The Humble One

Via Bill Kristol, Haaretz reports what President Obama told a gathering of Jewish leaders yesterday:

Obama also stressed he probably knows about Judaism more than any other president, because he read about it - and wondered how come no one asks Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner or Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell about their support to Israel.  

What humility.  But it's not surprising, especially coming from the same man who said this in 2008:

“I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

And what about the man who boasted these claims in 2008:

But let's get back to his claims on his knowledge of Judaism.  So, Obama must then know more about Judiasm and the Jewish people than the President who penned this letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport:

Gentlemen:

While I received with much satisfaction your address replete with expressions of esteem, I rejoice in the opportunity of assuring you that I shall always retain grateful remembrance of the cordial welcome I experienced on my visit to Newport from all classes of citizens.

The reflection on the days of difficulty and danger which are past is rendered the more sweet from a consciousness that they are succeeded by days of uncommon prosperity and security.

If we have wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored, we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good government, to become a great and happy people.

The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy--a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

It would be inconsistent with the frankness of my character not to avow that I am pleased with your favorable opinion of my administration and fervent wishes for my felicity.

May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants--while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.

May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in His own due time and way everlastingly happy.

G. Washington

The Split

I just got home and turned on the TV in time to see a new campaign ad from Barack Obama that lays the blame for our current economic malaise on George W. Bush.  Among the hyperboles and out right falsehoods in the ad was the claim by the narrator that there are some who think out best days are behind us.  What flashed across the screen?  Video from what looked like a Tea Party rally.   

This is dumb.

The Tea Party began to form prior to the 2010 election, and it's focus was on a return to the Constitution.  Tea Partiers saw that government had slowly become unmoored from the Constitution that was built to constrain it--especially on the federal level.  They understood that because government is built upon the consent of the governed, a rejuvenation in civic education was needed to sweep across the land so that the nation would be put back on a course consistent with the principles and virtues of the Founding.  They by no means argued that the U.S.'s best days were behind us; they were arguing that we can get to back to the good days by returning the Constitution and the principles of the Declaration of Independence.  Implicit in their argument was the idea that we must get back to the government as construed and realized by the Founders not because of blind veneration for the Founders but because those principles which the Founders' expounded are good for all men and all times. 

Barack Obama, being somewhat of a mix between a post modern and progressive, thinks the idea that there are universals truths outside of our personal preferences is bogus, to put it nicely.  Here is a bit from his The Audacity of Hope where he lays out the Founders (and therefore his) distrust of any claim to absolute truth:

It's not just absolute power that the Founders sought to prevent.  Implicit in the it structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any ideology of theology or "ism," any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course.

Here is another riff:

The rejection of absolutism implicit in our constitutional structure may sometimes make our politics seem unprincipled.

And again in a reference to a supposed teaching from Abraham Lincoln:

Lincoln, and those buried at Gettysburg, remind us that we should pursue our own absolute truths only if we acknowledge that there may be a terrible price to pay.

But what the Founders (and Tea Partiers) called self-evident truths in the Declaration and what Lincoln later said were principles that are applicable to all men and all times, Barack Obama calls"our own absolute truths" -- basically rending them nothing more than simple individual preferences that don't have any moral standing beyond the individual.  This is the real difference between President Obama and the Tea Party.

What Goes on in the Capitol

Andy Ferguson's new piece in Time magazine (I didn't know they featured a good writer once in a while) titled "Bubble on the Potomac" is scary.  Here is the clincher:

It is a soft spring evening. The office buildings downtown are emptying out, and the bars are filling up for happy hour. Uber cars are out in force, Town Cars and Benzes rolling down 14th, up Ninth, under the overspreading oaks of Logan Circle and back down Vermont, past the Churchkey, where 555 kinds of beer are on offer. Its list gives each beer’s alcohol content and country of origin, the hops used to brew it and the temperature at which it will be served. The menu offers nibbles from the other America, served with the requisite irony: disco fries, a staple of the Jersey Shore, and a deep-fried macaroni-and-cheese stick familiar to fans of Midwestern state fairs. There’s also pricey charcuterie for those who don’t get the joke. Seven blocks east and a few blocks south, at the edge of the Penn Quarter neighborhood, six diners take their places at Minibar. In a city quickly becoming famous for tony restaurants, they are the luckiest feeders of the night: Minibar takes reservations a minimum of a month in advance for six seats from supplicants who must call precisely at 10 a.m., usually for several days in a row, sometimes for weeks. The meal they savor has 25 to 30 courses. The cost: $150.

The optimism of über-Washingtonians so far survives the unspoken worry about a coming age of austerity, in which government spending cuts would end the high life that Washingtonians have come to expect. They are right to be optimistic. The two most plausible deficit-reduction proposals—one by President Obama, the other by the Republican-controlled House Budget Committee—each calls for the government in 2021 to spend a trillion dollars more than it spends today.

I also think one of the themes Ferguson brings to light has to do with the the recent Hunger Games trilogy (I'm not sure if this was intentional, but it probably was).  In that series there are 12 districts that are barely scraping by while those who live in the Capitol couldn't fathom that there are people who do not eat a 7 course meal every night.  The housing bubble didn't last forever; neither will the bubble that is Washington D.C.

(H/T Mollie Hemingway)

Thoughts From Jay Nordlinger

Some bits of wisdom from Jay Nordlinger in today's Impromtus:

The truth is, both Romney and Obama are rich, by the standards of ordinary people: Romney is a millionaire; Obama is a millionaire. Romney has many more millions, but they both have more money than most people will ever see, or possibly dream of.

In my view, Romney should be utterly unapologetic: “Sure, I’m rich, and he’s rich too. We’ve both been successful. The difference is, I want to help create the conditions in which you can be as successful as possible too. He’s holding you back, and the whole country back.

“No matter who wins — President Obama or me — he and I will live very well. We have plenty of money. But the country at large — that’s another story.”

Now, when you’re unapologetic, you don’t have to be obnoxious. Romney is good at that: being unapologetic without being obnoxious. May he continue, through to November.

On the realities of MSM bias:

Last week, I talked about the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and his revelations to Edward Klein, the former editor of The New York Times Magazine who has authored a book on President Obama.

Wright says that a close friend of Obama’s, Eric Whitaker, offered him what amounted to a bribe: $150,000 if he would keep his mouth shut until after the 2008 election.

I ask you again: What if a minister in a Republican president’s past had said this? Wouldn’t the mainstream media be devoting full time to this story? Wouldn’t every cover of Time and Newsweek be about it? Every hour of 60 Minutes, every Sunday until as long as it took? Planes would stop flying, birds would stop chirping, the earth would stop spinning around the sun until the story were nailed down.

But the interest of the mainstream media in Obama and Wright is zilch. From these media outlets, silence.

Conservatives are often accused of making too much of media bias. Maybe we do, sometimes. But maybe, sometimes, we make too little of it. Complaints about media bias are supposed to be uncouth. But media bias itself — that is worse.

I’ll make the world a deal: Reduce the bias, and I’ll complain less. Until then, I will point out that there is indeed a gross imbalance.

This is controversial, but it's a gem nonetheless:

Years ago, I noticed something about liberals, and it is quite rude to point out: Often, their views seem to be those of children. Views we all once had, but that some of us outgrew. “Take from the rich and give to the poor.” “If you’re nice to dictators, they will be nice to you.” “Crime is a response to injustice.” “Because guns hurt people, people shouldn’t have guns.” “Drilling for oil is mean to the earth.” Etc., etc.

It has sometimes seemed to me that becoming a conservative is simply a matter of growing up. There is scarcely any view in the Democratic national platform that I did not hold until I turned about 19. A great deal of liberalism strikes me as not just mistaken but immature.

A View into the World of the New York Times

Over the weekend, the New York Times ran a front-page expose detailing the ugly, hidden truth about Mitt Romney:  he just so happens to be rich.  So rich in fact, he and his wife -- gasp -- own horses.  Many of them in fact.  Here is the opening couple of paragraphs:

As Ann Romney immersed herself in the elite world of riding over the last dozen years, she relied on Jan Ebeling as a trusted tutor and horse scout. In her, he found a deep-pocketed patron.

A German-born trainer and top-ranked equestrian, Mr. Ebeling was at ease with the wealthy women drawn to the sport of dressage, in which horses costing up to seven figures execute pirouettes and other dancelike moves for riders wearing tails and top hats.

As the Times sees it, this story offers "a glimpse into the Romneys’ way of life, which they have generally shielded from view."  Mona Charen at NRO sums up the rest of the story:

The Times’s crack investigative team has unearthed some really critical information here: 1) it’s expensive to buy horses, 2) when buying and selling horses, the parties sometimes squabble about foot injuries, horse tranquilizers, and other fascinating equine stuff, 3) the Romneys are supporting a trainer/Olympic hopeful who does dressage, 4) said trainer was once sued and, oh boy, prepare yourselves, hired a veterinarian who supported Romney for president in 2008.

Of course it's a cardinal sin that Anne Romney's trainer hired a vet who supported Romney for president in 2008 -- obviously breaking many laws in the process (it's not a federal crime to support a Republican for president -- at least not yet).  I'm sure Barack Obama's never worked with anyone in his private life who may have supported him for president.  I'm sure Obama was never involved with anyone under federal investigation, lawsuits, or people in nefarious circles.  Nahhhh...

The Meaning of Memorial Day

Michael Walsh on Memorial Day:

The cemetery in Normandy, just above Omaha Beach, is among the most sacred of places. In a reverential stillness broken only by nature, row after row of white crosses and Stars of David mark the final resting places of nearly 10,000 American soldiers, many of whom fell on the nearby beaches, on the cliffs or in the hedgerows.

The wind, the cries of the birds, the pounding of the surf below: These eternal, immutable sounds amplify the silence of the graves, and make them speak to us with nearly unbearable poignancy.

A nation may be judged by how it honors its war dead, whether in vainglorious triumph or in somber meditation. America has always chosen the latter, allowing the very absence of glory to proclaim its presence — and our national resolve.

From Normandy across the Atlantic to Arlington National Cemetery and then across the Pacific to Punchbowl Cemetery in Honolulu, the scope and size of America’s wars are symbolized by the headstones that mark the fallen. Their loss is the price our nation has always been willing to pay for honor and freedom.

And not just ours.

France is often considered hostile to America these days, but in the villages of Normandy, American flags still fly from stone farmhouses, impromptu D-Day museums dot the landscape, and American visitors are as welcome as their grandfathers and great-grandfathers who first hit the beach in June 1944.

And everybody knows why.

From Chosin to Fallujah, Khe Sahn to Kandahar, America has continued to pay the price.

Memorial Day originated as Decoration Day, in the aftermath of the Civil War. In that deadliest of conflicts, we lost some 618,000 people, on both sides — including President Abraham Lincoln, who lived less than a week after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

Better than anyone, Lincoln knew what a powerful force the memory of the dead could be; that, even in death, the soldier fights on by inspiring others by his moral and physical courage. No one ever spoke more eloquently about the “last full measure of devotion” than the president who arrived at the Gettysburg battlefield just four months after the decisive battle of the Civil War to say:

“We can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground,” he said.

“The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

There will be other wars after Iraq and Afghanistan, and more soldiers will die in the “unfinished work” to which Lincoln alluded — for that work can never be finished.

The struggle for personal sovereignty against totalitarian coercion — no matter what “ism” it goes by — likely won’t end ’til Judgment Day. Eternal vigilance really is the price of liberty.

So we mourn our dead, even as we salute their sacrifice.

They are our silent sentinels, forever on watch. On that lonely, windswept clifftop in Normandy, and in countless other places around the world, they serve their country still.

I want to thank my grandpa, who was stationed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, for his service during WWII.

Running Up the Tab

President Obama has lately been claiming the mantle of a fiscal conservative when it comes to spending, claiming that federal spending under his watch has slowed to rates unseen since the Eisenhower Administration.  Ed Morrissey at Hot Air takes a closer look at the numbers and finds these claims to be just a little short of the truth:

The last fully Republican budget was FY2007, which came in at $2.77 trillion.  The last Bush/Democrat budget was FY2008, which was $2.982 trillion.  The FY2009 budget, which Obama signed into law and which was passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress, was $3.517 trillion with a $1.4 trillion deficit.  That’s a year-on-year increase of nearly 18%, and those numbers come straight from the White House website.  If you prefer the figures in percentage of GDP, as Kessler noted yesterday, we went from 20.8% of GDP in FY2008 to 25.2% in FY2009, which is an increase of 22% year on year.

Nor does it get any better.  Using FY2008 as the baseline comparison, FY2010′s budget was $3.456 trillion, an increase of 15.88% over the last Bush/Democrat budget.  FY2011′s $3.603 trillion budget was a 20.8% increase, and FY2012′s projected $3.795 trillion (the White House projection, mind you) is an increase of 27.26% over the last Bush budget — in just four budget years.  An argument that this is a demonstration of fiscal discipline would have to come straight out of the pages of George Orwell’s 1984.

Cannot Compute

Jonathan Horn at Ricochet takes note of a line in a speech President Obama gave yesterday at a campaign event (hell, it could've been an official White House stop and no one would've noticed any difference).  Here is the interesting snippet from the President's remarks:

And when enough of you knock on enough doors and pick up enough phones, and talk to your friends or your neighbors and your coworkers -- and you're doing it respectfully and you're talking to folks who don't agree with you, you're talking to people who are good people, but maybe they don't have all the information -- when you make that happen, when you decide it’s time for change to happen, you know what, change happens.  Change comes to America.  (Applause.)

So, those opposed to the President and his policies simply don't "have all the information."  In other words, they are just dumb.

But the implicit argument in this line is that one can know "all the information" -- after all, that really is the premise of the administrative state.  I think our President needs to read a good book on the subject.

Restoring the Constitution

In the Spring edition of the Claremont Review, Drs. John Marini and James Ceaser have essays respectively on the how we have come to abandon the Constitution and what it will take to restore the Constitution to its former preeminence.  For now, only the Ceaser essay is available, so I will start there.  In that essay Ceaser details how we have to view the Constitution more and more in a purely legalistic sense rather than the political sense it was intended.  Here is more on this important distinction:

The first sense—legalistic constitutionalism—understands the Constitution as a set of rules that can decide policies or cases; these rules are of a sort that can offer definitive answers and that could be employed and enforced by courts. The second sense—political constitutionalism—understands the Constitution as a document that fixes certain ends of government activity, delineates a structure and arrangement of powers, and encourages a certain tone to the operation of the institutions. By this understanding, it falls mostly to political actors making political decisions to protect and promote constitutional goals.

[...]

The two labels—legalistic and political—suggest something about the character of the two approaches. Legalistic constitutionalism refers to formulas and rules. It makes one think immediately of lawyers and judges spinning elaborate constitutional doctrines and devising multi-pronged "tests." Like ancient Egyptian priests, these legal experts speak an occult jargon that few citizens can grasp. Political constitutionalism, by contrast, is premised on the view that much, even most, of what determines whether the Constitution is being respected stems from the accumulation of ordinary policies on issues ranging from education to energy and to the environment. The real work of defending the Constitution accordingly falls to statesmen and parties acting in the political realm and by political means; they must embrace positive programs to protect the Constitution that go well beyond anything that courts could determine.

As Ceaser points out, the legalistic view views the Constitution in a vacuum -- largely unconnected with the greater political universe in which it which it was created to serve.  Ceaser discounts Rick Perry's stumbling explanation of how he would deal with reining in the entitlement programs set up by the New Deal and the current conservative arguments against Obamacare as evidence of the problem with the purely legalistic method.

Here is how we have to go about restoring the understanding of political constitutionalism:

Understanding the formal properties of political constitutionalism is a necessary first step in reviving the concept. But it can only be restored if it is put to work in the form of an actual program, which means that there are likely to be competing programs that are offered. Political constitutionalism is often partisan, as is evident from examining the positions of the political parties for much of the 19th century. Each party had its own interpretation of the Constitution which it pressed openly and vigorously. Only in our times has political constitutionalism died out or been turned into the deceptive exercise of hiding a party's real intent.

[...]

Conservatives today have shown the greatest interest in restoring the Constitution. But they face major obstacles of their own in developing a credible program of political constitutionalism. Many conservatives need to resist the temptation to "ideologize" the Constitution by imagining that their political theory is not just permitted under it, but dictated by it. It cannot be forgotten that the Constitution was instituted to replace the Articles of Confederation in order to allow for the exercise of broad powers in certain areas. How such powers are to be used is left to the winners of elections, who are entitled to promote their ideas of good government within the boundaries of the supreme law. If conservatives believe that some of these powers are being exercised in an undisciplined way, it is for a conservative party to make this case. The Constitution cannot do all the work that a party must do on its own. To think otherwise, and to hold that courts could enforce most conservative doctrines, amounts to legalistic thinking with a vengeance.

Please read the whole thing.

Our Current State (and What Mitt Romney Can Do About it)

Yuval Levin has a great piece in the Weekly Standard about how Mitt Romney can take advantage of the current problems plaguing America, caused in large part due to the creation of agencies and entitlement programs predicated on the principles of modern liberalism.  Here is Yuval first on what Obama offers us:

Barack Obama personifies this opposition to the reforms essential for growth. His express objectives are to protect our existing entitlement system from structural reforms, to increase the tax burden on investment and employment, to further empower and liberate regulators, and to bring more of our economy into the public sector. His economic policy is unimaginative in the extreme—combining early-20th-century social democratic theory with mid-20th-century pork barrel politics. His answer to the government’s fiscal woes is to squeeze the military and the taxpayer to buy a few more years of denial. In every respect, he stands for stagnation and stasis, for defensive consolidation rather than aggressive growth. He thinks the best we can do is to manage decline. 

Simply put, President Obama has no interest in a new way of thinking about America’s prospects, and therefore essentially nothing to offer to assuage the public’s growing anxiety. All he can do is try to direct that anxiety away from himself. He is at best irrelevant, at worst a great impediment, to the effort to keep America growing in the new economic order we are entering.

What Romney should do to take advantage regarding fixing health care:

[A broad health care reform] should involve transforming today’s tax exclusion for employer-provided coverage into a fixed tax credit available to anyone (or at least to people not currently covered by a large employer) for the purchase of coverage. The credit would replace the value of the tax exclusion while giving people far greater control over their own insurance. By putting the credit on the table, moreover, such a reform would create an enormous incentive for insurers to offer attractive products to today’s uninsured at roughly the cost of the credit—by adjusting the balance between premiums, co-pays, and deductibles and offering some catastrophic-coverage options rather than only fully comprehensive ones. This would put at least some meaningful insurance within reach for essentially all of the uninsured at a fraction of the cost of Obamacare.

And what he should do on crafting a beneficial energy policy:

While the president has indulged in embarrassing fantasies about solar and wind power and electric cars, America’s domestic energy supply has undergone an utter revolution in the past few years. Advances in technologies for recovering oil and gas from previously inaccessible sources now look increasingly likely to make available astonishing quantities of domestic fossil fuels. 

Producers and investors are clearly adjusting to this new reality, but it has barely begun to be noticed in our political system. In a May 10 hearing of the House Science Committee’s energy subcommittee, for instance, Anu Mittal of the Government Accountability Office told a stunned panel of members that oil-shale deposits in the Green River Formation in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming alone “are estimated to contain up to 3 trillion barrels of oil, half of which may be recoverable, which is about equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.” Newly accessible natural-gas reserves around the country could be equally staggering in volume. The United States may be on the verge of becoming the world’s fossil-fuel colossus.

I would argue that even before Mitt tackles the policy changes that are needed to move the U.S. from our current, unsustainable course, he needs to take some time to study the foundations on what those policies should be built upon:  the Constitution and the principles of the Declaration of Independence.  One has to have the ends in mind before one can devise the means to attain those ends. 

Please take some time to read the whole thing.

Trust but Verify

Paul Rahe has a good take on how conservatives should view Mitt Romney in the coming election:

Mitt Romney is no more a socialist than [New York City Mayor Michael] Bloomberg. But he has never been a conservative, and in the past -- before he moved to the national stage -- he distanced himself as much as possible from conservatives and even from the Republican Party. In the 1990s, when he was the Republican nominee for the Senate in Massachusetts, he insisted that he was not the same kind of Republican as Ronald Reagan. A decade later, he insisted that he was "a progressive" in his views and that he should be thought of as "a reformer" and not as a Republican. His record in office as Governor of Massachusetts -- with regard to Romneycare and global warming, for example -- is consistent with this. He deserves our support in the upcoming election but he has not earned and should not be accorded our trust.

That having been said, I would not rule out the possibility that Romney will as President earn that trust. Circumstances -- and I have in mind the grave fiscal crisis threatening the administrative entitlements state -- may persuade him to rethink. He is a man of goodwill and evident integrity. Moreover, he knows a failing enterprise when he sees it; he recognizes the limits of the state's capacity to extract revenue from those who actually work; he has seen the threat that the administrative entitlements state poses to religious and political liberty. If he is in any way intellectually agile, he will by now have realized that the path he was on as Governor in Massachusetts is unsustainable and that, when pursued at the federal level,  it will concentrate power and influence in the hands of the federal government on a scale inconsistent with our retention of the liberties we have enjoyed for more than two hundred years.

Dr. Rahe may be right about this.  The latest example that comes to mind has to do with the current occupant of the White House.  While running for president in 2008, Obama chided President Bush for his supposed mangling of the Constitution when it came to the treatment of enemy combatants, Guantanamo Bay, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  But when he assumed office, Obama tacitly kept most of the policies enacted by the Bush Administration in tact.  That has to do with the prudence of the executive office and the knowledge that comes with that seat.  Maybe it will be the same for Romney.

Up In Smoke

Excerpts from David Maraniss's new book "Barack Obama:  The Story" that hit the web today details Obama's penchant for smoking marijuana in his early days.  Here is one story:

"When you were with Barry and his pals, if you exhaled precious pakalolo (Hawaiian slang for marijuana, meaning 'numbing tobacco') instead of absorbing it fully into your lungs, you were assessed a penalty and your turn was skipped the next time the joint came around," Maraniss writes.

"Wasting good bud smoke was not tolerated," explained one member of the Choom Gang.

And another:

"Barry popularized the concept of 'roof hits,'" Maraniss writes.

"When they were chooming in the car, all the windows had to be rolled up so no smoke blew out and went to waste; when the pot was gone, they tilted their heads back and sucked in the last bit of smoke from the ceiling."

Somewhere Bill Clinton is nodding his head, thinking about the days of old.

Rather Dumb

Dan Rather told CNN last night that the 2012 campaign is "by far the worst" of the campaigns that he has covered.  The reason why Rather thinks it's so bad?  No one has created fake documents to make Mitt Romney look bad yet.

Who is Barack Obama?

NRO has re-published this article by Michael Gledhill (a pseudonym of a writer who lives in Washington D.C.) that originally ran during the 2008 election.  The article, apt as ever, is on the odd fact that Dreams From My Father tells a completely different story than the one that the Obama campaign presented to the American people in 2008.  Oddly enough, four years later, most in the MSM still haven't even read through that book.  Some telling differences between the man and  the myth:

Candidate Obama claims that “throughout my life, I have always taken my deep and abiding love for this country as a given.” He tells us his “heart swells with pride at the sight of our flag.”

In Dreams, his heart swells at many things but the sight of the flag certainly isn’t one of them. There he presents a warts-only history of the U.S., a story of evil and suffering. U.S. society is a “racial caste system” where “color and money” determine where you end up in life. He tells us of white children’s stoning black children, Jim Crow, and heatless Harlem housing projects. He describes “Japanese families interned behind barbed wire; young Russian Jews cutting patterns in Lower East Side sweatshops; dust-bowl farmers loading up their trucks with the remains of shattered lives.”

On my favorite character from the Obama composite life, Jeremiah Wright:

Candidate Obama declared that he was shocked when he heard Rev. Jeremiah’s Wright’s outrageous remarks about American society. Despite the fact that he had been a member of Wright’s church for over a decade, Obama asserted that he had never heard such remarks from his spiritual mentor before.

But in the autobiography, Wright’s rants are in plain view. It is obvious that Obama is drawn to Wright’s ministry not in ignorance, but precisely because of the Reverend’s politics. In Dreams, Wright asserts: “Life’s not safe for a black man in this country, Barack. Never has been. Probably never will be.” Obama apparently agrees, ignoring the obvious facts that nearly all black homicides are committed by other blacks, and that the number of violent crimes committed by blacks against whites is about eight times greater than the number of such crimes by whites against blacks.

When Wright, in the pages of Dreams, rants from the pulpit about Hiroshima and proclaims that “white folks’ greed runs a world in need,” it’s not so jarring, since Obama has been saying pretty much the same thing throughout the book. Obama expresses joy and a real sense of belonging in connection with only three places: his childhood home in Indonesia, Kenya, and in the pews of Reverend Wright’s Trinity United Church.

The media's compliance in getting Obama elected is truly amazing.  Other than Bill Clinton, I don't know if they ever worked so hard for a presidential candidate.

Is Bernie Quigley Real?

In the wake of the scandal involving Elizabeth Warren and her claim to be of Cherokee heritage (it was later revealed through genealogy that she is 1/32nd part Cherokee), Bernie Quigley at The Hill offers the best defense I have seen so far in support of Ms. Warren:

So Warren's claim to be "part Indian" is correct in mythical terms. Every old-school white Oklahoman is in this regard even if this in nominally not true. But it is not a lie to want to be Indian and to imagine your ancestors were. It is to be free of Europeanism. Emerson saw the laggard Europeanism within the Yankee mind as a curse of the unformed American, living half in shadow. It would bring temptation unnatural to us raised free in the forest; fascism, as in Italy, Spain and German, and the perennial virus of French nihilism.

Warren in that regard brings a fresh, classical Americanism from the heartland back to us in Boston where we still have tendencies. The James brothers, both William and Henry, would appreciate it. Henry in particular, in The Bostonians, could only find one worthy character up here, the country cousin Basil Ransom, a lawyer visiting from Mississippi. We are lucky to have Warren among us. She adds stock and substance.

I hope Mitt Romney remembers this and incorporates Indian blessings and ritual in his inaugural ceremonies as Canadians do and as they did in those terrific Winter Olympics in Salt Lake in 2002. And I hope Elizabeth Warren doesn't back down on this, because wanting to be Indian, like Hawkeye, makes us in a deeper sense fully American.

And when I said best defense I meant the craziest, most illogical string of sentences every put together on the subject.  This is not satire.  This person who calls himself "Bernie Quigley" actually does exist.

Small Politics

Hadley Arkes from his latest column on the dangers of the where our politics seem to be trending:

Among the lessons taught by Lincoln was that a statesman finds a way of leading people to talk about the things that are truly central even though people may not wish to talk about them. My concern is that we have produced a truncated discourse on politics in this country, with a strong aversion to talking about those matters of moral consequence that people do in fact care about. 

And if we come to settle more firmly into the grooves of that kind of politics, the question is do we become the kind of truncated persons who fit that truncated political world?

The Constitution begins with the powers of the government extending from the consent of "We the People."  But that people isn't any group of people.  It's not a group of mobsters or thieves.  The people of the Constitution -- or a constitutional people -- is one which recognizes the standard for politics is the laws of nature and Nature's God -- or reason and revelation.  Lincoln saw that the people in the 1850's had lost their bearing and needed to come back to the principles, virtues, and character that distinguished them as the people of the Constitution.  And it is important to note that prior to Lincoln, the issue of slavery was treated by many politicians much like how many "moral" issues of today are treated:  it was put on the sidelines (at times slavery was barred from being discussed on the floors of Congress and it was thought that any talk about it would unduly rile the public and incite sectional strife).

Is Bringing Up Jeremiah Wright Racist?

Kathleen Parker at the Washington Post has an opinion piece in which she argues why it would be a bad thing for Republicans to bring the Rev. Jeremiah Wright back for the 2012 campaign.  I found this part interesting:

Obama has a record as president and can be challenged on that record. Raising Wright now would have been a serious miscalculation and would have been interpreted as attempting to inspire racial animus.

The bit about inspiring racial animus is interesting because, as Paul Mirengoff points out at Power Line,

...there is nothing inherently racial about bringing up the fact that Rev. Wright served as Obama’s spiritual adviser, while denouncing America, hating on Israel, and embracing Louis Farrakhan. Any candidate (of any race) who was closely associated with any minister (of any race) who delivered hateful, anti-American sermons would be expected to answer for it.

Sure Wright and Farrakhan are Black, but that doesn’t give them a pass for their racism and anti-Americanism. By the same token, the fact that Obama is Black doesn’t excuse him for selecting Wright as his spiritual leader. There were many other black clerics Obama could have looked to for guidance. He chose the Black liberationist who spews a message of hate.

If it wasn’t racist for Obama eventually to disavow Wright, it isn’t racist to hold him accountable for being so tight with Wright for so long.

It was Barack Obama himself who privately disavowed Jeremiah Wright, and who publicly proclaimed that he could no more disown Wright than he could disown his own grandmother.  The vices exhibited by Wright would still be vices no matter the color of Wright's skin.  Here is one example to show the wrongheaded arguments by those who would claim racism:  What if the roles had been reversed and it had been John McCain's pastor who said the things Wright had said? 

When Flip-flops are Good

You know how when Obama said his position on gay marriage was "evolving," everyone knew what that meant?  The Daily Caller has a piece detailing the myriad of shifts and changing policies within the Obama Administration -- from the troop surge in Afghanistan to the Nobel Peace Prize and everything in between.  Have these changes been described by the MSM as flip-flops?  No.  They are described as "evolutions."

Conservatism as a Mental Disorder

Andrew Ferguson's newest piece titled "The New Phrenology" in the upcoming Weekly Standard is truly a must read.  Ferguson dissects the new class of social scientists -- the psychopundits -- and discounts the ways in which they have attempted, in the name of Science, to prove that the conservative mind is largely a problem of evolutionary biology -- in other words, a mental disorder of some kind.  Here is Andrew's opening paragraph:

We are entering the age of the psychopundit (we can thank the science writer Will Saletan for this excellent word). Thomas Edsall, for example, is a veteran political reporter widely admired by people who admire political reporters. He has become very excited by social science, as so many widely admired people have. Studies show—as a psychopundit would say—that Edsall is excited because social science has lately become a tool of Democrats who want to reassure themselves that Republicans are heartless and stupid. In embracing Science, the psychopundit believes he is moving from the spongy world of mere opinion to the firmer footing of fact. It is pleasing to him to discover that the two—his opinion and scientific fact—are identical. 

Ferguson then sets his sights on skewering a few of the psychopundits themselves.  According to a new book by psychopundit Chris Mooney,

Liberals are “more open, flexible, curious, nuanced.” Conservatives are “more closed, fixed, and certain in their views.” But don’t get the wrong idea: Mooney insists he is not saying “conservatives are somehow worse people than liberals.” That would be judgmental, and Science is clear: Liberals aren’t judgmental. “The groups are just different,” he goes on amiably. Indeed, he warns that the truths he reveals in his book “will discomfort both sides.” Fairness requires him to be evenhanded. On the one hand, conservatives won’t like the scientific fact that they tend to deny reality and treat their errors as dogma. On the other hand, liberals won’t like the scientific fact that all their well-meaning attempts to reason with conservatives are doomed. 

I have seen articles like Mooney's published every couple of months -- supposed proof through scientific research that conservatives are just mean, irrational, and hate the poor by nature.  Liberals, of course, are guided by facts; conservatives are guided by their irrationalities and passions.

The funny thing is is that a reliance on facts or science doesn't get to the core of anything.  The atomic bomb took much scientific knowledge to design and build.  But that technical knowledge alone does not tell us how to use, or maybe not use, that bomb.  Science originally understood knew its limits and was aware that it was only a section of the whole of knowledge and not the whole itself (Aristotle maintained that political science was the highest science one could study).

Ultimately, the modern scientific project undertaken by the psychopundits and their social science brethren is very damaging to a country that rests on abstract truths -- like the principle that all by nature are created equal -- that are applicable to all men and all times.

All One Thing or All the Other

Charles Krauthammer on the two ways that gay marriage is typically defended:

There are two ways to defend gay marriage. Argument A is empathy: One is influenced by gay friends in committed relationships yearning for the fulfillment and acceptance that marriage conveys upon heterosexuals. That’s essentially the case President Obama made when he first announced his change of views.

[...]

Argument B is more uncompromising: You have the right to marry anyone, regardless of gender. The right to “marriage equality” is today’s civil rights, voting rights, and women’s rights — and just as inviolable.

The seeming contradiction with Obama's position:

Problem is, it’s a howling contradiction to leave up to the states an issue Obama now says is a right. And beyond being intellectually untenable, Obama’s embrace of the more hard-line “rights” argument compels him logically to see believers in traditional marriage as purveyors of bigotry. Not a good place for a president to be in an evenly divided national debate that requires the two sides to offer each other a modicum of respect.

Obama now finds himself -- strangely enough -- in the position of Senator Stephen A. Douglas in the 1858 debates between himself and Abraham Lincoln.  In the Dred Scott decision, which was set down in 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney stated that the right to slavery was "expressly affirmed" in the Constitution, which meant that it was now a constitutional right (it fell under the right to property under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment) -- something that could logically not be abridged by popular vote.  Stephen Douglas, however, the champion of popular sovereignty, voiced his support for Dred Scott, which, as Lincoln pointed out, was a seeming contradiction.  Douglas held both that it was up to the people of the territories to decide questions like slavery, a question which Douglas no doubt thought was solvable by democratic forms, and that the right to slavery was now firmly entrenched in the Constitution -- that, in the words of Taney, "the negro has no rights which the white man is bound to respect."  These two things couldn't be reconciled with one another.  And neither can Obama's positions.  Ultimately, as Lincoln foresaw, we must be all one thing or all the other.

Born in Kenya

News broke yesterday on Breitbart that in 1991, Obama was pictured in a booklet produced by his then literary agent that, among other things, described him as being born in Kenya.  In a disclaimer on the top of the report, the senior management lets readers know that Andrew Breitbart was not a "birther" and that this story should not be construed as an attempt to prove that he really was born in Kenya and is thus not qualified to be president (though some will no doubt take it that way anyway).  The interesting fact is that this information was taken down only in 2007.

The point of the report is that either Obama, his literary agent, or both thought it necessary to construct this narrative out of whole cloth so that he would appeal to an even more diverse audiences.  It evidently was not enough simply being a African American; one has to be born in Africa.

Marriage and Life: Lessons From Ronald Reagan

This week a letter Ronald Reagan wrote to his son, Michael, was released to the public.  Reagan wrote it shortly before his son was married in 1971.  Reagan's advice:

Michael Reagan
Manhattan Beach, California
June 1971

Dear Mike:

Enclosed is the item I mentioned (with which goes a torn up IOU). I could stop here but I won't.

You've heard all the jokes that have been rousted around by all the "unhappy marrieds" and cynics. Now, in case no one has suggested it, there is another viewpoint. You have entered into the most meaningful relationship there is in all human life. It can be whatever you decide to make it.

Some men feel their masculinity can only be proven if they play out in their own life all the locker-room stories, smugly confident that what a wife doesn't know won't hurt her. The truth is, somehow, way down inside, without her ever finding lipstick on the collar or catching a man in the flimsy excuse of where he was till three A.M., a wife does know, and with that knowing, some of the magic of this relationship disappears. There are more men griping about marriage who kicked the whole thing away themselves than there can ever be wives deserving of blame. There is an old law of physics that you can only get out of a thing as much as you put in it. The man who puts into the marriage only half of what he owns will get that out. Sure, there will be moments when you will see someone or think back to an earlier time and you will be challenged to see if you can still make the grade, but let me tell you how really great is the challenge of proving your masculinity and charm with one woman for the rest of your life. Any man can find a twerp here and there who will go along with cheating, and it doesn't take all that much manhood. It does take quite a man to remain attractive and to be loved by a woman who has heard him snore, seen him unshaven, tended him while he was sick and washed his dirty underwear. Do that and keep her still feeling a warm glow and you will know some very beautiful music. If you truly love a girl, you shouldn't ever want her to feel, when she sees you greet a secretary or a girl you both know, that humiliation of wondering if she was someone who caused you to be late coming home, nor should you want any other woman to be able to meet your wife and know she was smiling behind her eyes as she looked at her, the woman you love, remembering this was the woman you rejected even momentarily for her favors.

Mike, you know better than many what an unhappy home is and what it can do to others. Now you have a chance to make it come out the way it should. There is no greater happiness for a man than approaching a door at the end of a day knowing someone on the other side of that door is waiting for the sound of his footsteps.
Love,

Dad 

P.S. You'll never get in trouble if you say "I love you" at least once a day.

The redefinition of manliness has become the new norm but with teachings like these, we can still come back to the principles and virtues that used to be more widely practiced.  I think too many self-described moralists today talk of the past and today's general abdication of morality as something which cannot be undone.  Anyone can come back to the Truth.  Anyone can be redeemed.

The Bully

Michael Ramirez on who the real bully is:

Irrelevance

This line from Victor Davis Hanson perfectly sums up the strategy of the Obama campaign:

Forget about America borrowing $5 trillion in three years; worry instead about a dog on a car roof three decades ago.

And as VDH points out, the non-vetting of Obama by the MSM in 2008 -- as evidenced by the whole composite-gate story in which it was revealed that virtually no one in the press had even read through Dreams From My Father -- may help Romney quite a bit in 2012.

Constitutional Historicism

On Ricochet Fred Cole poses a question to readers, asking what they would change about the Constitution if they could rewrite it in 2012.  I found this part of his post cringe-worthy:

Our Constitution was written in 1787, in a three-mile-per-hour world. It was pre-Freud, pre-Darwin, pre-Einstein, pre-germ theory, pre-atomic theory. It reflects the values and the times that produced it. 

So because the Founders didn't know about future technological advances, that somehow makes their ideas and principles less true today than they were in 1776 (or 1787)?  But that cuts out the ground under Fred as well.  He is just as susceptible to charges that will be made by someone 100 years in the future that will invalidate whatever changes he proposes today.

I seem to remember that around those times, the Founders also produced that memorable line about the self-evident truth that all men are created equal and that they have certain inalienable rights, among those being life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Is it less true today that all mankind is imbued with certain natural rights, that were given not from the government but from the Creator?  Or that the Constitution is built on the metaphysical structure of the insights into the permanent truths of the Declaration?  I guess for Fred, the fact of Lady Gaga and Spam somehow invalidates all of this.

Fred should consider Hamilton's lesson in the opening paragraph of Federalist 31:

IN DISQUISITIONS of every kind there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasonings must depend. These contain an internal evidence which, antecedent to all reflection or combination, commands the assent of the mind. Where it produces not this effect, it must proceed either from some disorder in the organs of perception, or from the influence of some strong interest, or passion, or prejudice. Of this nature are the maxims in geometry that the whole is greater than its part; that things equal to the same are equal to one another; that two straight lines cannot enclose a space; and that all right angles are equal to each other. Of the same nature are these other maxims in ethics and politics, that there cannot be an effect without a cause; that the means ought to be proportioned to the end; that every power ought to be commensurate with its object; that there ought to be no limitation of a power destined to effect a purpose which is itself incapable of limitation. And there are other truths in the two latter sciences which, if they cannot pretend to rank in the class of axioms, are yet such direct inferences from them, and so obvious in themselves, and so agreeable to the natural and unsophisticated dictates of common sense that they challenge the assent of a sound and unbiased mind with a degree of force and conviction almost equally irresistible.

History, Obama Style

On the official biographies of the presidents on the White House website dating back to Calvin Coolidge, the Obama Administration has added a factoid relating each president, with the exception of Gerald Ford, to some policy currently being touted by the Administration.

Here are a couple samples:

• On Feb. 22, 1924 Calvin Coolidge became the first president to make a public radio address to the American people. President Coolidge later helped create the Federal Radio Commission, which has now evolved to become the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). President Obama became the first president to hold virtual gatherings and town halls using Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.

• In a June 28, 1985 speech Reagan called for a fairer tax code, one where a multi-millionaire did not have a lower tax rate than his secretary. Today, President Obama is calling for the same with the Buffett Rule.

So whatever policy was started by a particular president, President Obama has only made it better through the actions of his Administration.

In other news, an earthquake measuring 10.0 on the Richter scale occurred today.  The cause?  The collective force generated by every president since Coolidge simultaneously turning in their graves.

Cliches as Argument: A Primer

This is how Paul Krugman's latest column, with the teacher-scolding-kindergartener title "Why We Regulate," begins:

One of the characters in the classic 1939 film “Stagecoach” is a banker named Gatewood who lectures his captive audience on the evils of big government, especially bank regulation — “As if we bankers don’t know how to run our own banks!” he exclaims. As the film progresses, we learn that Gatewood is in fact skipping town with a satchel full of embezzled cash.

And from there, it's all downhill.  Republicans and conservatives are cast as the anarchy-loving fools that they are, not caring if there are rusty nails in our children's food.  For Krugman, those skeptical of any limits on government power are completely anti-regulation and overall, are anti-government. 

KC Mulville at Ricochet breaks down Krugman's cliched rhetoric:

Consider Paul Krugman’s piece today, in which he defends regulation. Krugman thinks he’s patiently explaining to us (rubes) why we need regulation, and what would happen if we got rid of it. Of course, this is a straw-man, since hardly anyone wants to remove regulation entirely. But Krugman takes it one step further. Krugman implies that unless we embrace the full set of regulations, and embrace the idea that regulators have unlimited authority, then we must be in favor of Big Bank or Big Finance excesses … and only the ignorant henchmen of Big Money, or their unwitting slaves, would accept that.

States' Wrongs

John Yoo has some questions for President Obama on his new found faith in federalism regarding his policy that it should be up to the states to decided the question:

1. Obama's Justice Department has refused to defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act.  The very purpose of the Act is to advance Obama's stated goal: to allow each state to decide for itself whether to legalize gay marriage, by allowing states to refuse to recognize gay marriages from out of state. President Obama can order -- tomorrow -- Attorney General Eric Holder to reverse the Justice Department's extraordinary decision to refuse to defend this federal law in court.

2. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit this spring struck down California's Proposition 8, which prohibits gay marriage. The grounds of the decision are directly opposite to President Obama's stated belief: the court found that the right to gay marriage is nationwide and not subject to state choice. President Obama can direct his Attorney General to support the efforts of Proposition 8's defenders to overturn the decision. In fact, he could have his Solicitor General file a friend-of-the-court brief when Proposition 8's defenders appeal to the Supreme Court (known as "petitioning for cert") recommending that the Court accept the case and reverse the Ninth Circuit.  He could even issue the order now, to take effect when the Prop 8 case hits the Supreme Court.

John is by the way a defender of gay marriage.

Angels Above America

This is what will appear on the cover of the new issue of Newsweek:

 

John Hinderaker at Power Line has some thoughts on this:

First Bill Clinton was anointed, weirdly, as our first black president. But he wasn’t, of course. Now our actual first black president, Barack Obama, has been anointed as our first gay president. Which he isn’t, either. The odd thing is that the news outlets that promote these “firsts” consider them to be high compliments. Coming out for gay marriage isn’t just good public policy, it is angelic!

Mitt Romney will be, most likely, our first Mormon president. If that happens, it will be a remarkable accomplishment, given how relatively few Mormons there are and how recently they were viciously persecuted. Joseph Smith was tarred and feathered in 1832 and murdered by a mob in 1844. Do you think that our newspapers and magazines will celebrate the election of our first Mormon to the presidency? No, I don’t think so either. No halos for Mitt.

 

Wright to Remain Silent

A new book coming out titled "The Amateur" details that a person close to Barack Obama in 2008 offered the Rev. Jeremiah Wright $150,000 to shut up until the campaign was over. 

I really don't get it.  What makes them think that this guy would have damaged the campaign???

Oh, wait...

The Hobbesian Constitution

In two new essays on Right Reason, Hadley Arkes takes Justice Kennedy to task for his majority opinion in Lafler v. Cooper and finds that he has taken on the premises of that justly decried political philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

The background of the case:  Anthony Cooper pointed and shot a loaded gun at Kali Mundi, missed, and as she fled, he shot and hit her three times, none being fatal.  The prosecutors brought five charges on Mr. Cooper, but they ultimately offered him a plea deal consisting of serving 51-85 months behind bars, which his counsel advised him not to take.  On the first day of trial, he was offered a lesser deal, and at the advice of lawyer, he rejected that as well.  Cooper was ultimately convicted on all counts and received a sentence of 185 to 360 months in prison.   Cooper, taking this case all the way to the Supreme Court, argued that his right to counsel meant the right to effective counsel, which, in his case, meant the first plea bargain.  Justice Kennedy in a 5-4 majority agreed that this was what the Constitution meant in this instance.  For Arkes, this displaced the moral foundations of the law:

In place of those principles, grounded in the very axioms of justice, Justice Kennedy has offered now the Hobbesian version: Higher than a fair trial, higher than a dispassionate and accurate judging of guilt and innocence, is the interest of any man in avoiding punishment, no matter how justified that punishment may be. "The fact that [Anthony Cooper] is guilty," wrote Kennedy, "does not mean he was not entitled by the Sixth Amendment to effective assistance or that he suffered no prejudice from his attorney's performance during plea bargaining." And his right to that "assistance" may override the verdict on the serious wrong he had in fact committed. 

Arkes notes that that great doubter of the natural law, Justice Scalia, thought otherwise:

What the majority had done, in Scalia's reckoning, was to invert the moral ordering of the legal system: In Kennedy's construal "constitutional rights are infringed by trying the defendant rather than accepting his plea of guilty." Even if lawyers had made massive mistakes, those mistakes would be overborne if the trial itself offered a rigorous test of the evidence and a justified judgment on innocence and guilt. As Scalia crystallized the matter, "Anthony Cooper, who shot repeatedly and gravely injured a woman named Kali Mundy, was tried and convicted for his crimes by a jury of his peers, and given a punishment that Michigan's elected representatives have deemed appropriate."

Justice Scalia is still continuing the tradition of doubting the natural law while, at the same time, talking and making judgements rooted in the natural law, of rights and wrongs, of things just and unjust.  The prospect of him possibly retiring from the Court in the next four years makes the coming election more important than ever.

And please read both essays.  Hadley Arkes has a lot to teach us.

Kid Romney

The other big story this past week was a very long front page story in the Washington Post regarding Mitt Romney's days at Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, MI.  Romney at that time was known as a prankster who would often get laughs at the expense of others.  There were times when the jokes went too far, as exhibited when Romney cut the hair of a fellow student, John Lauber, who later came out as gay.  In an interview this week when asked about this and other incidents, Romney said that he did not remember, but he did apologize to anyone he hurt with his pranks.

The Lauber story of course was front and center in article, especially with President Obama's big coming out interview regarding gay marriage (as Paul Mirengoff notes at Power Line, it's more than odd that this story never came out during any of Romney's previous runs for office).  Trying to beat Romney over the head with something he did 50 years ago -- and who knows truly why he did it in the first place -- and to implicitly tar those who do not agree with same-sex marriage as mean bullies seems very in character with the way things seem to be going.  I guess what Romney did 50 years ago would actually matter if a couple weeks ago he knocked down Barney Frank and started giving him a buzz cut.

These types of front page exposés on some telling point on what Barack Obama did 30 years ago (drugs, anyone?) never seemed to fully materialize in 2008.  Why these stories matter so much today is telling.

For some insights on how Romney changed as a person between then and now, read this post, which is an excerpt from the recent Romney biography titled The Real Romney.

Full Circle

The biggest news of this past week was President Obama's public announcement of his approval for same-sex marriage.  Here is the President in an interview with Robin Roberts of ABC news:

At a certain point, I've just concluded that-- for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that-- I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.

[...]

And what you're seeing is, I think, states working through this issue-- in fits and starts, all across the country. Different communities are arriving at different conclusions, at different times. And I think that's a healthy process and a healthy debate. And I continue to believe that this is an issue that is gonna be worked out at the local level, because historically, this has not been a federal issue, what's recognized as a marriage.

I will get to this in a minute, but first I want to map out a timeline of sorts.  Obama was originally for gay marriage in 1996.  Later, at the forum at the Saddleback Church in 2008, when Pastor Rick Warren asked about his stance on marriage then, he stated:  "I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian — for me — for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. God’s in the mix."  Soon after that, he stated that his views were"evolving," a smoke signal to people in the high places of liberal society who understood what that vague language meant.  And then there was his announcement this past week.

But this announcement did not come out of the blue.  Last Sunday while on Meet the Press, VP Joe Biden stated his support for same-sex marriage, putting the President in a precarious position because of his not-as-yet fully evolved view on same-sex marriage (and the fact that many saw Joe Biden serving as the exemplar of political courage).  And this came just after North Carolina became the 31st state to make gay marriage (and civil unions) unconstitutional.

As evidenced by a $40,000 a person fundraiser at George Clooney's house last night, this change in public stance has no doubt helped Obama in the fundraising department (in which he still is way ahead of the ultra rich Mitt Romney).

But let's get back to his statements in the interview with ABC news.

He couched his support for same-sex marriage in the language of personal belief.  But Obama obviously thinks that same-sex marriage is a positive good for everyone, not just for himself.  He was trying to talk the language of universal rights, but struggling because his education taught him that any notion of natural law or natural rights is just an illusion.  Like Bentham said, belief in natural rights is simply nonsense on stilts.  In no way did he actually establish that same-sex marriage is a good for everyone.

Lets get to his comment about the right of the states to decide this question.  If it follows that he thinks same-sex marriage is a universal good, then his supposed concern for states' rights rings hollow (especially if Hadley Arkes is right about the ground already being set, by way of Lawrence v. Texas, for the right to same-sex marriage to be enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, thereby invalidating all state laws to the contrary).  His support for states to decide the question means that public support for same-sex marriage will just work itself out naturally.  People will someday rise to the intellectual heights of his own thought on the subject. 

As Lincoln said in the House Divided Speech regarding slavery, the Union would "become all one thing or all the other."  This teaching is as important today as ever.

End of an Era

Sorry I have been gone for a few days.  Work got extremely busy, but I now have some free time again.

The No Left Turns blog at the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University is closing its doors for good.  I want to thank Dr. Peter Schramm, Executive Director of the Center, for his time and work on the blog.  For a long time, it has been one of the best blogs on the internet for principled, deep discussions on the American Republic and its foundations in the laws of nature and nature's God.  NLT is truly what the founders had in mind when they conceived of a nation of people capable of self-government.  

I will quote Dr. Schramm's last post in full:

We started NLT in October of 2001.  I thought it was a good idea, as did many of you even back then.  In fact, in my typical bragadoccio mode I warned Jonah Goldberg a few months later that we would put NRO out of business.  I'm glad we didn't do that, of course.  But I am happy that we had a good run at things.  In fact, I am proud of our effort and I want to thank our fine authors.  Thank you very much!  As you know we were one of the few serious blogs where no one was paid for writing, and yet our authors wrote and wrote, plus there were some very good conversations with readers.  Thanks to all of you for that.

Over a decade of writing isn't bad. It's an accomplishment we can be proud of.  I know all our words at NLT were not birds in flight, some were, inevitably, potatoes.  But all of it was thoughtful, sometimes full of flair and ardor, sometimes full of deep learning, almost always revealing a liveliness of mind found only at a few other blogs.  I am grateful to all the bloggers  for their work.  I have learned much.  We have taught one another much.  We acted like citizens.

We will archive it all, and it will be accessible from our new Ashbrook site that will go up in three or four weeks.  It will be a fine site.  I hope you will like it.

I don't have to get too soft and weepy with y'all for you to know that I am--as is everyone at the Ashbrook Center--very grateful that we had this opportunity and that it lasted so long.  God Bless.

Our bloggers can be found at other places, including Postmodern Conservative, Liberty Law, and Power Line.

Life Under Obama

David Burge has a hilarious take on the Obama campaign's "Life of Julia"presentation here.  One of the best slides:

Shostakovich and Strauss

In the latest issue of the Claremont Review of Books, Robert Reilly reviews Wendy Lesser's Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets and finds that while Lesser's book has many admirable qualities, it violates Leo Strauss's most important pedagogical teaching:  that in order to understand anyone, you have to first understand them as they understood themselves.

When Dimitri Shostakovich was finally forced to join the Communist Party in 1960, he did so with public enthusiasm and became a musical emissary abroad.  He soon wrote symphonies and other works dedicated to Stalin and other Soviet heroes.  But why were those symphonies so jumbled and inaccessible?  Reilly may have the answer:

The answer is that Shostakovich was engaged in secret writing in the exact way in which Leo Strauss defined it, although transposed to the world of music. In Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), Strauss said, "Persecution...gives rise to a peculiar technique of writing...in which the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines.... It has all the advantages of public communication without having its greatest disadvantage—capital punishment for the author." To the consternation of many who had interpreted Shostakovich's music programmatically, according to various Communist or "Great Patriotic War" themes, Shostakovich revealed in Testimony that he had been speaking in code.

For instance, Shostakovich said that the end of the Fifth Symphony is a false apotheosis: "the rejoicing is forced, created under threat.... You have to be a complete oaf not to hear that." The Seventh Symphony, subtitled Leningrad, was blatantly used for propaganda purposes against the Nazis during World War II. Shostakovich said that the Seventh was "planned before the war and consequently it simply cannot be seen as a reaction to Hitler's attack. The ‘invasion theme' has nothing to do with the attack. I was thinking of other enemies of humanity when I composed the theme.... [I]t's about the Leningrad that Stalin destroyed and that Hitler merely finished off." Likewise, the Eleventh Symphony is not about the Revolution in 1905: "it deals with contemporary themes even though it's called ‘1905.' It's about the people, who have stopped believing because the cup of evil has run over." Of the 14th Symphony, Shostakovich said, "I don't protest against death in it, I protest against those butchers who execute people." As for why he said different things to different people at various times, Shostakovich gave a reply that, no doubt, Leo Strauss would have enjoyed: "I answer different people differently, because different people deserve different answers."

Obama/Hollande 2012

The Socialist candidate Francois Hollande won the run-off election over the weekend and will be the next President of France, succeeding the incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy.  In case you didn't know, here is one of Hollande's most popular campaign pledges:

Hollande has pledged to tax the very rich at 75 percent of their income, an idea that proved wildly popular among the majority of people. The measure would bring in only a relatively small amount to the budget, and tax lawyers say France's taxes have always been high and unpredictable and that this may not be as much of a shock as it sounds.

But it's interesting that even the AP report admits that the increase, which in the next breathe it denies the seriousness of the increase, will do next to nothing to help the budget (sounds strangely similar to something else...).

Another campaign pledge of Hollande's is to shift away from the budget austerity that has been supposedly sweeping through Europe.   But over at NRO, Vernonique de Rugy wonders in what universe these supposed massive budget cuts are taking place:

Look at this chart. It is based on Eurostat data which you can find here. Following years of large spending increases, Spain, the United Kingdom, France, and Greece — countries widely cited for adopting austerity measures — haven’t significantly reduced spending since 2008. As you can see on this chart:These countries still spend more than pre-recession levels

• France and the U.K. did not cut spending.
• In Greece, and Spain, when spending was actually reduced — between 2009–2011 — the cuts have been relatively small compared to what is needed. Also, meaningful structural reforms were seldom implemented.
• As for Italy, the country reduced spending between 2009 and 2010 but the data shows and uptick in spending 2011. The increase in spending represents more than the previous reduction.

The most important point to keep in mind is that whenever cuts took place, they were always overwhelmed by large counterproductive tax increases. Unfortunately, that point is often overlooked. This  approach to austerity — some spending cuts with large tax increases — is what President Obama has called the “balanced approach.”

As I was just watching Fox News, Charles Krauthammer said exactly was I was going to say on this subject:  Contrary to Hollande's economic policies helping raise revenue, tax revenues will decrease and will put France into a greater hole than it is in right now.

Forward March!

The Obama campaign late last week unveiled their new campaign slogan for 2012:  Forward (this is not adapted from a Christopher Buckley novel).  Obviously the slogan is ripe for attacks, with the most obvious being the fact that socialist movements of the past used the exact same word as a rallying cry.  And of course, Forward, just like its predecessor Change, is a neutral word and tells us nothing about whether going Forward is good or bad (people seem to forget that there was a time that the most forward-looking thinking regarding race was that blacks were not and could never be equal to whites).  For Progressives like Obama, History is moving like a freight train and we just have to do our best to hold on for dear life.  Unlike earlier Progressives though, Obama can no longer be sure where the train is taking us.

Anyway, Steve Hayward posted some funny pictures making light of the new slogan.  This is the best one:

Overreach

Carl Scott at Postmodern Conservative has an extremely thought-provoking (and quite long) post on the composite character story that broke out mid-last week.  Carl focuses much of the essay on the many conservatives who mocked the young Obama's struggle to deal with T.S. Eliot in a love letter to his then-girlfriend Alex McNear (here is the quote from an earlier post of mine).  Here is Carl's take:

A number of conservative commentators have used that quote in ways that make me squirm. They apparently hold an expectation that all real conservatives will regard it as ridiculous. NRO has a slide show that juxtaposes it against goofy young Obama toker photos. At Ricochet, Diane Ellis gives us this headline: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious than Current Obama. Thankfully, many of the commenters there are much more charitable, sounding the obvious “didn’t a lot of us write embarrassing stuff in our college years” line, thereby showing us that Ricochet’s aim of fostering civil web discourse bears real fruit. But a far more typical conservative response is exemplified by that headline, and without the “may have been.” And that angers me. I know in a previous thread I said Obama was a faux intellectual, and received a partial correction from James Ceaser, but at least towards the younger Obama, I feel egg-head-ish solidarity, and resistance to the charge of pretentiousness.

Consider the quote.  Obama’s use of “he accedes to maintaining” admittedly displays a classic tick of trying-too-hard undergraduate writing. And there’s certainly a kind of a sketchy flirt in his getting into the sexual aspect. But what particularly jumps out is that this guy in his senior year is trying to be serious about literature, and doing a better job of it than most of us would have. I do not detect much calculation here about how to impress this woman; rather, I get the sense of a young man who is in a season of giving himself over, even obsessively so, to literature and things intellectual. Hints of Obama’s now well-known narcissism, or at least, tone-deafness with regard to how speak about himself, are already there, but still.

 [...]

And that is all the more why I denounce those conservatives who gleefully snipe at the purported weirdness or pretentiousness of a young ambitious man who—gasp!–apparently took T.S. Eliot and such seriously. Go back to your ESPN or your Larry the Cable Guy if Eliot is out of your league–stick with criticizing Obama’s decisions and speeches, and leave the intellectual dimension of his story to those of us who actually care and know about such matters.

We would actually be happy to learn that Obama was basically a B.S.-er on literary matters, something that these extracts do not prove, and in fact suggest otherwise. Because for us, the really unsettling (Lionel Trilling-like) question is the following: did his engagement with fine modern literature not give him any hesitations, as he successively got in bed with tactically-ruthless socialists, Chicago machine politicians, and black-nationalist “theologians”? Did it do so little for him?

I won't get into the rest of what Carl says--and he has a lot of important things to say (e.g., Shelby Steele is closer to living out Ralph Ellison's teachings than any of the modern civil rights leaders)--but this is definitely something worth thinking about.  As Carl argues, the fact that Obama tried to take Eliot seriously is not the problem (and conservatives attacking that aspect of it really fall into the stereotype liberals have created about them being dumb and stupid).  The problem is that he did not fully grasp the principles Ellison, Eliot, and others taught.  If he did, he might not be in the mess he is in right now. 

Lifting All Boats

President Bill Clinton last week in the New York Times reviewed the fourth volume of Robert Caro's on-going series on LBJ.  Among the many interesting things said was this assertion:  "...the end of broad-based economic growth that had indeed 'lifted all boats' in the early ’60s, made it harder and harder to win more converts to the civil rights and anti­poverty causes."

I remember reading something about this in Steve Hayward's great Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents:  From Wilson to Obama.  The "lifted all boats" line is an aphorism from a speech JFK gave to the Economic Club of New York in the fall of 1962.  Here is the pertinent part of that speech:

The current income tax system siphons out of the private economy too large a share of personal and business purchasing power. . . it reduces the financial incentives for personal effort, investment, and risk-taking.”

Our true choice is not between tax reduction, on the one hand, and the avoidance of large Federal deficits on the other. It is increasingly clear that no matter what party is in power, so long as our national security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance our budget just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits. Surely the lesson of the last decade is that budget deficits are not caused by wild-eyed spenders but by slow economic growth and periodic recessions, and any new recession would break all deficit records.

In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now. The experience of a number of European countries and Japan have borne this out. This country’s own experience with tax reduction in 1954 has borne this out. And the reason is that only full employment can balance the budget, and tax reduction can pave the way to that employment. The purpose of cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy which can bring a budget surplus (Emphasis mine).

So Bill Clinton implicitly praises JFK's cutting taxes which, in his words, led to "broad based economic growth" in the early 60s.  Regarding the basic economic policies Kennedy and his advisers enacted, especially those in the bolded part, the same policies today would be completely rejected by the Democratic Party (Clinton's presidency included).  Here is Steve Hayward in a post on this subject back in June of 2011:

Any Democrat who talked this way today would be drummed out of the party, and would make [Paul] Krugman’s head explode. (Hey, there’s. . . never mind.) Instead, Krugman, Robert Reich, and company are starting to wax nostalgic about the 70 to 90 percent marginal income tax rates of the 1950s, which they argue didn’t retard economic performance at all, thereby willfully forgetting the critique the growth liberals made of the slow-growth Eisenhower years.

Interesting how the times change.