Tue, Sep 29, 2009
My new Washington Examiner column is posted.
How the MSM covers what increasingly appears to be a full scale strategy of appeasement vis-a-vis Iran will define the legacy media’s legacy, in the same way that Geoffrey Dawson’s support for the policies of Neville Chamberlain defined the Times of London’s editor’s reputation.
Iran is reported to have test fired a long range missile today, which is all the reply a sensible person needs to understand how the mullahs will conduct themselves over the next two months. Today’s coverage of this event will tell us a lot about whether Beltway-Manhattan media elites even understand what is unfolding around the world.
The Monday morning column from Clark Judge:
With ObamaCare in a Hole, Will the White House Stop Digging?
By Clark S. Judge, managing director, White House Writers Group, Inc.
Increasingly in Washington over the last few weeks, we have heard this assessment of the president’s health care upheaval prospects: Something will pass, because the president and his party have such large majorities (nearly 60 percent) in both chambers of Congress that it is inconceivable that they could not bludgeon their way to the necessary majorities. But victory will be the product of power, not debate – and it will cost them control of the House in the next election.
The problem for the president is that he has lost the health care debate. No one in either party or in the media has dared speak this fact as of now, but it is inescapable.
Let’s review the bidding:
-Cost: The president said the upheaval would cost nothing. The Congressional Budget Office put a trillion-dollar-plus price tag on it. Others have since confirmed their assessment.
-Taxes: The president said only those making more than $250,000 per year would pay more. As details have emerged, virtually every American will be paying additional taxes to fund this new federal health care behemoth. [# More #]
-Death Panels (really policies to cut the cost of that famously expensive “last year of life”): The president and his team have called the death panel charge a lie. They have pointed to Britain’s National Health Service as a counter example. But about two weeks ago, an article by British policy expert Rupert Darwall appeared in the Wall Street Journal (http://tinyurl.com/nqr3au) showing that, well, actually policies in the British service are tilted toward cutting off care to the aged.
As Darwall wrote:
[Recently] a group of senior doctors and health-care experts wrote to a national newspaper expressing their concern about the Liverpool Care Pathway, a palliative program being rolled out across the NHS involving the withdrawal of fluids and nourishment for patients thought to be dying. Noting that in 2007-08, 16.5% of deaths in the U.K. came after “terminal sedation,” their letter concluded with the chilling observation that experienced doctors know that sometimes “when all but essential drugs are stopped, ‘dying’ patients get better” if they are allowed to.
Darwall was pointing out what everyone except the president’s policy experts seems to understand: None of us knows which year is our last year of life until we actually die. The rationing policies at the heart of the president’s money saving plan will inevitably lead to government panels setting standards for the entire population. But not everyone – actually, not most of us – will fit those standards. With genetics driving medicine towards highly individualized care at all levels, the president’s upheaval plans will drive the nation to care by the averages, or, as one former senior Food and Drug Administration official called it in a talk with me recently, a lurching back to the Middle Ages of treatment.
-Keep our own plans: The president has said that no one will be forced to give up his or her current health plan. But increasingly it is clear that his program will drive current health plans from the market. As someone put it, “No, you won’t be forced to give up your current plan. It’s just that your current plan will cease to exist.”
-More: I could go on. But undoubtedly the best rundown of the misconceptions at the heart of the president’s plan and of why he has lost the debate is a book (available here — http://tinyurl.com/6rzagq — for free in pdf form) titled The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care: A Citizen’s Guide. It is by Sally Pipes, president of San Francisco’s Pacific Research Institute (of which I am chairman). “[F]or health care policy makers, it should be required reading,” says Steve Forbes in its introduction — not that the president’s people can be expected to heed Forbes’ advice.
On point after point, the president has been on the short end of the health care argument. Facts have got in his way so often as to raise doubts about whether the White House even has a fact checking staff.
Meanwhile, he and his allies have tried to ignore the increasingly loud and much better informed voices for modest reforms that might actually lower costs while improving access and quality. A recent and brilliant brief for this consumer-driven model appeared (http://tinyurl.com/lquswk) in the September issue of The Atlantic. By businessman and Democrat David Goldhill, it was just one dozens of recent appeals along the same lines: that if Washington’s Golden Rule is “he who has the gold makes the rules”, in health care each of us individually should have the gold: not the government, not our employer, us.
Over the weekend, the Rasmussen organization released polling numbers that found the percentage of likely voters strongly disapproving of the president’s handling of his job ten points higher than strong approving. Public opposition to his health care proposals was as large a week following his recent address to Congress as it was the week before. This debate is over – even if the power politics are not.
An old political rule says, if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. The more Mr. Obama demands passage of his unsaleable program, the higher his disapproval ratings go. The question now is, will he will he have the sense to stop digging?
Byron York has the story of Mitt Romney’s assessment of the president’s choice on Afghanistan.
The announcement today by President Obama, Prime Minister Brown and President Sarkozy marks a decisive moment for the West –but also another enormous failure of will by the three leaders. Iran gets two months to do what? Test a bomb? Does anyone really believe that a nation that has systematically lied for decades about their nuclear ambitions will suddenly change course, come clean, and dismantle all of their installations?
And why didn’t the presidents and the prime ministers use the podium of the U.N. to declare before the world that the outlaw nation that threatens the entire world’s stability needed to be brought to heel? Why indulge Ahmadinejad and his pal Chavez when the evidence was surely already in the possession of the president and our most important allies? Why force Prime Minister Netanyahu to do the heavy lifting before the world?
The sad answer is that President Obama leads a coalition of new appeasers, a group that cannot summon enough collective will to do more than warn the most dangerous government on the planet that sanctions will be forthcoming if it doesn’t stop doing that which it has refused to stop doing for a decade.
The only response for a rational citizen who wants very much for the U.S. to adopt the policies of strength that may yet deter Iran and to support our ally Israel in what looks increasingly like an inevitable air campaign against iran is to support voices and thinkers in America who have been right about the nature of the iranian regime for a long time and who have been urging decisive action for a long time, and that surely includes The Center for Security Policy.
You can donate to the Center online, and you can hear its founder and president, Frank Gaffney, at the the start of today’s program. Dig deep to help the voices of clarity which the Center supports stay in the center of the debate in the crucial months ahead.
UPDATE: A joint, bipartisan statement from Sentors Bayh, Kyl and Lieberman.
An excellent tune in the top place at Amaze.fm this week.
If you are the band, the singer or the songwriter, post your work at Amaze.fm and once a week the “pick of the week” gets played across the USA on my show.
Quite a week, with POTUS giving not one but two very disappointing speeches at the U.N., plus the fanatic from Iran and the nuts from Libya and Venezuala.
There’s also the “mark-up” in the Senate Finance Committee which underscores just how immense a gamble is being taken with American medicine. These senators really have no idea what they are voting for, and it is one-sixth of the U.S. economy they are playing with.
No wonder the cash is rolling in to the NRCC.org and NRSC.org. House Dems are worried but Speaker Pelosi is committeed to the public option and President Obama is unwilling to call a halt to that or any of the other terrible parts of the left’s scheme for ruining American health care.
It feels like an enormously long time until November 2010, but proponents of free markets, fiscal sanity and a strong defense –and of victory in Afghanistan and Iraq and of stopping Iran’s nuclear dreams– have to commit one day at a time to stay in the battle whatever it means that day.
So, what have you done for the cause lately?
That’s what one e-mailer wrote in response to my playing of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech to the U.N. today.
Michael Goldfarb has the speech here.
Duane has posted a side-by-side of President Obama and the Israeli Prime Minister at theHughniverse’s Duane’s World Blog, where your comments are most welcome.
The best response yet to Sam Tanenhaus’ new book, “The Death of Conservatism,” has arrived from one of my high tech captialist wizard friends. It is long but deserves a close read and a wide audience:
Greetings,
I found your interview last week with Sam Tanenhaus fascinating. Especially fascinating to me were Mr. Tanenhaus’ observations about the current state of the Conservative Movement. So, I thought I’d reply to them.
The American Left has been claiming, almost since the day Ronald Reagan left office that “American Conservatism was out of intellectual steam. There were no fresh or vital new ideas that would power Conservatism into the future.”
Well, setting aside the fact, that as far as I can tell the Last New Idea the Left had was “maybe, just maybe, we went a little overboard during the French Revolution”, I would like to reply to Mr. Tanenhaus and others who are saying the Conservatism is a Dead Letter.[# More #]
“Is the Conservative Movement in danger of collapsing from lack of
contemporaneous intellectual capacity? Has the intellectual side of the Movement become soft or flabby or acquiescent or has it gone drowsily navel gazing, dreaming only of Past Glories?”
I thought that the easiest way to evaluate the state of Conservative
intellectualism is compare “Political Science – Conservative Style” to the Physical Sciences – Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, etc.
The key to this analogy is how the different jobs and roles in the Physical Sciences mirror equivalent roles in the Conservative Movement.
A THEORETICAL PHYSICAL SCIENTIST – must know everything about her specialty – and having acquired that knowledge, the theoretician than examines the totality of their specialty from the outside and total systems viewpoint seeking new aspects, characteristics, behaviours, relationships and properties.
THE key point of theoretical breakthroughs is making an enormous
intellectual leap OUTSIDE the existing body of thought and knowledge about a given system.
To borrow a meme – the accomplished theoretician “Boldly Goes Where No Woman Has Gone Before” (wildly splitting infinitives and trashing grammar, wherever necessary, only for the sake of improving our human condition, of course.)
NEXT STEP — THE APPLIED PHYSICAL SCIENTIST – takes the newly discovered output of the theoretical scientist and says “Hmm, i didn’t know that about this system. Now that I have this new system property – what can i do with it in the real world?”
The applied scientist then goes on to take the newly discovered/emergent property and connect it to established processes/techniques/equipments/etc to find new capacities or to dramatically improve existing ones. These are the so-called “applications”.
NOW COMES THE ENGINEER – once the Applied Scientist had done her thing, and said “You can now make widgets or whatever at 10 times the speed/efficiency or 1/10th the time and/or cost of the OLD PROCESS…
The Engineer takes the Applied Scientists’ output and “boxes it for sale”…
LATHER, RINSE, REPEAT.
This is how science and technology have progressed since the Scientific Revolution.
NOW APPLYING THIS CLASSIFICATION OF DIFFERENT ROLES TO CONTEMPORARY CONSERVATIVE AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE…
William F. Buckley Jr., Frank Meyer, Willmoore Kendall, John Dos Passos, Samuel Insull, Andrew Mellon, Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, Leo Strauss, Irving Kristol, Milton Friedman, F. A. Hayek, Ludwig Von Mises, Albert JayNock, Wendell Wilkie, Andrew Carnegie, Pierpont and Jack Morgan, et al.
THESE were CONSERVATISM’S “THEORETICAL” POLITICAL SCIENTISTS.
They evolved the Basic Theoretical Framework(s) of Modern Conservatism. They POKED and PRODDED and INSPECTED and ARGUED and NAME CALLED and DESCRIBED THE
TOTALITY OF THE MODERN CONSERVATIVE SYSTEM – which has largely been an emerging process since one/other/both of the Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson and the emergence of the American Progressive Movement.
By the time WFB launched The National Review in 1955, Modern Conservatism was ready to launch along with it and in it.
Well, after our Conservative Theories were developed, next came the APPLIED POLITICAL SCIENTISTS. They brought Modern Conservative Theory to the Political Marketplace as elected politicians and policy experts.
William F. Buckley Jr., in addition to his prior importance as a
Conservative Theoretician, would also fulfill a huge role, over FIVE
decades, in the emergence of Conservative practices and policies.
Other “Applied Conservative Scientists” would have to include Goldwater and Reagan and Gingrich and the group of Young Turks within (and without) the 70’s/80’s GOP that brought the “Conservative System” to “market”, that is they became the “Salesmen” of the Conservative System to the general public.
THE LAST STEP IS ALWAYS ***engineering*** – Limbaugh, Hannity, the Salem Radio Network hosts, National Review, the Weekly Standard, Fox News, et al are effectively the “implementers” and “educators” and third-party
“analysts” of the existing well-defined Conservative System, educating the public as to what Conservative Theory looks like in the Real World, “boxing it for sale” as it were.
SO NOW THE SPECIFIC QUESTION WOULD BE…
…”DOES CONSERVATISM NEED A NEW ROUND OF THEORETICAL ANALYSIS?”
I’d say, “No”
I’d further say CONSERVATISM DOES NEED a NEW ROUND of “Applied Analysis” to make up for our current “Real World”; New Media, alterations in the legal, geopolitical and financial landscape, both in America and Abroad, this is NOT Ronald
Reagan’s or FDR’s World.
This is commonplace in the sciences; new discoveries lead to reevaluation and tweaking of existing systems. I would say that is exactly what is happening in the Conservative Movement at this time.
In politics usually a new round of analysis will be driven by “marketing failure”, i.e., widespread rejection by the voters.
Which is WHAT happened to us in 06/08. The Political Marketplace rejected us for numerous reasons, most of which will be known by anyone interested enough in politics to read this far.
The best response yet to Sam Tanenhaus’ new book, “The Death of Conservatism,” has arrived from one of my high tech captialist wizard friends. It is long but deserves a close read and a wide audience:
Greetings,
I found your interview last week with Sam Tanenhaus fascinating. Especially fascinating to me were Mr. Tanenhaus’ observations about the current state of the Conservative Movement. So, I thought I’d reply to them.
The American Left has been claiming, almost since the day Ronald Reagan left office that “American Conservatism was out of intellectual steam. There were no fresh or vital new ideas that would power Conservatism into the future.”
Well, setting aside the fact, that as far as I can tell the Last New Idea the Left had was “maybe, just maybe, we went a little overboard during the French Revolution”, I would like to reply to Mr. Tanenhaus and others who are saying the Conservatism is a Dead Letter.[# More #]
“Is the Conservative Movement in danger of collapsing from lack of
contemporaneous intellectual capacity? Has the intellectual side of the Movement become soft or flabby or acquiescent or has it gone drowsily navel gazing, dreaming only of Past Glories?”I thought that the easiest way to evaluate the state of Conservative
intellectualism is compare “Political Science – Conservative Style” to the Physical Sciences – Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, etc.The key to this analogy is how the different jobs and roles in the Physical Sciences mirror equivalent roles in the Conservative Movement.
A THEORETICAL PHYSICAL SCIENTIST – must know everything about her specialty – and having acquired that knowledge, the theoretician than examines the totality of their specialty from the outside and total systems viewpoint seeking new aspects, characteristics, behaviours, relationships and properties.
THE key point of theoretical breakthroughs is making an enormous
intellectual leap OUTSIDE the existing body of thought and knowledge about a given system.To borrow a meme – the accomplished theoretician “Boldly Goes Where No Woman Has Gone Before” (wildly splitting infinitives and trashing grammar, wherever necessary, only for the sake of improving our human condition, of course.)
NEXT STEP — THE APPLIED PHYSICAL SCIENTIST – takes the newly discovered output of the theoretical scientist and says “Hmm, i didn’t know that about this system. Now that I have this new system property – what can i do with it in the real world?”
The applied scientist then goes on to take the newly discovered/emergent property and connect it to established processes/techniques/equipments/etc to find new capacities or to dramatically improve existing ones. These are the so-called “applications”.
NOW COMES THE ENGINEER – once the Applied Scientist had done her thing, and said “You can now make widgets or whatever at 10 times the speed/efficiency or 1/10th the time and/or cost of the OLD PROCESS…
The Engineer takes the Applied Scientists’ output and “boxes it for sale”…
LATHER, RINSE, REPEAT.
This is how science and technology have progressed since the Scientific Revolution.
NOW APPLYING THIS CLASSIFICATION OF DIFFERENT ROLES TO CONTEMPORARY CONSERVATIVE AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE…
William F. Buckley Jr., Frank Meyer, Willmoore Kendall, John Dos Passos, Samuel Insull, Andrew Mellon, Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, Leo Strauss, Irving Kristol, Milton Friedman, F. A. Hayek, Ludwig Von Mises, Albert JayNock, Wendell Wilkie, Andrew Carnegie, Pierpont and Jack Morgan, et al.
THESE were CONSERVATISM’S “THEORETICAL” POLITICAL SCIENTISTS.
They evolved the Basic Theoretical Framework(s) of Modern Conservatism. They POKED and PRODDED and INSPECTED and ARGUED and NAME CALLED and DESCRIBED THE
TOTALITY OF THE MODERN CONSERVATIVE SYSTEM – which has largely been an emerging process since one/other/both of the Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson and the emergence of the American Progressive Movement.By the time WFB launched The National Review in 1955, Modern Conservatism was ready to launch along with it and in it.
Well, after our Conservative Theories were developed, next came the APPLIED POLITICAL SCIENTISTS. They brought Modern Conservative Theory to the Political Marketplace as elected politicians and policy experts.
William F. Buckley Jr., in addition to his prior importance as a
Conservative Theoretician, would also fulfill a huge role, over FIVE
decades, in the emergence of Conservative practices and policies.Other “Applied Conservative Scientists” would have to include Goldwater and Reagan and Gingrich and the group of Young Turks within (and without) the 70’s/80’s GOP that brought the “Conservative System” to “market”, that is they became the “Salesmen” of the Conservative System to the general public.
THE LAST STEP IS ALWAYS ***engineering*** – Limbaugh, Hannity, the Salem Radio Network hosts, National Review, the Weekly Standard, Fox News, et al are effectively the “implementers” and “educators” and third-party
“analysts” of the existing well-defined Conservative System, educating the public as to what Conservative Theory looks like in the Real World, “boxing it for sale” as it were.SO NOW THE SPECIFIC QUESTION WOULD BE…
…”DOES CONSERVATISM NEED A NEW ROUND OF THEORETICAL ANALYSIS?”
I’d say, “No”
I’d further say CONSERVATISM DOES NEED a NEW ROUND of “Applied Analysis” to make up for our current “Real World”; New Media, alterations in the legal, geopolitical and financial landscape, both in America and Abroad, this is NOT Ronald
Reagan’s or FDR’s World.This is commonplace in the sciences; new discoveries lead to reevaluation and tweaking of existing systems. I would say that is exactly what is happening in the Conservative Movement at this time.
In politics usually a new round of analysis will be driven by “marketing failure”, i.e., widespread rejection by the voters.
Which is WHAT happened to us in 06/08. The Political Marketplace rejected us for numerous reasons, most of which will be known by anyone interested enough in politics to read this far.
The GOP Elect are clearly struggling to adjust to a: Blackberry, iPhone, iPod, Zune, Twitter, DIGG, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, HDTV world. We now operate in a world where the Old Rules of political marketing and discussion have been radically altered or completely upended. And, as Conservatives we’ll have to adapt to that New World or else…
This is a world my Fellow Technologists and I couldn’t precisely predict only 3 or 4 years ago, and politics moves much more slowly then technology.
The Conservative Founders clearly recognized the dangers of intellectual stasis, but they also believed the dynamics of the political system would either catalyze change or the political marketplace would consume any party or political system that refused to adapt…
“March Or Die” as the Foreign Legion says….
I think Our Movement will be fine, if we, in a concerted and prudential fashion, take the “Wisdom of the Fathers” and adapt it to this New, All-Connected, All-The-Time World.
IF WE DO NEED NEW THEORIES…there are PLENTY of people such as; John Fund, Jonah Goldberg, Sean Hannity, Bill Kristol, Rich Lowry, Andy McCarthy, John Podhoretz, Jennifer Rubin Mark Steyn, and others too numerous to mention (My Apologies to All The Others, No Slight Intended).
If Mr. Tanenhaus would ONLY look at JUST the blog spaces Conservatives meet on the Web at; Commentary, National Review, Townhall, Twitter, the Weekly Standard, and the other thousands and thousands of personal blogs devoted to
Conservative thought, Mr. Tanenhaus would find 24/7/365 lively, vital, frenetic, occasionally splenetic discussions of who we are, what we stand for, and what to do next.These thousands upon thousands of conversations are perhaps little streams, but they are coming together to form a Mighty River of Conservative Activism that will form the Rock upon which the New Generation of Conservatism will be built.
“Old”, “Tired”, “Worn Out”?
Really?
My advice to Mr. Tanenhaus – “Keep your eye out for that Mighty River.”