William Voegeli, in the Claremont Review of Books, contemplates the conservative prospect after electoral disaster.

He notes that lost elections have previously been claimed to mark conservatism’s final defeat very prematurely. The difference this time seems to be a vacuum in our national leadership and a new accommodationist internal (Brooks, Frum, Douthat) movement urging conservatives to concede on liberal positions and scuttle toward the center in hope of finding a majority.

Voegeli disagrees, arguing that we should nail our colors to the mast; and, like Whittaker Chambers, resolve to stand upon the side of truth and liberty however adverse their prospects.

One measure of its strength is that conservatism’s policy victories often engender conservatives’ political defeats. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 paved the way for Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, in the same way that the success of the surge in Iraq in 2007 took the war off the front page in 2008, and made it impossible for John McCain to gain electoral traction as its chief advocate. The tax reduction and simplification achieved by the tax reforms of 1986 cleared the canvas for liberals to immediately begin advocating new increases and complexities. Even as the memory of the great crime wave from 1960 through 1994 has been effaced by the expectation of safe streets over the past 15 years, liberal activists and writers are laying the groundwork for a campaign against America’s “scandalously” high incarceration rates. Their “logic” is that safe streets have rendered full prisons unnecessary-rather than full prisons having rendered safe streets possible.

In short, America’s political division of labor finds conservatives cleaning up liberals’ messes, and liberals sweeping into the newly tidy spaces to start making new messes. If that’s true, what is to be done? ….

The danger liberalism poses to the American experiment comes from its disposition to deplete rather than replenish the capital required for self-government. Entitlement programs overextend not only financial but political capital. They proffer new “rights,” goad people to demand and expand those rights aggressively, and disdain truth in advertising about the nature or scope of the new debts and obligations those rights will engender. The experiment in self-government requires the cultivation, against the grain of a democratic age, of the virtues of self-reliance, patience, sacrifice, and restraint. The people who have this moral and social capital understand and accept that there “will be many long periods when you put more into your institutions than you get out,” according to David Brooks. Instead, liberalism promotes snarling but unrugged individualism, combining an absolute right “to the lifestyle of one’s choice (regardless of the social cost) with an equally fundamental right to be supported at state expense,” as the Manhattan Institute’s Fred Siegel once described it. Finally, the capital bestowed by vigilance against all enemies, foreign and domestic, is squandered when liberals insist on approaching street gangs, illegal immigrants, and terrorist regimes in the hopeful belief that, to quote the political scientist Joseph Cropsey, “trust edifies and absolute trust edifies absolutely.”

Conservatives have no guarantees that they will be able to save the American experiment from those who cavalierly dissipate the capital required to sustain it. They can only struggle to prudently reconcile the experiment’s deepest needs with the exigencies posed by today’s circumstances and threats. If that reconciliation ultimately requires nothing short of morally disgusting compromises that give up basic principles, the conservative will, instead, cheerfully commit to doing his duty for the duration, fully expecting to die on the losing side.

Read the whole thing.

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But a recent Gallup Poll shows we still outnumber liberals and our numbers are growing.

40% of Americans interviewed in national Gallup Poll surveys describe their political views as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 21% as liberal. This represents a slight increase for conservatism in the U.S. since 2008, returning it to a level last seen in 2004.

Andrew Sullivan counsels the Obama Administration to rely upon restraint, and green neck ties (!), to effectuate the liberation of the people of Iran.

[T]he evidence of outright fraud is now overwhelming. And the infliction of violence against defenseless protesters should be condemned forcefully.

The administration should, in my view, resist the grandstanding of the neocons – who remain almost autistic about the world they seek to remake – but insist that no violence be used against peaceful demonstrations. The truth is: if these crowds continue to grow and the regime does not massacre them, there’s a chance they could topple the regime. By focusing on government restraint, you can empower the resistance without giving Ahmadi’s thugs an opening.

Oh, and the president should wear a green tie from now on. Every day. He need say nothing more.

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Even fellow converso John Cole finds Andrew’s approach a little twee.

If someone can give me one legitimate piece of evidence that wearing green boxers is going to help bring democracy to Iran, so help me I’ll wear plaid from head to toe and shoot for world peace.

I know he means well, but this is what I was talking about this morning when I said that the coverage of the events in Iran by American bloggers was giving me a warblogger circa 2003 vibe. I can’t be the only one who is reminded of Abbie Hoffman’s plans to levitate the Pentagon through the power of meditation.

My thoughts are with the folks in Iran risking it all fighting for democracy, but this can not be said enough- this is not about us, it is about them. I love the coverage of events, but please stop with this narcissistic nonsense.

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Andrew Sullivan has become (as the Brits would say) so wet you could shoot snipe off him.

European newspapers and Mossad-mouthpiece Debkafile are publishing rumors that Muslim radicals on board Air France Flight 447 brought the plane down in the Mid-Atlantic in the midst of a violent storm killing 228.

Bild:

French authorities believe the Air France crash may have been caused by terrorists after it was revealed that two radical Muslims were on board the Airbus A330.

Two of the names on the passenger list for flight AF447 have been linked to Islamic terrorism, according to French newspaper ‘L’Express’.

According to ‘The Sun’, French intelligence agents from the DGSE agency were sent to Brazil after the crash and recognised the names while working through the list of those who boarded the doomed plane in Rio de Janeiro on May 31.

The two names are also on highly classified documents listing the names of radical Muslims considered a threat to France.

A source working for the French security services told a newspaper that the link was “highly significant”.

It has also been reported that Air France received a bomb threat in Brazil four days before the doomed flight crashed.

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Debkafile:

[C]ounter-terror sources report that in the last few months Paris has received several threats of an impending al Qaeda mega-attack against a French city on the lines of the hijacked airliners which struck New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. The jihadis were bent on punishing president Nicolas Sarkozy for posting fresh French troops to Afghanistan.

Should further investigations connect the two Muslim passengers to this conspiracy, it would go far to indicate that the Air France flight was destined to crash over Paris – except that the plan misfired and the plane came down sooner than planned over the Atlantic.

According to our sources, the French flight crews warned of the plot might have succeeded into pre-empting it by an extraordinary act of bravery to crash the plane in the ocean before it reached France.

Uighurs in Paradise

Back in 1959, well before Vietnam, there was a very funny Peter Sellers comedy called The Mouse That Roared.

Impoverished by the collapse of its only industry, the tiny European Duchy of Grand Fenwick proposes to declare war on the United States, lose, and then achieve prosperity via US reconstruction assistance and aid to a defeated foe.

American charity to wartime enemies was sufficiently notorious in the post-WWII era to provide themes for comedy, but it never occurred to George Marshall or Harry Truman to dispatch captured members of Axis forces to tropical resorts in the manner described by yesterday’s New York Times.

Almost exactly seven years after arriving at Guantánamo in chains as accused enemy combatants, and four days after their surprise predawn flight to Bermuda, four Uighur Muslim men basked in their new-found freedom here, grateful for the handshakes many residents had offered and marveling at the serene beauty of this tidy, postcard island.

In newly purchased polo shirts and chinos, the four husky men, members of a restive ethnic minority from western China, might blend in except for their scruffy beards. Smelling hibiscus flowers, luxuriating in the freedom to drift through scenic streets and harbors, they expressed wonder at their good fortune in landing here after a captivity that included more than a year in solitary confinement. …

“Before we were asking, ‘Why are the Americans doing this to us?’ ” said Mr. Abdulahat. Now, he said, with others nodding in agreement, “We have ended up in such a beautiful place….

While some less affluent residents said they felt it was unfair to offer jobs and citizenship to men the United States itself would not take, many others shrugged and expressed pride at Bermudan hospitality. As the men venture from the seaside cottage where they temporarily live until they get jobs and figure out next steps, people often come up to shake their hands and wish them well, and the men said they were deeply touched.

Their homeland of Xinjiang, a largely Muslim region in western China where many residents chafe under Chinese rule, is landlocked, and many of the Uighur detainees saw an ocean — still a distant, mysterious presence — for the first time ever through fences at Guantánamo.

Now they can play in the waters. Khaleel Mamut, 31, said he went fishing on a boat on Saturday and caught his first fish ever. “I was so excited,” he said. “You just drop the hook in the water and you get a fish.” Hearing that fishing did not always bring such quick results, one of the other men quipped that perhaps the fish were joining in Bermuda’s welcome.

They have been promised work visas and, in perhaps a year or so, possible citizenship, their American lawyers said. That would give them passports and a right to travel.

slideshow

Tired of living in hopeless poverty driving sheep across the Gobi’s trackless sands? Get yourself an AK-47 and start taking potshots at US troops. Maybe you, too, will be captured and awarded a new life in a tropical resort at US taxpayers’ expense. Allahu Akhbar!

Breitbart has assembled a montage of fourteen videos from a variety of sources featuring riot police brutality, protests, and Iranian crowds besting riot police thugs.

Meanwhile, on the domestic insanity front, New Republic’s Laura Secor thinks Ahmadinejad is George W. Bush and Mousavi is John Kerry.

Identifying American conservative opponents with nasty foreign dictators is a reflexive habit of the left, it seems. Andrew Sullivan is comparing Ahmadinejad to Karl Rove this morning.

Ahmadinejad’s bag of tricks is eerily like that of Karl Rove – the constant use of fear, the exploitation of religion, the demonization of liberals, the deployment of Potemkin symbolism like Sarah Palin.

Personally, I think the demonization of opponents and exploitation of wild and emotional exaggerations of reality (fear) is really characteristic of the political approach of Secor and Sullivan’s side.

Mark Steyn notes that the claim that government can deliver a scarce item cheaper to more people resembles promises to sell you a certain well-known bridge.

When President Barack Obama tells you he’s “reforming” health care to “control costs,” the point to remember is that the only way to “control costs” in health care is to have less of it. In a government system, the doctor, the nurse, the janitor and the Assistant Deputy Associate Director of Cost-Control System Management all have to be paid every Friday, so the sole means of “controlling costs” is to restrict the patient’s access to treatment. In the Province of Quebec, patients with severe incontinence – i.e., they’re in the bathroom 12 times a night – wait three years for a simple 30-minute procedure. True, Quebeckers have a year or two on Americans in the life expectancy hit parade, but, if you’re making 12 trips a night to the john 365 times a year for three years, in terms of life-spent-outside-the-bathroom expectancy, an uninsured Vermonter may actually come out ahead.

As Louis XV is said to have predicted, “Après moi, le deluge” – which seems as incisive an observation as any on a world in which freeborn citizens of the wealthiest societies in human history are content to rise from their beds every half-hour every night and traipse to the toilet for yet another flush simply because a government bureaucracy orders them to do so. “Health” is potentially a big-ticket item, but so’s a house and a car, and most folks manage to handle those without a Government Accommodation Plan or a Government Motor Vehicles System – or, at any rate, they did in pre-bailout America. …

[B]y historical standards, we’re loaded: We have TVs and iPods and machines to wash our clothes and our dishes. We’re the first society in which a symptom of poverty is obesity: Every man his own William Howard Taft. Of course we’re “vulnerable”: By definition, we always are. But to demand a government organized on the principle of preemptively “taking care” of potential “vulnerabilities” is to make all of us, in the long run, far more vulnerable. A society of children cannot survive, no matter how all-embracing the government nanny.

When I was young, eons ago, when dinosaurs still walked the earth, doctors didn’t turn people away because they didn’t have health insurance. When Doctor Jones ran into an indigent patient, he simply shrugged, took care of the patent, and figured that it was his turn to do something charitable.

What has changed isn’t human nature, but the intensity of our regulatory environment and our politics. Government tax policy gradually created a health care corporate regime in which people employed by big companies used to get any amount of health services for absolutely nothing.

When you don’t pay for things, you have no incentive to economize, so demand rose and health care costs dramatically escalated. Meanwhile, government went along giving away more and more free health care to the elderly. So a while back, it became a joint interest of government and insurance companies to do something to control costs.

They made a deal. Government would set fixed prices for procedures and services delivered via medicare, and insurance companies would only pay at those same (lesser) medicare rates. Hard cheese for doctors, of course, but hey! cost cutting is important.

We have since experienced a bizarre regime of increasingly reduced health insurance benefits, managed by occult fine print to bamboozle beneficiaries into thinking they have coverage until doctors and hospitals subsequently surprise them by balance billing. The balance is the difference between what insurance companies are willing to pay and what health care providers want to charge.

The current situation featuring constant covert fighting over dollars makes charity its victim, too. If a hospital or physician treats that derelict indigent for free, ahem! the eyeshade-wearing bean-counter in Mega Insurance’s head office contends that was only possible by adding extra unjustified costs to the services Mega is paying for, and Mega wants a refund. That refund, you see, is supposed to come from your uncle and mine in Washington.

Thus, Capitalism is busily greasing the skids as we slide into Socialism.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s annual Ten Thousand Commandments report on the growth and costs of federal regulation has some startling figures.

Given 2008’s government spending of $2.98 trillion, the regulatory “hidden tax” stood at 39 percent of the level of federal spending itself. (Because of the months-old spending surge, this proportion will surely be lower next year.)

Trillion-dollar deficits and regulatory costs in the trillions are both unsettling new developments for America. Although FY 2008 regulatory costs are more than double that year’s $459 billion budget deficit, the more recent deficit spending surge will catapult the deficit above the costs of regulation for the near future.

CBO now projects 2009 federal spending to hit $4.004 trillion and the deficit to soar to $1.845 trillion. The game has changed; although these spending levels eclipse federal regulatory costs now, unchecked government spending translates, in later years, into greater regulation as well.

Regulatory costs are equivalent to 65 percent of 2006 corporate pretax profits of $1.8 trillion.

Regulatory costs rival estimated 2008 individual income taxes of $1.2 trillion.

Regulatory costs dwarf corporate income taxes of $345 billion.

Regulatory costs of $1.172 trillion absorb 8 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), estimated at $14.3 trillion in 2008.

Combining regulatory costs with federal FY 2008 outlays of $2.978 trillion implies that the federal government’s share of the economy now reaches 29 percent.

The Weidenbaum Center at Washington University in St. Louis and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia jointly estimate that agencies spent $49.1 billion to administer and police the 2008 regulatory enterprise. Adding the $1.172 trillion in off-budget compliance costs brings the total regulatory burden to $1.221 trillion.

The 2008 Federal Register is close to breaking the 80,000-page barrier. It contained 79,435 pages, up 10 percent from 72,090 pages in 2007—an all-time record high.

Federal Register pages devoted specifically to final rules jumped nearly 16 percent, from 22,771 to a record 26,320.

In 2008, agencies issued 3,830 final rules, a 6.5-percent increase from 3,595 rules in 2007.

The annual outflow of roughly 4,000 final rules has meant that well over 40,000 final rules were issued during the past decade.

Although regulatory agencies issued 3,830 final rules in 2008, Congress passed and the President signed into law a comparatively low 285 bills. Considerable lawmaking power is delegated to unelected bureaucrats at agencies.

According to the 2008 Unified Agenda, which lists federal regulatory actions at various stages of implementation, 61 federal departments, agencies, and commissions have 4,004 regulations in play at various stages of implementation.

Of the 4,004 regulations now in the pipeline, 180 are “economically significant” rules packing at least $100 million in economic impact. Assuming these rulemakings are primarily regulatory rather than deregulatory, that number implies roughly $18 billion yearly in future off-budget regulatory effects.

The most devastating response to David Letterman’s joke attacking Sarah Palin’s daughter comes from the inimitable James Lileks who does to Letterman approximately what Rome did to Carthage.

[I]t must be funny, because David is funny and hip. Right? Or maybe not; maybe he’s actually a brackish, hermetically-souled guy who’s spend the last twenty years going from table to table with a giant wooden grinder, asking anyone if they want some fresh-ground scorn with that. Say when. Or maybe he’s about as edgy as a soccer ball, and exists only to remind people they were Edgy once, and hence must be ever-blessed with the gift of Wryness and Irony. With those shields we can never grow old, you know. We’ll always be as sharp and perceptive as we were when we were sitting on a cast-off sofa in college, working through a midweek buzz, happily fellated by the preconceptions the TV so charitably provided. …

What’s amusing is how unamusing he is in the clip. How sour he seems. Compare him to his predecessors: Carson was all midwestern charm, with unreadable yet mannerly reserve; Steve Allen was almost as smart as he was certain you thought he must be, but he was cheerful; Parr was a nattering nutball covered with a rich creamy nougat of ego, but he was engaging. Letterman is empty; he’s inert; he stands for nothing except disdain for people foolish enough to stand for anything – aside from rote obesciance to all the things Decent People stand for, of course, all those shopworn assumptions passed around in the bubble.

This posture was fresh in ’80; it even had energy. But it paralyzes the heart after a while. You end up an SOB who shows up at the end of the night to reassure that nothing matters. I think he may have invented the posture of Nerd Cool, an aspect so familiar to anyone who reads message boards – the skill at deflating enthusiasm, puncturing passion with a hatpin lobbed from a safe distance. The instinctive unease with the wet messy energy of actual people.

Yes, reading too much into it. Really, it’s just a rote slam: If your mother is a loathed politician, and your older sister gets pregnant, famous old men can make jokes about you being knocked up by rich baseball players, and there’s nothing you can do. That’s the culture: a flat, dead-eyed, square-headed old man who’ll go back to the writers and ask for more Palin-daughter knocked-up jokes, because that one went over well. Other children he won’t touch, but not because he’s decent. It’s because he’s a coward.

Oh, one more thing: it’s okay for David to say that because someone said something else about someone, and since I didn’t write about that, I’m a hypocrite. Just so we’re clear.

Andrew Thomas observes that liberals want to be punished. Liberalism is a lot like BDSM. Liberals yearn to surrender to a domineering master. For them, pain turns into pleasure.

[L]et’s objectively review the initiatives in the neolib agenda: Environmentalism, global passivism, overpopulation, socialized healthcare, and promoting government intervention into all aspects of life. All of these priorities require individuals to sacrifice their lifestyles, their income, and/or their basic comforts.

This past week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi exhorted, “Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory…” in order to sacrifice ourselves to the gods of global warming. As presidential candidate Obama said, “We can’t drive our SUVs and, you know, eat as much as we want and keep our homes on, you know, 72 degrees at all times…” He seems to indicate that he wants us to starve and freeze.

Most of these initiatives involve the inflicting of pain and misery. Tom Daschle, in his book “Critical: What We Can Do About The Health Care Crisis” says health-care reform “will not be pain free” and that seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of having them treated. In other words, you will suffer a slow agonizing death under government mandate.

As a final phenomenological exercise, impassively observe the level of neolib support for this agenda. It has not appeared to wane. In fact, neolib fervor continues to increase as the promised level of suffering increases.

Hatred of life, detestation of abundance and material success, self-infliction of pain are all very old patterns of perversity associated with extreme forms of religious aberration. In the Christian context, this sort of thing was usually classified as a heresy, being rightly identified with Manicheanism, a mystical Middle Eastern sect which viewed the universe as dualistic, featuring a good spiritual world created by a positive “Father of Greatness” and a fallen and defective material world created by the “Prince of Darkness.”

In the good old days, when patterns of insanity of this kind led to destruction of works of art, physical assaults on persons, and rejection of property rights in favor of some new millenialist regime prominently featuring sodomy and free love, the Church of Rome and the knightly aristocracy would take drastic action to stamp it out and restore order.

Imelda probably looks something like this

Foxes are playful and mischievous, and are known on occasion to develop a hobby of collecting things. Rita Mae Brown‘s Virgina-based murder mystery novels have featured crucial clues discovered hoarded away in a fox’s den.

The International news-reading community is bemused today over the account in Spiegel of the criminal career of a German vixen, who has developed a passion for shoes worthy of Sex and the City‘s heroine Carrie Bradshaw.

A vixen has stolen more than 120 shoes from doorsteps in the German town of Föhren over the last year, amassing a collection that would impress even Imelda Marcos. Little bite marks on the laces suggest they’re intended as toys for her cubs.

For more than a year, the people of Föhren, a small town in the wooded Eifel hills of western Germany, wondered who was going around stealing shoes from their doorsteps and garden terraces at night. Well over 100 muddy hiking shoes, wet Wellingtons, steel-capped workman’s boots, flipflops and old slippers went missing.

The mystery has now been solved after a forestry worker discovered an Imelda Marcos-scale collection of footwear in a fox’s den in nearby woods.

The bushy-tailed culprit, believed to be a vixen with a family of cubs, is still at large, and locals have two explanations for her kleptomania. Either she amassed them as toys for her children, or she simply likes collecting shoes, or both. So far 120 stolen shoes have been retrieved.

Malvern Priory

The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone.

—Reginald Heber.

Preservationism in Britain, as practiced by the official quango, English Heritage, in the case of Malvern Priory is determined to block the repair or replacement of ill-designed wooden Victorian bell frames, invisible to public and now warped, at the price of condemning the exercise of the far more ancient English tradition of change ringing to desuetude.

Here is the problem with enlightened regulations generally: those in charge of applying them are commonly too ill-informed and unwise to understand what is important and what isn’t. I remember my former New England town debating a proposal to surrender similar sweeping authority to a local historic district, whose officers could tell us what color we could paint our house and whether we could repair our porch. But the authorities in charge would have been the same clueless housewives who arranged to have our Main Street’s ancient slate sidewalk pulled up and replaced with synthetic, and who thought it a good idea to install halogen lights on the steeple of our Congregational meeting house.

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The Telegraph:

The bells of Malvern Priory could fall silent for the first time in more than 650 years because English Heritage has refused to allow bellringers to replace ageing parts.

The historic bells, which include one that dates from 1350, desperately need new frames to be installed high inside the tower.

However, English Heritage objected because it believed the A-frames from 1887 needed to be preserved.

There were no objections to updating the frame from the parish, the general public, the Victorian Society, or the Council for the Care of Churches.

However, English Heritage has stood its ground and took the case to an expensive and special consistory court hearing where the chancellor of the diocese heard the evidence and ruled the frames must stay.

Without the necessary replacement frames, the bell ringers say it is now just a matter of time before the bells become too difficult to ring.

The tower band is getting older and locals are concerned at the prospect of “The Exercise” not being practised in the Worcestershire spring town if new ringers can’t be trained there.

Campanologists across the country now fear the ruling might prevent other parishes taking on the might of English Heritage, and that other historic towers could fall silent.

The Victorian A-frames are now accepted to be a bad design and they were not in use for long.

Birmingham Post

Times

Household Net Worth as Percentage of GNP

Well, we’ve recently on the average lost the last decade’s growth of personal assets.

Household Net Worth, according to the Fed, is down $14 trillion from its peak in 2007, and as the chart above illustrates, is down to levels very much like those of the 1990s when we were just beginning to emerge from a painful recession.

All over the country, current bad times have forced families to dip into savings, to sell equities at drastically reduced values, and to liquidate real estate in a very unfavorable market.

The impact of Barack Obama’s spending binge, of course, and the new regime of government regulation, intrusion, and control over the economy is really still yet to be felt.

Arthur Laffer, in the Wall Street Journal, contemplates what government has done so far, and shudders at the consequences yet to come.

It’s difficult to estimate the magnitude of the inflationary and interest-rate consequences of the Fed’s actions because, frankly, we haven’t ever seen anything like this in the U.S. To date what’s happened is potentially far more inflationary than were the monetary policies of the 1970s, when the prime interest rate peaked at 21.5% and inflation peaked in the low double digits. Gold prices went from $35 per ounce to $850 per ounce, and the dollar collapsed on the foreign exchanges. It wasn’t a pretty picture.