Category: Politics

The Fat Lady Is Singing Has Sung

National Review has a piece on the legacy of Mier’s failed nomination. My opposition to Miers was based less on ideology (although I don’t think she would have been a strict constructionist), but on qualifications. In the words of Hamilton, Miers struck me as little more than an “obsequious object” of Bush who simply didn’t have the intellectual rigor to be a member of the Supreme Court.

A justice on the Supreme Court needs a sharp and incisive legal mind, and Ms. Miers writing and statements indicated that she simply didn’t have what it takes. She may be a nice person, a good litigator, and is clearly an individual of character, but that doesn’t qualify one for the highest court in the land.

The editors of NR are right – this is no cause for celebration. It is a cause for relief. The President put Miers in an untenable position, and that reflects as badly on the White House’s utter lack of vetting as it does on Ms. Miers.

President Bush has an opportunity to do things right – to find a justice with the right legal qualifications who will see the Constitution as a set of enduring guiding principles rather than a roadblock to be overcome. There are plenty of people with excellent legal credentials and diverse experiences who would serve this nation well and ensure that our founding document is treated with the respect that it deserves.

UPDATE: Well, my prediction was very much correct. Harriet Miers has withdrawn herself as a nominee to the Supreme Court. Already, Erick Erickson has some insights as to who might be taking her place.

My prediction: Miers will withdraw within the next 48 hours. I can’t see this nomination continuing.

Captain Ed is off the fence and against Miers. Paul Mirengoff has done a 180 and put himself with the majority who oppose Miers. Leonardo Leo of the Federalist Society, one of the people responsible for helping Bush with the nomination has dropped out of that position.

The Miers nomination is DOA. If she doesn’t withdraw, she won’t make it through the Judiciary Committee, and she almost certainly does not have the votes to be nominated on the Senate floor. GOP Senators know quite well that there’s absolutely no political price to pay for defying the Bush Administration (see Senators McCain, Frist, Thune, etc…), so they have no reason to alienate their conservative base and vote for Miers. Democrats love to see Bush fail, and they’ll get yet another chance to draw blood with Miers.

This whole sordid affair has completely blown up in the already beleaguered faces of the Administration. Miers has demonstrated that the she’s not only unqualified for the position, but that her core beliefs are as changeable as the season – neither of which are appropriate for a strong conservative Supreme Court justice. President Bush has divided his base at the worst possible time, done a ham-fisted and half-assed job of supporting his nominee, and given plenty of new ammo for his critics – and even some of his friends.

It is simply time for Miers to go before this particular sinking ship takes more people down with it.

Miers On The Outs

I’m going to make a not-so-bold prediction that the Miers nomination will collapse by the end of the week. Already Eric Erickson’s White House sources are indicating that the vetting process for a replacement has quietly started. John Fund of the Wall Street Journal writes that the Miers nomination was a debacle from the beginning and that Bush is now realizing his position is untenable.

Fund’s analysis is a good one:

The botched handling of the Kerik nomination was a precursor of much that has gone wrong with the Miers nomination. This time, the normal vetting process broke down, with Mr. Card ordering William Kelley, Ms. Miers’s own deputy, to conduct the background checks–a clear conflict of interest. Even Newt Gingrich, a supporter of Ms. Miers’s nomination, says that “the president believes in her so deeply, he is so convinced she’s the right person, that I don’t think it ever occurred to him to go through the kind of normal opposition research and normal vetting.”

Miers was basically thrown to the wolves – unintentionally to be sure – but the effect is the same. The White House had nothing they could use to defend her, and based on her flimsy record, she wasn’t a defendable candidate to begin with. Bush wanted a woman, and Miers turned out to be one of the few candidates that the White House thought would survive a Senate confirmation. It was a major tactical mistake, and a major black eye to the White House.

The Miers nomination was one of the single biggest political mistakes of Bush’s political career. It’s the first time that Bush’s conservative base has truly begun to fracture, and that is severely hurting the Administration. Conservatives are no longer willing to ignore the fact that the Bush Administration is only playing lip service to key elements of the conservative agenda. The Bush Administration has been trying to engage in a series of increasingly ineffective tactics to salvage the Miers nomination, all of which have only exacerbated the problem.

Bush needs to have a “come to Jesus” moment with the conservative base. He needs to realize that he’s eroding his own base of support, and conservatives political loyalty is based on advancing an agenda, not just filling seats. When a Republican President has National Review calling for a judicial nominee to be defeated it is clear that the battle has already been lost.

Miers was a poor choice to begin with, and there’s little point in continuing to make things worse. It is time for her to gracefully bow out and allow the process to go forwards with a qualified nominee.

Fiscal Conservatism Making A Comeback?

Fiscal conservatives haven’t had much to crow about from the Bush Administration. Despite Bush’s policies of lowering the tax burden across the board, in terms of fiscal policy he’s governed like a Democrat. Under Bush we’ve seen a massive increase in wasteful farm subsidies, we’ve seen the creation of a new and fiscally damaging Medicare prescription drug benefit, and the energy and transportation bills have been stuffed with enough pork that copies of it would be banned in British offices less it offend Muslims.

In short, Bush may be good on taxes, but lower tax rates aren’t fully effective unless they’re accompanied by reductions in spending, and Bush has not only failed to deal with runaway entitlement spending and pork, but he’s expanded both.

It’s time that the GOP rank and file said “enough is enough.”

And thankfully, they are.

The Coburn Amendment would take money to build a wasteful multimillion-dollar bridge in Alaska where it is entirely unneeded and use it to rebuild a bridge battered by Hurricane Katrina. Mike Krempasky calls it “a hill to die for” and that statement is dead-on for fiscal conservatives. It may not mean much in the grander context of the national budget, but it’s a powerful sign that conservatives are no longer going to sit around and let Congress spend willy-nilly while the US budget deficit skyrockets.

It’s about time. Non-defense discretionary spending under the Bush Administration has skyrocketed at unprecedented rates. Spending on education at the federal level under Bush has outstripped even Clinton-era spending increases, despite the fact that Bush campaigned as a proponent of local control and school choice. The Medicare prescription drug benefit was a clear political move designed to win over senior voters – and it wouldn’t seem as though it achieved that goal. The number of seniors who have an actual need for such a benefit was and is small enough to have been dealt with by existing programs, both public and private. Instead of having seniors utilize those resources, the Bush Administration created a monstrosity that will add nearly $700 billion in unfunded liabilities to the already failing Medicare system.

It’s time for fiscal conservatives to make themselves heard. The Bush Administration has ignored the most basic principles of fiscal conservatism for too long, and in a time of war and natural disasters, it is simply intolerable that American taxpayers are being asked to foot the bill for bridges to nowhere and other pork projects. The most basic tenet of the modern Republican party since the days of Reagan has been that government is not the solution to every problem. In fact, more often than not, it’s the cause of many of them.

Expanding government by necessity limits individual autonomy, and tax cuts are only half of the equation. Government spending must be restrained. We don’t elect Republicans so that they can govern like Democrats and continue to expand the size and scope of the federal government at alarming rates. Fiscal conservatism can and should make a comeback, but the only way to do that is to show that fiscal irresponsibility is a losing proposition. A massive groundswell of grass-roots support for the Coburn Amendment is an ideal way of telling Congress that it is time to put America’s fiscal house in order.

Thank God For Ridiculous Enemies

I have always made one prayer to God, a very short one. Here it is: “My God, make our enemies very ridiculous!” God has granted it to me.

– Voltaire

Jonah Goldberg has a typically biting column on Howard Dean’s comments about the “Merlot Democrats”. It’s nice to know in a time where the GOP is barely holding it together that no matter how bad things seem to get for us, the other guys still have absolutely no clue how to relate with Middle America.

The fact is that the Democrats are engaging in the techniques of personal destruction – the very same thing they accused us of doing in the 1990s (and not without some justification). The problem with that line of attack is that it tends to turn American off to politics, which doesn’t help either party. The Democrats might have a chance if they could elucidate a message other than “We hate Bush. I mean, really hate him. We hate him more than Spiceworld and rotten milk combined.” However, when the Democrats actually do present something, it’s almost always something that the American electorate doesn’t like – such as nationalizing healthcare (as if the argument that a government-run system will be any more efficient or less costly than the mess we have now) or raising taxes.

The fundamental problem with the Democrats is that they’re still decidedly out of the cultural mainstream. They’re secular, sometimes to the point of display anti-Christian bigotry. Americans are religious. The single biggest determinate of being a Republican is being married with children – while the Democrats dominate single voters. When it comes to speaking to the fears and concerns of American families on social issues, the Democrats are utterly and completely clueless. They don’t understand that family values aren’t a cover phrase for intolerance and bigotry, but a representation of the desire for parents not to have their children grow up in a society that encourages them to become self-indulgent, vapid, and sexually irresponsible. In the age of both AIDS and the decline of stable relationships, those trends aren’t healthy.

The Republican Party is seeing an increasing amount of tension between social conservatives (who support the President strongly on Miers despite her potential for being a squish on their pet issues) and fiscal conservatives (who rightly don’t see the President as one of their own). However, that’s nothing compared to the multiple fractures in the Democratic Party. Environmental activists and auto workers aren’t a natural constituency. Blacks don’t see eye-to-eye with gay rights activists. “Merlot Democrats” and the last vestiges of the heartland Democrats who haven’t already become Republicans are as different as night and day. The GOP has two main constituencies who agree on a wide spectrum of issues, most notably national defense. The Democratic Party is a mix of groups who are united at the moment by little more than their hatred of George W. Bush. By January 2009 it’s quite possible that these groups will be at each other’s throats now that the radical fringe of the Democratic Party has suddenly found themselves once again in the position to play kingmaker like they did in 1968 – and we all know how that turned out.

If anything, the recent split between the Bush Administration, Congress, and the conservative base is good for the party. Five years of political power tends to produce stagnation in a party, and we need to kick some asses in our own party before we go out and kick some other asses. On issues of spending and immigration, the Bush Administration is outside the conservative mainstream. Conservatives want restrictions on government spending and they want secure borders – and it’s about time we started putting pressure on our elected officials to start moving in the right direction.

Dean’s “Merlot Democrats” are exactly the kind of people who do represent the base of the Democratic Party. They’re the kind of people who believe George Lakoff when he posits that all the Democrats need to do is “frame” their issues with the magic words that will get the electorate to accept them. The Democrats don’t understand that the problem isn’t the presentation – a party with the slavish support of the media doesn’t have much cause to worry – but the content of the ideas. The conservative movement spend most of the last 50 years as a minority in American politics, which forced them to take ideas seriously – while the Democrats could use power rather than a concrete ideology to advance their causes. It has only been since 1980 that conservatives have been able to start translating ideology into political success – and it took the legendary charisma and leadership of Ronald Reagan to do it.

The GOP has a lot to be worried about, partially from the usual spate of Democratic attacks and partially from their own failures of leadership. However, like Voltaire, they’ve been praying for ridiculous enemies, and those prayers have certainly been answered.

Advise And Consent

The nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court is the singular worst decision of the George W. Bush administration. It has split the Republican base from the President in a way that has not happened previously and reinforced the charges of cronyism on the part of his Administration. There’s simply no other way to put it – Miers is the worst possible choice.

Even if Miers were a committed conservative, she does not possess the judicial acumen necessary to be an adequate member of the Supreme Court of the United States. Given that there are many doubts about her views on Constitutional jurisprudence (such as it is), the risks inherent in nominating someone with no practical experience and no real record should have torpedoed the idea instantly.

I must agree with Alexander Hamilton in this case when he made the following argument in the Federalist #76:

To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity. In addition to this, it would be an efficacious source of stability in the administration.

The Senate’s role is to “advise and consent” on judicial nominations in the fashion that Hamilton argued. The Senate should not obstruct nominees for partisan political purposes – at the same time they should not provide a rubber stamp to an unqualified nominee.

Unless Harriet Miers demonstrates an undiscovered aptitude on matters of Constitutional law, the Senate of the United States should exercise their Constitutional rights and refuse to confirm the nomination of Ms. Miers. Political concerns must take a back seat to the values of the Republic, and the relationship between Ms. Miers and the President clearly does not allow her to be a dispassionate justice, nor does she possess the kind of understanding of Constitutional law that any member of the Supreme Court should have. Her gender, educational history, or any other side issue is irrelevant. Harriet Miers is simply unfit for office.

For the good of the party, and more importantly for the good of the Republic, the Senate should end this travesty.

Why Bush Gets It

While Bush is taking a pounding over the nomination of Harriet Miers (and for very good reason, I might add), he also delivered on of his best speeches on the war at the National Endowment for Democracy. While Bush may be taking heat on domestic policy, he hasn’t gone wobbly on the war at all. Bush thankfully understands why a withdrawal from Iraq is a horrible idea:

We know the vision of the radicals because they’ve openly stated it — in videos, and audiotapes, and letters, and declarations, and websites. First, these extremists want to end American and Western influence in the broader Middle East, because we stand for democracy and peace, and stand in the way of their ambitions. Al Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, has called on Muslims to dedicate, quote, their “resources, sons and money to driving the infidels out of their lands.” Their tactic to meet this goal has been consistent for a quarter-century: They hit us, and expect us to run. They want us to repeat the sad history of Beirut in 1983, and Mogadishu in 1993 — only this time on a larger scale, with greater consequences.

Second, the militant network wants to use the vacuum created by an American retreat to gain control of a country, a base from which to launch attacks and conduct their war against non-radical Muslim governments. Over the past few decades, radicals have specifically targeted Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, and Jordan for potential takeover. They achieved their goal, for a time, in Afghanistan. Now they’ve set their sights on Iraq. Bin Laden has stated: “The whole world is watching this war and the two adversaries. It’s either victory and glory, or misery and humiliation.” The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war against humanity. And we must recognize Iraq as the central front in our war on terror.

It is currently irrelevant whether or not Iraq was a base of terrorism before 2003 – it most certainly will be if we do not strengthen Iraqi military and political institutions so that they can fight terrorism. We’re coming closer to that end, but it remains the height of irresponsibility to advocate a troop withdrawal that would turn Iraq into a petri dish for terrorism.

President Bush is right on when he describes the psychology of al-Qaeda. When we withdrew from Somalia in 1993 after the bodies of US servicemembers were paraded through the streets of Mogadishu, it made bin Laden and the rest of al-Qaeda believe that the United States was little more than a paper tiger. Yes, we’d launch a few furtive cruise missile raids, but we didn’t have the stomach to put boots on the ground and finish the job. Our invasion of Afghanistan disproved that theory – but now it’s being put to the test in Iraq.

Make no mistake about it: al-Qaeda wants us to leave Iraq. They want the major strategic victory and the massive morale boost it would come from a handful of terrorists defeating the largest military in the world. And like it or not, those who advocate a withdrawal are playing right into the hands of al-Qaeda, willingly or not. Such an action would turn Iraq into an even more dangerous version of Afghanistan and erase everything that we’ve done in the past four years. It is absolutely irresponsible to advocate such a plan of action, and those who do so are deserving of the harshest condemnation.

Bush, to his credit, understands fully that those who argue that this war is unwinnable are wrong. This war is very much unwinnable, and for the first time Bush really elucidates why:

Islamic radicalism, like the ideology of communism, contains inherent contradictions that doom it to failure. By fearing freedom — by distrusting human creativity, and punishing change, and limiting the contributions of half the population — this ideology undermines the very qualities that make human progress possible, and human societies successful. The only thing modern about the militants’ vision is the weapons they want to use against us. The rest of their grim vision is defined by a warped image of the past — a declaration of war on the idea of progress, itself. And whatever lies ahead in the war against this ideology, the outcome is not in doubt: Those who despise freedom and progress have condemned themselves to isolation, decline, and collapse. Because free peoples believe in the future, free peoples will own the future.

Bin Laden’s values are incapable of producing a healthy and productive society. They are incapable of meeting basic human needs. Islamic radicalism is damned by its own internal contradictions, just as Communism was. The oppression of radical Islamism runs counter to the innate human desire to be free and to have the power to effect change. Across the Middle East, the old ideologies of autocracy and stasis are being challenged by a generation that was raised with an increasing understanding of what it is to be free. Like Communism in the 1970s-1980s, some leaders are tentatively embracing change, while others are trying to control it. And like the wave of freedom that swept through the totalitarian states of the Eastern Bloc, a wave of change is sweeping across the Middle East, from Beirut to Tehran, and the old orders will either have to adapt to it or have it sweep them away.

This is the speech Bush should have given a long time ago, and it is unfortunate for him that he waited until now to find his voice and clarify these issues. With the criticisms over FEMA’s response to Hurricane Katrina, the out-of-control levels of government spending, and the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, Bush is facing a political firestorm. However many faults the Bush Administration may have, and they are legion at the moment, he is one of the few leaders who possesses a true understanding of our war on terrorism. We cannot afford failure in Iraq, and we have an obligation to finish the job we started. Defeat in Iraq would be defeat in the wider war, and it is time that Bush’s childish critics stopped advocating defeat and working towards doing what we need to achieve victory.

Bush Blows It

President Bush has nominated White House counsel Harriet Miers to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court. Bush made an excellent choice with Chief Justice Roberts. With this choice, he utterly blew it.

Miers is first and foremost unqualified for the job. She has an extensive list of accomplishments, but none of which qualify her to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. She has not served on any of the Federal Circuit Courts. She may have a sharp legal mind, but she doesn’t have the paper trail to prove it.

As a nominee for a Circuit Court, she would have been an acceptable choice. But nominating someone of her limited qualification to the nation’s highest court is a major strategic mistake. The Democrats are out for blood, and the Republicans aren’t going to have much more than lukewarm support for Miers.

Miers is not going to receive much support from conservatives who were hoping for someone in the legal and intellectual mold of a Scalia or a Rehnquist. Instead, we got one brilliant legal mind and one more Souter. The last thing that conservatives want on the Court is another Souter when so many critical legal issues hang in the balance.

Miers is not an adequate nominee, and President Bush has blown it with the base. For their own political good, Republican Senators had better start telling the President to find a more appropriate pick.

Ed Morrissey – Captain’s Quarters:

All that being said, I find this pick mystifying. Miers just turned 60 years old, not exactly ready to retire but potentially giving up at least a decade for the Bush legacy on the Supreme Court. Other women with judicial experience and/or a stronger track record of conservatism could have been found. She didn’t graduate from a top-drawer legal school (SMU), and she didn’t clerk for a highly influential jurist (US District Judge Joe Estes).

Not only does Harriet Miers not look like the best candidate for the job, she doesn’t even look like the best female candidate for the job. If judicial experience is a liability, why not Maureen Mahoney, who is younger, has argued cases at the Supreme Court, and worked within the Deputy Solicitor’s Office after clerking for William Rehnquist? Better yet, why not nominate J. Michael Luttig or Michael McConnell, with their brilliant and scholarly approaches to the law and undeniable qualifications through years of judicial experience? Why not Edith Hollan Jones, if Bush wanted to avoid the confrontation that Janice Rogers Brown would have created?

Miers may make a great stealth candidate, but right now she looks more like a political ploy. Color me disappointed in the first blush.

Power Line – Miers is “a disappointment”:

I’m sure that she is a capable lawyer and a loyal aide to President Bush. But the bottom line is that he had a number of great candidates to choose from, and instead of picking one of them–Luttig, McConnell, Brown, or a number of others–he nominated someone whose only obvious qualification is her relationship with him.

UPDATE: Senator Thune has this to say:

The nomination and confirmation process of Judge Roberts was a fine example of the Senate performing its Constitutional responsibility of advice and consent. Just as Judge Roberts received a fair up-or-down vote after a thorough examination by both Republicans and Democrats, I expect the same treatment for Harriet Miers. However, I will reserve judgment on this nominee until the Senate studies her qualifications. It has been my expectation that President Bush would nominate someone in the mold of Justices Scalia and Thomas and it is my hope that Harriet Miers will prove to be such a person.

I think it’s a prima facie case that Miers does not have the requisite qualifications to be a Supreme Court nominee, but Thune and the rest of the Senate does owe her at least a fair hearing. Sadly for the Republic, I don’t think there’s anything that a fair hearing would reveal that would make her seem any more qualified than she already appears – and there’s a good chance that things will come out that will make her seem less qualified.

Based on a previous job as a lawyer for big entertainment companies, her positions on such important issues as intellectual property law, the DMCA, fair use, and other key issues are likely to be less than palatable. The more I look, the less I see to like. The President blew it, and he blew it bigtime.

The Opportunity

Howard Fineman has an interesting piece in Newsweek asking why the Democratic Party can’t seem to capitalize in the GOP’s current weakness. There’s no doubt that this is turning into an annus horribilis for the GOP. January’s promise has long faded into a series of horrendous political stumbles. Bush’s approval numbers are in the toilet, the Republican base is not happy, and DeLay’s legal troubles only make things worse.

A competent party – say the GOP of 1993 – would be salivating right now. Yet Fineman notes that the Democrats aren’t too happy:

With George W. Bush’s presidency mired in the muck of hurricanes and doubts about the war, you’d think Democrats would be bursting with energy, eagerly expecting to regain power. But, in a roomful of well-connected Democrats the other night, I was struck by how gloomy they were. They can’t stand Bush, but didn’t have much faith in their own party’s prospects.

I think Fineman hits on something here. What does the Democratic Party stand for? For the past 5 years it’s been “We hate George W. Bush.” That isn’t enough. It wasn’t enough in 2000. It wasn’t enough in 2002. It wasn’t enough in 2004. It won’t be enough in 2006. In 2008, the issue becomes entirely moot. George W. Bush’s political career ends in January 2009, and basing your entire party on the hatred of one man and his party doesn’t win elections.

If anything, this crisis of leadership is probably good for the Republican Party. The GOP has grown too complacent by far. The fatcat Washington culture has taken over from the Contract for America outsider culture that brought the GOP to power. Bush’s compassionate conservatism means pushing for a responsible fiscal policy but a manifestly irresponsible spending policy. Bush has not shrunk government, he’s grown it faster than ever.

Bush just appears tired – it’s hard to blame him for that, after 5 years of incalculable hatred and vitriol every single day. But the President doesn’t have that luxury. A captain can’t spend time in his cabin when there’s a storm battering the ship – he needs to take the wheel and do his job. Bush needs to be pushing a conservative agenda – demanding fiscal restraint, finding a conservative jurist to replace Justice O’Connor, reforming Social Security, and leading on this war. In other words, the Republican Party needs to stand for something.

The GOP can’t count on Democratic disarray forever. If the Democrats start ditching the Cindy Sheehan/Michael Moore/MoveOn/Daily Kos radical wing of the party and put together some reasonable, articulate, and fiscally responsible candidates the GOP will be in deep trouble in 2006. It’s heartening to see that some Republican lawmakers are getting the idea, but that’s only a start. We’ve lost our way when it comes to how we view government. If we’re the party for Slightly Less Bigger Government instead of the party of Small Government, then a lot of fiscal conservatives – a group that is vastly larger than social conservatives – will start leaving our corner. The division of the GOP isn’t a great as the division between the antiwar radicals and the moderates on the other side of the aisle, but it isn’t something that can be swept away either.

Does that mean that the GOP should surrender to despair like their Democratic colleagues? Absolutely not. Fineman’s right – we have a host of very promising candidates for 2008, and some strong ones for 2006. McCain, Guiliani, and Rice could all wipe the floor with any candidate the Democrats throw at them – and while the old argument says that they’d never survive a primary, don’t be so sure. If Guiliani decides to run, he’s got the job, based simply on his leadership abilities, and especially if he’s willing to draw a compromise on abortion such as supporting parental notification and restricting federal funding of abortion providers. McCain is pro-life, one of the staunchest fiscal conservatives in the Senate, has indicated that he’ll hold the line of taxes, and has been one of the strongest advocates for this war we have. His positions on campaign finance reform are reprehensible, but then again, President Bush is the one whose signature is on the BCRA.

It all comes back to the fundamental truths of politics – the two things that matter are candidates and ideas. Everything else is a sideshow. If the Republicans can start advancing a pro-growth, anti-pork platform for 2006, they stand a reasonable chance of holding onto power or even taking a few vulnerable seats from the Democrats like North Dakota and Minnesota. If not, 2006 is going to get hairy.

Bill Clinton won in 1993 because he advocated a fiscally responsible platform that eschewed the hard left and faced a Republican base that was deeply divided over fiscal issues. The Republicans have a chance now to ensure that history does not repeat itself by embracing the core values of smaller government, fiscal restraint, and national security. It’s time to get this party back on track, because counting on a weakened Democratic Party may end up paying off, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.

The Failure Of The Media

Power Line finds that the reports of anarchy in New Orleans were horrendously overblown, and that the media’s sensationalism diverted badly-needed resources to deal with non-existent crises.

It appears that the media is fundamentally broken. The misreporting of events during the Katrina aftermath aren’t an isolated incident. The trust network that the media used to have with the American people is breaking down, and for good reason. The media is supposed to be neutral, objective, and competent. Yet it would appear that it meets neither of those criteria. Instead, we’re subjected to a bunch of blow-dried blowhards commenting on absolutely nothing and contributing even less. At least when the media is fixated on the latest Blonde-Girl-Goes-Missing story du jour the impact of their inability to get the facts straight is minimized. When it’s matters of life or death like public policy, war, or natural disasters, the media is actively making things worse.

One of the problems is the rise of the professional journalistic class. Journalists who comment on military matters almost never have served in the military. They don’t understand military strategy. The vast majority of reporters covering Iraq never leave the Green Zone and rely on stringers – who often have ties to the terrorists themselves – to do the original reporting. The story that we get very rarely reflects the reality of life on the ground – which is why there’s such a fundamental disconnect between the people fighting in Iraq and the American population at large. You have a case of journalistic groupthink at its finest – the opinion that Iraq is a quagmire was established a long time ago, and the reporting from Iraq is designed to bolster that view. You could say that the evidence is being “fixed” around the policy.

The “embedding” of reporters into combat units helped by ensuring that journalists got the story from the ground first-hand, but sadly that program has largely been cast aside.

It’s this blend of inexperience and bias that is driving the mainstream media right into the ground. Exacerbating the situation is the institutional arrogance of the media. Since Watergate (and even before), the media cemented the idea that they were the “Fifth Estate” – they represented an unelected branch of government whose job – nay, duty – was to provide a check on political power. The problem with that attitude is that when you see yourself in that light, everyone wants to become the next Woodward and Bernstein – no matter what. When the media smells blood, it’s like a feeding frenzy of sharks, even though there may be nothing to the story. For liberals, think Whitewater. For conservatives, think the faked ANG memos.

The media is experiencing the inevitable result of their own institutional arrogance in the form of plummeting readership and ratings. The New York Times recently went through a round of layoffs. The Los Angeles Times is experiencing a similar fall in circulation. Ratings for the Big Three networks are down.

The trust networks that made anchors like Walter Cronkite and Peter Jennings such monumental figures are being eroded by years of sloppy and biased journalism. Fox News exploited a major ideological hole in the media – everyone was too busy catering the liberal viewers that conservative viewers had nowhere to go – and Fox quickly realized that by portraying themselves as more “fair and balanced’ than the other networks they could steal back the viewers turned off by the biases perceived in the other networks. And indeed, that strategy worked. Fox is hardly a paragon of journalistic excellence, but it does have some of the finest political coverage, in large part due to old-fashioned journalists like Brit Hume.

And therein lies the secret to the media’s future: getting back to the basics. The media’s problem is that they’re less concerned with the hold fashioned idea of reporting Who, What, Why, Where, When, and How and more with trying to “speak truth to power” and jockeying to be the next Woodward and Bernstein. Instead, the media needs to adopt the philosophies of Sgt. Friday – “Just the facts, ma’am.” The fact is that most journalists are increasingly lazy and vapid, but emboldened by a sense of noblesse oblige that blinds them to the reality of life outside their own little world. If you want to “change the world”, you should be in the Peace Corps, not the press. The job of the press isn’t to change the world, it’s to tell us what’s going on and let us all form our own conclusions.

Sadly, budgets for reporting are getting slashed, editorial standards are declining, and the marketplace is fundamentally changing. Not to beat on that particular dead horse, but the reporting in the blogosphere is every bit as good as that in the mainstream media – provided you know where to look. For instance, Michael Yon’s reports from Mosul with the “Deuce Four” are some of the best examples of modern war reporting we have. Yon’s work is incredibly gripping – easily Pulitzer Prize material, and offers a perspective rarely seen in the rest of the media. That is the future of journalism.

And while bloggers are certainly not unbiased, their biases aren’t masked by a veneer of objectivity maintained in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. CBS’ faked Bush documents fiasco didn’t survive more than a few hours in the blogosphere. When the mainstream media has Jayson Blair, Howell Raines, Dan Rather, and other reporters who routinely and strongly inject their biases into what should be straightforward reporting, it’s hard to argue that the signal-to-noise ratio of the mainstream media is all that much better than blogs.

The media is failing us in Iraq. They failed us after Katrina. They will continue to get things wrong, because the focus of media is no longer on presenting the facts, but buttressing a particular worldview. The very attitude of modern journalism is at fault here, and so long as that attitude remains prevalent, the continuing decline of the profession will continue unabated.

UPDATE: Jeff Goldstein has much more on the problems with today’s media:

Just give us the facts, I say. Give us the context. Those who control the narrative control the power. And the thought of Shepard Smith or Geraldo Rivera or Dan Rather driving public policy on a regular basis is simply to horrible to consider.

Indeed.

McCain Stands Against Pork

While John McCain may give conservatives paroxysms from time to time, he also has a well-earned reputation for being one of the strongest fiscal hawks in the Senate. He’s even gone as far as calling on Congress to repeal the Medicare prescription drug bill to pay for hurricane reconstruction.

When McCain is right, he’s right, and when McCain is wrong, he’s wrong. In this particular instance, Sen. McCain is absolutely right. The Medicare bill is a massive expansion of an already over-stretched entitlement system that puts a massive drain on the Treasury. Canceling that one bill alone would more than pay for reconstruction, as well as help us relieve some of the massive debt we’re accumulating due to the fiscal irresponsibility of Congress and the President.

What McCain is proposing is politically risky – in fact, it’s extremely risky. Repealing entitlement spending is not the sort of thing that most Republicans care to do less they be crucified by the press for being heartless bastards who want to make Grandma eat dog food. However, McCain is one of the few politicians who can have a shot at pulling that off. He has a reputation as a straight shooter, and if he says we need to tighten our belts, people may listen – whereas if Bill Frist would have the fortitude to do the same the media would eat him alive.

In any event, McCain is right. We must control the massive growth of non-defense discretionary and entitlement spending in this country. And so far, McCain is one of the few members of Congress who has the cojones to stand up and say that we may have to make some serious cuts to spending in order to put our fiscal house in order.

McCain is right, and the rest of the Congressional Republicans should be standing with him. It is a time to end business as usual in Congress. We face war, natural disasters, and shifting demographics. Now is the time to get serious about fiscal discipline, before our problems grow to the point where they drag on economic growth.

It’s time for the Republican Party to once again become the party of fiscal discipline – a mantle we have sadly abdicated in recent years. If John McCain will lead this party towards that end, then the rest of the party would do well to follow in his footsteps.