by Jeffrey Lord

Read full article at: http://spectator.org/archives/2011/07/26/the-gops-reykjavik-moment

Comment:  The debt-ceiling ‘crisis’ is far more than a dispute to raise the debt ceiling, yet again. It has finally become what it has always been, a deep-rooted conflict between two visions for America. The Democrat/Liberal/Socialists want to turn American into a miserable, bankrupt, third-world banana republic where the constant theme would be “shared sacrifice”. Where our lives, our incomes, our liberty, and our future would continually shrink. The socialist/fascist vision wants Americans to accept deprivation, misery, no future for themselves or their children, poverty, and descent into tyranny. The conservative, constitutional Republicans have finally gotten the spine to defend the completely opposite vision for America.  Those Republicans are now putting forth a vision of American where government is sharply curtailed, reduced in size, does not tax and regulate it’s citizens to death, and allows the free-enterprise system and American’s energy and creativity to flourish and enrich us all. It is a vision that says that government is not the solution, but is the problem. It’s a vision of free Americans being allowed to exercise their talents, grow rich, keep what they earn, have productive lives for themselves and their children, free from the strangling tentacles of socialist political manipulators who think that they have the right to be santa claus with other people’s money, and to tax and regulate every American into poverty and despair.

This debt-ceiling battle is finally a line in the sand by newly elected Republicans who grasp that they are fighting for a crucial principal of individual economic and political liberty against a failed, incompetent, evil socialist fate for America if we don’t fight this battle. If Republicans don’t fight for this crucial principal now, then when? Do we let the socialist rot sink ever deeper into the American economy and destroy our lives? Do we have this same fight again six months from now, a year from now? I urge the Republicans to stand fast and stay the course. The fate of our country as a free, prosperous nation is at stake. If we have to default to do this, to finally grasp the evil incompetence of a socialist America, then let us default. Let the battle be joined here. There is nothing like a good default to slap us awake from descending into a socialist hellhole.

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by Jeffrey Lord

Read full article at: http://spectator.org/archives/2011/07/19/obama-and-the-collapse-of-the

Comment: In a way, we have to thank Comrade Obama for finally bringing home to the American people the slimy, envy-eaten, incompetent, destructive, anti-American, anti-human nature of Socialism/Liberalism. Hopefully, Americans will elect true liberty-loving, free-enterprise protecting, Constitutional conservatives to office in 2012, so we give Americans back their future. We’ve had enough of Comrade Obama’s miserable radical-left socialism in America, and the “community organizer” should be deported to Cuba, where he would feel right at home. Let’s just hope he doesn’t get sick in Cuba where he would have the magnificent benefit of being treated in a socialized-medicine paradise.

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by Peter Ferrara

Read full article at:  http://spectator.org/archives/2011/07/20/2012-the-end-of-the-world-as-w

Comment:  Once Comrade Obama is thrown out of office in 2012 by the American people, I think he should be deported to Cuba. Maybe Castro will give him a government job as head of Communist propaganda.

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by Peter Ferrara

Read full article at:  http://spectator.org/archives/2011/04/13/death-trap-democrats

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By Peter Ferrara on 12.22.10

Read full article at:   http://spectator.org/archives/2010/12/22/the-death-panels-first-murder

Comment: Here we have naked medical fascism by radical-left government bureaucrats. The FDA revoked its regulatory approval of the drug Avastin. It decided that it’s not “worth it” to allow women to tale this new drug, even in the face of actual case histories where this drug saved the lives of women with advanced breast cancer. The FDA itself should be revoked and shut down, since we should not give government bureaucrats despotic control over the development or use of life-saving pharmaceutical drugs. Each person has the right to decide for themselves if they are willing to risk taking an ‘experimental’ drug to possibly save their life. This vile FDA decision is only the beginning. Obamacare will soon bring us “health-care” death panels on a massive scale, with despotic bureaucrats deciding who will live or die, whose life is “worth” saving based on the cost of the treatment. These death panels have been a deadly fact of life for the past 30 years under Canada and England’s socialized-medicine systems. Now the death panels are coming to America.

Solution:  First priority of the new Congress should be to repeal Obamacare. Get rid of this monstrosity and its death panels. Second order of business should be to impeach Obama.

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By Robert James Bidinotto on 9.30.10 @ 6:08AM

Read full article at:  http://spectator.org/archives/2010/09/30/where-epa-is-public-enemy-1

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By Andrew G. Biggs & Jason Richwine from the September 2010 issue of American Spectator

“What recession? Government workers are probably wondering what all the fuss is about. The private sector has lost 2.5 million jobs since the Obama administration’s stimulus bill was passed, while the public sector — federal, state, and local government combined — has added 416,000 jobs over the same period. Although 85 percent of Americans work for private employers, the administration’s own Recovery Act database admits that four out of five jobs “created or saved” were in government. Likewise, average pay has risen in the federal, state, and local government, while private sector wages have fallen. More jobs, better security, and rising wages — it’s boom time in the public sector.” .  .  .  .

Read full article at:  http://spectator.org/archives/2010/09/24/those-underpaid-gothose-underp

Comment:  Millions of government workers and their unions now sap the American economy with their overblown salaries, benefits, and pensions. The way to rid ourselves of expensive government workers is to shut down the government agencies they work for. We can start with the Dept of Education, Dept of Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency, for starters.  These agencies enforce thousands of regulations on the American people and businesses, cost us tens of billions of dollars to “conform” to their regulations, and strangle the resources and initiative of the American people. These workers help government agencies commit immoral and unconstitutional socialist control of the free market and our lives, controls that are wrecking our economy and our children’s future. Their work for government agencies promote the radical left agenda of comrade Obama and his marxist cronies’ in Congress. Government workers could use their talents and ambition better if they had real jobs in the real world, rather than enforcing government regulations that strangle the rest of us.

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By Fred Lucas on 9.17.10 @ 6:09AM — American Spectator

“Last Sunday, days before 20 other states went to federal court to oppose the new health reform law Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli — who had already trounced the feds in the first round of his state’s anti-ObamaCare litigation — delivered a national address of sorts in front of the U.S. Capitol.  .   .   .”

Read full article at: http://spectator.org/archives/2010/09/17/the-constitutions-ag

Comment:  Many of America’s Founding Fathers who fought the first revolution against government (British) tyranny came from Virginia. Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s lawsuit to kill fascist Obamacare and re-assert state’s rights to oppose Federal tyrannical laws, will hopefully be the first new shot heard round America to restore our liberties.

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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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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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“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 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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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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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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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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OObama’s Latest Monstrositybama’s Latest Monstrosityby John Berlau

Today he signs the 2,315 page Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill into law — thanks in part to the Republicans’ unwillingness to resist when resist they could have.

Read full article at:   http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/21/obamas-latest-monstrosity

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THE OBAMA WATCH — By Peter Ferrara on 7.14.10 @ 6:09AM

Read full article at:  http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/14/hes-playing-you

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THE OBAMA WATCH

Peter Ferrara | 6.16.10 @ 6:09AM

He can’t imagine how anyone else could think differently.

Read full article at:  http://spectator.org/archives/2010/06/16/the-green-pied-piper-from-chic

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A FURTHER PERSPECTIVE

Ben Stein | 6.16.10 @ 6:10AM

We’re still a constitutional republic, right?

Read full article at:  http://spectator.org/archives/2010/06/16/the-caudillo-president

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That was how Rhonda Abrams
summarized the findings of a recent study
by the Pew Research Center in USA Today.

“Small business is the most trusted institution in
America,” explained Abrams. “More than churches. More than
colleges. More than technology companies. And certainly more than
labor unions or large corporations.”

Maybe that’s because we operate in a competitive
environment and can’t force people to deal with us. The
interchanges with our customers are basically voluntary and
mutually beneficial, unlike what happens to people when they’re
dealing with monopolistic agencies in the public sector and the
less competitive sections of the private sector.

We’re also not too big to fail so we aren’t draining
billions out of taxpayers’ wallets for any bailouts. And unlike
the cushy retirement deals for “public servants” that are
bankrupting America’s cities and states, we don’t have cooks and
servers who expect to retire at 50 and live off the taxpayers for
35 years.

Small business was at the top of two lists — the most
highly regarded institution by the public and, in contrast, the
most disregarded and neglected by the politicians.

“When asked about which groups were getting too much or too
little attention from the government, Americans felt small
business was getting dealt the worst hand,” reported Abrams.
“Small business is one of the few groups that Americans want to
get more government attention.”

The survey’s respondents might be wrong about that. Being
overlooked by the politicians and bureaucrats might well be the
best hand to be dealt. As Reagan said, “The nine most terrifying
words in the English language — ‘I’m from the government and I’m
here to help.’”

In any case, during this era of growing polarization and
harsh partisanship, the favorable ratings for small business cuts
across party lines, with 72 percent, 70 percent and 73 percent of
Republicans, Democrats and Independents, respectively, saying
that the small business sector plays a key and positive role in
how things are going in the United States.

“What’s really interesting is that large corporations are
viewed almost as negatively as Wall Street,” explained Carroll
Dougherty, Pew’s Associate Director. “The contrast between large
corporations and small business is enormous.”

Banks, the federal government and large corporations ranked
at the bottom of the pile in public approval, receiving favorable
ratings, respectively, from only 22 percent, 25 percent, and 25
percent of respondents.

Also ranking poorly in public approval were federal
agencies and the national news media, each receiving positive
ratings by only 31 percent of respondents. Also at the bottom in
approval, labor unions and the entertainment industry received
positive ratings, respectively, by only 32 percent and 33 percent
of the public.

Nancy Pelosi, ranked in the cellar of the bottom-ranked
Congress, attempted to tie her faltering wagon to the top-ranked
small business community by going to the podium in the House
chamber shortly after the health reform bill was rammed through
and declaring that the unpopular legislation would “unleash
tremendous entrepreneurial power” and create millions of new
jobs.

I’ve never met an entrepreneur, current or potential, who
was keeping his entrepreneurial power on a leash because
Congress hadn’t passed a bill.

More specifically, Speaker Pelosi, with no expertise or
experience in small business or economic forecasting, proclaimed
that the health reform legislation would be a government-granted
stimulant to entrepreneurial growth, a special Congressional gift
to America’s mom-and-pop enterprises, creating “4 million jobs in
the life of the bill,” i.e., 400,000 new jobs per year for a
decade.

More in touch with reality, Susan Eckerly, senior vice
president at the National Federation of Independent Business, the
nation’s leading small business association, issued the following
warning in January: “Like a freight train without brakes,
Congress is determined to pass health reform, even at the expense
of our nation’s chief job creators — small business.”

In March, three days after the health overhaul legislation
was passed, Eckerly warned of the job-killing impact of
legislation’s mandates for higher taxes: “This isn’t a health
care bill. This is a tax bill wrapped in health care
paper.”

Eckerly’s right. Incentives and job creation aren’t
stimulated by way of higher taxes and increased mandates.

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The congressmen point out that this is the highest level of
federal spending as a percentage of the economy since we fought
and won World War II. This high spending has been accompanied by
an explosion of government borrowing, as the federal budget
deficit has ballooned from an already-high $318.3 billion in 2005
to a staggering $1.4 trillion in 2009. The national debt has
grown from $7.3 trillion to $11.9 trillion over roughly the same
period — “a five-year increase equal to the nation’s entire
accumulation of debt from the presidencies of George Washington
to Bill Clinton.”

And this will be remembered as a golden era of fiscal
responsibility compared to what is to come. As the Baby Boomers
retire, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will as presently
constitute go bankrupt. The public debt will exceed 110 percent
of the economy in 2026 and climb past 200 percent by 2040.

Worse, all these projections assume that Washington does not take
on any further unsustainable spending commitments. That means it
doesn’t take into account trillion-dollar stimulus packages,
health care bills, bailouts, or wars. To keep pace, taxes would
have to more than double and the government’s share of the
economy would increase by a commensurate amount.

To contend with this looming crisis, Reps. Mike Pence (R-Ind.),
Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), and John Campbell (R-Calif.) have
proposed a constitutional solution: on Tuesday, they unveiled a
Spending Limitation Amendment (SLA) to cap federal spending at 20
percent of the U.S. economy. Yesterday Pence and Hensarling held
a conference call making their case.

“I’m not naïve about the fact that 5,000 amendments have been
offered and only 27 have been enacted,” Hensarling said at the
outset of the call, acknowledging the hurdles ahead of
ratification. But he believed the rising public concern over
excessive borrowing and spending by Washington required a
national consensus as to the proper size of the federal
government.

The SLA could only be waived when an official declaration of war
is in effect or by two-third majorities of both houses of
Congress. As its sponsors explain in the document announcing its
release, the proposed amendment “does not promise a particular
spending plan of which programs to restrain and by how much.”
They quote columnist George Will: “The Constitution stipulates
destinations. It does not draw detailed maps.”

Under the SLA, the stipulated destination would be a federal
government that consumes only its historic average share of the
national economy. “Total annual outlays shall not exceed
one-fifth of the economic output of the United States of America,
unless two-thirds of each House of Congress provide for a
specific increase of outlays above that amount,” the amendment
reads. “Total outlays shall include all outlays of the United
States Government, except for those for repayment of debt
principal.”

Neither Pence nor Hensarling let their own party off the hook.
The massive spending increases they identify in arguing for the
SLA all began under the big-government presidency of George W.
Bush. “Some of the toughest battles I’ve fought have been against
the leaders of my own party in Congress,” says Pence. “Both
parties have shown an inability to rein in spending. We’ve seen
Gramm-Rudman, the line-item veto, and PAYGO falter… the only
force strong enough to rein in spending is our national charter.”

Hensarling says that even the strongest budget-control rules were
“only effective for a short period of time, as political pressure
grew and Congress un-enacted what it enacted.” And the Texan
maintained that the Democrats were now making things even worse:
“We were already heading toward a cliff, they [Barack Obama,
Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi] are pressing on the accelerator.”

Most proposed constitutional amendments go nowhere, especially
those with ideological implications. The Equal Rights Amendment
came close before Phyllis Schlafly and company beat it back. The
political landscape is cluttered with conservative constitutional
amendments that have similarly failed, dealing with issues
ranging from abortion to flag burning and forced busing. Milton
Friedman concluded Free to Choose with several suggested
amendments, including one similar to the SLA.

Pence and Hensarling think it will be worthwhile to even start
the debate. “The amendment for women’s suffrage probably wasn’t
seen as likely for passage,” Hensarling says. “Just having the
balanced budget amendment debate in Congress during the early to
mid-’90s frankly had a beneficial impact on spending patterns for
the time.”

But they do hope the SLA can actually be ratified. “We need the
American people expressing themselves through our cherished
national charter,” Pence says. “Other than the Ten Commandments,
the highest bar you can set is the Constitution,” quips
Hensarling. They quoted Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) as saying
“you can peg California’s decline to when California eliminated
their state spending caps.”

Without some kind of brake on federal spending, we will see the
Californication of the United States. The suffocating growth of
government will compromise America’s freedom, prosperity, and
national security — “Look at who we’re having to borrow the
money we don’t have from,” says Pence.

Even without an amendment, it is a fiscal crisis that could have
been averted by heeding the Constitution in the first place.

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Grandiose plans are one thing. Most presidents fall prey to
them. It’s another thing entirely, though, to refuse to accept
the ordinary republican restraints on implementing grandiosities
without public support, and furthermore to do so by A)
bending
existing
rules; B) directly
violating multiple personal pledges; C)

ignoring constitutional limits; D) directly lying; and E)
demanding that other politicians sacrifice their own political
careers.

A little humility would be nice. So would a sense that he
answers to the public rather than to some self-proclaimed (and
self-determined) imperative of history and/or call of destiny.
What Obama seems to fail to understand is that his own, overblown
self-assurance and self-mythologizing is actually hampering his
own goals. One need not stretch too far to observe that one of
the factors adding to public opposition to Obamacare is a growing
public disquietude about the lack of responsiveness, the
authoritarian certitude, and the zealous near-fanaticism of the
government that would run the new health-rationing system –
all character traits as embodied by the president
himself.

As Obama ignores public opinion while pushing for
full-fledged Obamacare in one fell swoop, and as he insists that
he knows best and that the public is too ill-informed to know
what is good for it, he directly — as the very symbol of the
state — reminds the public of what they distrust about
government in the first place and of why they don’t want
government interfering in a realm as personal as health care.
These feelings are especially fierce because Obama is trying not
to change something with which most Americans are dissatisfied,
but instead to change (and arguably take away) a system in which
some
four-fifths of the public remains
generally satisfied with their own personal level of
care.

For most Americans, Obama doesn’t seem to be giving them
something they don’t have, but instead to be taking away
something they already value.

Worse, he and the increasingly unpopular Harry Reid and
Nancy Pelosi are doing it while hectoring the public, insulting
(at least by implication) the public by belittling the public’s
understanding of the issue, and treating opposition as if it is
guided by evil motives rather than sincere concerns.

Passage of this health overhaul/takeover under these
circumstances would be frightening. The harm it would do the
political system would be almost as great as the harm it would
cause the health system. The American republic was designed to
give a minority a way to slow down major changes buoyed by
popular passions. It was not designed to give a minority the
power to implement major changes against popular passions.

The Obamites are doing the latter. They are turning
American
checks and balances on their heads. They
are using temporary parliamentary advantages for a permanent
power grab. The Obamites are dictating to Americans rather than
representing them. Revolutionizing, not just evolving. Ruling,
not serving.

And it’s not just on health care. They work against public
opinion on matters of criminal justice, terrorist treatment, race
preferences, bank bailouts and corporate takeovers, overall
spending, domestic welfare requirements, fossil fuel development,
missile defenses, advocacy of American interests (and pride!)
abroad, and on the whole panoply of oft-unstated attitudes that
cohere as American exceptionalism.

This is not the way the system is supposed to work. This is
not the American government we grew up with. This is not the
national ethos that we love.

Yet Obama pushes on, perfectly cognizant of what he’s
doing, intentionally upending the American Way. This is a form of
mania — megalo- or otherwise. And, by any and all legitimate
means, it must be stopped.

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 Nor should they or their parents care one way or
another. Although the District’s traditional public school system
is undergoing a much-needed overhaul led by Blackberry-touting
reform maven Michelle Rhee, just 49 percent of its high school
freshmen graduate four years later; a mere 12 percent of its
8th-graders in 2007 had reading skills rated “proficient” or
higher on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the
federal test of academic performance.

These families shouldn’t have to wait until Rhee turns
around the district’s performance in order to avail their
children of opportunities for high-quality academic instruction.
Their interest in improving the quality of education for their
children should outweigh concerns about the racial and ethnic
segregation that they choose. And their hard-earned tax dollars
shouldn’t remain captured by a district that isn’t delivering the
goods.

Centrist and progressive Democrat school reformers are
certainly familiar with these arguments. After all, they have
successfully used them in beating back efforts by teachers
unions, traditional school districts and some civil rights
activists (usually the kind that spend more time on manicured Ivy
League campuses than in gritty urban locales) to stamp out and
restrict the existence of public charter schools, the
publicly-funded-privately-operated entities that have become
their favored form of school choice. And they should keep it in
mind whenever vouchers (and similar tax credit programs) come up
for discussion. If nonprofit- and for-profit operators can be
trusted with public funding through charters, then school
vouchers used for Catholic and private schools shouldn’t be a
problem.

Vouchers and Catholic schools are once again in the
headlines thanks in part to an effort by U.S. Sen. Joseph
Lieberman this week to revive the D.C. Opportunity program after
it was all but shut down by Congressional Democrats last year.
Despite attempts by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and others
to quash discussion among Democrats about the program — which
helps 1,716 students attend Catholic and other private schools in
the District — calls for its revival continue to come not only
from conservative Republicans, but even from the likes of
disgraced former mayor Marion Barry, who launched his career as a
member of the local school board. A similar plan may be
considered in Illinois thanks to the decision by controversial
state Sen. James Meeks to reverse his past opposition to
vouchers. 

It also comes as the nation’s Catholic school systems, no
longer able to count on nearly-free labor from clergy and lacking
the taxing power granted to traditional school districts for
financing their (equally-unsustainable) teacher compensation
packages, continue their secular decline. Just yesterday,
Baltimore’s archdiocesan school system announced
that it would close 13 of its 80 school districts — nearly
all of them in the most-impoverished inner city areas. The fact
that Mob Town has just 34 charter schools — and that Maryland is
one of the most-restrictive states for starting charters — means
that 2,152 soon-to-be former Catholic school students have even
fewer options for high-quality instruction. This has Thomas B.
Fordham Institute scholar
Andy Smarick wishing that “we could give a little attention
to preserving the high-performing, high-poverty private schools
that are disappearing before our eyes.”

Certainly the school reform movement — especially centrist
Democrats — can claim stunning success in getting policymakers
and even parents to embrace their prescriptions of standardized
tests, stricter accountability measures, mayoral control of
school districts, and expansion of charter schools. Even
President Barack Obama has embraced reform through his $4.3
billion Race to the Top effort; the program has helped convince
legislators and governors in states such as California to turn
their back on their allies and eliminate restrictions on the
geographic and demographic growth of charters. But even as they
have spurred the creation of new charters, reformers are letting
dissipate the other choices for poor urban and rural families to
escape the worst traditional public education has to
offer.

The number of Catholic schools in the United States — 42
percent of which are located in big cities — has declined by 12
percent between the 1998-1999 and 2008-2009 school years,
according to the National Catholic Educational Association. But
it isn’t just diocesan and parish schools shutting down. Eleven
hundred sixty-two urban parochial schools shut their doors
between 2000 and 2006. The impact of these closures on urban poor
and even middle-class families cannot be underestimated,
especially given the success of parochial schools in improving
student academic achievement, stemming dropouts and even sparking
college completion. The average nine-year-old Catholic school
student scored 8 percent higher on the 2007 NAEP than his
counterpart in a traditional district; that gap remained constant
among middle-school and high school students tested.

It is especially problematic given that other school choice
options aren’t nearly as plentiful. Intra-district choice options
such as magnet schools — long touted by Kahlenberg and others as
the best solution over vouchers and charters — hardly exist.
When they do, these options usually end up being used by
middle-class households, who use their strong political
connections (and exploit ability tracking systems that serve as
the gateways into such schools) to assure seats for their own
children.

Charters — the more-preferable school choice option among
reformers — have generally proven to be better than magnets in
promoting choice and improving academic achievement; a study
released last March by the RAND Corporation shows that
children attending charters in Chicago and Florida are 7-15
percent more likely to attend college than those attending
traditional public schools. But, until recently, many states have
restricted the number and location of charter schools. And even
with Race to the Top, teachers unions and school districts have
assured that charters may not reach urban neighborhoods. Last
month, legislators in Alabama, at the behest of the National
Education Association affiliate there, rejected the latest effort
to allow the opening of charters.

None of this, of course, sways progressive critics of
vouchers (and ultimately, of private and parochial schools
altogether). This isn’t surprising. After all, Kahlenberg once

declared that “the purpose of public schools is not to
satisfy the individual preferences of parents.” But it doesn’t
explain why centrist Democrats such as former New America
Foundation scholar Sara Mead
thinks vouchers “just change where pupils are allocated among
existing schools.”

Certainly their discomfort with handing money over to
religious operators comes into play. But as pointed out by
Fordham in a 2008 report on reviving urban Catholic schools, the
federal government already pours $3 billion annually into
Catholic Charities alone. And don’t forget that school reformers
are more than happy to back charters, which are operated by
nonprofit and even for-profit organizations. Considering that as
much of the decline in the number of urban parochial schools is
related to the competition for instructors — fueled largely by
the dealmaking between school districts and teachers unions that
have made teaching the most-lucrative profession in the public
sector — a redistribution of wealth back to the urban parents
(who must pay for both private schools out of pocket and
traditional districts out of payroll withholding) wouldn’t seem
all that unfair.

There are efforts underway to preserve Catholic schools,
even if they aren’t exactly providing religious education. In
D.C., the Archdiocese of Washington has
spun off seven of its schools and converted them into
charters; a similar effort is likely to take place in
Indianapolis, where two schools are considering a conversion. But
in the process, the schools do end up losing some of the faith
and values that have helped make Catholic education successful in
the first place. To be sure, American public education has always
provided something similar to the religious instruction in
parochial schools in the form of civics (including pledging
allegiance to the flag); in fact, teaching students about
American values was one of the foremost reasons why public
schools were created. This is the
argument that may come to play in the next year
as Brookwood Presbyterian Church, a Columbus, Ohio church, sues
state officials after they rejected its efforts to sponsor a
charter school.

Given the success of charters, Centrist Democrat school
reformers can no longer argue against voucher plans. And if the
ultimate goal is to assure that every child, no matter their race
or wealth of their parents, has opportunities for high-quality
education, then preserving Catholic and other parochial and
private schools (and in turn, supporting voucher plans) is no
longer just an option. 

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The received wisdom has it that the Palestinians wish above
all things to have a state of their own, but that their fervent
wishes are frustrated by Israeli delaying tactics, such as
endless arguments over West Bank settlements, security fences,
water rights, and the like.

While the Israelis probably do not want a Palestinian state
on their borders, an entity that could easily become Hamastan II
(and yet another missile launching platform), there is increasing
evidence that the Palestinians themselves are of two minds about
the prospect of their own statehood.

The first piece of evidence is the unchallenged observation
that Palestinian leaders have rejected or sabotaged every
proposal for statehood since 1947. In that year the Palestinians
rejected the UN-sponsored division of the former British mandate
into Jewish and Arab states on the grounds that they did not want
to share Palestine with the infidel Jews. Instead of developing
trheir own state, they tried through armed conflict to eradicate
the nascent Jewish state. Their leaders took this big step just
two years after the end of the Holocaust; and, guided by Hitler’s
associate Haj Amin Al-Husseini, their implicit goal was to
continue the slaughter. But if you start a war of politicide plus
extermination you had better win it; otherwise, like Hitler, or
Tojo, or the Palestinians of 1948, you will very likely end up
with a bombed-out wasteland, or — in the Palestinian case — as
a defeated rabble of landless refugees.

The Palestinian leaders did not draw the obvious
conclusions from what they call their “Naqba,” their
catastrophe. Instead, the next time a state was practically
handed to them, they again turned it down, in favor of war with
the Jews. Thus, when Clinton and Barak, reviving the stalled Oslo
Accords of 1994, made Arafat an offer he couldn’t refuse — 95%
of the West Bank, control of the Temple Mount, border
adjustments, etc. — he refused it, while giving an ultimatum
that only a thoroughly defeated Israel could accept: the
resettlement of some five million “refugees” within the
boundaries of the Jewish State. No diplomatic pause to negotiate
this new demarche: just “take it or leave it,” and Arafat
flounced out, to fire up the second, soon to be crushed,
Intifada.

Why don’t the Palestinians learn their lesson? Why won’t
they accept the grant of statehood? To repeat, perhaps because
they don’t really want their own country? There are, after all,
many bounties attached to their current status, perks that would
disappear under the condition of statehood.

This is the age of the sanctified victim; and any person or
group who can claim that title is automatically in a state of
grace. Nobody is allowed to “blame the victim,” and so these
lucky unfortunates can follow any course, however bloody, so long
as they can blame their violence on their victimized condition.
Convincing much of the world — including too many Jews — that
they were the embodiment of the new Christ, the latest targets of
Jewish savagery in the holy land, the Palestinians year ago
captured the victim’s high-ground, and have since worked their
claim for great profit. They are the darlings of the UN and of
European elites: The West Bank hums with idealistic foreign youth
eager to interpose their bodies between Palestinian flesh and
Israeli tanks, as well as with foreign NGOs eager to drip healing
valuta over the physical, psychological and financial
wounds of this martyred folk. Unable to beat the Jews militarily,
the Palestinians are winning the moral victories, and these are
leading to decisive political victories as an outraged world
threatens to sanction and boycott Israel.

But under statehood, the Palestinians will no longer have
their special charisma as the world’s premier victims, innocent
agrarians suffering under a harsh occupation. When the fickle
world turns its attention to the latest victim du jour,
their welfare benefits are likely to be sharply cut,

Then too, the wiser Palestinians, who remember Arafat and
his predatory crew, have their own good reasons for quietly
resisting statehood. They realize that, should they gain their
own country, externally imposed Israeli rule would be replaced by
internally based oppression, by the corrupt or fanatic leaders
who — via factional warfare and the Arab politics of
assassination — typically reach the top in their
societies.

Thus far, we have been looking at the Palestinians’
practical reasons for avoiding statehood. They don’t want to lose
their world-celebrity status, nor the funding that goes with it,
and they don’t want either the likes of Hamas forcing Sharia law
on them, or the likes of Arafat robbing them blind. But the
Palestinian resistance to statehood has also less rational but
equally compelling bases.

Foremost among these is the legacy of collective shame.
With the possible exception of the Japanese, no culture is so
vulnerable to a sense of shame and humiliation as the Arab world.
Even in the 21st century, Arabs continue daily to lament Crusades
that occurred nearly a thousand years ago. They still feel shame
over the loss of Spanish Andalusia (“Andaluz” to the
Arabs), their last European redoubt, evacuated in the 15th
century. More recently, Palestinian Arabs have been exposed to
traumatic humiliation by their defeat during the Israeli War of
Independence. I remember how they initiated that war with febrile
enthusiasm, confident that their magnificent Islamic warriors
would sweep away the puny, cowardly Jewish opposition, certain
that the Palestinians would inherit all of the Holy Land. But
when push came to shove, instead of chasing the Jews into the
sea, it was the majority of Arabs who ran away from the poorly
armed Israeli Hagana (a militia that added insult to Arab injury
by fielding women).

For example, the local Arabs had cleared out of Sidn’a Ali,
a fairly prosperous village on the Sharon Plain, before our
Palmach contingent had even arrived in their neighborhood. They
ran on the rumor of our coming, and before our sparsely armed
troops could have evicted them. The same drama was enacted across
Palestine. A vast Palestinian and leftist PR apparatus has been
developed to deny this truth, but the Naqba was largely
self-inflicted.

The refugees’ reluctant hosts in neighboring Arab states
were not as sympathetic as Europe’s Leftists: “You Palestinian
whores! You sold your land to the Jews, and then ran away!!” The
refugees, who had shamed not only themselves but also the whole
Arab nation, were not generally accepted as citizens of the Arab
countries to which they fled. Instead, they were penned up in
fetid camps, where many remain to this day.

The calculus of Shame dictates that the Palestinian stigma
of defeat can only be removed by a bloody victory over the Jews
who inflicted it. By the same token, their state cannot be handed
to the Palestinians by some benign international arbiter, or by a
generous Israeli government. These are people who elect Hamas,
who celebrate the “Victories” of Hezbollah, and who dance in the
street when Israeli teenagers are blown up in a pizza parlor. The
gift of a state that was not won in battle would only increase
Palestinian shame. The Israelis tore their state out of the heart
of Palestine; in order to get the Palestinians dancing again,
their shame must be exported, to become Israeli shame. The
Palestinian state must — in an act of bloody reparation — be
torn out of the heart of Israel. Until a defeated Israel begs for
terms, or better yet, is utterly destroyed, no final peace is
possible, and no state otherwise gained can be acceptable to the
Palestinians.

President Obama should realize that his dream of a
Palestinian state can only be realized after a new, hi-tech
Holocaust of Jews. These unfortunates would most likely die under
a cloud of missiles from Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Gaza, even as
Obama counsels them earnestly against any “disproportionate
reaction.”

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Lavrov’s style is an interesting and effective combination
of smooth, reasoned manner along with an unbending fault-shifting
technique that borders on bombast. His manner well reflects the
present Medvedev/Putin foreign policy itself. This policy has at
its core the residue of the old Soviet communist fear of NATO and
American influence in European affairs.

Why Moscow should fear Washington’s role in European
security matters is hard to understand when it is patently
obvious that the Obama Administration is so little concerned with
Europe. Yet this is the motivating factor behind the Russian
desire to create what has been described as Dmitry Medvedev’s
pan-European security treaty. If the implications of Mr. Lavrov’s
behind-the-scenes comments can be credited, Moscow’s perception
is that the United States is driving NATO toward building an
offensive capability challenging Russia’s “natural” border of
Eastern Europe all the way to and through Ukraine.

How the Kremlin could divine a conflict-avoiding Obama
government to be supporting a NATO push eastward is explicable
only if the Russian leadership seriously believes it needs a
neo-Cold War propaganda line to offset its domestic fears of the
future. The fears are legitimate even if the Moscow reaction is
not. But even these legitimate fears do not justify the type of
exaggerated response emanating from the Russian foreign and
defense policy establishment.

It is true that there is a serious potential fall in the
Russian population. It is true that the Russian economy has not
grown in proportion to the country’s new and important role as an
energy exporter. It is true that Islamic extremism threatens a
large portion of Caucasian Russia. But such circumstances do not
justify the dredging up of old attacks on the West’s “aggressive
ambitions.” There is more reason to fear Iranian efforts to
infiltrate and exploit the Moslem minority in Russia and the
growing Chinese economic influence in Eastern Siberia than the
imagined dangers of a U.S.-led NATO aiming to destabilize
Russia.

As great as may be the temptation to dismiss Russian
foreign policy mutterings by Sergei Lavrov as simply a replay of
earlier Soviet international agitprop, it is important
to recognize the Russian historical paranoia that goes back to
the 19th century. There is an opportunity now for Russia to take
great strides in just the areas about which its leaders most
rant–strategic defense. But they have chosen to ignore the
opportunity.

The program of U.S. anti-missile batteries placed in Poland
with radar in the Czech Republic aimed at countering Iranian
nuclear missile systems could have been used by Moscow to begin
an entirely new defense alignment with Washington. Instead Putin
chose to characterize these purely defensive weapons as carrying
the potential of aggression against Russia. It was deemed more
valuable to the Kremlin to revive fears of U.S. and NATO
aggression than to accept the advantages of a mutual defense
posture.

In the same manner the Lavrov/bad cop phase of Russian
diplomatic schizophrenia has treated nuclear arms reduction with
a far less welcoming attitude than it deserves. Of course this is
all directed from the current Putin/Medvedev tandem leadership,
but nonetheless the “bad cop” side of their foreign minister is
once again the same very useful device it was seventy years ago
under Vyacheslav Molotov.

This analogy holds true for other periods of contemporary
Russian history. Khrushchev tried the Molotov demeanor with the
young John F. Kennedy during their meeting in Vienna and then
reversed himself the next year when he pulled the Soviet missiles
out of Cuba. At present the Russian Foreign Ministry is working
overtime to show its two faces at once on Iranian matters,
simultaneously smiling in order to keep up Russia’s commercial
relationship with Tehran, while showing toughness in support of
threatened UN sanctions over Iranian nuclear weapon
development.

Although this game of offering opposing characterizations
of Russia to the world may strike Moscow as a clever way to
protect its own ambitions, two-faced diplomacy doesn’t really
work well in the globalized system in which we must all operate.
Operational tacking aside, it’s very important for great
countries like Russia to aspire to clear and consistent foreign
policies. How else can the rest of the world, West and East,
formulate its own consistent positions in return toward Russia.
Sergei Lavrov, and any successor to him, must be allowed to bury
the ghosts of Litvinov and Molotov.

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I had just finished a brisk walk around the block, enjoying
the sun on my untanned face and the crisp winter air in my lungs,
when I stopped at the mailbox. There was the usual junk:
circulars, an ominous pink power bill, some coupons for junk
food, and something that looked curiously like one of those
magazines sent to AARP members.

It was one of those magazines sent to AARP
members! There was the standard geezer actor on the cover
grinning through his dentures (this time Michael Douglas), along
with the stock articles: which adult diapers are the most
absorbent, where to vacation free from obnoxious college kids on
spring break, how to start your own geriatric motorcycle
gang.

Granted, some of the articles interested me, like where to
vacation without obnoxious college kids, but that was beside the
point. Why was AARP sending me, of all people, their crummy
magazine? I’m only 46, for crying out loud. Yes, I know “only 46″
is a relative term. To my 16-year old son, I doubtless resemble
some recently unearthed fossil from a bygone era. But I’m a long
way from needing a walker. Most days.

Or am I?

That’s how they get you, those dadgum AARP folks — them
with their fancy, high-priced marketing gurus. They plant little
seeds of doubt and up springs the green shoots of uncertainty.
Who knows, maybe they’re right? Maybe I am getting old.

See what I mean?

Until that fateful trip to the mailbox, I had thought of
myself as middle aged. After all, the life expectancy of the
American male is 78. So half of that would be 39.

Maybe that’s not a good way to look at it. A better plan is
to see middle age not as an exact age, but more of a range. Like
35-45, more or less.

Or maybe the range shouldn’t be ten years, but twenty.
Let’s say 35-55. Why not? I wanted to see what the experts
thought, so I went online, which proves two things: that I don’t
know where to find experts, and that I’m still middle aged. A
real AARP member couldn’t even figure out how to turn on a
computer, let alone look something up. According to
the Oxford English Dictionary, which I
would never dream of second guessing because it has both Oxford
and English in its name: “the period between youth and old age
[is] about 45 to 60.” So, on the authority of the venerable and
estimable OED, I’ve barely tasted middle age. Take that
AARP.

Less reassuring was the definition of the U.S. Census
Bureau, which, even though it is a government agency run by
sluggish bureaucratic drones, still gets to call the official
shots. The Bureau lists two periods of middle age, a sort of
lower middle age of 35 to 44, and an upper middle age of 45 to
54. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to this division other
than the general idea that, as far as bureaucrats are concerned,
the more categories the better.

OF COURSE, YOU don’t have to be a retired person or a
person at retirement age to be a member of AARP. You need only be
50 years old, which I will be soon enough, thank you. And, as my
much younger girlfriend never fails to point out, there are
benefits to AARP membership. Such as “senior” discounts for
travel and dining. Oooooh, I can’t wait to sign up for one of
their “exciting spiritual journeys and pilgrimages”
to the Yakov Smirnoff Theater in Branson, Missouri.

Needless to say, I was, for the rest of the afternoon, in a
blue funk, which soon darkened into a brown study. I turned up
the thermostat and wrapped myself in a warm quilt and I sat in my
rocking chair and fumed. My girlfriend brought me some chamomile
tea and some stewed prunes and put on my Tommy Dorsey records to
try to cheer me up. And there I sat, glaring at that damn AARP
magazine in my lap, until, at length, I sighed and surrendered
the last of my youth. “Might as well read this article about how
to avoid telemarketing scams,” I muttered to myself.

That was when my girlfriend leaned over and said, “You
blind old idiot. This magazine isn’t address to you. It’s address
to somebody named Gertrude Freen.”

“What?” I shouted. “Quick, fetch me my readin’
glasses!”

Sure enough, the post office had gotten the address
wrong.

I jumped up and I threw off my quilt and I swept up my
girlfriend in my strong, virile arms and I danced her around the
living room, just like when we were kids.

For a good half minute, anyway.

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In a sense, the predictability is refreshing, as it signals
the filmmakers’ desire to revive a genre, not cynically co-opt it
for other purposes. The film looks great: it changes the time
period from the 1940s to the 1890s, and the Victorian trappings
are perfectly suited to a story about curses and the
supernatural, and where most of the action takes place on the
fog-bound English moors. Del Toro is an appealing and convincing
successor to Chaney’s haunted Talbot.

As for the wolf himself, well, this is 2010: you can
imagine the effects will look pretty good, and they do, thanks to
famous makeup man Rick Baker, who also did An American
Werewolf in London. Baker is a longtime admirer of
Universal’s legendary makeup artist Jack Pierce, who
created and applied the iconic looks for Boris Karloff in both
Frankenstein and The Mummy and for Chaney in
The Wolf Man. Baker wanted to update that look, and when
you see his final creation you understand why he is regarded as a
modern master.

But during production Baker
complained that the filmmakers had decided to do
the transformation scenes — the highlight of any werewolf
picture, when viewers watch the character change from man to wolf
— in computer-generated imagery. Pierce, of course, did not have
access to CGI, and his transformation scenes required a
painstaking physical process. Baker wanted to make an attempt at
emulating that effort. But the film’s real sin in the use of CGI
is not so much in the transformation scenes as in the action
scenes, when the wolf man catapults around like a superhuman
creature. All is thunderous movement and blinding speed and
improbable leaps in the air, including leaps between buildings in
an urban scene that makes one think he is watching
Spiderman with fur.

In this regard The Wolfman becomes the latest
entry in the long-running trend to make all such fantasy films
into superhero movies. I suppose the reason why the superhero
approach always wins out is simple enough — it’s popular; in
other words, it pays — but maybe someday a director will create
a monster who, while no longer an ordinary man, is still subject
to the mortal world that the rest of us inhabit. Most of that
nuance is lost in The Wolfman and other films of this
kind.

Nuance is also thrown to the winds when it comes to the
film’s depictions of violence, which revels in ripped flesh and
blood, relying on sensory assault to do what suspense and
character development did in the days before computers made us
all lazy.

But there are other aspects to like. The movie achieves one
fine moment of tension in its most memorable scene, which also
seems a sly homage to King Kong. Lawrence, who by now
has been institutionalized, is wheeled into a medical class,
strapped to a wheelchair, to demonstrate that his lycanthropy is
an illusion from which he has been cured by psychological
counseling (which in truth consists of brutal and sadistic
torture, including a submersion treatment that seems a clear
allusion to waterboarding). But as the audience knows, Lawrence’s
problems are not in his head. The scene has the same
kind of churning tension and cathartic violence as the scene in
King Kong when Kong breaks
out of his shackles on a New York stage.

Director Johnston clearly reveres the Wolf Man
original (if not 1935′s
Werewolf of London, the genre’s true
ancestor, though it’s mostly forgotten now). He’s brought back
the gypsies who played such a key role in the 1941 film, and
though there is no one to fill Maria
Ouspenskaya‘s shoes as Maleva, the old woman who sees
Talbot’s fate clearly, Geraldine Chaplin (daughter of Charlie)
does a solid enough job reprising the role. The remake even
features torch-bearing bands of men on the hunt for the monster,
a staple of the old Universal films. That one detail alone put me
in a forgiving mood.

The Wolfman is also blessedly free of
the kind of ironic mockery that so many remakes of old classics
seem unable to resist. There are no wolf jokes, no agitprop
feminist characters comparing lusty men with ravenous beasts;
even the Talbot family dog is principally used to illustrate the
changes in Lawrence, not to provide a canine comic foil. In fact,
The Wolfman‘s very earnestness, as refreshing as it is,
may have met its match in the ironic consciousness of today’s
audience. Throughout the movie, we hear the distinctive wolf howl
echoing across the desolate moors; this works well so long as we
don’t see the wolf man doing it. But when we do — and again,
it’s in that urban scene, where the trappings are all wrong –
it’s hard to suppress a chuckle or the suspicion that one has
stumbled onto an excellent beer commercial.

Irony really is this culture’s silver bullet, against which
even well-meaning tribute can only defend itself so much.

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Toward the end of Jeffrey Lord’s open letter,
addressed to Michael Smerconish and to me (February 24, 2010), he
poses the central question of his marathon missive: “At some
point, one has to ask, when is enough enough?” My sentiments,
precisely. And I’m not just talking about Lord’s rambling
assertion that my position as a pro-choice Republican is somehow
anti-choice. What I and other reasonably-minded Republicans have
had enough of is the party’s extremes exercising disproportionate
influence on policy and political decision-making.

Mr. Lord is right on one point: the abortion debate has
been costly and divisive for our party and for our country. But
he points his finger in the wrong direction.

Moderates like myself and others in the Republican Majority
for Choice organization support a Big Tent GOP,
which focuses on common sense solutions — not division. We have
members who are personally anti-abortion but support the ideal
that families and individuals should make choices best for them,
whether that be adoption, parenthood or abortion. Furthermore, we
support proven and effective ways to reduce the number of
abortions through access to prevention methods, family planning
and education instead of laws that would criminalize women who
seek abortions.

Mr. Lord’s intellectual calisthenics make no contribution
towards solving biology’s basic dilemma: women will
become pregnant, often unintentionally, and they sometimes will
do so when it is virtually impossible for them to successfully
raise children, with or without a partner. On top of that,
pregnancy itself can be fraught with danger to a woman’s health
and well-being. At those moments, women need to consult with
their doctors, their families and their own consciences — not a
political party looking to round up votes in the next
election.

Facts are stubborn things. Studies show that abortion rates
in countries in which the procedure is illegal are similar to
those in which it is legal. The starkest divergence between
places where abortion is legal and illegal is the safety of the
procedure and the number of woman who may die. The consequence of
Roe is that American lives have been saved and
preserved. Legal abortions are safe abortions — even if we
personally aren’t happy that they occur.

But this assumes that Mr. Lord spends time thinking about
the health and well-being of American women. He
seems more interested in the intellectual back and forth about
what constitutes a conservative, so let’s return to that line of
argument.

I was raised on the idea that less government frees the
individual to live a productive, entrepreneurial, responsible
life. Uncle Sam should stay out of your bank account, your
bedroom and your doctor’s office. Giving states the option to ban
abortion, as Mr. Lord argues, would be the
antithesis of this Republican ideal. Legislatures
and governors would have the power to dictate the very dynamics
of the American family: its size, its economic prospects, even
its physical condition (depending on the mother’s ability to
carry and bear a child, and the child’s own health once it’s
delivered).

Is this the conservative position in 2010 America?

Mr. Lord asserts that I support a judicial philosophy that
is “expressly designed to circumvent the real choices the America
people wish to make,” which, by extension, makes me anti-choice.
He attempts to back up that nonsense with a misguided
dissertation on the court’s history with slavery. He conveniently
ignores more salient decisions, such as Brown v. Board of
Education, which declared separate public schools for black
and white children to be unconstitutional (I’m assuming he agreed
with that bit of judicial activism). Brown upended state
laws that denied black children access to equal educational
experiences. Similarly, Roe prevents states from
legislating away the rights of women. Access to quality family
planning — which shapes the entire lives of adults and children
— should not be dictated by where you live or how much money you
have.

Unlike Mr. Smerconish, I have not left the Republican
Party. As a voter and activist I still believe in the Party’s
philosophy of limited government. My views are completely
consistent with that philosophy. Where I differ with the
fundamentalists’ right is their failure to
acknowledge the views that I and so many other Republicans hold,
and to work with us toward common goals.

The GOP’s recent surge is an exciting development for those
of us who believe in a vibrant two-party system. However, this
momentum will grind to a screeching halt if Party leaders pursue
litmus tests for candidates, with abortion being at the top of
the list. GOP victories came from the middle, where the American
people happen to be. Groups like the Republican Majority for
Choice remain central to those victories because we signal to
voters that the right to personal freedom remains one the most
important GOP ideals, and one which we will not
easily give up to a vocal minority.

Mr. Lord, Mr. Lincoln would be proud.
– Jennifer Stockman
Former chair,
Republican Majority Coalition for Choice

Jeffrey Lord
replies:
Thanks to Jennifer Stockman for responding.

First, whether she realizes it or not — and the “not”
seems operative here — while Ms. Stockman cites the GOP’s
“extremes” she is quick to call her side in this
almost-40-year-old mess “reasonably-minded Republicans.” She
seems honestly unaware that to many she and the Republican
Majority Coalition for Choice have repeatedly and deliberately
book-ended themselves as the other extreme in this equation,
making them appear as the “Non-Republican Minority Coalition for
No Choice.” There is nothing “moderate” or reasonable about
denying choice on abortion policy to the American people.

Typical of this mindset is Ms. Stockman’s line that implies
I have not spent time “thinking about the health and well being
of American women.” Sigh. The obvious counterpoint of the
pro-life activist (which, I should say, I am decidedly not) is to
wonder whether Ms. Stockman spends any time thinking about the
health and well-being of the millions of babies whose lives have
been snuffed out because of Roe. Both lines are, well,
out of line. Yet typical of the raw emotion that Roe
brings to the surface, typical of its tendency to push good,
rational people to extremes, one of which Ms. Stockman occupies.
And for the record, I harbor no such unkind thoughts about
Jennifer Stockman who, I believe, is the mother of, I’m sure, two
wonderful daughters and doubtless loves babies.

A few points:

•  The Big Tent
argument. Sounds wonderful, infers broadmindedness. Really? In
2004 pro-life Pennsylvania U.S. Senator Rick Santorum had done
the Big Tent thing and provided crucial support for pro-choice
then-Republican Senator Arlen Specter in a tight primary fight
with the conservative Pat Toomey. Specter won, and promptly
thanked Santorum. In 2006 Ms. Stockman went out of her way to
oppose Santorum, running ads against him and editorializing
against him in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
In effect, Ms. Stockman vividly demonstrated the real idea behind
the Big Tent. Which is to say, the Big Tent is for me but not for
thee. She in fact believes religiously in a litmus test on
abortion for candidates, and vigorously demanded a litmus test
for Santorum. She talks the talk but refuses to walk the
walk.

• It startles
to see that Jennifer Stockman says I “conveniently” ignored
Brown v. Board of Education in my list of Supreme Court
decisions that, as with Roe,
deliberately violated the Constitution. I confess I simply
believed that Ms. Stockman understood Brown and no
explanation was needed. Obviously not so. Far from being an
example of judicial activism, Brown was precisely the
judicial antidote to the judicial activism that was Plessy v.
Ferguson, which, in the style of Dred Scott and
Roe, conjured a right for states to segregate, a direct
violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Judge Robert Bork,
famously pro-life and very much the originalist, called
Brown  a “great and correct decision,”
which it was. Not because it was morally correct — which it also
was. But because it righted the constitutional wrong that was
Plessy, specifically violating the plain intent of the
Fourteenth Amendment. Plessy,
like Roe, was judicial
activism. Brown is
its opposite.

• To airily
dismiss the idea that “legislatures and governors” — i.e., the
people’s chosen representatives directly elected by those same
people — should set abortion policy, while defending, Roger
Taney-style, the right of judges to write in their own personal
abortion policy prescriptions that deny choice to Americans, is
morally wrong but more to the point constitutionally wrong. To
update the essence of the quote from dissenting Justice Curtis in
Dred Scott, one woman’s common sense is another woman’s
nonsense. Which is why we have a Constitution and the rule of
law. The law is not about Jennifer Stockman or Sarah Palin. It’s
about — the law. Which both Jennifer Stockman and Sarah Palin –
and all the rest of us — have the opportunity to write.

• The
“conservative position” in 2010 America should be to let the
American people chose the abortion policy they wish to
have.

Last.

With the greatest of respect I think Jennifer Stockman
should take a leadership role in resolving this issue for good
while upholding her point of view. Let me suggest the following
language for a proposed 28th Amendment to the
Constitution.

The right of a woman in the United States to have an
abortion is unlimited.

Two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the states, and
the abortion issue is resolved in a simple, quite plain
Constitutional fashion, with the American people getting to chose
the abortion consensus they prefer by supporting or not
supporting it. Surely she could get the support of President
Obama and Speaker Pelosi and, I bet, even the pro-life Harry
Reid, not to mention pro-choice Republicans who are, she insists,
the Republican Majority.

No fuss, no muss. No government in the bedroom. No judges
in the womb. True to the Constitution. Choice for all Americans,
not just judges. Women free at last, as embedded specifically in
the Constitution itself, to “consult with their doctors, their
families and their own consciences — not a political party
looking to round up votes in the next election.” And most
attractive, surely, it would be the end of those irritating
pro-lifers for good.

The problem? Ms. Stockman told Sean Hannity she opposed
abortion at the very last stage of a pregnancy. Which makes
her…drum roll please…not just an opponent of a Constitutional
amendment legalizing abortion, but one of those irritating
pro-lifers after all.

Over to you Jennifer.

Thanks for writing.

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Since this is stream of consciousness, I’m not sure I
explained that as well as I could or should, but the point is
this: As long as Obama keeps this alive, he, yes, keeps it alive.
In that tautology lies his continuing chance to get a bill
passed.

It’s like this. I once sat in a meeting of the board of an
organization on which there was a bitter division. I was the
vice-chair; the chairman was on the other side. There were, I
think, nine people on the board, with four (including me) on my
side, three (including the chair) on the other, and two swinging
back and forth with each argument. At one point the chairman said
each side had clearly made its points and that he would call a
vote after he wrapped up his last points. But as he wrapped up,
he could tell that one of the two “swing votes” he thought he was
swaying had, instead, become puzzled, and he wasn’t sure he had
her vote after all. So when he wrapped up, despite my objections,
he decided not to take the vote after all. Instead, he called on
the swing voter to ask what was puzzling her. Well, that
re-opened the whole shebang again. The debate went back and
forth, and then he again promised to finally hold the vote. This
time, because of who had spoken when, I had what should have been
the last word. When I finished, the body language in the room
made it clear I had won the day: Both swing members were about to
vote my way.

So the chairman didn’t take the vote. He started making his
arguments again, and threw in a new wrinkle. And the swing
members started swinging back his way.

Well, this process repeated itself about six more times. No
matter what happened, the chairman would not, absolutely would
not, actually allow the vote to take place until he felt sure
beyond a doubt that he had the majority. It didn’t matter how
many times he promised a vote after “just five more minutes.”
Unless he could win, he wouldn’t hold the vote, and unless he
held the vote, he couldn’t lose. This went on for something like
two hours overtime, late into the night. And when I objected to
his tactics, he said, in effect, “Tough: I’m chairing this
meeting. I decide when we vote.” It sounded an awful lot like
Obama saying “I won.”

Finally, having worn down everybody, the chairman saw that
just in order to get out of there, both of the swing members
would give in. Reading their expressions correctly, he suddenly
called for a vote, and he won, 5-4.

That’s what Obama is doing. But refusing to admit defeat,
by keeping the subject open, he is hoping to find the one window
of opportunity when the stars and votes line up, and then have
Congress pass this health care monstrosity.

What Thursday’s summit did was buy time. It kept everybody
at the table. It kept the issue open. And the whammy vote is
still waiting to be sprung on us.

That said, Obama is so wrong on all this that it is
outrageous. He made a terribly false analogy. He spoke about the
advantages of purchasing power, saying that with greater
purchasing power that supposedly comes from consolidating into a
large purchasing pool, costs will go down. He used Wal-Mart as an
example. But it’s a bad example. What happens with Wal-Mart is
that, once Wal-Mart has driven all of its nearby competition out
of business with low prices, then it slowly hikes its prices –
because it can afford to do so, because it has no competition. At
least to an extent. The other thing Wal-Mart does is it starts
buying more and more from small-shop suppliers, until it becomes
a majority of the suppliers’ business. It then pressures the
suppliers for “exclusive” deals, so that because it
purchases in bulk, it corners the market for that particular
supplier. Then, and only then, once the supplier is hooked, it
unleashes the whammy: It dictates to the supplier the prices at
which it, Wal-Mart, will buy the suppliers’ goods. So while
consumers of Wal-Mart benefit in the short term, the suppliers
all get squeezed. In the long run, the suppliers, the
wholesalers, get squeezed almost out of business — and the
repercussions can spread, so that sometimes a whole community
gets pinched.

This isn’t to knock Wal-Mart. Thank goodness Wal-Mart is
there to provide goods at low prices. And thank goodness that no
community acts entirely in isolation, and that cars exist,
because market forces still apply from community to community and
state to state so that Wal-Mart itself answers to market forces
too. The market is mostly self-correcting. If Wal-Mart squeezes
too much, its supplier runs out of business. That hurts Wal-Mart.
So Wal-Mart answers the market forces. And we all benefit.

But health care cannot work that way, or at least
not with government in the role of Wal-Mart — because the
government does not answer to market forces. We saw that
with Fannie and Freddie. When they “failed,” they didn’t go out
of business: Government just bailed them out. By borrowing from
our children, and by raising taxes or fees. Meanwhile, thousands
of banks were forced to adopt new lending standards that are too
strict, even though their old lending practices were fine under
normal circumstances — and the economy slowed down even more
without enough credit acting as necessary grease for the works.
In short, the downstream consequences were horrible, while Fannie
and Freddie skated.

So too, in health care, will the downstream consequences be
horrible. Once government takes over the huge role of “bulk
purchasing agent,” it faces no real pressure — but the doctors
face pressures, and the remaining insurance companies face
pressures until they go out of business, and the patients face
rationing, and…. and so on.

In short, Obama’s argument is nonsense. Yet even
nonsensical arguments sometimes can start sounding reasonable
when you are tired of a subject — and even if there is only a
small window when the argument is taking hold, the “chairman” or
president can call for a vote right at that moment — especially
in a closed universe such as Congress — and pull out a “win” on
the issue at hand.

The Democrats tried the bulk purchasing argument, by the
way, with the Medicare prescription drug program. In what was
otherwise an execrable new program, Republicans insisted on one
market-based provision: namely, that drug prices be determined by
the market rather than by having government do the negotiating.
Democrats desperately wanted government to negotiate the prices,
through bulk purchasing power. When they couldn’t get their way,
they did some math and tried to insert a provision saying that
government would at least set the premium prices that the private
companies would charge. The premium they wanted to set to start
at $35; they thought that without such price controls, the
premiums would rise astronomically, well above that.

With G.W. Bush in the White House, that premium price
control also was blocked. So, to the dismay of the Dems, the
market was allowed to set premium prices.

Well, lo and behold, what happened? After the first two
years, the average premiums were $24. In other words, the market
worked better by $11 per month – right around a 30 percent
savings for the average participant. What the Democrats thought
would be a great price, $35, and wanted to write into law, turned
out to be an absolutely awful deal — or at least it would have
been awful if it actually had been written into the law.

Obamacare would follow the same model. The bulk purchasing
of government would destroy competition, not add to it. And costs
would go up, not down.

But Obama will keep trying to argue otherwise. And when he
thinks that, by hook or by crook, he finally, at least
temporarily, has the votes in hand, he will try to shove it right
down our throats. Conservatives who want to block it will need
never to let down their guards.

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A gentleman was called in and he was very, very emotional. He
was getting ready to have transplant surgery. But he was told
that because he’s on Medicare, his post-operative treatment is
going to be limited to three years. After that, he’s going to
have to find some way to pay. He was very, very emotional.

Think about that for a minute. The patient is about to
receive a transplanted organ (the Congressman didn’t specify what
it was) and the horror is the government is only going to
continue to pay his medical bills for three years. If this is the
worst we can say about American medicine, are we really in that
bad shape after all?

Yesterday’s all-day event went much better than it might
have. There was no shouting, no screaming, no name-calling.
Despite the talk that Washington doesn’t work anymore, the
dialogue was very civilized. Deliberation seems to be alive and
well.

Except of course, for the fundamental difference, which
remains the same — Republicans want to reform and improve health
care without destroying its free-enterprise base, while Democrats
would be very happy to see the entire thing absorbed into a
government-controlled system, as half of it has been already
through the extension of Medicare, Medicaid and other government
programs.

What became most outstanding is that President Obama and
his teammates still do not have any real understanding of how the
current system works. Take for example the President’s constant
insistence that the problem is the insurance pools in which very
sick people must shop and that the solution is to “get everybody
into those pools” so that risks can be shared. That’s a very good
idea and a very simple principle of insurance — people who
aren’t sick pay for those who are sick. But “getting everybody
into those pools” is precisely what the current system is
designed to avoid.

Just as a guess, what percentage of the population do you
think now buys their insurance individually on the open market?
15 percent? 20 percent? The answer is 6 percent. The figure has
not changed for the last 15 years.

Only 6 percent of the population actually
buys their own insurance. (And for
this, we are painting the insurance companies as the villains of
this melodrama?) Fourteen percent of the population is on
Medicare, 14 percent on Medicaid. The other 66 percent do not
have insurance but health benefits¸,
which is not the same thing. Nine percent gets its benefits from
government employment, 4 percent from the military and the
remaining 43 percent get their benefits from private employment.
The last 15 percent (there is some overlap) has no coverage at
all.

President Obama kept talking about how it is these “large
pools” in big companies that make insurance cheap, but that is
not true. Large pools are only part of the equation. Equally
important is that these employees are getting their benefits
tax-free. This is a huge advantage not
available to the uninsured population. Because the government is
not getting its cut, employers are also eager to convey benefits
to their employees instead of wage increases because they have
more value. This is why, for many people, health benefits
constitute the major reason for employment. Wages transfer easily
from job to job but benefits do not.

Yet another advantage of company-run health benefits
programs is that they are exempt from state
regulations. There was a lot of talk at Blair House
yesterday about monopolies and how many states are served by only
one or two insurance companies. There was also talk about how the
government must mandate minimum coverage or people will not
realize their insurance doesn’t cover much. What no one said is
that all these mandates are now being imposed at the
state level and it is precisely this that limits
competition and makes insurance so expensive.

Corporate benefit plans, on the other hand, are all exempt
from state regulations under the Employees Retirement Income
Security Act (ERISA), which pre-empts state regulation. This is
why large corporations are able to provide insurance relatively
cheaply — because they don’t have to comply with state mandates
that insist that chiropractic, foot massage, alcoholic treatment
and all kinds of marginal medical services be included. Companies
can provide their employees with what they want — and it doesn’t
take any government oversight to do it.

So Obama’s premise is wrong. We’re not going to be able to
“get everybody into the pool” because doing that would mean
breaking up the system of employment-based health benefits that
is protected by ERISA. That 43 percent of the market is staying
put. The only thing that could crack this wall of protection
would be if benefits were highly taxed
and the federal “insurance exchanges”
were made so attractive that people were willing to give up their
employment-based benefits in exchange. Those are the things that
Obama has sworn won’t happen.

Instead, whatever “exchanges” are created will remain
isolated, populated only by the very sick and people who can’t
get coverage anywhere else. That’s what we have now. The only
thing that can make the exchange more attractive is if it is
highly subsidized. Several states tried this in the 1990s and
found it impossibly expensive — as several Senators testified
yesterday. It’s hard to believe the federal government will find
it any different.

Because the President does not recognize what makes health
benefits such a good deal for employees of large companies, he
also refuses to do what Republicans have been suggesting all
along — extend those same advantages to everyone else. Several
times, Obama talked about the Senators’ and Congressmen’s own
health plans — apparently thinking he was embarrassing them –
and asked why we couldn’t extend the same benefits to everyone
else? But of course that would mean everybody working for the
government — which might eventually happen if the Democrats stay
in power long enough.

Instead, these advantages could simply be identified and
passed on to everyone else. Give people an allowance of tax-free
money to spend on their own health benefits. Let them buy
insurance that is not weighted down with government mandates.
This is what health savings accounts do. Eight million people now
have them (almost as many as are covered by the military) and
they work very well.

Ah, but the President doesn’t like that, either. “All the
data says that the people who have health savings account have a
lot of disposable income,” he said yesterday. The implication is,
of course, that HSA’s are a rich man’s game and will leave the
poor to fend for themselves.

But then in the next minute he contradicts himself. The
uninsured, he said, are not the poor. The poor are covered by
Medicaid. The uninsured tend to be the self-employed and people
working for smaller companies that cannot afford to provide
benefits to their employees. Aren’t these precisely the people
who could benefit from health savings accounts? But instead, the
Democrats would prefer to mandate that
these smaller businesses provide health insurance to their
employees — even though they obviously can’t afford it. Could
there be a more efficient way of killing job creation in this
country?

The Republicans came off very well in yesterday’s summit.
They drew a line in the sand — solve the problem by enhancing
free markets — and stuck with it. If Democrats want to persist
in pushing their reform bill on the American people, let them.
Then let them stand by it in the November election.

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Crist, a formerly conservative politician who “grew in
office” after becoming governor in 2007, went through a 50-point
lead over conservative former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio
faster than Sherman went through Georgia. Polls released this
week by Rasmussen and the Florida Chamber of Commerce both show
Rubio with an 18-point lead over Crist in a race for the
Republican nomination to the U.S. Senate seat Mel Martinez
resigned from last summer.

Crist’s fall and Rubio’s ascendance (the Marco Rubio who
gave a well-received keynote speech at CPAC last week) have been
so steady and uninterrupted that key members of Crist’s political
organization — including his political director and his media
consultant — are leaving in order to pursue “other
opportunities” (translation: this train is going nowhere — I’d
better find another one to ride).

The sounds you hear of many hands clapping are those of
grassroots Florida Republicans pleased at the prospect of Crist’s
long but undistinguished political career coming to an end. Not
to mention the prospect of a young, energetic, intelligent
conservative representing Florida in the U.S. Senate instead of
the Arlen Specter wannabe Crist has become.

In a series of straw-polls taken by Republican
organizations across the state, the most active Sunshine State
Republicans have demonstrated their overwhelming preference for
Rubio, who fashioned a conservative record in eight years in the
Florida House and has run for the Senate nomination on
conservative themes such as limited government, reliance on the
market, personal freedom, and a strong foreign policy.

There have been 23 such straw polls, taken by groups from
Republican county executive committees to Republican women’s
clubs to business groups. Rubio has won all of them, by a total
margin of 1993 to 265. Crist has tried to claim these votes are
unimportant, just a sliver of the Republican electorate. Perhaps
there’s nothing else Crist could have said about these votes, but
anyone who follows politics knows this is nonsense. The folks who
voted in the straw polls are exactly the kind of voters who will
show up in August on primary day. Crist is in the deepest
possible trouble with the most active Republicans who know the
most about him.

It wasn’t always this way between Charlie and the
Republican base, especially between Charlie and the Republican
Executive Committee of Crist’s home County of Pinellas. In 2006
this group endorsed Crist for governor and raised thousands to
help him win this office. But by January of this year the romance
with the home-town boy was over. The Pinellas REC voted 106-54
for Rubio over Crist in its Senate straw poll. This 106-54
drubbing, even with home field advantage, has been Crist’s most
successful straw vote so far.

So what happened between 2006 when Crist was the recipient
of hugs and checks and all best wishes, and 2010, by which time
so many grass-roots Republicans had had more than all they wanted
of Charlie Crist? Not that long ago Crist was a popular
Republican politician with a fairly conservative record, even
though his political achievements have been too slim to make even
a decent Trivial Pursuit question. The answer is that Charlie
Crist got greedy — not greedy for money, but politically
greedy.

Crist is not the first Republican politician to assume that
he has Republican and conservative voters in the bag, so why not
try to poach a few Democrat and liberal voters by whooping up
things these voters like? It’s the old all-things-to-all-people
gambit. It usually doesn’t work for long. And it certainly
backfired here.

Crist was just a little more bodacious in the way he dialed
for Democratic voters. He tried to stimulate Democratic erogenous
zones by whooping up leftist policies like cap and trade and
other costly environmental policies that are beloved of leftists
but produce no environmental benefit at a huge cost in money and
freedom. He appointed a liberal justice to the Florida Supreme
Court. When conservative social issues came up, Charlie was
nowhere to be found. He crooned a lot about “bipartisanship,”
which was usually just a cover for taking leftist
positions.

But Crist’s biggest misstep was supporting a then popular
President Obama’s $787 billion “stimulus” slush fund before it
was adopted. He did this at a time when other Republicans were
advocating smaller government spending and targeted tax cuts to
deal with the recession. Much later, when it became clear how
negative his support of the slush fund was in a
conservative-minded political year, Crist said he hadn’t really
supported it and wouldn’t have voted for it if he had been in the
Senate. At the same time he’s claimed the stimulus has saved
87,000 jobs in Florida, a comically precise number, and a
downright curious one considering unemployment in Florida is
higher now than it was when the slush fund was adopted. Not even
veteran Charlie-watchers can make head or tail of Charlie’s
various re-inventions on this one.

On a Newsmax-TV interview Tuesday, still popular former
Florida governor Jeb Bush called Crist’s support of Obama’s
spending plan “unforgivable.” He said Crist should have supported
other Republicans who were calling for less government-intensive
alternatives.

“He’s the only statewide political leader that embraced the
stimulus package when Republicans were fighting to suggest an
alternative,” Bush said. “In its place we have this massive
spending bill that is not related to stimulus. It’s related to
trying to carry out a liberal agenda. He did it the day
before the vote. It was a mistake, and then he denies that he
would have supported the bill.”

So what’s a candidate in a flat spin to do? Crist’s left
turn since assuming the governor’s office is too well known now
for Crist’s claim to be the real conservative in the race to have
any credibility. An option would be to exercise some real
leadership in his last year as governor. But leadership has never
been part of Charlie’s game. He’s been a hands-off governor,
allowing the Florida Legislature to deal with the state’s
problems, only showing up after the battle was over to claim
credit where possible.

The recession may be officially over, but the melody
lingers on in Florida at least as much as elsewhere. Florida is
looking for about $3 billion in spending cuts or tax and fee
increases this spring to balance its budget, as the sate
constitution requires. The federals may be able to print money or
run a larger tab with China. Florida can’t. With almost no help
from Crist, who has vetoed some of its spending cuts, the Florida
Legislature has sweated Florida’s budget down from $73 billion
three years ago to $66.5 billion this year. It hasn’t been easy.
Selected taxes and fees have had to be raised, discretionary
spending has been cut, and trust-funds have been raided.

It will be even harder this session, which begins next
week, to find $3 billion more in cuts or revenue increases. So
with this in mind, Crist pitched in by submitting a proposed
budget calling for hundreds of millions in new spending on K-12,
the university system, and environmental projects. Crist
introduced his proposed budget in steps, mostly in front of the
constituencies for the new spending that he knows will never
happen. He’s once again thrown the legislature under the bus,
leaving it to legislators to balance the budget and be the bad
guys who have to tell those expecting the new spending the
governor proposed that it won’t happen. What a guy.

The plan backfired. Whatever support Crist has received
from those wanting more spending for education and the
environment is tempered by the fact that Florida media saw
through the scam and gigged Crist for it. The legislature didn’t
take the proposed budget seriously.

The only thing left to a desperate Crist to turn things
around is to go negative. To try to find something with which to
tarnish Rubio. So far Crist’s attempts to paint Rubio as a big
spender, a tax increaser, or a proponent of cap and trade have
been pretty much laughed off by Republican voters and most of the
state’s media. The facts just don’t support any of these
charges.

The latest gambit of the Crist campaign is to try to
suggest that somehow Rubio engaged in some shady spending with a
Republican Party of Florida credit card Rubio had when he was
Speaker and was crisscrossing the state to support Republican
candidates and raise money for the party. This probably won’t get
much traction either. Rubio has said that he kept his personal
and party spending separate. In any case, he says, he didn’t
spend as much in the almost three years he had a party credit
card than Crist’s hand-picked, high-rolling state party chairman
Jim Greer spent in a month. (Greer was recently obliged to resign
his party chairmanship because he was better at spending party
money than raising it.) The state party approved Rubio’s
expenditures.

Florida national committeewoman Sharon Day jumped into the
fray after the word surfaced that Rubio’s credit card expenses
were in question.

“I’m not upset with Marco Rubio at all,” Day said. “If you
can raise $12 million on $110,000, we all should be that
good.”

So there it is. Crist attached himself to a new president
when said president was popular, and tried to woo Democrats and
independents by supporting the big government projects that were
popular in 2007 and 2008. Now that he’s facing a solid
conservative candidate in a conservative year, this support has
proven toxic. It will probably cost Crist his political career.
Not many will be crying. Most in the party have moved on to
“other opportunities.”

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I have previously described the entitlement crisis as a
kind of “Death Star” hovering over this and future generations of
our countrymen and women, including my eleven
grandchildren.

Sarah Palin is not my choice for president, but her recent
description of our hemorrhaging fiscal situation as “generational
theft” pushed all my buttons. You go, girl!

As it turns out, I had a chance encounter in an elevator
with my former boss, John Ashcroft, former Attorney General of
the United States, U.S. Senator, Governor and Attorney General
for Missouri. In fact, I owe my current career in environmental
and natural resources work to him. He appointed me to his cabinet
as director of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, the
state EPA (with parks, energy and soil conservation thrown in for
good measure), in his second term as governor. I had more fun in
that job than any human being has a right to have — even with
the headache of finally resolving the Times Beach Superfund
settlement.

John (as he always prefers to be called) invited me up to
his office to chat about an upcoming Lincoln Day celebration back
in Missouri at which he was going to make a tribute to retiring
U.S. Senator Kit Bond. He was looking well and displayed his
customary ease in conversation which I have experienced even when
he was in public office and up to his ears in alligators. In
time, the conversation turned to the debt and whether or not the
Republicans will be up to the challenge of reining in federal
spending.

I shared with him my concerns about the Republicans’ sorry
record on spending, earmarks, entitlement reform, and their own
failure to even consider President George W. Bush’s reforms for
Social Security.

John Ashcroft considered the matter and first responded
with the observation that certainty was not given to us in this
world much less in the political sphere. You have to consider the
probabilities over time. In terms of the current Democratic
dispensation, the prospects were pretty slim that they were going
to do anything substantive about spending, entitlements or the
debt.

The Republicans, however, despite their past lapses, have
the political incentive to tackle spending, even entitlement
reform, at least at the outset. He cited the 1990s, admittedly
good economic times, when Republicans supported balanced budgets
and reformed welfare.

But, again, nothing is certain. John Ashcroft believes that
all wings of the party — social as well as economic and national
security — have to rally around the spending issue, first and
foremost. He believes this for both policy and political reasons.
Clearly, the debt cannot continue to grow, indefinitely, without
wrecking the country. But, politically, for the Republican Party
as a center-right party, John believes that “the coefficient of
unity is the highest on spending.” In other words, the spending
situation, now in extremis, draws in all elements of the
Republican base as well as the restless independent voters who
see the current trend as an existential threat to all that makes
this country unique and exceptional.

John went on to tie in these fiscal concerns with families
and the future of our children. “Stealing from your kids is as
ugly a picture as you can imagine,” said the former Attorney
General. He even went so far as to liken it to a kind of
prospective “child abuse” for generations to come, depriving them
of their birthright, as Americans, in terms of economic
opportunity, the ability to raise, clothe and shelter a family,
and pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as they see
it.

While we did not discuss the consequences for national
security of debt and escalating entitlement spending, they are
self-evident as evidenced by the steadily declining military
budgets and commitments of the Western European welfare states
over the past 40 or 50 years.

I mentioned the recent proposal by Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI)
to reform, simultaneously, both entitlements and the tax code,
which even the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says would
balance the budget without raising taxes. I told John that I
would vote for it in a heart beat, but I would not want to
predict what the majority of sitting Republican congressmen and
women would do since it takes away benefits as well as reduces
tax rates. John indicated that he hears very good things about
Paul Ryan but was not familiar with his proposal.

I came away from my conversation with John Ashcroft more
hopeful than I have been in a long time. His view of both the
economic necessity and the political benefits of focusing on
spending made sense. It is a necessary starting point in a
political realignment that, eventually, must go beyond reducing
discretionary spending and actually restructure, reduce, or
means-test the big three entitlements of Medicaid, Medicare, and
Social Security.

We are dealing with probabilities, compounded by the
vagaries of human nature. Yet, hope is a theological rather than
a rational or natural virtue. Indeed, it is hope that brought
most of our ancestors to these shores in the first place. So we
cannot give up on the land of the free and the home of the
brave.

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Retribution for earlier crimes may be considered a benefit,
but the crime itself would appear to require justification of
broad, and usually, continuing effect. This is, of course, the
so-called revenge motive. “An eye for an eye” is biblically
sourced. The Israelis would seem to be well suited for such a
justification. But then the action must have some relativity in
terms of time and importance.

If all that is so, how does the assassination of Mahmoud
al-Mabhouh fit in? We are told that he participated in or
personally carried out the killing of two Israeli soldiers back
in the late eighties. Rumors are circulating that he had been
“involved” in recent times in the arms business for Hamas.
There’s no doubt he had risen to be a relatively important
individual in that organization, but no particular focus had been
placed on him that would signal a reason for murder at this
time.

For the moment let’s just accept the thesis that for one
reason or another Mr. Mabhouh was worthy — as films and
television would say — of getting whacked. We have been told
that the Dubai police (actually British-trained Special Branch)
have determined that an assassination team of eleven people was
involved. Doesn’t that seem like an exceptionally large group
that would be needed to kill one man? Isn’t one of the principles
of a professional “hit” to keep the operation as simple as
possible while using the fewest possible team members?

The point of the small, simple operation is that fewer
things can go wrong and fewer people can make mistakes. Eleven
operators in what once was called an “executive team” are
possibly required if other activities are expected to be
necessary. Such efforts as diversionary tactics, communications
degradation, surveillance and other similar functions would
certainly justify increased numbers of participants above the
more normal 3-5 person team. Heavy surveillance, though, doesn’t
seem to have been necessary. Mr. M had been traveling to Dubai
regularly from Damascus and apparently always stayed at the same
hotel. Nor was a diversion or control of communication
needed.

Operating in a modern environment such as Dubai might
require establishing several alternate escape routes by air and
sea, but this contingency structure requires additional time to
establish rather than an enlarged team. The tactical plan for
exfiltration appears to have depended most importantly on a delay
in the eventual discovery of the dead Mr. Mabhouh. This delay in
discovery would allow for evasion and escape through regular
civilian transport. In passing it should be noted that the victim
was found in a sealed room with the door electronically locked
from the inside. Reportedly the target was killed in the evening
of January 19 but not discovered until late the following
morning.

At this point one must question the method of killing that
was used. According to the Dubai police, the target was smothered
with a pillow. Another account, this time by Hamas, stated that
in addition to suffocation Mr. Mabhouh was electrocuted first.
How these two instrumentations worked is not explained, but they
were apparently effective — if inexplicably exotic. Perhaps some
form of locally assembled taser device was used to initially
subdue the target, who was then suffocated with the
pillow.

All of which brings up the question of why this target was
selected in the first place. Mahmoud al-Mabhouh’s brother has
suggested that Mr. M had been the subject of a failed poisoning
effort some years ago, but no evidence has been put forth. Hamas
sources have indicated that two Palestinian double agents were
involved in luring al-Mabhouh to Dubai. These men, according to
Hamas, are both Fatah members. Fatah denies any involvement and
says Mr. Mabhouh was done in by rival elements in Hamas
itself.

Israel’s external intelligence service, Mossad, is now the
media’s favorite sponsor of this operation. Naturally, Mossad
says nothing one way or another. Why should it? The British,
French, Irish and Germans are all going through the expected
outrage against the possible Mossad use of those countries’
passports in identity kits for the assassination team. The U.S.
has ” deplored” the affair in appropriate diplomatic style, while
anti-Israeli and anti-Hamas elements internationally have had a
propaganda field day.

It may seem naïve to question the circumstances and process
of the killing of the not-well-known Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. He was,
nonetheless, an important player in the dark and dangerous world
of Israeli/Palestinian covert war. He may have been a
professional Hamas killer himself. However, there is just
something fishy about this whole story of eleven-plus operators
needed to kill one man by suffocating him with a pillow in a
hotel room. But maybe we’re all too influenced by Jack
Bauer.

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Sotomayor, conservatives agreed, was a progressive jurist—a judge
who shows insufficient deference to the text and meaning of the
Constitution, preferring to interpret laws according to her own
values. Case closed. The only remaining question is how much
damage she and future Obama appointees can do.

McDonald, meanwhile, isn’t at all
cut-and-dried for the right. The case builds on last
year’s D.C. v. Heller, in
which the Court struck down a gun ban in the nation’s capital,
saying that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to
keep and bear arms. This was itself controversial in conservative
circles; some said the Supreme Court had overstepped its bounds,
and should have left the issue to the elected branches of
government. McDonald asks the
question of whether the Second Amendment—which initially applied
only to the federal government, including the government of
Washington, D.C.—should also apply to state and local
governments.

Both of these developments raise issues that go to the heart of
the judiciary’s future. Yes, for right- wingers, Sotomayor
is a setback, but she comes in the midst of a very
significant resurgence of conservative jurisprudence—a resurgence
that came about through both politics (Republicans appointed six
of the Court’s nine current justices) and academic research. In
some ways, particularly intellectually, the conservative approach
to the law is stronger than ever.

McDonald, meanwhile, exposes
fractures not only within conservatism, but within liberalism as
well. Factions on both sides of the aisle disagree not only
on whether but also on
how the Court should apply the Second
Amendment to the states.

II.

FIRST, A WORD ON TERMINOLOGY. A
“conservative” judge is not one who always votes to uphold
conservative laws and to strike down liberal ones. Rather, when
observers call a judge “conservative,” they typically mean that
he is to some degree an
originalist. That is, he believes
that laws have reasonably definite meanings, set by the words
within them, and that these meanings do not change over time.
Originalists do not believe that the Constitution is “living,”
and most originalists agree that judges should avoid looking
beyond the text of enacted laws, except to learn the context and
meaning of the laws themselves.

Originalism has come a long way in a very short time.
During a speech at an American
Spectator dinner in late 2008, Justice Samuel
Alito noted that there has been an explosion of judges’ citing
dictionary definitions from the eras when laws passed. This
reflects a desire to understand what laws meant when the people,
through their representatives, consented to them. Alito also
noted that in Heller, both the
majority opinion and the main dissent used originalist arguments.
That is, the justices disagreed only on what the words of the
Second Amendment meant to the generation of Americans that
enacted it, and used a good deal of historical evidence in making
their points.

To understand originalism’s rise, it helps to understand
originalism’s history. In the 18th century and most of the 19th,
originalism was the only game in town. The Supreme Court almost
never struck down the actions of the other branches of
government. When the justices made decisions, the reasoning was
typically grounded in the text of the Constitution, sometimes
with extra evidence of the Founders’ intentions from contemporary
documents like the Federalist
Papers.

In the decades leading up to the New Deal, the Court
increasingly struck down federal and state laws. Often its
reasoning involved the dubious doctrine of “economic due
process”—the idea that the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of
“due process” guaranteed a right to freedom of contract, even
though no such right is stated explicitly. In Lochner
v. New York (1905), the most widely cited of
these cases, the Court struck down a state law limiting the
number of hours bakery employees could work.

These decisions sometimes impeded President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt’s ambitions. But by this time academia had revolted
against decisions like Lochner, and
the Court slowly caved (thanks in no small part to FDR’s
appointment of eight justices). On questions of economic policy,
it let states regulate as they pleased. In other areas, the Court
expanded its role in overseeing legislatures. It used the “due
process” clause—ironically, in much the same way
Lochner had—to “incorporate” the Bill
of Rights to prevent the states, not just the federal government,
from passing laws that curtail constitutional rights. This
process had begun with 1925’s Gitlow v.
New York, which
incorporated freedom of speech, but picked up steam in the 1940s.
For example, 1947’s Everson v. Board of
Education prevented state-run schools from
establishing religion.

In addition to incorporating enumerated rights, justices
protected, usually on due-process grounds, a slew of rights that
weren’t even mentioned in the Constitution. Starting in the
1960s, the Court found rights for birth control and abortion, and
for criminals to be “Mirandized” before answering questions. The
Court never became so bold as to admit it was making things up.
Every decision was presented as flowing naturally from some part
of the Constitution, or at least from the Constitution’s
principles. But it’s undeniable that the document’s original
meaning became less and less of a concern.

The most notorious example, of course, was 1973’s
Roe v. Wade. The basic reasoning was
that a state could not ban abortion without running afoul of “due
process”—even if the state legislators went through the proper
(or “due”) lawmaking process. Such a law violated the
“fundamental” “right to privacy,” and thus its passage failed to
provide “substantive” due process. Decisions leading up to
Roe (in particular
Griswold v. Connecticut, the
birth-control decision) had recognized the privacy right, which
supposedly had “roots” in the First Amendment; could be found in
the Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments; lurked in the
“penumbras” of the entire Bill of Rights; and even emanated from
the “concept of liberty” underpinning part of the Fourteenth
Amendment.

III.

IT WAS AGAINST THIS TIDE that originalism swam. The academy
produced some critics of judicial activism, and even some mild
successes, almost as soon as the most controversial decisions
started materializing. As Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg once pointed
out at an American Enterprise Institute lecture, in 1966
then-professor Robert Bork offered an originalist analysis of the
antitrust Sherman Act—the law’s drafters, Bork said, intended the
law to protect consumers, not to further various social aims the
way judges had interpreted it. The Supreme Court agreed.
Professor Raoul Berger, a liberal, released
Government by Judiciary in 1977,
arguing that the Constitution requires judges to stick to the
Framers’ original intentions, and that the Warren Court’s
Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence had strayed from those
intentions.

In the 1980s, the interpretive method gained a high profile
thanks to two of its backers: Edwin Meese III, Reagan’s attorney
general; and Bork, who by this point had served as President
Richard Nixon’s attorney general and whom Reagan appointed
(unsuccessfully) to the Supreme Court. In 1982, the
pro-originalism Federalist Society launched chapters at some of
the nation’s premier law schools. As the New York
Times later put it (in its typical unbiased fashion),
the Society quickly became a “shadow conservative bar
association, planting chapters in law schools around the country
that served as a pipeline to prestigious judicial
clerkships.”

It was tough going, though. “For many years, the
Constitution was hardly mentioned in constitutional law classes,
let alone read,” Meese, now chairman of the Center for Legal and
Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation, remembers. “I gave a
speech on originalism, and I mentioned that in the leading
constitutional-law casebook, the Constitution itself wasn’t
involved until Appendix H. I got a letter from the professor
who’d written it, and he said, ‘I wanted to let you know that in
the next edition, I’m moving the Constitution up to Appendix
A.’”

But political success led to academic recognition. With
Meese and Bork national figures, and with Antonin Scalia fast
becoming an influential member of the Supreme Court—and an
increasingly public defender of originalism—the importance of
understanding originalism was clear to anyone who wanted to
practice constitutional law. Professors investigated the
histories of various constitutional provisions, providing a
foundation for originalist arguments. Law students were taught
originalist philosophy, even if professors continued to cast it
in a negative light. And most important, originalism’s defenders
refined the theory in response to its critics, moving originalism
onto firmer ground. Princeton law professor Keith Whittington
writes that these adjustments created a “New Originalism.”

Adherents to the “Old Originalism,” such as Berger, had
often focused on original intent:
what the writers of a given law meant to do. The obvious
counterargument was that it is impossible for us to read the
minds of the dead—and even if we could, we might find that
different drafters wanted different things from the same laws. In
response, many originalists, including Scalia, began emphasizing
laws’ original public meaning
instead. The idea was that it didn’t matter what the Framers
subjectively wanted; they passed laws made up of words, and at
that time, those words had specific, objective meanings. One can
ascertain these meanings by consulting contemporary writings,
particularly dictionaries.

“The ‘New Originalism’ is much less interested in reining
in the judiciary than in getting the Constitution right—even
where the meaning of the Constitution would authorize greater
judicial review, or constrain Congress or the president,” says
Randy Barnett, a legal theory professor at Georgetown University
and author of Restoring the Lost
Constitution (Princeton University Press, 2005). For
example, New Originalists often decry how Congress has used its
right to “regulate commerce…among the several states” to justify
just about any law it feels like passing—and also decry that the
Court has let Congress get away with it.

These changes helped originalists build on the momentum
they’d gained in the 1980s. Though the Rehnquist court of the
1990s can’t be considered originalist on the whole, many
opinions—including some by centrist and liberal justices—made
arguments based on the original intent or meaning of the
Constitution, writes history professor Johnathan O’Neill in
Originalism in American Law and Politics
(John Hopkins University Press, 2007).

IV.

DID SUCCESS COME WITH A COST? For those who
think courts should defer to the elected branches of
government—even, sometimes, when those branches exceed their
constitutional powers—the answer is yes. These critics are
skeptical of “judicial supremacy,” the idea that the Supreme
Court gets the final say on interpreting the Constitution.

In this view, when mainstream originalists supported the
majority’s interpretation of the Second Amendment in
Heller, they had made a 180-degree turn:
they used to protest when the Court struck down democratically
enacted laws such as abortion bans, but here they were asking the
Court to strike down the elected D.C. government’s handgun ban.
(For many New Originalists, the difference is that the
Constitution explicitly protects the right to keep and bear arms,
but says nothing about abortion.)

True, critics-from-the-right of
Heller often sided with the dissent’s
originalist analysis over the majority’s— they agreed that the
Second Amendment, interpreted according to its Founding-era
meaning, did not create an individual right to keep and bear
arms. But the deeper criticism they made was that even
if the majority’s interpretation of the Second Amendment was
correct, there are reasons the Supreme Court
should not have enforced this interpretation against another
branch of government. For example, in Harvie Wilkinson’s
Virginia Law Review article “Of Guns,
Abortions, and the Unraveling Rule of Law,” three of the four
anti-Heller arguments given are
“descending into the political thicket,” “ignoring the
legislature’s strengths,” and “disregarding federalism’s
virtues.”

Matthew J. Franck, a Radford University political science
professor and Heller critic, has
vigorously supported a strict definition of judicial restraint;
he’s the author of Against the Imperial
Judiciary (University Press of Kansas, 1996). Franck
does see the Constitution as a document granting Congress
specific and limited powers, and he admits that Congress
frequently exceeds those powers. The rub? “For me, one of the
most under-examined questions in originalism today is, What was
the original understanding of the scope and authority of judicial
power?” Franck says. “We’re liable to believe that every breach
of the Constitution is somehow fit for judicial
invalidation.”

Franck advances a thesis that he admits sounds harsh and a
little paradoxical: According to the Constitution, the executive
and legislative branches can get away with some violations of the
Constitution. The text of the document does not grant courts the
right to nullify the acts of other branches of government, and
again, courts rarely did so during America’s first century of
existence.

Of course, New Originalists read the Constitution and its
history as being much more friendly to judicial review than
Franck does. They point out that Hamilton talked about judicial
review in the Federalist Papers, for
example, and that Marbury v. Madison
laid the groundwork for at least some judicial review only
a decade or so after the document’s ratification.

And as a practical matter, critics have pointed out, when
Congress, states, and the president get to decide whether their
own actions are constitutional, it’s akin to letting the foxes
guard the henhouse. Franck replies to this line of reasoning
thus: “Everybody who believes the judiciary is or ought to be the
broad-ranging and final authority on every constitutional
question is ignoring the fairly routine violations of the
Constitution by the judiciary. By my
reckoning, the Supreme Court violates the Constitution four or
five times a year.”

V.

SOME ON THE LEFT have had a very different reaction to
modern originalism: They’ve not quite accepted it, but they have
made it their own. These liberals often concede that the Court’s
excesses in the ’60s and ’70s don’t square with the
Constitution’s original meaning, but they add that the Court
could have expanded citizens’ rights in a way that
was constitutional. Specifically,
they say that the Fourteenth Amendment’s “privileges or
immunities” clause—“no state shall make or enforce any law which
shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the
United States”—provides a better excuse to do this than the
guarantee of “due process” does.

Their main argument is that the Slaughter-House
Cases (1873), decided soon after the Fourteenth
Amendment passed, interpreted the “privileges or immunities”
clause too narrowly. The majority decided that the clause “did
not create additional rights, it merely required states to apply
[their] laws equally to non-state residents as well as state
residents.” Since then, the clause has been essentially
meaningless. But correctly interpreted, these liberals say, the
clause not only requires full incorporation of the Bill of Rights
(as opposed to the “selective” incorporation achieved thus far
under “due process”), but might protect things like abortion and
gay rights too.

This reasoning, at least regarding the incorporation of
enumerated rights, is far from implausible, and even some on the
right share it. Justice Clarence Thomas implied such a view in a
1999 dissent, writing that “the demise of the Privileges or
Immunities Clause has contributed in no small part to the current
disarray of our 14th Amendment jurisprudence” and that he’d be
willing to reconsider the clause’s meaning. Even when it comes to
unenumerated rights, many libertarian-leaning originalists (such
as Barnett, who would like to see the Court protect everything
from sodomy rights to economic freedom) share the
progressive-originalist view.

Which bring us to McDonald, the
gun-rights case now before the Court. The case specifically asks
the Court to consider the “privileges or immunities”- based case
for incorporation. There’s no way to tell what, if anything, will
come of this—it seems likely that the Supreme Court will
incorporate the Second Amendment, but it could do so on familiar
“due process” grounds (as the Ninth Circuit already did in a
different case) rather than head in this brave new
direction.

If the Court does reconsider the “privileges or immunities”
clause on originalist grounds, it will likely have to do so over
a series of cases, during which it will face many thorny
questions. What economic and civil rights does the clause
protect? Can one determine those rights by researching what the
term of art “privileges or immunities” was commonly understood to
mean when the Fourteenth Amendment passed, or must one simply
guess? Should the Court overturn old “due process” decisions and
replace them, when appropriate, with “privileges or immunities”
ones? Or should the new rights just build on the old?

Perhaps what should concern conservative originalists most is
that, even if these cases put the “privileges or immunities”
clause back in its rightful place, future courts could stretch it
the same way they stretched the due-process clause. “Privileges
or immunities” could give a progressive court a whole new avenue
to run down when it came to inventing rights.

VI.

HOWEVER THINGS PAN OUT, originalists will have
much more sway than they had a few decades ago. Obama’s liberal
appointees will likely replace other liberal judges. Liberal John
Paul Stevens, born in 1920, is the Court’s oldest member by more
than a decade; Ginsburg and Breyer were born in the 1930s (though
so were Scalia and moderate Kennedy). Roberts and Alito were born
in the 1950s, Thomas in 1948. It seems most likely that Obama
will preserve liberalism on the Court— possibly for decades, if
he replaces several more old liberals with young ones—but
probably won’t be able to roll back the gains of
originalism.

It’s also important to remember the lower federal courts,
which to varying degrees have adopted the Court’s proclivity for
ignoring the Constitution’s meaning. Lower courts have
significant power, and could soon be home to some important
battles. There is a push for courts to recognize gay marriage,
though up to this point only state (not federal) courts have done
so. It will probably fall to the lower courts to untangle some of
the knots McDonald leaves. Obama’s
appointments to lower federal courts could determine the policies
governing entire regions.

Aside from filibustering particularly egregious nominees,
there’s not much originalists can do about judges while the Obama
administration is in office. They can be grateful, however, for
the work various scholars and judges have done to bring the
philosophy back.

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Now, of course, we know that “bad,” like Bad, is good. Or
at least not bad. And Crazy Heart is here to tell us,
like my favorite TV show, “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew,” that
good is not bad too — maybe even that good is good, though it is
still better, like Bad, to have been bad before becoming
— which by the end of the film Bad has — good. He has also,
significantly, reverted to his given name. It kind of makes you
tired to go over such familiar ground, which brings up both the
reason for the long establishment and the problem with the film
which is that, however momentous it is for the person in
recovery, addiction therapy is fundamentally pretty banal in the
watching. The appeal of “Dr. Drew” is that his addicts are people
whose names we know — so we feel that we are getting a private
look behind the scenes at life among the celebs — and that they
are quite likely to backslide. It’s like watching a NASCAR race
with the near certainty that somebody is going to crash.

I know this is a hard thing to say. Of course, we must feel
sorry for the fictional Bad’s pain and loss, just as we would for
a real person’s, and for the fact that his self-medication for
pain and loss has caused still more pain and loss, including that
of his most recent love-interest, who is played by the much
younger Maggie Gyllenhaal. She goes the way of his multiple
wives, just as her four-year-old son is lost to him in the same
way that his four-year-old son was lost to him, through
his own fault, 24 years before. Tough on Bad; tougher on the
kids, maybe. But Bad has got to be the center of attention even
though, in terms of cinematic artistry, it’s pretty hard to do
anything interesting with such materials. Miss Gyllenhaal’s
character, for instance, is a kind of groupie — the film has
already shown us what such a person looks like when she turns up
— who has one-night stands with washed up country singers. And
yet that’s, somehow, meant to be not pathetic? Wouldn’t there be
more to think about if we didn’t have to be focusing on poor Bad
all the time and, therefore, seeing her as just the perfect
mother to her four-year-old?

This is just one of the film’s false notes and suggests a
larger falseness in the whole set-up. It’s a cliché to say that
the addicted are the victims of their own “weakness,” but I have
always liked what Milton’s Samson has to say to the treacherous
Dalila when she makes a similar plea:

…if weakness may excuse,
What Murtherer, what Traytor, Parricide,
Incestuous, Sacrilegious, but may plead it?
All wickedness is weakness: that plea therefore

With God or Man will gain thee no remission.

The point is that weakness is just not very interesting as
a subject of a drama or a movie. It’s an excuse for something
else, rather than the thing itself, which is what we’re really
interested in — in this case Bad’s bent for self-destruction.
Getting over this weakness is correspondingly anti-climactic even
when it is overcome, as we would all wish it to be in real life,
through dutiful but unphotogenic striving.

When the movie finally gets around to telling a story that
is not, or not just, the familiar story of addiction, ruin, and
redemption, it is the equally familiar story of turning one’s
pain and loss into art — in the form of songs, ostensibly by Bad
Blake but actually by T-Bone Burnett, Ryan Bingham, and Stephen
Bruton, all quite persuasively performed by Mr. Bridges himself
— and of the rivalry between Bad and a former protégé (Colin
Farrell) who is now more successful. That these stories are all
pretty familiar is not the problem with the film. All stories
have been told before in one way or another. But there needs to
be something more original to make all this stuff come to life.
There the film comes up short, I find, which is why the best bits
of it are the musical numbers.

And here, I fear, I must sound a dissenting note on Jeff
Bridges, who has been universally praised for his portrayal of
“Bad” and is widely tipped to win this year’s Oscar for Best
Actor. It is that, to me, there is something annoyingly
postmodern in his performance. Bad is always, as it were, looking
at himself being bad, and that self-awareness is corrupting.
There are those who are bad out of sheer exuberance of spirit,
and that’s what this film wants you to think about Bad. But, fine
as he may be as an actor in other ways, Jeff Bridges can’t be
unself-conscious. He can’t be, as it were, naïvely and sincerely
bad, which is what his character needs to be in this picture to
make us believe in him. He’s much more himself and therefore
better and more interesting artistically as the Dude from

The Big Lebowski, a man who is bad on
purpose, almost in principle. To that extent, he stands above and
apart from Crazy Heart‘s improving and uplifting moral
lesson.

I hope I won’t be misunderstood as attempting to deny that
the lesson is improving and uplifting, but it must be
admitted that sobriety is a bit boring, in dramatic terms. In the
end, our hero has just returned to the place where ordinary,
decent, responsible people have remained all along. That’s great,
of course, but there is something that strikes another one of
those false notes, artistically speaking, about the fact that so
many people these days expect to be congratulated merely for
being ordinarily decent and responsible citizens — and in many
cases, like this one, after they have also been congratulated for
the authenticity of being non-decent and irresponsible in
culturally significant, “transgressive” ways. Mr. Bridges’s “Bad”
Blake can’t quite disguise the fact that he is coming forward,
grinning, to accept these awards — for genuine
grittiness, or gritty genuineness — in the first place, so that
in due course his creator may finally get his Oscar.

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During a time period of America’s existence as an English colony
and then a young nation — when, to put it mildly, communication
and transportation faced challenges — this businessman’s
enterprise processed 1.5 million fish per year sent throughout
the 13 American colonies and the British West Indies. The mill he
built grinded 278,000 pounds of branded flour annually that was
shipped through America and, unusual during colonization, even
exported to England as well as Portugal. And in the 1790s, during
the last years of his life, this mogul built one of the largest
whiskey distilleries in the new nation.

Don’t think you’ve heard of this entrepreneur? Well, it’s
possible you might know him from some of his achievements in the
political sphere. He did, in fact, have a few notable
accomplishments there. Like serving as a representative in
colonial Virginia’s House of Burgesses and as a Virginia delegate
to the pre-Revolutionary War Continental Congress. Then being
chosen to lead the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War
and leading the American nation to a hard-fought victory for
independence. And then, a few years after that, becoming the new
nation’s first president.

For many Americans, and indeed quite a few scholars, George
Washington has been little more than just the face on Mount
Rushmore and the one-dollar bill. People revered him but just
didn’t know how to relate to him. Whereas Thomas Jefferson and
Benjamin Franklin generated interest with their passions and
achievements in practical science and architecture, Washington
didn’t seem to have a career — or much of a life — outside of
his leadership as general and president.

But now, some pioneering scholars are documenting that
Washington’s life’s work was just as enthralling as that of any
of the Founding Fathers. His pursuits can be said to be just as
creative as those of Franklin and Jefferson, but in a different
way. Washington’s creativity of the type one associates with
modern entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates and even Donald Trump.
Whereas Franklin built gadgets at his homestead, and Jefferson
built fancy buildings, the notable thing Washington built were a
series of interconnected businesses.

In the 2006 biography The Unexpected George Washington,
historian Harlow Giles Unger calls Washington “one of America’s
leading entrepreneurs” and chronicles Washington’s transformation
of Mount Vernon from a sleepy tobacco farm into a type of
industrial village. As Unger writes, Washington “expanded a
relatively small tobacco plantation into a diversified
agroindustrial enterprise that stretched over thousands of acres
and included, among other ventures, a fishery, meat processing
facility, textile and weaving manufactory, distillery, gristmill,
smithy [blacksmith shop], brickmaking kiln, cargo-carrying
schooner, and, of course, endless fields of grain.”

Some of these enterprises are now on display at the Mount Vernon Estate and Gardens
historical site in Alexandria, Virginia, available for visitors
to see as we approach the national holiday of Washington’s
Birthday, celebrated on a Monday — today although Washington’s
real birthday is the 22nd. (And the federal holiday, by the way,
is still officially
Washington’s Birthday, not President’s Day. Although many
celebrate the birth of Abraham Lincoln in February, and some
states have their own legal holidays for him, Congress never
formally merged Washington’s day with Lincoln’s birthday nor gave
Lincoln his own official holiday.) The Donald W. Reynolds Museum
and Education Center, opened on the grounds of Mount Vernon in
2006, has a display of the Mount Vernon fishery and other facets
of his career as a “visionary entrepreneur.” And Washington’s
gristmill and whiskey distillery were themselves recently
reopened for attendees to get a first-hand look at some of
Washington’s interconnected ventures.

In this challenging time for free enterprise, Washington’s
business, as well as his political, biography can be seen as
emblematic of the American Dream. Washington’s background wasn’t
exactly poor, but it was not as rich as many of his
contemporaries among the Founders. His father died when he was
11, and, among the youngest of many brothers, he didn’t inherit
much, and the family lacked money to give him a formal education.

So at 16, Washington became an apprentice land surveyor for
Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron. From Fairfax
(namesake of Fairfax County, which is now part of the Northern
Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C.), Washington learned about
land acquisition, and became skilled in the practice that today
we would call a real estate speculator.

After fighting with distinction in the French and Indian War,
Washington inherited the 2,000-acre Mount Vernon farm from his
older brother Lawrence and began acquiring other land around it,
extending his homestead to 8,000 acres at the time of his death.
In 1759, Washington married the widow Martha Custis, and she and
her two children came to live at Mount Vernon. But although
Martha had considerable wealth, as has been noted, running a
productive farm against the backdrop of British trade
restrictions and taxes, as well as nature’s unpredictability, was
not an easy task. It was then that Washington began his
innovative agribusiness practices that made Mount Vernon, as
described in a paper (not available online) by Mount Vernon
director of restoration Dennis J. Pogue, “an expansive and
ambitious commercial enterprise.”

Washington’s first step to becoming an entrepreneur was to
abandon the most common cash crop of his native Virginia. That
would be the now-dreaded tobacco. But it was not for health
reasons that Washington stopped planting it. It was because of
taxes and duties that reduced his profits and the fact that the
tobacco crop was hurting Mount Vernon’s soil. As Pogue writes in
another paper (pdf),
“By 1766 the disappointingly low prices that he was receiving in
return for his tobacco harvest convinced Washington that he would
be better off devoting the labor of his workers to producing
other commodities that had a more dependable payoff.”

Washington grew hundreds of crops, many of which were imported
from Europe. (And yes, he did grow
hemp, but not very much and not for very long.) But for his
main cash crop, he chose wheat. But he didn’t stop fulfilling the
market need with the growing of this wheat. He became a
manufacturer of two products that contained his crop: flour and
distilled whiskey.

Recently replicated on their original foundations at Mount
Vernon, Washington’s gristmill and distillery are architectural
wonders that anticipated modern factories. The flour mill is
three levels high with two sets of mill stones, including French
buhr stones that were used to make the finest quality of flour.
The mill produced about 278,000 pounds of flower per year,
branded with the Washington name, sold throughout the colonies
and exported to England and as far away as Portugal. The flour
bore the identification of George Washington, in effect making it
similar to a modern branded food product.

Washington also “farmed” the banks of the Potomac for shad,
herring and other fish. His fishery consisted of rowboats and
large nets, and in a six-week fishing season each spring,
Washington’s men netted about 1.5 million fish, according to the
Reynolds museum at Mount Vernon. And the inedible portions of the
fish were used as fertilizer for crops such as wheat

But it is the distillery may offer the most fascinating example
of Washington’s entrepreneurial prowess. After retiring from the
presidency and returning to Mount Vernon — setting a precedent
for voluntarily relinquishing power — Washington built a
distillery in 1797 on the advice of his plantation manager James
Anderson, a native of Scotland who knew a thing or two about
distilled spirits. The whiskey was made largely from crops grown
at Mount Vernon. As one Virginia magazine describes
it, “rye, malted barley and corn were mixed with boiling water to
make a mash in 120 gallon barrels.”

This process is now reenacted at Mount Vernon at the distillery
that was reopened in 2007, thanks to a grant from the Distilled
Spirits Council of the United States. A few times a year,
Washington’s whiskey — using one of the old recipes — is even
sold to Mount Vernon visitors.

Washington’s lifelong entrepreneurship sheds new light on his
fight for liberty, and his motivation to develop a constitutional
structure in which all were free to develop their many talents.
Like that of other Founding Fathers, Washington’s career was
stained by the evils of slavery, and this extended to his
business enterprises, most of which made use of the labor of the
slaves at Mount Vernon. But his correspondence shows that
Washington realized this contradiction more than most of the
Founding Fathers, and he worked
tirelessly the last few years of his life to free all of his
slaves upon his and Martha’s death and also make provisions for
their education and for the support of the former slave children
and elderly.

So this month, if you can’t make it to the celebrations at Mount
Vernon, you just may want to toast George Washington — the
politician and entrepreneur — with a plate of herring washed
down with a glass of whiskey.

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Our frequent commenter Oldefarte is absolutely right that
lots of people have questioned how McCain’s favorite, Tim James,
made his money. But that’s the least of the problems with
McCain’s account. The way he describes the Riley tax plan in 2003
is unfair. I offer myself as a direct witness, as an editorial
writer and columnist for the Mobile Register at the
time. I bow to NOBODY as a Kemp-Reagan, supply-side tax cutter. I
was writing letters to the editor in support of Kemp-Roth back
while I was in high school, and have never once supported a
federal income-tax hike and have written repeatedly and publicly
for decades in favor of broad-based tax cuts. Yet I supported the
Riley tax plan. Why? Because in local context, it made a lot of
sense. Of course honest conservatives could disagree, but it was
anything but a typical “tax increase,” despite how McCain
described it.

Here was the deal: Alabama faced huge deficits and has a
balanced-budget requirement. Riley already had cut, largely
through administrative measures, about a whopping $350 million
from the budget in half a year, with more cuts proposed
legislatively. But he desperately needed a short-term bridge to
balance the budget.

This was PRECISELY the same situation Ronald Reagan faced
in his first year as governor of California, in 1967, and Reagan
acted in almost exactly the same way Riley did, with a short-term
revenue enhancement. Reagan later rebated a whole lot of taxes to
the people, after the initial crisis was over.

Back to Riley: Anyway, overall, Riley’s tax plan raised far
more money IN THE SHORT TERM than it would have “cost.” But it
did so in the context of one of the smallest combined
state-and-local government spending records in the country. Tim
James’ father had cut the state budget to the bone, and then
Democrat Don Siegelman’s spending hikes were largely taken back
through a process called “proration” when the economy temporarily
went bad. Meanwhile, among states that have property taxes,
Alabama’s property taxes were something like the second-smallest
in the nation. Its sales tax rates, though, were absurdly high,
and its exemption threshold for paying income taxes started at an
absurdly low $5,000 (well below the national average of about
$16,000). Plus, huge swaths of land were effectively off the
books because of what amounted to a huge exemption on taxes for
lands used for timber — even if the timberland wasn’t actually
being used in commerce, but just allowed to sit there as a nice
big, untaxed private preserve.

What all this meant was that Alabama’s tax system was
literally regressive — not regressive in the modern liberal
sense of not being “progressive” enough for liberal tastes, but
actually more burdensome on the poor than on the rich. Now I’m no
big advocate of progressive taxation. But I AM against, as should
be all conservatives, a situation in which the poor actually pay
a LARGER percentage of their income in taxes than the rich do.
Yet that was the case in Alabama. The low income tax threshold,
the low property taxes, the timberland tax exemptions, and the
high sales taxes (in Mobile, the sales tax was 9%, and 10% for
restaurant food), meant that the tax burden was upside down.
Several different independent groups did analyses, and while they
all differed slightly in how they crunched the numbers, their
basic conclusion was the same: The tax system was badly
regressive. At one end of the estimates, the lowest-income
Alabamians paid something like 9.5% of their income in state and
local taxes while high-income Alabamians paid only 7% or so; the
far end of the estimates looked even worse: low-income earners
paid as much as 11% while high-income earners paid just 4.5%.
Clearly, this wasn’t fair. Reform was desperately needed.

Finally, something like 90% of all Alabama tax revenues
were “dedicated,” by the Constitution, for one purpose or
another. And the super-powerful Alabama Education Association
owned more than half the state Senate, lock, stock and barrel,
which meant that the revenue source dedicated for “education”
spending amounted to the AEA’s own little bailiwick, with
legislators deliberately mislabeling non-classroom, or even
non-school-related items such as country music museums, as
“educational” so that they could hide all their pork and slush
funds in that account and use it also to pay off the AEA for
whatever the AEA wanted. Early this decade, even when the taxes
used for “general fund” revenues were incredibly tight, the
education fund sometimes was rather flush — but lawmakers could
not switch money between accounts, meaning the AEA kept its slush
funds and power base even as state law enforcement was cut to the
bone. As it was, the state police force at one point had only one
trooper to patrol every 180 miles or so of state highways. The
state crime labs were backlogged by as much as TWO FULL YEARS.
The court system was thus badly bottlenecked. Highway deaths were
rising rapidly. And all sorts of other basic governmental
functions were barely on life support. Riley desperately needed
to be able to move money from one account to the other depending
on how the economy affected each revenue source. In this case,
the general fund was starved even by all objective conservative
estimates. Even Gary Palmer of the very conservative Alabama
Policy Institute agreed with this basic fact of that the general
fund was in dire straits. (Gary thought at least some more
revenues were needed for the short term for the general fund,
although not as much more as Riley ended up proposing.)

So what Riley did was come up with a reform plan that cut
taxes for vastly more people than it raised them for — by
something like a 5-3 margin if I remember right. (i.e., it cut
taxes for something like 50%, kept them level overall for about
20%, and hiked them for about 30% of the populace). Even so, the
tax code would not have become progressive overall, but almost
exactly flat — exactly what conservatives have always said is
the ideal!

But overall, in the short term, the Riley Plan raised more
than a net $1 billion overall, mostly by raising the incredibly
low property tax rates, which is what financed the general fund
— and it made the NEW taxes “un-dedicated,” meaning their
proceeds could, for the first time, be moved among different
accounts. Even so, Alabama property taxes would have gone from
something like second lowest in the nation to something like
fifth lowest — hardly a terrible burden. And its overall
spending levels would have done likewise, still sitting among the
bottom six states in per capita spending in the nation.

And this was exactly when the second round, i.e., the
larger and more supply-side round, of the Bush tax cuts were
going into effect, so that EVEN FOR THOSE WHOSE STATE/LOCAL TAXES
WOULD GO UP OVERALL UNDER THE RILEY PLAN, THEIR COMBINED
LOCAL/STATE AND FEDERAL TAX LOAD WOULD BE SMALLER THAN
IT HAD BEEN JUST TWO YEARS BEFORE. In short, even for the 30% who
would have been moderately “hurt” by the Riley plan, their
overall financial situation, in terms of taxes, would be better
than it had been in 2001. No better time could be imagined to do
tax reform in Alabama than a time when a windfall was coming to
the very taxpayers, the minority of taxpayers, who would be hurt
by the reforms — especially when the windfall was bigger than
the new load. In sum, they wouldn’t even feel the pinch.

Finally — and here is the kicker — the Riley plan overall
had two more wonderfully clever assumptions underlying it. Riley
could not say it in public, but his idea was to do exactly what
Reagan did: Once the immediate budget crisis passed, he wanted to
give some of the money back to the public in a different form. In
year three or four, if the budget were balanced and especially if
the “rainy day fund” were replenished, Riley planned to bring to
the people a proposal to cut the state sales tax by 1/2 cent (or
perhaps more). After adding to the amount of money available for
use in whichever fund is needed, rather than being dedicated to
just one narrow use, he could afford to cut the “education” fund
by a small amount so it wouldn’t provide quite such a power
base/slush fund in the effective control of AEA. (How bad is AEA?
It even opposed criminal background checks for teachers!) Help
the taxpayers, while de-funding the AEA! What a great
idea.

The second assumption behind the entire effort was to
position himself politically in two ways more helpful to the
state as a whole than to himself. First, if the plan did NOT pass
— as it didn’t — it would show once and for all that fiscal
rectitude was the only option left. “Hey, guys,” he could and did
say (I’m paraphrasing here), with a big smile on his face, “I
hear you loud and clear. You want government to live within its
means, not by grabbing more of your means. I tried the big reform
package, and you didn’t like it, and I’ll listen. I’ll do what I
can in the future in piecemeal fashion, and let you weigh in on
it each time, but meanwhile we are going to have the leanest
government you have ever seen — and that’s a good thing.” In
short, Riley took ALL tax hikes off the table for years by
letting the voters themselves send even a carefully crafted
reform plan to a crashing defeat. So by bringing the reform
package to the people as a constitutional amendment, rather than
trying to pass a tax hike through mere statutory means, Riley
ensured that now ALL state politicians would be loathe to raise
taxes in ANY fashion without getting clear popular approval for
it. (Later, he actually did raise the income-tax exemption
threshold, thus cutting taxes slightly for every single Alabama
taxpayer.) Second, by putting himself on the line so much for the
“reformist” or “goo-goo” (“good government”) crowd, he earned the
undying support of the goo-goos, even many of those who were
ordinarily center-left. He therefore made sure that their
suspicions of the motives of a conservative Republican governor
were almost entirely dissipated, meaning he could push
conservative reforms for the rest of his term, on all sorts of
fronts, without taking flak from basically high-minded goo-goos
who might otherwise have assumed that the “reform” part of
“conservative reform” was a mere mask for “radical conservative.”
In other words, they would actually consider his reforms on the
merits rather than fighting against them from the start. Since
goo-goos tend also to be fairly high-finance folks
(chablis-and-bris center-left, at least some of them), it meant
Riley could pursue reforms without having a bunch of money spent
fighting him out of mistaken assumptions about his
motives.

In all, the Riley Tax Reform attempt was a great thing for
the state. Even in failure, it served good purposes. And if it
had passed, it would have served other good purposes. It was a
win-win.

The acid test, in the end, was how voters responded. In
conservative Alabama, if what Riley had tried was so obnoxious,
the voters could refuse to re-elect him. Instead, even in the
overwhelmingly Democratic year of 2006, Alabama voters re-elected
Riley by giving him 59% of the vote — an immense
landslide.

As for Tim James, I have found him singularly unimpressive,
a guy who tries to act tough and throw his weight around because
his daddy was governor.

The front-runner for governor this year, Bradley Byrne, is
a solidly reformist conservative — with a proven record of
accomplishment, integrity, fiscal conservatism, traditional
values, and tough and successful stands against entrenched,
corrupt interests on multiple fronts. Yeah, he was for Riley’s
tax plan — and he was right. He also
fought repeatedly against government waste, for
lower taxes overall, against the AEA, and in favor of
governmental transparency. Neither he nor Riley deserve the
back-of-the-hand treatment that McCain gives them. As a 30-year
veteran of the conservative movement, I vouch for Byrne
entirely.

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Obama seems to have embraced a similar approach to human
rights abroad. From Iran’s democracy protestors to Cuba’s
political prisoners and China’s human rights advocates, the
American president’s “open-hand” foreign policy has been defined
by conspicuous silence about human rights.

President Obama’s reticence on human rights contrasts
sharply with the rhetoric of a candidate who made human rights a
focal point of his campaign. Nowhere has the gap between Obama’s
campaign talk and his administration’s actions been greater than
on Sudan.

It is difficult to find a country more ravaged by war than
Sudan. The conflict in Darfur and the war between North and South
have together left some 2.5 million people dead and millions of
others displaced.

Senator Obama was one of the upper chamber’s most vocal
advocates of strong action against the Sudanese regime. As a
presidential candidate, he endorsed tougher sanctions on the
Sudanese government and implementation of a no fly zone. He
promised to
end the genocide in Darfur and preserve a fragile North-South
peace.

At her confirmation hearing, Sec. of State Hillary Clinton
said preserving the North South peace agreement would be a “top
priority.” Obama’s chief Sudan advisor, Susan Rice (now
ambassador to the United Nations), hinted
at U.S. military action against Khartoum, and vowed to “go down
in flames” advocating tough measures.

Joe Biden even said, “I would use
American force now [in Darfur].”

But like so many of its promises, the Obama
administration’s tough talk about Sudan has not translated into
tough policy. In fact, after years of blasting George W. Bush’s
Sudan policy, Obama is now being slammed for
offering too much carrot and not enough stick to a
government whose president is the first sitting head of state to
be indicted by the International Criminal Court, for war crimes
and crimes against humanity.

Obama’s special envoy to Sudan, Scott Gration, says he
wants to build rapport with Khartoum. He created controversy
recently with his bizarre
statement that he would win over Sudanese President Omar
al-Bashir with “cookies…gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes,
agreements, talk, engagement.”

Clinton has similarly called for “a menu of incentives and
disincentives, political and economic.”

In August, Gration suggested to Congress that Sudan be
taken off the U.S. terrorism list, thus laying the basis to lift
heavy sanctions previously imposed on Khartoum. Gration has also
created controversy by stating that the Darfur genocide is over
and that the deaths still occurring there are merely the
“remnants of genocide.”

Unlike his predecessor, President Obama rarely talks
publicly about Sudan. After Obama failed to mention Sudan in his
SOTU address to Congress, Darfur activists released a statement
…”We are very far from the unstinting resolve on Sudan that
President Obama promised in the campaign.”

China is complicit with genocide in Darfur through its
investment of more than $9 billion in oil in exchange for arms,
and in its refusal to back U.N. action against the Bashir
regime.

But Obama hasn’t talked to China about its unconscionable
support for Bashir. Which recently led 44 members of Congress to
send a letter to the president. It stated, in part, that Obama’s
“failure to exert sufficient public pressure on China regarding
its relationship with Khartoum will send a signal to the rest of
the world that the United States places other interests ahead of
achieving peace in Sudan.”

The president’s neglect of Sudan has caused much
disappointment among human rights groups. A recent Save Darfur
email stated, “As [Obama] took office, he promised
high-level leadership to bring peace to Darfur and all of Sudan.
Unfortunately, Obama’s strong words in the campaign have yet to
be accompanied by the kind of decisive leadership we expected
from the new president.”

Prominent Darfur advocate John Prendegast wrote in October,
“Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden talked tough when
they were presidential candidates, but this administration’s day
to day diplomacy on Sudan has been troubling.” He continued, “For
the past seven months, U.S. diplomacy toward Sudan has veered
dangerously in the direction of appeasing Sudan’s ruling National
Congress Party.”

You know things are bad when a former U.N. employee scolds
you for inaction. In December the world body criticized the
administration for its failure to enforce an arms embargo,

stating, “In contrast to the leadership of 2004 and 2005, the
United States appears to have now joined the group of influential
states who sit by quietly and do nothing to ensure that sanctions
protect Darfurians.”

Obama’s neglect risks wasting what is a critical year for
Sudan. Its first multi-party elections are planned for April, and
a referendum on southern independence from the north is set for
next January. There have already been allegations of electoral
interference by the Bashir regime, and if the elections are not
free, there is a good chance Southern Sudanese may give up and go
back to war.

Obama recently told reporters that the U.S. would increase
pressure on Sudan if the government does not respond to more
engagement. But Khartoum has never responded to anything but
credible threats (and sometimes not even then).

And Bashir and his cronies clearly do not see Obama as a
credible threat. After Obama’s election, Sudan’s ambassador to
the U.N.
dismissed his promises of a tough Sudan policy as “only
election slogans.” Sudan advocates are slowly coming
to the same conclusion.

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I went back to my wonderful hotel, the Capital, as good a
hotel as there is on the planet, and rendezvoused with my wife,
who had been dining with her extended family, all Arkansans. We
had a late night snack and then off to sleep and then I went to
the airport.

That was when the nightmare began. There was a modest rain,
and somehow that made the airplanes late. This was a problem
because my travel called for me to fly to Dallas, then double
back to fly to Kansas City. My speech was early in the morning so
if I missed my connection in Dallas, I would miss the speech, to
an important group, the American Society of Civil
Engineers.

I got scared and decided to get a car and driver to take me
to KC. On the map it didn’t look that bad. I figured it would
take six or seven hours. I called the limo company and they said
they had a highly experienced driver who knew the route in the
dark.

I waited an hour and there in the luggage claim area of the
airport appeared a rumpled man in livery who happily told me he
would be my driver. He walked uncertainly towards his beat up
looking Lincoln Town Car and off we went. I asked him several
times if he were sure he knew the way.

“What are you?” he asked. “Jew? Greek? Italian?”

“I’m Jewish, as you well know,” I said. “Do you know the
way to Kansas City?”

“Of course,” he said.

Okay. I’ll make this short and sweet. He didn’t know the
way. He was the most race-conscious person I ever met. Almost at
once he started baiting me about being Jewish. He told me
repeatedly about the superiority of black religious practice. It
was as if I had Al Sharpton in the car with me. He got lost in
the dark in the hills and hollers of Northern Arkansas. He took
us forty miles out of our way. His car only had one headlight and
the brakes were pitiful. He had no GPS. HE HAD NO IDEA OF HOW TO
GET TO KANSAS CITY. He had a pitiful map he had stitched together
from Google and kept taking his eyes off the road to read it or
try to read it.

He made fun of my hero, Martin Luther King, Jr. He
belittled and mocked my history of demonstrating for civil rights
for blacks and my free legal work for them in New Haven.

For the last four hours of the nine-hour trip, he preached
at me in his imitation of a black preacher–his preacher–about
my iniquitous ways and how I was destined for damnation.

It was only by constant prayer and by the miracle of my
little built-in GPS in my Verizon Voyager that I got through the
night. Only because of the Verizon GPS were we able to find my
hotel, the fantastic Marriott in downtown KC.

Still, because he had worked so hard, if so fecklessly, I
gave him an immense tip and paid for a room for him at my hotel.
He never thanked me. Wow, was I glad to get to my room where the
thoughtful ASCE people had set out a tea maker and herbal tea and
honey. For a long time, I was too jacked up to sleep.

That man, taking me through the night, promising he knew
the way, lying about all of it….well, you can guess who he
reminded me of. I won’t even say it.

I hasten to add that these are just my opinions and I am
sure the man has many good points and many faithful friends and
fans. And his emphasis on defining everyone and everything in
terms of race was what really bothered me the most, naturally.
Well good luck to him anyway.

Saturday
Up feeling
surprisingly well in the morning. These were super smart people,
these Civil Engineers. The speech went great and then I was off
to the friendly KC airport and then, my amigos, off to
Mexico.

Still, problems. My flight to Cabo greatly delayed. But by
a stroke of something, my wife was on her way somewhere and our
paths crossed in DFW. Her plane was late, too, so we got to spend
a lot of time together. American Airlines took their usual great
care of us, parking us in an electric cart off to the side of the
seats. TV’s all around the terminal were showing The World Series
and it was all great. American Airlines is so much better at
handling its passengers than anyone else it’s almost pathetic for
the others.

A middle-aged man came up to me as I was waiting for a taco
and told me he was a fan from Alabama. “We Southerners knew what
was coming with Obama,” he said archly. “We know his type. We
could see the stitches on the fastball.”

I am not sure I knew what he meant and I don’t care for
racists of any race, but by then my plane was leaving so I didn’t
really have time to engage him. I was on my way. It was a
pleasant, short night flight with pleasantly quiet cabin mates.
The guy next to me seemed to know every detail of life in Mexico.
It sounded pretty good. Cheap food, cheap lodging, not much
pressure.

In Cabo, American Airlines had a greeter for me to whisk me
through customs and onto a van to my hotel. I didn’t get there
until after midnight but a super friendly, good-looking couple
from the Young Presidents, one of my very favorite groups, were
there to meet me and take me to my room. Young Presidents, super
successful young business people, are consistently on the ball.
My room was lovely, with a fabulous ocean view in the moonlight.
I had no trouble at all falling asleep and only woke up at dawn
to see an immense cruise ship, still lit up from the night
before, gliding by in between the palm fronds.

A long, long way from being lost in Northern
Arkansas.

Wednesday
I am back in Los
Angeles now and it’s my birthday!!! I am 65. I have to tell you I
never in my life anticipated getting this old, this fast. It
seems as if I were 25 just a few days ago. (My college
girlfriend, Mary Just, and the wonderful Susan Sgarlat, and my
fabulous roommate, Arthur M. Best, had a super surprise party for
me back then at my apartment at 380 Riverside Drive. It was the
best party ever except for my 60th that my wife had for me and my
50th that TAS had for me. I can still recall how much
fun we had dancing to the song, “Shotgun,” by Junior Walker and
the All Stars. And Mary looked so cute. )

Anyway, I started out my day in my usual way, swimming in
my pool in Beverly Hills. Then breakfast and off to do Cavuto on
Business at Pac TV, then rushing off to do Wolf Blitzer at CNN,
then lunch with my great costumer and makeup artist, Lisa
Agustsson, at Talesai, a super good Thai place on Sunset. Then
rest, and then off to dinner with my son and his staggeringly
beautiful wife and Phil and Julie DeMuth and my nephew Matt and
Michael and Jordan Chinich. (Michael started my movie
career.)

Then, a long drive down to the desert, and then to bed,
only to be awakened at 3:15 by our son. He and his wife had
driven down to the desert, too, to stay at a hotel, and they
wanted to stop to exercise their dog, Buglette, in our yard. Yes.
At 3:15 AM. Yes. Then they decided they needed some food. Yes. By
then it was 4 AM. Then they wanted to talk to mommy and me, and
then at 4.30 they left.

This has been a very tiring birthday.

I am scared of getting old. I am scared of being ill. I am
scared of running out of money. Still, when I lie in bed with my
Brigid, I am happy.

It is so great to sleep in safe, glorious, beautiful
America. I just cannot get over it. No Gestapo. No NKVD. No
Cossacks. Just peace. I was restless after Tommy left (not much
peace there), so I swam for a while under the palms and the
moonlight coming through the fronds.

I don’t want this to ever end. But it will.

Meanwhile as I swam, all kinds of thoughts rushed through
my poor tired old brain:

Why doesn’t the Chief of Staff of the Army resign over the
colossal mishandling of that psycho Moslem terrorist who killed
all of those innocent people at Fort Hood? Where did personal and
command responsibility go?

Why don’t we change the Constitution to declare that this
is a nation founded on belief in a loving God, and that while all
are welcome, the preaching of hate and destruction against this
nation is not protected free speech.

You cannot beat something with nothing. If all we believe
in is making money and watching porn, we will not beat Moslem
Jihadism. If we forthrightly declare our belief in a God of love,
we have something infinitely great to believe in.

This was founded as a Christian country with belief in God
as the bedrock. We will not survive without that belief as a
general part of this land. Tolerance for all who keep the peace,
but no more atheism as the national religion and no more coddling
of terrorists out of political correctness. Well, as you can
tell, I am getting old.

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As is often the case when I’m doing brain-dead chores, I
was listening to a book while wrangling a load of laundry Sunday
afternoon. In this case a “Books on Tape” production of Dead
Heat, one of the best of Dick Francis’s recent works. I’d
read and enjoyed the 2007 novel before, but Martin Jarvis’s agile
reading of it adds a dimension.

It was with great sadness that after putting the CDs aside,
laundry done, I went on-line and learned that Francis had died on
Saturday at his home in the Cayman Islands. One can hardly be
surprised when someone 89 goes on. But it’s still very bad news
and a huge loss to the untold number of Dick Francis fans on both
sides of the Atlantic, me included, that he will no longer be
writing the taut crime thrillers we’ve come to enjoy over the
decades. Happily, Francis’s publishers, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, have
one more completed novel, Crossfire, a publication date
for which has not been announced.    

Those who know the name but haven’t had the pleasure may
think of Francis as “the horse writer.” Born in Wales to a horse
trainer, Francis said he can’t remember when he didn’t ride, but
admits in his autobiography that his first ride at about age five
was on a donkey.

Before turning to fiction writing in his forties, Francis
had flown RAF bombers in combat in WWII and then become a
championship steeple-chase jockey, often riding the Queen Mum’s
horses and coming within a whisker of winning the Grand National
in 1956. His novels aren’t horse-stories anymore than
Hamlet is a ghost-story. But all of his 42 crime novels
have something to do with the world of British horse racing, a
world Francis knew intimately, and could portray deftly, warts
and all.

The attraction to Francis for conservative TAS
readers — other than the pleasure of intelligently written
stories in lean, clear, insistent prose — is his conservative
protagonists. Francis doesn’t use the word, his novels are
apolitical with politicians getting hardly a mention at all. But
we’re probably justified in describing his heroes thus.

Francis does not have a series character. His heroes have
different names and are involved in a wide range of occupations.
But they’re all young, mostly in their thirties, physically and
mentally tough, courageous but not foolhardy, intelligent,
resourceful, self-disciplined, self-reliant, civil, and
thoroughly decent. They exemplify the manly virtues without
swaggering about it. Not a metro-sexual in the bunch. Not a
braggadocio either. No sense of entitlement. 

Francis’s bad guys subject his heroes to all manner of
physical and mental torment, which the good guys bear with
stoicism and overcome, along with the bad guys, by their wits and
courage. It’s good versus evil in a Francis story, and it doesn’t
take a philosophy major or a bioethicist to figure out which is
which. Francis’s stories ring with intelligence and strength.
They’re full of affirmation of life without anyone having to say,
“Would you like to talk about it?”

It’s no surprise that Francis’s heroes can and do take
physical punishment. They’re like their creator in this regard.
In his racing days Francis says he had his skull fractured once,
one or the other collar bones broken six times (he was married
with his collar bone in a brace), and his nose broken five times.
As for broken ribs, he said he quit counting after a while. But
like his heroes, Francis never complained about the constant
injuries that are the jockey’s lot. He said that compared to
Germans shooting at him while he attempted to drop bombs on them,
racing was a piece of cake. A pretty tough cake, but that’s how
he saw it. 

After one fall too many Francis retired from racing in 1957
to become a racing writer for the Sunday Express. It was
just a step, though a large one, from racing journalist to
writing novels based on the racing world. His first novel,
Dead Cert, hit bookstores in 1962. Since then his books
have sold more than six million copies and have been translated
into 20 languages.

Francis’s novels are found in the mystery section of
bookstores. But his deft handling of theme, character, and place
make his work more than genre fare. His work has the
I’ve-just-got-to-turn-the-page-to-see-what-happens insistence of
the good thriller, along with the depth of the well-done
mainstream novel.

Thanks to thorough research done, first by Francis’s wife
Mary who died in 2000, later by number two son Felix, readers get
a look at various worlds, including — the law in Silks,
the diplomatic corps and veterinary medicine in
Comeback, movie-making in Wild
Horses, cooking and the gourmet restaurant
business in Dead Heat, glassblowing in
Shattered, flying in Flying Finish, photography
in Reflex, et al.

Over the last three novels, Felix’s contribution has been
sufficient to lift him to the level of co-author, though the
style and stories of the last three are so consistent with the
body of Francis’s work that it’s clear that Dick has been at the
wheel throughout. And the throughout has been consistently good,
with Francis winning every prize for mystery fiction there is to
win to go along with the impressive book sales.

Francis was not one of those old guys stuck in a time warp.
He kept up. His later novels show the contemporary, culturally
diminished Britain without whining about it. But his stories
treat universal themes such that 1962′s Dead Cert and
the other novels in his impressive back-list are as readable
today as when they first appeared. I recommend them
to TAS readers.

The world has lost a champion on the racetrack, in the air
in defense of freedom, and on the page in defense of
intelligence, honesty, and decency. RIP Dick Francis. Your race
is run, and you done good.

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