Jay Reding.com

Ilya Sonin looks back on Boris Yeltsin. It’s easy to see Yeltsin as a buffoonish character, but he also was one of the people most responsible for keeping Russia from collapsing into utter anarchy following the fall of the Soviet regime. That is not a small feat by any means. The fall of the Soviet Union could have been an unmitigated disaster, but Yeltsin helped guide Russia on the right path towards democracy.

As Russia slides further and further into authoritarianism, Yeltsin’s period of reform and democracy may yet be seen as Russia’s all-too-brief golden age…

ABC News has run an article by a left-wing blogger defending Harry Reid’s comments on Iraq. It displays all the usual hallmarks of a left-wing blog screed, including the typically overheated and juvenile rhetoric, glaring flaws in logic, and crude partisanship. As is the custom, a thorough Fisking is in order:

Last week Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., caused a ruckus in Washington by saying that there is no military solution to the Iraq War. That it’s over and it’s time to get out.

“I believe myself that the secretary of state, the secretary of defense — and you have to make your own decision as to what the president knows — that this war is lost, and that the surge is not accomplishing anything, as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday,” Reid said…

What Reid said is 100 percent true, and he is not alone. For example, conservative columnist William F. Buckley is also on record saying that the war “has failed.” It’s no secret that Iraq has been torn apart and gutted as a result of the Unites States’ March 2003 invasion. The country is mired in civil war, and the violence worsens with each passing day. Let’s face it, Bush is not sending in an additional 20,000 troops because things are going well. Our soldiers are getting killed daily, the troops are forced to do longer tours of duty and our National Guardsmen are being sent back into battle before they even have a chance to unpack here at home. It’s a disgrace.

It’s war. Our soldiers are being asked to sacrifice a great deal, it is true. However, that’s what being a soldier is ultimately about. The way we honor those sacrifices is not to render them moot, but to give our troops what they need to win this conflict. That means more support, and the funds they need. The Democrats not only deny them those things, but denigrate their mission at the same time. That is the disgrace.

Bush and his war-mongering cronies took it upon themselves to invade a sovereign nation under the guise of (a) retaliating against Sept. 11; (b) protecting America and Britain from WMD “mushroom clouds;” and then (c) building a stable democracy in the Middle East. As we now all know, there were no WMD in Iraq, there was no connection to bin Laden and al Qaeda and true, sustainable democracy is but a fantasy. Failure, failure, failure. And the insurgents have been empowered and emboldened by this failure, not weakened. And Bush’s desperate “troop surge” is not going to make one bit of difference in changing Iraq’s military and political landscape.

We start out with the typical schoolyard rhetoric of the left-wing ranter. Grow up.

Nor are the facts right. We didn’t invade Iraq to “retaliate” against the September 11 attacks, we attacked to ensure that another would not follow. The world’s intelligence agencies were unanimous in their belief that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and the means to produce them. We had already been attacked with anthrax and the perpetrator of that attack remains unknown to this day. The idea that a nation like Iraq could attack the US with something similar and maintain plausible deniability was not an idea to be tossed aside lightly.

And once again, we get the less-than-subtle racism of the left. Apparently brown people just can’t have democracy — and it’s a fantasy to think it possible. Never mind the fact that Iraq has already had multiple democratic elections. It takes time to build a civil society, but the racist and bigoted assumption that the Iraqis are pathologically incapable of doing so is reprehensible.

The idea that somehow the “failures” of the past have emboldened the insurgency is also a non sequitor. One can make the argument that there have been plenty of US failures that emboldened terrorist in Iraq, but those aren’t any of them. This statement is more evidence of an individual whose mouth is on “rant” and whose brain is switched off.

The Republicans don’t like Reid and his assessment of the war. But too bad. This is not Reid’s mess. This military disaster belongs 100 percent to Bush and the Republican party. This is their war. If they don’t like it being called a failure, or that it is “lost,” then they should demonstrate its successes and spare us the incessant partisan rhetoric. Stop regurgitating all this BS about progress and success and show it to us.

Senator Reid voted for this war. It’s insulting that those who joined with the majority in approving this war now want to run away from it and pass the buck to others. The idea that the Democrats have no responsibility for this war is absolutely ridiculous. They voted for it. They supported it when it was politically popular, and now that the winds have shifted they’re trying to pin it on others. That kind of cowardice is unacceptable, and this argument is another piece of evidence showing why the left wing is pathological incapable of dealing with this war on a rational basis.

Bush and the Republicans, in their supreme arrogance, are choosing to ignore the will of the electorate, choosing to forget that a majority of Americans voted for a change in leadership last November and that the administration’s failed Iraq policy was the primary reason for this changing of the guard. Reid is doing what the American people asked him to do: exercising greater congressional oversight than when the GOP foxes were the ones guarding the henhouse. Bush and his Iraq War mob don’t get to run amok in Iraq, causing tens of thousands of deaths, and then expect a free pass here at home on the PR front.

A majority of Americans voted against an incompetent Republican Party. That much is true. But construing that as a vote for nothing short of abject surrender in Iraq is absolute hubris. The American people did want a change, but not a change that would see American interests subjugated to the Democrats petty politics. If withdrawal was so politically popular, why did the Democratic Party have to pass out billions in pork-barrel bribes to get it passed? The disconnect here is staggering.

What’s worse, saying those who are against the Bushies’ failed Iraq War are therefore against the troops, is a shameful, despicable political calculation. Sorry George, Reid and the Democrats just don’t believe that the way to support the troops is to send more of them to die in an unjust, miserable failure of a war that you and you alone created. Kudos to Reid for having the courage to stand up and say what needs to be said.

Instead we’ll hand over Iraq to al-Qaeda in Iran, piss on everything that our troops have died for, and ignore the bloodbath that results. Such cowardice is unpatriotic, and there’s no point in dancing around the point. When Harry Reid sounds virtually indistinguishable from Ayman al-Zawahiri or some other al-Qaeda propagandist, that should be a warning sign for the Democratic Party. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference.

This is not President Bush’s war. This is our war, and our losing it won’t just hurt the President, it will hurt the country. I see little sign that the Democrats either understand that point or care. In any event, it is shameful and unpatriotic. The fact that very few Democrats really seem to have any realistic plan for Iraq other than bugging out is an absolute shame. We can’t leave Iraq and pray all goes well — we know quite well that it will not. The question then becomes whether it’s better to do what good we can and hope that we can make enough progress for things to stabilize or whether we turn Iraq into a cesspool of violence and a petri dish for terrorism. Even though the risk is high, we cannot turn our backs on Iraq.

The Democratic Party wants to cut and run, not only from Iraq, but from their own responsibility for it. They should not be allowed to do so. We have a moral obligation to the people of Iraq to give them a fighting chance. We’ve changed strategies, and we’re getting some evidence that it has having an effect. The enemy knows our weaknesses, and they’re doing their utmost to exploit them. The fact that so many people are playing along just shows how little we know ourselves compared to how much al-Qaeda knows us.

Michael Barone takes a look at the Democratic divide over funding the troops in Iraq. Politically, they’re in a quagmire of their own making over this issue. The increasingly vociferous anti-war caucus in the Democratic Party wants the funding cut and an immediate unilateral withdrawal — something that even many Democrats know would be incredibly dangerous for the security of the region. However, with the Majority Leader of the Senate waving the white flag and calling the war “lost” it’s going to be that much harder for the Democrats to do anything but cut funding. If the Democrats really believe that Iraq is utterly unwinnable, they cannot responsibly keep our troops there under any timetable. The anti-war radicals have the most consistent position (if consistently wrong) — if Iraq truly is lost, then there is absolutely no point to keeping US forces in Iraq.

Doug Shoen of the Boston Globe they see the subtle signs of progress that the rest of us never see. The “surge” has produced results, and while the enemy is doing what they can to sow death in Baghdad, their stream of bombings are only one element of the story. It’s relatively easy to hit largely undefended civilian targets with car bombs in a nation that’s awash with munitions of every conceivable kind. It’s much harder to reverse the progress of an entire nation. The surge isn’t just over halfway in place. The enemy knows that Congress is deliberating on troop funding, which is why they’re ratcheting up the violence as much as they possibly can.

That is precisely the trap the Democrats are running into. For someone who isn’t a Democratic partisan, it doesn’t look very seemly that the Democrats seem to be doing exactly what the terrorists in Iraq want us to do. The fact that the position of Harry Reid and Ayman al-Zawahiri on Iraq are now identical doesn’t exactly make the Democrats look good. The constant stream of negativity and the open defeatism of the Democrats rub against the American spirit. There have been hundreds of thousands of American soldiers who have been deployed to Iraq. The vast majority of them support the mission and hate the way in which the Democrats and the mainstream media have portrayed this war.

That defeatism will not be free from political price. The Democratic Congress has approval ratings lower than even the President’s, yet they see themselves as having a mandate from the American people to end the war in Iraq by whatever means. However, they’re wrong on that count. The American people have tired of the war, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean that they want to see Congress start waving the white flag either. A unilateral withdrawal from Iraq will leave genocide in its wake on a scale never seen in the region. The Middle East will be destabilized for decades to come, and a regional nuclear arms race is a virtual surety. Yet the Democrats are deliberately blinding themselves to anything but the short-term consequences of their actions. Their sights are firmly focused on 2008 and nothing but.

That kind of short-sighted hubris is contemptible. The Democratic leadership finds themselves in the position of either having to put their money where their mouths are and cutting the funds or continuing a war they’ve already surrendered. Either they incur the wrath of the anti-war left and continue the funding, or they become the party that is saddled with the consequences of an ignominious American defeat. They’ve been trying to walk the line for months now, but their time is running out.

This is a quagmire of their own making. If they’d kept on talking about how they needed to change strategy in Iraq, they would be on top of this issue. If they’d taken credit for Bush getting rid of Rumsfeld, cracking down in al-Maliki’s government, and starting the “surge” they could have completed the GOP crack-up on national security. They could have credibly taken credit for every change that was made in the wake of the 2006 elections. But they chose to side with the anti-war partisans who now control the Democratic political machine. Now, they’re being pushed towards a course of action that will lead to a defeat in the war on terrorism. (A term they now apparently reject.) The consequences of that choice will have disastrous effects on this country for years to come.

A party with political courage and a true sense of patriotism would not have put this country in such a position. Even if one accepts that this war has been incompetently run, the Democrats have been no more competent than the Bush Administration, and are now outright advocating the same thing as the enemy. What is the substantive difference between Harry Reid and Ayman al-Zawahiri on Iraq? Both argue that the war in Iraq is lost. Both argue that the United States can find no military solution to the region’s problems. Both argue that the only way for America to win is to try to “talk” to the people who have sworn its destruction. The fact that the rhetoric from the Democrats might as well be the same thing echoing from al-Jazeera should give the Democrats pause. Their war is between themselves and the Republican Party, not between a united America and the barbarians who threaten to destroy it. Their war has produced collateral damage that threatens to ensure our enemies emerge victorious — and the fact that they seem completely unwilling to engage with those realities suggests that they remain fundamentally unfit to lead.

James Q. Wilson has an excellent piece in The Los Angeles Times on why more gun control laws isn’t the answer to atrocities such as the Virginia Tech massacre. The reality is that a disturbed individual can always find a weapon, either legally or illegally. The effects of gun prohibition fall only on those who decide to own guns in a lawful manner — it won’t dissuade unlawful gun owners from having or using guns.

The effects of gun prohibition in places like Britain hasn’t decreased gun violence — rather it has reduced the opportunity costs for violent criminals who know that they can prey on a disarmed populace. I’m skeptical whether things like concealed carry laws have more than a negligible impact in reducing crime, but they don’t hurt either. They would work better if every responsible adult had a weapon and knew how to use it in a responsible manner — but even with “shall-issue” laws only a fraction of the populace will ever carry a weapon. It may be enough to provide some herd immunity from violence, but not enough to make a dent in crime.

Horrors like what transpired at Virginia Tech this week are difficult to understand, and it’s easy to search for easy answers. However, there aren’t easy answers to atrocities like these, and thinking that merely banning guns would fix the problem is shifting the blame away from the perpetrators of violent crime and towards inanimate objects that are merely the instruments of an individual’s homicidal tendencies. If we are to prevent horrendous acts of violence like this, we have to look deeper than mere instrumentalities and understand why the systems that are supposed to protect the public from such violence failed.

While I have many policy disagreements with John McCain, it certainly can’t be said that he isn’t one of America’s most forthright politicians. His response to the tizzy over his “Bomb Iran” song is a welcome breath of fresh air from a political class that constantly tries and bend over backwards to political correctness. Instead of playing the usual game of feigned apologia he tells his critics to “get a life.”

There’s something refreshingly atavistic about Sen. McCain, and his reputation as a straight-talking maverick is a well-deserved one. While his positions of campaign finance reform make it difficult for conservatives to support him (among other issues), it’s not surprising that McCain is picking up some support. His willingness to take political risks and stand on principle is sorely lacking in the rest of America’s political class these days.

“A right to tax, without limit or control, is essentially a power to destroy.”
- Chief Justice John Marshall, McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316, 391 (1819)

Matt Stoller has an ode to the joys of paying taxes at MyDD that seems to accurately describe how the left feels about taxes these days. To Stoller, taxes are as American as Mom, apple pie, and the flag:

Our tax code is the DNA of our nation’s moral compass. I am proud to pay taxes because I take pride in America, and paying some tiny burden to keep our society running is an extremely small price to pay for being able to call myself an American citizen. The old expression ‘you get what you pay for’ is apt for all sorts of situations. People tend to express what they value in how much they are willing to pay for it. I am willing and feel privileged for the right to pay for my country. The right-wing is embittered to do so, if they do so at all. And that, more than anything, says something about how much they value this experiment called America.

Of course, it’s somewhat ironic to be saying that taxation is the “DNA of our nation’s moral compass.” For one, it’s one of the ugliest mixed metaphors I’ve ever read. Secondly, America was founded on a rejection of confiscatory taxation. The Founders of this country recognized that the power of the state and the rights of the individual are at odds — they certainly didn’t have the view that what makes America great was our tax code — in fact, when this nation was founded there was no such thing as an income tax. It’s rather difficult to argue that the 16th Amendment, which wasn’t passed until well after the founding of this nation, is responsible for America’s greatness.

That’s where the left gets it utterly wrong. The Founders had a very jaundiced view of government — it’s why we have a Constitution of enumerated powers, a Bill of Rights, and a tradition of limiting the power of the state. Such features were designed expressly to maximize the ability of the individual to succeed in life. In fact, Jefferson’s first drafts of the Declaration of Independence didn’t talk about the “pursuit of happiness” but borrowed directly from Locke and spoke of “life, liberty, and property.” The idea that our national greatness derives from our government rather than from the people would be deeply alien to the Founders. It goes against our real national DNA — which can be read in the texts of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and our other founding documents.

The greatness of our country comes not from the power of the state — if that’s the measure of greatness than the US should be at the bottom of the heap and nations like North Korea should be ruling the world. Yet we have one of the the oldest continually-running democracies on the globe. Our economic power is unmatched, and when there’s a genocide in Europe it’s our military that does most of the heavy lifting. The reality is that this nation is, by objective standards, the greatest on the planet, and that isn’t because we have an intrusive and bothersome state, but because for the most part our government stays out of the way.

Our Founding Fathers weren’t happy to turn over their fortunes to the state because they knew that controlling the economic destiny of individuals is no less onerous than trying to control our political destinies. The idea that we should happily pay taxes — no matter how onerous they are — isn’t an affirmation of American citizenship, but a rejection of what the Founders made clear when they broke free of England. The deliberately bequeathed to us a system of government of separated powers, federalism, and individual rights. The modern left does not seem to understand why they did that, and seems to reject that essential vision.

Our abiding respect for the rights of the individual is what makes America great. Go to the DMV or the welfare office and ask yourself, “is this what makes this country what it is?” Then go visit a church, a synagogue, a charity, or any of the other ad hoc community associations that have little if anything to do with the state but make up the best part of America. It is those small, personal, and responsible organizations that provide much of America’s greatness. At the end of the day, putting one’s faith in the large, the impersonal, and the bureaucratic is a fool’s errand. Federal government, by its very nature, will always be large, inefficient, and impersonal. That’s why the Founders limited its scope to only those powers enumerated in the Constitution. We can make government as small, as efficient, and as personal as possible, but it will never be able to replace the elements of civil society that make democracy work. Those who have tried have lost both civil society and democracy.

If one honestly believes that taxes are the reason that America is great, then you haven’t listened to what the Founders have said. Governments do not make nations great, but are only reflections of the people. When the size and scope of government serves to stifle the power of the individual to shape their lives, then democracy withers and dies. The left may have the best intentions, they may wrap themselves in the mantle of patriotism, but ultimately their policies and their voracious appetite for government revenue is a betrayal of the values that this country was founded upon.

The United States Supreme Court has upheld a federal ban on partial-birth abortions. I believe that Orin Kerr is correct in stating that this decision was based on very narrow grounds. The Court’s 5-4 opinion does not disturb the precedents of either Roe or Casey, nor does it preclude a later as-applied challenge to the Act.

Still, this is a rather significant change for the Court and shows the impact of the recent vacancies on the Court and the judicial inclinations of the men who have recently been appointed. This decision would have likely gone the other way had Justice O’Connor been on the Court, and the impact of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito being added to the court will be seen as other contentious issues come before the Court.

It is also interesting to note the concurrence of Justice Thomas and Justice Scalia — while the issue of the Commerce Clause was not an issue for litigation in this case, it appears that both of them are willing to more readily accept Commerce Clause challenges to laws such as this. That could have a great impact if they can get other members of the Court to follow suit — however, given that Justice Scalia hasn’t been perfectly consistent on Commerce Clause issues (see Raich

) it remains to be seen whether this is a portent of more strict Commerce Clause review/

This is a win for opponents of abortion, even if it is a somewhat narrow one. It doesn’t do what ultimately needs to be done — reject the Roe and Casey line of cases which are examples of massive judicial overreach — but at least it gives a good start towards the reigning in of abortion in the United States.