Saturday, February 18, 2012
The old totalitarian paradigm was guns or butter. The Soviet Union could provide its people with the basic food groups or it could run a military race to conquer as much of the world as possible. As a totalitarian ideology, it naturally chose the latter.
The modern incarnation of the hammer and sickle, the liberals who took it slow, working from within the system instead of seizing the reins and executing anyone who got in the way, isn't big on guns. The Clinton and Obama administrations both inflicted massive cuts on the military because it was extraneous to their domestic goals. They didn't want guns, but they didn't want butter either. They wanted a third thing.
The Obama Administration is about as interested in creating jobs as the denizens of the Kremlin were in making sure that every Russian family had plenty of milk and butter on the table. Totalitarian ideologies don't care about individual welfare and they certainly are not interested in individual empowerment. An improved economy would weaken the left, it would undermine its central program of promoting fear and dependence on a social safety net and a rights infrastructure administered by them.
The left is not very good at discussing the economy. Ask its leaders to apportion blame for economic problems and they are right there with denunciations of the banks, corporations and a thousand other factors. But ask it how to repair an economy and after some mumbling the answer is usually to fund a bunch of its pet projects that have nothing to do with the economy and everything to do with its social agenda.
The left's goal is to transform society, not to empower individuals to make their own choices. That is why an arena like birth control is its natural territory. A society with state subsidized birth control has a low birth rate, low marriage rate, high demand for social subsidies and a high demand for immigrants to compensate for the low birth rate and pay for the social subsidies. Now whether or not you think such a society is a good thing, it is the kind of society that the left wants.
Given a choice between universal birth control and universal free market jobs, the former is a priority and the latter a threat. It's not just birth control, there are any number of elements, which may be benign in and of themselves, but which fit into a larger picture of the kind of society it wants.
The Communist era left thought big. If there was hunger, they would grow more wheat. If there weren't enough jobs, they would create more factories. It was a grandiose insanity that eventually brought down Communism, but it was healthier than the post-human left which is declinist. If there is hunger, then their solution is to raise the price of food with a tax that will subsidize meals for the poor. If there aren't enough jobs, the solution is for more people to go on the dole and for everyone to make do with less.
From a distance this looks like wealth redistribution, but it's actually a program for teaching everyone to make do with less. That is why Obama has done everything possible to hike energy prices, by making it harder to get to oil, coal and natural gas, while promoting expensive "clean energy" and "energy efficiency".
Faced with a challenge, the new left's solution is always make do with less. Less heat, less food and less children. The old left still had some faith in human aspirations. The new left only sees humanity as foolish children who have to be regimented and taught self-discipline. To sacrifice not for a better world, but for a more sustainable existence. There is less of Marx to it and more of Gandhi in that.
There is a mystical strain to this incarnation of the left. It does not see economic problems as arising from natural causes, but spiritual causes. It assigns blame primarily to "greed", a venial sin and a spiritual problem. Its solutions all involve remaking society in ways that have little to do with creating jobs or even regulating the banks, but address their secular notion of spiritual ills that are responsible for the malaise.
Teaching everyone to make do with less of everything is just step one. Step two is to break down the structures of attachment. Break down the family, religion and the nation. Teach people to stop being possessive of the old structures. Wipe out the tribal and national bonds so that there is no longer any war or jealousy. Eliminate marriage and stable parenthood to end possessiveness. Leave people as isolates, individual units, citizens of the state.
It's an old program. The Nazis made some slight progress on it. Various leftist movements and regimes have flirted with communal arrangements, but no one has made an entire society work that way. Yet.
To people who think that way subsidized birth control is very important. So is tolerance, international travel, centralized schooling, learning to appreciate nature, disruptive immigration, extended adolescence, higher education, state subsidies, free love, multilingual training, world citizenship, social safety nets and a thousand other things. None of which involve creating jobs.
The left believes strongly in social solutions. It believes that all our ills are social in nature and that social justice can only be practiced by a healthy society. Their idea of a healthy society is totalitarian but they have that in common with most ideologues who want a perfect state, rather than a free state.
The mantra of a society where people are less concerned with things and more concerned with people repeats itself incessantly. But a society where people are constantly concerned with other people is a totalitarian state. In East Germany, there were as many informers as there were citizens. The people were not concerned with things, because they had very few of them. They were concerned with informing on everyone around them so that they would not be suspected of caring more about things than about people.
Our own society is already rather excessively concerned with people. Frighteningly so at times. The social reformers are working harder than they did a century ago when they might have actually been needed. The society they are creating is an obtrusive social surveillance state where everyone is constantly being monitored, where every action has political implications and the weight of children is a national security crisis. Nothing is off limits and no one but the enlightened elite are immune from being brought into line by state employees on a mission to create a noble and enlightened state.
Creating such a state does not depend on pandering to "selfish" clamoring about jobs. What use are jobs except to help people buy things and raise families, two things that the left believes is at the heart of our problems. And those problems can only be solved when people give up on such selfish urges and join in a communal system for the greater good that teaches them to make do with less while focusing on their ethical obligations to society at large.
Rather than addressing economic ills, the Obamas are working on transforming society. Their real response to American economic woes is telling Americans to seek enlightenment, the satori of socialism. A response that positively makes the apocryphal, "Let them eat cake" seem humane by comparison.
Not only isn't the crisis going to waste, its carcass is being skinned, butchered, deboned and ground up for the ultimate teachable moment, teachable year and teachable decade. Economic instability is being leveraged to teach everyone a lesson about the need for a stronger social safety net, which then becomes a lesson about how to sacrifice, how to give up personal freedoms and how to make do with less for the greater good.
The left's rhetoric about corporations isn't limited to companies or to the rich. There isn't really an actual dollar value beneath which your resources don't deserve to be redistributed by the enlightened hand of the state. The left is not at war with wealth, it is at war with private property. It is not at war with corporations, it is at war with the idea that there can be any organization that is not of the state. It is not at war with people who own yachts, it is at war with the idea that anyone is entitled to living without engaging in exercises of conspicuous lifestyle decline, whether it is recycling, sending money to Africa, paying carbon taxes or any other form of tribute to the need to be less selfish.
The mandate has always been social change. According to the left it is not our economy that is broken, we are the ones who are broken. We are too greedy and too selfish, as individuals and as nations. Our possessiveness must be curbed by destroying everything that the individual owns or is attached to in the name of the greater good.
Ideologues define all problems, no matter how minute, in relation to a failure to comply with their ideal way of life. They will exploit a crisis to achieve power and implement that way of life and that way of life alone. Nothing else interests them and they will not solve any problems except through the implementation of their program.
That is what we are up against. That is their weakness, if we can exploit it, but it is also the thrust of their assault on us. On all of us. We are dealing with people who are limited to thinking in very narrow and specific ways. Who are fanatically obsessed with transforming our society, but who are unable to question their own assumptions. That makes them dangerously single-minded, but it also makes them prone to failure.
The Obama Administration has been relentlessly single-minded about its domestic program and as a result it has lost public support. What people perceive as economic failure, it views as successful social reforms. If it can reclaim power, it will proceed with an even more ruthless version of the same program. It is not interested in guns or butter. Only in social change.
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Friday, February 17, 2012
WASTED PRIMARIES
Ideally the primaries should have built momentum for the emergence of a winning candidate to represent the Republican Party, instead they have dampened enthusiasm and made everyone involved look worse for just being involved. The best hope for winning a national election is the hope that few non-Republicans were paying attention or will remember what went on.
Much of the blame goes to Romney and the Republican establishment which was determined to win at any cost and went negative hard and fast. The rest is history. Obama's standing is improving and he's tipped to win the election. The game will change once the primaries are over and the party has a nominee, but it's clear that the acrimony and pettiness has alienated a lot of people.
Instead of competing on a vision for the country, the candidates, with media help, spent months hurling smears at each other. Among the candidates, Romney benefited the most from that type of campaign, but Obama is the one who really scores. The media successfully painted Republicans as being hateful and divisive and the material for that smear job came from within.
The Not-Romneyites are often criticized for focusing more on beating Romney than defeating Obama, and while that is occasionally true, it is truer to say that the establishment cares more about making sure that Romney is the nominee than about defeating Obama. For the Not-Romneyites it's about principles, for the Romneyites it's about power.
The Romney establishment has acted with the same elitist arrogance and insufferable disdain that has characterized the Obama Administration, dismissing popular dislike for their approach by pushing forward and waiting for the peasants to fall in line. But the peasants aren't falling into line. Romney is still flailing. The entire election has been a survey of candidates that most voters prefer to Romney and the last few months have shown that they prefer just about anyone to him. That isn't good news, but the establishment doesn't care. And that's scary. For people who claim to want to win the election, they aren't taking the situation too seriously. If we do end up with a brokered convention, it will be their obtuse unwillingness to pay attention to their own electorate that will be the cause.
Romney has a solid lead in delegates and will likely steamroll his way to the convention, but for now he's doing it with few decisive victories. And that's not good news for anyone.
FOLLOW THE MONEY
The media has spent a great deal of time touting the claim that Romney would be the richest president in half a century. But Romney’s net worth of approximately 200 million dollars would not even make him the richest senator. For all the news stories about his wealth, if Romney ran for Congress, he wouldn’t even make it as the wealthiest member of the House of Representatives. The combined net worth of Obama and his cabinet in 2010 was around 150 million dollars. The federal government spends over 20 billion dollars per work day. Romney’s entire net worth isn’t even 1 percent of the money spent by the federal government in a single day. A higher tax rate for Romney would be no more than a snowflake in the avalanche of federal spending. If we were to confiscate Romney’s entire fortune, what would that buy us? Obama proposed spending 200 million dollars on a Portland to Milwaukie light rail line. Milwaukie, a city in Oregon, is less than seven miles away from Portland. You can drive there in 15 minutes. It has a population of 20,000 which comes out to about 200,000 in light rail dollars per person. In the last five years, over 600 million dollars in payments have been improperly made to dead federal employees. The good news is that Romney’s entire net worth might cover a year of wrongful payments to dead bureaucrats.
You can see my entire article, Romney's Wealth in Context at Front Page Magazine
THE USS JOHN ROLL
John Roll worked his way up from a bailiff to city attorney to United States attorney to a Federal judgeship. He handled an immense caseload and worked to promote democracy and human rights in Eastern Europe. He was shot and killed on January 28, 2011. And he is not getting a ship named after him.
When the gunman opened fire, former army colonel Bill Badger tackled him and helped hold him until the police arrived. The 74 year old Badger had been wounded by Loughner and was three times his age, but nevertheless grabbed his arm, forced him down and made him drop his gun. Badger does not consider himself a hero. "Once you're in the military, you never retire. You're always there to help the community and the people who are in danger," he said. Bill Badger is not getting a ship named after him.
Gabrielle Giffords was a Fulbright scholar who became the CEO of her
family company at the age of 26. After it was sold five years later she
ran for public office. After four years of holding local offices in the
Arizona house and senate, she ran for congress with major liberal
backing. After three terms she attracted the attention of a mental
patient who opened fire at one of her events and killed six people,
including a 9 year old girl, three people in their 70's and Judge Roll.
Giffords was not killed. But she did get a book deal out of it. Representing her in the deal was Obama and Clinton attorney Robert Barnett. The actual author of the book, Jeffrey Zaslow was killed just this month, only a few months after the book was released. As a consolation prize, Giffords also got a navy vessel named after her.
There is no USS John Roll, but there will be a USS Gabrielle Giffords. Of the six living people for whom naval vessels were named in this century, she is only one of two who never served in the military. The other man was the Secretary of the Navy during World War II.
OF CONTROVERSIAL BENEFACTORS
After Sheldon Adelson, Gingrich's "controversial benefactor", meet Foster Friess, Santorum's "controversial benefactor". Oddly Obama's "controversial benefactor" who was a Nazi collaborator, a wanted criminal and a bigot never comes up when the media starts discussing those "controversial benefactors".
A TRULY SPECIAL VALENTINE'S DAY
Last year there were at least 675 honor killings in Pakistan and that number is a fraction of the total figure which can only be guessed at due to the culture of silence. In Sindh, famously known as “The Gateway of Islam,” where many Pakistani Romeo and Juliets run away to elope, there have been 227 such killings. To understand just how common this culture of death really is, we are introduced to one such couple. Her sister was killed for falling asleep on a train and coming home late, which convinced her family that she had run off with another man. His brother was killed for dating outside the clan. Together they are both on the run with a death sentence on their heads, which means that two siblings in each family were marked for honor killings. There was a time when every family either had a member who fell victim to Polio or knew someone who had. In Pakistan, Islamic morals are the local Polio, and everyone knows someone who has been touched by the disease. Now just in time for Valentine’s Day, in Faisalbad, a city named after the Saudi king, two men were arrested for killing their sisters. In Punjab, a man killed his wife and sister and their mother, because he suspected his wife of talking on her cell phone to another man. In Toronto, a city not yet renamed after a Saudi king, a Muslim cook was sentenced to jail for strangling his wife. This comes on the heels of the conviction of the Shafias in Ontario for murdering their three daughters and Mohammed Shafia’s first wife.
The entire piece A Muslim Love Story is up at Front Page Magazine
NO MUSLIM TERRORISM TO SEE HERE
Authorities have arrested a man on his way to the U.S. Capitol for what he thought would be a suicide attack on one of the nation's most symbolic landmarks, Fox News has learned exclusively.
The man, in his 30s and of Moroccan descent, was nabbed following a lengthy investigation by the FBI, initiated after he expressed interest in conducting an attack. The man thought undercover FBI agents assisting him in his plot were associates of Al Qaeda.
When he was arrested Friday in Washington, he was carrying with him a vest supposedly packed with explosives, but the material inside was not actually dangerous, A short time earlier, he had been praying at a mosque in the Washington area.
...but I'm sure he was only praying for peace
NO PRO-TERRORIST BIAS TO SEE HERE
The New York Times’ newly appointed Jerusalem bureau chief played Twitter footsie on Tuesday with some of Israel’s most extreme non-terrorist critics.
Jodi Rudoren, until recently the paper’s education editor, is set to take control of the Times’ Jerusalem bureau following the exit of longtime chief Ethan Bronner.
Already, Rudoren is beaming out cutesy missives to prominent, self-described anti-Zionist players such as Ali Abunimah, co-founder of Electronic Intifada, a website that contains a treasure trove of writings highly antagonistic toward the Jewish state.
Rudoren also Tweeted yesterday with the website Mondoweiss, an online portal that is known to traffic in Israel-bashing.
Despite the outcry over Rudoren’s schmooze session, the incoming Jerusalem bureau chief continues to publicly praise Israel’s critics. This morning, Rudoren took to Twitter to praise Peter Beinart’s forthcoming The Crisis of Zionism which she called “terrific: provocative, readable, full of reporting and reflection.”
This is not exactly shocking. It just tells us that the regime is staying the same at a paper which specializes in pro-terrorist propaganda. Twitter gives us an eye into the heart of the beast, it lets us see their agendas without the disguises of journalism.
On Jodi Rudoren's Twitter feed right now, is a retweet from an Electronic Intifada contributor and two retweets from a Muslim who claims to "dabble in the art of Zionist busting". This isn't interaction, it's straight up promotion.
Rudoren claims that she's "reaching out" to people of different stripes, but the bottom line is she's retweeting material from people who want to destroy Israel and there aren't a lot of reasons to be doing that unless you sympathize with their cause.
SADDLE ON UP BOYS
Anthony Shadid, New York Times' corresponded and two time Pulitzer winner and author of Legacy of the Prophet, Despots, Democrats and the Politics of Islam, died in Syria of an allergy to horses. Shadid had boasted of risking his life "covering Israeli atrocities". Sadly while he was on the alert for the Jewish menace, he never saw the equine threat coming. Had he spent more time investigating what the equines were up to, he might still be alive today.
Who knew that Mr. Ed was more dangerous to New York Times propagandists than the IDF and the US Marines?
IT'S NUCLEAR DOOM
A year ago, the Fukushima nuclear power plant was massively damaged by a powerful earthquake then a huge tidal wave. Now, a year later, we have a more complete picture, and its not what many people think. So far no one has died from radiation leaks as a result of the plant's damage. No one has even been reported as becoming sick. In fact, no one has required decontamination except plant workers. In other words, the leak was minimal and not problematic. (Word Around the Net, via American Digest)
But the real damage may have been done to the nuclear industry, particularly in Europe, which suffered a severe setback from the latest meltdown panic. With "Clean Energy" having its own meltdown, the big winners of the big scare were your friendly neighborhood sheiks.
REAL MONEY
First you start talking about 132 billion dollars a month and eventually it starts to become real money.
GRADING ON A DOWNWARDS SLANT
Children get grades for following government mandates. Schools get grades for compelling students to follow government mandates. Government officials get grades for compelling schools to compel students to follow government mandates.
And after all that our educational system is in the toilet. It's like grades don't matter.
THE ROUNDUP
One chart to rue them all.
The seven varieties of gun control advocate Via Gunslinger's Journal
FBI counterterrorism program falls victim to counter-counterterrorism political correctness.
Dude Where'd My Legs Go?
Just wait till our debt comes due and we're the Greeks
Idiocy is, of course, an important part of the problem in Brussels, explaining many of the errors of judgment and basic competence over the past few years. But what is more striking by far is the sheer callousness and inhumanity of EU commissioners such as Mr Rehn, as they preside over a Brussels regime that is in the course of destroying what used to be a proud, famous and reasonably well-functioning country.
In these terrible circumstances, how can the British liberal Left, which claims to place such value on compassion and decency, continue to support the EU? I am old enough to recall their rhetoric when Margaret Thatcher was driving through her monetarist policies as a response to the recession of the early Eighties. Many of the attacks were incredibly personal and vicious. The British prime minister (who, of course, was later to warn so presciently against monetary union) was accused of lacking any kind of compassion or humanity. Yet the loss of economic output during the 1979-82 recession was scarcely 6 per cent, less than a third of the scale of the depression now being suffered by the unfortunate Greeks. Unemployment peaked at 10.8 per cent, just over half of where Greece is now.
The reality is that Margaret Thatcher was an infinitely more compassionate and pragmatic figure than Amadeu Altafaj-Tardio’s boss Olli Rehn and his appalling associates. She would never have destroyed an entire nation on the back of an economic dogma.
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Wednesday, February 15, 2012
The Obama Doctrine can be summed up as the assertion that for the United States to have influence and standing on the global stage, it must first abandon its interests and its allies.
The doctrine is rarely described as bluntly as that by its proponents who employ euphemisms like multilateral policies and honest broker to mean much the same thing, denouncing the previous administration and all the preceding administrations going back to old Tom Jefferson for alienating the world by pursuing American interests and cutting deals with non-progressive allies.
The easiest way to spot the problem with this approach is to try and distinguish it from the UN. That's hard to do because except during the occasional pro-forma trade dispute there is no distinction. It's the same policy of multilateral human rights interventions, global mediation and stability, and promoting the welfare of the angrier parts of the Third World. And if America's agenda is identical to that of the United Nations, than for all intents and purposes there is no American foreign policy.
This leaves the United States as less than a nation, a version of the United Nations with its own military and a great deal of wealth. It has no interests except reaching out to befriend its enemies and it has no allies except those enemies willing to pretend to be its allies, at which point they will become enemies. But the United Nations was designed to be a forum in which nations pursue their own interests, it is not supposed to have interests or allies. The United States is a nation and it is meant to have both. If the United States cannot articulate interests apart from the UN agenda then it no longer functions as a nation on the world stage.
The Obama Doctrine dispensed with America's traditional allies and pursued relations with its enemies without improving America's standing or influence in the world, though it did garner its overseer a preemptive Nobel Prize. Even the Libyan War was more of a European project than an American one.
The truth that dare not speak its name in the ink stained pages of the New York Times or the Washington Post is that the Obama Administration has been standing by the sidelines of world events with a very limited influence on what happens anywhere. The United States will not decide what happens in Syria. France, Germany, Qatar and England will decide what they want to do and will allow Obama to sign on if he wants to. Exactly the way it happened in Libya.
The United States still has mass, but it no longer has momentum. It does things like abandon Mubarak or bomb Gaddafi because other countries think they are a good idea. It responds belatedly to events from the outside world and then does its best to take credit for them.
Part of that is inexperience. The White House is headed up by a junior Senator who was a State Senator five years before he ran for the highest office in the land. The Secretary of State is a former First Lady who spent eight years in the Senate before doing the same thing and then oddly enough landed as head of the country's foreign office. But it's not all of it.
The real problem is that the United States no longer has national interests. Its leaders act like they are the Secretary General of the UN, rather than the President of the United States. They jostle for standing on the world stage and play international philosophers preaching higher principles to the world, instead of looking out for their own country. Rather than representing the United States, they speak for some global ethical consensus on human rights and democracy.
The problem did not begin with Obama. LBJ may have been the last president who was satisfied with being a national leader, rather than an international leader, but it significantly worsened with Obama because he lacks even the vestigial allegiances that Biden or Kerry retain on some level. If they think like Americans at some gut level, Obama doesn't and he has no reason to. He is the figurehead of an ideology that champions an end to American interests.
The Obama Doctrine has not actually repaired America's foreign relations or made the world a better place. What it has done is taken American interests off the table.
The Reset Button did nothing to aid American relations with Russia. Abandoning Eastern Europe did not fix anything, because the problem was not that America was in Russia's backyard, (that might have been the problem under Yeltsin) but that Russia was run by a clique of thugs whose foreign policy was aligned with their interests. By abandoning America's allies in Eastern Europe, we did not create a new state of relations with Russia, we just got out of its way.
The same thing has happened around the world as the United States has gotten out of the way of the agendas and interests of our enemies, and in some cases actively aided and abetted their agendas, with entirely predictable results. In South America, in Europe, in Asia and the Middle East, the new policy has yielded dividends for those nations and causes hostile to us. It hasn't yielded any for us.
Abandoning American allies in the name of being an "Honest Broker" has not won us the respect of the world or made our enemies any friendlier. Alliances are based on mutual interests. Abandoning our alliances makes us more toxic than ever and even if our enemies were interested in approaching us, why would they when we have already demonstrated that an alliance with us is worthless?
The Honest Broker paradigm makes no sense on a national level. If we act as an honest broker between our allies and our enemies, then we have abandoned our allies and devalued the very idea of an alliance with us. And acting as an honest broker between warring allies is a thankless job that will not yield any benefits and infuriate both sides.
Advocates for honest brokerhood insist that it is in our national interest to be an honest broker. But nations aren't brokers, they are friends and enemies, they are buyers and sellers. Only international organizations can be brokers, and they generally aren't honest ones either. A nation with its own interests can never be an honest broker. Only by abandoning its interests can it play at being an honest broker and then it is no longer a nation.
Democrats positioned their post-Bush foreign policy as a soft power quest to be liked, but being liked is not a national interest. Not only are very few nations liked and those nations are usually obscure and far away, but being liked means that they have never come into conflict, which is another way of saying that they either have no national interests to pursue or do have national interests but do not pursue them.
National interests are often competitive. For a country to assert its own rights and agendas is to earn the enmity of those nations they conflict with. To have allies and friends is to earn the enmity of their enemies. Even to exist as a large nation on any terms is to earn the wrath of those nations whose aspire to your status.
To act in any way is to alienate. Everything the Obama Administration has done to be liked has made more enemies. Bombing Libya to win the favor of the Arab Street still infuriated that same street which wanted Gaddafi gone, but didn't want America to do it. Playing Honest Broker between the UK and Argentina over the Falklands has certainly earned the anger of the UK. The lesson here is that doing anything still creates enemies. There is no pure path will not alienate anyone which is why the path you choose should be based on practical interests, not a need to be liked.
The Obama Doctrine is completely detached from American interests and even hostile to American interests. Its goal is to overcome a legacy of American power and replace it with multilateral powerlessness and the only real end of that objective is more of the same. Multilateral powerlessness is not a means of better representing American interests as its advocates tries to claim, it is a policy that terminates the very notion of American interests as too selfish and alienating to have a place on the world stage.
This is not meant to be a surrender of power. Like European national leaders who aspire to regional leadership, the Obamas and the Clintons aren't interested in being powerless, they would just rather represent an international consensus, rather than a national one. They would like an upgrade from being the elected leaders of farmers and businessmen to the unelected leaders of the world. But for all their shiny diplomas, they are too basically dim to understand that their status and influence is derived from the status and influence of their nation.
 The Secretary General of the United Nations is impotent because he represents no one. The UN has no national base and accordingly it is every bit as useless as the League of Nations was. Obama has tried to act like a United Nations Secretary General, rather than an American president, and he has reduced his status and power to something closer to that of the Secretary General. If Obama did not have a military to throw into the pot every time select members of the international community decide to bomb someone, his status would be even lower.
International power is still national power projected internationally. International power without a national base is a fantasy akin to perpetual motion that exists only in the frontal lobe of the schizophrenic progressive. Take the nation out of the equation and all you have are empty words, which is what Obama's speeches amount to.
The only power that Obama has exercised internationally has been purely negative, the abandonment of American allies and interests. This self-destructive national wrist slitting campaign has not made America more influential, because by definition abandoning power cannot give you power. And that is the fallacy of the Obama Doctrine which chops down the American tree in order to build a castle in the air on top of it.
Like everything that the left does, the Obama Doctrine is self-nullifying, both in concept and in practice, the very exercise of it eventually destroys the thing itself. The problem is that as with so much the left does, the damage spreads inward so that the perpetrators of the policies are the last to feel its effects. A self-destructive ideology destroys everything it touches until its pursuit of power at the highest levels leaves even the highest levels powerless.
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Tuesday, February 14, 2012
The liberal deconstruction of Zionism begins with the Jews as the victims and ends with the Jews as oppressors. To understand their mindset it is enough to see a protest banner of the Star of David transformed into a Swastika paralleling the journey from concentration camp victim to concentration camp guard.
There is a certain amount of historical revisionism in play here, and not just the obvious kind. The left had been calling Zionists, Fascists and later Nazis, before there was a modern State of Israel and before the left was hard at work pretending that it cared about Muslim militias and clans who would later be rebranded as the Palestinian people. A meaningless name up there with the South American people.
The reason why the left damned the Zionists as fascists had nothing to do with oppression and everything to do with the left's rejection of a unique national identity for the Jewish people. Even the left leaning Zionist movements still linked nationalism and ethnic identity in a way that the left found reactionary, at least as applied to the Jews. Had there been no Arabs in Israel, the left would still have denounced Zionism for daring to assert a national right for the Jewish people.
Peter Beinart's splashy new book, The Crisis of Zionism, follows this same tired old path, attacking Jews for acting like concentration camp victims when they really ought to own up to being concentration camp guards. Beinart and his defenders pretend that they are cutting edge provocateurs, when they are really advancing tiresome arguments that depend entirely on the postmodern left's construct of victims and oppressors.
If the world could indeed be divided into the oppressors and oppressed, a tidy line in which countries can be assigned to one category or another based on their GDP and firepower, then the worldview of the left might make sense. But oppressor is not the opposite of oppressed and power is not the opposite of weakness. And even if they were, power relationships are not so simplistic that they can reduced to an on and off switch.
In the leftsphere, the powerful have to contemplate the ethical uses of power and the powerless have to uplift themselves through resistance to the status quo. According to Beinart, Israel having become powerful can no longer act as if its concern should be the safety of its people, but must now focus on resolving the plight of the Muslim armed militias and their fictitious claims to nationhood, which they have not been able to resolve despite billions in aid and control of their own towns and cities.
This polarity of power creates a safe space for self-righteousness, but is detached from the complexity of real power relationships. Israel's strength is often a weakness, as attacks like Beinart's demonstrate while the Palestinian Arab weakness is actually a strength because it allows them freedom from responsibility and consequences. This paradox of power is one that the left's polar view of power makes possible.
A rational view of power measures it against responsibility and obstacles to upholding that responsibility. Israel's power does not exist in a vacuum of privilege, it is measured in proportion to the responsibility that it has and the threats that it faces. As the custodians of the rights and lives of a people that has repeatedly faced genocide, its power must be proportional to the ability to resist another genocide.
These concerns are not victimhood, they are the proper sphere of its responsibility to the power granted to it by its own citizens. The majority of Jews did not move to Israel out of some idealistic model of liberal Zionism. Most came as refugees.
What Beinart does not seem to grasp is that Israel is not a nation of socialist experimenters. Had Communism, Nazism and Islam never existed, maybe that would have been the case. Instead the bulk of its population fled Europe, Russia or the rest of the Middle East. It is a nation of refugees. Beinart and Roger Cohen may sneer at them for exploiting their victimization, but the bottom line is that they moved from nations where they had no rights, not to their property, their persons or their lives, to a nation where they did.
This is not ancient history, even by the standards of those who view the Holocaust as ancient history. Syrian and Iranian Jews continue to flee. The last Yemeni Jews have just now left Yemen. And a new wave of migration is taking place in Europe under the pressure of the Islamic colonization of countries like Sweden and France.
Israel isn't just a nation of refugees from two generations ago. It is a nation of refugees right now. The failure to understand this simple fact reduces all the sanctimonious rhetoric of the left to hot air. Listing the number of hypothetical missiles that Israel might have, its industries, its cities and its army does not change that simple fact.
This is not a statement of victimhood, but of responsibility. A nation's responsibilities derive from its citizenry. While there is a small percentage of the descendants of a comfortably ensconced socialist elite that would like Israel to focus on treating the Muslim militias like an oppressed minority, the majority of the country wants safety and security. That is why the Israeli left has imploded and the center-right has been in power for quite a while now.
Liberal American Jews map on their own preoccupations with majority power onto Israel, but they fail to realize that their preoccupations are a luxury. They have grown up in a way of life buffered from the realities that Israelis deal with on a day to day basis. They have the privilege of weakness, they can play around with power relationships to see what it feels like. Sometimes they get killed doing it, but in the absence of an organized genocide the threat to them is personal, not collective. When a show weakness doesn't just get you killed, it gets everyone killed, then suddenly weakness becomes a luxury that no one can afford.
Jewish leftists who mock what they call a preoccupation with the Holocaust are demonstrating their own privilege and their ignorance of that privilege, of the buffers that keep them from living the way that their ancestors did. Or of living the way that Jews in Malmo or other parts of Europe do now.
The Jewish left has misunderstood the Holocaust in the same way that they misunderstood September 11, viewing them as individual events, rather than the unexpected intrusion of an ongoing reality into the lives of ordinary people. That reality is still ongoing. It has not gone away because the court jesters of the left sneer at it. The ridicule only makes its return that much more unexpected for those who accept the sneering into their worldview.
Israel has never embraced power for its own sake, nor has it ever had a great deal of it. Its leaders have hardly been universally wise and good men, they have often been as bad as the leaders of any other country. But on a national level, they did not have enough power to spare except to use it except as an immune system against something much worse.
Israel does not maintain checkpoints because it likes humiliating Beinart's Muslim friends. It maintains them because the alternative is dead children on burnt out buses and a resumption of the same Israeli raids on terrorists that would make Beinart and his friends even angrier. The separation barrier is there for the same reason. As is virtually every other security measure. These are not abuses of power, they are forms of restraint that prevent the necessity for the use of greater power.
Like so much of the middle class, Israel has achieved enough power to be free of the privileges of weakness, but not enough to achieve meaningful security. Its in between position always leaves it in danger of slipping and that means it does not have the luxury of extensive ethical debates about its use of power though it engages in them anyway, far more so than Beinart's model of Obama.
Beinart plays the old game of blaming Netanyahu, but if Netanyahu is to blame, then what do we make of a continued failure of the peace process under every single Israeli Prime Minister from the right, the left and the center? Has the situation dramatically changed for the better that Netanyahu is to be berated for it? Beinart's indictment of Netanyahu is that he does not appear to want peace enough to satisfy the perception of critics like him which is a circular absurdity. The proofs for it could have been leveled at every single prime minister from Rabin on.
Beinart positions Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf of Chicago, who never saw an anti-Israel petition he wouldn't sign, as Obama's role model of liberal Zionism. But if Wolf and Obama represent liberal Zionism, then it is a Zionism that is completely indistinguishable from Anti-Zionism.
These absurdities show that there is nothing new about The Crisis of Zionism, it is a restatement of all the old dusted off nonsense with very little thought put into it. Beinart claims that there is a crisis of Zionism, using his selective definitions of what Zionism is. And using those selective definitions, a Zionist Israel is completely unworkable. The only type of Zionist state that Peter Beinart would accept is one that could not exist. To implement Beinart's version of Zionism, Israel would have to destroy itself. This nicely summarizes everything wrong with the left.
Joining together with J Street, Beinart repeats the usual claim that he is speaking on behalf of a new generation of American Jews that is far more critical of Israel and must be heard. Assuming that this is the case, then why does J Street remain so marginal? Surely an organization that could command the allegiance of a million Jews shouldn't depend on funding from George Soros and some mysterious lady from Hong Kong?
J Street doesn't command those numbers. It's a construct group to allow the left to pass off its hostility to the Jewish State as constructive criticism. Like Beinart's book, it's a tedious exercise in the left's antipathy not to power or even to Jewish power, but to Jewish power used on behalf of Jews. The real crisis is not in Zionism, it is in a Jewish left which has chosen its politics for all the wrong reasons.
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Monday, February 13, 2012
Racism
is about many things but it isn't about race. To understand the uses of race in
American liberalism requires understanding its place in the political culture.
When American liberals speak of race they aren't speaking in the genetic sense,
what they are doing is clumsily piggybacking class onto race and adding one
dubious construct to another.
The
placement of racial politics at the center of liberal advocacy coincided with a
growing national prosperity that seemed to be on the way to making class warfare
of the old kind irrelevant. Previous liberal civil rights activity had been a
subset of class, but class now became a subset of race. And both were a means
of liberal self-definition as the people concerned with the plight of the
downtrodden.
Class
warfare was not really about the poor, it was about using a permanent social
problem as a means of recreating the social order and gaining permanent
political power. Race is just class dressed up in the same old class warfare
clothes so that there is nearly no distinction between the two. Reformers gain
power by attacking the failures of the system and positioning a social problem
as an open sore that must be healed. But it isn't healing that they have in
mind.
When
your power is a product of social problems then the failure to locate social
problems that are an open sore on society, a cry of conscience and a grievous
crime that must be faced, leaves you powerless and irrelevant. Once you start
running out of legitimate social problems to tackle, then you have no choice
but to start creating them or exaggerating them. Whether the problems you are
dealing with are real or unreal, your challenge is to find ways to make them
worse in order to retain your power and the social relevance of your movement.
Race
has very little to do with racial politics which rely on the older
methodologies of radicalizing slums and using subsidies to elevate community
leaders who will support the reformers, all tactics that date back centuries
and long predate the politicization of race.
When
the Democratic Party had its change of heart on race all it did was take the
same methods it used on German, Irish, Jewish and Italian immigrants and shift
them to urban African-Americans who had come north and were living in the same
neighborhoods formerly occupied by the immigrants. And so the party that during
the Civil War orchestrated urban anti-draft riots by white immigrants targeting
African-Americans was using the same methods to orchestrate African-American
riots aimed at the second and third generation of working class immigrants that
it had once fostered. What most people thought of as racial politics was just
the Democratic Party doing what it had been doing all along.
Race
hasn’t simply been politicized, the practical meaning of the word has been so
thoroughly transformed that it does not refer to what most people think that it
does. In the liberal lexicon race like class is an outcast term. It is a
catchall term meaning those who are oppressed by the powerful majority. It is why
the left will use accusations of racism in completely inappropriate ways that
make no sense in relation to the dictionary definition.
Muslims
are not a race, but they have been classified as an oppressed group. Socialism
is not a race, but they are the official representatives of all oppressed
peoples. To insult either one is to be “racist” because racism refers to
majority oppression and nothing else. To be a racist is to oppose or denigrate
the moral worldview of the reformers without reference to the skin color of any
of the parties. Therefore African-American opponents of President Clinton were
racists because the terminology of race had nothing to do with the preexisting
racial construct. The idea of race as it had existed in the United States no longer applied.
Words like racism were part of the Newspeak grammar which insisted on
appropriating the moral force of the old meanings, but without actually
employing those meanings.
This
liberal lexicon is the Newspeak that is all around us. It relies on the moral
power of words while first subtly and then grossly changing their definitions
until they no longer have anything to do with the old meaning. The process
begins with politicized terminology and ends when the core terminology of a
free country like “rights”, “freedom” and “democracy” no longer have anything
in common with their formal definitions. Their new definitions are those that
serve the purposes of the ideology that commands them.
Regardless
of what they are supposed to mean, progressivism, racial tolerance and social
justice all mean the same thing. And so in the inverse, racism, conservatism
and small government also add up to variations of the same idea in the liberal
lexicon. Which might not be so much of a problem if it were not also the
lexicon being used by the media, academics, politicians, judges and the
entertainment industry to name a few groups who are invested in the altered
meanings because they are also invested in the ideology that those meanings
support.
Ideologies
define a worldview where for compelling moral reasons the ideologues are the
only ones who can be safely allowed to rule. Imposing this worldview on the
people as often as possible and through every possible venue from news
reporting to novels and from music to the educational system as allows for the
perpetual power of the ideologues. So long as the cause is just then no
possible overreach of power or abuse can ever justify removing the ideologues
from their petty thrones.
The purpose of any ideology is power.
To gain power the ideology must impose its notion of a crisis and its view of a
solution as the right and natural one. Once the proponents of the ideology are
empowered to impose a solution then they gain factional and personal power that
allows them to remake the system in ways that will prevent them from being
dislodged. Their first goal once in power is to worsen whatever crisis brought
them to power without appearing to do so. Their solutions deepen the crisis
while appearing to devote every resource to resolving it.
The growing prosperity of working classes in the West
weakened the crisis of class warfare that had led the left to trumpet that the
only alternative to their political reforms was a bloody civil war between the
workers and the owners. That was when the left turned to race as their central
crisis. Over time the left has broadened race back to cover the immigration
exploitation that they had been engaged in during the late 19th and
early 20th centuries. As most of the new immigrants were now
non-white, the left rolled their old new crisis into their new old crisis and
continued to call the whole thing racism, even when as with Muslims, they were
conflating religion with race.
Crisis is king. Crisis justifies a war on poverty and a war
on racism which are actually wars on anything that is an obstacle to the
absolute power of the ideology that exploits the crisis. That is why we are now
forced to show photo ID’s in order to buy cough medicine when we come down with
the flu, but any talk of showing photo ID’s at the voting booth is shouted down
as racism. Why is it racism? Because the working definition of racism is
anything that interferes with the progressive power structure. Questioning the
existence of the crisis is the worst form of racism of them all.
Well over a century after the Civil War and Reconstruction, and
half a century after the civil rights movement, do we really need the Federal government
looking over the shoulder of states to stop them from controlling their own
electoral systems? Is it really in the name of equality that the Federal
government steps in and ban
non-partisan elections in the city of Kinston for fear that
African-Americans won’t know whom to vote for?
Protecting African-American voting rights has become code
for protecting the Election Day turnout for the Democratic Party. Preventing
the wrong kind of redistricting is about maintaining the gerrymandered minority
districts which are code for safe Democratic Party seats. Racial justice is the
tail of the dog and the dog is a Democratic Party hound and it has nothing to
do with the old fashioned kind of racism.
The Democratic Party has switched from suppressing minority
voters to giving added weight to minority votes, both in violation of the law. The
common denominator in both cases is that it does what serves its own interests
and calls it defending the rights of the people. The distance between the Red
Shirts and the New Black Panther Party, or the Redeemers and the Diversifiers
is shorter than most Democrats would like to admit. The bottom line goal in all
case was the power of the party.
Ideology is a vehicle for political power and all the Machiavellian
outfits draped around the naked emperor of power do not change that. Western
political parties in America,
Europe and around the world have traded in the
“Labor” ideology that banked on the dissatisfaction of the native working class
for a “Diversity” ideology banking on the dissatisfaction of minorities. Such a
transition would not have occurred, no matter how much the changing ideas of
the left pushed it, if it did not serve the interests of the political machines
driving them.
For decades now when we talk about race, what we are really
talking about is the power and privilege of a political movement and its
associated party. What we are really doing is reinforcing that power and that
privilege.
Reform is natively antagonistic. It requires problems and
crises and when those are exhausted, it needs to exploit or manufacture new
ones. Class or race, religion and culture, it makes no real difference. What it
needs is a source of dysfunction to maintain as its power base. When social
problems are resolved then it must create them and transform them into the axis
around which the wheel of the society revolves.
The engine of dysfunction grinds on making the society a
much worse place until it is willing to destroy the society rather than give up
the drive to create more dysfunction in order to justify its power and
privilege.
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Sunday, February 12, 2012
There are two possible conflicts on the table in Washington. One is with Iran and the other with Syria. The Iran conflict is the one that Washington doesn't want. Its most likely trigger at this stage is an Israeli assault on Iran's nuclear program. Like most of the wars centering around Israel, this one is existential and of no interest to the philosopher kings in D.C. who wage wars with the grand purpose of making the world a better place.
Washington does not particularly care whether Iran gets nukes or doesn't get nukes. It cares about History. With a capital H. Libya got bombed because it was on the wrong side of history. Syria is about to get bombed because it's on the wrong side of history. There are people in the administration like Samantha Power who would like to bomb Israel for being on the wrong side of history, but they don't think that even J Street and Peter Beinart could spin that as a pro-Israel move.
Being on the right or wrong side of history is one of those topics that primarily interests Islamists and nation builders on the right and the left who subscribe to a progressive version of history. Things don't just happen, they happen because a country and a people are riding the history escalator up or down, to the top floor of the mall of the world where the cultivated stores like Starbucks, Nordstrom and the now defunct Sharper Image are located, or the bottom where K-Mart, Payless and Gap take up space.
The Arab Spring was on the right side of history because of its transformative qualities. Supporters of it were on the right side of history. Opponents of it needed to be bombed if they were Arab dictators or disinvited from the right cocktail parties if they were merely columnists and analysts. And at the end of it all through the sublime majesty of democracy and people power, the Middle East would look exactly like Europe, but with a more exotic cuisine.
Israel has always been the hedgehog in the soup of Arab democracy, agitating them, empowering their rulers and causing them to distrust Western benevolence. Now Israeli jets threaten to spill the soup of the Arab Spring by bombing Iran, which may reinforce support for Syria, which will hold up the Arab Spring and halt the progressive escalator of history.
Washington needs the Syrian war to happen, and it needs to keep a conflict with Iran from happening. The great diplomatic problem of Israel has always been that its leader insist on viewing conflicts in practical terms. Israel does not fight wars to make the world safe for democracy, it fights wars because there's someone shooting missiles as it. This is an unacceptable reason for a war in a postmodern world where wars are fought to preserve the international order, protect civilization, make the world safe for democracy and prove that human rights violations will be punished by the duly constituted body of international jurisprudence.
Self-interest is Israel's original sin. It was the sin that countless titans of the left from H.G. Wells to Lenin berated the Zionists for. Instead of contributing to the welfare of mankind and participating in the international brotherhood of workers, they went off to rebuild a country that existed only in their holy books and stirred up all kinds of trouble doing it. And since they have kept on stirring up trouble, not in the name of some grand idea, but out of their tawdry interest in defending themselves.
With angry Muslims boiling in European cities, Koran touting terrorists blowing up the modern infrastructure of the world's capitals and turmoil roiling the hundreds of millions of Muslims who still haven't managed to get refugee status in the UK or the US, the progressive vision is in big trouble and the only solution is to somehow stabilize the situation. Democracy is the only panacea that the progressive prescription plan covers.
Israel's insistence on a purely existential view is dismissed as selfish and narrow-minded when the Middle East is headed toward a brave new world where nukes no longer matter because no one is angry anymore because there are no more dictators and democracy is everywhere. While the Israelis see the Middle East as basically static, the progressives see the Middle East as constantly on the verge of a great leap forward to a new more enlightened age.
As a result any affinity between the neoconservatives and Israeli leaders was always going to be limited. The neoconservatives were impressed by Israel's modernism, but they assumed that it could be copied over to their neighbors and came to resent Israel as an obstacle for not playing a more meaningful role in their grand theory of history. While outwardly the progressives see Israel as very modern, they reject it for not possessing the most vital element of modernism. Transnationalism.
While Israel has more than its share of leftists, its animating philosophy is an ethnic nationalism that is repugnant to the transnationalist. They can find no meaningful globally applicable philosophy that defines its success. Like Japan, Israel is a self-contained wonder. It is a nation, not a philosophy. Its identity is rooted in an infuriating recent and ancient history. It is modern in defiance of the progressive understanding of history-- which is why its technology, its human rights and its basic decency are dismissed.
The Arab Spring seems to be everything that Israel is not, a transnational transformation, the soul of Europe invested in a Middle Eastern body. A great leap forward that will lift the region out of its backward fanaticism and move the world closer to the modern place it ought to be. Then with some selective sanctions in Asia, laptops for every child in Africa, and some really good books on human potential, the entire world will be just like the European Union. If Israel doesn't louse it up this time.
The progressive philosopher-kings aren't stupid, their knowledge of history is. They believe that their wonderful system was not the product of a civilization, but of political protesters demanding change. If the political protesters demanding change are similarly empowered in the Muslim world, then they will end up with the same results.
To the left a theory of history in which a humanitarian society is created through the overthrow of the status quo makes perfect sense. To the American liberal right, a similar theory favoring democracy as the key element has almost as much appeal. Both agree on the notion that if their native process is exported, then the results will be the same.
There's a certain kind of technocratic sensibility to it, that if you build the same machines and use the same recipe, then anyone can make Coca Cola. Which is true, except that people in different parts of the world prefer versions of Coca Cola that taste differently. Exporting the process of democracy does not export the outcome of democracy. It only helps the local create the sort of government they really want. Egypt and Tunisia have already shown us what kind of government that is.
Washington is not interested in Israel's selfish need not to be nuked. It isn't in this for existential reasons and it doesn't see why Israel should be either. If the United States can sacrifice thousands of lives for the greater good to promote peace, tolerance and respect for international law, then why can't Israel risk a few million lives, especially when there are foreign policy experts who will explain slowly and distinctly to the dunces in Jerusalem why it is very unlikely that Iran will actually detonate a nuclear bomb.
Israeli leaders have a diminishing interest in grand theories of history arising from DC or Brussels. Small nations can't afford grand theories of history. They make do with keeping the rain from leaking through the roof. The Israelis aren't interested in another war, which is exactly why they want to launch a preemptive strike against Iran's nuclear program. In response Iran's terrorist proxies will do their part by shelling Israeli towns and villages, but that's part of life. Not the good part, but the part about living in a region overrun by terrorist militias that anyone can sponsor for a dollar.
They are often stupid, but they are rarely stupid in the way that American and European leaders are stupid. Israel can't afford its own version of Blair, Sarkozy or Obama. The closest thing to them, Shimon Peres, was quickly voted out despite wearing the cloak of martyrdom and has been relegated to a ceremonial office which allows him to explain his vision of the New Middle East dominated by nanotechnology and free trade zones to foreign visitors who are impressed by this visionary.
When Israel looks at Syria, it doesn't see a potential gateway to regional progress, it sees a local civil war backed by its neighbors, which will result in instability and one side or the other gaining Syria as a pawn. It sees Assad's weapons stockpiles ending up in the hands of terrorists, terrorists flocking to fight in the civil war, and it even sees Alawite refugees desperate enough to flee across the border. What it does not see is the glowing symbols of the Arab Spring.
And when it looks at Iran, it doesn't see a rogue state, it just sees a bunch of fanatics about to get their hands on nuclear weapons. And time running out in which their efforts can be aborted or at least slowed down. It will do something about it not because it wants to change the region or advance human civilization, but because it knows the exact casualty count from a nuclear detonation over Tel Aviv.
Washington desperately doesn't want anything interrupting its rush to war in Syria. Jerusalem has run out of patience and will go it alone in Iran. The consequences aren't unpredictable and won't be much fun. But that is also the difference between responsible and irresponsible leadership. Responsible leaders can take a hit now to avoid much worse consequences down the road. Irresponsible leaders take refuge in philosophy and chase after theories of history, rather than keeping the rain from leaking through the roof.
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Saturday, February 11, 2012
After occupying the headlines for far too long, Occupy Wall Street was dispersed by a combination of inclement weather, mayoral irritation and having served their purpose. Occupy Oakland will go on doing what it can to depress the economy of an already economically depressed city by attacking its ports. The other Occupations are being moved along back to the Starbucks that spawned them.
As committed Warmists, the Occupiers might have expected that temperatures in the northeast and the midwest in November and December would feel just like a day at the beach in Santa Monica. But while the manipulated hockey stick graphs might have been on their side, the weather wasn't. Neither were the already overstretched urban budgets turned inside out by having to pay for police overtime, electrical generators and cleanup duty. But most of all they had served their purpose as a launching pad for the Obama 2012 campaign.
The job of the Occupiers was to move the 99 and 1 percent memes into public consciousness, which in between the homeless camps, the rapes and the cardboard signs, they managed to do. Or the media did it for them. Around the time when well-meaning idiots began wearing 99 percent buttons, I thought of getting a 100 percent button. But the 100 percent button wouldn't have been very accurate. It implies that we're all in the same boat which is not the case.
The percentage debate is so much nonsense because the issue isn't class, it's position. OWS wanted the rest of the country to pay for a small government subsidized middle-class that would either work directly for the government or in occupations supported by government funding. The rich weren't being pitted against the poor. University grads were pitting themselves against the remnants of the aspirational working class.
Optimists see the glass as half-full and believe that with some effort it can be filled up all the way. Pessimists see the glass as half-empty and want to drink it all, before someone else does. Economic pessimists are also redistributionists, striving to secure their position within a shrinking economy. Economic optimists believe that wealth can come from outside the existing system and don't see the need for redistribution.
The economic pessimists of the left are acting like stranded castaways who keep bringing up cannibalism as the only way. OWS and Obama 2012 sound like the Donner Party, campaigning on who should get eaten first. Rarely has an incumbent campaigned on economic pessimism. It's all the more startling when a candidate who ran on hope is now running on hopelessness, but the only way to beat the call for change is to convince people that change is hopeless. That change will leave them even worse off. Economic pessimism is the ideal tool for the job.
The Republicans claim that things will get better while the Democrats whisper that they will only get better for people who aren't you. Forget about opportunity and vote for someone who will cut you a big slice of the leftovers so you can ride out the decline and fall of the West.
Obama 2012 and OWS is about patronage and their 99 percent slogan broadens the promise of patronage to everyone. Like Ivory's 99/44 clean or most other 99 percent advertising slogans, it's a clever fraud. 99 percent of the public can't be subsidized by the 1 percent, especially when the 1 percent are the ones doing the governing.
The percentage of the public that will be subsidized is the one that the sloganeers need to win elections and maintain their power. It won't be 51 percent, but between government employees, union members and those on the dole, it will probably be in the thirties. The rest will work low paying jobs in the private sector and a handful will work in the financial industry, though their jobs will mainly involve dubious transactions with no future. That will leave us with a very European economy of Muslim immigrants running businesses under the table and paying just enough taxes so the government can subsidize university degrees and conferences on poverty.
That latter group, the degree getters and conference attendees, are the ones targeted by OWS. The young and the cutting edge who bought into a dysfunctional educational system and now want the patronage of the government as their exit strategy. These are the same people who helped Obama get elected and bringing them out in 2012 is a priority.
Patronage is the issue. Or the old Russian term "Protektsia" transplanted to Israel, with parallels in most countries with a heavy bureaucracy. It's what happens when the "Pull" or "Connections" that are invaluable for mid-level personnel within the bureaucracy looking to get anything done become universalized so that public access to the system depends on their level of political access.
The left likes to say that everything is political, and when they make the government big enough, then everything really is political because you have to deal with the government to be able to get anything done. Since government bureaucracies are hideously inaccessible beasts, the only way to get anything done is to have friends within the system. The more you want, the bigger your friends need to be.
American politics has become so dysfunctional and the country so indebted because the system kept expanding its reach while the politicians kept doling out more pork. The bigger the system grew, the more the human touch of the pols was needed to compensate for it. This game of Good Government- Bad Government has taken most cities and the country to the breaking point. Between the restrictions and the favors, we have ended up with a country that has less freedom and more debt without anything to show for it.
Redistributionism is the final act of thieves looting the treasury who don't think there will be anything left for them. When Chavez brought Venezuela's gold home, he wasn't doing it for the people, he was doing it so that if he and his family and their cronies need to flee the country, they can carry with them a form of wealth that won't fluctuate like their currency or depreciate like the dollar. And when Obama offers patronage to tens of millions of his supporters, he's only doing it to be able to go on looting the treasury on a much larger scale.
Those who think that they are part of the 99 percent are really just bad at math. The percentages don't break down along income level, they break down by position. The government employee with a secure pension and early retirement is better off than the 1 percenter who lost all his money in bad investments. When patronage is pegged to the treasury and the lending power of the wealthiest nation in the world, then position matters more than stated income. A professor with tenure in a state uni is more secure than his contemporary working in the free market.
Warren Buffett and Bill Gates may both be in the 1 percent, but Gates makes money when his shares go up, Buffett makes money from a sweetheart deal in a government backed financial company. It's not income that matter. Only "Protektsia".
When the Democrats took Tammany Hall national again, they promised patronage for everyone in exchange for votes. The country is still trapped in their Democratic oligarchy where the economy can be destroyed as long as the right number of people go on voting for their government benefits and the Buffett's and the Soros' keep funding the United States of Tammany from the top.
The patronage economy brought us to economic disaster when the pols decided to create a subsidized mimicry of the free market by funding homes and college educations. Now we're a breath away from turning the entire economy into a way to sell environmental indulgence bonds as the price for being able to manufacture or do anything. And when that happens then the looting will finally be complete because there will be no industry left.
The problem is power. Centralize control and you create something like absolute power. Which is why income numbers don't matter. Money is a form of power, but it only buys you so much access from the outside. It's whether you are on the outside or on the inside that matters. It's your affiliation that counts the most.
Playing the percentages is more than an election strategy, it's a strategy to reconfigure the country. There will still be rich and poor, and a diminished middle-class, but wealth will increasingly align by affiliation, rather than by initiative or success. There is no competing with the oligarchy. You are either with it or against it. That is the absolute of absolute power turned into absolute corruption.
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Friday, February 10, 2012
CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS
It's not often that the Democratic Party's working class religious base collides with its progressive radical left base, mainly because the leaders of the first group rarely concede that there is a conflict between the radical left's agenda and their own. The contraception mandate was one of those unique events when the collision happened and the left backed down.
That the collision happened at all is a testament to the arrogance and cluelessness of the Obama elite which operates in its own bubble. Even the input of insiders like Biden who understood exactly what was going to happen did not prevent the ship from sailing. It took some aggressive pushback for the administration to reverse itself, while pretending that there was no reversal, but the real story is how tone deaf the insiders in this administration really are.
The last thing you want to do before a national election is pick a fight with a major section of your own base which is a bit skeptical about you anyway. Giving them a reason to turn on ObamaCare and the administration was the dumbest thing possible. And it happened because the people running things did not understand it would happen. They assumed that they could put on their paternalistic attitude, smile dismissively, spin up some talking points and everyone would go along.
This stupidity is our best hope. If the Republican Party establishment insists on arrogantly making a mess of things, the Obama Administration's arrogance and heavy-handedness exceeds their own and may succeed in the battle of alienation.
ISLAM'S GROUNDHOG DAY
Groundhog Day is the long eternal tragedy of Islam, which always sees its shadow and always ends up with six weeks, six months or six hundred years of more winter. That hopeful time when the bitter cold of winter begins its slow transition into the warmth and renewal of spring never comes for Islam.
In a reversal of the cycle of season, the Arab Spring led to the Islamic Winter, but that is the endless pattern of Islamic attempts at reform and rejuvenation, which rather than finding renewal in their attempts at transformation only go on perpetuating the same cycle of violence, tyranny and oppression.
There is a peculiar tragedy to a religion which cannot escape its own destructive nature, each time it reaches for some form of redemption, its hands come up dripping with blood and it all ends in more bodies and petty tyrannies.
The full article is up at Front Page Magazine
GET YOUR WAR ON
If you tune in to CNN you can see footage of adorable Syrian children, as reported by Anderson Cooper. Because we've got to get our war on in Syria and liberate the Syrian people on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood. No adorable Christian children need be shown because we might have to think about what's going to happen to them once the funloving Religion of Peace is in the driver's seat.
Copts in the village of Kobry-el-Sharbat (El-Ameriya), Alexandria, were attacked on January 27 by a mob of 3000 Muslims led by Salafi leaders, who looted and torched homes and shops belonging to Copts.
Three "reconciliation meetings" were held at the El-Ameriya village police headquarters. They were attended by Salafi and Muslim Brotherhood representatives from neighboring villages, as well as church representative. Muslims demanded the eviction of all Coptic inhabitants from the village because "Muslim honour had been damaged."
That's what's going to happen to them. The Obama Administration is bent on this, but they don't particularly want to do the heavy lifting. Which makes it more likely that the Turks, the Saudis and some others will contribute the troops, while the United States acts as the air force for the Muslim Brotherhood one more time.
AKP's sleazy Islamist Foreign Minister is meeting with Clinton to discuss the next "steps" and it's clear that Turkey would like to be at the center of a coalition to take down Assad. The euphemism will be "Friends of Syria", because nothing says friendship like an invasion.
I WAS A MAINSTREAM MEDIA REPORTER BUT I BROKE FREE
Can anyone imagine seeing a headline like, "I was a Sunni Muslim but I broke free" in any mainstream American newspaper today? Nope.
But you can see a headline like "I was a Hasidic Jew - but I broke free" in the Post. Now if we are to have "I was a Jew, but I broke free" articles, then we should at the very least have equal time for, "I was a Muslim but I broke free" articles.
It's not too hard to break out of being a religious Jew. You just stop. Nobody beheads you or kidnaps you and ships you to Pakistan. Breaking out of being a Muslim is a good deal harder as plenty of Ex-Muslims can tell you.
Peculiarly though the media will not pay any attention to Ibn Warraq or to the victims of Muslim honor killings, but street trash like Deborah Feldman looking to find a book deal can always get media coverage.
Deborah Feldman claims that Jews are no better than Muslim "extremists" and while I'm no fan of the community she was a part of, she could leave. She doesn't have to look over her shoulders waiting for a cousin or brother to come up and kill her. The women who actually do have to live like that can't get book deals or the media coverage she laps up.
Jews and Christians who leave their religion bask in the adoring attention of a media which loves to portray those religions in the blackest colors. But when it comes to Islam, the only coverage allowed is the positive kind.
What's really repulsive is that the blurb for Deborah Feldman's book actually dares to compare this Satmar version of Snooki, with about the same IQ, to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel.
Ali has actually taken risks for what she believed in. Feldman grew up in a broken family and deciding she wanted the party life broke up her marriage. She's more qualified to be on the Jersey Shore than to write a memoir about her "struggle". If you're an Orthodox Jew and you decide not be one anymore, your only challenge is shopping for new clothes. If you're a Muslim and you decide to opt out, then you are endangering your life.
Today Ali needs bodyguards. Feldman needs PR agents. The difference between the two tells you all you need to know about the reality of Islam and the contempt in which Western elites hold traditional religion while embracing Islam.
THE CHUTZPAH OF OMAR THE BOYCOTT MAKER
The classical definition of the Yiddish word Chutzpah is a man on trial for killing his parents who asks for leniency because he is an orphan. Next to that definition is a picture of Omar Barghouti, a Qatari-born Muslim who moved to Israel and enrolled in Tel Aviv University to obtain a Masters Degree in Philosophy while conducting an academic boycott campaign against Israel.
See the full article at Front Page Magazine
LOOSE LIPS
There was still some ambiguity after Panetta's statement on the Iran window what the Obama Admin was up to, that ambiguity is all but gone after anonymous "officials" appeared to have hand fed NBC news a story that claims Israel is working with the MEK Iranian group to assassinate Iranian nuclear gurus.
This is straight up sabotage and a warning that the Obama Administration will keep on leaking information to damage any Israeli action against Iran unless Israel falls into line. Considering the operational necessities of launching an attack and the level of US surveillance, O and his cronies can do a lot to inhibit and even cost lives in an attack on Iran.
This should also settle any further rumors that bombing Iran is an election strategy for Obama. That couldn't be further away from the truth.
The Obama Administration's sabotage is all the more obnoxious after it threw a hissy fit because Russia and China wouldn't let it go after Syria. So war with Syria on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood, yes. Allowing Israel to take out Iran's nuclear program, no. Sabotaging Israeli efforts to go it alone, also yes.
Israel had to inform the United States of what it was doing as part of the process of cooperation, though considering the MEK's presence in Iraq, it is extremely doubtful that the United States had no involvement in this, under the previous administration or even the current one.
While there is no independent verification of this story, it is far more plausible than the nonsense peddled by the mainstream media about Mossad agents running around Tehran. I have suggested all along that Israeli and American backed Iranian dissidents were responsible. But it doesn't take much to reach that conclusion.
After the Iranian backed Iraqi PM's MEK massacre and the US withdrawal, the MEK would need backers more urgently. Its position in Iraq is precarious and while its people have refugee status, nobody is going to protect them from Maliki's thugs. The Ashraf\Liberty situation is ugly and the MEK certainly has no sympathy from the Obama Administration. Not unless MEK was willing to hit Syria.
The ideology wouldn't really matter. The region is full of militias willing to ally with anyone on a temporary basis if it gets them money and advances their agenda. That's what keeps Afghanistan and Iraq where it is. And MEK is "unusual" enough that just about anything could be expected. But none of that means it's actually true.
Iran's claim that this is an MEK-Israel plot is convenient, but this is a region where every Muslim state or party accuses its enemies of working with Israel. During the Arab Spring, both governments and rebels accused each other of being pawns of Israel. Iran would like to delegitimize the MEK and justify further crackdowns by Maliki. This is the best way to do it.
The Pre-Tehran arm of the American left has been pushing the same line for a while, tying the MEK to some Republican officials who have at times supported it as a foil against Iran. The NBC article even looks like it was written by ThinkProgress with the same talking points.
It doesn't really matter though who's pulling the trigger. The assassinations are a sideshow that aren't going to stop the nuclear program. Israel is now on its own moving toward a direct strike method, while Obama tries to hold it back.
Defense Minister Barak, formerly a darling of the Clintonites in the Obama Administration, is on the outs after having strongly endorsed a strike. How bad is it? So bad that Administration handlers are now pushing the message that Netanyahu is the reasonable party who needs to keep Barak in hand.
The following excerpt from the New York Times, a reliable administration organ sets the tone
President Obama tried to defuse arguments for military action in a telephone call last month with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, the substance of which was confirmed by an Obama administration official who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to describe the conversation. While the two men have had an often contentious relationship over Middle East diplomacy, American officials emerged from that exchange persuaded that Mr. Netanyahu was willing to give economic sanctions and other steps time to work.
Which is the tune that was played all along. Give us more time till Iran has a nuke.
a senior Obama administration official, expressing frustration that the Israelis are looking at the problem too narrowly, given the many kinds of pressure being placed on Tehran and the increasing evidence that far tougher sanctions are having an effect.
Ah yes too narrowly, instead of taking the "broader view", which all comes out to not enough nuance. Which is a good summary of liberal foreign policy.
Administration officials cite this more complex picture in pressing the Israelis to give the latest sanctions a chance to inflict enough pain on the Iranian leadership to force it back to the negotiating table, or to make the decision that the nuclear program is not worth the cost.
Just like North Korea. And here we go...
Administration officials also noted a distinction in the tone of Mr. Barak and Mr. Netanyahu, who does not publicly favor the phrase “zone of immunity.” This week, an American official noted, Mr. Netanyahu declared that on the topic of Iran, officials should just “shut up.”
“I think that’s good advice,” the American official said.
Yes I'm sure administration officials are big fans of Israel shutting up about Iran, but then shouldn't they be shutting up about Israeli plans for Iran?
NUDGES
The creepy social engineering innovations that you'll see tomorrow are being tested in Europe today. So here's a sample of what you can look forward to.
Mr Halpern is director of Downing Street's behavioural "nudge unit". It advises government on ways to encourage people to change behaviour, without using compulsion. The approach is based on a school of thought that "nudging" people in a certain direction is more productive and cost-effective than trying to change behaviour by banning things or passing regulation.
So where is the UK "nudging" people now?
Mr Halpern said Britain faced a shortage of housing, partly because elderly people remained in family homes after their children left. “A big issue we have is under-occupation of houses,” he said. “We have more TVs than people in the house.”
Officials also denied Mr Halpern was urging elderly people to down size after he told the conference that “we do have enough houses… it is just essentially they are lived in by older people”.
A report last year suggested there were 25 million empty bedrooms in the country. Ministers were urged to draw up proposals to encourage elderly couples to downsize and create more affordable family homes. The Government has recently backed council schemes that help pensioners move into smaller properties and rent out their family homes.
Sic transit.
BUT JEWISH REPORTERS CAN BE ANTI-ISRAEL TOO
CNN's Israel bureau is downsizing, reportedly to cope with a reduced budget due to falling advertising revenues.
That doesn't explain why they fired four Israeli Jewish journalists (out of a crew of 8), and retained only Arab journalists. The local chief editor of CNN is now an Arab.
This is blatantly unfair considering how hard Jewish CNN reporters have worked on smearing Israel. This discrimination fails to take into account how hard reporters like Joshua Hammer, Joe Klein and Peter Beinart have worked at proving that they hate Israel more than any Muslim does.
No one denies that Muslims really hate Israel, but I would urge CNN to remember that while hating Israel may be a qualification for working at CNN or in any mainstream media organization
THE ROUNDUP
The obsessive compulsive narcissism of Barry
What will European Sharia law look like? You're already seeing it now.
As larger and larger urban areas become Islamized (and it is happening very quickly), shari'a will not need to come in from above, through the traditional processes of legislation. Rather, it will come in from below, from people willing to enforce it and profit from it, and from the fact that the ethnic-European police will not even enter a lot of those neighborhoods.
So we are talking about de-facto City States, not de jure Nation States, going Islamic. That seems like an incontrovertible trend to me, and I would love to see any evidence pointing away from this reality. The nation state as a model will become increasingly unimportant, I project, as Western Civilization continues to decline, and the Islamic cultures overcome the sterile remains of the Englihtenment.
The entire piece is a good assessment of the trajectory of the process. Londonistan made real.
How big is that jobs deficit anyway?
According to the US Debt Clock Time Machine, in the period from 2000-2004, we gained about 10 million in population and 4 million in the workforce -- that is, for every new person in the population, we gained four tenths of a person in the workforce.
Now here's what worries me. From 2008-2012 we gained 9.5 million in population. Supposing an "average" gain in the workforce of about five tenths or 50%, we should have seen the workforce grow by 4 or 5 million. Right? But instead, the workforce SHRANK by nearly 5 million.
If it should have grown by 5 million and instead shrank by 5 million, aren't we looking at a deficit of 10 MILLION JOBS?
The Arab Spring comes to Sydney.
Showdown in Georgia
It's not easy being a Black Conservative.
It's getting harder to deny anymore...even as my adult, grownup brain wants to disdain the idea—actual evil seems to be afoot in the world, and its guise is becoming ever more clear.
Decoding the code
Islamonausea: It's the new human condition.
Veteran discrimination
The lost art of raking up profits
I decided long ago to end the shameful practice of begging on my property. First, I never allowed my own kids to raise funds this way. Second, every time a tot or teenager arrived on my doorstep, he was given a choice.
My pitch was simple; I'd say, "Look, I don't need or want what you are selling. But I understand that your teacher wants you to raise money for your class project/field trip/whatever, and I'd like to help. There's a rake in my garage, and I'll pay you ten dollars in cash if you work in my yard for one hour. You can give the money to your school, or you can keep it for yourself.
Only one ever took me up on my offer.
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