Tight

According to the conventional wisdom, while President Obama and Mitt Romney are running almost even in the popular vote, the President is handily ahead in the Electoral College. Close examination of the Electoral College tells a different story. If one visits the Realclearpolitics website and looks for the Do It Yourself electoral map, one sees immediately that the conventional narrative is not correct. On the DIY map, one begins with the Realclearpolitics map, in which the President is indeed ahead but nowhere close to the 270 electoral votes needed to secure reelection. At present, the map shows the President with 121; if one awards North Carolina nd Virginia to Romney--both of which I think are very likely--then the electoral count is 119-121. Romney will need to fight hard to get to 270, but so will President Obama. The race is much closer than the pundits say and at the moment is at least as likely to go Romney's way as Obama's.

That's one reason for increasing Democrat worry, which TMH thinks will manifest itself in a bitter, sardonic, superior and generally off putting Democrat Convention next week. Another reason for their desperation to reelect the President is that the Democrat Party faces a most uncertain future. Who, for example, can they nominate four years from now if the President should not be reelected? The only Democrat we can think of who has a favorable national profile is Hillary Clinton, while as they showed at the convention this week, the Republicans have an attractive array of people plausible as national candidates. From Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico to Nikki Haley of South Carolina, from Mia Love to Paul Ryan himself the Republican Party has an amazing and attractive deep field of inspirational leaders.

That Sly Carney Smile

Today the White House press briefing apparently witnessed quite a clatter about the advertisement by Priorities USA that presents the testimony of Joe Soptic, a former steel worker, who claims that his being laid off after Bain Capital assumed control of his company led to his wife's lack of treatment for and death from cancer. It has now become clear that Mitt Romney was no more connected with Mrs Soptic's death than was Kevin Bacon, yet Jay Carney again and again deflected any suggestion by the press corps that the President should denounce this fraud.

While we had thought that the Clinton Administration epitomized postmodernism, press briefings such as the one today gild the lily by showing that this White House can even spin spin. Far more worrisome than the ad itself--it's not as if we haven't seen and survived outrageous attacks before in American political history--is Jay Carney's supercilious treatment of the matter. With his smile telegraphing a smug certainty that his side only benefits from the controversy, Carney himself did what the Administration has been doing for the past several days in refusing to respond directly to the issue itself. The ad claims quite fraudulently that Romney is partly responsible for Mrs Soptic's death; on the other hand, it is now quite clear that the White House itself is the origin of the lie told in the ad--a lie compounded by the lie given out earlier this week that the White House had no connection to the ad whatsoever. So we are left with a completely bizarre situation of the White House casting opprobrium on Romney for something he never did, while flatly lying about its own behavior.

How to account for this mess? The White House is doing what it's doing because it knows that for the time being, it can only profit from this situation. So far, the White House has managed very successfully to avoid responsibility for any of its bad behavior, intentional or unintentional. With the economy in a dangerous deceleration and fuel prices again on the rise, the White House continues to blame George W. Bush, and the mainstream media utters no protest. In short order, Iran will have a nuclear weapon, which among other things will show the abysmal failure of the President's policy in the Middle East, and again the White House simply refuses to talk about the matter. In the rare moments that anyone pays attention to the deficit, which is rapidly increasing under Obama's tenure, the White House points out that Romney's tax proposals would...wait for it: increase the deficit.

And thus the White House sticks with the tactics that have served it so well over the past several years. Since the mainstream media acquiesced four years ago and refused to hold Obama accountable for any of his shortcomings--from a breathtaking lack of experience to his deeply suspicious associations with people like Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright--the White House knows that the majority of the media will refuse to hold the President responsible for any other mischief he may get up to. That leaves more centrist and conservative news outlets, such as Fox or the Drudge Report, but these institutions have been successfully ghettoized by the Administration and those in the mainstream media in competition with Fox and Drudge. Indeed, just days ago Jay Carney attacked the Drudge Report with a wink and a nod, insinuating for all those in the press room who speak his language that Drudge is an unreliable source, and the Obama Administration has practically made a second career of attacking Fox News. Not only, therefore, does itself never take responsibility for any of it's many failings but it has insulated itself from any criticism by others.

So the White House knows that if the President does not disavow the ad, the press will soon neuter the issue by beginning to report not on the President's lack of response but on the controversy as a controversy, which promotes the matter from being a crisis to which the President should respond to a matter that people are talking about. In the meantime, while people talk about it, the original claim--that Romney killed Mrs Soptic--continues to be made over and over, the claim will continue to run up Mitt Romney's negatives, and the swing states will slip ever further into to the blue column. Romney will lose, and in the warm glow of the second inauguration everyone will forget the filthy politics of the Reelect Obama campaign. And all the while, the lie that Mrs Soptic died because of being without health insurance will bolster support for Obamacare. On the other hand, if this controversy should suddenly grow into a crisis for the President, he can always step in and denounce the ad at any moment, in which case Romney's negatives will have still have increased, and the President will look like the post-partisan shining white knight that in his previous campaign he claimed to be.

The only way to handle such a crisis is for Romney himself to forget himself once and for all. He needs to quit thinking that this election is about him, his record, his resume, his ambition, his kind and moral decency and to engage in the fight filled with the conviction that the campaign is about three things (none of which happens to be Mitt Romney): the nation, which is rapidly deteriorating, the utter incompetence of this president, and the outrageous venality of a White House so desperate to fulfill its lust for power that it not only capitalize on the agonizing death of a good woman but freely, smilingly lie while doing so and about doing so. Romney needs, in short not to defend himself in the matter of Mrs Soptic but to talk fiercely and relentlessly about this situation as one that shows the utter corruption of this Administration. And he needs to select as his running mate not an avuncular Midwestern slice of bland white bread but a person with enough of a vision of what American liberty really means that the Republican ticket can wage a bold, inspiring campaign in the late summer and fall. Mitt Romney has a responsibility to all Republicans and all conservatives to do just that.

Whether Romney has the humility to forget himself and think only about the good of the nation is an open question. We sincerely hope he does. Having sought the nomination for president, he has a responsibility to do everything--within the bounds of honesty--to win the office. If he doesn't, those on the other side will have learned, once again, that the way to gain power and to govern is to lie with impunity, destroy the reputations of good people, and smile--ever so knowingly--while they do so.

Don't Blame Us for the Culture War, Part II

This morning, The Weekly Standard had this to say on its website about the apparently record day of sales at Chic-fil-A yesterday: "Pastor Rick Warren reported last night on Twitter that fast food chain Chick-fil-A 'set a world record' yesterday. His claim is based off a phone call he had with Dan Cathy, the CEO of Chick-fil-A who ignited a culture war when he expressed his preference for traditional marriage." While we generally love The Weekly Standard, we recognize that as a fallible organ it occasionally misspeaks, and so it has here.

Dan Cathy did NOT "ignite a culture war": first of all, the culture war has long been raging. Second, Cathy merely said what, for example, President Obama used to say as recently as this winter. Third, those who came out to support Chic-fil-A yesterday showed how opposed they are to an escalation of the war. When one can be punished by the government (in the form of municipalities that refuse to allow your business to expand in their towns) express an opinion that was apparently fine just six months ago, then we are on a very slippery slope to a nightmare world governed by adepts in Doublespeak.

Or maybe it's reached the level of Triplespeak by now. How many of those who say that a person must be punished for saying today what was fine for the President to say several months ago would be willing to punish radical Muslims who think not just that marriage should be reserved for heterosexuals but that those who disagree ought to be killed?

Comfortable Illusions, Hard Reality

Today is a sad day in American political and judicial history. Our Supreme Court has shown itself once again to be masters of sophistry, laying themselves open to the preposterous arguments of the Obama Administration which claims on certain days of the week that the individual mandate is not a tax and on other days that it is a tax; in so doing, the current ruling lies in a tradition of decisions based upon untruth. The beginning of this tradition is the claim in Griswold v. Connecticut that when the Constitution supplies no grounds for a certain decision, shadows and penumbras (i.e., pretexts) will provide the excuse necessary to allow a ruling that the actual text of the Constitution will not allow; one remembers, too, that Roe v. Wade was based upon the lie that Norma Jean McCorvey had been impregnated as a result of rape, a lie that McCorvey herself has often repudiated. That we are governed by sophistry is really no surprise, since sophistry is simply the most expedient alternative to truth. Truth, which is simply the description of reality, conveys the realities of existence, one of the most basic of which is that success requires hard work and that short cuts usually give us terrible results. Today's decision bynthe Supreme Court underscores precisely those truths about life. As a society, we reject ever more emphatically these ancient truths, and so we are left with illusion, with the hope (half, after all, of the President's reason for being) that we can leave easy, comfortable lives not requiring much in the way of hard, sacrificial contact with the rough surface of reality. It is precisely this love of illusion, which tells us that we can have something for nothing, that has placed us in our current predicament. Several years ago, when things in Iraq were difficult, we began as a society to say that we never needed to be there to make that sacrifice, that in fact the only reason we were there is because President Bush unilaterally decided to invade that nation. We delude ourselves into forgetting that Congress voted to give the President the authority to invade Iraq--even those liberal Senators voted for it. So then, faced with historical reality, we fall back on the illusion that President Bush lied us into war, that he tricked us, once again ignoring the historical reality that President Bush provided all the relevant intelligence to Congress before their vote and that most of those who voted for the invasion and later claimed to be against it refused even to look at the President's evidence when it was offered. So we prefer illusion, which is more convenient in the short term, though it leaves us with the dangerous ability to justify virtually any conduct with virtually any argument. It is this love of illusion that led many people to vote for President Obama in 2008, on the grounds that "Hope and Change" actually meant something, that it was not the empty slogan of the demagogue. And in voting for him, so many were able to congratulate themselves on choosing cool over the solid virtue and hard-won accomplishment of John McCain, President Obama's opponent. Such was the clear implication of Peggy Noonan, who, if she really is as sophisticated as she thinks of herself as being, ought to have known better. But that's precisely the problem: she, and so many others like her, are sophisticated, too clever for the hard old virtues, and so she breathed huskily about how cool and sophisticated Senator Obama is. Her sophistication also expressed itself with disdain about Sarah Palin, also a person who achieved success with hard work bred by her association with old unsophisticated understanding of the hardness of the world in the way it really works. This illusion that we can be politically cool without consequence is now shown finally to be dangerous. A vote for Obama was a vote, as he warned us, for a complete transformation of our society. Now that the damage has been done, we are again faced with a choice, this time perhaps possibly final. The only way to repudiate the dangerous life of political illusion into which we have fallen is to wake ourselves and take up the hard task of hard electoral politics. That it can be done is evident by the recent victory in Wisconsin, but it will take across the nation what it took there--sacrificial financial contribution and sacrificial commitment of time and energy. In the short term, this decision by the Supreme Court is a good thing, since, by placing the very unpopular health care bill at the center of the summer campaign, it may well be the nail in the President's coffin. But the defeat of Obama will not undo his legislation. The only way to do that is to keep the House and win the Senate by an overwhelming margin. Again, that can be done, but it will take a commitment to almost superhuman and sacrificial political virtue. If, as has so far been the case, we prefer life of illusion because political life in the real world is just too hard, then we will find that we have today taken a very great slide along what Hayek called the Road to Serfdom. A couple of months ago on The O'Reilly Factor, Bernie Goldberg made the arresting remark that Americans are addicted to entertainment and that that addiction is a very bad thing. Entertainment gives us cool; its very heart blood is to take the empty and insignificant and by dressing it smartly, providing it with an emotional soundtrack, giving it a script full of currently cool expressions, and surrounding it with carefully-coordinated pastel backdrops, making us believe that it means anything. The mere fact that we can let ourselves be thus deceived--and deceived to the point of electing Barack Obama--means that we are no longer instinctively at home in the world of hard reality. The only way to recover our identity as truly free men is to tear our eyes from the meretricious and eternally flickering images on the wall of Plato's cave and begin the long, hard slog up the tunnel into the harsh light of the world of reality. If we don't, we can continue to enjoy the life of illusion for awhile longer. But if we wish to recover what we've lost, we will need to elect a conservative Congress that will not only repeal the Affordable Care Act and confirm as a matter of course conservative justices to the Supreme Court, year after year. Nothing else will do.

Praise and Blame

Kudos to George Clooney for appearing on Fox News Sunday this morning in order to bring attention to the plight of non-combatant civilians in Sudan. Good show first of all that the über liberal Clooney would appear on Fox, which is typically a whipping boy of committed leftists, even better that he's calling attention to the hardships of innocent civilians in a corner of the world that few people care about. To our mind, Clooney is a fair-minded liberal of the sort that one can have constructive dialogue with, not one of the all-too-common type today for whom power is everything and who therefore are willing to stoop to any tactics to achieve their goals.


No kudos whatsoever to President Obama for his response to another place in which non-combatant civilians are being ground beneath the authoritarian boot in the worst tradition of the twentieth century: Syria. We have discussed before the odd fact that when the Arab spring came to regimes friendly or responsive to the United States, the President lent both moral and material support to those who overthrew those regimes, while in places like Iran and Syria, with regimes hostile to the United States, he says as little as he can get away with. Not being conspiracy theorists, we don't charge the President here with a hidden agenda, but we do think that he ought to speak out against tyranny where freedom has a serious chance of replacing it. President Obama's virtual silence two years ago during the uprisings in Tehran was shameful; equally shameful is his lack of vigorous response to the rebellion in Syria. The people of Syria are worthy of immense respect for their dogged resistance in the face of overwhelming firepower. Even two months ago their cause seemed hopeless, which alone earns them the respect of freedom loving people everywhere. Now, with no help from the United States, the rebels appear to have a significant chance of overthrowing Bashar al-Assad. (According to the Washington Bureau Chief of Al-Jazeera this week, Assad seems to have lost politically, and the sense in Syria is that he will be leaving.) That the United States appears indifferent to their heroic and inspiring attempt at freedom is a terrible thing which can only damage our reputation as the friend of freedom everywhere in the world.

Not Mitt

Politically, it has been a rich and confusing cycle. A year ago, speculation was rampant about which of the strong Republican contenders would enter the race for President, and there were many--Mitch Daniels, Sarah Palin, Chris Christie, Haley Barbour. In the end, we were left with a rather weak field, led by Mitt Romney, who looks good on paper but in the flesh leaves the average Republican voter interested, but for all the wrong reasons. I share with many Republicans two objections to Romney, one which he might have been able to overcome and one which I think will end the prove seriously damaging not only to him personally but also to the Republican Party.

The first is the obvious problem of solving the riddle. As Governor of Massachusetts, Romney governed like a liberal--not perhaps compared with most recent politicians from the state but compared to virtually all Republicans anywhere else. He compromised a great deal and did not fight for conservative principles. Many have explained that governing from the right is not a serious option in Massachusetts, and they may be correct; however, governing from the center or center left doesn't leave one with any serious credentials as a Republican man of experience. The fact is that Romney's political experience would suit a Democrat perfectly--leftish but still reasonable enough to make him palatable to voters in the general election. The lack of a serious conservative record means that what we most want to know about him--whether he will fight the liberals in the Senate for, say, conservative nominees to the Supreme Court--is a serious question. In as polarized a polity as is ours at the present time, we can no longer afford David Souters on the Court. Romney claims that he is conservative, but that claim is belied by his record as Governor. Will he govern as a conservative from the White House? His record makes it impossible to say.

The second problem is the manner in which he runs his campaign. Since his politics are murky, he finds it difficult to run a positive campaign: I still cannot say what exactly Romney stands for, other than general competence (precisely what Michael "this election is not about ideology but about competence" Dukakis ran on in 1988). Neither, apparently, can many other voters, which is why, when the field was larger, week after week, the attitude of anyone but Romney launched Bachmann, Perry, Gingrich, Cain, and Santorum to the front of the pack. In contrast with Romney, each of these candidates had a positive message which allowed voters to distinguish between them. And as soon as each of these candidates began to look like a serious contender, Romney began savagely to attack, wounding each of them so badly that they began to falter. To be sure, some of these candidates, like Perry and Cain, also damaged themselves, but Romney ensured that they would not survive the heavy artillery of his negative ads. That is one way to ensure that no one stands in Romney's way, but it will also ensure bad feeling and further lack of trust. Part of the wisdom of Reagan's famous eleventh commandment is that it promotes good feeling within the Party; Romney's destructive, negative campaign does just the opposite. What he did to Gingrich, and Gingrich's immature but natural and thus understandable response, is a perfect example of what such negative campaigning can do.

In the end, Romney is likely to win the nomination. He may even defeat President Obama. If he does so, however, it will be not because anyone likes Romney and is willing to support him because of what he stands for. Rather, it will be because he trashed the other guys. That is not a mandate. As Newt Gingrich showed in the 1990s and Barack Obama more recently, much can be accomplished by a positive campaign. And neither of these men ran simply one-dimensional positive campaigns: both were willing to make clear distinctions between themselves and what they thought was bad policy for the country. But relentlessly negative campaigns don't do that. In Romney's case, trashing the other guy still tells us nothing about Romney--other than that he very, very badly wants to be President. I am not at all convinced that they who want it the most ought to have it.

The President at College

No, we are not at present discussing the fact that President Obama, who promised unparalleled transparency, has not released his college transcripts. Why he has not, no one can be quite sure: perhaps his transcripts would run counter to the myth of Obama's native brilliance, a myth, it's worth pointing out, that involves far more than the current President himself, since every Republican Presidential nominee in our memory has always been portrayed as a dunce (sometimes amiable, sometimes not) and every Democratic nominee as an intellectual giant. It is an article of faith in the mainstream media, so much so that one can hardly blame John Kerry for famously lamenting on election day 2004 in regard to George W. Bush, "I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot." The reflexively contradictory nature of the statement itself might have been a clue that something is inherently wrong with the myth; for those innocent of elementary logic, the historical fact might have been instructive, since the putative Republican dunces more often than not defeat the Democratic geniuses. In an enterprise of such complexity--rhetorical, historical, sociological, statistical, economic, and so on--as a national election, the intellectual David really should not be able to slay the mental Goliath with such predictable regularity.

But let all that pass: it is with President Obama's comments yesterday at the University of Michigan that we have to do. In decrying the rapid rise of college tuition, the President put public universities on notice that if they do not find a way to curb cost, he will find ways to withhold Federal money from their budgets. As usual (and as more usual in an election year), some Republicans reacted negatively to this proposal, arguing that the President is again interfering with Freedom of Enterprise by telling colleges how they should charge tuition. Now we have no doubt that the President, also well aware that this is an election year, is saying what he is saying for the worst possible reasons, but it does give one pause that in the matter of college tuition, the President at the very least has a genuine issue on which to give a speech. For the past fifty years, the best path to a comfortably affluent life led through a college education to a profession that allowed one the potential for growth as the economy continued its predictable expansion. Now, however, college, and with it the reasonable certainty of a good life is being pushed beyond the reach of the middle class. In the case of TMH, college some thirty or so years ago cost (without room and board) about $1000 per year, and the last two years were easily paid for by unsought scholarships that came as the reward of the merest modicum of effort. This was of course at a public university, but certainly not a third-rate one: the fact was that a solid education in the Honors College of a major public university could be had in those days for so modest a cost. In such a case, paying for tuition and books was well within the reach of most middle-class parents, even if it meant some sacrifice. One of the major reasons for these low costs is that the universities in those days were modest affairs that functioned by providing the basic elements of a university education: students, faculty, facilities (including dormitories and a library or two), and the minimal administration necessary to keep faculty and students together.

Now, however, things are different. College costs vastly more--so much more that providing children to college now requires on the order of $15,000-$20,000 a year, even at very small regional public universities. To be sure, some of the increase is due to the cost of better facilities, such as dorms that look like reports, with suites for sleeping, basement wellness center for exercise of the body, and lounges and computer labs putatively for improvement of the mind. Still, such costs are relatively fixed in the sense that the residence resort gets built only once and probably does not cost vastly more to maintain than does the old concrete dorm built a quarter-century ago in the brutalist style apparently so essential to the aesthetic experience of a higher education across the land. A much larger potential expense is new employees at the universities. First, such employees, whoever they be, are not a one-time expense like the new building: they require an annual salary, which may be frequently increased over the course of their twenty-five or thirty years of employment, and they require the medical plans that come with these salaries. Second, colleges over the past quarter century have tended to hire not so much new faculty members but administrators. Colleges do so for the simple reason that colleges--at least public colleges--are, like virtually all other governmental or quasi-governmental organizations, bureaucracies, and the main principle about bureaucracies, first and last, is that they exist primarily for the benefit of those they employ. In the case of public colleges, they have since the 1980s almost without exception evolved into institutions which exist primarily to provide (relatively well-paid) employment for those working there. And so, like all bureaucracies, they must perpetuate themselves, primarily by continuing to hire more administrators to oversee the paradoxically growing number of administrators. Spatula has pointed out that as a national average colleges now employ more administrators than faculty members, a baroque condition entirely unnecessary if universities existed to educate students.

TMH has only a sentimental opposition to bureaucracy: in the cold light of logical analysis, we have no firm opposition to any private corporation that wishes for its own ends to hire as many administrators as there are offices in its buildings, computers to monitor, or keyboards at which to type. But public institutions, which are funded to a large degree by taxpayer money--that is to say by the salaries of average men and women working in order to provide better lives for their families--have a responsibility to treat their budgets and their missions with the greatest respect. Those administrators who are paid by public money have an obligation to use those funds precisely to educate students. When faced with a choice, they should always decide to hire the extra faculty member, who may very well be essential and thus by educating his students make a very real contribution to the public good, rather then the third assistant vice president for intramural affairs. The unfortunate matter of fact is that over time college administrations have grown more autocratic and have taken on more and more power to make the essential decisions, while faculty lose ever more voice in collegiate governance; it is no surprise that in the end the administrators in charge of slicing the pie slice it so that they receive ever larger portions. As an actual fact, then, public universities have to a large degree become marked by a soft and genteel corruption, in which administrators partly direct funds meant for education to increasing their own salaries and hiring lieutenants onto whose shoulders they shift more of the actual workload required to run the institutions they control. This has long been the state of public education from kindergarten through high school; it should be no surprise that the contagion has now spread to public universities.

I suspect that in the case of President Obama's proposal, the devil may be in the details, as it has been in so many of his policies (such as the Affordable Halth Care Act); but in its general outline, we agree with his central idea. If public universities continue unthinkingly to increase the size, wealth, and power of administrations, then they should do so without public money. For the simple matter is that these institutions could never survive if they genuinely had to compete in the educational marketplace. If they had to do so, then they would have to focus upon education and put most of their money to that task: university administrations are free not to do so precisely because they are sheltered from the rough weather of competition by the steady supply of government money. Take that away, and administrators, faced with the choice of extinction or education will either retire or turn their attention to educating students, which will result in leaner administrations and a redressing of the current imbalance of power in favor of faculties. It may be heresy to some whose knees jerk in too reactionary a fashion that President Obama is on the right side of an increasingly important issue, but so he seems to be. We hope that it accrues to our favor to point out that saying so at least causes us considerable pain.

The Death of Jobs

Sometimes life is an allegory. If Plato and all his fellow idealists are right, life is always exactly that, but sometimes no matter how skeptical you are, life seems transparently scripted in certain ironic moments almost to shout at us the meanings behind the events we experience. Such is the case with the death of Steve Jobs, which made the nation sadder yesterday. I will say little about his passing itself, since so many others more qualified to speak about the man and his achievements have already eulogized him so eloquently and so well. But even I, technologically challenged as I am, have enough experience with the Macintosh computer, the iPod, and now the iPad to lament the passing of one who has revolutionized technology and the way virtually all humans experience it--as well as to lament all the innovations that he would have made had he been granted another few decades among us.

No, what I wish to discuss even more is one of meanings of his passing at just this moment. Surely Jobs' death is ironic since it comes at a time when we are beginning to see the results of our President's socialist vision of spreading the wealth and, instead of encouraging a society that produces, satisfies itself with spending the capital that other generations have created. In the 1970s, when Apple was getting off the ground, Jobs was producing during the day what he had dreamed at night in part because he worked in a field in which government was absent. He did not have to worry about regulations, about government making decisions which he himself could make much better on his own. He was free to create, free to fail, and therefore free also to do everything in his power to ensure that he succeeded. And succeed he did by creating products that people wanted, that met their needs, and that vastly multiplied human freedom by serving as tools that allowed users to unleash their creativity.

Now, however, we inhabit a different world. Candidate Obama promised fundamentally to transform American society, and unfortunately that means changing even what is good about America, like the freedom that Jobs enjoyed to transform America in a far less authoritarian way. No, the President's transformation entails using the power of government to deprive people of choice as ever-increasing regulation tells us what to do and what not to do--in short, as regulation makes those decisions for us that constitute our freedom as human beings and allow us to capitalize on that freedom to create the goods such as those that Steve Jobs did at Apple. While some worry about technology impairing humanity, it might be fairer to say that the greater perennial threat to human nature is expansion of government beyond Constitutional limits. If the great stream of Western philosophy is correct in teaching that the essence of humanity is freedom, then a government that renders us less free by coercing ever more of our behavior and making ever more of our decisions for us poses a very real threat to the freedom that defines us as human beings.

Thus, it should come as no surprise that as government grows, jobs die. It is more than simply a pun to point out that the current lesson of the growth of government killing jobs comes at a time when Steve Jobs died, that great symbol of innovation and economic freedom that has made life so much better for so many people. And he did so with no force other than persuasive power. If you wanted his products, you bought them; if you didn't, you didn't. But that's the way Jobs was--freedom for himself and freedom for you. President Obama, however, has a different vision. For the promise of more government largesse, he asserts that government is the solution of all problems. In his view, government must grow, and therefore it must intrude ever further into your life and mine, taking ever more of our fundamental humanity as it makes ever more of the decisions that define the essence of our humanity.

Steve Jobs will live on in the innovations produced by his vision, his freedom, and his choices. And when the United States eventually replaces President Obama's statist vision with one that again treats us all like adults capable of making our own ways in the world, the jobs--as represented by Steve Jobs--will once again return and allow us all to live the lives we choose.

It is Hard to Grow Up

In 1999 the French novelist and thinker Pascal Bruckner published a book-length essay entitled La tentation de l'innocence, in which he ponders the question of why in the West--the freest, most affluent society in the history of the world--so many people purport to be discontented, alienated, and oppressed. Ultimately, he arrives at the conclusion that many westerners, deprived of much in the way of spiritual education, satisfy themselves with a consumerist mentality, viewing themselves primarily as physical beings, whose endless desires are endlessly catered to by a capitalistic society that encourages consumerism so as to foster its own wealth. As a result, many in the West have lost touch with basic human values--particularly freedom, which allows individuals through rational choice and hard work to make meaningful and ultimately virtuous and happy lives.

Instead, says Bruckner, many in western society have adopted an attitude of passivity and often of infantilism, since doing so assures them that like the infants they aspire to be, their needs and desires will be met, not so much by their own parents but by the state, which in alarming ways acts ever more, as time goes on, in loco parentis. And acting like infants entails adopting the pose of the victim. Whoever is a victim, says Bruckner, is entitled to the sympathy of society, to the protection of the paternal state, to a life free from the possibility of catastrophe or failure. Indeed, Bruckner gives several examples of even radical Muslims who play the ultimate trump in the game of sympathy--identifying themselves with the Jews of the Holocaust. For whoever can claim to be currently in the position of European Jewry in the middle decades of the last century has it bad; no misfortune in history, as Timothy Snyder has shown again in his masterful Bloodlands, compares with that of the Jews subjected to the Holocaust.

Bruckner provides good evidence for his thesis--some shocking, some (as in the case of the woman who, after bathing her poodle and then attempting to dry it in her microwave, sued the manufacturer of the oven for not issuing a warning against using it to dry live animals) amusing (depending, of course, on how one feels about poodles)--and all of it adds up to a depressing assessment for those who subscribe to Edmund Burke's belief that free societies require a virtuous populace. More depressing still when one reflects that were he writing the book today Bruckner might find in the riots currently under weigh in England (to say nothing of the anti-austerity demonstrations in Greece, Spain, and Israel) more examples to hand than he could possibly use.

But it strikes me that Bruckner's analysis also goes far toward explaining our present discontents here in our fretful American summer of 2011. At a time that requires robust leadership we have in the highest office in the land a President who embodies the infantilization of culture lamented in Bruckner's book. Does Bruckner argue that we are plagued by people with no discernible values? One might ask what President Obama's core values are--besides his obvious thirst for reelection. As many have pointed out, "hope and change" is curiously devoid of any specific content, since the phrase can mean anything one wants it to. Indeed the mantra functions very like a mirror: the content it provides is only a view of whoever happens to look into it at the moment. If Bruckner writes about a populace in which everyone is convinced of his own uniqueness and therefore his own special right to privileges that do not extend to others, one is reminded of the sheer amount of money our President and his family have spent on junkets and self-serving indulgences afforded by the office he holds. And if in Bruckner's view many westerners behave like children because they wish not to hold responsibility and are therefore free from the need to act, one is reminded starkly of President Obama's incessant, ungracious habit of blaming others for our current problems. He is never responsible; Democrats--even when for two years they held the White House and large majorities in the Congress (including for a time a supermajority in the Senate)--are never to blame. His habit of never calling for and never proposing a budget (except for his feckless budget in the spring, which even every Democrat in the Senate voted against) demonstrates that he wishes to enjoy the office without ever taking the responsibility of holding a position, itself a perfect illustration of what Bruckner means when he writes of the citizen as child.

If Bruckner's book, however, helps us see that a little thoughtful cultural criticism can help us diagnose pressing difficulties, the book also yields melancholy reflections as well, such as the fear that if the problem was alarming enough in France and Europe to call for attention twenty years ago, might the malady have now crossed the Atlantic and come to our shores? Does the fact that we have in the Oval Office a leader who perfectly embodies the infantile behavior that Bruckner discusses mean that America is now very far down the yellow brick road to the puerile utopia of Oz, or is Barack Obama a cautionary tale, a warning that if we are not careful we could end up like Europe--i.e., at the mercy of the marauding yobs currently setting Britain aflame? It is difficult to know, but the next election should go far toward answering that question.

Whether or not Barack Obama represents American character, one thing is certain: his current lack of leadership should come as no surprise at all. He has spent the past three years complaining about the state of the Union, and with some justification, for we are in difficult circumstances. But a complaint is a dodge. It is an admission of powerlessness; it is an assertion that nothing is to be done but, as Shakespeare's very passive Richard II puts it when faced with the great crisis of his reign, "sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings." It is an admission by the passive man-boy that he is not up to the task, that the world is too much for him to handle. The habit of blame in itself tells us that our President has no real solutions. If he did, if he were confident in his principles, if, in short, he were a leader, blame would be irrelevant. He would welcome difficulty for the challenge that it is; he would remind this nation it is great because God has blessed our character with a spirit that rises to a challenge and delights in difficulty, and, as if to illustrate that very truth, he would square his shoulders and get to work. As it is, he blames. He points out tirelessly that he is not responsible. And in so doing he convinces more than any speech he could ever give that indeed he is not responsible--in any sense of the word.

One Cheer for Fareed

Last Thurday night, driving home from work, I thought I had reached a milestone--metaphorically speaking, of course, because there are no literal milestones in my neck of the woods, unlike, say, along the Appian Way in the imperial days of ancient Rome. No, this milestone was an intellectual milestone, a stone that stood as unshakeable testimony to such an intense intellectual life that it occasionally produced something original. I speak of Fareed Zakaria, the much vaunted journalist and intellectual that graces the pages of Time and appears at the center of his own show each week on CNN. He has all the makings of a star--an international background, heavy with experience in the newly-chic cultures of South and Central Asia, a fist-class education, the ability to hold his own in conversation with the best of them, and yet I must confess that over the years I have found him, well, just a bit thin. Be honest, gentle reader: have you ever actually learned anything from the man? Have you ever come away from his page in Time or his show on the tube and said to yourself, "Yes, I admire the strongly counterintuitive stand he's taking"? Or have you ever thought to yourself after reading his prose or listening to his admittedly musical voice, "Well, there's an idea I've never encountered before. What bold, fresh thinking"? I must confess that after seeing hime a number of times on the ABC show This Week, I came away with the feeling that Zakaria embodies what Alexander Pope once described as the great virtue of fine verse: he says "what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed." I have heard him explaining that the war in Afghanistan is difficult, I have heard him say that the President's health-care bill faced a tough fight in Congress, I have even heard him go way out on a limb and opine that corruption is bad for countries. But I have never heard him utter an opinion that is bold, striking, and that in the gathering mists of time one will always associate with him.

It need not be thus. Public intellectuals can indeed--and often do--say striking things. Rightly or wrongly, Bernard-Henri Levy this spring strongly pushed Nicolas Sarkozy to intervene militarily in Libya. Francis Fukuyama boldy supported the invasion of Iraq, though it tarnishes his record as a reliable sage that when things there began to look bad, he decided that he had been wrong--just in time for the surge to work and President Bush to receive credit for salvaging an almost impossible situation. And then there is Bill Kristol, who in the darkest days of Iraq, when even so stalwart a Republican as Indiana Senator Dick Lugar was urging President Bush to abandon the mission in Iraq, used the editorial page of The Weekly Standard to argue that President Bush should stay the course and said that leadership often meant taking the hard, unpopular decisions, which with time may yield great victories when the overwhelming temptation is to take the easy way out. In those days, when seemingly everyone was opposed to continuing the war in Iraq, when scores, sometimes hundreds, were killed daily in the chronic Iraqi civil conflict, Kristol took a bold stand and said what might have gone a long way to discrediting him if things should have turned out differently--if things, in other words, had turned out precisely as almost everyone in those days was predicting it would.

Not so Fareed Zakaria, whom one is tempted to call Mr Bromide. His new book, which he is currently marketing, has as its thesis--I kid you not--that in our new multi-polar world, other countries will be as economically powerful as the United States and will come to challenge us militarily as well. Not exactly the fresh, innovative thinking of Pascal Bruckner's Tears of the White Man or Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. Those books may be right (Bruckner's perhaps; the jury's still out on Fukuyama) or wrong, but at least they say something; they provoke thought and provide conversation. Zakaria, by contrast, almost never says anything that wasn't said--and often repeated--by other mouths among the media elite.

So imagine my delight when, driving down the road, as I said, the other night, I caught Zakaria on Terry Gross' Fresh Air flogging his new book and heard him make the argument that, yes, American power relative to that of other countries in the world will almost certainly decline as places like India and China begin to transform economic power to military. But, he said--and this for me was the kicker--that's not necessarily a bad thing. It will be unpleasant if we find ourselves less powerful vis-a-vis China, for instance, but if we think back over the course of American history, it has usually been thus. We have been a world power only since the end of WWII: for most of our history, we have not been a major player on the world stage, and we did just fine. In fact, the decades that we think of as contributing most to the establishment of the American character were not decades when we were the world's lone hyperpower. This insight struck me at the time as brilliant; in the course of thirty seconds I revised my entire opinion of Zakharia. Here at last was an insight both simple and powerful--something that seemed so self-evidently true and yet no one else of any stature was saying it. (Indeed, he went on to make the point the point that since patriotism and American exceptionalism play so well on the stump, politician were almost by definition not going to make it.)

But then came the crash--once again I speak metaphorically. I made it home, but I walked through the door in a fog, because a very quick analysis had shown me that Zakaria made only a seemingly telling point. His point would have been true a hundred years ago: we might easily have been fine as a second-rate power or as only one pole in a multi-polar world. But as things now stand, with the rapid advance of technology, when countries on the other side of globe might now just as well be just off-shore, such a seondary or tertiary role could well be disastrous for the United States. The main reason to be a hyperpower is to project power outward so that we do not have to face battles here at home. During the 1990s, when we were the lone superpower but did not behave as if we were, we invited the type of thinking that led to the attack of 9-11. After 9-11, President Bush once again acted with authority around the globe, and we have remained safe at home. But if, with current technology, we find the world being ordered by the Chinese, then things may become very grim indeed. For my money, I disagree for various reasons with those conservatives who see China as a great threat. But I am not certain that I'm right, and I certainly wouldn't bet the nation's security on it. I would feel much safer--and so would most people around the world--if America remained able to react decisively to any major geopolitical developments abroad.

So, here's to Fareed Zakaria for a good try. But he might do better. Perhaps because he has the privileged background that he does he feels safe by travelling along well-trod paths. Still, right or wrong, I prefer the bolder vision of Bill Kristol any day.

Where Credit Is Due

In one of the best things he has written, Mark Steyn over the weekend pointed out that Paul Ryan recently asked Bob Elmendorff in the Congressional Budget Office if he would score the implications of President Obama's non-budget "budget framework," presumably the new postmodern Democrat Party way of not really offering a budget although one is required by the Constitution to do so. Steyn then quotes Elemdorff's lapidary refusal of Ryan's request: "No, Mr Chairman, we don't estimate speeches." Steyn's typically incisive comment shows why he is almost certainly the best political writer in English today: "'We don't estimate speeches': There's an epitaph to chisel on the tombstone of the republic."

So fine a comment, in fact, that Charles Krauthammer used it this afternoon on Brett Baier's Fox News Channel show, Special Report. Krauthammer recounted the same story without credit, which is fine, since he might have gotten the information from somewhere other than Steyn's piece, but then he went one too far by offering his own reflection on Elmendorff's statement: "There's an epitaph to carve on the tombstone of the Obama Administration." Krauthammer, a veritable oracle of Conservative wisdom and a national treasure, is right to find Steyn's statement attractive--great minds thinking alike, deep speaking unto deep. But when he's citing Steyn's opinion in Steyn's own inimitable image, he ought to give credit where credit is due. Krauthammer, on record many times as disdainful of the President's desire to spread the economic wealth, ought to fight hard himself against the temptation to steal Zeus' thunder.

Don't Even Think about It!

We all know that conspiracies, while an ever-increasing staple on screen and page, don't really exist in the real world of politics. Whenever anyone, whether a John Bircher or Michael Moore, shows us evidence of a conspiracy, all we need do is wait, and the theory will eventually collapse under the accumulating weight of counter evidence. (This seems not to be happening with those who believe that "9-11 was an inside job." But these political Quixotes have from the beginning swallowed such a palpable falsehood that they are already committed to living outside the world of facts, and therefore no amount of evidence to the contrary will sway their faith.)

Indeed, major political conspiracies in an open society are by definition almost impossible, since virtually anything threatens their establishment and maintenance. Anyone with knowledge of one, for instance, can make his fortune simply by giving an interview to the New York Times, so the centrifugal pressures will always overcome the centripetal and tear such a plot apart. For this reason, anyone who believes in conspiracies is perhaps moving around the bend, and it is therefore best not to hang around conspiracists if one wishes to be taken seriously as an analyst of a very complex world in which free agents are constantly making free decisions day by day, hour by hour.

And yet. No, I don't seriously mean to imply that there is a conspiracy afoot in the current Administration when it comes to North Africa, but I do mean to say that the attitude of the President is so difficult to understand that one is tempted not to untie the complex knot with careful reasoning but simply to cut through it with that sharp if old, rusted, overworked, and disreputable sword named "Conspiracy."

One notes, for instance, that virtually the minute trouble began in Egypt, the Administration was applying great moral susaion to aid the uprising and remove Mubarak; a year and a half before, however, when the trouble occurred in Iran, the President remained stubbornly, unconscionably silent. As he did for the first couple of weeks during the uprising in Libya, though he later claimed he did so in consideration for the safety of Americans trapped in that country. But this excuse was nothing more than a justification, since he was far more eager when it came to Egypt, though many more Americans reside there than in Libya. Is the President, then, in favor of popular uprisings and against dictatorships? No: else he would have voiced as much support for the Iranians and Libyans as for the Egyptians. Is he for dictators and opposed to human rights? No, for then he would have supported Mubarak in Egypt.

And here one can see why a conspiracy theorist might say: the President seems to be on the side of anyone opposed to the United States. Both Gadaffi and the regime in Iran are anti-American, and the President has been very reluctant to support those who would imperil those regimes. Mubarak, for all his imperfections, was much more favorably disposed to America than his counterparts in either Libya or Iran, and yet the President was eager for him to be gone, even though many analysts predicted that Egypt would as a result become anti-American. One could put this a number of ways. To wit--another common denominator in these three situations is these countries' relationships with Israel: for whatever reason, the President has been far more eager to replace Mubarak, who kept the peace with Israel for many years, than to put pressure on Gaddafi or the mullahs in Iran, all of whom vigorously oppose the existence of Israel. One could put it still another way: the Venezuelan lunatic Hugo Chavez, who is doing his best to destroy one of the most vibrant and beautiful countries in the Western hemisphere, was, like President Obama, enthusiastic in his support of the rebellion in Egypt but is much more favorably disposed to Gaddafi and to the Iranian regime.

Let me make clear that TMH regards conspiracy theories as the crack cocaine of political discourse, since they appear so attractive, are quickly addictive, destroy one's capacity for reason, and in the end, always succumb, with pain, to the messy circumambient reality of things. However, in the case of the current troubles one can sympathize with those who believe such fairy tales. As with the crack addict, I don't want to be one, but I can certainly understand how folks get hooked, and I can also sympathize with their plight. The current Administration, in other words, is by its amateurish and terribly counterproductive policies, inviting people to draw unthinkable conclusions. Thank goodness we have the Administration's words to the contrary, because their deeds certainly are confusing.

The Badgers

While the troubles in Wisconsin may not be emblematic of what Glenn Beck says they are--a growing wave of anarchy across the world that threatens peace and stability everywhere--they are indeed emblematic of how much and how quickly things change over time in our society. We are subject to ever-increasing pace in our lives, as the rapid development of political events here and abroad show us now almost every week.

When we at TMH were even younger than we are now, we were consious of the narrative from 1995, when the Federal government was shut down because a conservative Republican House of Representatives and President Clinton could not agree on a budget. The Republicans were the agents of change, since until the year before the Congress had been in its fourth decade of Democrat control, so it was only natural to see those who symbolized change as responsible for what, frankly, some of them explicitly said they were for: shutting down the government.

But time moves on; nothing remains the same, and now the agents of change--at least in Wisconsin--are the liberals. The Democrats left Gov. Scott Walker and the State Legislature in a fiscally untenable situation, since because of their budgets the state is now over $1 billion in debt. Because of this situation, voters in liberal Wisconsin elected conservatives to fix the financial problems, and this the Governor and legislature are trying to do by the only realistic means possible, cutting spending.

Now, however, in order to illustrate their disagreement with the conservative solution, liberals--Democrats all, in this case--have essentially shut down the government. Democratic senators from Wisconsin have all fled the state so that the Senate is left without the quorum necessary to enact the solution that voters elected them to provide. So liberal Democrats are now doing what conservative Republicans did in the 1990s: animated by a philosophical belief they are shutting down the Wisconsin Senate.

If the conventional wisdom in the mainstream media is correct, those who take the initiative in shutting down the government always lose. The media have repeated this narrative again and again to pressure the Republican Congress not to face down President Obama on the matter of a continuing resolution later this spring, but if their logic is correct, then the romantic flight of the Democratic senators from Wisconsin will damage the Democratic, not the Republican, Party in that state. And if Talk Radio is correct (and even liberal Talk Radio agrees), what is happening in Wisconsin is a war by proxy over the future viability of the Democratic Party. If that is so, and if the Democrats are engaged in what the media has been warning for weeks now it would be suicidal for Republicans to do, then the Democrats and their allies in Wisconsin should be very worried indeed.

Sowing the Wind in Egypt

The general consensus this morning among the conservative commentators on Fox News Sunday ran counter to what we said here yesterday as soon as we learned that the Obama Administration is pushing for Mubarak to leave power in Egypt. Events today have shown those commentators to be far too optimistic and too kind to the Administration. Hillary Clinton made it clear this morning that the Administration not only wanted Mubarak out of power but that it had wanted him gone for some time; that statement, coupled with Vice President Biden's confident support for Mubarak just the other day, leads one to believe that the Administration has not until the past twenty-four hours coalesced around a response--which is worrisome in itself--and that its response is precisely the wrong one.

The Administration should be working to keep Mubarak in power and then, when things stabalize, press him to enact reforms slowly and surely. The current policy of encouraging him to leave will contribute to too rapid a change in Egypt without winning us any friends, since the demagogues that will surely attempt to fill the vaccum will try to gain power by attacking the United States anyway. It is axiomatic, from Syria to Iraq to Cuba to Venezuela: if one wants public prominence quickly, if one is in power and wishes to stay there, blame the United States for all problems and whip up sentiment against her. For this reason, TMH says again that the worst thing that can happen in Egypt at the moment is for Mubarak to leave power.

Now there is talk of the Muslim Brotherhood--whom we were told by the pundits this morning on Fox News Sunday were probably not going to be able to come to power--forming a transitional government now that (as everyone thinks) Mubarak is on his way out. Mubarak is no democrat, but he holds power for the old-fashioned motive of person gain; when the Muslim Brotherhood comes to power, it will hold power for rigidly ideological reasons. It will be on a mission from God, and for that reason, it will command the support of all the most strident elements in Egypt and beyond.

Much as I respect the commentators who spoke this morning, I fear that they are very wrong. I fear that the Administration's response is made fully in the knowledge that Egypt is not likely to bloom into a democracy (if so, why not celebrate President Bush's achievement in Iraq?) but may become another strict Muslim regime. Perhaps the Administration wishes to appease the forces arrayed against the liberal Western democracies, much as Jimmy Carter tried to appease the Soviets by never really doing much in response to their expansionism in the late 1970s.

Not only did such a foreign policy weaken the United States and her allies, it also led to the terrible suffering of many in nations whose fall to communism went unopposed (if not roundly encouraged: see Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe). If the Muslim Brotherhood should come to power in Egypt in part because President Obama has been too eager once again to bow to the radical mullahs east of Suez, we will have helped to condemn millions more to the type of life that Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes so tellingly about in her two memoirs.

Another example from the late 1970s that we would do well to heed is that of Jeane Kirkpatrick. It was she who wrote in her landmark essay "Dictatorships and Double Standards" that traditional totalitarian regimes rarely if ever reform themselves, while authoritarian regimes sometimes do. Hence Castro's Cuba is still a totalitarian hellhole, while Gen. Pinochet allowed during the 1980s the reforms that allowed Chile to become the most viable democracy and economy in Latin America (so free, in fact, that the Chilean courts have now announced that they will hold an inquiry into the death of the Communist Chilean President Salvador Allende, whom Pinochet overthrew in 1973).

If Kirkpatrick was right, it should give us pause: it should make us wonder whether it wouldn't in the long run be much easier for us--and much better for the people of Egypt--if we had an ally of the old, traditionally corrupt variety to work with in Cairo than a new ideologically rigid government. We might well be able to work with Mubarak, particularly if we have this week's unrest to point to as a powerful argument for reform. What leverage the Great Satan will have with the true believers who will condemn us as infidels and friends of the Zionists is anybody's guess.

Egypt

About the rapidly cursive hand presently writing the history of Egypt, two observations.

The first is that if current reports are accurate, once again our President has shown himself entirely wrong in a crisis. If it is true that he threatened to suspend or seriously curtail foreign aid to Egypt if Hosni Mubarak responded with much force to the uprising, then President Obama is in some measure responsible for kicking the chair out from under the precariously situated leader. In a country which in the past two weeks has seen serious anti-Christian rioting on the part of Muslims, a country in which the Muslim Brotherhood is said to be ideologically powerful, that blow to Mubarak, possibly decisive, could have the effect of bringing a rigidly Islamic regime to power. If that happens, a very important ally of the United States--the one that controls the Suez Canal--becomes an enemy, and Israel will now contend not with a neutral country but a hostile power on its southern border.

The second is that TMH finds it very strange that President Obama, who could find no words of support for the those who rose two summers ago against the Iranian regime now seems to be aiding the protestors (revolutionaries?) in Egypt. The common thread seems to be that if the revolution might result in the institutionalization of Islamic extremism the President is for it, while if the revolution might threaten such a regime, he is opposed to it.

Finally (we at TMH can't count), one thinks back with less than equanimity to other revolutions. In history, these have not often been portents of good. They were for the best in Eastern Europe in 1989; other revolutions have been less reassuring. The French Revolution, the Russian, the Cuban, and the Iranian all ended with regimes far worse than those they replaced; only the American Revolution led to a happier situation, and as Burke argued, 1776 was not so much a revolution, a great change, as it was an attempt to restore the liberties that the colonists had held in the days of salutary neglect before the accession of George III. What is unfolding in Egypt now may be a good thing, but if historical example is statistically reliable, it is more likely to be very messy indeed. In the long term, Hegel (and Fukuyama) may be right. In the short term, this momentous change may not work out well for western democracy and for the United States, which is still the primary guarantor of peace and stability where it may still be found in this troubled world.

Miscellania

A few quick observations today, since time runs short.

1. When the President said two days ago that he was speaking with officials from BP so that he could know whose a** to kick, was he employing the same rhetoric of violence that a couple of months ago liberals said conservatives must never use? I don't fault the President for saying such a thing--he was throwing a bone to those who found him lacking energy in response to his Katrina. It was, in fact, an oddly dispassionate fit of passion, which therefore belied the sentiment, though if one read the statement in a newspaper, one could read it with all the lively inflection that the President's delivery lacked. The larger point, however, is that the President did precisely what the liberal punditry said must never be done. And when they speak so vociferously about such a matter, one gets the feeling that they don't exactly mean what they say. (One needs only to remember that at the time they were "outraged" that Sarah Palin should put on her website a chart designating with something akin to a bullseye liberal incumbents that she would like to see defeated this year, even as several months earlier the National Democratic Campaign Committee had followed the same practice on their website. From which we can deduce that those decrying "violent political speech" were not expressing a principle but lifting a club with which to hit conservatives. How violent.)

2. Speaking of Sarah Palin, she had a very good last night, as the candidates she endorsed in primaries across the country did very well, not least in South Carolina, where Nikki Haley, recently in fourth place according to the polls came within a fraction of one percentage point of avoiding a run-off in her gubenatorial quest. Her surge was due in large part to Palin's endorsement. It was also due to the favor of such grass-roots organs such as RedState.com and to the preposterous smears against Haley that ended up making the very case against the dank and slimy political climate that Haley proposes to brighten and aerate. I suppose in the end that those three reasons (and there were others, of course) end up being more or less the same. Which is to say that Sarah Palin respresents a politics that rejects the worst of the old backroom dealsmaking as well as a politics that the grassroots find very appealing indeed.

She Knew She Was Right

With apologies to the mid-Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, whose He Knew He Was Right is one of the great political novels in English, I don't intend here to engage in literary criticism--well, perhaps I do, after a manner of speaking.

What I refer to is a person, a shibboleth, in fact, by which, if one reacts to her with disdain, one has secured a reputation as cool, hip, politically correct, and caring about all that is important on the two coasts. On the other hand, if one takes her seriously, by which I mean not reacting to her in fear but listening to what she says and then reacting to it analytically, then one has established himself as a rube, retrograde in his thinking about all that currently constitutes sweetness and light. I refer, of course, to Sarah Palin.

And regarding Sarah Palin I wish to make an observation: about the most important political question of 2008--the question of whether or not Barack Obama was ready to lead this nation--Sarah Palin was thunderously right in her acceptance speech at the 2008 Republican National Convention, and all of her critics--the Saturday Nights Live, the Bill Mahers, the New York Timeses, and politically correct snarks of every stripe--were wrong.

To be sure, Presidents often grow in time to exhibit the leadership required of them. President George W. Bush was perhaps when he took office not prepared to lead in a moment of crisis, as shown by his response in the first three or four hours after the strike on the Twin Towers. But within a very few hours after that, he was leading, and in a decisive and inspirational way.

Of course, one could argue that subsequently, after Hurricane Katrina, President Bush did not lead effectively at all. Leaving aside for a moment the question of whether or not he could legally have intervened in a state that did not request his help, he did certainly step in to help the situation--and it did not take him seven weeks (!) to do so. In contrast, President Obama is in a much better situation that was President Bush: he has the example of Bush and Katrina as a guide, and Governor Jindal of Louisiana made it easy for him by quickly specifying what Lousiana needed in order to protect its coast. In taking weeks to respond to Louisiana while the oil was rushing out and moving toward land, and now in making the terrible decision to ban deep-water oil production in the Gulf of Mexico, President Obama has managed both not to act when he should have and make a bad decision when he should not have. In light of which, it is worth noting, as RedState.com recently has, that Karma is not merciful. At the time of Katrina, many warned that it was unfair to judge President Bush by his response to such a disaster; the opportunity, however, was too precious not to seize, and so the media and the pop-culture mavins piled on. In doing so, they set a precedent that's caught a President, as it were, and now many of them don't like the results.

To judge him, then, by their own criteria, I repeat: On the salient question of 2008--whether Barack Obama was prepared to lead this nation--Sarah Palin was correct. Not in the sense that the slick and clever ironists mean who use the term, but in the only sense that matters when one is mugged by reality.

Imprimis

Another blog? Well may you ask, dear reader: why another amidst hundreds of thousands, if not millions? The answer, though not easy to find, still less perhaps to admit. One answer, though, given 400 years ago by old Robert Burton himself, in that gigantic book that would surely have been a blog if blogs then were: I write of melancholy, said he, to avoid melancholy. That is as much as to say, as they often say about the mountain, because it is there. Or, to be philosophical, since man is the rational animal and his reason is most perfectly expressed in speech, in writing, to speak, to write, to put into words our ideas is to be most rational, most human. And so whether some readers or none or few do hang upon this blog that shakes against the folly of this world, I am happy to think or try to think and then to try to put such thought into words.

And speaking of the folly of this world, our Supreme Executive in Chief, the esteemed President of the United States, said yesterday that he finds unacceptable the finger pointing among those other executives, the ones responsible in whole or in part for the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. It boggles the mind that the President who at least in speech has done little more for the first year and a half of his administration than point the finger at George W. Bush should be upset at those who blame others for the circumstances they are in. Indeed, in pointing the finger at these executives, the President (who blames President Bush for not being immediately on the scene just after Katrina swept the Gulf Coast) is himself blaming them for the current disaster, for which, if we press his logic in regard to President Bush, he bears some of the blame. This is postmodernism at what would be its most entertaining if there were not so much at stake, both in the livelihoods of many on the Gulf Coast and in the political discourse of our nation.