Category: Obama Administration

Obama On Iraq: Setting The Record Straight

Tonight, President Obama will speak to the nation about the end of combat operations in Iraq. I’ll be liveblogging the speech here. I’ll be using a new system for liveblogging — as I liveblog the speech, you’ll be able to follow along without the need to reload the page. I’ll also be sending out liveblog updates through my Twitter feed.

Setting the Record Straight

An Iraqi woman raises a purple finger after voting for the first time in a free Iraqi election.

But first, it’s important to set the record straight. We would not be able to be removing our combat troops from Iraq had we not successfully quelled the sectarian violence in Iraq. In short, without the surge back in 2007, Iraq would not be nearly as stable as it is now. The surge worked. It reduced sectarian violence.

Because the U.S. worked with Sunni leaders, Iraqi Sunnis helped us remove al-Qaeda in Iraq. This lead to the death of al-Qaeda leaders like Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi and more recently Abu Omar al-Baghdadi. While there are still al-Qaeda affiliated splinter groups in Iraq, they are nowhere near as powerful as they were in 2007.

Because the threat of al-Qaeda in Iraq was eliminated, the radical Shi’ite groups lost support. Iranian-backed radicals like Moqtada al-Sadr couldn’t use the fear of al-Qaeda to win over Iraqi Shi’ites. Instead of leading a Shi’ite civil war, Moqtada al-Sadr ended up being discredited. His band of thugs, the Mahdi Army, are no longer a major threat to the future of Iraq. Al-Sadr himself was forced to flee to Iran out of fear.

All of this was due to the surge—not just the fact that we added more troops, but we used better tactics to protect the Iraqi people and improve their security and their living conditions.

There are two reasons why Iraq never flew into civil war in 2007: the bravery of the Iraqi people and the bravery of the U.S. and coalition troops.

The Real Obama Record On Iraq

Notably absent from these reasons in President Obama. His record on Iraq is a record of being fundamentally wrong from the beginning. Then-Senator Obama was an ardent opponent of the surge from the very beginning. He is on record as saying that not only would the surge not work, but the added troops would have increased tensions in Iraq.

As a candidate, Obama strongly opposed the surge throughout 2007 and into the 2008 campaign. His position was that the U.S. should begin immediately removing troops from Iraq. Had President Bush listened to Obama then, there would have been a power vacuum in Iraq that would have turned the country into another Somalia.

In fact, Obama had said that even after it was clear that the surge was working, he still would have opposed it.

But Obama has subsequently changed his tune. He tried to scrub his prior criticisms of the surge from his campaign web page. And it would be only a few years after Obama ripped the concept of the surge to shreds that he would endorse the very same policy—but that time applying it to Afghanistan. President Obama may have opposed the surge when he was a candidate, but now he seeks the credit.

He deserves little credit. He can’t say that he fulfilled any campaign promise to withdraw from Iraq: in fact the timetable for US withdrawal was set before Obama took office. It was the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that set the withdrawal date, not President Obama. Regardless of who had won in 2008, the situation would be the same. It was the surge that allowed the U.S. to draw down its forces in Iraq without creating a dangerous power vacuum that would have destabilized the entire region.

Now, if President Obama gives full credit to the troops without politicizing the issue, he’ll have set the right tone. But Obama’s statements must be set against Obama’s record on the war. He was wrong on the surge. The surge worked. The security of the Iraqi people was a necessary precondition to any political rapprochement. Obama’s preference for a “diplomatic surge” would never have worked.

No matter what Obama says tonight, the real heroes in this conflict and the American, coalition, and Iraqi soldiers, police, and security forces that put their lives on the line day in and day out to secure a better future for Iraq. If the President acknowledges this, he deserves credit. But if he tries to spin Iraq into a political victory for himself, it will backfire on him. This isn’t Obama’s victory, this is a victory for Iraq. We should never let the President forget that.

A Tortured Sense Of Priorites

In the Financial Times, Clive Crook wonders why President Obama is so keen on going after the Bush Administration on the “torture” issue:

Common sense may tell you waterboarding is torture, but the law is less clear-cut. Congress should make waterboarding a crime, for the reasons I have stated, and it has had many chances before and since 9/11 to do so. The fact is, it has chosen not to. Some of those in Congress now calling for prosecutions, including Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House, were briefed about these methods in the panic-stricken aftermath of 9/11 and offered no objection.

Politically, what Obama is doing is pandering to the MoveOn.org left. Obama’s pragmatism is running against the blood lust on the left to get back at the Bush Administration any way they can. The left wants a kangaroo court to put on a nice show trial, then send the objects of their unbridled hatred to jail—or worse. The irrational hatred of the Bush Administration has not gone away with the left, even though the Bush Administration is gone.

Substantively, Obama is being foolish. For one, the idea that there was some kind of torture “regime” with tentacles spreading from GTMO to Abu Ghraib would never stand up to serious scrutiny, because their was no such regime. Prosecuting the Bush Administration for acts like waterboarding would be a blatantly unconstitutional ex post facto prosecution, as Congress had the opportunity to make the practices illegal but did not do so. Moreover, the majority of Americans don’t feel a great deal of outrage over waterboarding someone like Khalid Sheikh Mohammad—especially since there is likely strong, if not incontrovertible, evidence that doing so saved many American lives. In a country where a show like 24 is popular, the idea that people are going to give much care to the “civil rights” of one of the masterminds of the September 11 atrocity is not a very good bet.

Congress should not be so quick to want either prosecutions or a “Truth Commission”—Congressional leaders knew exactly what was being done, and they signed off on it. Speaker Pelosi knew what was being done, and said nothing. The outrage from Congress is nothing less than pure hypocrisy and political payback.

In the end, this is about politics and nothing but. Obama had taken a reasonable and pragmatic response to this issue. Now, the radical left is pushing him further and further towards a politically unsustainable course. Playing politics with national security does not play well outside of the Beltway, especially when this country faces very real and much more immediate crises. Obama should, to borrow a term, move on. What was done in the aftermath of September 11 was done to protect this country and was approved be the same members of Congress who now want to seek a kangaroo court to prosecute crimes they failed to make crimes when they had the chance. Obama has exercised his prerogative to prevent it from happening again under his watch. If the left wants to regard those actions with shame, let them. But this country deserves better than to have do deal with a political circus when there is work to be done. The Democrats will have to lead rather than try to enact their partisan vengeance, and Obama should make it clear that his concern is on the future rather than the past. Let history pass judgment, not partisans.

Some People Just Don’t Get It

Bill Maher flaunts his ignorance once again over the issue of the Tea Party protests. Like many who live in a comfortable cocoon of left-wing orthodoxy, Maher fails to understand that the reaction to the Obama Administration is about matters of substance. Maher rants:

t’s been a week now, and I still don’t know what those “tea bag” protests were about. I saw signs protesting abortion, illegal immigrants, the bank bailout and that gay guy who’s going to win “American Idol.” But it wasn’t tax day that made them crazy; it was election day. Because that’s when Republicans became what they fear most: a minority.

The conservative base is absolutely apoplectic because, because … well, nobody knows. They’re mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore. Even though they’re not quite sure what “it” is. But they know they’re fed up with “it,” and that “it” has got to stop.

Here are the big issues for normal people: the war, the economy, the environment, mending fences with our enemies and allies, and the rule of law.

Mr. Maher, here is what “it” is, in a way that even you can understand:

obamadebt.jpg

This is what President Obama is doing to this country. Former President Bush was fiscally irresponsible enough, but what Obama is doing is sheer madness. Trying to use government to fix the economy will not work. The bailouts are failing. The housing market is still in the toilet. Lenders are still holding back. If that isn’t a reason to be worried about the future, then it is time to pull your head out of the sand and look at the numbers.

When it was politically convenient, liberals pretended to care about the effect of massive deficits on the future of America. Now that Obama is in office, who cares about a few trillion here or there?

The Tea Party movement is not a partisan movement. There is great anger at the GOP for not leading on the issues of our time and allowing government to grow out of control during their tenure in office. This is a protest based on principles: in fact, it is a protest based on the classically republican principles that the United States should have a limited federal government of enumerated powers.

Maher, like many, think that just because Obama won an election, that means his policies are 1) popular and 2) right for the country. Neither are true. Winning an election doesn’t vindicate your policy prescriptions now any more than it did in 2004. Obama’s ham-handed handling of the economy, his Quixotic campaign against the Bush Administration on torture, and his constant prostrations before America’s enemies from Iran to Venezuela all demonstrate how radical he truly is. His popularity is being supported by a fawning media and a public that is hardly paying attention. Obama’s gotten the same honeymoon that most new Presidents get. But in time, his star will fade, as all Presidents do.

When that happens, the arrogance of Mr. Maher may come back to bite him. Politics in America is cyclical, and given the radical course that President Obama has set for this country, it may well be the Tea Parties that get the last laugh.

The United Socialist States Of America

The United States of America is now a de facto socialist nation.

That may seem like hyperbole, but there’s more than enough evidence to suggest that it’s true. Look at the definition of socialism from that font of all knowledge: Wikipedia:

Socialism refers to a broad set of economic theories of social organization advocating public or state ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods, and a society characterized by equality for all individuals, with a fair or egalitarian method of compensation.

Let’s assume that definition is roughly accurate. Does the U.S. fall under that definition?

Well, we now have a system in which the government has a controlling interest in several major sectors of the U.S. economy. Whether the banking system is officially nationalized or not is largely irrelevant—it has already been de facto nationalized. The U.S. government now has effective control over all of AIGs operations, right up to the the amount that it may pay its workers. At least for a huge swath of the financial sector, the government has effective control.

Now, President Obama has set his sights on the auto industry, essentially firing GM’s president. The fact that the President just ordered an official of a private company to step down should be deeply troubling to all. What if President Bush had demanded that the Democratic president of a major arms manufacturer resign? The left would have been in an uproar. Regardless of Wagoner’s competency, to have the President of the United States order a private company to fire an employee should not happen in our system. The government is now calling the shots at GM. This isn’t forced nationalization, but like AIG, GM and Chrysler are now de facto state-run enterprises.

The government now controls the means of production in two huge swaths of two major industries. Even if we have not arrived at full-scale socialism yet, we are at the very least perilously close.

Economist Arnold Kling calls the current state of affairs “Progressive Socialism“—although it is really another version of state socialism. Socialism doesn’t require the government to own all the means of production (as does Communism), but merely to have effective control over the economy. Right now, the Obama Administration is effectively in the driver’s seat of the U.S. economy. Looking at the markets, it’s quite clear that the aimless direction that Obama is taking us is destroying trillions of dollars of actual value.

The Fall of Capitalism, The End of Freedom

Why should we care? The reason why the advent of American state socialism is such a problem is because political freedom and economic freedom are really two sides to the the same coin. As Janet Daley notes in The Telegraph an attack on capitalism is ultimately an attack on human freedom itself:

When we make the case for capitalism, we are defending the political principle of freedom, not arguing for one kind of rigid economic organisation over another. The debate is being hopelessly muddied by those late converts to free enterprise – politicians like Mr Brown who believe that markets should only survive if they can be made to serve Left-wing purposes.

Capitalism is premised on individual agency. Socialism is premised on the power of the state. The second we give government—which has the legal ability to use force—all of our economic power, what do we really have left? In essence, socialism is really a more “enlightened” form of feudalism in which the serfs trade their freedom for the protection of the elites.

The United State should not fall into the trap of socialism. Socialism is not a workable economic model. The larger and more diverse the nation, the more quickly socialism fails. Industrious and homogenous Sweden can ride out the problems of strong government control longer than could the large and diverse United States. If we continue down this road, our economic collapse will only get worse.

The United States has become a de facto socialist state, and the crisis on Wall Street is a reaction to this untenable and unsustainable trend. If we want to preserve our quality of life, we cannot have our economy being run by the same Washington apparatchiks who have caused this crisis in the first place. Obama’s shift of the U.S. economy to a more centralized and socialized one will lead this country ever closer to disaster.

You Can’t Squeeze Blood From A Turnip

E.J. Dionne does what Democrats love to do, except when running for public office: call for a massive increase in American taxes. Again, he demonstrates the fundamental flaws in the Democratic understanding of basic economics:

He’s right that a large share of any increase should hit those who enjoyed the biggest income gains over the last decade. But in the end, no politician (with the possible exception of libertarian Ron Paul) is willing to cut the budget enough to contain the deficit without a general tax increase down the road.

Every budget analyst knows this, and every politician knows that it’s far easier to bemoan deficits in the abstract than to risk spending cuts or tax increases that hurt sizeable groups of voters. “There are no more low-hanging fruit,” says Tom Kahn, the staff director for the House Budget Committee. “The low-hanging fruit have already been picked. Any tax increase or spending cut is going to trigger opposition from somewhere.”

In an ideal world, Obama would come right out and say we’ll need broad-based tax increases. But that would be suicidal right now. Witness the reaction to his effort to put a 28 percent ceiling on deductions. His proposal would affect only 1.2 percent of taxpayers, yet even that idea is about to die in Congress.

Dionne is correct in one aspect: just raising taxes on the “top 5 percent” isn’t going to do anything. President Obama could raise the top marginal tax rate to 99% and still never get nearly enough money to pay for his additional proposed spending, no less the entire federal deficit. The idea that raising the top marginal tax rate from 36% to 39% will be anything more than a tiny drop in the bucket compared to Obama’s radical spending plans is ridiculous. Even combining that with removing payroll tax caps, limiting deductions, etc., won’t nearly be enough.

So, is a broad tax increase the answer? Dionne suggests yes. But that answer is self-evidently incorrect. Exactly what is going to be accomplished by adding to the tax burden of the American people in the middle of a recession that is precipitously close to becoming a depression? Where is the average American member of the middle class going to get the extra money to pay off Uncle Sam’s never-ending appetites? People are already cutting back on their spending—raising taxes would cause them to cut back even more. When the economy is already having problems with paradox of thrift, why would policymakers try for a plan that would reduce consumer activity even more?

The root of this whole problem was bad policy. We let everyone get over-leveraged, homeowners, banks, and even the government. Now, instead of tightening their belts, our “leaders” in Washington D.C. are trying to find every inventive new way they can to spend even more money. Dionne is also right in that just nibbling away at the margin will not do it—we have to re-evaluate the massive and virtually uncontrolled growth of government.

Raising taxes and having government “invest” that money will not work. Government is subject to the political process, which virtually guarantees waste. If anyone thinks that Congress will rationally allocate money based on the national interest, then they have a fundamentally irrational faith in government unjustified by facts or common sense.

Raising taxes is simply not the answer. In a time when the American people are cutting back, losing their jobs, and losing their homes, it is grotesquely irresponsible for government to demand even more of their hard-earned money—they don’t have the money to give. The argument that somehow the government will spend its way out of this recession is completely unjustified. Those who think that we should follow the example of FDR had better hope the Europeans start slaughtering each other so we can bomb them to rubble and then help them rebuild—it was World War II and not the New Deal that finally ended the Great Depression. We do not have the ability to spend our way out of this—and all Dionne would have us do is feed the beast more.

What needs to be done? For one, we need to re-evaluate our view of what government does. Nearly all of our current problems can be traced to government intervention. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could cook their books because they (and everyone else) knew that they were “too big to fail” and if anything went wrong, Uncle Sam would bail them out. For all the talk about how it was deregulation that caused this mess, the reality is that the less heavily regulated industries are doing better than the most heavily regulated ones. The idea that banks were living in some kind of libertarian paradise and government wasn’t watching everything they did is completely wrong. The banking industry was, and is, heavily regulated. The problem was that the big players (Countrywide, for example) could “buy” Congress and get them to pass laws and rules favorable to them.

The answer is to make sure that this kind of capture can’t happen again. The best way to do that is to make sure that Congress can’t rewrite the rules to line their own pockets. That means not only tougher ethics reform in Congress, but also preventing Congress from being able to screw around with the nation’s economy. Everyone treats this as a demand problem—but it’s really a supply problem. If Congress could only do so much to regulate the industry, there would be no incentive for companies to spend billions on influence peddling. There would be no point to doing so—even if they wanted to, Congress couldn’t stack the deck in their favor.

That means restricting the power of government, except in making sure that companies act transparently. The government does have some need to interfere with the market, but what we are seeing now is when government substitutes the “wisdom” of someone like Tim Geithner for the judgment of the market—quite literally making Geithner the one who gets to make all the rules. Even if Geithner were an unqualified genius, this sort of concentration of power is dangerous.

What we need is less government, not more. What we need is the development of the private sector, not more reliance on government employment. What we need is less of a tax burden, not more. We need a government that does a few things and does them well, not a government that tries to do everything and ends up failing more often than not.

Dionne is wrong at the core of his argument—the level of government spending is unsustainable, and we can never raise taxes enough to cover the difference—and if we tried it would further depress the economy. We cannot keep hoping that the same top-down solutions will work. We cannot just assume that substantive entitlement reform is off the table.

This nation is at a crossroads. We can either continue to spend our way into bankruptcy or we can start looking at alternatives. Raising taxes only makes things worse. We cannot blindly put our faith in government, but must look back to the basics of what makes our economy strong: hard work, a government that promotes opportunity, and a government that is small but effective. The more we stray from those basics, the harder things will be in the future.

Serious Times Call For More Serious Analysis

Foreign Policy has two perspectives on Fareed Zakaria’s latest piece in Newsweek. Both are interesting critiques of both Zakaria and the Obama foreign policy.

First, Christian Brose finds Zakaria’s thinking too reflective of the “Washington establishment”:

We’ve been hearing a lot about the Obama administration’s plans to talk to adversaries — Iran, Russia, Syria, the Taliban, etc. But we’ve heard preciously little about how the administration intends to create conditions of strength that are the requirement for diplomatic success. Everyone knows Obama is willing to talk. The question is what new leverage he will bring to bear to make that talk effective. Will we use the military forces we are withdrawing from Iraq to exert greater pressure on Iran? Are we asking our European allies to take any bold new steps on financial coercion? What exactly is Russia willing and able to do to change Iran’s decision-making? So far, answers to questions like these have not exactly been forthcoming, and in their absence, it’s not at all off-base to think that talking without leverage could harm U.S. interests. (And all of this is assuming that Iran hasn’t just said, screw it, we’re getting the bomb, and damn the torpedoes, which opens up a whole new world of problems.)

Second, Peter Feaver argues that Zakaria doesn’t have a serious critique of American foreign policy:

A more balanced perspective on Bush — some positive, some negative — would pave the way for Fareed to offer a more balanced perspective on Obama. I agree with Fareed that some of the critiques of Obama have been exaggerated, almost as exaggerated as, well, the conventional wisdom on Bush. But surely in a column calling for a reasonable perspective on Obama’s foreign policy performance, Fareed could have found space to at least discuss some of the missteps and rookie mistakes: perhaps a mention of the ham-handed personnel decisions (like this one or this one) or the needless insults to allies (such as this one or this one). If these are dismissed as minor peccadilloes, how about a candid admission that, as Fareed himself recommended, Obama has more often than not continued Bush’s foreign policies while claiming to make bold dramatic changes?

In the end, I don’t think that the Obama Administration cares all that much about foreign policy. Obama is not a foreign-policy oriented President. He’s much more concerned with the U.S. economy, which is (rightly or wrongly) popularly conceived as much more important than what’s going on abroad. Obama’s view of American power is not fully formed. He had almost no foreign policy experience when he took office, and he’s displayed little interest in foreign policy now—other than largely staying the course from the Bush Administration.

Obama’s idea is that if somehow everyone gets together and talks somehow everyone will come to a consensus. That model barely works in faculty meetings, and it won’t work in international diplomacy. Iran will not give up their pursuit of nuclear weapons. Why should they? The US can talk all they want, but there’s nothing we can offer that will give Iran a reasonable incentive to stop. The Iranians are doing what a rational state would do in their shoes: develop a nuclear deterrent to Israel. That they may be insane enough to use that deterrent is a problem, but even if the Iranian regime were perfectly rational, they’d still be developing nuclear weapons.

There’s no “consensus” there. Iran wants nuclear weapons, we want to deny them the opportunity. There’s no amount of carrots that can dissuade them otherwise, and the Iranians know damned well that Barack Obama does not have the political will to stop them. They have no fear of President Obama, and there’s no reason they should fear him. That is a problem for us.

On the other hand, I suspect that Tehran is frightened of Binyamin Netanyahu. He will not tolerate a nuclear Iran, and he’s the only world leader who would do something to stop them. But even that seems a less than likely circumstance.

What should Obama do? He has to face facts: the world is not a peaceable place. If he chooses to negotiate it must be with the full understanding that negotiation may be pointless. That means understanding that players like Russia, China, Iran, and Venezuela may not have any interest in so much as throwing us a bone. That means being willing to be both smart and tough. All the tough rhetoric in the world is worthless. Nobody fears Vladimir Putin because he talks tough, they fear Putin because he’s perfectly capable of killing dissidents, invading countries, and playing hardball to get what he wants.

That doesn’t mean that Obama should emulate Putin, but that does mean that he needs to learn to play hardball. That means being willing to engage Central Asian states on the same terms that Russia does: and they’ve become far better than us at offering tasty carrots and brutal sticks. We can’t pretend that Tashkent works the same way as Washington D.C. It doesn’t, and we have to learn to play by the regions rules.

Obama has shown some promise—he has been less radical in foreign policy than some had predicted. But he still has a long way to go. He can’t keep alienating allies like he did with his shameful performance with Gordon Brown. He has to face the realities of a harsh and unforgiving world. Obama has the benefit of being intelligent and articulate, which counts for a lot. But it will never be enough, and unless the world fears him just a little, America will never truly be respected.

Weapon Of Mass Wealth Destruction

Bloomberg has a deeply critical piece written by Kevin Hassett arguing that Obama has declared “war” on American business. This may seem like hyperbole, but the evidence bears it out:

Imagine that some hypothetical enemy state spent years preparing a “Manchurian Candidate” to destroy the U.S. economy once elected. What policies might that leader pursue?

He might discourage private capital from entering the financial sector by instructing his Treasury secretary to repeatedly promise a brilliant rescue plan, but never actually have one. Private firms, spooked by the thought of what government might do, would shy away from transactions altogether. If the secretary were smooth and played rope-a-dope long enough, the whole financial sector would be gone before voters could demand action.

Another diabolical idea would be to significantly increase taxes on whatever firms are still standing. That would require subterfuge, since increasing tax rates would be too obvious. Our Manchurian Candidate would have plenty of sophisticated ideas on changing the rules to get more revenue without increasing rates, such as auctioning off “permits.”

Now, Obama is no “Manchurian Candidate”, but he is doing everything he can to bring the economy into depression. His policy goals will continue the already unprecedented destruction of American wealth that has resulted since his elections. The markets, looking ahead to the Obama Administration, have reacted with panic. They see the future wealth-destroying effects of higher taxes, more government intrusion into the markets, a socialized system of health care, and a reckless “cap and trade” system that will push energy prices sky-high.

The markets are seeing Obama clearly for what he is: a weapon of mass wealth destruction.

If Obama wants to restore the economy, he would restore the engine of American prosperity: American business. Yet through higher taxes and more unnecessary and unneeded regulations, the Obama Administration has already put itself out as strongly anti-business. Small business owners are already trying to do whatever they can to get through the next four years, and that means continuing to stockpile rather than sell and cutting as many jobs as we can.

I have always said that liberalism will always fail because its premises are wrong. Obama has barely started to enact his agenda, and already the results speak for themselves. Into Year Two of the Obama Recession, it’s going to be very hard for the left to blame the previous President for the bad economy—not that they won’t. But the reality will be that Obama’s policies will not create wealth, they will destroy it. We will all suffer due to this reckless experimentation. What we are seeing in the markets is a clear-headed response to Obama’s policies—and the markets will continue to sink unless this nation changes its current, disastrous course.

Buyer’s Remorse

Sometimes, a concept can be so obvious that even David Brooks sees it. Brooks, the New York Times’ wishy-washy man of the Right no wakes up to the obvious and that Barack Obama is not a moderate at all and that he and the Democratic Party are engaged in an orgy of spending and ideological experimentation.

Brooks and other erstwhile conservatives—I’m looking at you, Chris Buckley—are just figuring out what should have been obvious all along: Barack Obama is not a moderate, and never was. He just played one on TV.

As Brooks puts it:

Those of us who consider ourselves moderates — moderate-conservative, in my case — are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was. His words are responsible; his character is inspiring. But his actions betray a transformational liberalism that should put every centrist on notice. As Clive Crook, an Obama admirer, wrote in The Financial Times, the Obama budget “contains no trace of compromise. It makes no gesture, however small, however costless to its larger agenda, of a bipartisan approach to the great questions it addresses. It is a liberal’s dream of a new New Deal.”

Where were these people during the campaign? What in Obama’s background suggested that he would be anything more than a doctrinaire left-wing liberal? His Senate voting record was the most liberal in the Senate by any objective measure. He grew up in the Chicago political machine. He was raised in a comfortable liberal orthodoxy. His books are filled with grand liberal planning. He’s a devotee of left-wing radical Saul Alinsky. And yes, Gov. Palin was right, he was “pallin’ around” with such esteemed “moderates” as Rev. Jeremiah Wright and admitted left-wing terrorist Bill Ayers.

What did these “moderates” expect?

They let their own gauzy feelings dictate their choices rather than evaluating Obama as he really is. They used Obama as an empty vessel into which they poured their vision of the ideal candidate. Of course, their idealized version of Barack Obama had little do with the real Barack Obama once one gets beyond the superficial elements. They thought that because Obama was so intelligent and articulate that he wouldn’t be so radical. How little did they know…

President Obama is not a moderate. He never was, no matter how fervently ersatz conservatives like David Brooks and Chris Buckley wanted him to be. Now that Obama has power, he is showing his true spots. The real Barack Obama is the most radical President in American history, even more so than LBJ. He aims to fundamentally transform American culture and society into something akin to a European welfare state. He does not believe in limited government, he believes in the expansive state. He does not believe in moderation, but in radical transformation. He does not need the support of people like Brooks or Buckley, he has the power he needs, and he will wield it.

Obama will not listen to Brooks’ proposed “moderate manifesto”—he doesn’t need to. He has his power. He has a Congress that is equally committed to left-wing experimentation. He has a media that is utterly supplicant to him. He has a populace that has yet to see through his charming façade. The more the markets sink in reaction to his dangerous experimentation, the more he can use the crisis as a justification.

Obama’s critics were dismissed as reactionaries for not recognizing his brilliance—and now it looks like those of us who questioned the President’s much-vaunted moderation were right. Brooks and the others who were so swept away by Obama’s surface appeal are not belatedly coming to see what others saw from the beginning. The problem is that it’s too late—Obama was figuratively and literally given a blank check, and now the “moderates” no longer matter.

We’re All Merrily Skipping Down The Road To Serfdom

For those who want to know what our future will look like, here’s a brief preview. F.A. Hayek’s brilliant The Road to Serfdom in a short illustrated form.

I’ve never been more bleak about the future of this country. The road to serfdom isn’t obvious. Nobody intentionally elects a dictator for the purpose of electing a dictator. Instead they pour the ill-conceived hopes and dreams into a Leader who promises them the world so long as they give him the power to create it.

Now, I don’t necessarily think that Barack Obama is a dictator. But the point is that he doesn’t have to be. He’s just creating the ideal conditions for one. What truly saddens me, what truly sickens me, is if that Obama passed the “Fairness Doctrine” to silence his critics, created “civilian work corps” to put an army of young men and women into his service, and arrested business owners, nearly half of the county would go along. Nearly half are so filled with irrational love for Obama that they’d let him become a Caesar. It isn’t about issues, it isn’t about the country, it’s about some gauzy notion of “hope.”

To hell with “hope.”

As Charles Murray says, everything Obama is promising has already been tried and failed. There’s nothing new. This isn’t “change we can believe in” this is “I can say whatever the hell I want and you simpletons will slurp it up.” It’s the wish list of every statist in the last 40 years, and it represents a radical and dangerous turn away from tested principles and towards abject statism.

Universal healthcare? It means the government will have to ration what we get. That’s the only way such a system can possibly work. Even worse, it doesn’t scale up at all. Which means America’s larger population will make the endemic and innate problem with universal healthcare worse than in a smaller country like Sweden or even Canada. Which means that we had better get used to dying in lines, and forget risky or experimental treatments.

Universal college education? For most people, a four-year college degree is a waste of time and money. I believe in a liberal arts education, but I’m not so arrogant as to say that it’s right for everyone. But now Obama will make the value of that degree effectively zero—and a four-year college degree is already worth nowhere near what people pay for it. My suspicion is that the real reason for this is ideological: make everyone go through the like-minded public university system and you’ll have an ideologically “pure” citizenry. Even if that’s not the plan, that will be the effect. A better solution would be to make our existing system actually work, but that doesn’t concentrate any political power into the President’s hands.

A cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions? It’s already been tried and failed. It’s a way of creating a stealth tax increase on energy consumption. A more honest approach would be to just slap a tax on energy. But Obama doesn’t want to be honest, he wants to play to the mob. That cap-and-trade programs hurt the Third World doesn’t seem to matter.

I don’t like to ascribe the worst motives for people, but even so President Obama is taking this country farther down the Road to Serfdom than it even has been. It may take decades for America to recover from what he is doing. He is pouring sugar into the engine of American prosperity, and we will suffer for it.

I love this country. I want this country to succeed, regardless of who is the occupant of the Oval Office or what party is in power. But the end result of what Obama wants will be a United States that is following the disastrous path of statism. At best America will suffer a “Lost Decade” like Japan.

At worst? America takes the road to serfdom to its inevitable conclusion.

I wish this were merely sour political grapes. But the future of this country truly is in deep peril. The way to the future is through individualism, hard work, limited government, thrift, ingenuity, and political pluralism. Today, we have a President who wants a cradle-to-the-grave welfare state and has the audacity to not only hope for one, but to say it in no uncertain terms.

I fear that if we continue down this road, the future will belong to India and China, while this nation lives out its twilight years in increasing obsolescence.

Andrew Sullivan’s Further Descent Into Hackery

Andrew Sullivan went from being an astute conservative columnist to a frothing partisan hack somewhere around the 2004 elections. His latest column in The Sunday Times amply demonstrates his fall into hackery. Now, because the Republicans have the sheer audacity to defy the Leader and go against a budget-busting spending bill in a time of fiscal turmoil, they are akin to the Taliban.

So much for not questioning the patriotism of others.

For instance, Sullivan makes this blatantly silly argument:

From the outset, the Republicans in Washington pored over the bill to find trivial issues to make hay with. They found some small funding for HIV and sexually transmitted diseases prevention; they jumped up and down about renovating the national mall; they went nuts over a proposal – wait for it – to make some government buildings more energy-efficient; they acted as if green research and federal funds for new school building were the equivalent of funding terrorism. And this after eight years in which they managed to turn a surplus into a trillion-dollar deficit and added a cool $32 trillion to the debt the next generation will have to pay for. Every now and again their chutzpah and narcissism take one’s breath away. But it’s all they seem to know.

Which conveniently ignores the very nature of the bill—a trillion-dollar giveaway to Democratic special interests. It is hardly “narcissistic” or an act of “chutzpah” to cry foul when the Treasury is being raided in a time when America’s debts are already threatening our fiscal future. But Sullivans M.O. is already well established—Republicans are always evil schemers seeking to establish their own power while the Obama Administration is always pure of heart. His simple morality play has little to do with reality, but it is a constant struggle for Mr. Sullivan to ignore what is in front of his nose.

The Republicans are an opposition party, and they have finally rediscovered the idea that they are supposed to be the party of small and responsible government. Apparently to Sullivan, their job now is to roll over at acquiesce to whatever the Great Obama wishes them to do. That someone who so frequently quotes George Orwell cannot see the Orwellian implications of our times is distressing.

That Sullivan adds some faint condemnation of the Democrats is only due to it allowing him to show how magnanimous and post-partisan the Obama Administration is. That the Obama Administration is attempting to politicize the Census is ignored. That the Obama Administration’s attempts at partisan “compromise” is largely window dressing is ignored. The ethical scandals that surround the Obama Administration is immaterial to Sullivan’s worldview. The resignation of Sen. Gregg as Commerce Secretary? To Sullivan, this had nothing to do with the Obama Administration’s evisceration of the post in favor of having Rahm Emmanuel run the show, it was clearly an act by the Republican base.

Sullivan is capable of deep though, but he choses not to exercise it, instead going for the rhetoric of a third-string Daily Kos blogger. How tiresome must it be to be yet another unquestioning mouthpiece for the Obama Administration. One would think it to be intellectually deadening after a while. But perhaps Mr. Sullivan has become tired of thinking and would rather trade his insightfulness and relevance for the adulation of the “netroots” mob.

The loss of such a formerly insightful thinker, alas, diminishes our political rhetoric at a time when it’s at one of its lows.