Rich Lowry makes the same point, observing that the democrats are operating on the basis of a mandate for radical change that they never had.

On November 3, the fairy tale died. The election results in Virginia and New Jersey dismantled the self-satisfied, just-so story that Democrats have been telling themselves about last year’s election.

The story goes like this: In 2008, Americans voted for change not just in the nation’s leadership, but in its fundamental political orientation. They wanted a shift to the left not seen since 1932. The nation’s political map had been utterly transformed. Barack Obama owned the suburbs and independents, and laid claim to formerly secure Republican states. An outdated GOP had been reduced to a rejectionist husk clinging to rural areas and the South.

A more modest rival interpretation explained it differently: A charming young man running against a Republican party debilitated by its association with an unpopular war and a politically toxic incumbent won a solid 7-point victory nationally. He sounded reasonable and moderate, and won for his party something important, if not necessarily epoch-making: a chance to govern after the other side had blown it.

The Republican sweep of the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey is flatly incompatible with the first, heroic interpretation of 2008. If things changed so fundamentally, they wouldn’t have snapped back so quickly.

Read the whole thing.

David Brooks, too, observes that the willingness of democrats to try for radical change at the risk of the economy is costing them the support of the non-ideological center.

Independents turned on the Republican Party because the MSM persuaded them that it was George W. Bush’s intransigent extremism which had poisoned American political life and produced bitter factionalism, and that it was Bush’s war spending and Republican banking deregulation that produced the economic crisis. They put democrats in charge, and our politics has not become bipartisan, the Middle East is not at peace, and the economy has not recovered. On the other hand, the deficit has quadrupled, the government owns General Motors, and Congress is trying to nationalize another one sixth of the economy while adding another trillion dollar entitlement, just before it proceeds to start working on carbon taxes.

Right now, independent voters are astonishingly volatile. Democrats did poorly in elections on Tuesday partly because of disappointed liberals who think that President Obama is moving too slowly, but mostly because of anxious suburban independents who think he is moving too fast. In Pennsylvania, there was an eight-point swing away from the Democrats among independents from a year ago. In New Jersey, there was a 12-point swing. In Virginia, there was a 13-point swing.

The most telling races this year were the suburban rebellions across the country. For example, in Westchester and Nassau counties in New York, Republican candidates came from nowhere to defeat entrenched Democratic county officials. In blue Pennsylvania, the G.O.P. won six out of seven statewide offices.

Middle-class suburban voters who have been trending Democratic for a decade suddenly lurched out of the Democratic camp — and are now in play.

Why? What do these voters want?

The first thing to say is that this recession has hit the new suburbs hardest, exactly where independents are likely to live. According to a survey by the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, 76 percent of suburbanites say they or someone they know have lost a job in the past year.

The second thing to say is that in this time of need, these voters are not turning to government for support. Trust in government is at its lowest level in recent memory. Over the past year, there has been a shift to the right on issue after issue. According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans who believe that there is too much government regulation rose from 38 percent in 2008 to 45 percent in 2009. The percentage of Americans who want unions to have less influence rose from 32 percent to a record 42 percent.

Americans have moved to the right on abortion, immigration and global warming. Over the past seven months, the number of people who say government is doing too many things better left to business has jumped from 40 percent to 48 percent, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

According to that same survey, only 31 percent of Americans believe that the president and Congress “should worry more about boosting the economy even though it may mean larger budget deficits.” Sixty-two percent, twice as many, believe the president and Congress “should worry more about keeping the deficit down, even though it may mean it will take longer for the economy to recover.”

These shifts have not occurred because conservatives and liberals have changed their minds. They haven’t. The shift is among independents.

According to Gallup, the share of independents who describe their views as conservative has moved from 29 percent last year to 35 percent today. The share of independents who believe there is too much government regulation of business has jumped from 38 percent to 50 percent. Independents are in the position of a person who is feeling gravely ill at the same time he has lost faith in his doctor. ...

Independents support the party that seems most likely to establish a frame of stability and order, within which they can lead their lives. They can’t always articulate what they want, but they withdraw from any party that threatens turmoil and risk. As always, they’re looking for a safe pair of hands.

Daniel Henniger explains that economic fears drove independent voters to flee the Republican ticket and vote for Barack Obama, whose calm tones and competently-run campaign promised he could handle the crisis. The economic crisis was not resolved quickly. Democrats chose not to adopt the conventional policy of cutting taxes, preferring to regulate and spend. The public’s unease has been increased rather than assuaged by the Administration’s determination to advance an extreme partisan agenda, even in the face of declining public support.

Independent voters across the U.S. have become like the massive cattle herd John Wayne drove from Texas to Kansas in “Red River.” These voters are spooked and on the run, a political stampede that veered left in November 2008 and now right a mere year later. They will keep running—crushing incumbents, candidates and political models of the left and right—through November 2010 and onto 2012 until they find a person or party capable of leadership appropriate to our unsettled times. And yes, Virginia, the possibility of a man on a white horse in 2012 is not out of the question.

Exit polls in New Jersey and Virginia said the economy was on voters’ minds. Unemployment is near 10% and may stay there for a year. But it’s deeper than that.

This isn’t just another turn in the business cycle. On Sept. 15, 2008, the economic structure of the U.S. imploded. Lehman Brothers, a synonym for the American financial bedrock, filed for bankruptcy. On June 1, 2009, General Motors, once a synonym for American economic primacy, filed for bankruptcy and was effectively nationalized. In the nine months between these two iconic events, the American people were riveted to news of economic distress.

The signal event of the 2008 presidential election was the day in September when Sen. John McCain “suspended” his campaign to deal with the financial crisis. Within 48 hours, his candidacy stood naked. Mr. McCain’s instincts were right; The American people wanted leadership. But he didn’t have a clue how to provide it. The restless herd ran toward Barack Obama.

Now they’re ready to run toward someone else. They just did in New Jersey and Virginia.

This is not normal. A new American presidency, especially this one, should not be in this much trouble 10 months into a four-year term. Nor would it be if not for the economic events that fell out of September 2008.

Absent the immediate need to steady the credit markets and deal with a deepening recession, the Obama White House would have introduced—and passed—its restructuring of the U.S. health-care system in early spring. Instead, voters watched Congress create and pass a nearly trillion-dollar “stimulus” bill, and then erect the world’s tallest national budget—a towering $3.5 trillion. They watched the Obama Treasury, now hard-wired to the Federal Reserve, intervene massively in the structure of the private economy. There was an attempted federal climate-control bill, an attempted expansion of union organizing rights (card check) and second thoughts on free-trade agreements.

Only then, in June, was this hyperactive government able to introduce its health-care proposal—the public option, the remaking of the insurance industry, a 5.4% tax surcharge, the expansion of Medicaid.

After his election, Mr. Obama’s strongest attribute was limitless self-confidence. He was a man aglow with knowledge, control and . . . leadership. Now, with the scale and cost of Mr. Obama’s ambitions so clear, the question many voters are asking is whether the Obama government’s reach exceeds its grasp or abilities—or any government’s.

The most acute voters know these are not normal times. The Obama vision so far looks a lot like the social-market economic model of Europe, where leaders such as Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel give homilies about the “crisis” of capitalism. If American voters then look toward Asia, they see rising economies using capitalism to supplant Europe.

American voters know they’ve reached a long-term economic tipping point. Which way to go, old West or new East? They understand the challenges are growing while the politicians seem to be shrinking.

So the Republicans “won” Tuesday. Now what?

Just as the Democrats in 2008 ran mainly against “Bush,” the Republican political model seems to be to let Democratic failure dump states like New Jersey and Virginia into their control. But I think most voters, no matter their party registration, know that in the past 12 months the stakes for them have suddenly become larger than political “control.”

Unless leadership emerges equal to the new world voters see they have fallen into, volatility in America’s election returns is going to be the norm for a long time.

The moral is that personal charm and a reassuring manner are powerful tools in gaining middle-of-the-road support in American politics, but keeping the support of a coalition including the ideologically uncommitted requires a kind of leadership which Ronald Reagan had and which Barack Obama lacks.

Obama already seems already far more likely to go down in history as a surly extremist who achieved election by temporarily feigning a false bonhommie, à la Jimmy Carter, than a genuinely transformative president like Reagan.

Going for a New Deal-style massive entitlement program in the midst of recession, after quadrupling the deficit, will never persuade independents that this administration is responsible and pragmatic.

Virginia Governor
McDonnell (Rep) 59, Deeds (Dem) 41

New Jersey Governor
Christie (Rep) 49, Corzine (Dem) 45

New York (23d District)
Owens (Dem) 48, Hoffman (Con) 46

We won the two big governor’s races and, despite the uphill difficulty in New York’s 23rd Congressional District, came close to pulling off a conservative win out of what started as a three-way race.

John Dickerson, at Slate, explains that the independent voters have come back to the Republican Party. Independents are, naturally enough, frightened by the economy and appalled at the deficit.

The Republican candidates killed among independents. In both New Jersey and Virginia, they won by two to one. Independent voters make up their largest share of the electorate since pollsters have been counting them. In 2006 and 2008, these voters backed Congressional Democrats, and in the 2008 presidential race, they went for Obama 51 percent to 47 percent over John McCain. They’ve been souring on his presidency, though, and now more disapprove of his performance than approve. In Virginia, Obama won 48 percent of independents. The Republican Bob McDonnell won 68 percent of those voters this time around. In New Jersey, Christie carried independents 58 percent to 31 percent, which helped him overcome the fact that there are 700,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in that state.

I don’t always agree with the Jack Russell Terrier camp of Conservative blogging (Michelle Malkin, Pam Geller, Dan Riehl, and so on). I recently thought they were all being silly about the 30 year old Roman Polanski scandal.

But today I certainly think our most belligerent rightwing bloggers are all right and Rick Moran must have failed to take his vitamins recently or has converted to vegetarianism or something. He wrote a sermon advocating RINO conservation, and is dead wrong this time.

Moran’s post opens:

What is it that possesses certain conservatives to fool themselves so spectacularly into believing that they can create a majority out of a minority?

Creating majorities out of minorities is what political ideas and leadership are all about.

We created a majority out of a minority in 1980 and in 1984 and in 1994 and in 2000 and in 2004. We get some excellent assistance from the democrats who do outrageous, foolish, and unpatriotic things all the time, and who sometimes try to nationalize the American health care system.

When Hillary Clinton tried that last time, we converted a minority into majority control of both houses of Congress.

We’re just starting to vote today, but we are predicted to convert a conservative minority into a whopping majority in the Virginia gubernatorial race. And events in New York state’s 23rd Congressional race seem to be well on the way to proving that the conservative minority can oust the establishment ersatz Republican candidate and still win the election.

I hope Rick Moran has a taste for feathers, because it certainly looks like he will soon be eating crow.

I’m with Pam Geller on this one. Olympia Snowe a la lanterne! Give Rick Moran a stiff shot of fiery rum.

Senator Orrin Hatch (R- UT) yesterday. in an interview with CNS, questioned the constitutionality of the democrat health care reform bill, and explained why Nancy Pelosi and the democrat party’s congressional leadership are willing to defy opinion polls and risk losing control of Congress by ramming through ObamaCare.

The Hill:

HATCH: That’s their goal. Move people into government that way. Do it in increments. They’ve actually said it. They’ve said it out loud.

Q: This is a step-by-step approach —

HATCH: A step-by-step approach to socialized medicine. And if they get there, of course, you’re going to have a very rough time having a two-party system in this country, because almost everybody’s going to say, “All we ever were, all we ever are, all we ever hope to be depends on the Democratic Party.”

Q: They’ll have reduced the American people to dependency on the federal government.

HATCH: Yeah, you got that right. That’s their goal. That’s what keeps Democrats in power.

Around 19:50 in the 33:57 video.
———————————————————————-

Duncan Black speaks for the left blogosphere generally by parsing Hatch’s warning into a more flattering form.

Orrin Hatch says we can’t have health care reform because it will be awesome and everyone will love it and they’ll be so grateful that they will vote for Democrats for all eternity.

Health care delivered by government will actually, judging by the experience of other countries, be crappy, severely rationed, and lacking innovation. The rich and powerful will simply go outside US borders to obtain first class health care at luxury clinics located in convenient resort destinations. The ordinary middle class citizen will find himself standing in long queues behind welfare moms, junkies, gangbangers, and illegal aliens.

The quality will be low, the service will be slow, but lunch will come without a check.

Democrats are counting on human nature being on their side. Free goods and services at somebody else’s expense have a powerful appeal. Also, they are addictive.

Once anyone has contributed revenue into the system, he is going to feel he has a claim to get those promised benefits. Once one sixth of the American economy goes down the federal anaconda’s throat, it won’t be coming back up.

Duncan Black’s boast can be more accurately paraphrased that the heroin will be so awesome, and will be so effective that the suckers’ will love it and will be unable afterward to do without it, and they’ll be so dependent on their dealer that they will happily surrender to him all the money and power he ever asks for.

Free government services, like addictive drugs, are morally corrosive, enervating to the human character and will, and a sure path to dependency and slavery.

Queue in Baltimore (Baltimore Sun photo)

Bill Kristol suggests, if you want to see ObamaCare in action, just look at how well the federal government is doing passing out Flu vaccine right now.

With Barack Obama as her front man, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—the real power in the Democratic party—has gone Clinton and Gingrich one better. Clinton tried to hike taxes. Gingrich sought to cut Medicare. Pelosi wants to do both at once. This is quite a feat: She’s combined the most unpopular Democratic and Republican proposals of the last generation in one piece of legislation.

And her timing is impeccable. Pelosi has decided to raise taxes and discourage employment just as joblessness approaches 10 percent. She’s decided to cut Medicare reimbursements just as seniors’ retirement accounts have shrunk. She’s decided to advance a huge spending bill just as the deficit is at historic highs. She’s decided to insist on federal funding of abortion just as the issue seems to have reached some sustainable middle ground. And she’s decided to put forward a 2,000-page piece of legislation with a mind-boggling array of scary instances of bureaucratic coercion and farcical examples of nanny-state liberalism—all nuggets of political gold for Republicans—at a time when the public is sick of statist overreaching and big-government meddling.

This is the Pelosi Plan to wreck our health care system and—the bright side!—the Democratic majority along with it. This week we’ll see whether enough of her fellow House Democrats intervene to prevent her from devastating their party. There will be no Republican votes for the Pelosi Plan of tax hikes and Medicare cuts. Will there be enough Democratic resistors so the bill is either withdrawn or defeated?

It’s hard to say at this point. The arm-twisting and palm-greasing haven’t yet produced enough Democrats to put the Pelosi Plan over the top. The substantive case against various versions of the legislation made for months by an army of nonpartisan experts and wonks has had an effect. The state of the American economy and the federal budget gives sane Democrats pause as they consider enacting a sprawling new entitlement. And as Americans read the legislation over the next week, they’ll find so much that is ill-considered, cumbersome, deceptive, and house-of-cards-like that it all just may collapse of its own weight.

Or it may collapse because of swine flu.

After all, we’re seeing a big government health care program in operation right now—the Obama administration’s effort to deal with the swine flu problem. No, come to think of it, it’s now the swine flu emergency. Last week, President Obama so legally designated it. How’s that test case in government-run emergency care going?

Turn on your local news to find out. You’ll see false reassurances, broken promises, rationing which doesn’t provide the promised rations, queues lengthening while supplies run out, and lots of bureaucrats explaining just why things aren’t working quite as their centrally planned plans had planned.

The swine flu emergency is a foretaste of life under the Pelosi Plan.

Megrahi welcomed home in August by Muamar Gadaffi’s son and designated successor, Saif al-Islam

The Telegraph reports that unidentified “senior official” source has revealed that predictions of the Lockerbie bomber’s imminent demise have proven inaccurate.

So much for the “within three months” legal basis for his compassionate release. Of course, we already knew that compassion had nothing to do with this. It was simply a sordid sale of justice by Labour in return for an oil deal.

The health of the Lockerbie bomber has “not deteriorated” since his release from prison three months ago – despite doctors’ assessments that he would have died by now, a senior source has told The Sunday Telegraph.

Megrahi, who is suffering terminal prostate cancer, was sent home to Libya to die after medical experts concluded in a report on July 30 he had just three months left to live. The time span was crucial because only prisoners with three months or less to survive are eligible for release on compassionate grounds.

The disclosure will reignite the row over the release of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds despite his conviction for the murder of 270 people when Pan Am flight 103 exploded in mid-air over Lockerbie in 1988.

Within three weeks of the medical examination by Professor Karol Sikora, one of Britain’s leading cancer specialists, Megrahi was put on a plane and sent home to Tripoli to die.

But three months on from Prof Sikora’s diagnosis, Megrahi is well enough to “walk and talk” and shows no sign of deterioration, according to a senior source involved in his release.

The source told The Sunday Telegraph: “His condition has not deteriorated in three months. He is pretty much in the same way as he was when this all started. He is just as he was. There is nothing that leads anyone to believe he is in any different condition to when he left Scotland.”

Photographed in Prince William County

Via the Politico.

Mark Steyn responds to National Endowment for the Arts chief’s Rocco Landesman’s hyperbolic flattery of the Chosen One.

In his keynote address to the 2009 “Grantmakers in the Arts” Conference, Landesman hailed Obama as “the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar”. He didn’t mean a “powerful writer” as in a compelling voice, gripping narrative, vivid characterization, command of language, etc. He meant a “powerful writer” as in Caesar was king of the world, and now Obama is. He came, he saw, he stimulated: “If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.”

I suppose so. He could invade somewhere and force the natives to accept degrading roles in NEA-funded performance art. He could take out the Iranian nuclear program by carpet-bombing it with unreadable literary novels. That is, if you “accept the premise” that the United States is the most powerful country in the world. Rocco Landesman may, but it’s not clear, from his actions (or inactions) in Eastern Europe, Iran, Afghanistan and elsewhere, that the President does. But, even so, it seems an odd pitch to “American artists”. Rocco Landesman, Speaking Goof to Power, isn’t the first Obama groupie to enjoy the kinky frisson of groveling obsequiousness, but he’s set an impressive new standard in public revelation thereof. Rocco’s aunt, Fran Landesman, is the great lyricist of “Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most” as well as “The Ballad Of The Sad Young Men”. But surely there are few sadder middle-aged men than her nephew prostrating himself before his master as the most literate global colossus in two millennia.

David Harsanyi thinks Americans need a good stiff drink as we survey the sheer size of Nancy Pelosi’s Pharonic pyramid of paper.

The King James version of the Bible runs more than 600 pages and is crammed with celestial regulations. Newton’s Principia Mathematica distilled many of the rules of physics in a mere 974 pages.

Neither have anything on Nancy Pelosi’s new fiendishly entertaining health-care opus, which tops 1,900 pages.

So curl up by a fire with a fifth of whiskey and just dive in.

But drink quickly. In the new world, your insurance choices will be tethered to decisions made by people with Orwellian titles (“1984” was only 268 pages!) like the “Health Choices Commissioner” or “Inspector General for the Health Choices Administration.”

You will, of course, need to be plastered to buy Pelosi’s fantastical proposition that 450,000 words of new regulations, rules, mandates, penalties, price controls, taxes and bureaucracy will have the transformative power to “provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending . . . .”

It’s going to take some time to deconstruct this lengthy masterpiece, but as you flip through the pages of the House bill, you will notice the word “regulation” appears 181 times. “Tax” is there 214 times. “Fees,” 103 times. As we all know, nothing says “affordability” like higher taxes and fees.

The word “shall” – as in “must” or “required to” – appears over 3,000 times. The word, alas, is never preceded by the patriotic phrase “mind our own freaking business.” Not once.

To vote for the bill, a legislator must believe a $1 trillion price tag is “revenue neutral,” or that it alleviates any of the pain higher costs bring to the average American. This would require alcohol.

Peggy Noonan is feeling a bit depressed today contemplating 1990 unreadable pages costing $2.24 million dollars a word.

While Americans feel increasingly disheartened, their leaders evince a mindless . . . one almost calls it optimism, but it is not that.

It is a curious thing that those who feel most mistily affectionate toward America, and most protective toward it, are the most aware of its vulnerabilities, the most aware that it can be harmed. They don’t see it as all-powerful, impregnable, unharmable. The loving have a sense of its limits.

When I see those in government, both locally and in Washington, spend and tax and come up each day with new ways to spend and tax—health care, cap and trade, etc.—I think: Why aren’t they worried about the impact of what they’re doing? Why do they think America is so strong it can take endless abuse?

I think I know part of the answer. It is that they’ve never seen things go dark. They came of age during the great abundance, circa 1980-2008 (or 1950-2008, take your pick), and they don’t have the habit of worry. They talk about their “concerns”—they’re big on that word. But they’re not really concerned. They think America is the goose that lays the golden egg. Why not? She laid it in their laps. She laid it in grandpa’s lap.

They don’t feel anxious, because they never had anything to be anxious about. They grew up in an America surrounded by phrases—”strongest nation in the world,” “indispensable nation,” “unipolar power,” “highest standard of living”—and are not bright enough, or serious enough, to imagine that they can damage that, hurt it, even fatally.

We are governed at all levels by America’s luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they’re not optimists—they’re unimaginative. They don’t have faith, they’ve just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don’t mind it when people become disheartened. They don’t even notice.

A musical tribute from Creedence (with malice) to our democrat rulers via Moe Lane.

2:16 video

Capitol Weekly reports on an interesting recent political dialogue in California.

Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, famously told the governor to “kiss my gay ass” at a Democratic fundraiser last month. Two days later, the governor responded in the veto message of one of Ammiano’s bills.

Earlier in the month, the San Francisco Democrat was at a boisterous Democratic fund-raiser when Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger stopped by to say hello. The governor, a guest of former Mayor Willie Brown, said a few words of greeting and extolled the virtues of bipartisanship. But Democrats, unhappy with the governor in their midst, booed loudly.

“Kiss my gay ass!” Ammiano shouted out.

Schwarzenegger smiled and left. But he was plotting his move.

On Oct. 11, the governor vetoed Ammiano’s AB 1176, with a seemingly innocuous and vague veto message.

Innocent enough. But when read on the governor’s Web site, the first letter of the last two paragraphs line up to spell out a clear, if crude message.

Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear said the hidden message was a “strange coincidence.”

“When you veto so many bills, something like this is bound to happen,” he said with a straight face.

Why would anyone possibly want to carry a weapon in a National Park?

In classic liberal newspaper fashion, the Yellowstone Insider performs some grave chin-stroking over the successful passage of Senator Tom Coburn’s S. Amendment 1067 (Text: pg. 1—pg. 2, attached to bill H.R. 627 regulating the credit card industry.

Wyoming does indeed have a concealed-carry law—you can see for yourself on the state’s website—and does indeed recognize concealed-carry permits from other states. ... However, Wyoming is one of the many states that allows citizens to openly carry a legally registered weapon. ...

(T)he fact that Park Rangers must add gun enforcement to their list of duties is not the most desirable of outcomes. Generally speaking, the vast majority of gun owners are responsible citizens. The problem, however, doesn’t lie with responsible gun owners; it lies with irresponsible gun owners, and they, too, exist; there were issues raised by gun owners openly brandishing their weapons during Obama speeches in Arizona and Minnesota this summer, as they went out of their way to openly carry legal semiautomatic weapons in large crowds waiting to see the President. Poaching, too, is still an issue in Yellowstone. And, quite bluntly, we can’t think of many instances in Yellowstone National Park where anyone would need a weapon; we’re not talking about an environment where animal attacks or human crime occurs with any degree of regularity.

In the Daily article, local attorney Kent Spence of Jackson’s Spence Law Firm says he would feel more comfortable camping in the Yellowstone backwoods carrying a weapon capable of taking down a bear, though he admitted pepper spray would be his first line of defense. We’re not so sure every other gun owner would be as comfortable or responsible should a bear attack.

You really have to admire liberal journalistic reasoning in action. Making something legal is alleged to create a new law enforcement responsibility for Park Rangers. Most of us would have supposed that eliminating a potential violation would have the opposite effect.

And you certainly would not want to be “irresponsible” in the event of a grizzly bear attack. Who knows? The indignant bear might sue.

Yes, Pepper Spray is definitely the answer. (Old joke)

I favor the .500 Linebaugh brand of Pepper Spray myself.

What kind of people are running the Executive Branch and conducting American policy? Paul Mirengoff points out a revelation in Dick Cheney’s speech that a cursory reading could easily have missed, and points out how much this particular political exchange reveals about the ethics and character of Barack Obama and his administration.

In his speech last night to the Center for Security Policy, former vice president Cheney blew the whistle on some egregious dishonesty by the Obama administration:

Recently, President Obama’s advisors have decided that it’s easier to blame the Bush Administration than support our troops. This weekend they leveled a charge that cannot go unanswered. The President’s chief of staff claimed that the Bush Administration hadn’t asked any tough questions about Afghanistan, and he complained that the Obama Administration had to start from scratch to put together a strategy.

In the fall of 2008, fully aware of the need to meet new challenges being posed by the Taliban, we dug into every aspect of Afghanistan policy, assembling a team that repeatedly went into the country, reviewing options and recommendations, and briefing President-elect Obama’s team. They asked us not to announce our findings publicly, and we agreed, giving them the benefit of our work and the benefit of the doubt. The new strategy they embraced in March, with a focus on counterinsurgency and an increase in the numbers of troops, bears a striking resemblance to the strategy we passed to them. They made a decision – a good one, I think – and sent a commander into the field to implement it. Now they seem to be pulling back and blaming others for their failure to implement the strategy they embraced . . .

In short, the Obama administration falsely claimed that the Bush administration had done no planning or analysis regarding the worsening situation in Afghanistan, even though it (1) knew this was false, (2) had asked the Bush administration not to disclose its work, and (3) relied in part on the same work it claimed the Bush administration had not performed. ...

(W)hat Cheney described last night goes well beyond lack of class… (T)he rank, opportunistic dishonesty described by Cheney demonstrates an affirmatively bad character. And an administration craven enough to engage in it is a dangerous, potentially thuggish administration.

Last night, Dick Cheney gave a speech at the Center for Security Policy in which he surveyed the Obama Administration’s short and dismal foreign record. He condemned the cancellation of the missile defense of Central Europe, strongly criticized what he referred to as “turning the guns on” US Intelligence officers, and called upon Barack Obama to stop dithering and keep his word on Afghanistan.

Every time I hear Dick Cheney speak, I regret that he was occupying the second position on the Republican ticket in 2000 and 2004 instead of the first.

Most anyone who is given responsibility in matters of national security quickly comes to appreciate the commitments and structures put in place by others who came before. You deploy a military force that was planned and funded by your predecessors. You inherit relationships with partners and obligations to allies that were first undertaken years and even generations earlier. With the authority you hold for a little while, you have great freedom of action. And whatever course you follow, the essential thing is always to keep commitments, and to leave no doubts about the credibility of your country’s word.

25:03 video

Peggy Noonan contends that the Progressive Frontier of government expansion closed some time ago. Americans already have all the government, all the services, taxes, and regulations they can stand. Barack Obama and the democrats in Congress are yearning to go back to a Depression era past in which paternalistic leaders in Washington taxed and spent, and delivered de haute en bas charitable goodies to grateful voters. Americans today know that they will have to pay for any gifts sent to them from Washington themselves.

I’m not sure the White House can tell the difference between campaign mode and governing mode, but it is the difference between “us versus them” and “us.” People sense the president does too much of the former, and this is reflected not only in words but decisions, such as the pursuit of a health-care agenda that was inevitably divisive. It has lost the public’s enthusiastic backing, if it ever had it, but is gaining on Capitol Hill. People don’t want whatever it is they’re about to get, and they’re about to get it. In that atmosphere everything grates, but most especially us-versus-them-ism.

The biggest thing supporters of a health care overhaul do not understand about those who oppose their efforts, and who oppose the Baucus bill, which has triumphantly passed the Senate Finance Committee even though no one knows exactly what is or will end up in it, is the issue of context.

The Democratic Party and the White House repeatedly suggest that if you are not for the bill or an overhaul, you don’t care about your fellow human beings and you love and support the insurance companies. Actually, no one loves the insurance companies, including the insurance companies. ... But the Obama administration’s strategy of making (the insurance industry) “the villain” in “the narrative” will probably not have that much punch because . . . well, again, who likes the insurance companies? Who ever did?

People who oppose a health-care overhaul are not in love with insurance companies. They’re not even in love with the status quo. Everyone knows the jerry-built system of the past half-century has weak points. They just don’t think the current plan will shore them up. They think the plan would create new weak points and widen old ones. They think this because they have brains.

But even that doesn’t get to the real subtext of the opposition. Yes, the timing is wrong—we have other, more urgent crises to face, and an exploding deficit. And yes, a big change in a huge economic sector during economic crisis is looking for trouble.

But a big part of opposition to the health-care plan is a sense of historical context. People actually have a sense of the history they’re living in and the history their country has recently lived through. They understand the moment we’re in.

In the days of the New Deal, in the 1930s, government growth was virgin territory. It was like pushing west through a continent that seemed new and empty. There was plenty of room to move. The federal government was still small and relatively lean, the income tax was still new. America pushed on, creating what it created: federal programs, departments and initiatives, Social Security. In the mid-1960s, with the Great Society, more or less the same thing. Government hadn’t claimed new territory in a generation, and it pushed on—creating Medicare, Medicaid, new domestic programs of all kinds, the expansion of welfare and the safety net.

Now the national terrain is thick with federal programs, and with state, county, city and town entities and programs, from coast to coast. It’s not virgin territory anymore, it’s crowded. We are a nation fully settled by government. We are well into the age of the welfare state, the age of government. We know its weight, heft and demands, know its costs both in terms of money and autonomy, even as we know it has made many of our lives more secure, and helped many to feel encouragement.

But we know the price now. This is the historical context. The White House often seems disappointed that the big center, the voters in the middle of the spectrum, aren’t all that excited about following them on their bold new journey. But it’s a world America has been to. It isn’t new to us. And we don’t have too many illusions about it.

Hotline OnCall admires a very nice thank you gift recently delivered for services rendered during last year’s primary campaign for the democrat party presidential nomination.

It’s not often that a plum ambassadorship goes to someone who isn’t a career foreign service officer or a big bucks campaign contributor, but Pres. Obama has nominated Anne Slaughter Andrew to be the ambassador to the Republic of Costa Rica.

Hmmm.

The prospective diplomat is an Indiana Univ. trained atty who currently is Principal of New Energy Nexus, LLC, and, according to the WH release on her nomination, “advises companies and entrepreneurs on investments and strategies to capitalize on the New Energy Economy.”

But Andrew is also wife of ex-IN Dem chair Joe Andrew, who was tapped by Bill Clinton to be DNC from ‘99 to ‘01 who also was a big backer of then-Sen. Hillary Clinton in her ‘08 bid—until five days before the must-win IN Dem primary last year, when Andrew with great fan-fare threw Clinton under the bus, endorsed Obama, urged all his fellow Hoosiers to vote for Obama and called up party leaders and fellow superdelegates (Andrew had that status to the Dem convo because he was an ex-DNC chair) to basically shut the nominating contest down after the IN primary and get behind Obama.

In a public letter that at times was melodramatic and angst-ridden, Andrew wrote: “Why call for superdelegates to come together now to constructively pick a president? The simple answer is that while the timing is hard for me personally, it is best for America. We simply cannot wait any longer, nor can we let this race fall any lower and still hope to win in November. June or July may be too late.”

Well, the contest did run until June and Obama still somehow made it to the WH. But for Joe, this was a selfless act: “My endorsement of Senator Obama will not be welcome news to my friends and family at the Clinton campaign… If the campaign’s surrogates called Governor Bill Richardson, a respected former member of President Clinton’s cabinet, a ‘Judas’ for endorsing Senator Obama, we can all imagine how they will treat somebody like me.”

Geee, somehow he managed to survive and somehow the current Sec/State must have an amazing amount of equanimity and grace not to have choked on this administration nomination.

Charles Krauthammer notes that Barack Obama and the democrats painted themselves into the corner they presently occupy. Watching how they deal with the situation will be interesting. Krauthammer compares Obama to Hamlet. I think Obama is more like Aethelred the Unready.

The genius of democracy is the rotation of power, which forces the opposition to be serious—particularly about things like war, about which until Jan. 20 of this year Democrats were decidedly unserious.

When the Iraq war (which a majority of Senate Democrats voted for) ran into trouble and casualties began to mount, Democrats followed the shifting winds of public opinion and turned decidedly antiwar. But needing political cover because of their post-Vietnam reputation for weakness on national defense, they adopted Afghanistan as their pet war.

“I was part of the 2004 Kerry campaign, which elevated the idea of Afghanistan as ‘the right war’ to conventional Democratic wisdom,” wrote Democratic consultant Bob Shrum shortly after President Obama was elected. “This was accurate as criticism of the Bush administration, but it was also reflexive and perhaps by now even misleading as policy.”

Which is a clever way to say that championing victory in Afghanistan was a contrived and disingenuous policy in which Democrats never seriously believed, a convenient two-by-four with which to bash George Bush over Iraq—while still appearing warlike enough to fend off the soft-on-defense stereotype.

Brilliantly crafted and perfectly cynical, the “Iraq war bad, Afghan war good” posture worked. Democrats first won Congress, then the White House. But now, unfortunately, they must govern. No more games. No more pretense.

So what does their commander in chief do now with the war he once declared had to be won but had been almost criminally under-resourced by Bush?

Perhaps provide the resources to win it?

You would think so. And that’s exactly what Obama’s handpicked commander requested on Aug. 30—a surge of 30,000 to 40,000 troops to stabilize a downward spiral and save Afghanistan the way a similar surge saved Iraq.

That was more than five weeks ago. Still no response. Obama agonizes publicly as the world watches. ...

Less than two months ago—Aug. 17 in front of an audience of veterans—the president declared Afghanistan to be “a war of necessity.” Does anything he says remain operative beyond the fading of the audience applause.

Charles Gasperino, in the New York Post, describes how a large portion of the New York financial industry’s senior management fell for Barack Obama’s tone of moderation and failed to look at the democrat candidate’s actual political record. They’re sorry now, experiencing the Obama Administration’s economic naïveté and unrelenting commitment to leftwing radicalism.

In the depths of the financial crisis last year, people like Morgan Stanley’s John Mack, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Greg Fleming (then of Merrill Lynch), JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein were telling everyone that candidate Barack Obama was a “moderate,” and moderation was what this country needed.

What a difference a year makes. They won’t admit it in public—but in private conversations, the top guys on Wall Street are feeling burned.

The guy who seemed like such a steady voice—vowing to curb runaway spending and restoring order to the banking system and the economy as a whole—is instead so driven to achieve his big-government policy goals that he and his policy people are ignoring their own economic advisers on the severe economic costs that his agenda will cause.

I’m told that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and chief economic adviser Lawrence Summers have both complained to senior Wall Street execs that they have almost no say in major policy decisions. Obama economic counselor Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman, is barely consulted at all on just about anything—not even issues involving the banking system, of which he is among the world’s leading authorities.

At most, the economic people and their staffs get asked to do cost analyses of Obama’s initiatives for the White House political people—who then ignore their advice.

It’s almost the opposite approach, the Wall Street crowd complains, from the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, whose main first-term achievement—deficit reduction—was crafted by his chief economic adviser, Robert Rubin.

Like Obama, Clinton and Rubin promised to raise taxes on the “rich,” and they did. But Clinton didn’t raise taxes to embark on a wild-eyed redistribution of wealth and massive programs. In the early Clinton years, Rubin convinced the president that he needed to avoid the grim consequences of runaway spending—and after the Republicans took Congress in ‘94, it was no longer an option.

Of course, the Clinton tax hikes came at a cost—before the tech boom ignited the economy in 1995, growth was mediocre at best. But government spending remained under control, and lower interest rates followed, as did an economic recovery.

Obama, according to Wall Street people who regularly deal with his economic and budget officials, is acting as if he has a blank check to do what he wants, while ignoring the longterm costs of his policies.

As one CEO of a major financial firm told me: “The economic guys say that when they explain the costs of programs, the policy guys simply thank them for their time and then ignore what they say.”

In other words, the economic people feel that they have almost no say in this administration’s policy decisions.

Vera Lengsfeld (on the right) with well-known image of Angela Merkel in evening gown

Vera Lengsfeld, a 57-year-old Christian Democrat candidate facing a difficult race in a Berlin district against a Green incumbent, aroused controversy by producing and distributing the above poster, which informs voters: “We have more to offer.”

From the Telegraph.

Michael Barone admires the liberal establishment’s recent efforts to marginalize dissent.

I would submit that the president’s call for an end to “bickering” and the charges of racism by some of his supporters are the natural reflex of people who are not used to hearing people disagree with them and who are determined to shut them up.

This comes naturally to liberals educated in our great colleges and universities, so many of which have speech codes whose primary aim is to prevent the expression of certain conservative ideas and which are commonly deployed for that purpose. (For examples, see the Website of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which defends students of all political stripes.) Once the haven of free inquiry and expression, academia has become a swamp of stifling political correctness.

Similarly, the “mainstream media”—the old-line broadcast networks, The New York Times, etc.—present a politically correct picture of the world. The result is that liberals can live in a cocoon, an America in which seldom is heard a discouraging word. Conservatives, in contrast, find themselves constantly pummeled with liberal criticism, on campus, in news media, and in Hollywood TV and movies. They don’t like it, but they’ve gotten used to it. Liberals aren’t used to it and increasingly try to stamp it out.

Read the whole thing.

If we study the vocabulary of the American elite, we find that strange things have happened to the English language. Slavish conformity of thought, readiness to bow to conventional opinion, credulous acceptance of popular alarms, willingness to embrace crude simplifications, and firm refusal to question supposed authority and pretended expertise are continually cited as evidencing sound judgment and good education. Skepticism and questioning the authority of media culture is, on the other hand, extremist, polarizing, and ignorant. Our contemporary political culture basically turns language inside out. The most craven conformist mouthing empty platitudes (Albert Gore) is praised for wisdom and bravery, and anyone attempting to subject a received prescription to scrutiny or analysis (Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh) is intrinsically unintelligent.

Herbert London, at PJM, attacks the philosophy of Envy underlying the agenda of the American party of the left.

Whether it is the socialism espoused by the Nazis or the socialism of the former Soviet Union or the socialism that is emerging in the United States, there is one overarching sentiment, however different socialism in these three societies may be. Socialism everywhere expresses envy of excellence by treating the contributions and wealth of the successful as the wages of sin.

The Nazis saw the sin as a Jewish conspiracy, the Soviets saw sin as exploitation by the bourgeoisie, and what is emerging in the United States is the sin of the wealthy.

In the Obama administration greed is considered the sin that must be opposed. But greed, whatever its deficiencies, is, as Adam Smith pointed out, an incentive for the promotion of capitalism which, in the aggregate, has a salutary influence on the economy. To combat greed, the socialists emphasize envy. Since equality is the goal, even trivial differences in income are exaggerated and the progressivity in the tax system is employed as a blunt instrument to impose equality.

Lincoln said “you can’t make a poor man rich by making a rich man poor.” But President Obama seems to believe that wealth is invariably related to the wages of sin and must be controlled or, to use his language, “spread around.” To make sure this happens, government must expand and, in so doing, the private sector will inevitably contract. That explains why socialism, which purports to represent the interests of the average person, ends in overwhelming government control or outright tyranny. ...

President Gerald Ford put this matter in perspective when he noted “that a government that can give you everything you want will be large enough to take everything you have.”

Read the whole thing.

Ryan Grim, at HuffPO, spills (a day before the book’s release) some of the interesting bits from Bush Administration’s speechwriter Matthew Latimer’s new tell-all Speech-less: Tales of a White House Survivor.

While Karl Rove was appearing on Fox News and writing op-eds as an independent political analyst, he was privately smearing Democrats. “Karl spread rumors through the White House that one of Obama’s potential vice presidential running mates—and a United States senator—had beaten his first wife. ‘Karl says it’s true,’ the president assured a small group of staffers. Then knowing Karl, he quickly added, ‘Karl hopes it’s true,’” reports Latimer.

For a commencement address at Furman University in spring 2008, Ed Gillespie wanted to insert a few lines condemning gay marriage. Bush called the speech too “condemnatory” and said, “I’m not going to tell some gay kid in the audience that he can’t get married.” (Of course, Bush ran his 2004 campaign telling that kid just that.)

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice “adamantly opposed” any reference to jailed Egyptian dissident Ayman Nour when Bush traveled to Egypt to promote freedom. She won.

Bush, it turns out, is like millions of Americans: “I haven’t watched the nightly news one night since I’ve been president,” he said.

Laura Bush, says Latimer, “was secretly a Democrat for all intents and purposes, though it really wasn’t much of a secret.” ...

Bush on Jimmy Carter: “If I’m ever eighty-two years old and acting like that have someone put me away.”

John Hinderaker listens to another democrat apologizing for America.

Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright spoke at a forum in Omsk, Siberia. Pravda reported that her speech “surprised the audience.” No wonder. The Russians in attendance must have wondered how they managed to lose the cold war:

Madeleine Albright said during the meeting that America no longer had the intention of being the first nation of the world. ... The former US Secretary of State surprised the audience with her speech. She particularly said that democracy was not the perfect system. “It can be contradictory, corrupt and may have security problems,” Albright said. America has been having hard times recently, Albright said. “We have been talking about our exceptionalism during the recent eight years. Now, an average American wants to stay at home – they do not need any overseas adventures. We do not need new enemies,” Albright said adding that Beijing, London and Delhi became a serious competition for Washington and New York. “My generation has made many mistakes. We give the future into the hands of the young. Your prime goal is to overcome the gap between the poor and the rich,’ the former head of the US foreign political department said.

There you have it. And Albright was Secretary of State during the relatively moderate Clinton administration. I’m afraid she speaks for most Democratic foreign policy “experts.” Promoting American weakness: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

On liberal editorial pages and across the left-side of the blogosphere, conservative opposition to drastically increased government spending and Health Care Reform proposals, dissent at Town Hall meetings, and last weekend’s massive protest in Washington have all been diagnosed and interpreted as “anger” and “extremism” on the part of “White Males.”

David Harsanyi admires the left’s preemptive definition of political opposition as racism.

Who dictates what level of anger and dissent is allowable? Who decides what a clandestine racist sign looks like? Maybe someone like MSNBC’s Carlos Watson, who wondered if “socialism” was really about the nationalization of industry and hyper-regulation of the private market, or if it was just “becoming the new N-word.”

None of this has anything to do with the left’s paranoid belief that America is an inherently racist nation. It’s just that if you oppose more government dependency and expansion, you might as well be a Confederate infantryman. No, it doesn’t matter what you say, because we know what you really mean.

Read the whole thing.

Yesterday’s mass protest against federal spending was estimated by the comparatively neutral Daily Mail as made up of “up to two million.” US Parks and Recreation estimated 1.5 million.

All this was not even front page news for the New York Times, for whom the numbers involved dwindled to mere “thousands.” The Washington Post more generously acknowledged “tens of thousands.”

The astonishing demonstration of massive popular opposition to socialism naturally proved a problem for the left’s commentariat. The preferred discounting technique was demonstrated by Think Progress: point to Confederate flags, identify expressions of opposition to Barack Obama as “racism,” describe open expressions of conservatism as “offensive” and “radical.”

Glenn Greenwald at Salon dismisses all opposition to Obama as illegitimate, coming from people with heretical and unacceptible views, worthy only of contempt and dismissal.

What I find amusing is the leftist Greenwald’s claim to proprietorship of “the country’s core founding values.” Since when was the left in favor of the framer’s republic of federalism, individual rights, personal responsibility, and limited government?

Nothing that the GOP is doing to Obama should be the slightest bit surprising because this is the true face of the American Right—and that’s been true for a very long time now. It didn’t just become true in the last few months or in the last two years. Recent months is just the time period when the media began noticing and acknowledging what they are: a pack of crazed, primitive radicals who don’t really believe in the country’s core founding values and don’t merely disagree with, but contest the legitimacy of, any elected political officials who aren’t part of their movement. Before the last year or so, the media pretended that this was a serious, adult, substantive political movement, but it wasn’t any truer then than it is now. All one has to do is review their behavior during the Clinton presidency—to say nothing of the Bush years—to see that none of this is remotely new. Nothing they’re doing to Obama is a break from their past behavior; it’s just a natural and totally predictable continuation of it.

We were arguing about the bailouts on my class email list, and a liberal classmate noted that George W. Bush started them. Bush was a conservative, he argues, so bailouts are conservative.

My classmate writes:

If Bush is actually a conservative, why did he go along with the bailout?

And if you now say, he isn’t or wasn’t, how can you be so rigid in your identifications of political categories, like “liberal” or “conservative.” Bush sounds like a quantum experiment, he’s a conservative until he isn’t? Is that your Schrodinger cat experiment? Your polemics are so absolute, but the reality is less so.

Reality is less consistent than my politics. George W. Bush ran as a Republican. I think he had some conservative views, but do remember he was always a “compassionate conservative,” the kind of politician striving to be a “uniter not a divider.” GWB’s record is very mixed from a conservative point of view. He was most conservative with respect to siding with ordinary Americans in the culture wars against the leftwing coastal elite. He seems to have had a visceral antipathy to the same elite from which he traces his own roots, and I find that basically the most lovable thing about George W. Bush.

He had ambitions to reduce taxes and to fix Social Security and health care, but Republicans in Name Only rendered his Congressional majority meaningless. Bush got temporary tax cuts (which will soon be expiring, God help the economy!), and got neither of the others.

9/11 turned Bush into a Big Government president. He created the preposterous Department of Heimat Sekuritat. He allowed political correctness to reign in airline security, confiscating nail clippers and searching blue-haired grannies from Nebraska, while continuing to allow Muslims on US flights. He waged two wars, which he conducted in a politically correct, Wilsonian manner, losing the support of the public at home and failing to rebuke domestic treason. He never explained their goals and objectives well enough, and he was too slow. The US public gets tired of wars that take too long. He kept the country safe after 9/11. No second successful mass attack ever occurred, but he also never caught bin Laden, and I do not think he actually did democratize the Middle East.

His panicky bailouts were a terrible departure from Republican principle. And, in the final analysis, we are obliged to conclude that George W. Bush received the support of a comfortable American majority in favor of lower taxes, smaller government, less political correctness, a balanced budget and a strong national defense. He accomplished little, and he managed to throw away that majority and lose Congress and the White House to a radical democrat party rump, so scary left that a lot of people believed the GOP needed only to point to them and it could enjoy an electoral majority in perpetuity.

The framers in Valhalla are doubtless distressed to see a radical community organizer and representative of the corrupt Daley machine sitting in the White House apologizing to Muslims and trying to make America into a socialist welfare state. George W. Bush will have a lot of explaining to do when he sees them

Coyote identifies precisely what’s going on with “Health Care Reform.”

The leftish political strategy for over 100 years has been

1. Regulate something 2. Blame the free market for inevitable disruptions caused by the regulation 3. Use the above to justify more regulation 4. Repeat

We have an artificial situation, created by government tax policy in the first place. Healthcare charges have been removed from market influence because the consumer has not been paying them, his insurance has. The consumer normally does not buy his own insurance. Tax policy has arranged for health insurance to be a benefit of corporate employment.

When you do get to buy your own health insurance is when you lose your job, and then, ouch! you tend to find out just how expensive being a member of a maginal, ill-serviced market can be, at the very time you can least afford it.

Reforming health care simply requires transferring the tax deduction to individuals, reducing the burden of litigation and consequent staggering malpractice insurance costs and defensive medicine, and removing state barriers to insurance competition. Democrats don’t like any of that. When Whole Foods’ John Mackey made several of these suggestions in the Wall Street Journal editorial, his company was subjected to a boycott.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

They know how to achieve consensus in China

Republicans are declining to support Obama-Care and Cap-and-Trade. Why, it’s enough to make New York Times editorialist Thomas Friedman envy China.

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.

Our one-party democracy is worse.

Camille Paglia (who is a rebel, and will never ever be any good) finds life within the holier-than-thou democrat party left increasingly uncongenial. They are so conformist, so complacent… and so statist.

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism. ...

(A)ffluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it’s invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote “critical thinking,” which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms (“racism, sexism, homophobia”) when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it’s positively pickled.

Throughout this fractious summer, I was dismayed not just at the self-defeating silence of Democrats at the gaping holes or evasions in the healthcare bills but also at the fogginess or insipidity of articles and Op-Eds about the controversy emanating from liberal mainstream media and Web sources. By a proportion of something like 10-to-1, negative articles by conservatives were vastly more detailed, specific and practical about the proposals than were supportive articles by Democrats, which often made gestures rather than arguments and brimmed with emotion and sneers. There was a glaring inability in most Democratic commentary to think ahead and forecast what would or could be the actual snarled consequences—in terms of delays, denial of services, errors, miscommunications and gross invasions of privacy—of a massive single-payer overhaul of the healthcare system in a nation as large and populous as ours. It was as if Democrats live in a utopian dream world, divorced from the daily demands and realities of organization and management.

But dreaming in the 1960s and ‘70s had a spiritual dimension that is long gone in our crassly materialistic and status-driven time.

And, of course, they do. The supposed generosity of the bien pensants is really the purest selfishness. America’s pezzonovantes live limitlessly appetitive lives of aesthetic appreciation, worldly and even spiritual aspiration, of constant striving for success, power, personal advancement, and self affirmation. The sight of the poor, the uncomely, the disorderly, the untidied away aspects of cruel reality is disagreeable to them. Someone needs to do something about it. It is A PROBLEM. And all problems, from the viewpoint of the pseudogentsia, can be cleared away by simple transfer to the responsibility of the state with a generous allocation of other people’s tax dollars. Big Government is for the American left essentially just a larger-scale version of the building management they’re accustomed to calling upon to clean the elevator anytime someone has made a mess.

Charles Krauthammer muses over how exactly it came to pass that the Chosen One lost his mojo. His conclusion? As always, it was Hubris that brought the fortunate and previously successful man of destiny’s progress to a crashing halt.

What happened to President Obama? His wax wings having melted, he is the man who fell to earth. What happened to bring his popularity down further than that of any new president in polling history save Gerald Ford (post-Nixon pardon)?

The conventional wisdom is that Obama made a tactical mistake by farming out his agenda to Congress and allowing himself to be pulled left by the doctrinaire liberals of the Democratic congressional leadership. But the idea of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi pulling Obama left is quite ridiculous. Where do you think he came from, this friend of Chávista ex-terrorist William Ayers, of PLO apologist Rashid Khalidi, of racialist inciter Jeremiah Wright?

But forget the character witnesses. Just look at Obama’s behavior as president, beginning with his first address to Congress. Unbidden, unforced and unpushed by the congressional leadership, Obama gave his most deeply felt vision of America, delivering the boldest social democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president. In American politics, you can’t get more left than that speech and still be on the playing field.

In a center-right country, that was problem enough. Obama then compounded it by vastly misreading his mandate. He assumed it was personal. This, after winning by a mere seven points in a year of true economic catastrophe, of an extraordinarily unpopular Republican incumbent, and of a politically weak and unsteady opponent. Nonetheless, Obama imagined that, as Fouad Ajami so brilliantly observed, he had won the kind of banana-republic plebiscite that grants caudillo-like authority to remake everything in one’s own image.

Accordingly, Obama unveiled his plans for a grand makeover of the American system, animating that vision by enacting measure after measure that greatly enlarged state power, government spending and national debt. Not surprisingly, these measures engendered powerful popular skepticism that burst into tea-party town-hall resistance.

Obama’s reaction to that resistance made things worse. ...

Read the whole thing.

Mossad leak channel Debkafile says that Western irresolution has given the mullahs enough time for their recent furious buildup in nuclear development activity to bring Iran within imminent reach of its ambitions.

Tehran has (taken) the longest strides towards its objective than at any time since its program was surreptitiously launched.

The progress confirmed by our sources consists of four major steps:

1. Iran has succeeded in secretly combining uranium processing, airborne high-explosive tests and work on designing a missile cone to fit a nuclear warhead, according to Western intelligence updates.

2. The conflicting reports on the amount of uranium enriched and number of fast centrifuge machines in operation obscure the following hard facts: The Iranians have doubled the number of ever faster centrifuges that are working at their enrichment plants.

They are moreover completing tests on a more advanced homemade centrifuge, the IR4, which will halve the time taken for converting low-grade enrichment uranium into weapons-grade material.

3. By February 2010 – and some say sooner – Tehran will have stocked enough high-grade enriched uranium for two nuclear bombs.

4. Iran has also gone into home production of nuclear fuel rods for plutonium.

Ted Kennedy has been sober for 5 days, and is now eligible to vote in Chicago!

(Internet Viral Humor)

Hat tip to John C. Meyer.

Lt. George W. Bush in the cockpit of an F102 jet fighter at Ellington Field near Houston in 1968

Bernard Goldberg reveals a major detail disclosed by CBS’s investigation of Rathergate which the mainstream media for some mysterious reason has never considered worth reporting.

Dan Rather is suing the network that employed him for 44 years, asking for $70 million dollars in damages. Technically, the lawsuit is about a dry legal issue — breach of contract. But it is also about something much more personal to Rather: his legacy. It is a lawsuit, fundamentally, about saving Dan Rather’s reputation.

That reputation took a turn for the worse back in 2004. As has been widely reported, just 55 days before a very close presidential election, Dan Rather and his producer Mary Mapes put a story on the weekday edition of 60 Minutes that brought on the media equivalent of World War III. There were accusations that Rather, Mapes, and maybe the entire CBS News Division had set out to deliberately destroy George W. Bush and get John Kerry elected President of the United States – a charge everyone at CBS vehemently denies.

The story was about how the young George Bush got preferential treatment during the Vietnam War; how he wangled his way into the Texas Air National Guard back in the 1960s to avoid service in Vietnam; and how he was able to do it because his father was a big-shot, a United States Congressman from Houston. The story portrayed the Bush as a slacker. Others have said it portrayed him as a “cowardly draft dodger.”

And to bolster their story, Rather and Mapes got their hands on “never-before-seen” documents (as Rather put it in his story) that supposedly backed up their months (and in Mapes’ case, years) of reporting. But in no time flat the documents came under attack, mainly by conservatives on the web who examined the typeface of the memos and concluded they were fakes.

CBS News management aggressively defended the story in general and the documents in particular – until they didn’t. After about two weeks, CBS threw in the towel and said it could no longer stand by the story. Rather, who had been vigorously defending his story, reluctantly went on the air and admitted the documents could not be authenticated. Later he would say he was forced to do it.

In the aftermath of the fiasco, CBS established an outside panel to look into the matter. In January of 2005 the panel issued a report which concluded the news division failed to establish that the documents were legitimate and not bogus. Mapes was fired. A vice president and two producers were forced to resign. And Dan Rather was a dead man walking.

He had already lost his job as anchorman of the evening news but was allowed to stay on the weekday edition of 60 Minutes, which his story had sent on a glide path to oblivion. And when that show died an inglorious death Rather went over to the Sunday edition of 60 Minutes. But that wouldn’t last long, either. When his contract ran out CBS yanked him off the show, but made him an offer he decided to refuse: Rather would get an office and an assistant and he could report stories for any CBS News broadcast that called on him – if any CBS News broadcast ever chose to call on him. CBS offered Rather $250,000 a year, according to my sources, who say he wanted a million. When he didn’t get it, he quit. According to Rather, he was pushed out the door by the head of CBS, Leslie Moonves.

In 2007, Rather filed his $70 million lawsuit against his old company saying he wasn’t allowed to defend his story because the top management of CBS’ parent company, Viacom, wanted to appease the Bush Administration and protect its business interests.

Until now, the controversy over the Rather/Mapes story has centered almost entirely on one issue: the legitimacy of the documents – a very important issue, indeed. But it turns out that there was another very important issue, one that goes to the very heart of what the story was about – and one that has gone virtually unnoticed. This is it: Mary Mapes knew before she put the story on the air that George W. Bush, the alleged slacker, had in fact volunteered to go to Vietnam.

Who says? The outside panel CBS brought into to get to the bottom of the so-called “Rathergate” mess says. I recently re-examined the panel’s report after a source, Deep Throat style, told me to “Go to page 130.” When I did, here’s the startling piece of information I found:

Mapes had information prior to the airing of the September 8 [2004] Segment that President Bush, while in the TexANG [Texas Air National Guard] did volunteer for service in Vietnam but was turned down in favor of more experienced pilots. For example, a flight instructor who served in the TexANG with Lieutenant Bush advised Mapes in 1999 that Lieutenant Bush “did want to go to Vietnam but others went first.” Similarly, several others advised Mapes in 1999, and again in 2004 before September 8, that Lieutenant Bush had volunteered to go to Vietnam but did not have enough flight hours to qualify.

This information, despite the fact that it has been available since the CBS report came out four years ago, has remained a secret to almost everybody both in and out of the media — one lonely fact in a 234- page report loaded with thousands of facts, and overshadowed by the controversy surrounding the documents.

Hat tip to Scott Drum.
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That particular piece of data certainly puts this Huffington Post editorial by Mary Mapes in an interesting light, doesn’t it?

All the denials quoted in this ABC News story suggest that Leon Panetta fought too hard to protect Agency employees from a Justice Department witchhunt, and the skids are already greased to ease him out of the CIA Directorship.

Amid reports that Panetta had threatened to quit just seven months after taking over at the spy agency, other insiders tell ABCNews.com that senior White House staff members are already discussing a possible shake-up of top national security officials.

“You can expect a larger than normal turnover in the next year,” a senior adviser to Obama on intelligence matters told ABCNews.com.

Since 9/11, the CIA has had five directors or acting directors.

A White House spokesperson, Denis McDonough, said reports that Panetta had threatened to quit and that the White House was seeking a replacement were “inaccurate.”

According to intelligence officials, Panetta erupted in a tirade last month during a meeting with a senior White House staff member. Panetta was reportedly upset over plans by Attorney General Eric Holder to open a criminal investigation of allegations that CIA officers broke the law in carrying out certain interrogation techniques that President Obama has termed “torture.”

A CIA spokesman quoted Panetta as saying “it is absolutely untrue” that he has any plans to leave the CIA. As to the reported White House tirade, the spokesman said Panetta is known to use “salty language.” CIA spokesman George Little said the report was “wrong, inaccurate, bogus and false.”...

In addition to concerns about the CIA’s reputation and its legal exposure, other White House insiders say Panetta has been frustrated by what he perceives to be less of a role than he was promised in the administration’s intelligence structure. Panetta has reportedly chafed at reporting through the director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, according to the senior adviser who said Blair is equally unhappy with Panetta.

“Leon will be leaving,” predicted a former top U.S. intelligence official, citing the conflict with Blair. The former official said Panetta is also “uncomfortable” with some of the operations being carried out by the CIA that he did not know about until he took the job.

Commentators from the perspective of the right were not pleased by the prospect of Leon Panetta’s appointment, and back in January we were rooting for him to withdraw his name.

If Leon Panetta has actually fallen on his own sword as the result of defending the Agency against the desire of the democrat party’s moonbat base for sacrificial victims, I’m prepared to say that I did not give Panetta enough credit. He’s a better man, and made a much more worthy CIA director, than I had believed.

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Spook86 adds support to the stories of Panetta’s impending ouster by quoting a particularly horrifying rumor.

Under ordinary circumstances, we’d call for Panetta’s resignation, but his potential replacements would be far worse. One name making the rounds is Massachusetts Senator John F. Kerry, who served in Vietnam.

Kerry as CIA Director? God help us.

A traitor for CIA director? What could be a more obvious choice for Barack Obama?

Marc Ambinder identifies Health Care Reform as a classic example of the kind of policy fight a president can’t win.

I think he’s right. Socialized health care is a goal that the left can neither relinquish nor hope to win.

As the prospects for bipartisan agreement in the Senate fade, the need for Obama to unify Democrats will increase. Right now, though, he is losing Democrats from both wings of the party, even as independents soften and conservatives mobilize. Obama’s ratings in the Pew survey declined slightly from July to August among moderate Democrats (down two percentage points) and sharply among liberal Democrats (down nine percentage points).

These poll numbers suggest that health care is becoming the classic issue that wounds a president: one that unites his opponents and divides his own side. Obama probably has little hope of changing the first half of that equation; when Congress returns he’ll probably need to focus more on improving the second.

Warren Buffett spouts conventional pieties in the New York Times, but in the middle of Warren’s bromidal call for fiscal responsibility, the astute reader will find a shrewd assessment of what is really going to happen.

With government expenditures now running 185 percent of receipts, truly major changes in both taxes and outlays will be required. A revived economy can’t come close to bridging that sort of gap.

Legislators will correctly perceive that either raising taxes or cutting expenditures will threaten their re-election. To avoid this fate, they can opt for high rates of inflation, which never require a recorded vote and cannot be attributed to a specific action that any elected official takes. In fact, John Maynard Keynes long ago laid out a road map for political survival amid an economic disaster of just this sort: “By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens…. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

Get out the shovels and start burying it, folks, before it starts to smell. It’s dead. The Obama Revolution is over. The high tide of American leftism has crested. The Retreat from Moscow is on.

In 2008, a glib and fortunate beneficiary of a massive legacy of liberal guilt was able to smooth talk his way into an electoral victory based on a sudden market crash created by the combination of long-standing democrat housing market interventions combined with well-founded fears of the possibility of his election.

Ironically, it was Mr. Market’s bipolar panic attack which actually assured that the nightmare of his own imaginings could and would become reality. The GOP turned chicken, too, and chose what the bosses thought must be the safest play, nominating the geriatric and politically incoherent John McCain, who ran an uninspired campaign, trying to oppose age to youth and promises of less to promises of everything paid for by somebody else. Everything fell apart at once. So the least qualified, most radical candidate ever, a community organizer and Alinskyite radical, whose best friends have been black Communist poets, Weathermen cop killers, and racist clergymen, waltzed into the White House, accompanied by a Star Wars bar’s assemblage of exotic representatives of the radical fringe, all bent of bringing Socialism to America.

He spent a few trillions in a matter of weeks, assuring a dimmer future to a generation of Americans, then gleefully nationalized General Motors delivering control of America’s largest auto maker to the UAW’s commissars. Barack Obama took to heart Rahm Emanuel’s dictum about using an economic crisis as an empowering opportunity. But that power was only on loan. The American people were frightened and willing to put their faith in the two party system, roll the dice, and give the party which had been out of power a chance. Their decision had only been based on the “we’re tired of A and unhappy, let’s try B for a while” approach. The assertion by democrats and by Barack Hussein Obama that the 2008 election gave them a mandate for Socialism has been proven wrong.

Obama in 2009 has wound up just like Napoleon in 1812. Flushed with a string of victories, armed with an unfilibusterable Congressional majority, backed by an enormous army of labor unions, interest groups, and activist organizations, funded by George Soros, allied to the mainstream media, and well-supported by the mass artillery of the leftwing blogosphere, the Obama Administration even succeeded in negotiating free passage for the invasion from large corporations like Walmart and the pharmaceuticals companies (no doughty Belgium in 1914, they). As always, capitalists will willingly sell the rope used to hang free enterprise to the bolsheviks for short term profit as long as the sellers get assurances that they themselves will be hanged last.

But the denoument is worthy of Tolstoy. The Grand Armee of Socialist Ideology, despite all its votes in Congress; its media support; its grand alliance of corrupt businesses, unions; the AMA and the AARP; ACORN and George Soros has been brought to a crashing halt. Its morale is crumbling. It is in complete disorder, and it will soon be in full retreat. Barack Obama has been dealt a devastating defeat, one which will permanently shatter his image of invincibility, and placing Barack Obama, the democrat party, and the American left on the defensive, struggling to avoid complete and total ruin.

The left is crying out that it was the weak and inferior forces of the Republican Party and the American Right that brought them low. I’m a Movement Conservative and a rock-ribbed Republican myself. I wish that it were so. But the truth is the Republican Party and the Conservative Movement have no such capabilities. What defeated Obamacare was the American People.

Barack Obama believed the American People are so stupid, so selfish, and so greedy that they would fall for democrat promises of health care free lunch, all the health care everybody needs or wants, paid for by the upper tiny few percent of staggeringly rich taxpayers (who won’t even miss it anyway). Uncle Sam will just nudge the taxes on Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and the guys at Goldman getting those multi-million dollar bonuses up just a notch, essentially sneaking into their bedrooms and removing some extra spare change from the tops of their bureaus, and granny gets her hip replacement gratis, and Tiny Tim will walk again, even if Bob Crachit has no insurance.

None of these promises were true, of course. The democrat “health care reform” was never going to bring ordinary Americans the kind of care US Senators get, “just like me,” as Obama promised so persistently during the campaign. What it was going to do, obviously, was to create a new and enormous federal entitlement program necessitating a massive increase of government’s share of the US economy. Socialism would have made a scarce and desirable service, medical care, cost free, obviously dramatically increasing demand. Most Americans would inevitably pay more and get less, as the health care butter got spread by the federal knife onto ever more slices of bread.

America today is a rapidly aging nation. The time to offer the Woodstock Generation a nice socialist health care system was 40 years ago when we were young and perfectly healthy, and could not imagine ourselves ever really needing it. Today, there are lots of Boomer generation geezers out there who have a real personal interest in just how health care reform will affect them now and who are old enough to know better. A lot of people tried sharing the granola and peanut butter supply back on the commune in 1969. They know just how “sharing” works out.

It was not Dick Armey and Rush Limbaugh who showed up with greater strength and larger funding or who beat back the democrat advance with superior cunning. It was the American People, who are experiencing this country’s economy right now, who saw Obama’s stimulus package and his bailouts, who paid their income taxes, and who are beginning to become afraid, very afraid of where Barack Obama’s economic policies are leading us. It was the American People that said, No, we do not believe there is really such a thing as a free lunch. It is the American People who are turning out at those Town Halls, and whose negative opinions are showing up in all the polls. It is the American People, not the Republican Party, that has defeated Obamacare.

Democrat brooding over America

The late Susan Sontag, in her personal journals (undated 1957 lecture note, p.151), observed that modern leftism does not only, like Milton, make Satan into a hero, it actively embraces his cause.

One of the main strands in modern literature is diabolism—that is, self conscious inversion of moral values. This is not nihilism, the denial of moral values, but their inversion: still rule-bound, only now a ‘morality of evil’ instead of a ‘morality of good.’”

Gerard van der Ginsburg, at American Digest, pays tribute to the American party of diabolism with a new version of a familar beat poem, titled Growl.

What Socialist Party of cement and aluminum bashed open American skulls and sucked out their freedom, brains and imagination?

Democrat! Darwinist Solitude! NEA Filth! Pelosi Ugliness! Recycling Cans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming silent under the D&C! Boys sobbing for Big Daddies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Democrat! Democrat! Nightmare of Democrat! Democrat the loveless! Gone mental Democrat! Democrat the heavy aggregator of girly-men!

Democrat the incomprehensible African-American plantation! Democrat the skull & crossbones soulless Senate and Congress of sorrows!

Democrat whose buildings are Fascist overbuilding with gun slits! Democrat the vast bloating stone of Deficit! Democrat the broke government of the pauper nation!

Democrat whose mind is pure machinery! Democrat whose blood is running tax money! Democrat whose fingers are in your wallet!

Democrat whose breast is a transexual dynamo! Democrat whose mouth is a smoking tomb! Democrat of the atheist thumb pulling out a plum and saying what a free to be bad boy am I! Democrat whose only god is Dracula!

Democrat whose eyes are a thousand broken windows! Democrat whose empty skyscrapers smolder in the long Detroit streets like endless Molochs! Democrat whose brains dream Utopia and choke in the fog of their flatulent dementia! Democrat whose smoking bongs and facial piercings crown the crapulous cities!

Democrat whose love is endless lube and lust! Democrat whose soul is welfare and affirmative racism! Democrat whose poverty is perpetual servitude to the government salad bar, no seconds!

Democrat whose only true Doctor and Cure is Kevorkian! Democrat whose foreign policy is a cloud of glowing Iranian hydrogen! Democrat whose whore is BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH!

Democrat in whom I once sat lonely! Democrat in whom I once dreamt the New Jerusalem! Crazy in Democrat! Sucker of crock in Democrat! Lacklove and deballed in Democrat!

The people had forfeited the confidence of the government and could win it back only by redoubled efforts. Wouldn’t it be easier to dissolve the people and elect another in their place?—Berthold Brecht.

Nancy Morgan, at American Thinker, comments on the anger of the democrat elite at the common people daring to talk back.

The face-off between the ruling party and the people continues to unfold, as Democrat politicians hold town hall meetings across the country to build support for the Obama administration’s latest power grab, misleadingly labeled ‘health care reform.’

The faux outrage politicians manufacture on demand has been replaced by real outrage. Outrage at the American people for failing to understand the nuances, the broad outline of a 1,000 page plus bill that most politicians haven’t even read. Hey, that’s what staff is for, explained new Democrat, Arlen Spector.

Peons from fly-over country are daring to challenge the carefully scripted and (deliberately?) misleading talking points. Talking points which, by the way, have been endorsed by the media. Don’t these guys read the New York Times?

Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are using the standard liberal tactic of diverting attention from the issue by demonizing the dissenter, in this case, the American people. According to Pelosi and Reid, voicing objections to the federal government’s take over of 17% of the formerly free market economy is ‘un-American.’ Harry Reid has gone a step further, tarring dissenter’s as ‘evil mongers.’

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs has blithely dismissed the burgeoning dissent by informing one and all that these ‘townhalls are not representative of America.’ Obama, meanwhile, is trying to divert the issue by blaming the ‘headline hungry television networks’, accusing them of ‘enflaming an ugly backlash.’

Unused to any opposition that can’t be spun to their advantage or ignored, Democrats are desperately trying to convince Americans that the tidal wave of opposition is not genuine. Used to viewing every issue in political terms, our elected officials are actually convinced that the disruptive townhalls are merely the product of an evil conservative cabal. After all, every person these lawmakers know agree with them on this issue. Its called the ‘inside the beltway syndrome.’

Despite a new $12 million ad campaign designed to soothe Americans into relying on misplaced compassion instead of common sense, pesky Joe Six-Pack and Susy Homemaker still don’t get it. And adding insult to injury, American citizens are starting to question where all the money is coming from to run these ads. And by the way, who’s signing the paychecks for the new army of health care advocates who are being paid $12 to $13 an hour for their support? Inquiring minds want to know.

Answers to these questions are not forthcoming. Like the classic case of a wife catching her husband in bed with another woman, the question has become, “Who are you going to believe? Me, or your lying eyes?”

Just how much trouble Obamacare and the democrat party are in can be seen by the fact that they have actually managed to lose the confidence, and the support for their health care reform bill, of not only a majority of the public, but of even such an icon of the intellectual left as Camille Paglia.

In Salon, right now, today, (in addition to praising a topless photo of the 50-year-old Sharon Stone) avante-garde cultural commentator Paglia is agreeing with Sarah Palin and calling for Nancy Pelosi’s head. I love it.

(W)ho would have thought that the sober, deliberative Barack Obama would have nothing to propose but vague and slippery promises—or that he would so easily cede the leadership clout of the executive branch to a chaotic, rapacious, solipsistic Congress? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom I used to admire for her smooth aplomb under pressure, has clearly gone off the deep end with her bizarre rants about legitimate town-hall protests by American citizens. She is doing grievous damage to the party and should immediately step down.

There is plenty of blame to go around. Obama’s aggressive endorsement of a healthcare plan that does not even exist yet, except in five competing, fluctuating drafts, makes Washington seem like Cloud Cuckoo Land. The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities.

You can keep your doctor; you can keep your insurance, if you’re happy with it, Obama keeps assuring us in soothing, lullaby tones. Oh, really? And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and specialists? And what if my insurance company goes belly up because of undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor? Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing.

I just don’t get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy.

As with the massive boondoggle of the stimulus package, which Obama foolishly let Congress turn into a pork rut, too much has been attempted all at once; focused, targeted initiatives would, instead, have won wide public support. How is it possible that Democrats, through their own clumsiness and arrogance, have sabotaged healthcare reform yet again? Blaming obstructionist Republicans is nonsensical because Democrats control all three branches of government. It isn’t conservative rumors or lies that are stopping healthcare legislation; it’s the justifiable alarm of an electorate that has been cut out of the loop and is watching its representatives construct a tangled labyrinth for others but not for themselves. No, the airheads of Congress will keep their own plush healthcare plan—it’s the rest of us guinea pigs who will be thrown to the wolves. ...

...(W)hat do Democrats stand for, if they are so ready to defame concerned citizens as the “mob”—a word betraying a Marie Antoinette delusion of superiority to ordinary mortals. I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.

But somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills. The ethical collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration’s outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable “casual conversations” to the White House. If Republicans had done this, there would have been an angry explosion by Democrats from coast to coast. I was stunned at the failure of liberals to see the blatant totalitarianism in this incident, which the president should have immediately denounced. His failure to do so implicates him in it.

As a libertarian and refugee from the authoritarian Roman Catholic church of my youth, I simply do not understand the drift of my party toward a soulless collectivism. This is in fact what Sarah Palin hit on in her shocking image of a “death panel” under Obamacare that would make irrevocable decisions about the disabled and elderly. When I first saw that phrase, headlined on the Drudge Report, I burst out laughing. It seemed so over the top! But on reflection, I realized that Palin’s shrewdly timed metaphor spoke directly to the electorate’s unease with the prospect of shadowy, unelected government figures controlling our lives. A death panel not only has the power of life and death but is itself a symptom of a Kafkaesque brave new world where authority has become remote, arbitrary and spectral. And as in the Spanish Inquisition, dissidence is heresy, persecuted and punished.

Obama on the run

Peggy Noonan went scurrying back toward what she perceived as the center in the last election, and she is finding, only months later, that Barack Obama and the democrat Congressional leadership are anything but centrist.

Peggy Noonan is not buying the left’s talking points about “astroturf” and hired senior operatives sent by the Insurance Industry and Rush Limbaugh. She thinks the American people are really becoming scared, scared of deficits, scared of irresponsible policies hastily enacted, and scared of the impact upon themselves of vast expansions of remote federal power.

To her, Obama and the democrats appear to be in serious trouble.

We have entered uncharted territory in the fight over national health care. There’s a new tone in the debate, and it’s ugly. At the moment the Democrats are looking like something they haven’t looked like in years, and that is: desperate.

They must know at this point they should not have pushed a national health-care plan. A Democratic operative the other day called it “Hillary’s revenge.” When Mrs. Clinton started losing to Barack Obama in the primaries 18 months ago, she began to give new and sharper emphasis to her health-care plan. Mr. Obama responded by talking about his health-care vision. He won. Now he would push what he had been forced to highlight: Health care would be a priority initiative. The net result is falling support for his leadership on the issue, falling personal polls, and the angry town-hall meetings that have electrified YouTube.

In his first five months in office, Mr. Obama had racked up big wins—the stimulus, children’s health insurance, House approval of cap-and-trade. But he stayed too long at the hot table. All the Democrats in Washington did. They overinterpreted the meaning of the 2008 election, and didn’t fully take into account how the great recession changed the national mood and atmosphere.

And so the shock on the faces of Congressmen who’ve faced the grillings back home. And really, their shock is the first thing you see in the videos. They had no idea how people were feeling. Their 2008 win left them thinking an election that had been shaped by anti-Bush, anti-Republican, and pro-change feeling was really a mandate without context; they thought that in the middle of a historic recession featuring horrific deficits, they could assume support for the invention of a huge new entitlement carrying huge new costs.

The passions of the protesters, on the other hand, are not a surprise. They hired a man to represent them in Washington. They give him a big office, a huge staff and the power to tell people what to do. They give him a car and a driver, sometimes a security detail, and a special pin showing he’s a congressman. And all they ask in return is that he see to their interests and not terrify them too much. Really, that’s all people ask. Expectations are very low. What the protesters are saying is, “You are terrifying us.”

Read the whole thing.

Roger Kimball responds to the fresh hell that is reading Paul Krugman while living in a country with the current White House administration.

The White House, in addition to compiling its enemies list of people who say or write something “fishy” about its policies, has been urging its supporters to get out and “punch back twice as hard.” Obama flack Paul Krugman endeavored to do just that today, claiming that critics of the President’s plans for a government take over were — wait for it — motivated by “racial fear.”

Right. It’s another Dorthy Parker moment for the celebrated New York Times columnist. Let’s see if you have worked this out correctly. Presented with the bloated everything-but-the-kitchen-sink thousand-page obscenity that Rahm Emanuel is endeavored to shove down the collective gullet of America, why would you be critical? You might fear the government taking over another big chunk of the economy, since that way, you have learned “par expériences nombreuses et funestes,” is a prescription for waste, corruption, and inefficiency. You might be critical because you know that where similar systems have been tried, they have led to health care rationing and a denial of services to many vulnerable parts of the population, especially seniors> You might also be critical because you suspect that the plan will put a damper on medical innovation — one of the key ingredients that has made American health care the best in the world. You might further be critical because you have guessed the the price tag for this government sponsored boondoggle will be enormous and you do not relish paying yet higher taxes to fund it. I think you might be even more critical about the issue of freedom: the fact that, were anything like the Democrats’ plan to be passed, it would limit your freedom of choice in what doctors who see, what treatments you can get, and what sorts of insurance you choose to have (or, come to that, to forego). There are a dozen things you might not like about the Democratic plans. But what does Paul Krugman seize upon? “Racial fear.” Right. And I, as Miss Parker said, am Marie of Roumania.

Thomas Lifson thinks the photo of Sergeant James Crowley helping Henry Louis Gates Jr down the White House steps toward that rose garden beer summit, while Barack Obama strides blissfully ahead tells us a lot about Obama.

It certainly makes an effective contrast to the other photo of President Bush assisting Senator Robert Byrd.

Lizzie Widdicombe, in this week’s New Yorker, describes the beautiful people taking in the Bactrian Treasure Horde (fresh from darkest Afghanistan) at the Met, nibbling mutton at La Grenouille, and lamenting still another of Darth Cheney’s enormities.

Elisabetta Valtz-Fino, the exhibit’s curator, led a tour of the treasures, which included tiger, dolphin, and ram designs (the nomads loved animals). There was a jeweller in the crowd—Tim McClelland, of McTeigue & McClelland jewellers, which helped sponsor the event—and he studied the back of a collapsible gold crown. “This is the Hubble space telescope of jewelry,” he said. Adrianne Dicker-Kadzinski, a former Morgan Stanley investment banker, said she had done a stint in Afghanistan, in 2004, with the U.S. Army Reserve. “Kabul itself was very sad,” she said. “The whole country is like a moonscape—brown, brown, brown.”

Afterward, there was a lamb dinner at La Grenouille (“I feel very Afghan eating this,” the writer Ann Marlowe said) and a raffle: all the guests received little keys; one of them opened a treasure chest containing a special gold-and-lapis bracelet made by McClelland. (The winner was a J. P. Morgan asset manager named Sophie Bosch de Hood.)

As excited as people were to have seen the Bactrian jewels, a sadness wafted over the evening: because of security concerns, the hoard can’t be displayed in Afghanistan. “I’m so mad at Dick Cheney,” said Caroline Firestone, an eighty-year-old philanthropist, who has known the former Vice-President for a long time. “I once gave him my house in Wyoming so he could stay there at Christmas. And he never let me come and talk to him about Afghanistan.”

This Lady GaGa parody skewers BO and the democrats.

4:17 video

When certain centrist Republican commentators were seen abandoning the defense of George W. Bush and endorsing Obama over John McCain, one cynic observed that it is always nice to be so obviously winning that all the trimmers, conformists, and opportunists are busily scrambling to climb on board your political side.

New York Times token conservative columnist David Brook’s defection last Fall was one of the minor landmarks on the road to Republican defeat. But, now, not even a year later we find David Brooks scurrying down the ropes and right off the good ship Obama, with a column remarking on the decline in public support for the Chosen One’s policies and predicting his thorough and well-deserved comeuppance.

Why, welcome back, David. Save a seat for Peggy Noonan, will you?

In March, only 32 percent of Americans thought Obama was an old-style, tax-and-spend liberal. Now 43 percent do.

We’re only in the early stages of the liberal suicide march, but there already have been three phases. First, there was the stimulus package. You would have thought that a stimulus package would be designed to fight unemployment and stimulate the economy during a recession. But Congressional Democrats used it as a pretext to pay for $787 billion worth of pet programs with borrowed money. Only 11 percent of the money will be spent by the end of the fiscal year — a triumph of ideology over pragmatism.

Then there is the budget. Instead of allaying moderate anxieties about the deficits, the budget is expected to increase the government debt by $11 trillion between 2009 and 2019.

Finally, there is health care. Every cliché Ann Coulter throws at the Democrats is gloriously fulfilled by the Democratic health care bills. The bills do almost nothing to control health care inflation. They are modeled on the Massachusetts health reform law that is currently coming apart at the seams precisely because it doesn’t control costs. They do little to reward efficient providers and reform inefficient ones.

The House bill adds $239 billion to the federal deficit during the first 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. It would pummel small businesses with an 8 percent payroll penalty. It would jack America’s top tax rate above those in Italy and France. Top earners in New York and California would be giving more than 55 percent of earnings to one government entity or another.

Nancy Pelosi has lower approval ratings than Dick Cheney and far lower approval ratings than Sarah Palin. And yet Democrats have allowed her policy values to carry the day — this in an era in which independents dominate the electoral landscape.