Meltdown of The Climate ‘Consensus’ — More Proof of Global-Warming Fraud

President Obama just can’t help himself. It’s impulse. Every
time he sees the American people, in their infinite and confounding
ignorance, pursuing a course they shouldn’t, he intervenes to
correct them. Such is the view from the clouds on which he placidly
floats above us all.

Most politicians speak of the wisdom of the American
people. Some even believe it. But not Obama. Time and time again,
he takes to the lectern to scold or educate us.

Last Friday, he needlessly jumped into a percolating
political controversy — again — to enlighten the uneducated
masses. This time the subject was the Islamic cultural center
proposed to be built two blocks from Ground Zero, where Islamist
terrorists murdered more than 2,700 Americans.

“The 9/11 attacks were a deeply traumatic event for our
country,” he said, beginning what was to be yet another lecture on
what he sees as our failure as a people to live up to our values.
“And the pain and the experience of suffering by those who lost
loved ones is just unimaginable. So I understand the emotions that
this issue engenders. And ground zero is, indeed, hallowed
ground.

“But let me be clear. As a citizen, and as president, I
believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion
as everyone else in this country. And that includes the right to
build a place of worship and a community center on private property
in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.
This is America. And our commitment to religious freedom must be
unshakable.”

No one can pack more conceit, more condescension, into two
little paragraphs than Barack Obama can. In the first paragraph, he
establishes that opponents of the Islamic center are reacting
purely emotionally. “I understand the emotions that this issue
engenders.” In the second, he informs us that, as an enlightened
being, he sees this issue properly — it’s about freedom of
religion. Appealing to our reverence for the Constitution, he
states that “our commitment” (all Americans are bound by creed to
agree on this) “must be unshakable.”

These are not the words of a president attempting to lead
and unite a nation. They are the words of an academic attempting to
instruct a class that he considers particularly thick-headed. And
they came unprompted. He didn’t have to address the issue at all.
He wanted to. He needed to. His conscience compelled him
to.

This is how President Obama so often gets himself into
trouble. He didn’t have to weigh in on the Henry Louis Gates Jr.
arrest. But he couldn’t help himself. He had to use it as a
“teachable moment” on race relations.

He didn’t have to explain to Joe the Plumber that he
intended to “spread the wealth around.” He didn’t have to tell
Democratic donors in San Francisco that rural Pennsylvanians salve
their bitterness by clinging to guns and religion. But he just
couldn’t help himself.

Last year, in his third press conference as president, he
couldn’t resist telling Americans to wash their hands and cover
their mouths when they cough.

Obama has never transitioned from his former job as a
college lecturer. The reason is that he really doesn’t see his new
job as that different. It just has more perks, such as the ability
to use force when persuasion fails. And the ability to have paid
staffers step forward to clarify one’s ill-considered
remarks.

The day after asserting that no American should object to
an Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero — “in lower
Manhattan,” as he put it — he contradicted himself, saying, “I was
not commenting, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making the
decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically
on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That’s
what our country is about.”

If he wasn’t giving his approval of a mosque near Ground
Zero, then why did he specifically define the location (“lower
Manhattan”) where he said we must all be unshakably committed to
the right of Muslims to build a mosque?

When the press found his clarification not all that
clarifying, the president’s staff rephrased it. White House
Spokesman Bill Burton said on Saturday, “What he said last night,
and reaffirmed today, is that if a church, a synagogue or a Hindu
temple can be built on a site, you simply cannot deny that right to
those who want to build a mosque.”

That’s a better way to put it. But it still fails to
clarify. Here is why. The question never was one of religious
freedom — because the use of government force is not at issue. The
question is whether the backers of this Islamic center should build
it two blocks from Ground Zero, not whether government should stop
them.

In his haste to teach us all a lesson, Obama misread the
issue. This is nothing new. As is his habit, he was so eager to
talk that he never listened to the conversation into which he
injected himself. As with his instant analysis of the Gates affair,
he hastily leapt in with a pre-set conclusion. In both instances
his conclusion was the same — I must speak out to show the
majority how it is being intolerant of the minority.

Here is a president who presumes that most Americans are
intolerant, uneducated simpletons who need to be taught
constitutional basics by their president. And in his mind, they
have exactly the right president for the job.

Is it any wonder that the more he talks, the lower his
poll numbers dip?

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It’s so simple.

Fixing this economy, that is. Simple. One step. I’ve
written about it before in this space. But let’s build some tiny
suspense before I reveal it.

The key to the recovery is to unleash the spirits that
motivate productive investment. Spirits, that is, and also cash.
Right now there is a huge amount of the latter, an unprecedentedly
huge amount, sitting around waiting to be tapped into. American
businesses are sitting on a record $1.8 trillion is cash reserves,
according to the latest statistics. Another $1 trillion in reserves
rests in bank vaults.

Meanwhile, the personal savings rate of ordinary Americans
has jumped all the way above 6 percent, more than three times as
high as it was just three years ago. That means, if memory serves
(I can’t find this statistic at this writing), that there is
another $1.2 trillion in individual accounts that is available for
productive use. (Again, that dollar figure may be off, but whatever
it is, it’s very large if the savings rate is above 6 percent.)
Actually, the economy is well off if people don’t rush out and
spend this latter amount — it’s a constructive thing for people to
be inured against debt, for a multitude of macro-economic reasons
– but if just a little of it were unlocked for both spending and
more aggressive personal investing, it would provide the economy an
extra “oomph” as well.

The reason businesses and individuals alike are hoarding
cash is that they don’t know what’s coming next — but they have
reason to believe it won’t be good. Everywhere they turn, they see
the Obamites and Pelosi-Reid brigades raising taxes, badmouthing
businesses, bashing the profit motive, regulating the hell out of
everything that moves, driving up energy prices, spending the
federal government into oblivion, and taking over formerly private
enterprises. They also see a Federal Reserve that seems to care not
a whit about the strength of the dollar, and that seems so freaked
out about possible deflation that they forget that lenders are
unlikely to lend, and bond-buyers unlikely to buy bonds, if the
yields are too low. There comes a point where interest rates can be
so low for so long that they discourage lending while
actually exacerbating deflationary expectations, becoming a
self-fulfilling prophecy. (This is in the short term; in the long
term, the weakened dollar, as is evident in the outrageously high
cost of gold, could well lead to an inflationary explosion the
likes of which this nation hasn’t seen since 1979-80, if
ever.)

There are lots and lots of things that can be done to make
this situation better. Freeze domestic discretionary spending for
three years straight. Reform entitlements. Re-institute the parts
of welfare reform that Barack Obama gutted in the first stimulus
package. Reform the rest of the welfare-related infrastructure
along the lines that Congress reformed Aid to Families with
Dependent Children in 1996. Strengthen the dollar. Put a freeze on
all new regulatory rule-making. Repeal Obamacare. Repeal most or
all of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act. Phase Fannie
and Freddie out of existence. Read the Heritage Foundation’s newly
released “Solutions for America” and adopt it almost whole. Ditto
for Rep. Paul Ryan’s Roadmap for America’s Future. Refuse to spend
any still-unspent portions of any of the various stimulus porkages
passed in the past three years. Work to elect conservative
politicians at all levels of government.

But none of that is simple. Very little of that could be
done without complicated legislating. And little of it could
provide a virtually immediate jolt of the sort that would unleash
the spirits — the entrepreneurship, the lenders’ and investors’
positive outlooks, consumer confidence, stock market demand,
reduction of pensioner fears — that must be unleashed in order for
businesses, banks and (to a lesser extent) individuals to stop
hoarding their cash and instead spend or, far better yet, invest it
productively again.

But one step could be taken in one fell swoop (with a few
rather technical amendments added later). One step would be so
dramatic, so easily understood by the public, so clean and simple,
that it would shock the economy back to life like those devices
that EMTs use on cardiac arrest victims to restart their hearts.
(What are those things called — you know, those things
that look like air-hockey paddles that EMTs put on each side of a
patient’s chest?)

I’ve written
about
this idea before.
It sounds radical, but it really isn’t. It’s just common sense –
which, come to think of it, is a rather radical concept in Congress
these days. It stops taxing an entity that is an artificial
construct — and a construct, at that, which merely passes the
taxes on to real human beings in the form of higher prices, fewer
consumer choices, fewer jobs, and lower dividends and stock
prices.

Eliminate corporate income taxes.
That’s it. Kill them. Just do it.

Paul Ryan’s Roadmap calls for this same step (which means
I’m no longer alone in advocating it), although he “replaces”
corporate income taxes with some sort of transaction tax. The
latter isn’t necessary. Just stop taxing corporations
completely. For now, forget all the arithmetic, even though it
really does work out. (Do read the columns linked above for fuller
explanations.) Forget the bean counting; and forget the likelihood
that Barack Obama would likely demagogue the idea as being a
sell-out to “evil corporations,” because if politicians can’t put
both a positive and accurate spin on the idea to counter Obama’s
demagoguery, they don’t deserve to be in office in the first
place.

Instead, just imagine, upon elimination of all corporate
income taxes, what would happen to the $1.8 trillion in business
reserves, the $1 trillion in bank reserves, and part of the $1.2
trillion (or whatever the figure is that corresponds to a 6 percent
savings rate) in individual’s hoarded cash. People controlling the
cash would see the obvious likelihood of gushers of corporate
profits free of taxes, and would want to get in on the action.
Investors who love dividends would understand immediately that
dividends would rocket higher, and they would invest accordingly.
People looking for capital gains would see the start of a stock
market boom and want to get in on the ground floor, or on the next
floor, or on the next one, with each rise in stock value building
more and more confidence for even greater improvement.

And all that unlocked cash would have a multiplier effect.
In the summer issue of National Affairs, N. Gregory Mankiw
reviews a plethora of recent scholarship and reports that the
demand multiplier from tax cuts is $3 for every $1 cut, which is
twice as high as the multiplier for even well-designed stimulus
spending. (Amazingly, the most definitive
study showing this comes from Christina Romer, the
soon-to-depart chief of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors.)
Furthermore, reports Mankiw, “the stimulus packages that appeared
to be successful had cut business and income taxes, while those
that evidently did not succeed had increased government spending
and transfer payments.”

In addition to re-animating all of these unused cash
reserves — which in itself would dramatically and almost fully
re-start the economy — eliminating the corporate income tax would
serve as a super-powerful magnet for new businesses to start, for
businesses that have outsourced operations to repatriate in the
United States, and for foreign businesses to build more plants here
as well.

Again, it’s all so simple. The only complication, which
could be handled separately, would be to figure out what to do with
arrangements such as Limited Liability Partnerships, Subchapter S
Corporations, and the like. But those considerations could be
worked out.

This idea is an utter, complete economic winner. Handled
rightly, it could easily be a political winner too. (Again, see my
earlier columns for explanations of the politics.) Eliminate the
corporate income tax, and watch the United States become an
economic powerhouse again, almost overnight.

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Ray Bradbury, perhaps America’s most popular and prolific
short-story writer, turns ninety on Sunday. As a twentysomething
wannabe writer in the 1940s, Bradbury cared too much about what
critics thought of him. As he approaches his tenth decade, Bradbury
clearly could not care any less.

“I think our country is in need of a revolution,” Bradbury
told the Los Angeles Times earlier this week. “There is
too much government today. We’ve got to remember the government
should be by the people, of the people and for the people.”
Bradbury’s short-story broadsides against modern gadgets, the
all-intrusive state, and political correctness foreshadowed his
current outlook. Calling Bill Clinton a “sh–head” and Michael
Moore an “a–hole” have been less subtle indications.

Cell phones, virtual reality, and the Walkman lived in
Bradbury’s science fiction before they became our science fact. But
where he has proven a true prophet is in his cautionary tales about
parenthood by proxy. In “Zero Hour” (1947), parents, happy to have
their kids out of their hair, reap what they sow when their
out-of-site-out-of-mind children aid and abet an alien invasion. In
“The Veldt” (1950), a couple farms out their parental duties to a
nursery that projects the imagination of the children onto
three-dimensional walls. When the parents seek to shut off the
hi-tech playroom, the children imagine their parents dead — a wish
their African Veldt fantasyland enthusiastically grants. The
“nothing’s too good for our children” refrain of the parents in
“The Veldt” foreshadowed the generational rebellion of the
following decade that witnessed spoiled kids turning on befuddled
parents.

As with the god technology, Bradbury plays apostate to the
omniscient state. The state criminalizes night strolls in “The
Pedestrian” (1951), erases the past in “To the Chicago Abyss”
(1963), conscripts for perpetual nuclear war in “To the Future”
(1950), and burns books in Fahrenheit 451 (1953).
Compounding Bradbury’s sins against state and science is his love
for small-town America, immortalized in the books Dandelion
Wine (1957) and Something Wicked This Way Comes
(1962). Nothing could appear more uncouth to the hipsters and urban
denizens reviewing his books than a writer wanting to return to,
rather than escape from, his hometown.

Before Bradbury’s political epiphany transformed the World
War II pacifist and Cold War anti-McCarthyite into a stalwart
Republican, Russell Kirk picked up on the storyteller’s abilities
to impart moral truths through parables. Arguing in the late 1960s
that Bradbury should wear the literati’s scorn as a mark of honor,
Kirk explained that critics “perceived that Bradbury is a moralist,
which they could not abide; that he has no truck with the obscene,
which omission they found unpardonable; that he is no complacent
liberal, because he knows the Spirit of the Age to be monstrous –
for which let him be anathema; that he is one of the last surviving
masters of eloquence and glowing description, which ought to be
prohibited; that, with Pascal, he understands how the Heart has
reasons which the Reason cannot know — so to the Logicalist
lamp-post with him.”

But the literati were not always dismissive of the man
Time magazine dubbed “the poet of the pulps.” When
Bradbury flattered their ideology, or allowed them to project their
politics upon his stories, they lavished praise upon him.
Bradbury’s only story accepted among what he claims were hundreds
submitted to the New Yorker is a certifiably substandard
effort about the deportation of an illegal alien. It is a glaring
peculiarity that of his four stories honored by inclusion in the
annual Best American Short Stories anthology, one
chronicles a black versus white baseball game in which sore loser
whites quit, another explores an African-American-populated Mars
faced with imposing Jim Crow laws on white settlers, and yet
another is the aforementioned tale of the deported Mexican. It was
as if the bard of tattooed carnies, Martian ghost towns, and
endless summer vacations merited recognition only for the tiny
fraction of his oeuvre addressing hot-button issues.
Bizarre.

One suspects that Bradbury knew of what he wrote when he
reflected in a coda to Fahrenheit 451, “For it is a mad
world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they
dwarf or giant… pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or
sage, to interfere with aesthetics.” The special interests
rewarding “art as a weapon,” and rejecting “art for art’s sake,”
pose a greater threat to freedom of thought than any mythical book
burner.

Though his writings occasionally carry political
overtones, Bradbury has never been a particularly political writer.
But the Coors-drinking, Fox News-watching nonagenarian has been a
politically outspoken citizen as of late. For critics whose
political prejudices pass for aesthetic tastes, his recent
outspokenness may have knocked him down a few rungs in their
jaundiced eyes — just as his few postwar racially-themed stories
may have once elevated him. But for readers in pursuit of a good
short story, Bradbury’s politics don’t impede them from finding
just that.

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The California Academy of Sciences, located in San Francisco’s
Golden Gate Park, is one of the finest natural history museums in
the country. If you get the opportunity to go there, I urge you to
do so. Unfortunately, not everything in the museum deserves to be
called “science.”

The following statement is one of the informational
posters that’s part of an area called “Climate Change.” It is like
other such claims I’ve seen numerous times in similar venues over
the past several years. The poster is titled, “Rushing to
Extinction,” and has been part of the exhibit for at least two
years that I know of.

Today, we are living through the sixth mass extinction of
life in Earth’s history. This is due in part to climate change
triggered by the carbon dioxide we pump into the air as we burn
fossil fuels for energy. The resulting greenhouse gases are
altering the biosphere, which is causing the loss of plants and
animals around the world. If we don’t change our actions, we could
condemn half of all species to extinction in a hundred years. That
adds up to almost a million types of plants and animals that could
disappear.

I urge you to read the statement again and consider what
it says. Although the statement is extreme and sensationalistic, it
is not unusual. It is typical of the conventional wisdom. It is
ironic that it is found in what is called the California Academy of
Sciences. It is reckless fear-mongering propaganda, not science. It
cannot be substantiated and is a total distortion of
reality.

For example, it is simply not true that “Today, we are
living through the sixth mass extinction of life.” About 770 plants
and animals have been identified as having gone extinct in the past
800 years. That’s about one per year. We are discovering far more
species we did not know about than identifying
extinctions.

The poster implies there are a total of two million
species now existing. Biologists don’t actually know how many
species there are. Educated guesses range between five million and
fifty million.

Even if the total number of species is only two million,
it means that if half go extinct in the next hundred years, the
rate of extinction will have to increase from one each year to
10,000 each year. What’s the probability of such a massive change?
How, specifically, is that going to happen?

Previous mass extinctions were the result of asteroids or
ice ages. Have we had one of these lately that I didn’t hear
about?

Is the statement defensible? It’s a statement made in a
certain context, the Academy of Sciences. Apparently it’s an
assertion that is supposed to be accepted based on authority. If
you’re going to make such a cataclysmic prediction, shouldn’t you
provide a little documentation and support? Is it supposes to be
self-evident?

To this point “climate change” has not increased the rate
of extinction. We definitely are not currently “living through the
sixth mass extinction of life.” To say we will in the future is
speculation, about which there is much disagreement, to put it
mildly. There is definitely no “consensus.”

The poster is worded as if what it says is beyond dispute.
The statements are not qualified in any way. I assume the designers
of the exhibit intend for it to be taken seriously.

“If we don’t change our actions, we could condemn half of
all species of life on earth today to extinction in a hundred
years.” You can get away with about any outlandish prediction you
want to make if you hide behind the word “could.” In the context of
basic scientific protocol, any such statement should be presented
in terms of probabilities as well as a discussion of the specific
preconditions to such an event.

Judging from the numerous groups of children I see when I
go there, the Academy of Sciences is possibly the most popular
destination for Bay Area schools’ field trips. The statement, which
is truly frightening if you believe it, is seen by hundreds of
school children almost every day. What kind of impact do you think
such statements have on young, impressionable minds? It verges on
emotional child abuse. The Academy staff should be ashamed of
themselves, but I doubt they are.

Environmentalists are so fanatical about their Armageddon
beliefs that they think terrifying school children is justified. Do
these people ever think about the implications of what they say? Do
they care?

The purpose of the “Rushing to Extinction” poster and
similar statements is to deliberately frighten whoever reads it.
Environmentalists apparently get a perverse thrill from scaring
people and making them feel guilty for being members of the human
race. The California Academy of Sciences is allowing itself to be
used as a venue for manipulative propaganda.

The natural world is fascinating and magical. The best way
to illustrate that is to stick with the facts. It’s too bad natural
history museums don’t do so.

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There is a tendency for the media and academic analysts to
attempt to separate consideration of the illegal immigration of
Latin Americans (mostly Mexicans) into the United States from
criminal cross-border drug and gun trafficking. Unfortunately this
politically correct characterization obscures reality.

Human smuggling is a nice little side business for all
ranks of drug traders. A good portion of the cash made by the
“coyotes” is kicked upstairs to the sub-bosses of whatever
organizational section commands a given region. But as any
experienced old school mafioso will admit, that sort of
business is strictly for the lower echelon of “street humps.” The
real money, the serious action, is in what they call in Marseilles
– la merde. It sounds better than the English or Spanish
version of the same products.

What trafficking in humans does provide, however, is an
excellent diversionary activity that offers not only local
political protection on the U.S. side by committed and oft-times
innocent immigrant activists, but, importantly, a ready supply of
modestly compensated “mules” among the illegals themselves. And
here is where the situation becomes very sensitive.

The Hispanic community is outraged at what ultimately is
the “profiling” of their membership as a hand maiden of
international criminal enterprise. But, unfortunately, that plays
into the drug cartels’ hands. The continuing struggle to focus
attention on the moral issue of illegal immigration provides a
ready cover for the multi-billion dollar organization of narcotics
smuggling. To not recognize this is an exercise in
self-delusion.

The people who run the drug and arms smuggling cartels in
Mexico and elsewhere in Central and South America can read
newspapers as well as anyone. They see a message being sent that
Hispanic immigrants will continue to “get a pass” whenever
possible. From the cartels’ standpoint, the issue of so-called
racial profiling must be set front and center whenever possible in
order to take attention away from narcotics trafficking.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recently made a
highly publicized sweep of “illegal immigrants with criminal
records” in Arizona. The head of ICE, who just happened to be on a
visit to that state, said that it was the largest ever conducted
there. Sixty-three people were arrested. It was a 72-hour statewide
operation aided by the U.S. Marshals Service. The question is what
had held up these arrests before? Amazingly convenient timing
coordinated with the visit of the ICE director, wasn’t
it?

Equally interesting is that a major point was made of the
international nature of the arrested criminals. The arrestees
included citizens from nine countries: Canada, Czech Republic,
Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Uzbekistan and,
oh yes, Mexico. It doesn’t take an intelligence expert to wonder
how this star cast of international actors could have been so
miraculously available for arrest at that moment.

How very convenient for the Obama Administration that
wants to downplay the “illegality” of illegal immigrants of
primarily Mexican nationality. Clearly this type of high profile
“roust” did not go unnoticed by the union that represents 7,000
rank and file ICE agency employees who unanimously passed a
“vote-of-no-confidence” in ICE leadership for abandoning the
agency’s basic mission of enforcing all immigration
laws.

In a complex way the cracking down by local police on
“drop houses’ and the arrest of low level “coyotes” adds to the
statistics of federal authorities that the Obama Administration
loves to quote. “We’ve deported more people in the last 18 months
than the previous administration had done in four years,” is one of
the typical White House statements. Of course, these increased
deportees imply increased arrivals as well. But as Secretary Janet
Napolitano is reported to have said, “We have no way of measuring
that.”

What has been counted (by CBS News, hardly a conservative
source) is that 14.8% of Arizona’s prison population is illegal
immigrants. And this is after the ICE deportations. Twenty-four
percent in prison on drug charges are illegals, as are 40% of those
in prison for kidnapping. The DHS secretary might have noticed
those percentages when she reviewed their relationship to the fact
that 7% of the Arizona population is illegal. Some more measuring
is in order.

The reality is that peaceful, productive illegals — and
even some properly documented immigrants — are petrified to expose
the Hispanic transnational prison gangs that make up the drug
smuggling cadre who live among them. Illegals are totally
vulnerable to criminal coercion of all types. For self-protection
some illegals drift toward enlistment in the drug gangs. As one
sheriff’s deputy wanting to remain anonymous said, “Shut down the
flow of illegals and cull those already in place and you dry up the
recruitment pool among the drug traffickers already in the
U.S.”

It may not be politically correct, but there is no bright
line separating the illegal population in the Southwest from the
criminal element that exploits them. The criminals make sure of
that. Anyone familiar with mob history in the U.S. knows how local
fears and threats work. The main difference is that the mob
chieftains of today live protected from the police in Mexico and
use the structure of innocent illegals in the U.S. to provide an
unwitting cover and recruitment base for their criminal
distribution networks. And there is little American law enforcement
can do about it.

Would amnesty in any form ever change this equation? Until
that question is answered affirmatively, legalizing illegals will
have little justification. 

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Dismantling America
by
Thomas Sowell
(Basic Books, 341 pages, $27.95)

America, it seems, is always in decline.

Searching through Amazon.com reveals plenty of works
arguing that America’s best days are behind her. From the 1974
novel The Decline and Fall of America; to William
Dietrich’s 1991 book, In the Shadow of the Rising Sun:
The Political Roots of American Economic Decline,
about Japan’s inevitable surpassing of America economically; to the
more recent The Death of the West by the always upbeat
Patrick Buchanan, most such works of gloom-and-doom have usually
been followed by years of tremendous peace and prosperity. After a
while it is hard to take any book about American decline
seriously.

However, if there a reason to treat the idea of our
society’s fall with grave concern, it is that a book has now been
written about it by Thomas Sowell.

Entitled
Dismantling America, it is a collection of some of his
more recent newspaper columns grouped into five sections –
government policies, political issues, economic issues, cultural
issues, and legal issues — with some added commentary beginning
each section.

Sowell’s thesis is encapsulated in the following
passage:

The collapse of a civilization is not just the replacement
of rulers or institutions with new rulers and new institutions. It
is the destruction of a whole way of life and the painful, and
sometimes pathetic, attempts to begin rebuilding amid the
ruins.

Is that where American is headed? I believe it is. Our
only saving grace is that we are not there yet.

The decline of America is a theme that has increasingly
preoccupied Sowell’s work, and it might be tempting to dismiss it
as a natural occurrence of age. A little earlier this year, Sowell
became an octogenarian. As the British writer Samuel Johnson once
said:

Every old man complains of the growing depravity of the
world, of the petulance and insolence of the rising generation. He
recounts the decency and regularity of former times, and celebrates
the discipline and sobriety of the age in which his youth was
passed; a happy age which is now no more to be expected, since
confusion has broken in upon the world, and thrown down all the
boundaries of civility and reverence.

Yet Sowell seems to be well aware of such sentiment. For
example, in the random thoughts portion of the book, Sowell states,
“Despite people who speak glibly about ‘earlier and simpler times,’
all that makes earlier times seem simpler is our ignorance of their
complexities.”

Further, Sowell has not rushed into this subject lightly.
Indeed, he appears to have wrestled with it at length. In a
previous book, Sowell said that while he sometimes got depressed
about the future of this great nation, he once asked the Nobel
economist and libertarian Friedrich Hayek if he was pessimistic or
optimistic about the future. Hayek replied “Optimistic!” and
pointed out that in the 1940s he had been a lonely voice against
government intervention in the economy, but that in the decades
since his ideas about liberty had proliferated. Thus, Sowell has
been concerned about this subject for some time, and if he is
convinced America is in decline, we would do well to consider his
warning.

Sowell points to the Obama Administration as a prime
example of America’s decline. Obama has had no problem appointing
“czars” who determine the salary of corporate executives, praise
mass murderers like Chairman Mao, or believe public schools are the
place to promote sexual practices that most Americans find
objectionable. He seems eager to ram legislation thousands of pages
long through Congress before the American public has adequate time
to know what is in it and enthusiastic about a panel (now called
the Independent Payment Advisory Board) that will make
life-and-death decisions about medical care.

But Sowell does not view Obama so much as a cause of
America’s decline as the embodiment of trends set in motion decades
ago. One such trend is the gradual relinquishing to an elite of
intellectuals the liberty that rightly belongs with individuals.
These elites — comprised of politicians, academic, journalists and
judges — are infected with the belief that they are qualified to
make decisions for the rest of us. Sowell warns of the disaster
that they can do: “There is usually only a limited amount of damage
that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly
monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs.”

In the column “Playing Freedom Cheap,” Sowell warns
against the “dangerous power toward which we are moving, bit by
bit, on the installment plan, is the power of politicians to tell
people what their incomes can and cannot be.” To achieve this, the
elite foment resentment against “the rich” and distract the public
with phrases like “obscene wealth” and “unconscionable profits.”
Sowell argues:

But if we stop and think about it — which politicians
don’t expect us to — what is obscene about wealth? Wouldn’t we
consider it great if every human being on earth had a billion
dollars?

Poverty is obscene. It is poverty that needs to be reduced
– and increasing a country’s productivity has done that far more
widely that redistributing income by targeting the rich.

Yet it is redistribution of income, and not increasing
productivity, that enables elites to fulfill their self-anointed
role of deciding what is best for the rest of us. Sowell warns that
the power to tell people what incomes they can and cannot make
“will not apply to everyone all at once. Like the income tax…the
power to say what incomes people can be allowed to make will
inevitably move down the income scale to make us all dependents and
supplicants of politicians.”

Elites convince us to yield our liberty by use of
rhetoric, and their ability to create emotionally satisfying
phrases is considerable. Consider the debate over ObamaCare. Terms
like “health care for all,” “affordable coverage,” and “shared
responsibility” — who could be against any of those? That we will
now be forced to buy health insurance whether we want it or not,
that politicians and bureaucrats will determine what medical
conditions insurance must cover, and that we will eventually face
rationing of care in order to hold down costs were things that such
rhetoric was intended to obscure.

Unfortunately, flowery rhetoric that obscures reality can
have serious consequences beyond shoddy medical care. Sowell
writes:

One of the many symptoms of this decay from within is that
we are preoccupied with the pay of corporate executives while the
leading terrorist-sponsoring nation on earth is moving steadily
toward creating nuclear bombs. Does anyone imagine that we will
care what anyone’s paycheck is when we see an American city is in
radioactive ruins?

The dangers that Iran poses to the U.S. are glossed over
in nice sounding words like “world opinion” and the “international
community,” as though Iran were just a recalcitrant member of an
extended family that can be talked into behaving. As Sowell has
noted, President Obama, who has achieved little except through
rhetoric, apparently believes that with words alone he can convince
the Iranians into giving up their nuclear weapons
program.

Sowell examines the numerous factors that make it
increasingly difficult for the public to see through nice-sounding
rhetoric, from a culture that undermines moral values and promotes
the “virtue” of being “non-judgmental,” to propaganda emanating
from Hollywood and the universities that denigrates this nation.
But the biggest culprit Sowell singles out is the education system
which now actively works against equipping students with the tools
to analyze political arguments. He writes that students are
often

fed a diet of the politically correct version of the
world, from elementary school to the university…. Elementary as it
may seem that we should hear both sides of an issue before making
up our minds, that is seldom what happens on politically correct
issues today in our schools and colleges…. Hearing only one side
does nothing to equip students with the experience to know how to
sort out opposing sides of other issues they will have to confront
in the future, after they have left school and need to reach their
own conclusions on the issues arising later. Yet they are the jury
that will ultimately decide the fate of this nation.

According to Sowell, it “speaks volumes about the
inadequacies of our educational system” that at this dangerous time
in history our nation would elect “a man whose only qualifications
to be President…were rhetoric, style and symbolism — and whose
animus against the values and institutions of America had been
demonstrated repeatedly over a period of decades
beforehand.”

Nor would Obama’s defeat in 2012 ensure our survival. The
“gullibility and fecklessness of those voters who put him in the
White House will still be there to be exploited by the next master
of glib demagoguery and emotional images,” Sowell warns.

Yet Sowell provides some glimmers of hope, albeit
unintentionally. In one column he notes a San Francisco
Chronicle article in which some people did not seem to
understand how the health care legislation promoted by Obama and
the Democrats could “cost $940 billion and cut the horrendous
federal deficit at the same time.”

“It’s not hard to understand at all,” Sowell writes. “It
is a lie.”

Fortunately, most Americans aren’t buying it.
Most opinion polls continue to show that more Americans
disapprove of the new health care law than approve. A
recent survey found that 49% of respondents believed that the
law would add to the deficit, while another 37% were unsure.
Ironically, the survey was commissioned by a liberal group in
Washington D.C., the National Council on Aging. Sowell would not be
surprised that the NCOA claimed the 14% who thought that it would
reduce the deficit got the correct answer.

Is our decline inevitable? As Sowell notes, “nothing is
inevitable until it happens.” Recent polls and the phenomenon of
the Tea Party movement suggest that, at the very least, there are
still plenty of Americans who are not willing to accept a sorry
fate lying down.

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IT ONLY GETS WORSE
Re:
R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.’s Worse
Than Carter:

Thanks for articulating what has become painfully obvious
for some time now.
– Jeff
Rennie
Chesterhill,
Ohio

Mr. Tyrrell, it is not only time to declare one obvious
truth — that Obama is worse than Carter — but a second one as
well. Let’s drop the blather about Obama’s supposed intelligence.
His inexplicable serial blunders re Troopergate, the Arizona
border, the 9-11 mosque, et al. cannot continue to be dismissed
simply as signs of tin ear disease. His inability to utter anything
moving or uplifting when the teleprompter is off has become the
stuff of comic legend. Spouting banal platitudes about hope,
change, and freedom of religion without any awareness of context
are the signs of an uncritical mind skilled at parroting what
others have told it, not of any innate intelligence.

I grant that Obama is educated. I grant that he reads his
teleprompted words well and thus give a scripted, artificial
impression of eloquence. But I think it’s time to lay aside the
meme, probably psychologically inspired by the exquisite racial
sensitivity that now lies within us all, that the man is somehow
any more intelligent than any other failed politician. From foreign
policy, to domestic policy, to understanding the culture that
elected him, his cognitive skills have been painfully
lacking.
– John Rogitz
San Diego,
California

While I agree wholeheartedly that Obama has surpassed
Carter on the “worst” list, I don’t consider that to be a
stand-alone issue. This Congress is the worst Congress in recent
times. The two, together, constitute an as yet unmatched force for
the decline of the country. However, it should be borne in mind
that the reason for the election of these
incredibly destructive performers was the notably poor
performances of a Republican President and Republican
Congress. The American public, with the possible exception of those
Democrats who still support Obama, surely realize that they have
replaced poor performers with worse performers. The forthcoming
elections confront the voters with the problem of determining
who, if any, may be better. I think that it would be a mistake for
dissatisfied voters to leave the selection of the candidates to the
same political groups, the Republican and Democratic parties,
from whose ranks the poor and worse performers have come. The Tea
Parties offer voters a potential source for something better.
– Syd Chaden

Palermo, California

Mr. Tyrrell’s “Worse Than Carter” article is fantastic,
but I would like to add a few points. First, Mr. Obama is the type
of liberal who believes the First Amendment requires
the removal of the Ten Commandments from a state courthouse,
but allows the building of a controversial mosque at Ground
Zero. While his view is supported by the Supreme Court’s
liberal interpretation of the First Amendment, most voters would
not find the Ten Commandments in a courthouse offensive, but
would find a mosque built at Ground Zero offensive.

Second, when conservatives are quick to criticize Mr.
Obama’s credentials as a community organizer, liberals are quick to
respond that Moses and Jesus were community organizers. Aside from
the fact that Christians believe Moses was
a spiritual leader and Jesus was the Son of God, rather
than community organizers, the liberal comparison of Mr. Obama
to either of them implies that in 2008, liberals voted
for a religious leader, Mr. Obama, and thus violated the
“separation of church and state” principle.

Third, nothing symbolizes the intersection of
religion and state more than Ground Zero. In fact, it was the
site of the most violent interaction between the
Judeo-Christian West and the Islamic Middle East in recent history.
The idea of Saudi Arabia and Iran funding a mosque at
Ground Zero is akin to the idea of the U.S. funding a
Catholic Church and Jewish Temple in Kabul and Baghdad. The
difference is that the U.S. would never consider such absurd
projects, not only because our Constitution prohibits it, but also
because the motives are clearly malicious. Unlike the president of
the United States, most Americans realize the motives behind
the Ground Zero mosque are malicious and oppose it.
– Mike Mitchell
Scottsdale, Arizona

I’d say the article misses two greater instances of
petulance and bad manners: his chronic blaming of his predecessor
for all the economic woes he “inherited,” when in fact the worst
were attributable to the Clinton/Barney Frank laws requiring
irresponsible loans to house purchasers, and his mindless “I want
to know whose ass to kick” comment in respect of BP which, although
likely negligent in its drilling, was working diligently to staunch
the flow from the spill and had already agreed to set up a $20
billion fund.
– Roger M.
Milgrim
Easton,
Pennsylvania

“President Obama represents the leadership of a sterile
elite”? How about intellectually bankrupt, spiritual bereft,
morally anchorless, totalitarian, arrogant and inbred
elite?
–
C. Kenna Amos
Jr.

Princeton, West Virginia

Hey Tyrell [sic],

Don’t forget “W”, Grant, Garfield, Buchanan, and
Fillmore!

Obama is “THE OTHER,” right?

The cynical exploitation of FEAR and xenophobia by the
right wing is truly APPALLING. That is indeed “The
Other.”

Cheers.
– Moshe Mandelman 

PRIVILIGED EXEMPTION
Re: Peter Ferrara’s The
Obamacare Disaster:

Excellent summary but misses one item — the elites who
enacted this legislation excluded themselves from coverage under
the law. This fact needs to be commented upon frequently by
conservative candidates during this fall’s campaigns and thereafter
as an additional reason for repeal.

Please ask Peter to discuss that feature of the
legislation as well. an>
– Patrick R.
Spooner
Windham, New
Hampshire

GAYER, NOT ROSENBERG

Re: G. Tracy Mehan’s Paul
Ryan’s Friends:

This article incorrectly cited my name. The post that
appeared on TaxVox, the blog of the Tax Policy Center, entitled “In
Defense of Congressman Paul Ryan,” was written by Ted Gayer of
Brookings and TPC.
– Joseph
Rosenberg

Research Associate
Tax Policy
Center

G. Tracy Mehan, III
replies:
My apologies to Messrs.
Gayer and Rosenberg.

PGA PASTURE
Re: Quin
Hillyer’s
A Badly Wounded Spirit of Golf:

The trouble is the PGA picked what is no doubt the ugliest
cow pasture in the world for a major. They ought to pick a course
where you can tell the sand traps from fairway, greens and even
rough. I wonder if it had been Tiger, Watson, would it still be a
sand trap.
– Amo Stephens

IT’S THE STUPID POLICIES

Re: Ron Ross’s
This Recession Is Not Like the Others:

The most despicable thing about the current situation, as
Dr. Ross intimates, is that all of it could be corrected, and
probably fairly quickly, with the right policies, which will never
be put in place, because of Mr. Obama and Company’s “doctrinaire”
way of doing business. Even now, surely the president understands
this; Summers, Geithner, and Biden must understand it, too.
But they would all rather sink the nation, than admit that their
approach has been incorrect. Dr. Ross used the word “pathetic,” but
it is worse than that. It is a blatant betrayal of all their
respective offices and oaths stand for, and of the American people,
who put them in office, not to mention nearly all of Mr. Obama’s
campaign promises. This is not a matter of elected officials
bumbling around and doing a bad job; we have been betrayed, in
every conceivable way.
–
D. Reich

Auburn, New York

SEPARATED BY BIRTH

Re: W. James Antle III’s
The Constitutional Amendment Con:

This is an excellent article by James Antle III and speaks
eloquently to the problem confronting the electorate. The
Republicans always promise to pursue a conservative agenda, but
once in office they pursue and agenda that at best could be called
Marxism lite and at worst mimics the agenda of the democrat party
which I consider to be full blown Marxism. The problem confronting
the electorate and conservatives specifically is that there is no
real alternative to the Democratic Party. My most fervent hope is
that the Republicans will nominate someone like Newt Gingrich, John
McCain, Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin or some other progressive in
sheep’s clothing. If this happens it will be business as usual with
a lot of promises and conservative rhetoric accompanied by little
if any real action and change. Given the present political
environment I believe this will lead to the demise of the
Republican party and the rise of a real alternative to the Marxist
democratic party. Just remember when you start touting Newt
Gingrich as a viable presidential candidate that he supported
NAFTA, the WTO, CAFTA, is a member of the CFR and the Trilateral
Commission.
– Paul Martell

We don’t need to change the 14th- simply require
interpretation per the original intent.

Sen. Lyman Trumbull 1866 :”The provision is, that all
persons born in the US and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are
citizens. That means subject to the complete jurisdiction thereof.
What do we mean by complete jurisdiction thereof? NOT OWING
ALLEGIANCE TO ANYBODY ELSE. That is what it means.”

Rep. John Bingham of Ohio, 1866: “[I]find no fault with
the introductory clause [S61 Bill] which is simply declaratory of
what is written in the Constitution, that every human being born
within the jurisdiction of the United States of PARENTS NOT OWING
ALLEGIANCE TO ANY FOREIGN SOVEREIGNTY is, in the language of your
Constitution itself, a natural born citizen.” (NOTE plural
parents)

The fact is, the child of illegal immigrants is born a
citizen of their country and remains subject to that other country,
not the U.S.
– M. G. Ryon
Surprise, Arizona

PI IN THE
FACE
Re: Jed Babbin’s
Kisses for My Blackberry:

Jed Babbin’s glib assertion that the Declaration of
Independence and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense could have
been more efficiently circulated as attachments to
emails ignores the impatience that an
electronically-communicative society develops with expressions
longer than a couple sentences (or 140 characters). Sure those
crucial documents make handy email attachments, but would anybody
have read them? All the way to the end? I doubt
it. Common Sense is longer than even the longest story in
a modern newspaper, and as the New York Slimes knows well,
the best way to bury an inconvenient fact is to put it below the
fold on A-18, because few readers make it that far into the
story. 

Fast and easy communication comes at the cost of less, and
less intense, reading. Thus the begged question: were
Thomases Paine and Jefferson writing today, would we (1) read them,
and worse, (2) would we even know they existed?
– Ezra Hood

I had to laugh out loud of “LOL” when I read “Under FISA,
any innocent conversations that are intercepted have to be ignored
and any recording or documentation of them must be destroyed.”
That’s what the TSA said when full body scanners were introduced at
airports.
– Anthony (Tony) Reese
Peekskill, New
York

“Pi … is an irrational number. It is not a ratio of
a to b….”

If a is the circumference of a circle, and
b is the diameter of the same circle,
a/b=pi.

That is, pi is the ratio of
a to b, or stated another way, pi is the
ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.

But try as one might, 2 integers cannot be found whose
ratio is equal to pi, so Mr. Babbin is correct in calling
it irrational.

For pi to be a ratio of 2 integers, Congress must
act. Nancy Pelosi, acting irrationally as usual, could ram through
a bill that mandates pi a rational number. pi=3
should be close enough for government work. President Barak Obama
would sign the bill. He has lectured on Constitutional Law, you
know.
– Dan Martin
Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania

GREEN FOOTSIE
Re: Paul Chesser’s The
Dejected Greens:

I walk around barefoot as much as possible; among other
things, it’s one of the perks of self-employment. Generally, I am
barefoot from late March to just past Thanksgiving. Reading the
final quote from Mr. McKibben, regarding the Earth melting, prompts
me to believe that I might know earlier than most if things were
getting a little warm and gooey underfoot. Relying on my 40+ years
barefootin’, please accept my advice that it is not.
– Reid Bogie
Waterbury,
Connecticut

CLASS ACTION

Re: Angelo M. Codevilla’s
America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of
Revolution:

Great “article.” My daughter suggests one other class:
Subjects Class.
These people don’t mind being ruled over by the
Ruling Class as long as
they are “safe” and they are predominantly
the ones keeping the ruling
class in power.
– Boyd George

A Reader

As you are probably well aware by now, Angelo Codevilla’s
feature is probably the best thing you have ever
published.

I say this as a reader of 40 years.
– Steve Lasecki

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