That's why the Court, quite rightly, ruled the NIRA unconstitutional. (Thanks to the supposedly reactionary Court, the New Deal known to history is less arbitrary than it would have been had they not stepped in). If one reads the transcript of the case, one finds that the rules the New Deal created were so idiotic that they were literally laughed out of court. I hope our modern bureaucrats will be more reasonable, but doubt they will be.
Letting Congress delegate the authority to decide what is a "qualified plan" allows Congressmen to avoid responsibility. That's precisely why they're not supposed to be able to delegate such powers to quasi-executive, administrative agencies.
Economy
Political Parties
Health Care
Technology
Health Care
Health Care
Presidency
Literature, Poetry, and Books
In the NRO symposium on Barack Obama's first year, Bill Voegeli observes, "The Yankees pitcher Lefty Gomez often said, 'I'd rather be lucky than good.' One of the problems in trying to assess Barack Obama is that he has been such a lucky politician over the past six years that it's still hard to know how good he is."
This reflection calls to mind the extraordinary Charles McCarry novel, Lucky Bastard. McCarry was for many years a CIA agent, stationed abroad, and is justly hailed as the master of his genre. His hilarious 1998 spy novel recounts the career of the bastard son of John F. Kennedy, who blazes like a comet from obscurity to a serious presidential contender--aided every step along the way, from his days at Columbia University, by Soviet intelligence. David Skinner recently wrote an appreciation of McCarry's work in The Weekly Standard (subscriber only).
With his eye on John F. Adams' sexual adventures, McCarry of course had the then-incumbent president in mind. But his description of how Soviet intelligence paved the way for Jack Adams' rise reminds us how easily American media and other institutions can be swayed by shallow elite opinion. The 1998 novel is a highly instructive work for our time.
Elections
History
In honor of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial, the House of Representatives just passed a Resolution recalling the 1946 designation of Nov. 19 as "Dedication Day," when the Gettysburg Address should be read in public places. Here's a good prelude to Thanksgiving. Recall Lincoln's message designating the last Thursday in November as a national day of Thanksgiving.
Presidency
Politics
In an interview for the Wall Street Journal, National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Rocco Landesman exclaims: "The days of the defensive NEA are over!" Indeed, the offensive NEA may steal some of the Obama Administration show, as Landesman's NEA would return to giving the individual grants that encouraged so much offensive and, more to the point, trashy art. Landesman defends graffiti and hip-hop as examples of art worthy of public subsidy. See my previous posts on Landesman here and here.
Elections
Elections
Elections
Elections
Environment
Elections
Elections
Political Philosophy
Presidency
Has Obama's mask slipped or is just getting started?
George Will provides a detail about liberal bullying, by requiring disclosure of who signed petitions to validate a referendum. It is all a part of the exposure of liberalism generally: Obama is no longer the student body president but rather the schoolyard bully. But that's what contemporary liberalism has stood for as well; the masquerade as champion of the little guy/gal fell flat long ago. This underscores that deception.
Obama would use his narrative skills to further that deception. In a column titled "More Poetry Please" NY Times columnist Tom Friedman (The World is Flat) argues that Obama's poetry--his speeches--are an essential part of his political strategy of nation-building.
But to deliver this agenda requires a motivated public and a spirit of shared sacrifice. That's where narrative becomes vital. People have to have a gut feel for why this nation-building project, with all its varied strands, is so important -- why it's worth the sacrifice. One of the reasons that independents and conservatives who voted for Mr. Obama have been so easily swayed against him by Fox News and people labeling him a "socialist" is because he has not given voice to the truly patriotic nation-building endeavor in which he is engaged....
Therefore, let there be more speeches, Friedman argues. He is spot-on, in that conservative (and especially libertarian) intellectuals often ignore the poetry that has helped make America--note for example the legal arguments offered by the Federalist Society. As sound as they may be, they do not offer the winning political argument. Even a defense of "liberty" must have a goal beyond liberty. This is the vacuum Obama would fill, but Obama's critics on the right correctly suspect what he is up to (as have those of us who have read Dreams from my Father). But Obama's failure does not add up to the triumph of the best of the American political tradition. That requires further efforts.
Pop Culture