Some hard truths

Fellow conservative blogger Donald Douglas has an interesting post up that cites Robert Bork's recent book entitled: A Time To Speak:Selected Writings and Arguments. Many of you will remember Bork as having been an unfair victim of left-wing demagoguery during his 1987 Senate confirmation hearings after Ronald Reagan nominated him for the U.S. Supreme Court. Though beaten in that instance, Bork has been unbowed in using his prodigious intellectual talents to influence the national debate via his writings over the past 20 years. As Douglas recounts, Bork wrote back in 1995 with uncanny prescience in his essay Hard Truths About the Culture War that we face a real and growing threat from liberalism that is destroying our culture: Modern liberalism is most particularly a disease of our cultural elites, the people who control the institutions that manufacture or disseminate ideas, attitudes, and symbols-universities, some churches, Hollywood, the national press (print and electronic), much of the congressional Democratic party and some of the congressional Republicans as well, large sections of the judiciary, foundation staffs, and almost all the "public interest" organizations that exercise a profound if largely unseen effect on public policy. So pervasive is the influence of those who occupy the commanding heights of our culture that it is not entirely accurate to call the United States a majoritarian democracy. The elites of modern liberalism do not win all the battles, but despite their relatively small numbers, they win more than their share and move the culture always in one direction ....

What we are seeing in modern liberalism is the ultimate triumph of the New Left of the 1960s - the New Left that collapsed as a unified political movement and splintered into a multitude of intense, single-issue groups. We now have, to name but a few, radical feminists, black extremists, animal rights groups, radical environmentalists, activist homosexual groups, multiculturalists, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, and many more. In a real sense, however, the New Left did not collapse. Each of its splinters pursues a leftist agenda, but there is no publicly announced overarching philosophy that enables people to see easily that the separate groups and causes add up to a general radical left philosophy. The groups support one another and come together easily on many issues. In that sense, the splintering of the New Left made it less visible and therefore more powerful, its goals more attainable, than ever before.

In their final stages, radical egalitarianism becomes tyranny and radical individualism descends into hedonism. These translate as bread and circuses. Government grows larger and more intrusive in order to direct the distribution of goods and services in an ever more equal fashion, while people are diverted, led to believe that their freedoms are increasing, by a great variety of entertainments featuring violence and sex ...

As Douglas also notes, the "splintered" left-wing groups that Bork described in 1995 look a lot like the various liberal organizations that have now organized to make change within the Obama Administration.

An excellent example of this can be found in Ben Smith's recent article at Politico.com entitled: Unity '09 -- Dem Groups Quietly Align:

A broad coalition of left-leaning groups is quietly closing ranks into a new coalition, "Unity '09," aimed at helping President Barack Obama push his agenda through Congress.

Conceived at a New York meeting before the November election, two Democrats familiar with the planning said, Unity '09 will draw together money and grassroots organizations to pressure lawmakers in their home states to back White House legislation and other progressive causes.

The online-based MoveOn.org is a central player in the nascent organization, but other groups involved in planning Unity '09 span a broad spectrum of interests, from the American Civil Liberties Union to the National Council of La Raza to Planned Parenthood, as well as labor unions and environmental groups.

The obvious point to be made here is that the most radical of left-wing interest groups are organizing to have a major impact on public policy in the Obama White House. What follows logically from this is a pro-choice, pro-illegal immigration, pro-tort/pro-defendant and pro-union orientation that will systematically weaken the foundation of our nation and our economy. Just today, for example, it was revealed that estimates for Obama's "Cap and Trade" environmental protection regime will cost the economy well over $1 trillion over the next several years -- a huge tax on business in the name of satisfying the global warming alarmists who seek curbs on carbon at any cost.

With the Obama presidency we have opened the West Wing to the worst kind of single-minded interest groups -- for whom the word "compromise" and "in the national interest" have absolutely no meaning. There is no quid-pro-quo among the true believers, who have organized their lives around unyielding belief in the importance of a single issue -- be it abortion, immigration, torture, civil liberties or the environment.  For these disciples, there is no second place  -- total victory is the only option.  And for those of us who believe in open, honest debate, this is a hard truth, indeed.

BHO sees no evil with 'enemy' semantics

In a dramatic break with longstanding U.S. government policy and established interpretations of the laws of war, the Obama administration announced Friday afternoon (a time when the government announces policy changes it hopes will be ignored or buried by the news media) that it will abandon the use of the term “enemy combatant” as a standard “for the government’s authority to hold detainees at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility.” (DOJ release) This latest flipflop on legal policy regarding Guantanamo detainees is inconsistent with Obama’s recent policy declaration on detainees held in other areas and established norms of international law – as noted in a previous post. More importantly, it leaves those detainees in legal limbo and opens up the status of all detainees for legal challenges on spurious grounds – a litigator’s wet dream, but a national security nightmare. Incoherent:

The Obama/Holder elimination of “enemy combatant” designation leaves detainees in legal limbo:

The Justice Department filing doesn't give the war prisoners a specific designation. They aren't described as POWs or enemy combatants or unprivileged belligerents, all categories of war prisoners under international law.

A Justice Department official said Friday that, for now, they are just considered ''detainees..”

According to accepted norms of international law, there can be no grey area in detainee status:

"There is no intermediate status; nobody in enemy hands can be outside the law,"[4] as stated in the commentary of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on the Geneva Conventions, "If civilians directly engage in hostilities, they are considered 'unlawful' or 'unprivileged' combatants or belligerents.” Commentary: IV Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (1958)

In the United States, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 codified the legal definition of the term “enemy combatant” and invested the U.S. President with broad discretion to determine whether a person may be designated an unlawful enemy combatant. Holder’s Justice Department, in declaring that only the AUMF (Authorization for the Use of Military Force, 18 September 2001) is the basis for detention authority, contravenes the intent of Congress and subsequently enacted legislation.

Inconsistent:

Elimination of the “enemy combatants” designation for detainees at Guantanamo directly contradicts the continued use – in fact, reinforcement – of the term with regard to detainees held in venues other than Guantanamo (cf recent Obama policy declaration re: Bagram detainees).

We move the most dangerous prisoners – those with the most involvement in terrorist plots, the most presumed intelligence value, the most hard-core members of terrorist organizations - to Guantanamo. Suddenly, they’re no longer “enemy combatants” due to a change in venue? This defies all logic.

Dangerous:

This latest policy shift unnecessarily narrows the scope of authority for detention of terrorists AND the scope of activity subjecting individuals to capture and detention. Strictly speaking, the policy limits detention to those directly connected to the 9/11 attacks, or members of “Taliban or al Qaida forces or associated forces.” What about other terrorist activity, either concurrent or subsequent to 9/11? What about terrorists not belonging to the Taliban, al Qaida, or other “associated forces”? Analogies come to mind about lacking authority to combat and capture Japanese soldiers because they didn’t take part in the Pearl Harbor raid (to say nothing of German, Italian, or other Axis forces). Defense attorneys are no doubt salivating at the prospect of suing to free poor “Achmed” because he’s not a card-carrying member of al Qaida (never mind the fact that he blew up dozens of innocents) – however, those of us in the actual profession of Defense (of this country) are left betrayed by the knowledge that the bad guys we captured and sent to Guantanamo might get released on a technicality.

Yep, that’s “consistent with national security” all right.

'Big boy britches' time for Obama

"The country looks to the President on occasions like this to be reassuring to the nation," Peter Jennings once said. "Some Presidents do it well, some Presidents don't." That's how the late ABC News anchor assessed President George W. Bush's performance on Sept. 11, 2001. The criticism was superficial, shortsighted and unfair, given that President Bush's finest moments came in rallying the country after 9/11 ‹ not scapegoating the previous administration.

Bush didn't spend the next few months claiming that he "inherited" a national security mess ­ nor did he complain about the economy which faltered in two of the final three quarters under President Clinton before contracting again in Bush's first year.

Likewise, President Reagan didn't whine about the soaring unemployment and burgeoning inflation that awaited him after President Carter's tenure. These men understood that they campaigned for the opportunity to serve as President and to lead by making difficult, sometimes unpopular decisions.

That's why President Obama's transformation from a candidate of hope and change to a president of gloom, blame and opportunism is so disappointing - even for those who didn't buy what he was selling as a candidate. His ability to truly inspire 53% of the voters seemed, at least, refreshing.

Now, the Obama team takes every opportunity to complain that they "inherited" a deficit, an "economic crisis," and "a big mess." No hope, just bellyaching.

Despite his messianic aura, Obama didn't mysteriously appear on planet earth a few months ago, whereupon he was thrust into office. He spent four years in the U.S. Senate (between campaign appearances), including two years when his party was in the majority with power to block policies it deemed destructive.

If he and his Democrat allies accept no responsibility for the current mess, it's fair to ask:

Did you see it coming but chose to do nothing, calculating that the ensuing catastrophe would be more beneficial to your political ambitions?

Or were you just as complicit in or oblivious to the financial implosion as those who came before you?

Either Obama put his political agenda ahead of the country's economic wellbeing or he, like those before him, is severely over-matched. Now he has reverted to the form that made him The Most Liberal Member of the U.S. Senate - exploiting economic turmoil to advance an agenda that rapidly expands the size, scope and debt of the federal government.

Americans might have accepted the behemoth $787 billion stimulus as a one-time response to severe economic distress but not as an opening bid on future spending. After all, Obama told us, "When the American people spoke last November, they were . . . looking for a change in the way Washington does business."

Instead, Americans got a Trojan horse that indefinitely expands entitlements and explodes deficits.

Obama promises to cut budget deficits in half. But compared to what? Bush's deficits, prior to 2009, maxed out at $412 billion. Obama's benchmark is the $1.3 trillion deficit for 2009 - the one he "inherited" - which is approaching $2 trillion under his stewardship.

To Bush, 2009 was an aberration in response to a fiscal crisis; Obama sees it as an opportunity to grow government permanently. Even taking Obama's budget at face value, his smallest deficit will be $533 billion in 2013.

Obama's budget includes his own $750 billion banking bailout, a $650 billion carbon tax, a $410 billion omnibus appropriation for 2009 - loaded with 8,570 earmarks. Even Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Indiana) said this "only exacerbates the problem."

After vowing to "ban all earmarks" and to "go through the federal budget line-by-line" to cut wasteful spending, Obama is now falling into the same trap that snared President Bush.

No change here, except that Bush seems miserly.

Because I reject his principles, the best I hoped for from President Obama was honesty, responsibility, and a degree of humility. So far, he's 0-for-3.. Worse still, the pathetic tactic of whining about problems you campaigned to solve is beneath the Office of the President.

Memo to President Obama: You may never be a President I can agree with, but put on your "big boy britches" and start acting like one I can respect.

------------------------------ Mark Hillman served as senate majority leader and state treasurer. To read more or comment, go to www.MarkHillman.com

When will Atlas shrug?

(Denver Post, Mar. 15) What is the breaking point? Where will the resistance form? Heavy questions, but unavoidable in the current political climate. The productive members of society can only be pushed so far, some say. What they envision is not defiance of law or a reversal of the election. It is people’s growing disengagement from a new economic order that punishes effort and rewards envy – the creepy future that Bill Ritter and Barack Obama intend for us. National columnist Michelle Malkin calls that withdrawal, “going Galt.” Malkin was the first speaker last weekend when several hundred Coloradans gathered for a free-market leadership conference in Colorado Springs. Her reference was to John Galt, the individualist hero of Ayn Rand’s novel, “Atlas Shrugged.” She told of seeing a placard at the protest rally for Obama’s stimulus bill signing that warned: “Atlas will shrug.”

So what, you ask. So in human behavior, incentives matter. People are choosers, not automatons. Mess them over enough and they’re out of here. All history proves it. “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us,” the bitter joke among Soviet factory drones, sums up collectivism’s ultimate failure wherever tried.

Of course in the 1950s, when Rand was writing her epic about a slow-spreading spontaneous strike among Americans fed up with big government, tomorrow supposedly belonged to New Soviet Man. Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul II, the three champions of freedom who would prove otherwise, weren’t yet heard of.

But we’re now told that 2008, with its routine recession and its celebrity election, showed freedom is untrustworthy after all. Economic makeover via legislative intervention is the fashion fad of 2009, driven by DC Democrats under Pelosi and Reid along with Denver Democrats under Carroll and Groff. Suddenly everyone’s a socialist, crows Newsweek. Suddenly the headlines mirror “Atlas Shrugged,” laments the Wall Street Journal.

The novel -- with John Galt as capitalist superman and Dagny Taggart, Ayn Rand’s alter ego, as railroad tycoon – may not be great literature. But its message of radical self-reliance has inspired millions across the decades. And the story is set right here. “We can’t lose Colorado. It’s our last hope,” says a Taggart employee at the start. A Rocky Mountain valley is the retreat from Galt triumphs at the end.

Retreat attendees at The Broadmoor, where Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute spoke after Malkin and “Atlas Shrugged” was assigned reading, weren’t about to unplug Galt-style from daily life in protest against wind power, national health care, and charity-choking taxes. But they took seriously the disincentive effects against wealth creation and social comity in these and other collectivist proposals. We should too.

As ever more people ride in the wagon and fewer are left to pull it, there will come a breaking point. Crowding taxation onto the highest earners and debt onto our kids, as President Obama proposes, invites collapse. Ignoring the constitution at will, as Gov. Ritter and the spending lobby do, breeds contempt. Ruin must result. Did the USA learn nothing from the USSR’s implosion, wondered Vladimir Putin recently.

Yes, we did. Cold War victory taught us the power of ideas. The East crumbled when the West asserted the superiority of liberty, wakened by thinkers like Hayek with his expose’ of the road to serfdom and Bastiat with his ridicule of “everyone seeking to live at the expense of everyone else.”

Also influential was Rand with her capitalist commandos. Galt and Taggart’s crusade was idea-powered. With moral truth they defeated the lies of something for nothing and freedom through coercion. Not even the government office of Morale Conditioner, censoring radio, could stop their entrepreneurial comeback.

Their strike against the redistributionist guilt trip was fiction. But we can shrug it off for real. Colorado could be our last hope.

There will be blood

Recently I wrote a piece noting that Obama's economic policies are less about fixing the economy and more about retributive justice -- a pernicious form of wealth redistribution designed to achieve a liberal social agenda. This agenda is at the heart of Obama's philosophical orientation -- that same "spreading the wealth around" view that he inadvertently let slip to "Joe the Plumber" on the campaign trail. Many didn't pay attention to this off-hand comment -- but we know now just how revealing it was. Daniel Henninger reinforces the retributive justice argument in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today and highlights the underlying theory that alights the Obama redistribution plan. He cites a graph created by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, French economists who "are rock stars of the intellectual left."  Their specialty is "earnings inequality" and "wealth concentration" -- code words for socialist theory designed to validate confiscatory economic policies. It turns out that Piketty and Saez are for Obama what Arthur Laffer was to Ronald Reagan. Perhaps it tells you all you need to know about Barack Obama that his economic philosophy comes from French economists -- that nation of stagnant growth, high taxes and huge public sector unionization. That in itself should be troubling enough.

Piketty and Saez have provided the Obama Administration with their rationale for "soaking the rich". See the following graph:

"As described in Mr. Obama's budget, these two economists have shown that by the end of 2004, the top 1% of taxpayers "took home" more than 22% of total national income. This trend, Fig. 9 notes, began during the Reagan presidency, skyrocketed through the Clinton years, dipped after George Bush beat Al Gore, then marched upward. Widening its own definition of money-grubbers, the budget says the top 10% of households "held" 70% of total wealth."

This kind of income inequality is anathema to those who see an equality of outcomes in society. Never mind, of course, that the top 1% of earners pay almost 40% of all Federal income taxes to begin with, and that from these earners come a huge percentage of the jobs that fuel the economy. Socialists like Piketty and Saez would prefer that everyone dumb down to a common denominator where so-called "winners" and "losers" were much closer together. They would prefer that everyone be mediocre rather than have a few big winners who raise the tide for everyone. And it is exactly the economic philosophy that Obama has now embraced. Massive wealth transfer as social policy.

And it matters not that it is bad economic policy, because fixing the economy is a poor second to the need to dumb America down. In Obama's own words:

"While middle-class families have been playing by the rules, living up to their responsibilities as neighbors and citizens, those at the commanding heights of our economy have not.

Prudent investments in education, clean energy, health care and infrastructure were sacrificed for huge tax cuts for the wealthy and well-connected.

There's nothing wrong with making money, but there is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few. . . . It's a legacy of irresponsibility, and it is our duty to change it."

So if you made a lot of money you somehow cheated -- not living up to your responsibilities, even though you paid your fair share of taxes in what is already a highly progressive tax code.

What a tremendously offensive statement.

This is class warfare pure and simple. Or, as Henninger says, "the primary goal is a massive re-flowing of "wealth" from the top toward the bottom, to stop the moral failure they see in the budget's "Top One Percent of Earners" chart.

And for those top earners -- the engine of our economy -- there will be blood.