With one piece of legislation, Obama and his congressional allies have done in one year what it took President Lyndon Johnson and his allies two years to do in 1965 and 1966 -- revive conservatism. Today conservatism is rising on the stepping stones of liberal excesses.With just one year in power, BO and his total control of Congress has managed to awake the 40% of Americans that have always identified themselves as conservative from their stupor. A year ago, this seemed impossible, but while the capacity of the human race for the positive is sadly limited, the capacity for arrogance, narcissism, mendacity, elitism, and incompetence is completely unbounded. BO, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have just proven the known yet again.
The 2008 elections gave liberals the curse of opportunity, and they have used it to reveal themselves ruinously. The protracted health care debacle has highlighted this fact: Some liberals consider the legislation's unpopularity a reason to redouble their efforts to inflict it on Americans who, such liberals think, are too benighted to understand that their betters know best. The essence of contemporary liberalism is the illiberal conviction that Americans, in their comprehensive incompetence, need minute supervision by government, which liberals believe exists to spare citizens the torture of thinking and choosing.
"As I've watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war," Cheney begins.Washington Post, March '09 Says:
Flat-out untrue.
In a memo e-mailed this week to Pentagon staff members, the Defense Department's office of security review noted that "this administration prefers to avoid using the term 'Long War' or 'Global War on Terror' [GWOT.] Please use 'Overseas Contingency Operation.' "So BO renamed GWOT to "Overseas Contingency Operation". We also know that they are trying KSM, the mastermind behind 9-11 as a criminal, not a terrorist in a military tribunal. What does "flat out untrue" mean in the context of these facts? It seems pretty reasonable to me that BO is trying to treat terrorism as a criminal vs a military operation, and the efforts that Robinson points to relative to Iraq and Afghanistan are simply "getting out as fast as he can".
Cheney knows this. But he goes on to use the big lie -- that Obama is "trying to pretend we are not at war" -- to bludgeon the new administration on a host of specific issues. Here is the one that jumps out at me: The president, Cheney claims, "seems to think that if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core al-Qaeda-trained terrorists still there, we won't be at war."He goes on to point out that some of the folks released BY BUSH have already become terrorists again. What he doesn't point out is that Robinson, many Democrats in congress and some judges were pushing to have Gitmo closed, and the Bush administration was forced to release people that were there. Robinson and others have been DEMANDING that Gitmo be closed for a LONG time. What did they expect to be done with these people?
"We today who stand fore the Progressive movement here in the United States are not wedded to any particular kind of machinery, save solely as means to the end desired. Our aim is to secure the real and not nominal rule of the people. With this purpose in view, we propose to do away with whatever in our government tends to secure privilege ..." (TR)
"Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop."Those quotes are from Woodrow Wilson. What is the problem? The rule of law. Everything ought to "evolve" to what "the people want". As if life did not "obey" the laws of physics (mechanics). At the core of progressivism is simple wishful thinking -- we can have what we want by voting for what we want and telling others to give it to us. It is a movement dedicated to the ends somehow not only justifying the means, but somehow creating the means.
"By tyranny, as we no fight it, we mean control of the law, of legislation and adjudication, by organizations which to not represent the people, by means which are private and selfish."
"Now that mines are great social undertakings, and their products are sold at monopoly prices, has private ownership any basis is reason or ethics?" (Walter Rauschenbusch, theologian, social gospel movement"Private property is obviously the root of American freedom and economic success, but it is the bane of those who are primarily driven by envy rather than productivity as progressives are. If a thing has value, then a progressive believes that everyone ought own it collectively -- which as we know from the USSR, means that the value is destroyed and everyone loses. No matter to the progressive -- better that all should starve than a few are able to earn their way to wealth through their efforts and at the same time save any from starving. The burning anger in the breast of the progressive for the success of that one person is worth the deaths of any number of people required so that his success can be "leveled".
Obama also sensibly suspended all transfers of Yemenis from Guantanamo. Nonetheless, Obama insisted on repeating his determination to close the prison, invoking his usual rationale of eliminating a rallying cry and recruiting tool for al-Qaeda.
Imagine that Guantanamo were to disappear tomorrow, swallowed in a giant tsunami. Do you think there'd be any less recruiting for al-Qaeda in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, London?
Jihadism's list of grievances against the West is not only self-replenishing but endlessly creative. Osama bin Laden's 1998 fatwa commanding universal jihad against America cited as its two top grievances our stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia and Iraqi suffering under anti-Saddam sanctions.
Today, there are virtually no U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. And the sanctions regime against Iraq was abolished years ago. Has al-Qaeda stopped recruiting? Ayman al-Zawahiri often invokes Andalusia in his speeches. For those not steeped in the multivolume lexicon of Islamist grievances, Andalusia refers to Iberia, lost by Islam to Christendom -- in 1492.
This is a fanatical religious sect dedicated to establishing the most oppressive medieval theocracy and therefore committed to unending war with America not just because it is infidel but because it represents modernity with its individual liberty, social equality (especially for women) and profound tolerance (religious, sexual, philosophical). You going to change that by evacuating Guantanamo?
Nevertheless, Obama will not change his determination to close Guantanamo. He is too politically committed. The only hope is that perhaps now he is offering his "recruiting" rationale out of political expediency rather than real belief. With suicide bombers in the air, cynicism is far less dangerous to the country than naivete.
The tea party movement is mostly famous for its flamboyant fringe. But it is now more popular than either major party. According to the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 41 percent of Americans have a positive view of the tea party movement. Only 35 percent of Americans have a positive view of the Democrats and only 28 percent have a positive view of the Republican Party.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a branch of the US Department of Health and Human Services, estimated last month that the Senate bill would squeeze $493 billion out of Medicare over the next 10 years. As a result, it cautioned, “providers for whom Medicare constitutes a substantive portion of their business could find it difficult to remain profitable and . . . might end their participation in the program (possibly jeopardizing access to care for beneficiaries).’’ In short, the Democratic understanding of health care reform - more government power to set prices, combined with reduced freedom for individuals - will make medical care harder to come by: an Economics 101 lesson in the pitfalls of price controls.
I'm afraid that the past 10 years will be seen as a time when the United States badly lost its way by using our military power carelessly, misunderstanding the real challenges to our long-term security, and pursuing domestic policies that constrained our options for the future while needlessly threatening our prosperity."Afraid"? Don't you mean that you "fervently hope"? Later in the article he is going to hold up the 60's and the 30's as exemplary -- the 30's involved ignoring the rising threat of Fascism and a world war that followed, the 60's brought us Vietnam and the 70's economic collapse that followed (EJ fails to remember the existence of the 70's). EJ fervently hopes that Bush is seen as "the cause" of what he probably realizes will be the disastrous decade of the teens given the policies that BO has already embarked on. What are the actual drivers of the deficis? FICA, Medicare and other entitlements -- policies of the 30's and 60's. Dionne has a nice sleight of hand.
Domestically, Obama inherited an economic catastrophe. Dealing with the wreckage required a large expenditure of public funds that increased a deficit already bloated by the previous president's decision to fight two wars and to cut taxes at the same time. Bush's defenders, preferring to focus attention away from this earlier period of irresponsibility, act as if the world began on Jan. 20, 2009, by way of saddling Obama with the blame for everything that now ails us. But the previous eight years cannot be wished away.
It should not surprise us that the battle for the future will be shaped by struggles over the past. How often over the last 40 years have conservatives defended their policies in the name of rolling back "the excesses of the '60s"? For even longer, liberals were charged with being locked into "the New Deal approaches of the 1930s." Liberals, in turn, pointed proudly to both eras as times of unparalleled social advance.
As for the 1980s, they remain a positive reference point for conservatives even as progressives condemn the Age of Reagan for opening the way to the deregulatory excesses that led to the recent downturn.I'd say that the core difference is really there -- the 30's and the 60's gave us a host of entitlements and expansion of government that have saddled us with ever increasing debt, unfunded liabilities, and loss of the sense of individual responsibility to save to provide for ones own retirement. Both eras also gave us significant wars -- WWII and Vietnam. If Iraq was a "war of convenience", then Vietnam was even more so -- NOBODY attacked us. It is very interesting to try to claim that the subprime bubble is a product of "Reagan deregulatory excess". There is plenty of blame to go around, but the key element in sub-prime was the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 that forces lenders down the path of finding ways to loan money to people that actually didn't qualify for loans. It simply got out of hand.
