Category: Idiotarianism

Biden’s Servile Foreign Policy

Sen. Joe Biden (in an response to Sen. Lieberman’s must-read piece on Democrats and the war) writes on his critique of America’s post-9/11 foreign policy. His arguments are reasonable, but the problem is that the world he describes has little to do with the world in which we all actually live. For example:

At the heart of this failure is an obsession with the “war on terrorism” that ignores larger forces shaping the world: the emergence of China, India, Russia and Europe; the spread of lethal weapons and dangerous diseases; uncertain supplies of energy, food and water; the persistence of poverty; ethnic animosities and state failures; a rapidly warming planet; the challenge to nation states from above and below.

Instead, Mr. Bush has turned a small number of radical groups that hate America into a 10-foot tall existential monster that dictates every move we make.

The problem with Biden’s analysis is that all those problems are being dealt with: the Bush Administration has been the most progressive administration in this century in terms of Africa policy. We were the first on the scene for the Indonesian tsunami. We’ve been in the lead on trying to get aid into Burma. The list could go on.

What Biden is trying to do is downplay the reality that terrorism is the central problem we face. Terrorism is one of the factors making our energy supply uncertain, it perpetuates poverty in places like Iraq, and it feeds of failed states. That doesn’t mean that terrorism is the sole problem, but it is the most significant, and a focus on terrorism is by necessity a focus on doing things like preventing failed states.

Al-Qaeda wasn’t turned into a monster by President Bush. They launched the first significant attack on continental America since 1812. They massively destabilized our economy and our way of life. And they would just love to do so again. The confluence of terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction is the greatest foreign policy threat we face—not the phantom menace of “a rapidly warming planet.”

And what would Sen. Biden do? The same policies that failed the Carter Administration:

Last week, John McCain was very clear. He ruled out talking to Iran. He said that Barack Obama was “naïve and inexperienced” for advocating engagement; “What is it he wants to talk about?” he asked.

Well, for a start, Iran’s nuclear program, its support for Shiite militias in Iraq, and its patronage of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

And exactly what leverage to we have to get Iran to change, Senator? Exactly what would talking achieve. Does anyone believe that Ahmadinejad or Khameini is going to agree to a deal in which Iran stops developing nuclear weapons? Are they going to stop spreading their influence because we ask nice?

That is the central, failed conceit of current Democratic foreign policy: it is hopelessly naïve. The Iranians cannot be negotiated out of supporting Hamas and Hizb’Allah. Why should they stop, unless we have a credible threat of force to back us up. Should a President Obama go to Tehran, does anyone really think that the mullahs would give a damn about what he said? They would have no reason to—they know damned well that he would never use force against them, so why would they bother to hold themselves to their own promises?

We tried this approach with North Korea. It didn’t work there, it’s still not working, and it won’t work with Tehran. At best, talking delays the inevitable. Teddy Roosevelt said we should talk softly and carry a big stick. The Democrats want us to go into Tehran, but they also want us to put away the stick.

Beyond bluster, how would Mr. McCain actually deal with these dangers? You either talk, you maintain the status quo, or you go to war. If Mr. McCain has ruled out talking, we’re stuck with an ineffectual policy or military strikes that could quickly spiral out of control.

Except talking doesn’t work. We may not have any choice but to go to war, but we’re not at that point yet. Sen. Biden misses another option: making the costs involved in challenging us too high to countenance.

We need a Machiavellian foreign policy, and the Democrats want us to act like Barney the Dinosaur and pretend that we’re all friends. You want to make Tehran not develop nuclear weapons? You make sure that the costs of doing so are high. We defeated the Soviet Union not through talks, but by making it very clear to the Soviets that if talking failed, we were perfectly willing to wipe them off the face of the globe.

Biden’s arguments on Iran don’t get any better:

It also requires a much more sophisticated understanding than Mr. Bush or Mr. McCain seem to possess that by publicly engaging Iran – including through direct talks – we can exploit cracks within the ruling elite, and between Iran’s rulers and its people, who are struggling economically and stifled politically.

Iran’s people need to know that their government, not the U.S., is choosing confrontation over cooperation. Our allies and partners need to know that the U.S. will go the extra diplomatic mile – if we do, they are much more likely to stand with us if diplomacy fails and force proves necessary.

The Bush-McCain saber rattling is the most self-defeating policy imaginable. It achieves nothing. But it forces Iranians who despise the regime to rally behind their leaders. And it spurs instability in the Middle East, which adds to the price of oil, with the proceeds going right from American wallets into Tehran’s pockets.

What is the alternative? It’s clear that talking is not going to help. The world community is not going to turn against Iran. Russia will not. China will not. Even Europe would balk.

A foreign policy based on meaningless words back with no credible threat of force is a foreign policy damned to fail—just as it did when Jimmy Carter did it. Under his watch, the Iranian regime was founded. We cannot afford such a disaster again.

We have to deal with Iran, but pretending that talk will solve anything is futile. Iran, like the rest of the Middle East, respects strength and laughs at the weak. The Democrats continue to advocate for a foreign policy of weakness in which a servile United States goes to our enemies and begs them to play nice.

Americans don’t beg, we lead from strength. That is how Reagan led this country to the end of the Cold War and how a President McCain will help lead this country to an end to the War on Islamic Terrorism.

This Person Is The World’s Biggest Hack

The answer to this Jeopardy-style question can be found here. It seems as though Keith Olbermann, who is the liberal version of Stephen Colbert minus any intentional parody went on a little rant about the Obama passport data flap—accusing the Bush Administration of deliberately spying on Obama.

Of course, as we now know, all three candidates had their data looked at and there’s no evidence of anything more than three State Department employees letting their curiosity get the better of their judgment. But that didn’t stop Keith Olbermann from bolding jumping to conclusions.

Olbermann is a hack—and that’s probably a smear on professional hacks. Countdown is the sort of show that only a liberal activist could create—it’s like the liberals took their view of what a Fox News show is and flipped the ideological polarity. How people can stand Olbermann’s preening ego is beyond me—he makes Bill O’Reilly seem like wilting violet in comparison. When it comes from O’Reilly, it’s bad enough, but O’Reilly at least has something resembling a sense of humor. Olbermann’s prodding self-importance makes him almost unwatchable.

Of course, there are enough people watching for MSNBC to fritter away the shreds of their journalistic credibility—which is yet another reason why the cable news networks are less about news and more about appealing to the lowest common denominator.

Failing To Learn From History… Correctly

Mitch Berg takes a rhetorical baseball bat to a Star-Tribune op-ed calling for a new New Deal. Columnist Bob MacLean thinks that the US badly needs a make-work program to “rebuild infrastructure”—a theory which Berg manages to tear apart with aplomb. The columnist suggests the following:

Let’s use the $150 billion currently proposed for rebates and corporate welfare to instead fund an 18-month infrastructure and government-efficiency initiative. This initiative — call it IGE — would be a contemporary version of the indisputably successful WPA program launched in 1935 by presidential order to cure economic depression.

First of all, the idea that the WPA was “indisputably successful” is wrong—in fact, there’s been a significant amount of economic research supporting the contention that the New Deal in fact made the Great Depression worse by preventing the normal market mechanisms from restoring normal employment. In fact, throughout the Depression and the height of the New Deal, unemployment remained incredibly high. For those who could get jobs, wages were propped artificially but that came at the expense of wider employment—the lowest the unemployment rate ever got during the New Deal period was around 14%, and in fact unemployment peaked again in the late 1930s despite all of Roosevelt’s programs. What truly ended the Great Depression was not the New Deal but the outbreak of World War II.

Even if we ignore the data and take the popular view, MacLean’s argument still doesn’t make much sense. Berg points out the obvious: do we really want unemployed mortgage brokers and software engineers either doing engineering inspections or digging ditches? Either you’re taking skilled labor and making it do unskilled work or taking skilled labor and putting it into a position where all those skills are wasted. It makes absolutely no sense, and it’s why such programs are completely worthless as an economic stimulus. How do you advance an economy by taking skilled labor and turning it into unskilled labor? The short answer is you don’t. Digging ditches does not prepare a worker for competing in the 21st Century.

Then there’s the fact that this is an 18 month program. If the real purpose is to reduce unemployment over the long term, then what’s the point? You’ve taken people with marketable skills and taken them out of the skilled labor pool for 18 months, putting them even further behind. The fatal flaw in this theory is the completely ridiculous assumption that the amount of productive work in digging ditches for 18 months is greater than the amount of productive work that people could get in the free market. That’s not a very intelligent argument, and it belies the kind of economic illiteracy seen frequently from the left.

If the goal was really to reduce unemployment, there’s a case to be made for funding worker retraining programs to increase the pool of skilled workers. If the goal is to increase domestic employment in unskilled or semi-skilled labor, the quickest way to do that is to start enforcing immigration laws—the effects of that alone would be a dramatic increase in the number of open jobs.

Instead, this is an example of trying to return America to the days when Fabian socialism was an active part of American politics—which is why we constantly hear the drumbeat of economic despair from the left. If there’s a crisis, then their radical ideas can have more of a purchase. When things are looking up, there’s less of a need for radical government intervention. Ironically, the party that once said “we have nothing to fear but fear itself” now has an economic position that requires scaring the American people into accepting radical policies.

Doing What They Do Best

David Weigel notes how the anti-war left is “moving on” after failing to “stop the war”:

If you’d said in January 2007 that Congress would fully fund the Iraq War, that there would be no timelines, and that a pro-war group fronted by Ari Fleischer would humiliate MoveOn… well, you’d be smarter than me.

It’s interesting to see that the surrender caucus has basically surrendered themselves. All the talk about how they were going to “end the war” ended up hitting the brick wall of reality. The Democrats didn’t have the votes, and the idea that there was a massive groundswell of opposition to the war never materialized. The reason behind that is rather simple: this war doesn’t effect most of us. This is not Vietnam. There’s no draft, the people fighting in Iraq are people who signed up to be in the military, not conscripts. Iraq is a theoretical issue for 90% of this country. They may not like the war, but it’s not something that directly effects them.

The other problem is that the anti-war left overplayed its hand. They immediately pronounced the surge to be a failure: which left them looking like idiots when the surge actually worked. To use a poker metaphor, the Democrats went all in thinking that they had a good hand—but when the flop actually came down, they ended up losing. Now the Democrats are in the unnecessary position of having to backtrack on their own rhetoric. It just proves the point that many of us have been making for years now: the Democratic Party is invested in failure in Iraq, and victory in Iraq is a loss for them. At some level, that comes down as unseemly, even for those who oppose the war.

I don’t think Iraq will be a major political issue. Al-Qaeda is unable to mount a convincing counteroffensive. Each day they wait they lose more, so if they had the capability of punching back it seems likely they’d have done it by now. Unless there’s a mass-casualty event, the American people have accepted Iraq as part of life. It doesn’t effect them, and it doesn’t fire people up who aren’t already anti-war.

That won’t stop the Democrats from using Iraq as a campaign issue, and Democrats respond strongly to it. However, it’s not the major issue that it was in 2004 and 2006 (and it wasn’t even the key issue in 2006). The Democrats bought into their own rhetoric: they assumed they won because of a groundswell of opposition to the war rather than the lack of leadership among the Republicans. They overplayed their hand, and now they’ve been forced to surrendering on surrender.

Invested In Failure

The Washington Post has a pointed op-ed asking why the Democrats cannot acknowledge that the “surge” actually worked:

A reasonable response to these facts might involve an acknowledgment of the remarkable military progress, coupled with a reminder that the final goal of the surge set out by President Bush — political accords among Iraq’s competing factions — has not been reached. (That happens to be our reaction to a campaign that we greeted with skepticism a year ago.) It also would involve a willingness by the candidates to reconsider their long-standing plans to carry out a rapid withdrawal of remaining U.S. forces in Iraq as soon as they become president — a step that would almost certainly reverse the progress that has been made.

What Ms. Clinton, Mr. Obama, John Edwards and Bill Richardson instead offered was an exclusive focus on the Iraqi political failures — coupled with a blizzard of assertions about the war that were at best unfounded and in several cases simply false. Mr. Obama led the way, claiming that Sunni tribes in Anbar province joined forces with U.S. troops against al-Qaeda in response to the Democratic victory in the 2006 elections — a far-fetched assertion for which he offered no evidence.

It’s simple: the Democrats cannot countenance the idea that Iraq is not failing, and that the surge worked. Just one year ago they were all saying that there was no end to the violence in Iraq. Now they have to face up to the fact that nearly every single dire prediction they made was false. None of them have the intellectual courage to admit that they were wrong. To do so would irretrievably endanger support from the vociferously anti-war base of the Democratic Party today.

As typical, political rhetoric and political reality are on opposite ends. The surge worked because it involved a significant change of tactics, using the successful model of Tal Afar on a national scale. The goal of the surge was never to make Iraq into another Switzerland. It’s hypocritical of the Democrats to simultaneously argue that it’s impossible to create democratic reforms through military force, then argue that the only way that the surge can be successful is to do exactly that. The purpose of the surge was always singular: to end Iraq’s spiral into anarchy and create the conditions upon which democratic development can occur. It’s up to the Iraqi people to take the next steps, and it will take some time before that happens. In the meantime, the level of violence has dropped precipitously and the qualitative measures of life in Iraq are becoming better than they were before the war—for example, electricity production is above where it was when Saddam was in power.

The Democrats don’t want to acknowledge these facts because they’re still wedded to a political narrative of defeat. For all their talk about being “agents of change” the Democrats apparently can’t drift too far from their political script on Iraq even when it makes them look desperately out of touch.

Not-So-Great Moments In Pandering

Reason finds a wonderful Christmas tale of how a 7-year-old girl got the best of Mike Huckabee:

“Who is your favorite author?” Aleya Deatsch, 7, of West Des Moines asked Mr. Huckabee in one of those posing-like-a-shopping-mall-Santa moments.

Mr. Huckabee paused, then said his favorite author was Dr. Seuss.

In an interview afterward with the news media, Aleya said she was somewhat surprised. She thought the candidate would be reading at a higher level.

“My favorite author is C. S. Lewis,” she said.

Ouch. Just ouch.

Reopening Old Wounds

Wading through the fever swamp of The Daily Kos provides yet another reminder of the general intellectual vacancy of the left these days:

On this day in 1998, in a sickening display of partisanship, the House of Representatives approved two articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton for consensual sex obstruction of justice and perjury.

The next time a corporate CEO is brought up on charges of sexually harassing a subordinate, I’d love for them to try to use the “it was consensual!” defense. I’m sure that would excuse such behavior. It’s ironic that a party that’s supposed to represent the interest of feminists is so quick to dismiss someone misusing the highest position of power in the country to avail oneself of a naïve 21-year-old intern. And by ironic, I mean reprehensible.

Not to mention that Clinton was hardly innocent—he was disbarred in Arkansas and had to step down from the Supreme Court bar before they disbarred him as well. It’s one thing to make the reasonable argument that lying in a civil deposition doesn’t justify the impeachment of a President. It’s a thin reed to hang on, but it’s something. The argument that it was “just about sex” was always a trope, and those who use it demonstrate once again that for some, partisanship eclipses all reason.

Please, commemorate this anniversary of an impeachment that should not have occurred by supporting one that is long overdue: Please sign Rep. Wexler’s petition to hold impeachment hearings on Dick Cheney.

Yes, because politicized impeachments are terrible things! So we need more of them!

The magnitude of the idiocy is astounding.

Part of me would love to see Rep. Wexler’s impeachment pipe-dream come to pass. I’d love to see the Democrats try to further politicize matters of national security, justify their own idiotic claims that Bush “lied” about something that everyone else in the world believed in, and generally make fools of themselves in an election year. Especially given that under the Constitution, Cheney would preside at his own trial.

Of course, the simple truth of the matter is this: there will never be an impeachment. Rep. Wexler and the rest of the Congressional Clown Caucus are playing Lucy to the raving left’s Charlie Brown. They’ll keep dangling that football out them to get the raving partisans fired up, but they’ll always pull it away at the last second. Why? Because they know there’s no case there, and if they actually had to defend their political rantings in an impeachment trial they’d end up looking like fools. The radical left is being played, and they’re still too mired in their own petty hatred to see it.

Not to rehash the battles of the past, but it does serve as a reminder of just how much Kool-Aid the left continues to quaff in this country.

UPDATE: Not to mention their ghoulish attempts to use those who died in Iraq as political puppets. I’d ask if they had any shame, but after all these years we all know the answer.

Jim Crow This Isn’t…

Mitch Berg notes Rep. Keith Ellison’s support for an anti-voter ID bill. As usual, there’s the comparisons to requiring a voter ID to “poll taxes” and the like. Such comparisons are an insult to people’s intelligence. So long as voter ID requirements are uniformly enforced there’s absolutely no reason why such rules should not be in place. You have to have an ID to drive, to get on a plane, and to do many other common tasks. There’s no reason to not have photo IDs for voter registration.

Opposition to voter ID laws are less about principle than they are about politics: by keeping voting requirements lax it’s a lot easier to pull electoral shenanigans. Pulling the race card is just a way of polarizing the debate even more. The fact that Rep. Ellison would support such an odious and unsupportable contention demonstrates his lack of personal character and his willingness to take the party line even when he should no better.