Well, it seems to be in the bag now. I try to be a sunny the-glass-is-one-sixteenth-full kinda guy, but it’s hard to overestimate the magnitude of what the Democrats have accomplished. Whatever is in the bill is an intermediate stage: As the graph posted earlier shows, the governmentalization of health care will accelerate, private insurers will no longer be free to be “insurers” in any meaningful sense of that term (ie, evaluators of risk), and once that’s clear we’ll be on the fast track to Obama’s desired destination of single payer as a fait accomplis.
If Barack Obama does nothing else in his term in office, this will make him one of the most consequential presidents in history. It’s a huge transformative event in Americans’ view of themselves and of the role of government. You can say, oh, well, the polls show most people opposed to it, but, if that mattered, the Dems wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing. Their bet is that it can’t be undone, and that over time, as I’ve been saying for years now, governmentalized health care not only changes the relationship of the citizen to the state but the very character of the people. As I wrote in NR recently, there’s plenty of evidence to support that from Britain, Canada and elsewhere.
More prosaically, it’s also unaffordable. That’s why one of the first things that middle-rank powers abandon once they go down this road is a global military capability. If you take the view that the US is an imperialist aggressor, congratulations: You can cease worrying. But, if you think that America has been the ultimate guarantor of the post-war global order, it’s less cheery. Five years from now, just as in Canada and Europe two generations ago, we’ll be getting used to announcements of defense cuts to prop up the unsustainable costs of big government at home. And, as the superpower retrenches, America’s enemies will be quick to scent opportunity.
Longer wait times, fewer doctors, more bureaucracy, massive IRS expansion, explosive debt, the end of the Pax Americana, and global Armageddon. Must try to look on the bright side…
I watched a few minutes of Pelosi crossing the street to get to Congress, with an enormous symbolic gavel in hand, apparently trying to recreate the spirit of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Which is Orwellian on a host of levels: The original goal of the civil rights movement was to provide equal freedoms for all Americans; ObamaCare, once it reaches its full Hindenburg/Teddy Kennedy proportions, will take plenty of freedoms away. And it’s also a reminder that for the far left, history began in the 1960s.
On the other hand, Steve Green and Glenn Reynolds each note this issue isn’t over by a long shot today.
Still though, in the meantime, as Mark suggests above:
Investor’s Business Daily argues that the “health” debate is really a proxy fight on the size and role of government. According to their poll, 64 percent of people think the federal government has “too much power.” Correct. But a big chunk of that 64 percent voted less than 18 months ago for a man and a party explicitly committed to more government with more power, and they’re now living with the consequences. Obama is government, and government is Obama. That’s all he knows and all he’s ever known. You elected to the highest office in the land a man who’s never run a business or created wealth or made a payroll, and for his entire adult life has hung out with guys who’ve demonized (deemonized?) such grubby activities. Many of which associates he appointed to high office: Obama’s cabinet has less experience of private business than any in the last century. What it knows is government, and government’s default mode is to grow, and grow.
The Boston Globe notes: “Diversity training has swept corporate America. Just one problem: It doesn’t seem to work”:
Now a few social scientists are taking a hard look at these programs, and, so far, what they’re finding is that there’s little evidence that diversity training works. A paper published last year by the psychologist Elizabeth Levy Paluck of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School and the Yale University political scientist Donald Green comprehensively surveyed the literature on prejudice reduction measures and found no empirical support for the idea that diversity training programs change attitudes or behavior. Similarly, a 2008 literature review paper by Carol Kulik of the University of South Australia and Loriann Roberson of Columbia University found that, on the question of changing behavior, there were few trustworthy studies – and decidedly mixed results among those. And research by a team of sociologists on more than 800 companies over three decades has found that the best diversity training programs make little difference in who gets hired and promoted, and many programs actually decrease the number of women and minorities in management. “Even with best practices, you’re not going to get much of an effect,” says Frank Dobbin, a Harvard University sociology professor on the research team. “It doesn’t change what happens at work.”
Two observations: first: wouldn’t you expect someone associated with the Woodrow Wilson School to say that diversity training doesn’t work? But second, as Florence King memorably wrote a few years ago, in contradistinction to the misanthropy that Mad Men demonstrates each week, the American corporate world is already very much “the Republic of Nice.” And as Orrin Judd quips, “Don’t we all hate anyone who makes us go to a meeting?”
Click here to tune into the latest edition of PJM Political:
Join host Steve Green of VodkaPundit.com for the ultimate cocktail party, as Louis Armstrong, H.L. Mencken, and Ayn Rand — or at least their biographers — stop by:
Taken from his Silicon Graffiti video blog, Ed talks with historian Jennifer Burns, author of the recent book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. Jennifer will discuss how Rand, the ultimate contrarian managed to spend the 1950s alienating conservatives, the 1960s alienating liberals, and the 1970s alienating libertarians. As Groucho Marx would say, whatever it was, Rand was against it, or so it seemed.
Pres. Calvin “Silent Cal” Coolidge, the poster boy for the ’20s, was once asked what he thought of his achievements in office. He replied: “Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.”
That was the return to normalcy FDR was talking about. A government minding its own business, according to FDR, amounted to the spirit of fascism.
It’s not hard to see why so many liberals today take one look at the vast gatherings of decent, middle-class Americans known as tea parties and instantly think, “Fascists!” Never mind that fascists, properly understood, don’t usually demand less government intervention.
What we have here is a fundamental conflict of visions, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Sowell. One side believes that people are born into their station in life and that it is the government’s job to make their miserable lives a little better. Indeed, it is the natural order of things for the government to provide jobs, health care, and homes to the people. If you object to this concept of government, it must be because you want to “punish” the downtrodden and discriminated. You must be animated by racism, sexism, greed — “fascism!”
The other side says that our rights come from God, not from government. That while the government has an obligation to promote the general welfare, it doesn’t have a holy writ to design the nation as it sees fit. The Constitution is not a coupon insert in your local paper, brimming with all sorts of giveaways and two-for-one deals. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights delineate what the government cannot do, not what it can. What was so fantastic and revolutionary about that is that for the first time in history, a nation was founded on the proposition that the government should mind its own business. Believing that doesn’t make you a fascist, it makes you a patriot.
But the leaders of one America don’t see it that way, and probably never will. Which is why, whatever happens in Congress in the coming days and weeks, it will be “two Americas” for a very long time.
Read the whole thing. And then check out James Lileks, who flashes back to the days of the original Great Recession, circa 1976 to 1979.
The most obvious being that ABC felt it had to go outside the network to find someone for the job. Over the past few months the network has experimented with a number of guest hosts all from within ABC’s family: Jake Tapper, Terry Moran, Barbara Walters. Early on many viewed Moran as the likely successor to Stephanopoulos, who left to take over Diane Sawyer’s job at Good Morning America. Lately, however, Jake Tapper has appeared to be the crowd favorite. Only very recently did Amanpour’s name pop up as a possibility.
It seems clear that ABC was attracted to Amanpour’s international reporting bona fides — ABC head David Westin notes early on in his memo to staff that Amanpour boasts a “wealth of experience and knowledge, as well as a deep commitment to bringing news of the world to the American people” and that with her at the helm the network will now be able to “provide our audiences with something different on Sunday mornings. We will continue to provide the best in interviews and analysis about domestic politics and policies. But now we will add to that an international perspective.” He also said that over the years the network has talked to Amanpour about bringing her aboard but that it had never worked out until now. Needless to say, she’s also a woman, which marks a welcome and long overdue change to the Sunday morning political shows.
Incidentally, if ABC or CBS is still doing a 6:30 PM news show a decade from now and Diane Sawyer or Katie Couric decides to retire, I’m sure a network spokesman say about a replacement anchor, “Needless to say, he’s also a man, which marks a welcome and long overdue change to the network evening news shows”, right?
“Rahm thinks bipartisanship is a way to get what you want — to fake bipartisanship to get what you want,” a senior administration official told me. “He understands that’s a better way to get things done than to be nakedly partisan.”
Related: “How stupid must Ben Nelson feel tonight? He sold his soul in return for a kickback, he’s reviled in his own state and will likely never again be elected, and now his bribe has been removed from the hot mess that is the healthcare bill.”
Barack Obama campaigned offering a new era of sane government. And I believe he would do it if he had the chance. But he has been so sucked into the system that now he stands by while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi talks about passing health care via “deem and pass” — a tricky legislative device in which things get passed without members having the honor or the guts to stand up and vote for it.
Deem and pass? Are you kidding me? Is this what the Revolutionary War was fought for? Is this what the boys on Normandy beach were trying to defend? Is this where we thought we would end up when Obama was speaking so beautifully in Iowa or promising to put away childish things?
Linked by Glenn Reynolds, who has his theory as to why the Cartoon Network is more popular. Thanks.
Since it seems we’ll never have Fox News at the airports, is there any chance of switching from CNN to the Cartoon Network there? It would certainly soothe the nerves of the passengers better than CNN, as well as provide more honest reporting.
ABC, which Tom Hanks called home during his Bosom Buddies salad days claims, “Hanks Angers Conservatives.” But Victor Davis Hanson takes exception to the legacy media’s attempting to claim that the backlash against Tom Hanks’ racialist remarks to Time magazine when promoting his series on World War II in the pacific that’s currently airing on (Time-Warner-owned) HBO is purely partisan-driven:
Tom Hanks said this to Douglas Brinkley in a Time interview: “Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”
Some of us dissected this nonsense point by point. In subsequent remarks Hanks did not back away from his theses that the Pacific war was predicated on racism (I wonder whether our WWII alliances with China and the Philippines, or our prior alliance in WWI with Japan, were as well?), and thus similar to our attitudes in the current war on terror. (Racism apparently explains the American effort to foster democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, and save Muslims in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Kosovo, Kuwait, and Somalia.)
What was strange is the media’s reaction to the reaction. Why is being appalled by Hanks’s infantile philosophizing a “right-wing” or “conservative” reaction? Would not liberals as well be angry that in blanket fashion, Hanks had reduced veterans’ efforts in the Pacific after the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor (and to be followed by a magnanimous peace that fostered autonomous Japanese democracy) into largely a racist rage to annihilate?
Compare and contrast the thoughts of representatives associated with the Reuters news agency on Middle Eastern terrorists with American conservatives. Regarding the former, let’s flashback to Stephen Jukes, then the global news editor for Reuters on September 11th, 2001. As James Taranto wrote:
Stephen Jukes, global news editor for Reuters, the British wire service, has ordered his scribes not to use the word terror to refer to the Sept. 11 atrocity. . . . “We all know that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist,” Jukes writes in an internal memo. “To be frank, it adds little to call the attack on the World Trade Center a terrorist attack.”
So while a radical terrorist such Osama bin Laden or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed deserve special nuance from Reuters, what about half of the American people? Check out this article from Godfrey Hodgson, in MercatorNet, which describes him as:
“[The former] director of the Reuters’ Foundation Programme at Oxford University, and before that the Observer’s correspondent in the United States and foreign editor of the Independent. His most recent book is The Myth of American Exceptionalism (Yale University Press, 2009).”
And with a C.V. like that, Hodgson’s take on recent American history is just about as reactionary as you’d expect (emphasis in passages below mine):
During the cold-war years, and especially after the disgrace of Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954, public life in the United States was dominated by what I have called “the liberal consensus”. This does not mean (as conservative commentators occasionally try to suggest) that America was subject to the will of a liberal elite indifferent to the feelings and interests of “ordinary” Americans; it means that the public sphere, and in particular the mood of Congress, was ruled by a vast if unspoken compact in which the different political sides accepted elements of the other’s doctrine.
Thus, most liberals (who could equally be described as social democrats and progressives) shared the conservative, anti-communist ideology of the era; this was as true of the labour unions as it was of the Kennedy administration. At the same time, most conservatives accepted, if often grudgingly, the underlying principles of Roosevelt’s new deal; this could be said of the majority of elected Republicans, and the dominant figures and thinkers in corporate business-management and the law. [This gets history exactly wrong. Most conservatives, whether pre-National Review paleocons such as Albert J. Nock, or proto-libertarians such as Ayn Rand and even H.L. Mencken did not accept, grudgingly or otherwise the New Deal. And the Republicans of the time in office were "me too" Rockefeller liberals, until Barry Goldwater and then Reagan began making inroads in the 1960s. -- Ed]
The Kennedy-Johnson years saw many “outliers” to both left and right: union leaders, black leaders, intellectuals on the left, and old Taftite or new Goldwaterite conservatives. But it is possible to speak, without doing violence to the truth, of a liberal consensus in American public philosophy in the period. In broad terms, Americans accepted social-democratic government and a mixed economy at home and the containment of communism as the chief principle of foreign policy.
Since 1968, everything has changed – in such a way that the world in which Lyndon Johnson could dominate the political scene has disappeared into the “urns and sepulchres of mortality”.
Before 1965, each of the two parties that dominated American politics was a coalition of ideologically and demographically distinct elements. The division between them was rooted in the events of the 1860s: civil war, the emancipation of the slaves, the reconstruction of the south and its ending. The legacy of these events was that the core cleavage in American party politics was not a straightforward left-right one.
But since Richard Nixon’s years in power (1968-74), [even though Nixon governed domestically as an extension of LBJ's Great Society? -- Ed] and even more since Ronald Reagan’s (1980-89), the division between the parties has become as ideological – and as much a conflict between “haves” and “have-nots” – as in Europe. The pivot was the events of the 1960s: the civil-rights struggles, the Vietnam war, the early women’s movement, and the decade’s social libertinism.
* * *
The large shift in the intellectual history of the United States in the late 20th century continued as conservative ideas advanced in the law schools and eventually the Supreme Court. The court, once controlled by a liberal majority that accepted the doctrine of social activism inherited from Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis D Brandeis, came to acquire a more or less reliable five-to-four permanent majority on the right. A single example can stand for many: the Buckley vs Valeo judgment in 1974, which held that political ads were free speech and thus protected by the first amendment to the constitution. This ended attempts to reform the electoral-finance system.
Perhaps even more important in America’s large-scale move to the right was the changing profile of the news industry. The fashionable depiction of a liberal media establishment had always been exaggerated; the majority of journalists may long have been liberals, but most of their bosses were always conservatives. [So what? This is a variation on the Folk Marxist trope that all businesses are conservative. -- Ed] If the news media had once sustained the “liberal consensus”, however, there has been a steady change over the last half century in the direction of more variety and then more conservatism. [Sure. Just look at their voting records. -- Ed]
A few landmarks indicate the trend. William F Buckley’s founding of the National Review in 1955 broke the monopoly of liberalism in the intellectual magazines. Robert Bartley’s promotion to head of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal in 1972 (for which he had worked since 1964) allowed him to make it the vehicle of undiluted conservative propaganda. [Only in the editorial section. -- Ed] Between the the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, the three television networks found their New-York-liberal tone gradually diluted – first by the appearance of cable (albeit the pioneering Atlanta-based CNN was relatively liberal), then by the foundation of Fox News, owned by Rupert Murdoch and controlled by Richard Nixon’s spin-doctor Roger Ailes. [Until Fox News came along, how exactly did cable TV in and of itself "dilute" the monolithic liberal nature of the Legacy Media, since, as Hodgson acknowledges, CNN was and is liberal. -- Ed]
The result of this overall social and intellectual progression (or regression) has been a profound change in the United States’s ideological weather. The difference helps to explain why Lyndon Johnson could preside over a monsoon of liberal legislation that completed and in some ways transcended the achievements of his hero Franklin Roosevelt, whereas Barack Obama’s more modest reform efforts have become mired in frustration amid bitter polarisation and populist resurgence.
President Obama reached office on the promise of changing America. But the country had already changed. It is time to shift attention from the individual personality and specific failures of the president to what has happened to the United States’s public philosophy and its political-media climate.
So there you have it. In the morally inverted world of Reuters, Osama bin Laden could be a terrorist…or he could be a freedom fighter! (Tell that to those who died on 9/11, or those whom Al Qeada and the Taliban would return to a Stone Age lifestyle.)
But those conservatives seeking to be free from statism in America represent “regression”, not to mention “bitter polarisation and populist resurgence”, ginned up by Rupert Murdoch, the English left’s favorite boogieman, and “controlled by Richard Nixon’s spin-doctor Roger Ailes.”
Great job, Reuters. I’d suggest picking up a few extra gallons of condescension from the company store, but I doubt you’ll run out anytime soon. Or as Theodore Dalrymple notes on the Pajamas homepage, “Our Contemporary Sanctimony Puts the Victorians to Shame.”
Update: ABC’s Peter Jennings had a worldview quite similar to Reuters. Evidently the network believes such an anti-American, pro-Middle Eastern tone has been lacking since his untimely passing, something they plan to rectify shortly.
After Scott Brown’s victory, we heard that the White House was going to “pivot” toward jobs. But the Obami did no such thing. Doubling down, and doubling down again, became the order of the day. We’ve had 24/7 coverage of health care — when not interrupted by news of a new low in U.S.-Israeli relations. So how’s that affecting Obama’s standing? For the first time, he’s “upside down” in Gallup — with 46 approving and 47 percent disapproving of his performance. Over at Rasmussen, only 44 percent of voters approve of Obama’s performance.
For members of Congress, it’s getting harder and harder to deny reality. Whether one looks at the generic congressional polling or the president’s own standing (which is as good a predictor as any of the fate of his party in the midterm election), the conclusion is the same: ObamaCare and the attendant procedural stunts are political losers for the Democrats. Republicans are struggling mightily to defeat ObamaCare, but one senses it’s a predicament that’s not altogether unwelcome. After all, running against ObamaCare and Democratic tricksterism may have its benefits both in November and in 2012.
The New York Times gives us a glimpse into David Axelrod’s mood, which confirms exactly what the president tends to exude when talking about critics:
In an interview in his office, Mr. Axelrod was often defiant, saying he did not give a “flying” expletive “about what the peanut gallery thinks” and did not live for the approval “of the political community.” He denounced the “rampant lack of responsibility” of people in Washington who refuse to solve problems, and cited the difficulty of trying to communicate through what he calls “the dirty filter” of a city suffused with the “every day is Election Day sort of mentality.”
Unfortunately for the White House, these days “the peanut gallery” critics more often than not are reflecting what many Americans outside the Beltway are saying. And that’s not just an Election Day concern for those in the White House. Their jobs there entail representing those who sent them to Washington in the first place.
BAIER: Do you know which specific deals are in or out, as of today?
OBAMA: I am certain that we’ve made sure, for example, that any burdens on states are alleviated, when it comes to what they’re going to have to chip in to make sure that we’re giving subsidies to small businesses, and subsidies to individuals, for example.
BAIER: So the Connecticut deal is still in?
OBAMA: So that’s not — that’s not going to be something that is going to be in this final package. I think the same is true on all of these provisions. I’ll give you some exceptions though.
Something that was called a special deal was for Louisiana. It was said that there were billions — millions of dollars going to Louisiana, this was a special deal. Well, in fact, that provision, which I think should remain in, said that if a state has been affected by a natural catastrophe, that has created a special health care emergency in that state, they should get help. Louisiana, obviously, went through Katrina, and they’re still trying to deal with the enormous challenges that were faced because of that.
(CROSS TALK)
OBAMA: That also — I’m giving you an example of one that I consider important. It also affects Hawaii, which went through an earthquake.
Incidentally, Jim Hoft quotes ABC News’ Jonathan Karl’s report on the “Louisiana Purchase”, who said, “I am told the section applies to exactly one state: Louisiana, the home of moderate Democrat Mary Landrieu, who has been playing hard to get on the health care bill.”
This moment, from Bret Baier’s interview on Fox News with Obama, might just be one of the biggest “WTF?!” moments from Obama’s presidency yet. Obama is either completely making things up, living in an alternate reality, or really, really confused.
Concurrent with the administration and the left-hand side of Congress continuing to distance themselves from reality, as Mark Steyn noted recently, the American people are becoming increasingly re-engaged with politics:
Jonah, I enjoyed your column today – a nice rebuke to David Brooks’ latest silly unpersuasive thesis. You write:
[Michael] Lind argues that the right has become a “counterculture [that] refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the rules of the game that it has lost”… Whereas the Luddites and know-nothings once dropped out for the “Summer of Love,” today’s Luddites and know-nothings have signed up for the “Winter of Hate.”
That’s almost exactly backwards. There was more right-wing “dropping out” in the Nineties, when Dan Rather was warning of”the shadowy right-wing militia movement” and there was a kind of psychological Ruby Ridge siege mentality among a certain sliver of the right: Find a strip of land, live off the grid, stockpile ammunition, raise emus for meat, and keep your eyes peeled. There’s your right-wing counterculture.
A New Hampshire neighbor of mine did this for a while. Then he figured out the ATF guys don’t need to besiege his stockade. What with GPS and so forth, Obama can take him out with an unmanned drone launched from Diego Garcia and no-one would know a thing about it. So he came back down to town and ran for the Select Board as a budget-cutter – and won.
The Tea Party has a certain paradoxical quality – a mass movement of self-reliant individuals, etc. But Brooks and Lind are wrong: It represents a conscious re-engagement, and a rejection of dropping out. That’s why the left is rattled.
On the other hand, as Iowahawk satirically notes, channeling his inner Mamet, and (language alert) firing plenty of F***ing F-bombs along the way, patent medicine salesmen who are desperate enough will do pretty much anything to earn a commission.
When you think over the last year, it’s clear Obama has some of the most inept advisers in recent presidential history. Allowing him to risk his entire presidency on a global overhaul of health care – when an incremental overhaul could have been had simply for the asking – seems absurd politics, win or lose. It also isn’t worth that much in the grand scheme of things – other than the obvious, increasing the amount of the economy under government control. The nostalgia for marxism inherent in it all this almost pathetic. Don’t these people live in the real world?
At Big Hollywood, James Hudnall has a Climategate-related question. He asks, “What Will Television Do With All Their Scare-Programming?” Read the whole thing; there’s too much for me to quote to do it justice. But here’s the pith of the gist of the marrow, as James Lileks might say:
But two things happened last year that shot an arrow in the heart of the beast; one of the worst winters on record and Climategate. And the hits keep on coming. Now it turns out that NASA, who claimed for years that their data proves Global Warming is real, was actually just using CRU data all along. And the CRU couldn’t back up any of its data. In fact, they “lost the records” when they were forced to produce them. Oops!
So now these news channels who’ve been trumpeting the story as fact, all those cable networks who spent millions on documentaries hyping it, all those TV shows hawking green as the in color; they all look like fools. Or worse, they look like they were in on what will go down as one of the biggest scams in human history.
What would you do if you were in their position? It’s not hard to understand why they’re carrying on like Climategate never happened. They have a president in the White House as clueless as they are, pushing the Cap and Trade agenda as if those darn glaciers are just about melted. We have to do something fast! Not a moment too soon, kiddies.
The climate scam is worth trillions of dollars and who knows how many millions, if not billions have been spent to win over the public. Too bad the public is losing interest fast. People are increasingly saying it’s all made up or at best, exaggerated. You can’t put toothpaste back in the tube. The proverbial genie is out of the bottle, The cat has left the bag. There’s no going back to the lies and spin. But our friends in the media are still living a lie. It’s like they threw a party and only their mom and a few friends showed up. What was once a hip thing to be a part of, like smoking, is fast becoming a loser tattoo on their foreheads.
The public’s trust is evaporating and it’s not helping that many in the media are circling the wagons. As their ratings drop and their Nielsens tank, as the suits upstairs start laying off staff, they’re going to have to deal with reality. Something they’ve tried to deny all these years. Yes, folks. The warm-mongers are in fact the deniers.
The economy is in a down-spiral. Telling people they need to cut back is like rubbing salt in their wounds. Promising them “green jobs” is like telling a 40 year old Santa Claus is coming to town.
A 1930s scare film such as Reefer Madness was seen as high camp by liberals by the time the 1970s rolled around, as were Jack Webb’s anti-communist efforts of the late ‘1950s. But seventies liberals, perhaps spurred on by the title of Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book Future Shock, if not the actual contents, had plenty of fears of their own, and wanted you to share the cold sweat of their own brand of paranoia.
Recall the horrific slate of politically-oriented science fiction films that Hollywood churned out in-between 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and 1977’s Star Wars. Films such asSoylent Green, Silent Running and ZPG were obsessed with the Malthusian nightmares of overpopulation and deforestation that dominated the overculture of the time. Rollerball depicted a world controlled by giant corporations, at precisely the same time that Steve and Woz were cobbling together the first Apples in their Bay Area garage. They were followed by Leonard Nimoy’s cheesy synthesizer-scored In Search Of TV series a few years later, which explored Global Cooling, Killer Bees, Deadly Ants, and other ’70s obsessions.
Today, these ’70s efforts are seen as equally campy as Refer Madness became three or four decades after its release. The eco-doomsday films of the naughts, such as The Day After Tomorrow, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, and Al Gore’s own An Inconvenient Truth are well on the way to becoming late night camp TV themselves, and at much faster rate as their equally schlocky predecessors.
Perhaps someone can recut Al’s film and dub it “Climate Madness.” Maybe hire William Shatner to cut an exaggerated Jack Webb-style parody opening.
Who knows: “Climate Madness” could eventually even have the same impact on its genre as his wife Tipper’s efforts to curb raunchy lyrics in pop music.
Related: Zombie observes some camp Malthusian performance art on the Streets of San Francisco, here.
As Noemie Emery writes at the Weekly Standard, the ObamaCare train wreck is “beginning to look like The Godfather crossed with a Marx Brothers movie, a bad sign for an administration that came in touting competence and projecting the feel of a Frank Capra film:”
Strangest of all is the popular theory that if the bill passes—by bribes, threats, and payoffs, and against fierce opposition—there will be a triumphant, Rose Garden signing, and then the whole issue will fade. Good luck with that. A bill forced through against such popular dissent is likely to start, and not settle, contention, for two big reasons.
First, this bill is not only disliked, it is disliked intensely, and across a wide swath of the population. Majorities not only dislike it, but majorities of those majorities dislike it intensely. Twice as many independents dislike as support it intensely, and the intensity of antipathy has only grown. They dislike it intensely because it will affect them intensely, on a personal level. Tax cuts don’t affect everyone equally. Very few people are ever on welfare. Most people who live long enough do get on Medicare, but not everyone does at the same time. Health care involves everyone, every day, on an emotional, primitive, life and death level. Everyone needs doctors. Everyone has had an experience, or has friends and relations who have had the experience, where the right or wrong medical treatment at the right or wrong time by the right or wrong doctor made the difference between life and death, between a full and a partial recovery, and an experience that was neither traumatic nor financially ruinous, or one that was hell on all counts. Everyone fears a system that could give them the wrong doctor instead of the right one at just the wrong moment, and everyone, no matter how rich, strong, well-connected, or seemingly healthy, knows that an accident or a bad diagnosis can come any day. Polls show that most people believe this plan will make their care more expensive, and at the same time, less satisfactory than what they already have. Add to this the fact that the bill by necessity trips a mare’s nest of hot wires—abortion, rationing, euthanasia on the basis of “social utility,” and the whole moral complex of beginning- and end-of-life issues—and one has no reason for thinking this issue will be laid to rest soon.
Second, the bill’s defenders say “process” themes don’t move the public, and they may be right. But what they call “process” in this case reads like “corruption” to others, such as the bribes, threats, and buyoffs with which the bill cleared the Senate. Three hundred million dollars to buy Mary Landrieu, over a billion to pay off Ben Nelson. Besides being corrupt, the administration is looking inept in the bargain: The past week brought Massapiece Theatre, along with the wavering Democratic congressman whose brother was offered a judgeship just as he was being asked to the White House for a collegial talk. This is beginning to look like The Godfather crossed with a Marx Brothers movie, a bad sign for an administration that came in touting competence and projecting the feel of a Frank Capra film.
In fact, the process is part of the problem, and stems from the bill’s weakness, which makes payoffs essential: “Because the legislation is frightening and unpopular, Democrats have had to resort to serial bribery,” writes George Will, correctly. “Massachusetts voted immediately after the corruption of exempting, until 2018, union members from the tax on high value” insurance plans. This and the Cornhusker Kickback helped fuel Scott Brown’s upset, which created the need for still more extravagant buyoffs: Each bribe makes the bill more unpopular, creating the need for more bribes. Senate rules may bore voters, but they find this arresting—one reason the strife will go on.
Other big bills may have been controversial, but most passed in the end by comfortable margins. No reform bill on this grand scale has ever passed in the face of such opposition, with solid majorities so firmly against it, with no votes at all from the opposite party, and with the party in power so split. No such bill had an organized opposition—the tea party movement—in place against it, ready to march at the first opportunity. Opposition to health care has been very good to the Republican party, and as long as it is, the party will use and run on it. Legal challenges from the states, already in progress, will also add to the air of contention. This is a war that could go on for years.
Liberals say Democrats have to pass this bill to prove they can govern. But will the public see wasting a year on something that’s not a priority, then pushing a bill they don’t want through multiple payoffs, and ending up with something they think will make their lives worse as a species of “governing” they want anything more to do with? Meanwhile, the Democrats are in the intensive care unit, their president wounded, their members demoralized, their coalition in tatters. Come November, voters may decide they’d rather be much less “governed”—or governed by somebody else.
The “elite” the restorationists dislike is better understood as a “new class” (to borrow a phrase from the late Irving Kristol). The legendary economist Joseph Schumpeter predicted in 1942 that capitalism couldn’t survive because capitalist prosperity would feed a new intellectual caste that would declare war on the bourgeois values and institutions that generate prosperity in the first place. When you hear that conservatives are anti-elitist, you should think they’re really anti–new class. Conservatives see this new class of managers, meddlers, planners, and scolds as a kind of would-be secular aristocracy empowered to declare war on traditional arrangements and make other decisions “for your own good.”
And that’s why Obama backlash is part of the culture war. Defenders of Obamacare, cap-and-trade, and the rest of the Democratic agenda insist that they’re merely applying the principles of good governance and the lessons of sound, sober-minded policymaking. No doubt there’s some truth to that, at least in terms of their motives. But from a broader perspective, it is obvious that theirs is a cultural agenda as well.
The quest for single-payer health care is not primarily grounded in good economics or in good politics but in a heartfelt ideological desire for “social justice.” The constant debate over whether the “European model” is better than ours often sounds like an empirical debate, but at its core it’s a cultural and philosophical argument that stretches back more than a century.
The restorationists reside on one side of that debate, while the Obama administration and the bulk of the progressive establishment reside on the other. And that debate is far from over.
Connery’s overall performance was pretty awesome in Brian DePalma’s 1987 big screen version of The Untouchables, though the Oscar he won for best supporting actor is likely more for his overall career than his role in the movie itself. But Connery’s accent in the film is much more of his own Scottish brogue than anything authentically Irish sounding. So it’s not surprising that he made the cut in this collection of video clips assembled by the British Screen Rush Website of “The Worst Irish Accents In The History Of Cinema.”
Not to mention their much ballyhooed claiming of embracing a tolerance for diversity. Back in 2002, Charles Krauthammer famously wrote, “To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.”
Moody’s Investor Service, the credit rating agency, will fire a warning shot at the US on Monday, saying that unless the country gets public finances into better shape than the Obama administration projects there would be “downward pressure” on its triple A credit rating.
Examining the administration’s outlook for the federal budget deficit, the agency said: “If such a trajectory were to materialise, there would at some point be downward pressure on the triple A rating of the federal government.”
If you had a time machine and it was good for only one trip, would you go back and give contraceptives to Hitler’s parents — or to the parents of John Maynard Keynes?
Obviously, I’m being facetious, but only by half.
Hitler discredited fascism, by launching wars of aggression and sending millions of Jews, Gypsies, gays, and the handicapped to the gas chambers. And, minus the extent that he started all those wars and killed all those people — well, good for Hitler.
Again, obviously, I’m being facetious.
But I’m not being facetious at all when I tell you that Keynes legitimized fascism, by giving decent, liberal democracies license to tax and spend and borrow in the name of political expedience.
Look, whatever Keynes may have gotten right — I suppose he could wipe his own bottom unassisted — what he got wrong is precisely what bedevils us today. And Keynes, the fascistic bastard, I think got it wrong on purpose.
Let me explain.
Quite famously, Keynes wrote, “In the long run we are all dead.” Which politicians of the Great Depression, and long thereafter, took to mean, “Right now I can buy votes with money borrowed from people who aren’t even born.” And Keynes enabled them. Keynesian theory held that governments should save money in the good times, so that they could spend it during lean times to “stimulate” the economy.
Gee, where have we heard that word before?
But let’s be frank here. That bit Keynes said about saving money must have been with a wink and a nod and a nudge, nudge — because popular democracies almost never save any money. And Keynes was too smart not to know it, and too conniving not to say it.
Of course, Keynesian theory also held that inflation and recession couldn’t coexist — but then Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter and the 1970s came along and disproved all that. And yet, somehow, liberal governments still hold by Keynes.
