Counting Down to Zero

In the wake of Keith Olbermann's absence from Current TV's coverage of the Iowa cacauses, Olbermann has come out with a statement blasting network executives and the conditions he is working under.  Here is his statement:

“I was not given a legitimate opportunity to host under acceptable conditions,” Olbermann said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter on Wednesday. “They know it and we know it. Telling half the story is wrong.”

 And that's not even the best part of the story.  Check out his ratings:

Countdown is the highest-rated show on Current by far. On Dec. 15, the program averaged 52,000 viewers among news’ target demographic of viewers ages 25-54. The network’s two-hour post-Iowa GOP debate analysis on the same night had 4,000 viewers in the demo, while the 2 a.m. rebroadcast of Countdown pulled in 11,000.

Wow.

Slipping into the Recesses of the Mind

President Obama's recent recess appointments--Richard Cordray, former Ohio Attorney General and now head of the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and three new members to the NLRB--have caused a firestorm of criticism.  Questions on the constitutionality of these appointments have abounded.  Here are some of strong criticisms and charges that have been leveled:

Recess appointments [are] ‘the wrong thing to do.’ “‘It’s the wrong thing to do."

A recess appointee is ‘damaged goods… we will have less credibility.’ “To some degree, he’s damaged goods… somebody who couldn’t get through a nomination in the Senate. And I think that that means that we will have less credibility…” 

‘An end run around the Senate and the Constitution.’

‘They are mischievous.’ “Also, understand this: We have had a difficult problem with the President now for some time. We don’t let him have recess appointments because they are mischievous, and unless we have an agreement before the recess, there will be no recess. We will meet every third day pro forma, as we have done during the last series of breaks.”

'Troubling.' “When you have an appointment that is this critical and this sensitive, and the president basically says he’s going to ignore the will of the senate and push someone through, it really is troubling.” 

Oh, I'm sorry. I must have gotten some notes mixed up.  The following quotes were from then-Senator Obama, then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, and Senator Dick Durbin on the supposed Constitution-shredding recess appointment of John Bolton as the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. by President George W. Bush.  Whoops.

 

The Teachings of the Declaration

This Washington Post story features an encounter between Mitt Romney and a couple who are distrustful of a Mormon becoming president.  Here is Romney's speech to persuade the couple and others who may be wary of supporting a Mormon:

“This is an election not just about replacing President Obama, it’s an election about the soul of America,” Romney said, as Poe gingerly climbed a chair to get a better view. As Romney cited the Declaration of Independence, Poe nodded in agreement. “They said that we had been endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights. And as you know, those rights came not from the state, not from the government, but from our creator.”

“He did great,” Poe said as Romney walked around the room shaking hands. “If he were the chosen candidate, I could support him, yes.”

Where has this kind of talk been?  This is in perfect agreement with the Founders and Thomas Aquinas, the latter who said that the natural law was the rational creature's participation in the divine law (notice that no mention of religious sect or denomination is present in this definition).

Here is Joseph Knippenberg with more:

Romney is here using what we are at least supposed to have in common–commitment to our founding principles–to bridge the gaps that divide us (particular creeds).  The principles support limited government, a common ground on which believers of many stripes can agree.  They’re more ”robust” than a Rawlsian “overlapping consensus,” which abjures any “metaphysical” statements about inalienable rights.

If this is any clue to the way Romney the nominee would comport himself, then we’d have an interesting debate between someone who takes the founding principles seriously and someone more comfortable filtering them through a Rawlsian lens.  I’ve long thought that the latter “liberal” response to pluralism cannot sustain what it purports to sustain.  Romney, on the other hand, is making common cause with Thomas Jefferson (not religiously orthodox, but politically true): ” [C]an the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?”

I just wish Romney would see the natural law reasoning he displayed above in reference to his healthcare plan and realize how off-base it actually is on the level of principle.

Iowa Caucus Thoughts

I want to congratulate Rick Santorum for basically coming from nowhere a few weeks ago (in the Iowa Straw Poll he garnered single-digit support) to get second place in the Iowa caucuses by a razor-thin margin.  Mitt Romney, who only in recent weeks devoted time to campaigning in Iowa, won but by only by 8 votes, and Ron Paul, who seemed disappointed, finished in third.  The question for Santorum is this: is he just the next in a long line of anti-Romney candidates who have come and gone or will he be able to enlarge his support and keep this momentum going? Here are some thoughts on the candidates for New Hampshire from Peter Lawler at Postmodern Conservative, and here is the NRO symposium on last night.

The Problem with Mitt Romney

In a single paragraph, Steve Hayward nails the main problem with Mitt Romney.  Here is Hayward:

The real problem, as I size it up, is that Romney doesn’t perceive—and doesn’t match up to—our present constitutional moment, in which basic questions about the size and nature of government are salient in ways they haven’t been for decades.  Romney’s stubborn defense of the individual mandate “for Massachusetts” suggests he doesn’t get it.  I had a conversation a year ago with a very prominent person close to Romney (who shall go unnamed since it was a private conversation) who said to me that she didn’t understand why conservatives were so opposed to the individual mandate.  I allowed as how I understood the policy logic of it, but thought that it was simply unconstitutional—an abuse of the proper limits of government power.  This produced only a dumbfounded look from my Romneyite interlocutor.  My suggested path for Romney to back away from the individual mandate without doing himself flip-flopping damage was met with further puzzlement.

This may be, along with Dr. Paul Rahe's critiques, the single best paragraph written on Romney's problem and why conservatives, who were open to him in 2008, are in droves flocking to different canidates every few weeks or so.

Lincoln Redux

Although I am waiting in anticipation for Steven Spielberg's movie on Lincoln based on Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, an opinion piece published on The Daily Caller gives me pause.  Even though Spielberg is a liberal (which makes him prone to historical deconstruction among other futile modern academic exercises) I think he still would be fairly faithful in trying to capture Lincoln as he understood himself.  Now I am not so sure.  Consider this from Mark Judge on screenwriter Tony Kushner:

New York [magazine] asked Kushner whether he thought Lincoln — “that original Log Cabin Republican” — would be a Republican today. “Absolutely not,” said Kushner. “He was a deeply progressive man and a deep believer in the Constitution. Any party that could make George Bush, who has raped the Constitution, is not one that Abe Lincoln would want anything to do with.” And if he were alive today, Honest Abe would be all about Obama: “They’re both from Illinois. You can really trace a line from the politics of Lincoln through American pragmatism to the politics of Barack Obama.” If that’s not enough, Kushner informs us that Lincoln was most likely gay. “I’m struggling with that question while I’m writing it. The historical record is very cloudy. There’s possibly some evidence he was bisexual at least.”

Kushner, himself a gay man, was behind the play Angels in America, which featured one scene where Roy Cohn was visited by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg on his deathbed. Rosenberg's ghost takes pleasure in Cohn's slow death (Cohn previously worked with Senator Joe McCarthy to out suspected communists, which included Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, working within the U.S. government). Never mind the fact that in 1995, old Soviet documents were declassified and "revealed that Julius was indeed a spy who had passed vital national security information to the Soviets, much more than originally thought, and that Ethel was at least an accomplice."

As Judge points out, Lincoln's politics revolved around the natural law and natural rights principles of the Declaration of Independence. Adherence to the natural law, a set of permanent unchanging standards about right and wrong, just and unjust, is what makes this county unlike any other. No other people have based their government upon truths accessible to anyone of the human species. Lincoln's teachings (and the Founders teachings) are an anathema to much of modern liberalism and even some of the teachings of modern conservatism.

Having Kushner as the screenwriter certainly does not inspire confidence that the true importance of Lincoln will be examined.

Ron Paul: Progressive Utopian

I have been waiting for this.  Paul Rahe sets his sights on Ron Paul and finds his brand of libertarianism to be less than advertised.  In fact, Dr. Rahe finds Paul to be nothing more than a progressive utopian, which, in his estimation, is even worse than a managerial progressive because unlike Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, Mr. Paul is simply irresponsible.

Here is Dr. Rahe on Paul's surprising mess of a budget (you would think this would be Paul's strong suit), which cuts the military budget by 40%:

Leave aside the obvious fact that if we cut 40% of the military budget and took that sum from the budget for personnel, weapons procurement, and weapons systems development, we would be inviting the Chinese to assert their hegemony in Asia and the Iranians to assert theirs over the Middle East; we would be leaving the Europeans entirely to their own devices (which is never wise); and we would be laying the groundwork for another world war -- one for which we would be almost entirely unprepared. Leave that small matter aside.

And Paul's plan for reining in entitlement spending?  He has none.  John McCormick at The Weekly Standard has more:

First of all, the entire annual defense budget, including war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, is less than $700 billion--not $1.4 trillion as Paul claims. More important, by 2025 Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and interest on the debt will consume all federal revenues. In other words, we could eliminate all defense spending and all other federal spending, and we'd still be running a deficit in a little over a decade.

So what's Ron Paul's plan to avert the oncoming fiscal catastrophe? He doesn't have one. Paul's "Plan to Restore America" doesn't deal with Medicare, which is on track to be the biggest driver of our debt. And Paul's plan doesn't deal with Social Security. But he does endorse block-granting Medicaid to the states.

Ok, so Paul's budget is confused to say the least.  But what about his laudable consistency to his political principles?

Rahe, in a separate post, peels back to layers of Ron Paul's political philosophy and finds it to be nothing more than an ideology closer akin to Marxism than anything remotely touching on the American Founding.  Dr. Rahe observes that

Human beings have a propensity for turning half-truths into overarching doctrines that purport to explain everything, and the academy is the natural locus for doctrinaire thinking of this sort. In this regard, today’s libertarianism is not unlike the old Marxism. It starts with an insight into the way the world works, and some of its adherents take the part for the whole. The old Marxists were right to think that transformations in the means of production have far-reaching consequences. They erred, however, when they jumped to the conclusion that these developments can be made to explain everything. Today’s libertarians are right when they argue that central planning cannot work, that the free market is a mechanism for collecting and distributing information, and that the pretense to “rational administration” is madness. When they assert that recessions are a natural and welcome consequence of the business cycle and that attempts to interfere with this process have a tendency to backfire and produce severe and prolonged downturns, they are on the mark.

When, however, they extend their theory of the spontaneous emergence of order from the economic sphere to foreign affairs, they make a mistake quite similar to the one that the old Marxists made. I have attended small academic conferences in which I have heard libertarians earnestly argue that we, not the Germans or the Japanese, are at fault for our involvement in World War I and World War II. I found these discussions, as I found my interchanges with the old Marxists, stimulating in the extreme. Those who make these arguments are often quite intelligent. They are also doctrinaire to the point of madness. When you are a hammer, everything that you encounter looks like a nail.

For instance, the typical Paulian-like statements that the US should not have gotten into WWI or WWII and that the Civil War was unnecessary misses the historical context and any type of fact surrounding those major events.  On Paul's foreign policy (he could serve as President Kucinich's foreign policy adviser) in regards to Iran and Iraq:

It is in light of this digression that you can understand Ron Paul’s stance regarding Al Q’aeda and Iran. Our troubles are, he persistently tells us, our own fault. We have provoked these people, and what they have done to us in return is perfectly understandable and, he implies, perhaps even just.

We had troops in Saudi Arabia, says the Congressman, and that is why Al Q’aeda attacked the twin towers and the Pentagon (if, of course, it was not the work of Mossad). Ron Paul conveniently ignores the fact that the troops that we stationed in Saudi Arabia were there at the invitation of the government of that country, and he never mentions the fact that the first attack on the twin towers arranged by Al Q’aeda took place before we had any troops in Saudi Arabia at all. In an alternative universe in which the libertarian isolationists reside, inconvenient truths are resolutely ignored.

Ron Paul wears blinders of a similar sort when he discusses Iran. The truth is that the Khomeini regime has been prosecuting a war against us for more than thirty years. At the outset, when Jimmy Carter was President, the theocrats of Iran seized our embassy and took our diplomats hostage. Later, when Ronald Reagan was President, they arranged for a suicide bomber provided by Hezbollah to take out our embassy in Beirut and a great many of our diplomats. Not long thereafter, they did the same for a marine unit posted elsewhere in Lebanon. Later, they arranged for the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia; and when we were in Iraq, they carried on a covert war in that country against our troops.

In our dealing with Iran, we have been comparatively restrained and circumspect. It is true that, towards the end of the Iran-Iraq War, we provided intelligence support to the Iraqis; and when the Iranians tried to shut down the Gulf, we intervened to keep that shipping lane open. But for the most part we have held our fire, mindful that Iran could easily become a quagmire. And we have repeatedly – from the time of Reagan on (remember the Iran-Contra affair?) – made overtures to the mullahs, but never to any avail.

Mr. Paul obviously overlooks anything that would do damage to his political ideology and instead lifts consistency above reason.

I could say more about the now infamous newsletters that went out under Paul's name in the 70s, 80s, and 90s that feature racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and conspiracy mongering, his close association with the conspiratorial Alex Jones who constantly talks about the few ultra rich elites setting up a New World Order by euthanizing the rest of us, his almost open 9/11 Trutherism, his embrace of neo-confederates and open flirtations with secession (why this brand of libertarianism involves a full-throated defense of the Confederacy I will never understand), and his statement to Cato President Ed Crane that "his best source of congressional campaign donations was the mailing list for The Spotlight, the conspiracy-mongering, anti-Semitic tabloid run by the Holocaust denier Willis Carto until it folded in 2001" but I will leave it at that.

To say the obvious:  Mr. Paul is clearly unfit to be the next president.