Immigration Ain't That Easy

I've got a window full of tabbed articles I will never have the time to write about. So you're going to get them in linked bullet points.

• First, a little bit of classic Mark Steyn. From 2003. His characterization of Democrats resonates and truly today as it did back then.

• This blogger's favorite columnist, Bret Stephens, had a piece in the latest Foreign Affairs magazine about President Obama's Middle East policy. It is fantastic, natch.

• Stephens also wrote a column about the importance of truthful history. As you can imagine, this one resonates with me.

• Public intellectual, Rush Limbaugh, wrote a piece for the WSJ wherein he defended the Tea Party movement against their media antagonists. Given liberal hysteria and hyperbole in response to AZ immigration law, this one is timely. (Mind you, I'm not saying I agree with AZ policy, just pointing out liberal hypocrisy.)

• Daniel Henninger documents the massive shift in public opinion away from Obama's vision of America and towards a more limited vision of the role of government. This shift has occurred in a very short period of time. Like, a year.

• This is the Bret Stephens show. This time he takes aim at the idea of "peace processes" which are, of course, a friggin' joke. Stephens (I think rightly) calls those who derive benefit therefrom "wicked."

• When it comes to immigration, I tend toward the WSJ line rather than the National Review one. Looks like Jonah Goldberg agrees. Also, Byron York does some good political reportage on the Arizona law particulars.

• Thomas Sowell, another favorite, on the misuse and abuse of history to serve political ends--in this instance, race and slavery.

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Post-ObamacareApocalypse: The Way Forward Friday

Unrelated: I'm not saying it's because of Obamacare's passage that I'm listening to the blues, but let me tell you, Eric Bibb is fantastic. I highly recommend his album "Painting Signs." Brilliant.

First off this morning, a column from earlier in the week by Richard Rahn, a senior fellow at Cato. He writes on the importance of failure--especially as it relates to regulation of financial markets--in a capitalist society. I know that the self-esteem society has infected much of our debate about practically everything, but it's important to remember that people have to be allowed to fail. Does this make me a heartless conservative? Probably. I can live with that. Better that than the alternative.

Next, a column by another one of those conservative ideologues from whom I mindlessly take my marching orders, Mark Steyn. But seriously, folks, in this column about civilizational decline, he draws important lessons from the decline of the British empire and why it wasn't bad, because America took its place, but also how if/when America declines, it will be bad because, well, who's going to take America's place? Who's going to be the benevolent hegemon, allowing the rest of the world to free ride on its guarantee of peace and prosperity? The hard lesson is that there isn't anyone else.

Lastly, a bit of optimism in the form of a look at Paul Ryan. In case you hadn't picked up on it yet, I'm a big fan of the guy. He singlehandedly took on the economically ignorant progressives on the House Budget Committee. Some have called him "Jack Kemp on steroids." Before all you deficit hawks get your panties in a bunch over that comment and the hypocrisy of conservative economics, let me say that unlike Kemp, Ryan is concerned about deficits and has proposed your kind of policy solution to what ails America. The GOP isn't just the party of no. (though if you're a small-government type, isn't that a good thing?)

FWIW, we liked Kemp because he, like Paul Ryan, was an unabashed defender and advocate of free market capitalism. There are too few of those.

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

The Beginning Of America's Decline?

Depressing that this post comes after the one about America's comeback. But as Mark Steyn put it, it's tough to be optimistic:

Well, it seems to be in the bag now. I try to be a sunny the-glass-is-one-sixteenth-full kinda guy, but it's hard to overestimate the magnitude of what the Democrats have accomplished. Whatever is in the bill is an intermediate stage: As the graph posted earlier shows, the governmentalization of health care will accelerate, private insurers will no longer be free to be "insurers" in any meaningful sense of that term (ie, evaluators of risk), and once that's clear we'll be on the fast track to Obama's desired destination of single payer as a fait accomplis.

If Barack Obama does nothing else in his term in office, this will make him one of the most consequential presidents in history. It's a huge transformative event in Americans' view of themselves and of the role of government. You can say, oh, well, the polls show most people opposed to it, but, if that mattered, the Dems wouldn't be doing what they're doing. Their bet is that it can't be undone, and that over time, as I've been saying for years now, governmentalized health care not only changes the relationship of the citizen to the state but the very character of the people. As I wrote in NR recently, there's plenty of evidence to support that from Britain, Canada, and elsewhere.

More prosaically, it's also unaffordable. That's why one of the first things that middle-rank powers abandon once they go down this road is a global military capability. If you take the view that the U.S. is an imperialist aggressor, congratulations: You can cease worrying. But, if you think that America has been the ultimate guarantor of the post-war global order, it's less cheery. Five years from now, just as in Canada and Europe two generations ago, we'll be getting used to announcements of defense cuts to prop up the unsustainable costs of big government at home. And, as the superpower retrenches, America's enemies will be quick to scent opportunity.

Longer wait times, fewer doctors, more bureaucracy, massive IRS expansion, explosive debt, the end of the Pax Americana, and global Armageddon. Must try to look on the bright side . . .

Congratulations, progressives. You've just made the citizens of the country started with a Declaration of Independence permanent wards of the state. This is what you wanted--to begin to manage and organize and run people's lives--and you got it.

The post-WWII decline of Great Britain wasn't inevitable. It was hurried along its way by their "governmentalized" health care. And all of the things that everyone now predicts for the US are already reality in the UK: long wait times, fewer doctors, ever-expanding debt & cost, drop in quality, bureaucracy between the patient and the doctor, and on and on.

As my econ-minded friends like to point out, there are always trade-offs. Don't assume that this, the most massive entitlement in American history, will come without cost. By the time the full reality of this thing hits, it's going to hurt everybody.

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Ghost Of Socialized Medicine (Read: Obamacare) Yet To Come

Via Mark Steyn and Newsrealblog:

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Eric Holder's Ridiculous Decision To Try KSM In NY, &c.

The WSJ's Review & Outlook editorial for yesterday pretty well sums up all the legal, historical, practical, and terror-fighting implications of Holder's leftist-appeasing move to abolish the military commissions specifically designed to try KSM & others for whom normal evidentiary rules, among other things, would be difficult.

Please spare us talk of the "rule of law." If that was the primary consideration, the U.S. already has a judicial process in place. The current special military tribunals were created by the 2006 Military Commissions Act, which was adopted with bipartisan Congressional support after the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision obliged the executive and legislative branches to approve a detailed plan to prosecute the illegal "enemy combatants" captured since 9/11.

Contrary to liberal myth, military tribunals aren't a break with 200-plus years of American jurisprudence. Eight Nazis who snuck into the U.S. in June 1942 were tried by a similar court and most were hanged within two months. Before the Obama Administration stopped all proceedings earlier this year pending yesterday's decision, the tribunals at Gitmo had earned a reputation for fairness and independence.

No one doubts these men's guilt, but what if--what if--they receive reduced or no sentence because of some procedural rule that ought not apply to enemy combatants?

Then, there's the ridiculous leftists & media (but I repeat myself) response to the mass murder of US soldiers at Ft. Hood by Islamic terrorist-in-US-uniform, Nidal Hasan.

51 people were shot, of which, 13 eventually died, including one unborn child. But to hear the liberal take on things (& that idiot Gen. Casey), the biggest tragedy would be the loss of diversity.

Here's Charles Krauthammer:

One must not speak of such things. Not even now. Not even after we know that Hasan was in communication with a notorious Yemen-based jihad propagandist. As late as Tuesday, the New York Times was running a story on how returning soldiers at Fort Hood had a high level of violence.

What does such violence have to do with Hasan? He was not a returning soldier. And the soldiers who returned home and shot their wives or fellow soldiers didn’t cry “Allahu Akbar!” as they squeezed the trigger.

The delicacy about the religion in question — condescending, politically correct, and deadly — is nothing new. A week after the first (1993) World Trade Center attack, the same New York Times ran the following front-page headline about the arrest of one Mohammed Salameh: “Jersey City Man Is Charged in Bombing of Trade Center.”

Ah yes, those Jersey men — so resentful of New York, so prone to violence.

And Mark Steyn:

“Diversity” is one of those words designed to absolve you of the need to think. Likewise, a belief in “multiculturalism” doesn’t require you to know anything at all about other cultures, just to feel generally warm and fluffy about them. Heading out from my hotel room the other day, I caught a glimpse of that 7-Eleven video showing Major Hasan wearing “Muslim” garb to buy a coffee on the morning of his murderous rampage. And it wasn’t until I was in the taxi cab that something odd struck me: He was an American of Arab descent. But he was wearing Pakistani dress — that’s to say, a “Punjabi suit,” as they call it in Britain, or the shalwar kameez, to give it its South Asian name. For all the hundreds of talking heads droning on about “diversity” across the TV networks, it was only Tarek Fatah, writing in the Ottawa Citizen, who pointed out that no Arab males wear this get-up — with one exception: Those Arab men who got the jihad fever and went to Afghanistan to sign on with the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In other words, Major Hasan’s outfit symbolized the embrace of an explicit political identity entirely unconnected with his ethnic heritage.

Mr. Fatah would seem to be a genuine “multiculturalist”: That’s to say, he’s attuned to often very subtle “diversities” between cultures. Whereas the professional multiculturalist sees the 7-Eleven video and coos, “Aw, look. He’s wearing . . . well, something exotic and colorful, let’s not get hung up on details. Celebrate diversity, right? Can we get him in the front row for the group shot? We may be eligible for a grant.”

The brain-addled “diversity” of General Casey will get some of us killed, and keep all of us cowed. In the days since the killings, the news reports have seemed increasingly like a satirical novel the author’s not quite deft enough to pull off, with bizarre new Catch 22s multiplying like the windmills of your mind: If you’re openly in favor of pouring boiling oil down the throats of infidels, then the Pentagon will put down your e-mails to foreign jihadists as mere confirmation of your long established “research interests.” If you’re psychotic, the Army will make you a psychiatrist for fear of provoking you. If you gun down a bunch of people, within an hour the FBI will state clearly that we can all relax, there’s no terrorism angle, because, in our over-credentialized society, it doesn’t count unless you’re found to be carrying Permit #57982BQ3a from the relevant State Board of Jihadist Licensing.

Ezra Levant, my comrade in a long battle to restore freedom of speech to Canada, likes to say that the Danish cartoons crisis may one day be seen as a more critical event than 9/11. Not, obviously, in the comparative death tolls but in what each revealed about the state of Western civilization. After 9/11, we fought back, hit hard, rolled up the Afghan camps; after the cartoons, we weaseled and equivocated and appeased and signaled that we were willing to trade core Western values for a quiet life. Watching the decadence and denial on display this last week, I think in years to come Fort Hood will be seen in a similar light. What happened is not a “tragedy” but a national scandal, already fading from view.

It used to be that the pursuit of "diversity" in the form of affirmative action put some less qualified people in school or a job in place of a more qualified applicant. While stupid & unjust, such behavior rarely resulted in the deaths of 13 people and injury of dozens more.

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Mark Steyn: 'Government Health Care Would Be Wrong Even If It “Controlled Costs.”'

Steyn makes much the same point about liberty that I've been trying to make only he, you know, does it with more flair & humor.

On the price tag: It’s often argued that, as a proportion of GDP, America spends more on health care than countries with government medical systems. But, as a point of fact, “America” doesn’t spend anything on health care: Hundreds of millions of people make hundreds of millions of individual decisions about what they’re going to spend on health care. Whereas up north a handful of bureaucrats determine what Canada will spend on health care — and that’s that: Health care is a government budget item. If Joe Hoser in Moose Jaw wants to increase Canada’s health-care spending by $500 drawn from his savings account, he can’t: The law prevents it. Unless, as many Canadians do, he drives south and spends it in a U.S. hospital for treatment he can’t get in a timely manner in his own country.

You can make the “controlling costs” argument about anything: After all, it’s no surprise that millions of free people freely choosing how they spend their own money will spend it in different ways than government bureaucrats would be willing to license on their behalf. America spends more per capita on food than Zimbabwe. America spends more on vacations than North Korea. America spends more on lap-dancing than Saudi Arabia (well, officially). Canada spends more per capita on doughnuts than America — and, given comparative girths, Canucks are clearly not getting as much bang for the buck. Why doesn’t Ottawa introduce a National Doughnut Licensing Agency? You’d still see your general dispenser for simple procedures like a lightly sugared cruller, but he’d refer you to a specialist if you needed, say, a maple-frosted custard — and it would only be a six-month wait, at the end of which you’d receive a stale cinnamon roll. Under government regulation, eventually every doughnut would be all hole and no doughnut, and the problem would be solved. Even if the hole costs $1.6 trillion.

How did the health-care debate decay to the point where we think it entirely natural for the central government to fix a collective figure for what 300 million freeborn citizens ought to be spending on something as basic to individual liberty as their own bodies?

That’s the argument that needs to be won. And, if you think I’m being frivolous in positing bureaucratic regulation of doughnuts and vacations, consider that under the all-purpose umbrellas of “health” and “the environment,” governments of supposedly free nations are increasingly comfortable straying into areas of diet and leisure. Last year, a British bill attempted to ban Tony the Tiger, longtime pitchman for Frosties, from children’s TV because of his malign influence on young persons. Why not just ban Frosties? Or permit it by prescription only? Or make kids stand outside on the sidewalk to eat it? It was also proposed — by the Conservative party, alas — that, in the interests of saving the planet, each citizen should be permitted to fly a certain number of miles a year, after which he would be subject to punitive eco-surtaxes. Isn’t restricting freedom of movement kind of, you know . . . totalitarian?

Freedom is messy. In free societies, people will fall through the cracks — drink too much, eat too much, buy unaffordable homes, fail to make prudent provision for health care, and much else. But the price of being relieved of all those tiresome choices by a benign paternal government is far too high.

Government health care would be wrong even if it “controlled costs.” It’s a liberty issue. I’d rather be free to choose, even if I make the wrong choices.

This is a distinction I've made privately and tried to explain on the blog: There is a difference between what America pays and what Americans pay for health care (or anything else, for that matter).

Leftist progressives want government to plan & manage an ever-growing share of American life in pursuit of their dystopian utopian dreams.

Make no mistake: This is The Road to Serfdom.

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Mark Steyn Holds Forth On Socialized Universal Healthcare & The Spread Of Apathy

This is why someone hopefully pays Mark Steyn the Big Bucks.

Look, by historical standards, we’re loaded: We have TVs and iPods and machines to wash our clothes and our dishes. We’re the first society in which a symptom of poverty is obesity: Every man his own William Howard Taft. Of course we’re “vulnerable”: By definition, we always are. But to demand a government organized on the principle of preemptively “taking care” of potential “vulnerabilities” is to make all of us, in the long run, far more vulnerable. A society of children cannot survive, no matter how all-embracing the government nanny.

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

'A Heroic Climb': Goldberg & Steyn On The GOP

Continuing the theme from last week, here are a couple of good articles on the state of the Republican party & conservatism generally. I probably just should have referred you all to these pieces in the first part rather than rambling on myself. Oh well.

First, Jonah Goldberg:

The mainstream perception that conservatives are close-minded and dogmatic while liberals are open-minded and free-thinking has it almost exactly backward. Liberal dogma is settled: The government should do good, where it can, whenever it can. That is President Obama’s idea of pragmatism and bipartisanship: He’s open to all ideas, from either side of the aisle, about how best to expand government and get the state more involved in our lives. Meanwhile, conservatism’s dogma remains forever in flux. We constantly debate the trade-offs between freedom and virtue, the conflicts between liberty and order.

Yup. Conservatives are the dogmatic ones. But wait, there's more:

Also, partisans like to believe that whenever their guy wins, it’s because their ideas have been ratified by the American people, and whenever the other guy loses, they pronounce that the American people have resoundingly rejected this or that idea. Sometimes this is obviously true, but not nearly as often as we like to think. Obama, after all, promised over and over that his administration would provide a “net spending cut.” How’s that going?

When you repeatedly state during your campaign that you want to "cut taxes for 95% of Americans," is that really a mandate to govern as an extreme liberal?

Mark Steyn writes about everything that interests me and does so in the exact manner I would do it--if only I were as witty:

the GOP’s tent has many poles: It has social conservatives, libertarians, fiscal conservatives, national-security hawks. These groups do not always agree: The so-cons resent the libertarians’ insouciance on gay marriage and abortion. The libertarians don’t get the warhawks’ obsession with thankless nation-building in Islamist hellholes. A lot of the hawks can’t see why the fiscal cons are so hung up on footling matters like bloated government spending at a time of war. It requires a lot of effort to align these various poles sufficiently to hold up the big tent. And by the 2006 electoral cycle, between the money-no-object Congress at home and a war that seemed to have dwindled down to an endless, half-hearted, semi-colonial policing operation, the GOP poles were tilting badly. The Republican coalition is like a permanent loveless marriage: There are bad times and worse times. And, while social conservatism and libertarianism can be principled to a fault, the vagaries of electoral politics mean they often wind up being represented in office by either unprincipled opportunists like Arlen Specter or unprincipled squishes like Lincoln Chafee.

In the Democrat party....

Meanwhile, over in the other tent, they celebrate diversity with ruthless singlemindedness: In the Democrats’ parade, whatever your bugbear, government is the answer. Government is the means, government is the end, government is the whole magilla. That gives them a unity of purpose the GOP can never match.

Once the Democrats are ensconced in government glory, the infinity sided caged deathmatch of lobbying, favor giving, spoils dividing, etc., etc., takes place the & winners--as happens when the Democrat party gets its way--are chosen by the government. We've already seen some of this--ACORN payoffs in the 2010 census, the liberal grab bag that was the spendulous, er, stimulus, the Orwellianly-named "Employee Free Choice Act" (Orwellian because it aims to do exactly the opposite of what the name implies), and will continue with the cap & trade that will no doubt put money in the pockets of "green" people (not martians) who helped get Obama elected. Ditto healthcare.

One last quote from Steyn on Colin Powell:

Consider this cooing profile of Secretary Powell from Todd Purdum in the New York Times back in 2002: “Mr. Powell’s approach to almost all issues — foreign or domestic — is pragmatic and nonideological. He is internationalist, multilateralist and moderate. He has supported abortion rights and affirmative action.”

So supporting “internationalism,” “multilateralism,” abortion, and racial quotas means you’re “moderate” and “nonideological”? And anyone who feels differently is an extreme ideologue? Absolutely. The aim of a large swathe of the Left is not to win the debate but to get it canceled before it starts. You can do that in any number of ways: busting up campus appearances by conservatives, “hate speech” prohibitions, activist judges’ more imaginative court decisions, or merely, as the Times does, by declaring your side of every issue to be the “moderate” and “nonideological” position — even when, in many cases, the “extreme” position is supported by a majority of voters. Likewise, to Colin Powell, it’s Ann Coulter who’s “vicious,” not Michael Moore, who compares the jihadists who blow up Western troops in Iraq to America’s Minutemen and gets rewarded with a seat next to Jimmy Carter in the presidential box at the Democratic convention.

Steyn has got some great recommendations on the way forward..... but you're going to have to click the link & read the article to find out.

I'll give you one hint: He's a Happy Warrior; he's optimistic about our chances.

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Civilization & Its Haters

Steyn sums up well the basic struggle between civilized nations and those bad actors seeking their (the civilized) overthrow:

As my colleague Andrew McCarthy wrote, “Civilization is not an evolution of mankind but the imposition of human good on human evil. It is not a historical inevitability. It is a battle that has to be fought every day, because evil doesn’t recede willingly before the wheels of progress.” Very true. Somalia, Iran, and North Korea are all less “civilized” than they were a couple of generations ago. And yet in one sense they have made undeniable progress: They have globalized their pathologies. Somali pirates seize vessels the size of aircraft carriers flying the ensigns of the great powers. Iranian proxies run Gaza and much of Lebanon. North Korea’s impoverished prison state provides nuclear technology to Damascus and Tehran. Unlovely as it is, Pyongyang nevertheless has friends on the Security Council. Powerful states protect one-man psycho states. One-man psycho states provide delivery systems to apocalyptic ideological states. Apocalyptic ideological states fund non-state actors around the world. And in Somalia and elsewhere non-state actors are constrained only by their ever increasing capabilities.

Ah, the appeasing fruits of liberal progressivism.

As McCarthy & Steyn so wonderfully illustrate, civilization--peace, democracy, the rule of law--is not the default condition of humanity.

These things cost blood & treasure to earn and more blood & treasure to maintain.


If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Liberal Sensitivity Training

This is progress. And by "progress," I mean part of the progressive agenda to outlaw anything they don't like--in this case, speech they find offensive.

Mark Steyn & Iowahawk are the two funniest political pundits in the webosphere. This is why I bring you their stuff so frequently.

Here's a bit from Steyn's latest:

Ah, but, as the computer wallahs say, that’s not a bug, that’s a feature. If the pen is mightier than the sword, then criminalizing words is a way of disarming potential opposition, of inculcating a reflexive self-censorship in the citizenry. And, after all, self-suppression is the most cost-effective of tyranny. Political correctness isn’t merely the blasphemy law of our time. It makes communication impossible. It renders a people literally illiterate: The conventions of language used by functioning societies throughout human history - irony, indirect quotation, period evocation, and, yes, even comic stereotype - are all suddenly suspect. What a strange fate to embrace. In London, the Lord Chamberlain’s power to censor West End plays was finally abolished in 1968: It was widely accepted by then that there was something absurd in a palace courtier ruling that your script could have three “Bastards!” but not four, and that two specific references to sodomy had to be replaced with one vague allusion to heavy petting. Yet, four decades on, Britons now think it entirely normal for police constables and timeserving bureaucrats to function as literary critics determining the “intent” behind a throwaway jest.

I see a lot of this in higher ed.

Just the other day my brother and I discussed the ever-changing PC words for various things. Right now, disabled is out as the word of choice for those either physically or mentally, well, disabled.

Before "disabled," we called them handicapped.

Now we call them "special needs." (hell, even special has become a pejorative)

As that takes on the same negative connotation as disabled & handicapped (because people feel bad to acknowledge that there is, in fact, anything wrong), we'll find some new, meaningless PC word to describe them and then cast off once it has worn out its welcome.

In today's society, the focus is not on expressing oneself accurately or well, but on offending the fewest amount of people. This is why 30 Rock got so much mileage out of the "Puerto Rican joke."


If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

'The Decline & Fall Of America'

In the spirit of my earlier Anglo-American post, here's Mark Steyn on a very disturbing & possible repetition of history.

America has a choice: It can reacquaint itself with socioeconomic reality, or it can buckle its mandatory seatbelt for the same decline most of the rest of the West embraced a couple of generations back. In 1897, troops from the greatest empire the world had ever seen marched down London’s mall for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. Seventy years later, Britain had government health care, a government-owned car industry, massive government housing, and it was a shriveled high-unemployment socialist basket-case living off the dwindling cultural capital of its glorious past. In 1945, America emerged from the Second World War as the preeminent power on earth. Seventy years later . . .

Let’s not go there.

The Brits were fortunate enough to partner with a strong friend (the US).

With whom will we partner to guarantee our future security and prosperity?


If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

'It's The Ideology (And The Demographics), Stupid'

(with apologies to James Carville)

Mark Steyn's take on the Mumbai attacks and how they fit in to the broader picture is a must read. Sure, he pounds the demographics drum, again, but it's an important part of the advance of jihadism as an ideology:

[...] we’re in danger of missing the forest for the trees. The forest is the ideology. It’s the ideology that determines whether you can find enough young hotshot guys in the neighborhood willing to strap on a suicide belt or (rather more promising as a long-term career) at least grab an AK and shoot up a hotel lobby. Or, if active terrorists are a bit thin on the ground, whether you can count at least on some degree of broader support on the ground. You’re sitting in some distant foreign capital but you’re minded to pull off a Bombay-style operation in, say, Amsterdam or Manchester or Toronto. Where would you start? Easy. You know the radical mosques, and the other ideological-front organizations. You’ve already made landfall.

It’s missing the point to get into debates about whether this is the “Deccan Mujahideen” or the ISI or al-Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba. That’s a reductive argument. It could be all or none of them. The ideology has been so successfully seeded around the world that nobody needs a memo from corporate HQ to act: There are so many of these subgroups and individuals that they intersect across the planet in a million different ways. It’s not the Cold War, with a small network of deep sleepers being directly controlled by Moscow. There are no membership cards, only an ideology. That’s what has radicalized hitherto moderate Muslim communities from Indonesia to the Central Asian stans to Yorkshire, and co-opted what started out as more or less conventional nationalist struggles in the Caucasus and the Balkans into mere tentacles of the global jihad.

[...]

This isn’t law enforcement but an ideological assault — and we’re fighting the symptoms not the cause. Islamic imperialists want an Islamic society, not just in Palestine and Kashmir but in the Netherlands and Britain, too. Their chances of getting it will be determined by the ideology’s advance among the general Muslim population, and the general Muslim population’s demographic advance among everybody else.

So Bush is history, and we have a new president who promises to heal the planet, and yet the jihadists don’t seem to have got the Obama message that there are no enemies, just friends we haven’t yet held talks without preconditions with. This isn’t about repudiating the Bush years, or withdrawing from Iraq, or even liquidating Israel. It’s bigger than that. And if you don’t have a strategy for beating back the ideology, you’ll lose.

(emphasis added)

This is the ideological challenge: Making "moderate" Islam (broadly speaking, the ones who don't use violent means to achieve a worldwide caliphate) more appealing than radical (is there any other kind) jihadism (aka, Islamofascism or whatever other word you like to use).

Look, whatever you may have originally thunk about Iraq, it is quickly shaping into exactly the type of pluralist, muslim, moderate state President Bush always hoped it would be. Sure, Obama will take credit when that happens, but still, Iraq will be there as an example to the rest of the Middle East (and world, for that matter).

Democracy allows for Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds and Christians to all get along.


If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Surveying Case For McCain & Against Obama - Part 2

Similar to what I did on Saturday, here's a few quotes from Mark Steyn's latest column on Barack Obama.

Mark Steyn - "Obama in 2-D":

The problem is we’re not electing a symbol, a logo, a two-dimensional image. Long before he emerged on the national stage as Barack the Hope-Giver and Bringer of Change, there was a three-dimensional Barack Obama, a real man who lives in the real world. And that’s where the problem lies.

The Senator and his doting Obots in the media have gone to great lengths to obscure what Barack Obama does when he’s not being a symbol: his voting record, his friends, his patrons, his life outside the soft-focus memoirs is deemed non-relevant to the general hopey-changey vibe. But occasionally we get a glimpse. The offhand aside to Joe the Plumber about “spreading the wealth around” was revealing because it suggests a crude redistributive view of “social justice.” Yet the nimble Hope-a-Dope sidestepper brushed it aside, telling a crowd in Raleigh that next John McCain will be “accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten.”

But that too is revealing. As John Hood pointed out at National Review, communism is not “sharing.” In a free society, the citizen chooses whether to share his Lego, trade it for some Thomas the Tank Engine train tracks, or keep it to himself. From that freedom of action grow mighty Playmobile cities. Communism is compulsion. It’s the government confiscating your Elmo to “share” it with someone of its choice. Joe the Plumber is free to spread his own wealth around — hiring employees, buying supplies from local businesses, enjoying surf’n’turf night at his favorite eatery. But, in Obama’s world view, that’s not good enough: the state is the best judge of how to spread Joe the Plumber’s wealth around.

(per usual, emphasis added)

This is Barack Obama's "social justice," this is his socialism: Confiscatory taxes that take money from those who earned and give to those who did not. Might as well pay people for their votes.

But then, there's already some of that going on, too. It's the Democrat Party way.


If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Mark Steyn On Barack The Benign

From last Saturday's column.

This is why I don't want the U.S. to turn into just another European nation. Because their status quo is unsustainable. And because, when I look north, I see what happens when a North American country plays euro-wannabe.

Would that all conservative pundits stood strong (Parker, Noonan, Buckley) like Mark Steyn.

[...]

McCain vs Obama is not the choice many of us would have liked in an ideal world. But then it’s not an “ideal world”, and the belief that it can be made so is one of the things that separates those who think Obama will “heal the planet” and those of us who support McCain faute de mieux. I agree with Thomas Sowell that an Obama-Pelosi supermajority will mark what he calls “a point of no return”. It would not be, as some naysayers scoff, “Jimmy Carter’s second term”, but something far more transformative. The new president would front the fourth great wave of liberal annexation — the first being FDR’s New Deal, the second LBJ’s Great Society, and the third the incremental but remorseless cultural advance when Reagan conservatives began winning victories at the ballot box and liberals turned their attention to the other levers of the society, from grade school up. The terrorist educator William Ayers, Obama’s patron in Chicago, is an exemplar of the last model: forty years ago, he was in favor of blowing up public buildings; then he figured out it was easier to get inside and undermine them from within.

All three liberal waves have transformed American expectations of the state. The spirit of the age is: Ask not what your country can do for you, demand it. Why can’t the government sort out my health care? Why can’t they pick up my mortgage?

In his first inaugural address, Calvin Coolidge said: “I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people.” That’s true in a more profound sense than he could have foreseen. In Europe, lavish social-democratic government has transformed citizens into eternal wards of the nanny state: the bureaucracy’s assumption of every adult responsibility has severed Continentals from the most basic survival impulse, to the point where unaffordable entitlements on shriveled birth rates have put a question mark over some of the oldest nation states on earth. A vote for an Obama-Pelosi-Barney Frank-ACORN supermajority is a vote for a Europeanized domestic policy that is, as the eco-types like to say, “unsustainable”.

More to the point, the only reason why Belgium has gotten away with being Belgium and Sweden Sweden and Germany Germany this long is because America’s America. The soft comfortable cocoon in which western Europe has dozed this last half-century is girded by cold hard American power. What happens when the last serious western nation votes for the same soothing beguiling siren song as its enervated allies?

“People of the world,” declared Senator Obama sonorously at his self-worship service in Germany, “look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.”
No, sorry. History proved no such thing. In the Cold War, the world did not stand as one. One half of Europe was a prison, and in the other half far too many people — the Barack Obamas of the day — were happy to go along with that division in perpetuity. And the wall came down not because “the world stood as one” but because a few courageous people stood against the conventional wisdom of the day. Had Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan been like Helmut Schmidt and Francois Mitterand and Pierre Trudeau and Jimmy Carter, the Soviet empire (notwithstanding its own incompetence) would have survived and the wall would still be standing. Senator Obama’s feeble passivity will get you a big round of applause precisely because it’s the easy option: Do nothing but hold hands and sing the easy listening anthems of one-worldism, and the planet will heal.

To govern is to choose. And sometimes the choices are tough ones. When has Barack Obama chosen to take a stand? When he got along to get along with the Chicago machine? When he sat for 20 years in the pews of an ugly neo-segregationist race-baiting grievance-monger? When he voted to deny the surviving “fetuses” of botched abortions medical treatment? When in his short time in national politics he racked up the most liberal – ie, the most doctrinaire, the most orthodox, the most reflex — voting record in the Senate? Or when, on those many occasions the questions got complex and required a choice, he dodged it and voted merely “present”?

The world rarely stands as one. You can, as Reagan and Thatcher did, stand up. Or, like Obama voting “present”, you can stand down.

Nobody denies that, in promoting himself from “community organizer” to the world’s President-designate in nothing flat, he has shown an amazing and impressively ruthless single-mindedness. But the path of personal glory has been, in terms of policy and philosophy, the path of least resistance.

Peggy Noonan thinks a President Obama will be like the dog who chases the car and finally catches it: Now what? I think Obama will be content to be King Barack the Benign, Spreader of Wealth and Healer of Planets. His rise is, in many ways, testament to the persistence of the monarchical urge even in a two-century old republic. So the “Now what?” questions will be answered by others, beginning with the liberal supermajority in Congress. And as he has done all his life he will take the path of least resistance. An Obama Administration will pitch America toward EU domestic policy and UN foreign policy. Thomas Sowell is right: It would be a “point of no return”, the most explicit repudiation of the animating principles of America. For a vigilant republic of limited government and self-reliant citizens, it would be a Declaration of Dependence.

See also Pete Du Pont on the "Europeanization" of America and what an Obama presidency might look like.


If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Mark Steyn Is Back

Fresh off his Kangaroo court acquittal in Canada, Mark Steyn is back on the humorous political commentary scene. And this one won't disappoint. It's not a short little post at The Corner, this is the real deal.

Excerpt:

Where was I? Oh, yeah. Citizen-presidents: Who needs ’em? The day after the debate I bumped into two Obama supporters in St Johnsbury, Vermont who said isn’t it great that he's on course to win. Well, they were cute chicks, and I know an obvious pick-up line when I hear one, so I stopped to chat. God Almighty, it was like reverse Viagra: After ten minutes of Babes For Barack, I never want to meet a female woman of the opposite sex for the rest of my life. Their basic pitch was:

How do you solve a problem? Like, Obama!

How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?

That’s John McCain's problem. Traditionally, when an unknown politician emerges on the national scene, it’s a race to define him. Governor Palin is a good example: within days, the coastal sophisticates were mocking her as a chillbilly ditz with a womb that spits out inbred kids faster than the First National Bank of Welfare Swamp issues subprime mortgages. That’s politics as usual: Define your opponent. But Obama is defined by his indefinability. When I pointed out to my Vermont gals that he lives in a swank pad that was part of some shady real estate deal with a convicted fraudster (Tony Rezko), that he entrusted his daughters’ entire religious education to a neo-segregationist anti-American nut who preaches that the government created the AIDS virus to kill black people (Jeremiah Wright), that he attended fundraisers with a political patron who’s an unrepentant terrorist proud of plotting to blow up young ladies just like them at a dance at the Fort Dix military base (William Ayers), when I pointed all this out, they looked at me as if I’d brought a baseball bat to a croquet match. Mere earthbound politicians are defined by their real estate deals and sleazy buddies, but Obama is defined only by his vibe. As his many admirers in France would say, he has a certain je ne sais quoi. And, if you try to pin down quoi precisely, then they don’t want to sais.

Welcome back, Mr. Steyn. You have been missed.


If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Iowahawk!

Back in the day I used to read 2 columnists every week--Daniel Henninger & Mark Steyn (now I pretty much read everything). Since the Canadians sued Steyn for writing about Muslim demographics, he hasn't written much. Which is a shame, because Steyn is awesome.

So now I get my weekly comedic fix from Iowahawk. To really get a sense of who Iowahawk is, let me quote from one of his many admirers:

Iowahawk might get up tomorrow, get [redacted], grab his beautiful wife and ride his moped backwards to a Hells Angel rally, then drink himself into oblivion and fight about 7 crank dealers from the Racine chapter of the Death Jokers all by himself. Then maybe he'd go home, romance the beautiful wife, build a perfect retro treehouse for his perfect kids, drink a bottle of tequila, prepare a 3-course meal while beating away a push-in home invader and sacrificing him on a makeshift, though historically accurate, Inca altar he built in the woods behind the railroad tracks. Then he'd sit down and knock out a tremedously insulting Leftist parody that pissed off thread after thread of Kos and DU lunatics, romance the bride once again and fall asleep chuckling. It's like he's Paul Bunyan and Mark Twain rolled up into one hipster.

I'm sure the guy doesn't mean that Iowahawk is a hipster in the same sense as all the too-cool-for-school twentysomething hipsters who form Obama's core supporters.

Anywho, read the latest. A sampling:

The subprime mortgage crisis rocked Wall Street again last week, spurring federal bailouts and takeovers of several large financial institutions - including Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG Insurance, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. Americans are asking the tough questions -- how will this effect me? and, where do I get my bailout check? To help understand the issues Dave travels to TGIFriday's Happy Hour for a spirited roundtable debate with guest financial expert Linda Mustaine from First Coralville Mortgage, and next-door neighbor Craig Evers.

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Links! Links! Links!

Climate Change

- More Bjørn Lomborg. This time, you can read him in his own words in an op-ed he wrote for The Guardian, a British newspaper. Our opinion on Climate Change pretty well matches his--it's reasonable, empirical, and realistic.

- Lomborg Part II - Kathryn Jean Lopez, National Review Online editor, interviewed Lomborg on the intersection of Climate Change and politics. Very interesting read.

Miscellaneous

- Jason L. Riley, member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board and pro-immigrationist, wrote about the problem of multiculturalism. Check out, Keep the Immigrants, Deport the Multiculturalists.

- In probably the best article we've read this year on the conservative outlook, Roger Kimball wrote an article entitled Conservative Gloominess. From that article:

Progressives cannot wrap their minds (or, more to the point, their hearts) around this irony: that “reform” so regularly exacerbates either the evil it was meant to cure or another evil it had hardly glimpsed.

- Looking for responsible energy policy? Larry Kudlow weighed in against cap & trade and tentatively in favor of a carbon tax.

- We wrote about it earlier this week when we quoted Pres. Bush's speech to the Knesset and asked readers to find "Barack Obama" in the speech. No one has succeeded yet. Mark Steyn, as usual, does a better job lampooning Obama and his Democrat apologists for their foreign policy idiocy--an idiocy which is even more indefensible in this instance than usual (no mean feat).

- Re: The appeasers in the Democratic party (and those among the Republicans): This, quote of the day:

Liberals think the way to deal with dangerous tyrants is to send in a sensitive president who will make Ahmadinejad fall in love with him. They imagine Obama becoming Ahmadinejad's psychotherapist, like Barbra Streisand in "The Prince of Tides.

- This next article, written by David Ranson, head of research at H.C. Wainwright & Co. Economics Inc., wrote about tax policy, much-maligned supply-siders, and the state of economic research. (subscription required, email us for a copy)

- Naomi Schaeffer Riley interviewed Roger Hertog about philanthropy and the cause of conservatism in higher education. Very interesting read.

- From the Seattle Times, a newspaper we usually only read for their sports coverage, on Boeing's 787 Dreamliner. This is quite the plane requiring a whole new style of production.

- Our fav. economist, Thomas Sowell, gave his recommended summer reading list.

- Finally, Dan Henninger, the other columnist we read without fail each week, on China and Burma and why non-democratic countries suck. It's summed up in the title, Democracies Don't Let People Die, but there's more to it than that. This is push-back against multiculturalists who think all governments, societies, and cultures are equally good, with no one better than the other.

*UPDATE 7:50pm MST: Pendulum Politics

- buruboi on the European demographics. This is a topic that interests us greatly. We'll leave it to buruoi to explain, but European demographics are such that their massive entitlement/welfare state programs are wholly unsustainable. This, combined with unemployment rates that are sometimes double the U.S.'s combine to create a dismal prognosis for Europe's economic future--Western & Northern Europe that is.

Countries in Eastern Europe and Ireland have produced low tax, pro-growth policies similar to the U.S.'s which should help them avoid the future pit and pratfalls of their euro-neighbors.

- RD on Moderation in U.S. politics. We read his post as an economic critique on the policies of the left and right. As in, apply a systematic way to value the priorities of both sides--his examples are the environment & abortion--and then compromise. This seems like wise counsel.

His critique of advocates on the right, so-called pro-lifers, is unfair and unsupported by empirical evidence. He says that the Right cares more about the lives of the unborn than it does people in less-developed countries. The truth is that religious organizations and self-described conservatives donate hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to charities and humanitarian philanthropies organizations around the world every year. Donations in the wake of the 2004 Tsunami are an illustrative example. (see the list of NGO donations).

RD, we agree with your call for moderation, but your critique of the pro-life right's motivations is not accurate.

**UPDATE 22 May 10:31am MST: Ben's assertion regarding a supposed contrast between Reagan, Nixon, (Olmert) responsible diplomacy and Bush's "chest beating" is inaccurately characterized--not least of all because liberals in the '80's used to bash Reagan for being a cowboy (Evil Empire, ramped up military spending, Star Wars, Iran-Contra, etc.).

The meme Ben (and Obama) willfully misread into Bush's comments is that we should never engage in diplomacy. But Bush never said that. This was not the point of Bush's Knesset speech.

It was that Obama's tea-with-Tyrants and Carter's handholding-with-Hamas/Hezbollah is irresponsible and ignorant of reality. Meeting without precondition with tyrants and rogue terrorist states gains American nothing while lending prestige and legitimacy to thugs who kill American soldiers and threaten America and her allies.

When Nixon went to China, it was the result of 134 secret meetings, 18 months "behind-the-scenes" discussions by Henry Kissinger, and another 7 months of diplomatic hard work. (h/t: S. Lybbert)

Similarly, Olmert has not personally met with the Syrians--neither has the Israeli Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni. We (OL&L) and the U.S. may not like the result or tenor of the talks between the Israelis and the Syrians, but they are low-level meetings (thanks Kurt M.) with preconditions--not direct, POTUS-to-thug meetings w/o preconditions as Obama naively suggested.

Like Ben, we are frustrated with the Bush Administration's failure to stop Iran from killing American soldiers in Iraq and their continued nuclear development. To a lesser extent, we're frustrated with North Korea's continued belligerence.

But these failures do not invalidate Bush's Knesset speech, nor do they mean that the next President should meet with every two-bit terrorist in the world. There are lessons to be learned from Bush's failures, but Obama's is the wrong one.


If you have tips, questions, comments, suggestions, or requests for subscription only articles, email us at lybberty@gmail.com.

Happy Birthday, Israel

60 years.

That's how long modern Israel has been in existence. Considering its precarious position in the Middle East, their mere existence is quite an accomplishment. But they've achieved more than just survival.

Today, Israel is a modern, successful democracy experiencing strong economic growth. And this, despite Hezbollah Katyushas and Hamas suicide bombers.

Felicitations, Israel.

*UPDATE 12 May 1:22am MST: We agree with Mark Steyn, Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East (may Iraq soon join it). His article, commemorating Israel's 60th anniversary and commenting on the challenges it faces, is a must-read.


If you have tips, questions, comments, suggestions, or requests for subscription only articles, email us at lybberty@gmail.com.

Pennsylvania Day-Eve, &c.

Because we traveled to sunny Southern California last weekend, we weren't able to do our regular reading. This meant, much to our dismay, that we read USA Today. We used to enjoy reading USA Today. It had all these cool features and graphics and stats on the sports page--it was certainly better than our hometown sports page.

Then came the internet.

And our reading taste matured, a little.

After awhile, we realized that USA Today is horrible reporting, horrible writing for the liberal semi-literate. We read, for example, their reportage on the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania and could not believe the amount of editorializing in what was supposed to be a just the facts, please, ma'am article. Mostly it was about the plight of Democrats who can't decide which minority they feel more strongly about giving a chance--a woman or a black man.

Polls still show that both camps will be extremely bitter if the other side wins. What does that bitterness get them? John McCain. Awesome.

Then there's Buzz. Liberal Rev. Buzz Thomas thinks we should all do our religious duty and quit having so many children. It seems the Holy Algorian Environmental Apocalyptic is not satisfied with its denunciation of our (collectively speaking) carbon producin' ways, they're now calling out our kids. This op-ed piece is so ridiculous, we regret even linking to it.

Back to Pennsylvania.

We think tomorrow holds bad news for Obama supporters. No, we're pretty sure he's still going to win. The McCain people we talked to last week are all gearing up for Obama like it's a foregone conclusion. But they, and we, will be more than happy to see Hillary do well in Pennsylvania and continue the fight. The more she bruises him, the less saintly he looks.

And because Hillary is doing the dirty work, McCain and the Republicans won't be the ones blamed for spoiling everyone's Barackian day-dreams. Killing the messenger and all that. Even if the messenger (Hillary) is right about Obama.

With Hillary providing the smack in the face, McCain ought to be able illustrate the extreme left liberal nature of Obama's positions. America is a center-right country, after all, and that's pretty much what McCain is--center-right.

Which brings us to our point about McCain: we've gone from reluctant support of John McCain, to downright admiration for the man (Obama supporter's note: not veneration or adoration). One of the things we appreciate most is McCain's ability to identify talented people and put them in the right spots. We believe that a President McCain will be able to focus on a few of his favorite things--foreign policy, military--and leave the rest to a capable cabinet. Because he's loyal, he'll support them and stand up to the Democrat bullies in Congress. He won't try and micromanage everything.

Hillary would micromanage everything. And if you thought Bush was a "for us or against us" President, wait until you see Hillary.

Obama would community organize everything. That's no way to run a Presidency. What do community organizers do, anyway?

*UPDATE 10:55pm MST: Be sure and check out Emmitt Smith's mock draft. Lots of laughs.

Also, Mark Steyn's weekly installment. He is the best and this week's column is particularly good.


If you have tips, questions, comments, suggestions, or requests for subscription only articles, email us at lybberty@gmail.com.

Sunday Night Links

Image link

(from Drudge: we'd be cool with a VP Rice.)
(ps. at least then the Dems couldn't call us racists.)
(pps. they definitely couldn't call us racist: we like Condi AND we're a member of the NAACP.)

***

Tomorrow, sometime, America's Future Foundation will announce the winner of their inaugural college blogger contest. Our gut feeling is not good.

While we all wait, here are a few links to a few good articles:

- Robert Paarlberg in The New York Post on the charity efforts to feed Africans.

- In the Wall Street Journal, and discussing another issue affecting families--our theme of the week--is Donna Freitas. She talks about the "hook-up" culture that dominates college campuses across the country and the damage it inflicts. (hat tip: S. Lybbert)

- Your weekly dose of Mark Steyn.

- Michael Barone provides electoral analysis of the Democrat civil war. So far the bloodletting in this dust-up has been limited to resignations or, in some cases (gasp), forced resignations. If someone actually dies we'll capitalize "civil war."

- Over at Pendulum Politics, RD surveys national news, buruboi takes a look at religion in election years, and also the limits of rationality.

- Finally, the article of the week which also contains the quote of the week. Drum roll, please..... This week's winner, George Will with "McCain's Housing Restraint." And from that article, this gem on liberal Democrats and the "housing crisis:"

The market, which bewilders and annoys liberals by correcting excesses without the supervision of liberals, is doing that as housing prices fall far enough to stimulate demand.

Cross your fingers and toes, everybody. Thanks a bunch for your comments and support.


If you have tips, questions, comments, suggestions, or requests for subscription only articles, email us at lybberty@gmail.com.