Lies of the Left (continued) -- "The Kingdom of Lies"

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

I am a subject in a kingdom of lies. At 57, I have grown up with decades of untruth — advanced for the purposes of purported social unity, the noble aim of egalitarianism, and the advancement of a cognitive elite in government, journalism, the arts, and the universities.


Alger Hiss really was a communist operative, albeit an elegant and snooty sort of one. The Rosenbergs were tag-team spies. Noble Laureate Rigoberta Menchu did not really write her own memoir. I admire the lives of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, even as I sensed there were large areas of their biographies that simply could not be disclosed and that the censorship was apparently for our own good. I know that if I did what Eliot Spitzer did I would not be hosting a TV show.


I did not quite know how “witch hunt” characterized the often disreputable tactics of Joe McCarthy — cruel and obnoxious were the better adjectives. You see, there were really communists in Hollywood at a time of a dangerous global cold war against communism, in a way there were never any witches at all in Salem.
But then for some reason I sensed that a murderous, camouflaged Fidel Castro killed more innocents than a murderous, gold-braided Augusto Pinochet. I accepted that we were to be silent about the former’s crimes since his ends were said to be good, while the latter’s crimes were for the bad — though economists of no particular political affiliations have shown that Chileans escaped poverty and dictatorship while Cubans were, and are still, plagued by both.

He's just getting started. Read the whole thing here and ponder the magnitude, persistence and pervasiveness of the falsehoods on which our contemporary culture is based, and how profoundly they represent a repudiation of our national experience prior to the 1960's. 

Slowly I Turned....

A conversation with an old friend brought to mind this comedy treasure from burlesque theater. Here's Lucille Ball's version of it. Enjoy!

Obama's Fantasyland

The great debate continues -- are the many and manifest failures of the Obama administration attributable to sheer incompetence, or are they informed by guiding principles?

Nile Gardiner, writing in The Telegraph, thinks it is the former. He sees "a clueless presidency adrift in a sea of confusion" of which the Libya misadventure is only the most recent instance. [here]. Steven Metz, over at the New Republic, disagrees. He strives mightily to discern within the seemingly random impulses generated from the White House a coherent strategy. He writes:

Put simply, Obama’s Libya strategy is designed to avoid the most undesirable outcomes rather than optimize the chances of a desired outcome, to do something without “owning” the conflict, to maintain maximum flexibility as the situation evolves, and to do all of this in the face of powerful constraints. The question is whether this strategy can actually work.

Read it here.

I will give Metz credit for ingenuity. He alone seems to have some idea of what is going on in Obama's mind. I, on the other hand, think the wise course is never to ascribe to conspiracy what can just as easily be explained as incompetence. At least I hope so. Responding to Metz' article Richard Fernandez notes that if he is right then Obama has fled the real world for a fantasyland of legal fictions.

In that strategic world, no matter the galaxy it inhabits, neither victory nor defeat exist.  It’s gone. Poof. Finished. Kaput. America can tag along on expeditions which it pays for, but cares not where it leads. Best of all, it isn’t war, repeat: it isn’t war. Therefore the President doesn’t have to ask Congress for permission to make it.

....

[S]uch a strategy, if accurately described by Metz may really represent the ultimate triumph of lawfare over common sense. Of fantasy over reality. Of the cartoon network over the news channel. Strategy becomes ultimately an affair of words, perceptions and formulations. There is no objective correlative between these fancy concepts and physical events like death, the occupation of cities, looting, curfews, the forced movement of persons or things of that sort.

But Fernandez notes fantasies are not innocuous. They do have real world consequences.

You may tell a man that if he feels a boot in his face or a bayonet in his gut to imagine it isn’t there. Unfortunately he still feels it, but so long as all the gunpowder and blood remain overseas, and only ink and talking points are shed domestically, then a boot isn’t a boot and a bayonet isn’t a bayonet.

Read the whole thing here.

So in the end it really doesn't matter whether the failed policies are attributable to incompetence or malfeasance. What matters is that the failures have real world consequences from which millions of people are and will be suffering. As I have pointed out in a number of posts, the objective state of the world became much better during the Bush presidency. I doubt that we will be able to say the same of his successor.

Film Studies 101 -- The Future of Film

"The Future of Film" by Joseph Susanka

Film is not dead.
 
Well, film as a format might be dead. When such cinematographic greats as Dante Spinotti, John Seale, and the criminally underappreciated Roger Deakins begin proclaiming the extraordinary technical and artistic benefits of shooting digitally, the writing is definitely on the wall.

But film as an art form? As an exciting, engaging way to tell stories; to explore human nature in its many fascinating facets; to communicate with others and challenge them to consider great truths? Borrowing from Twain's immortal words, the rumors of film's death have been greatly exaggerated.

Read the whole thing here.

Film may have a future, but does Hollywood?

Mark Harris writes:

[L]et's look ahead to what's on the menu for this year: four adaptations of comic books. One prequel to an adaptation of a comic book. One sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a toy. One sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a movie based on an amusement-park ride. One prequel to a remake. Two sequels to cartoons. One sequel to a comedy. An adaptation of a children's book. An adaptation of a Saturday-morning cartoon. One sequel with a 4 in the title. Two sequels with a 5 in the title. One sequel that, if it were inclined to use numbers, would have to have a 7 1/2 in the title.

Can Hollywood continue to survive churning out such crapola?

Harris thinks so. Read why here.

Burning the Koran

Yes, Terry Jones act of book burning was provocative, offensive, and irresponsible.

No, he should not be prosecuted, investigated, or the subject of any official response. We do have rights, and he was exercising his.

Jones is a moron, but he is in no way worse than those infantile "artists" who deface or offensively represent Christian symbols. They are offensive, irresponsible morons too.

Nor is he any worse than Bill Ayres or any of the other creeps who deface or destroy the American flag.

In no way is Pastor Jones responsible for the deaths of people in Afghanistan. If you wish to condemn him, then you must assign equal responsibility to the news media who publicized his actions, to Hamid Karzai who exploited those reports for political gain, and to the Muslim religious zealots who instigated riots. But, in the final analysis, the only responsible parties are those sub-human wretches who carried out the murders.

The most dangerous and dismaying aspect of the whole affair is the opinion expressed by various government and media figures to the effect that Pastor Jones should be investigated, the subject of other official actions, etc.

That's all I have to say on the subject.

I leave further comment to Christopher Hitchens [here].

The Good President (continued) -- Guantanamo

Well, it took a while, but our fine young President, on the very day he announces his re-election bid, finally admits that President Bush was right on Guantanamo, he just can't bring himself to say the worlds. Instead we get [from the NYT]:

WASHINGTON — In a major reversal, the Obama administration has decided to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for his role in the attacks of Sept. 11 before a military commission at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and not in a civilian courtroom. 

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is expected to announce on Monday afternoon that Mr. Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the attacks, and four other accused conspirators will face charges before a panel of military officers, a law enforcement official said. The Justice Department has scheduled a press conference for 2 p.m. Eastern time. 

Read it here.

Another tacit admission that on all the things that really matter, Bush was right.

Things Fall Apart

The liberal-progressive synthesis that has dominated our political culture through most of the past century is rapidly disintegrating. Jonah Goldberg points out some of the most prominent instances:

For the last two years, the old ways of Washington have been crashing down like pillars of Mordor at the end of The Lord of the Rings.

Then-candidate Obama was himself fond of noting that the conventional wisdom — or “CW” — was that a black guy with a funny name could never be elected president.  

....

Coming into office during a wrenching financial crisis, the conventional wisdom was that the American people would rally around New Deal policies. At least that’s what liberal historians and political scientists said they should do.

The experts were wrong.

He discusses a number of other areas in which the 

The reason, of course, that the conventional expert opinion has regularly, and sometimes spectacularly, been wrong in its assumptions is that the political culture is changing. In hindsight you can see the harbingers -- the tax revolt, Perot, the success of anti-Washington candidates, etc. but intellectual habits die hard. It will take a real shock to the system to finally convince the political class that the old progressive nostrums no longer apply.

Now who is going to administer that shock.

The Good President (continued) -- TARP

In the avalanche of anti-Bush hysteria ginned up by political opportunists and journalistic know nothings in the past few years every one of his actions has been subject to intense criticism -- none more so than TARP [Troubled Asset Relief Program] created by the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, signed into law back in October, 2008. Variously attacked as a "bailout" for Wall Street, a "takeover" of the banking industry, and a mean-spirited and limited failure to respond effectively in the face of economic collapse, TARP has actually been one of the most successful government responses to an economic crises in history. At least that is what Robert Samuelson has argued. He writes:

It isn’t often that the government launches a major program that achieves its main goals at a tiny fraction of its estimated costs. That’s the story of TARP — the Troubled Assets Relief Program. Created in October 2008 at the height of the financial crisis, it helped stabilize the economy, using only $410 billion of its authorized $700 billion. And most of that will be repaid. The Congressional Budget Office, which once projected TARP’s ultimate cost at $356 billion, now says $19 billion. 

This could go lower.

One lesson of the financial crisis is this: When the entire financial system succumbs to panic, only the government is powerful enough to prevent a complete collapse. Panics signify the triumph of fear. TARP was part of the process by which fear was overcome. It wasn’t the only part, but it was an essential part. Without TARP, we’d be worse off today.

Indeed we would! One might quibble with some ways in which the Obama administration has administered the program -- I certainly would -- but as originally conceived and signed into law by President Bush it has been a stunning accomplishment. It is important to appreciate this. TARP is one of the few examples in which the government has responded effectively to economic crisis. There will be other such crises and it will be to nobody's benefit if the shining example set by President Bush should be buried under a cloud of politically-inspired acrimony.

Read Samuelson's column here.

Film Studies 101: Gone With the Wind as a Postapocalyptic Epic

An interesting take on one of the greatest films of all time. A world destroyed and then the saga of survivors' attempt to rebuild their ruined lives.

Obama and the "Three Graces"

Victor Davis Hanson, the great summarizer, asks the question:

how did Obama, the archetype war critic, find himself bombing—in optional and preemptive fashion, and without congressional authority — an Arab Muslim oil-exporting country, and one that posed no immediate threat to American national security, despite being governed by a monster who, nevertheless, had been recently courted by Western intellectuals, academics, universities, and diplomats?

His answer is the best, most coherent, short summary of the crisis I have seen yet.

Read it here.

Goldberg on Conservatism and American Exceptionalism

Jonah Goldberg recently published a short piece in which he criticized Western feminists for their apparent indifference to the plight of women in the Muslim world. It's an excellent and well-reasoned argument, but it has roused a storm of criticism from people on the Left. In today's NRO Corner he responds to his critics and in doing so makes some very perceptive observations regarding American conservatism and how it differs from European varieties.

America is ideologically and politically syncretic. What is fundamentally American is a mix of ideas that are both on the “right” and “left” in other countries. A French conservative might hold positions shared by an American leftist, and a French liberal certainly holds positions shared by American conservatives. To say that conservatism must, of necessity, reject anything, anywhere, solely because at a specific point in time it can be dubbed “leftist” is absolutely ridiculous. So many ideas born on the left have come to be embraced on the right and for good reason. We on the right now champion governmental colorblindness, for example.

Conservatism isn’t about teams and hoarding ideological chips. It is about figuring out what is right and wrong, discriminating between the enduring and the transitory. This means, as Lincoln said, that conservatism will tend toward adhering to the old and tried over the new and untried. But eventually the new and untried become the old and tried, and there’s no reason for conservatism to reject ideas proven by time simply because of their embarrassing leftist parentage.

As I’ve been writing here for years (with all credit due to Friedrich Hayek and Sam Huntington), American conservatives are the only self-described conservatives in the world who defend a classically liberal revolution. That means something very special, indeed it is a great wellspring of American exceptionalism. A conservative in America doesn’t conserve theocracy or monarchy. He conserves the institutions of liberty. Perhaps not solely, for there are other things worth conserving as well. But a conservatism that does not conserve those institutions is not worth conserving. And in that fight, foreign and domestic, the Right should look for allies wherever it can.

Liberal Paranoia and the Press

Writing in the Weekly Standard, Matthew Continetti illuminates the latest of many conspiracy theories advanced by the political Left.

David Koch’s secretary told him the news. This was in February, during the rowdy standoff between Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and demonstrators backing 14 Democratic legislators who’d fled to Illinois rather than vote on a bill weakening public employee unions. Koch’s secretary said that an editor for a left-wing website, the Buffalo Beast, had telephoned the governor posing as David Koch and recorded the conversation. And Walker had fallen for it! He’d had a 20-minute conversation with this bozo, not once questioning the caller’s identity. But then how could Walker have known? Sure, David Koch was a billionaire whose company had donated to his campaign. But Koch (pronounced “Coke”) had never talked to Walker in his life. 

Yet here were the media reporting that he and his brother Charles were behind Walker’s push against public employees. Anger washed over David like a red tide. He’d been victimized by some punk with a political agenda.

Read the whole thing here.

Two obvious points to make -- First, this explains how Governor Walker could be so easily taken in by the hoaxer -- he has had no contact with his supposed co-conspirators. The Left's conspiracy theory makes no sense. Walker could not be hoaxed if he knew and had  dealt with David Koch in the past, and the success of the hoax therefore invalidates its premise. Second, despite this the Left's bizarre claims that the hoax proved conspiracy were widely accepted and disseminated by the mainstream media which then used the allegations to launch a deep and widespread investigation of the Koch brothers.

Faugh!

Continetti then goes on to detail the wild accusations launched against the Kochs.

Liberals in the media turned into Koch addicts. They ascribed every bad thing under the sun to the brothers and their checkbooks. Pollution, the Tea Party, global warming denial—the Kochs were responsible. The liberals kneaded the facts like clay until the Kochs resembled a Lovecraftian monster: the Kochtopus! Its tentacles stretched everywhere. “Their private agenda is really the eradication of the federal government in almost all of its forms, other than the parts of it that protect personal rights,” New Yorker writer Jane Mayer told NPR’s Terry Gross. Anonymous, the hackers’ collective, accused the Kochs of attempting to “usurp American Democracy.” The Koch brothers manipulated the Tea Partiers, according to Keith Olbermann, by “telling them what to say and which causes to take on and also giving them lots of money to do it with.”

And so it goes, and so it goes. Time and again liberals in the media construct and market insane conspiracy fantasies, and the bizarre nature of these efforts goes largely unnoticed. Liberals are widely portrayed as exponents of reasonable analysis while conservatives are associated with a "paranoid style" of political discourse. Such has been the case ever since half a century ago Columbia historian Richard Hofstader, in a deeply dishonest essay informed by warmed over Frankfort School nonsense,  identified the political right with conspiratorial thinking. Hofstader's essay has ever since been a staple of liberal thought and its application permeates the liberal media. Yet, as Continetti notes, expressions of the "paranoid style" on the Left are largely unremarked on and are even endorsed by the mainstream press. Such is the state of our current political discourse.

At the Movies

"She Who Must Not Be Named" occasionally goes on a movie kick. This week, for instance, at her insistence we have seen three movies. The first was "The Lincoln Lawyer" starring Matthew McConaughey. It's a silly little trifle in which Matt plays a street smart lawyer who operates out of the back seat of a Lincoln Town Car [hence the title] who is challenged by a rich pretty-boy, played by Ryan Philippe, who likes to assault women. It is pitched at about the level of a weekly TV drama and never aspires to anything higher. Readers might be interested to know that Matt keeps his streak intact -- he takes his shirt off, just as he has done in every other of his films. Instantly forgettable, LL is a waste of both time and money.

The second film was truly atrocious. It was "Limitless" starring Bradley Cooper. It's about a non-productive writer who takes a pill that boosts his intelligence and makes him into a super-genius. Eventually things begin to go wrong and he starts to have problems..., big problems. At first I thought this might be an updated version of the Faust legend, but it soon became apparent that it was much less profound than that. Then I hoped that it might have some of the clout of Cliff Robertson's 1968 SF classic, "Charly", but by the end it had morphed into Charlie Sheen's fantasy world where appropriately administered medication can turn you into a "winner" rather than a corpse. Again, it is not worth your time or money. Skip it.

The third flick was a real winner. "Battle: Los Angeles" stars Aaron Eckhart and state of the art CGI in a SF tale pitting evil aliens against doughty American marines. On a technical level -- the use of sound, CGI, shakeycam, etc. it is as contemporary as you can get, but in terms of theme, characterization, and plotting it is a throwback to the military dramas of half a century ago. I loved it! The queasycam was a bit too much -- it always is -- and the sound effects were a bit annoying, but the story [essentially a love letter to the USMC] was a lot of fun. You had a small, ethnically mixed, squad of marines, led by a vet on the brink of retirement, who face danger and overcome their fears and limitations to [and I'm not spoiling anything here] fight on to victory. There's not much characterization and every cliche of the old battle stories is prominently and unapologetically portrayed. It was a relief to see a film that didn't wink at or parody the old conventions and for me the whole thing worked beautifully. It's my recommendation for this week -- check it out!

"Obama is Awesome"

Michelle Malkin's Cousin is Missing

 If you live in or visit the Seattle area, here's the basic information. For more go here.

What the West Looked Like

Check out this terrific collection of photographs taken along the western frontier between 1887 and 1892. The pictures really bring the past to life.

Rubbing It In

Instapundit links to this, calling it the blog comment of the week. It's devastating.

What I like about Obama

Obviously, the biggest problem with Bush was sending the military into an Arab Muslim country that hadn't even attacked us. Among the several things that made that offensive were
* the rush to war - it was only several months after the possibility of military involvement was raised that combat operations began
* lack of United Nations sanction - only 17 relevant resolutions were ever passed before they were enforced
* lack of Congressional oversight - the President authorized the use of military force based on the flimsy pretext of a bill passed by Congress titled "Authorization of the Use of Military Force", rather than seeking a document that had the words "declaration of war" in it; that's every bit as bad as getting no Congressional approval at all
* obvious financial motives - clearly no one approved of the murderous dictator or sought a normal working relationship with him besides the French; at the same time, one couldn't help but be suspicious of the fact that the population we were ostensibly protecting was located conveniently near the oil fields
* stretching our military - we were overburdened as it was, and our brave military despite its courage lacked the resources for yet another operation
* inflating our military - the only way to keep the bloodthirsty Pentagon beast fed was to give it the hordes of jobless young men who had no prospects in an economy that saw unemployment skyrocket above 4% in most states
* ignoring our generals - the decision to go to war was made by political hacks who had never worn a uniform
* inflaming the Arab Street - despite some touchy-feely talk about Islam, it was impossible for the Muslim world not to notice how the President made repeated, insistent proclamations of his Christianity, how he only ever used the military against Muslim targets, and how at the time the war started he'd kept the concentration camp at Guantanamo open for over a year
* wasting money - it was completely irresponsible to commit the military to an expensive mission when the President's fiscal mismanagement had resulted in a budget deficit of over $150 billion in 2002

But anyway, what I really like about Obama is that he's gone 29-3 in his bracket picks over the first two days. You have to spend a lot of time watching college basketball to be that good.

Wow, just wow! The snark doesn't get any more vicious than that. I have to admit that I'm really, really enjoying this.

Pretending to be President

Jim Geraghty writes:

It's also worth recalling that [George W. Bush] was demonized endlessly, for A) continuing to listen to a teacher read My Pet Goat after being informed of the 9/11 attacks, refraining from causing a panic among children before him; B) holding a guitar, somehow showing he ignored Hurricane Katrina C) saying "now watch this drive," supposedly showing he was lazily golfing while the War on Terror raged. In other words, our friends on the left already established the standard that a president dare not be seen doing anything less than fully appropriate focus while a crisis is occurring, anywhere in the world.

 In the past week, as the budget negotiations, the deteriorating situation in Libya and the Japan crisis have been big issues one, two, and three, the president has found time for not just bracket picks and a DNC fundraiser but the bullying summit, a ceremony with the Chicago Blackhawks, a round of golf, the Gridiron dinner, a meeting with "student finalists of the Intel Science Talent Search 2011 competition", a speech at a school in Arlington, a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen of Denmark in the Oval Office, discussing "the close ties between the United States and Denmark," and a weekly presidential address focusing on "Women's History Month." Wednesday, he's got another fundraiser.

It's almost as if he's looking for things to do other than deal with these big pressing issues.

Indeed!

How to Live on 10 Billion Dollars a Day

Iowahawk's latest, and as usual hilarious, commentary.

Seems like these days I hear a lot of whiney whiners whining about "out of control government spending" and "insane deficits" and such, trying to make hay out of a bunch of pointy-head boring finance hooey. Sure, $3.7 trillion  of spending sounds like a big number. "Oh, boo-hoo, how are we going to get $3.7 trillion dollars? We're broke, boo-hoo-hoo," whine the whiners.  What these skinflint crybabies fail to realize is that $3.7 trillion is for an entire year - which translates into only a measly $10 billion per day!

Mister, I call that a bargain. Especially since it pays for all of us - you and me, the whole American family. Like all families, we Americas have to pay for things - health, food, safety, uncle Dave America with his drinking problem. And when little Billy America wants that new quad runner they promised, do Mom and Dad America deny him? No, they get a second job at Circle K, because they know little Billy might have one of his episodes and burn down the house.

So let's all sit down together as an American family with a calendar and make a yearly budget. First, let's lock in the $3.7 trillion of critical family spending priorities; now let's get to work on collecting the pay-as-we-go $10 billion daily cash flow we need.

12:01 AM, January 1
Let's start the year out right by going after some evil corporations and their obscene profits. And who is more evil than those twin spawns of Lucifer himself, Exxon Mobil and Walmart? Together these two largest American industrial behemoths raked in, between them, $34 billion in 2010 global profits. Let's teach 'em both a lesson and confiscate it for the public good. This will get us through...

9:52 AM January 4
Okay, maybe I underestimated our take. But we shouldn't let Exxon and Walmart distract us from all those other corporate profiteers out there worth shaking down. In fact, why don't we grab every cent of 2010 profit made by the other 498 members of the Fortune 500? That will net us another, let's see, $357 billion! Enough to get us to...

2:00 AM February 9....

Read the whole thing here.

Who Is Obama Most Like?

Obama likes to compare himself to Lincoln. Republicans look at him and see Jimmy Carter. Don Surber thinks he is most like Richard Nixon.

Maybe it is the fund-raising.

Maybe it is the enemies list.

Maybe it is the many wars on Fox News.

Maybe it is his friends, although Bebe Rebozo never said “God Damn America” or tried to blow up the Pentagon.

But there is something about Barack Obama that reminds me of Richard Nixon.

He notes that public confidence in the government is at the lowest point since the Nixon administration and ties that to the fecklessness of our commander in chief.

Read it here.

As for me -- I think he's most like Obama. Each president is unique.

Beware

Don't forget -- Brutus, Cassius and the crowd were all Republicans.

The Danger of Liberalism

The Christian Science Monitor recently published a piece on the repressive nature of modern liberalism that contains one of my favorite quotes from one of the great liberal icons of the Twentieth Century -- Lionel Trilling.

"Some paradox of our nature leads us," Trilling wrote in "The Liberal Imagination," "when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion."

Trilling's observation succinctly outlines the process by which liberal reform rapidly degenerates into tyranny. The article goes on to outline a number of areas in which liberal policies serve to radically restrict the freedom of individuals and it contains links to a number of other sources on the subject. It's worth spending a little time on. Check it out here.

Ignoring the Elephant

Tom Friedman wrote another of his supremely silly columns the other day in which he listed what he considered to be the non-obvious factors that underlay the revolutionary impulse in the Arab world. They included:

The fact that Obama is now President of the United States has inspired Muslim youth to think that they can achieve anything.


Google Earth has revealed to urban proles the vast inequalities in land distribution throughout much of the Arab world.


Israel has shown that democracies can punish politicians who violate the public trust.


China's success stands in sharp contrast to Egypt's failure to compete in the modern world.


The new Palestinian leadership has promised to be more accountable than in the past.

I'll say! They really are non-obvious, even to the point of being totally implausible. He does make passing mention to the obvious, and far more plausible, factors underlying Arab discontent: tyranny, youth unemployment, rising food prices, and social media. What I find interesting, though, is the fact that he did not see fit to include President Bush's liberation of Iraq which created a functioning Arab democracy. But then, that's not surprising. He works for the New York Times.

Read the article here.

As a counterpoint to Friedman's nonsense, Charles Krauthammer notes the immense importance of Bush's accomplishments in Iraq:

Now, it can be argued that the price in blood and treasure that America paid to establish Iraq's democracy was too high. But whatever side you take on that question, what's unmistakable is that to the Middle Easterner, Iraq today is the only functioning Arab democracy, with multiparty elections and the freest press. Its democracy is fragile and imperfect - last week, security forces cracked down on demonstrators demanding better services - but were Egypt to be as politically developed in, say, a year as is Iraq today, we would think it a great success.

For Libyans, the effect of the Iraq war is even more concrete. However much bloodshed they face, they have been spared the threat of genocide. Gaddafi was so terrified by what we did to Saddam & Sons that he plea-bargained away his weapons of mass destruction. For a rebel in Benghazi, that is no small matter.
Yet we have been told incessantly how Iraq poisoned the Arab mind against America. Really? Where is the rampant anti-Americanism in any of these revolutions? In fact, notes Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes, the United States has been "conspicuously absent from the sloganeering." 

It's Yemen's president and the delusional Gaddafi who are railing against American conspiracies to rule and enslave. The demonstrators in the streets of Egypt, Iran and Libya have been straining their eyes for America to help. They are not chanting the antiwar slogans - remember "No blood for oil"? - of the American left. Why would they? America is leaving Iraq having taken no oil, having established no permanent bases, having left behind not a puppet regime but a functioning democracy. This, after Iraq's purple-fingered exercises in free elections seen on television everywhere set an example for the entire region. 

 Read the column here.

David Broder Is Gone

He was, until quite recently, an  important figure in the beltway commentariat and could usually be relied upon to provide sober and thoughtful, if often conventional, perspectives on national political silliness. I always enjoyed reading his columns and will miss him.

Read the WaPo obit here.

Will's Wisdom

I haven't been paying much attention to George Will lately. Maybe I should. He has some questions that should be considered by the administration before they decide if and how to react to the ongoing crisis in Libya. To wit:

• The world would be better without Gaddafi. But is that a vital U.S. national interest? If it is, when did it become so? A month ago, no one thought it was.
• How much of Gaddafi's violence is coming from the air? Even if his aircraft are swept from his skies, would that be decisive?
• What lesson should be learned from the fact that Europe's worst atrocity since the Second World War - the massacre by Serbs of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica - occurred beneath a no-fly zone?
• Sen. John Kerry says: "The last thing we want to think about is any kind of military intervention. And I don't consider the fly zone stepping over that line." But how is imposing a no-fly zone - the use of military force to further military and political objectives - not military intervention?
• U.S. forces might ground Gaddafi's fixed-wing aircraft by destroying runways at his 13 air bases, but to keep helicopter gunships grounded would require continuing air patrols, which would require the destruction of Libya's radar and anti-aircraft installations. If collateral damage from such destruction included civilian deaths - remember those nine Afghan boys recently killed by mistake when they were gathering firewood - are we prepared for the televised pictures?
• The Economist reports Gaddafi has "a huge arsenal of Russian surface-to-air missiles" and that some experts think Libya has SAMs that could threaten U.S. or allies' aircraft. If a pilot is downed and captured, are we ready for the hostage drama?
• If we decide to give war supplies to the anti-Gaddafi fighters, how do we get them there?
• Presumably we would coordinate aid with the leaders of the anti-Gaddafi forces. Who are they?
• Libya is a tribal society. What concerning our Iraq and Afghanistan experiences justifies confidence that we understand Libyan dynamics?
• Because of what seems to have been the controlling goal of avoiding U.S. and NATO casualties, the humanitarian intervention - 79 days of bombing - against Serbia in Kosovo was conducted from 15,000 feet. This marked the intervention as a project worth killing for but not worth dying for. Would intervention in Libya be similar? Are such interventions morally dubious?
• Could intervention avoid "mission creep"? If grounding Gaddafi's aircraft is a humanitarian imperative, why isn't protecting his enemies from ground attacks?
• In Tunisia and then in Egypt, regimes were toppled by protests. Libya is convulsed not by protests but by war. Not a war of aggression, not a war with armies violating national borders and thereby implicating the basic tenets of agreed-upon elements of international law, but a civil war. How often has intervention by nation A in nation B's civil war enlarged the welfare of nation A?
• Before we intervene in Libya, do we ask the United Nations for permission? If it is refused, do we proceed anyway? If so, why ask? If we are refused permission and recede from intervention, have we not made U.S. foreign policy hostage to a hostile institution?
• Secretary of State Hilary Clinton fears Libya becoming a failed state - "a giant Somalia." Speaking of which, have we not seen a cautionary movie - "Black Hawk Down" - about how humanitarian military interventions can take nasty turns?
• The Egyptian crowds watched and learned from the Tunisian crowds. But the Libyan government watched and learned from the fate of the Tunisian and Egyptian governments. It has decided to fight. Would not U.S. intervention in Libya encourage other restive peoples to expect U.S. military assistance?
• Would it be wise for U.S. military force to be engaged simultaneously in three Muslim nations?

Read the whole thing here. Given all these unknowns it is easy to understand the confusion and hesitancy of the One and his advisers as the situation in North Africa seems to be changing hourly, What is sickening is watching them treat the whole thing as a PR problem as they try to catch up to and exploit the latest journalistic postings from the region while at the same time trying to pretend that they have a coherent policy. The irony, of course, is that the harder they try to pretend that they are competent and on top of things, the more they reveal their incompetence and ignorance.

Faugh!

Street Work

Getting ready for the race. On Labor Day Baltimore will be hosting a formula one event at the Inner Harbor so crews have been busy for the past several months resurfacing and grading all the streets downtown. At times it makes driving near the harbor a nightmare, but since they are also upgrading and repairing water and sewage facilities at the same time, it is for the long-term benefit of those of us who are fortunate enough to live in the neighborhood. As it turns out I will be able to watch the race from my living room. How cool is that?

Responding to the Prophets of Doom

For as long as I can remember commentators on America's future have been spewing an endless stream of doom and gloom. We were always on the verge of being buried by the Soviet Union, or a resurgent Europe, or Japan, or somebody. Today the somebodies are China and India and, in the midst of the current economic crisis, the doom mongers are out in full force.

So far the doomsters have been wrong every time, and there is good reason to expect that they will be wrong again. Shika Dalmia, writing in Reason, explains why. She argues that, although China, and to a lesser extent India, have made extraordinary strides, the benefits of economic growth are largely concentrated within a relatively small stratum of their societies. In both countries hundreds of millions of people still live in abject poverty and the great mass of the population is afforded few of the opportunities produced by economic growth. Because of the narrow and shallow nature of Asian economic growth America is still far and away the land of opportunity.

America maximizes the talents of its population to a much greater extent than does either India or China.

Americans of all classes also have access to vast amounts of "intangible wealth" in the form of good roads, clean water, efficient sewage removal and a variety of social services that are not available to most of the population in Asian countries.

The American education system, if considered in toto, is superior to those of Asian countries. It seeks to serve the entire population whereas in Asian countries good education is available only to the elites.

Because of the depth and breadth of its prosperity America still offers immigrants from Asia far better opportunities than they could find in their home countries.

Americans, unlike Asians, have a profoundly critical perspective on their own country, a point of view that is reflected in the constant, but never realized, assertions of imminent collapse. This pessimism means that in America social and economic problems are more quickly identified, recognized and addressed than in China and India. Moreover, and this is important, when faced with problems Americans still tend to look for solutions outside the government rather than waiting for authorities to address them.

It's an interesting argument and it does contain certain truths. Studies of American and Asian economies we are often comparing apples and oranges in ways that mask the deep strengths of the American society and economy. Still, there is no reason to indulge in complacency. As Asian economies mature the benefits they generate will begin to reach more of their populations, creating opportunities comparable to those Americans have long enjoyed. And, in America, there has been in recent decades a very disturbing development -- the emergence of a relatively closed pseudo-meritocratic credentialized elite that perpetuates itself from generation to generation. In the future disparities between American and Asian societies may diminish, but for now Shika Dalmia is right -- the American advantage is not likely to disappear for a long time.

Read the article here.

Spring Is Coming

The Snowdrops are up! Spring is on the way. Every year these are the first of my wife's flowers to bloom.

But the bulbs are not far behind. Already the leaves are poking up through the soil. Soon come the flowers. Soon, soon, soon. I can hardly wait.

Lies of the Left -- Student Achievement and Unions

Iowahawk demolishes the argument, advanced by liberals, that students in unionized States get better instruction than those who attend school in non-unionized ones. Yes, Wisconsin ranks near the top on national surveys of student achievement, as do several other unionized States in the Midwest and Northeast, while non-unionized states in the South. But, as Iowahawk points out when standardized by ethnic group, the discrepancies disappear and are even reversed. When compared to students in the same ethnic category, the scores of students from non-unionized States are actually higher than they are in the high-ranking unionized States. It's a brilliant, straightforward, and devastating rebuttal to liberal sophistry.

Read it here.

The Collapse of "Realism"

Leon Wieseltier writes in the New Republic:

As the dictators fall, the clichés fall, too. Cairo and Tunis and Tripoli are littered with the shards of platitudes about what is possible and what is impossible in Arab societies, in closed societies. Civilizational analysis lies in ruins. Idealism, always cheaply mocked, turns out to be a powerful form of historical causation, as disruptive of the established order as any economic or technological change, and even more beneficent. Stability, the false god of hard hearts, has been revealed to be temporary, chimerical, provisional, hollow, where the social arrangements are not decent or fair: the stability of injustice, though it may last a long time, is essentially unstable.

It certainly is, as Weiseltier puts it, "delicious" to watch hard-headed foreign policy "realists" have to swallow their previous positions on the Middle East, but it is far too early for such triumphalism. Yes, President Bush and the much-reviled "Neo-Cons" were right to assert that the brutal dictatorships, which realists held to be the natural, if not exactly proper, state of affairs in the region, were in fact unstable and thin reeds upon which to base our diplomacy, but the consequences of the latest round of revolutions to sweep through the region have yet to be established and may [as turned out in Lebanon and Gaza] be extremely problematic.

Weiseltier is right to assert that the current administration is operating on assumptions and ideas that are hopelessly out of date, but that is not to say that the Neo-cons were right in all things. It does, however, support the idea that the much-reviled President Bush and his advisors had a far better, and more sophisticated, grasp on the dynamics of Middle East affairs than their successors have so far displayed.

The Best Of Times

You would never know it by listening to the news, but we are living in the Best Decade Ever. Sure there are a lot of problems, but as Charles Kenny notes in the latest edition of Foreign Policy:

For all its problems, the first 10 years of the 21st century were in fact humanity's finest, a time when more people lived better, longer, more peaceful, and more prosperous lives than ever before.

Global per-capita income is today at the highest level in history and has risen quickly in the past decade. The global middle class is expanding rapidly. The proportion of the world's population that is undernourished has been halved since the 1970's and every day, even despite recent rises in food prices, more and more people have access to adequate nutrition. Major infectious diseases are on the wane. Between 2000 and 2008 infant mortality mortality around the globe dropped 17 percent and life expectancy increased by two years. Literacy levels, especially for women, are at all time highs and women are better represented today in government positions than at any time in the past.

We are also living in a time of unprecedented peace. Between 2000 and 2008 the death toll from conflicts worldwide dropped by 40 percent and since 1990 the amount spent on military budgets has been cut in half. This past decade has been the most peaceful in the past century and it is quite possibly the most peaceful ever.

Put it all together and you realize that we are living in the best time ever. As Kenny writes, in the past decade: More people lived lives of greater freedom, security, longevity, and wealth than ever before.

And that is certainly something to be proud of. 

Boids

For the past few weeks "She Who Must Not Be Named" and I have been traveling along the East Coast, and everywhere we have gone it has felt as if we were trapped inside a Hitchcock movie.

A lonely red tail keeps watch along the roadside.

Migrating Canada geese, just one of dozens of flocks that overflew us that afternoon.

Another, much smaller, flock overflew the parking lot. Noisy critters, they are.

A couple flocks of Canada geese circled over this field, but the Snow Geese had already taken possession of it.

An immature snowy egret takes wing right in front of us.

A pair of pelicans cruising by.

A snakebird dries its wings after a quick dip.

Here we are really in Hitchcock territory. At sundown flocks of crows fight for the best perches.

The winnahs!!!!

The Good President [continued] -- Education

I well remember how, during the last administration, friends of mine who were professional educators would become almost incandescent when the subject of President Bush's educational reform, "No Child Left Behind", came up. Their contempt for him was boundless. It did no good to point out that the sponsor of the bill was Senator Kennedy [whom they cherished as a great friend of education] or that there was overwhelming public support for accountability, or that rises in expenditure on education had not been matched by gains in student performance for some time and something clearly had to be done. No, they were adamant in their insistence that Bush's reforms were ruining the educational system.

And they were wrong. Enough time has now passed to see the results of Bush's reforms. Writing in the New Republic, Jonathan Cohn notes that tests show that "Bush's vilified education law works".

NCLB’s vision of school reform may be blinkered, and [formerly failing schools] owe [recent] success as much to... gifted staff as... to any outside force. But, as even [hostile] educators admit, NCLB changed the way they taught and led them to reach some of the children who might have otherwise fallen behind.

In other words, score another one for Dubya. Once again he was right, and his critics were wrong. And even Democrats, like the writers at the New Republic, are forced to admit it.

More and more history is vindicating George W. Bush, but so deeply has the Democrat campaign narrative been embedded in our political culture that emerging truth is unlikely to have much impact on people's attitudes regarding one of our best and least appreciated presidents.

Public Sector Unions are Different

David Brooks explains why public sector unions are quite different from the old industrial unions.

[P]ublic sector unions and private sector unions are very different creatures. Private sector unions push against the interests of shareholders and management; public sector unions push against the interests of taxpayers. Private sector union members know that their employers could go out of business, so they have an incentive to mitigate their demands; public sector union members work for state monopolies and have no such interest.

Private sector unions confront managers who have an incentive to push back against their demands. Public sector unions face managers who have an incentive to give into them for the sake of their own survival. Most important, public sector unions help choose those they negotiate with. Through gigantic campaign contributions and overall clout, they have enormous influence over who gets elected to bargain with them, especially in state and local races.

As a result of these imbalanced incentive structures, states with public sector unions tend to run into fiscal crises. They tend to have workplaces where personnel decisions are made on the basis of seniority, not merit. There is little relationship between excellence and reward, which leads to resentment among taxpayers who don’t have that luxury. 

Divisiveness, resentment, fiscal crises, poor performance, unaccountability, corruption of the political process..., all these inevitably result over time from the establishment of public sector unions. Silent Cal knew this. So, too, did Reagan. We must learn from their example. 

UPDATE:

Jonah Goldberg explains why public employee unions should  be broken here.

Pascal Bruckner on "The Tyranny of Guilt"

Bruckner explains the terrible consequences of wallowing in collective guilt.

The Latest in Evolutionary Science

Want to know the latest nuances in evolution theory? Why is "Ardi's" status as a human ancestor being challenged? Why is the "Out of Africa" narrative crumbling? How much of evolutionary "science" simply a reflection of sociological imperatives within the profession? Check out this dialogue between Razib Kahn and Milford Wolpoff and be informed.

Rummy Speaks Out

Here is video of Don Rumsfeld's interview with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell. It is classic Rummy. She hits him with every loopy left-wing theory about Iraq and he easily swats them down. She's an experienced interviewer, but he has her completely flummoxed. Enjoy!

Revolutionaries

Tina Rosenberg has a fascinating piece in Foreign Policy on CANVAS, a group of Serbian activists who have been training dissidents to foment democratic revolutions throughout the world. If her assertions are true, the wave of revolutions currently sweeping through the Arab world are far more closely coordinated than generally recognized and are part of a much larger democratic impulse affecting authoritarian regimes throughout the world. Their roots lie not in 1848, or in the collapse of the Soviet empire, or in the enthusiasms unleashed by President Bush's liberation of Iraq, but in Serbia in the late 1990's. I'm skeptical, but it's an interesting perspective.

Read it here.

Freeman Dyson on Science

Writing in the New York Review of Books one of the greatest scientific minds of the past century argues:

The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find mysteries. Our planet is covered by continents and oceans whose origin we cannot explain. Our atmosphere is constantly stirred by poorly understood disturbances that we call weather and climate. The visible matter in the universe is outweighed by a much larger quantity of dark invisible matter that we do not understand at all. The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness. We have no clear idea how the electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions.

Even physics, the most exact and most firmly established branch of science, is still full of mysteries.... Science is the sum total of a great multitude of mysteries. It is an unending argument between a great multitude of voices. It resembles Wikipedia much more than it resembles the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Dyson has come in for a lot of criticism, and was subjected to a classic New York Times hatchet job, lately because he has resisted the orthodox position on global warming, but his view of the nature of science is far superior to that of his critics. Read the whole thing here. 

The Silk Road at Penn

If you are in Philadelphia next month you might want to check out a wonderful exhibit at the University Museum. "Secrets of the Silk Road" is a wonder to behold. Unfortunately a featured element of the exhibit, the "Beauty of Xiahoe" has been removed at the request of the Chinese government. The problem: the "Beauty" [pictured above] is quite obviously caucasian and is visual evidence of the fact that the ancient inhabitants of Western China were not Chinese, something that the current regime wants to suppress.

There is a lecture series that accompanies the exhibit. Some of these are already online and can be viewed here.

American Manufacturing

Most Americans are strongly convinced that America's manufacturing sector is in steep decline, largely because businesses are shipping production overseas. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Jeff Jacoby explains:

There’s just one problem with all the gloom and doom about American manufacturing. It’s wrong.

Americans make more “stuff’’ than any other nation on earth, and by a wide margin. According to the United Nations’ comprehensive database of international economic data, America’s manufacturing output in 2009 (expressed in constant 2005 dollars) was $2.15 trillion. That surpassed China’s output of $1.48 trillion by nearly 46 percent. China’s industries may be booming, but the United States still accounted for 20 percent of the world’s manufacturing output in 2009 — only a hair below its 1990 share of 21 percent.
....

In fact, Americans manufactured more goods in 2009 than the Japanese, Germans, British, and Italians — combined.

American manufacturing output hits a new high almost every year. US industries are powerhouses of production: Measured in constant dollars, America’s manufacturing output today is more than double what it was in the early 1970s.

So why all the gloom and doom?

The reason is that manufacturing jobs are disappearing, but that is not due to globalization. Rather it is a result of productivity gains resulting from technological innovation. American manufacturers these days can produce more stuff with fewer workers than they did in the past. Moreover they are producing far more sophisticated things than they were in the past. The old, obsolete labor intensive factories are gone or going, but they are being replaced by high-tech production facilities.

A vast amount of “stuff’’ is still made in the USA, albeit not the inexpensive consumer goods that fill the shelves in Target or Walgreens. American factories make fighter jets and air conditioners, automobiles and pharmaceuticals, industrial lathes and semiconductors. Not the sort of things on your weekly shopping list? Maybe not. But that doesn’t change economic reality. They may have “clos[ed] down the textile mill across the railroad tracks.’’ But America’s manufacturing glory is far from a thing of the past.

This is an important distinction that has to be made clear before the public can have a rational and informed discussion on the state of the American economy. Too bad that unscrupulous politicians choose to obscure and distort, rather than to clarify, the real issues at stake.

Read the whole piece here.

"Silenced Cal"

Amity Shlaes, who is writing a book on him, outlines the argument for considering Calvin Coolidge to be one of the greatest of American presidents and explains why "liberals" have worked so hard to erase the nation's memory of just how good he was. Read it here.

The Anti-Tolkien

A Russian scientist and Tolkien fan decided to write an alternative version of "Lord of the Rings" told from the side of Mordor. It has been around for years, but because of copyright limitations was not available in English until recently. Now an English translation of the Russian original is available for free online. You can download it here. Sauron as an enlightened ruler? Interesting.

Wisconsin Updates

Anyone interested in following the ongoing events in Wisconsin as public employees unions revolt against the new governor's budget plans should visit Ann Althouse's site [here]. She is based in Madison and is updating and offering shrewd observations on the ruckus.

Thinking About JEB

John Miller makes the case, based upon his solid track record as Florida governor and his performance since leaving office, for seriously considering Jeb Bush as a Republican candidate for president in 2012.

Check it out here.

We could do a lot worse. Chris Christie is getting all the headlines, but in many ways Bush's term of office in Florida prefigured what Christie is doing now.

I Wonder How This Is Going to Affect TV Coverage of the Arab Revolt

CBS TV Reporter Sexually Assaulted in Cairo

(CBSNews)  

On Friday, Feb. 11, the day Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan was covering the jubilation in Tahrir Square for a "60 Minutes" story when she and her team and their security were surrounded by a dangerous element amidst the celebration. It was a mob of more than 200 people whipped into frenzy.
In the crush of the mob, she was separated from her crew. She was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers. She reconnected with the CBS team, returned to her hotel and returned to the United States on the first flight the next morning. She is currently in the hospital recovering.

I wonder what they would have done if CNN's Anderson Cooper had proudly proclaimed himself to be gay.

"The People" are not always the heroic masses you think they are.

Check out this response by liberal/left scholar and MSM commentator, Nir Rosen. Absolutely disgusting!

Barak Obama Explained

What interests me about this is that not long ago I heard many of these very same arguments from a former high-level Washington bureaucrat.

Tunisia Update -- Voting With Their Feet

Tunisians are voting with their feet on the results of the "Jasmine revolution". AP reports:

LAMPEDUSA, Italy (AP) - A month after massive protests ousted Tunisia's longtime dictator, waves of Tunisians are voting with their feet, fleeing the country's political limbo by climbing into rickety boats and sailing across the Mediterranean to Europe.

More than 5,000 illegal immigrants have recently washed up on Italy's southern islands - an unintended consequence of the "people's revolution" that ousted autocrat Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and inspired the uprisings in Egypt and beyond.

European powers cheered when Tunisia's 74-year-old ruler fled into exile in Saudi Arabia on Jan. 14, but the fallout a month later has tempered their enthusiasm. It has also exposed a dilemma for western countries that allied with repressive leaders in North Africa seen as bulwarks against extremism, and now must build new diplomatic relationships in a still-uncertain political climate.

This is precisely what Prof. Ferguson was warning when he appeared yesterday on MSNBC. The smug assertions by the hosts that the Egypt crisis was a triumph for the Obama administration were far too early and were unwarranted. The situation is still quite uncertain and very bad things could easily happen and there are many reasons to believe that they will. Young people are very good at tearing things down. They aren't very good at building things up. 

The fact that people are leaving post-revolutionary Tunisia in droves points up the uncertainty of the situation. By the measures applied by the MSM Tunisia's bloodless revolution was a complete success, driving out a corrupt and authoritarian leader. But what is to replace Ben Ali? We don't know. And the economic problems that contributed mightily to the revolutionary situation have not been addressed. That is why so many Tunisians are taking to their boats and moving north. They are not fleeing political repression. They are worried about the future and are seeking refuge in the relatively stable lands to the north.

George Shearing RIP

From AP:

NEW YORK – Sir George Shearing, the ebullient jazz pianist who wrote the standard "Lullaby of Birdland" and had a string of hits both with and without his quintet, has died. He was 91.
Shearing, blind since birth, died early Monday morning in Manhattan of congestive heart failure, his longtime manager Dale Sheets said.

 Read the full notice here.

Here he is playing his greatest hit, Lullaby of Birdland



Aaaaaaaahhhh, thats nice!

Obama the Inept

Niall Ferguson unloads on our hapless young president in this week's Newsweek.

“The statesman can only wait and listen until he hears the footsteps of God resounding through events; then he must jump up and grasp the hem of His coat, that is all.” Thus Otto von Bismarck, the great Prussian statesman who united Germany and thereby reshaped Europe’s balance of power nearly a century and a half ago.

Last week, for the second time in his presidency, Barack Obama heard those footsteps, jumped up to grasp a historic opportunity … and missed it completely.

In Bismarck’s case it was not so much God’s coattails he caught as the revolutionary wave of mid-19th-century German nationalism. And he did more than catch it; he managed to surf it in a direction of his own choosing. The wave Obama just missed—again—is the revolutionary wave of Middle Eastern democracy. It has surged through the region twice since he was elected: once in Iran in the summer of 2009, the second time right across North Africa, from Tunisia all the way down the Red Sea to Yemen. But the swell has been biggest in Egypt, the Middle East’s most populous country.

In each case, the president faced stark alternatives. He could try to catch the wave, Bismarck style, by lending his support to the youthful revolutionaries and trying to ride it in a direction advantageous to American interests. Or he could do nothing and let the forces of reaction prevail. In the case of Iran, he did nothing, and the thugs of the Islamic Republic ruthlessly crushed the demonstrations. This time around, in Egypt, it was worse. He did both—some days exhorting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to leave, other days drawing back and recommending an “orderly transition.”

 

The result has been a foreign-policy debacle.

Devastating analysis. Read the whole thing here.

Basically, the problem with Obama's foreign policy is the same as with his domestic programs. He just doesn't have a clear understanding of the goals or the mechanisms of government. Nothing in his background prepared him for governance -- certainly not the elite education he received -- and when confusion inevitably results he, as he did in the Senate, simply votes "present". His instinct is to straddle, to shift responsibility away from himself, and to studiously avoid the hard work of acquiring a significant understanding of the issues with which history presents him. Even when he has a clear goal, as in the case of establishing a national health system, he turns the whole matter over to others [in that case Congressional Democrats] who pursue their own ends, not his. This is a man who cannot, or will not, take charge. Prof. Ferguson has his number.

Here is Ferguson explaining his position to a largely hostile audience on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" show.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The First Harbinger of Spring

Pitchers and catchers report tomorrow.

Mitch Daniels Speech at CPAC

Damn, I'm starting to like this guy.

Liberal Foreign Policy Explained

Don't Tangle with Sarah

and expect support from conservatives.

That's the lesson Rick Santorum learned this week when he attacked Sarah Palin. Here's how the audience at CPAC responded. They stayed away from his presentation in droves. Rick has become the "nowhere man" of the convention.

HT to William Jacobson

The Future of Carthage

Richard Miles has a piece in the Guardian on attempts to recover the heritage of ancient Carthage, and how they have been frustrated by the corrupt government of former Tunisian leader, Ben Ali [here].

We recently visited the site of Carthage and the problem is quite apparent. This first picture is of the outer harbor of Carthage. As you can see it is ringed by mansions housing the nation's elite.

And here is the famed circular Carthaginian war harbor with the Byrsa hill in the background. On the Byrsa there is a relatively small excavation illustrating the nature of the old settlement, but although the area has long been declared a UN World Heritage Site, it has been overbuilt by elite residences housing family and political allies of Ben Ali. In the process an immense amount of the nation's cultural heritage passed into private hands/  Now that the regime has been overthrown archaeologists have new hopes that much of that heritage can be reclaimed.

Sarah Palin Honors Ronald Reagan

Sarah Palin speaks at the Young America's Foundation ceremony honoring Ronald Reagan. It's a good speech, well worth listening to.

British Sense and Sensibilities

The politically correct insanity that has gripped so much of the Western world is slowly but surely coming to an end as leaders begin to realize that government embodying the diverse imperatives of multicultural relativism is unworkable. David Cameron recently made some interesting remarks on the subject:

David Cameron has criticised "state multiculturalism" in his first speech as prime minister on radicalisation and the causes of terrorism.

At a security conference in Munich, he argued the UK needed a stronger national identity to prevent people turning to all kinds of extremism.

He also signalled a tougher stance on groups promoting Islamist extremism.

The speech angered some Muslim groups, while others queried its timing amid an English Defence League rally in the UK.

As Mr Cameron outlined his vision, he suggested there would be greater scrutiny of some Muslim groups which get public money but do little to tackle extremism.
Ministers should refuse to share platforms or engage with such groups, which should be denied access to public funds and barred from spreading their message in universities and prisons, he argued.

"Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism," the prime minister said.


...

"Let's properly judge these organisations: Do they believe in universal human rights - including for women and people of other faiths? Do they believe in equality of all before the law? Do they believe in democracy and the right of people to elect their own government? Do they encourage integration or separatism?

"These are the sorts of questions we need to ask. Fail these tests and the presumption should be not to engage with organisations."

That's precisely right. No polity can tolerate the activities of groups that seek to destroy or seriously undermine its essential values and forms. Anglo-American liberalism is based on specific sets of values and its representatives should proudly and determinedly assert those values and strenuously resist attempts to undermine them. It is good to see that PM Cameron has finally shown a willingness to embrace the core values of his nation's political culture. Sense is finally beginning to be asserted against the welter of conflicting sensibilities, and often destructive sensibilities that the multicultualists seem to treasure.

Read about it here.

Haters

The "Climate of Hate Blog" Required reading. Absolutely! It documents who the real haters are.Warning, you have to have a strong stomach to view what passes for sophisticated humor or political commentary on the Left.

Check it out here.