I was so busy making plans to celebrate Scott Brown’s victory over what’s-her-name — you know the lady who likes to jail innocent people — in the Massachusetts Senatorial race next Tuesday that I neglected to catch news of President Obama’s latest plan to tax success. It’s a doozy.

You have to hand it to Team Obama. They do have a sense of humor. Just as Obama  called his preposterous budget “A New Era of Responsibility” (since when did  we start giving titles to budgets? This one ought to have been called “Gone with the Wind”), so he calls this plan to impose a new tax on the nation’s 50 or so largest financial institutions “a financial crisis responsibility fee.”  George Orwell, where are you?

“We want our money back,” the President of the formerly free world said, “and we’re going to get it back.”

Golly gee. Tough talk, what? None of that “monitoring the situation” or “isolated extremists” here.  No siree, when it comes  to putting it to Wall-Street fat cats Barack Hussein Obama gets down to business.

The money in question, of course, is the $700 billion appropriated by President Bush to help out major financial institutions that were teetering on the brink of collapse in the fall of 2008. It wasn’t long, however, before big gobs of that dough were shoveled to other institutions — Government Motors, for example (formerly known as General Motors).

As for getting his money back, he pretty much has — from the banks, that is.  Many refused assistance in the first place.  Most who took it have paid the dough back. Doesn’t matter. Obama still wants to tax ‘em to put a dent in what he calls “massive profits and obscene bonuses.”

What about the car companies that lined their pockets with the people’s pelf? Have they paid the government — i.e., you and me — back? No. What is the president, who is Oh-so-concerned-about-the-American-taxpayer, what’s he going to do about that $66 billion? How do you spell “United Auto Workers”?

The president’s plan is bad from just about every point of view. For one thing, as Nicole Gelinas points out in a characteristically percipient column in The New York Post today, the tax won’t even have the chastening effect on banking practices that the president claims to be interested in. ”All imposing this fee will do,” Gelinas observes, “is hammer home the idea in bondholders’ minds that the firms  — reportedly the nation’s top 20 financial companies — are too big to fail, that the government will bail them out again the next time they screw up.”

Exactly right.

But I’d like to come back to those “massive profits and obscene bonuses.” I first heard about Obama’s latest plan to raise taxes from a friend over lunch. He made the interesting observation that penalizing a company for “massive,”  i.e., large profits was like penalizing someone for “massive,”i.e., robust health. Generally, large profits are an outward sign that a company is doing well, just as physical robustness is an outward sign that all is well in the personal health department. Obama is constitutionally an egalitarian. Like the Dodo in Alice in Wonderland, his position is “prizes for everyone.“ He looks at excellence of every kind with suspicion, because excellence is by definition discriminatory. If Sally excels in relation to John, Dot, and Timothy, that means that Sally does better. Is that fair? And if John Doe, who works for Acme Bank and Finance, has a great year and is rewarded with a fat bonus, that means he does better than Jack, George, and Aloysius, whose bottom lines were not so cheery this year.

Capitalism is all about competition. When there are competitions, there are winners and losers. The great thing about capitalism is that it is such an efficient engine for the production of wealth that everyone benefits — though some, of course, benefit more than others. The alternative, as we know “par expériences nombreuses et funestes” universal immiseration.  You might have thought that the President of the United States would have taken that elementary economic fact on board. Think again.

Yesterday, I was pleased to be able to attend part of a conference in New York on Reclaiming American Liberty. Sponsored by The Hudson Institute, in conjunction with Family Security Matters and Human Events, the day-long conference set itself the lugubrious task of registering the many ways in which American liberty is being eroded by an intrusive government. The morning panels, which I missed, included of economic matters and national security, and included talks by Betsy McCaughey, Gen. Richard Myers, and Andrew McCarthy, among many others. The afternoon panel was devoted to national sovereignty, which is another ways of saying it was devoted to the task of self preservation. The panel, moderated by Midge Decter, featured talks by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Joseph Loconte, a research fellow at The King’s College in New York, my Pajamas Media colleague Claudia Rosett, and the Mark Steyn, the prolific author and columnist.

I won’t endeavor to provide a precis of the proceedings other than to note that the picture presented was a grim one. David Hume remarked that “It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.” But as we look around the world today, the assaults on liberty are as multifarious as they are insidious. Whether one considers the resurgence of socialist sentiment in this country and in Europe, the top-down policies promulgated by increasingly centralized and increasingly unaccounted governmental agencies, or the smorgasbord of legislation designed to stymie innovation and enforce conformity on issues from energy consumption to health care, we live in an age in which freedom is regularly bartered for the that peculiar emotion of virtue that is never far away from the heart of leftist sentimentality.

Although the speakers ranged widely, touching on issues from the proper way to deal with terrorists to the depredations of that embarrassing international sink hole, the United Nations, the unifying theme was something Mark Steyn dilated on in his remarks: political correctness.

The very phrase “political correctness” has a certain period feel to it — is it not just a bunch of silliness that sweep through college campuses in the 80s and 90s but that we are now well beyond?

Hardly. At the core of political correctness is a refusal of reality, a refusal to call things by their real names, hence a the propagation of a lie.

Today, the phrase “political correctness” is generally accompanied by a smile — an uneasy smile, but a smile nonetheless. The phrase describes some exaggerated bit of left-wing moralism — so exaggerated that it is hard to take seriously. We smile when we read about an elite American college that has enrolled the sin of “lookism” — the unacceptable belief that some people are more attractive than others–into its catalogue of punishable offenses. We laugh when hearing that a British academic has condemned Frosty the Snowman as a white “male icon” that helps “to substantiate an ideology upholding a gendered spatial/social system.” We scoff when we hear about the University of Michigan professor who complains that J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books “conventionally repeat much of the same sexist and white patriarchal biases of classical fairy tales.” We smile, we laugh, we scoff. But we do so uneasily.

Our two-year-old daughter has just embarked on the difficult exercise of saying “Massachusetts.” She doesn’t get it quite right, and as far as I know she can’t spell it yet, but then neither can the Martha Coakley campaign, whose latest video ad attacking Scott Brown bore the credit line “Paid for by Massachusettes Democratic Party and Authorized by Martha Coakley for Senate. Approved by Martha Coakley.”

Big deal, right? It’s just a typo. But just imagine, as the folks at Powerline ask, if Sarah Palin had approved an ad that misspelled Alaska. Dan Quayle on steroids, what?

Massachusetts is the state to watch. Can Republican candidate Scott Brown pull it off? Today, less than a week away, it is impossible to say. But were I Martha Coakley, the fact that it is impossible to say would have me very, very worried. Democratic voters in Massachusetts outnumber Republicans 3 to 1. In the normal course of events, Coakley would be solidly, even untouchably ahead. But she isn’t. The polls are all over the place. And Brown has momentum. Into the final stretch, he is raising money hand over fist, and the public performances I’ve seen are very impressive. The guy gets it. On issues from taxes to terrorism to health care reform, he dissents sharply and articulately from the big-government non-solutions proliferating from Washington and state capitals across the country.

He also understands something many of our career politicians have forgotten or perhaps never knew. That in a democracy, public servants serve the public, not themselves and their coterie of special interests. It seems simple, right? You learned it in civics 101, except of course they no longer teach civics 101. That had to go to make room for oppression studies 101 through 896.

Evidence of that lacuna regarding the proper workings of representative democracy is everywhere to be seen. Consider, for example, the debate on Monday between Brown, Coakley, and a third-party candidate. The exchange was moderated by David Gergen — the “insufferable David Gergen” as Powerline correctly observed. When the discussion turned to health care reform, Gergen went on the attack against Brown. The last time Washington set out to socialize health care (I paraphrase) under the Clintons, its defeat meant that it would be fifteen years before the next  serious effort to bring about a government takeover of health care (again, I paraphrase).

The most successful form of intimidation, because it is the most economical for the party doing the intimidating, is preemptive intimidation. You get the party being intimidated to do all the heavy lifting. They supply whatever coercion is needed — often very little. They make the concessions, often without a murmur. Any threats or violence are mostly in the past. Every now and then a ritual show of power might erupt to keep memories fresh. But for the most part the really successful intimidator relies on his victims to provide the stick. They don’t call it a stick, though. They call it “prudence,” “being responsible,” “acting with sensitivity towards the feelings of others.”

Consider, to take one example, the action of Yale University Press (and the university itself) over The Cartoons that Shook the World, Jytte Klausen’s book about the Danish caricatures of Mohammed. As all the world knows, Yale insisted at the last moment that the book be stripped of any representations of that 7th-century religious figure — not just the cartoons that were published in September 2005 in a Danish newspaper but also various artistic representations of Islam’s main man. Yale’s stated reason for this extraordinary interference into the business of a scholarly press was fear: it was afraid of Muslim violence if they published the images. Why did they wait until the eve of the book’s publication to make this determination? I think it had a lot to do with money, but that’s not to say that a large dollop of politically correct, reflexive capitulation didn’t enter into the equation, too. Cowards can be cunning. They can calculate the odds even as they watch their backs.

But what about the Metropolitan Museum of Art? According to the New York Post, they have a bad case of “jihad jitters.” “The Metropolitan Museum of Art,” the Post reported yesterday, “quietly pulled images of the Prophet Mohammed from its Islamic collection and may not include them in a renovated exhibition area slated to open in 2011.” Why? “The museum said the controversial images — objected to by conservative Muslims who say their religion forbids images of their holy founder — were ‘under review.’ ”

Why did George H.W. Bush lose to Bill Clinton in 1992? Doubtless you could adduce several reasons, including “it’s the economy, stupid.” But there was also the matter of a broken promise: “Read my lips: no new taxes.” Enterprising observers have compiled an illuminating collage of President Obama promising not to negotiate health care “reform” “behind closed doors.” He would bring “all parties together,” he said in one of his exhibitions of campaign foreplay, “broadcasting those negotiations on CSPAN so that the American people can see what the choices are.” During the campaign, CSPAN was his mantra: the objective correlative of his promise to make his administration the most “open and transparent” ever. It was Andrew Breitbart, I believe, who first connected these dots:

In fact, as the contrast between candidate Obama’s repeated invocation of CSPAN and President Obama’s repeated recourse to secrecy reveals, the only thing “transparent” about this administration is its dishonesty, which, like Falstaff’s, “is gross as a mountain, open palpable.” Even the circumspect Brian Lamb, CEO of CSPAN, was moved to lament Obama’s poaching on the prestige of the network to further the Democratic political agenda.

Left and right, the public has reacted badly to this blatant failure to honor a campaign promise that was made not once, not twice, but at least eight times. The President’ Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs, has made a bad situation worse by his hostile tergiversations.

“I covered that yesterday,” he said, but a look at his comments then shows that he didn’t.

What does it all mean? For one thing, it means that Obama’s deficit spending extends to the spiritual exchequer of political credibility. Economists tell us the United States will be in hock some $12 trillion by the time Obama gets done with us. How overdrawn will he be in the public trust department? Rightly or wrongly, the epithet “tricky Dick” clung like a limpet to Richard Nixon. What nickname will Obama earn? “Blaguing Barack”? “Hustling Hussein”? “Obfuscating Obama”?

If The Washington Post is to be believed, Democratic Senator Chris Dodd — you know, the chap with the “cottage” in Ireland, the sweetheart deals with various mortgage companies that you and I, with no patronage to dispense, could never wrangle, and a reputation for honesty that rivals that of Barney Frank — will announce later today that he is not seeking reelection. “Embattled Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd (D),” the paper reports, “has scheduled a press conference at his home in Connecticut Wednesday at which he is expected to announce he will not seek re-election, according to sources familiar with his plans.” Well, 30 years with his lips sewn to the public teat was probably enough, and, besides, Dodd’s poll numbers make Obama’s look good. The likely beneficiary of Dodd’s withdrawal is Connecticut’s Attorney General, Richard Blumenthal, around whom the nimbus of candidacy has been swirling for months. Blumenthal would certainly be a more creditable candidate than Chris Dodd. Would he be strong enough to defeat the likely challengers, former Congressman Rob Simmons or political novice Linda McMahon? As a Connecticut resident, I am rooting for Simmons, who I believe would have crushed Dodd. It will be interesting to see how the stars reconfigure themselves if Dodd does indeed withdraw. The Post suggests that both McMahon and Simmons would start “as an underdog in a general election matchup with Blumenthal.” Perhaps so. But underdogs have been known to win. And in this political environment, starting as an underdog may prove to be an bankable advantage.

Yesterday, I was speaking with a friend who has inside knowledge about the episode of Yale and the Danish cartoons–you know, the story of how Yale University Press, together with the Yale administration, insisted at the last minute that Jytte Klausen’s book The Cartoons that Shook the World be published without the cartoons and, indeed, without any depictions of Mohammed. John Donatich, director of the Yale University Press, and various members of the Yale Administration covered themselves with ignominy both in their original decision to censor Professor Klausen’s book and in their response to the almost universal criticism their decision occasioned. “We deplore this decision and its potential consequences,” wrote Cary Nelson, President of the AAUP in a blistering open letter titled “Academic Freedom Abridged at Yale Press,” which sums up the case nicely.

My friend speculated that Yale would seize upon Friday’s attack on Kurt Westergaard, the 75-year-old Danish illustrator who drew the most famous of the cartoons, to justify their despicable behavior last Fall. Yale spokesmen, many readers will remember, said that the chief reason they censored Professor Klausen’s book was because they feared Muslim violence if they included the representations of Mohammed. Not that such fears are groundless. They’re a touchy lot, these disciples of the religion of peace. Just recall what happened at the Westergaard homestead on Friday. “An axe-wielding Somali extremist,” read a story in the Times (the real one, not the New York knock-off), “broke into the home of Kurt Westergaard on Friday. . . by breaking a window.” Westergaard fled into a specially reinforced “panic room” while the intruder “shrieked about blood and revenge, as he smashed the axe in vain against the bathroom door.”

As I mentioned yesterday, the whole idea of having “panic rooms” in order fend off the Paynim Foe sticks in my craw. I don’t deny the prudence of having a bolt hole. If your neighborhood is infested by axe-wielding Somalis, I’d positively recommend one. But to make retreat into an article of policy when dealing with fanaticism is unwise, not to say cowardly and, in the end, counterproductive. (You hope by cowardice to avoid an unpleasant fate: generally, your cowardice guarantees that such a fate, which you might have avoided by stalwart resistance, befalls you.)

The phrase is Martin Peretz’s, and it’s just right for the president’s scandalously inadequate response to what he called “the Christmas-day incident,” i.e., the near incineration of 289 people by an al-Qaeda-trained Nigerian Muslim who stuffed explosives into his underwear before boarding an airplane bound for Detroit. He failed to keep his early appoint with Allah, though, partly because of his own mechanical incompetence, partly because he was pounced upon by a few private citizens whose instinct of self-preservation had not been completely impaired. Had the would-be bomber been just a tad brighter, had his fellow passengers been a tad more sheeplike, then Northwest Flight 253 would have exploded in flames as it came in for a landing over Motor City.

Will we always be so lucky? Take your time . . . (Arresting detail: Richard Reid, the so-called “shoe bomber” had about 50 grams of the explosive Pentaerythritol tetranitrate; our fellow had about 80 grams of the stuff.)

That failed detonation led to a successful one in the wordy purlieus of the blogosphere, into which I dipped an occasional toe over the mostly blog-free Christmas holidays. There were a lot of good lines. I especially liked the blogger — now, alas, forgotten — who spoke of the round-the-clock “security theater” we would all henceforth be subjected to.

“Security theater”? It was new to me. But I instantly grasped what he meant. Wikipedia was on the case before the unnamed genius pressed “Post”: “Security Theater”: “security countermeasures intended to provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to actually improve security.” (Wikipedia credits Bruce Schneier, but that’s not where I read it.)

I’ll come back to “security theater” in a moment. For the moment, let me stay with Mr. Peretz, who was on a roll in this column. He was right that “the skivvies terrorist” (good, what?) laid bare not only the colossal intelligence failure that allowed that pathetic terrorist wannabe onto the plane in the first place (even the chap’s father, for Allah’s sake, had warned the CIA in November that his son had drunk the Muslim kool-aid and was dangerous). Equally alarming, Mr. Peretz pointed out, the episode laid bare President Obama’s total failure to grasp the reality of the evil that threatens the country he is supposed to be leading. He just doesn’t get it.

Predictably, Obama went through the three stages of accommodation. First, he told us he was “monitoring” the situation from his vacation on Hawaii. (His “Homeland Security” Director, Janet Napolitano, was similarly reassuring: there was “no indication,” she said, that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, he of the explosive stuffed undies, was part of a terrorist network.

Janet, Janet: what Hawaii of the mind do you inhabit? Umar Mubo Jumbo was on zillions of watch lists. What do you do all day as “director of homeland security”? (“Oh, but she eventually admitted there was a terrorist connection.” You don’t say?)

Where was I? Oh yes: eventually the leader of the formerly free world issued the bulletin that the attempted bombing was the action of “an isolated extremist” — a notion Claudia Rosett, with her usual percipience, instantly put paid to. “Extremist,” yes; “isolated”? If only.

Finally, on January 2, the President discovered what everybody not actually being paid to protect us had known all along: that the skivvies bomber was an al-Qaeda operative.

I don’t often associate the name “New York Times Company” with the phrase “good sense of humor,” but I must say today’s press release from that formerly august enterprise did bring a smile to my lips. Oyez, oyez, Hear Ye Now about the “The New York Times Ninth Annual Arts & Leisure Weekend January 7 – 10 at The Times Center.” Yes that’s right, Possums, you are invited to line up for a few days of fun and frolic with people The New York Times believes you will spend $30 a pop to see interviewed. Imagine, you can be the first (possibly the only) bloke on your block to see

— Rosanne Cash, “the Grammy-winner singer-songwriter on “The List,” etc., interviewed by Times “rock critic” Jon Pareles.

Kerchunk!, that’ll be $30 bucks, please. After that mesmerizing performance you indulge your taste for the really grotesque by plopping down another 30 clams to see

— Lee Daniels and Gabourey Sidibe “The director and star of the award-winning new indie film “Precious” interviewed by Patricia Cohen.

That makes $60. But wait, Be still my heart: you can also see

— “All My Children At 40 – Agnes Nixon, Susan Lucci, Cameron Mathison, Rebecca Budig, Debbi Morgan, Julie Hanan Carruthers Creator and head writer, actors, and executive producer of ABC’s “All My Children” discuss the daytime drama launched in 1970 and life in Pine Valley over the past 40 years. The discussion features readings from the show’s groundbreaking scripts. Interviewed by Jacques Steinberg.”

The meter is now at $90. It’s a rich cornucopia they have prepared for the credulous and immature. There are simply scads of other opportunities for profligacy: check them all out here, if you think your stomach can take it. We all should thank little Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger for this 4-day “signature event.” The emetic possibilities are endless.

A few years ago, Hilton Kramer and I commissioned a series of essays for The New Criterion on the illiberal underside of liberalism. We later published revised versions of the essays under the title The Betrayal of Liberalism: How the Disciples of Freedom and Equality Helped Foster the Illiberal Politics of Coercion and Control. I mention this now not only to help readers out with their last-minute Christmas shopping but also to highlight the message of our subtitle: “How the Disciples of Freedom and Equality Helped Foster the Illiberal Politics of Coercion and Control.” It is one of the underappreciated ironies of our age, I believe, that many who call themselves “liberals” habitually support policies that are distinctly illiberal — often, indeed, are downright coercive — in their effect.

A proper anatomy of this phenomenon would take a book. It might start with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose deficient sense of the reality of other people could never compete with the satisfaction he took in contemplating his own virtue. And it might end with the revolutionary health care bill now wending its way through the U.S. Congress. Of course, the people touting the bill say — perhaps they even believe — that it will be good for Americans and that it will save money. Critics (of whom I am one) say that it will be a catastrophically expensive suite of legislation that will limit choice, impede medical innovation, and degrade the quality and timely delivery of medical care.

Like any ambitious piece of legislation, however, the bill to restructure American health care raises issues that go far beyond its primary purpose. The President touched on this obliquely in his “precipice” gaffe: we are, he said, “on the precipice of achievement . . . that will touch the lives of nearly every American.”

“Precipice,” “threshold,” whatever: he is right, anyway, that if the current bill becomes law it “will touch the lives of nearly every American.”

How will it “touch” us? Let me count the ways. Colloquially, first of all, as when we speak of “touching” someone for money. (What easy touches we have all turned out to be!)

But it will touch us in other ways as well. To appreciate one central way in which the bill will touch our lives, consider “Impermissible Ratemaking in Health-Insurance Reform: Why the Reid Bill is Unconstitutional,” the somber essay the eminent legal scholar Richard Epstein has written. (It appears on the web site of PointofLaw.com, but like so much important commentary these days, I came across it here, at Instapundit.) If you read nothing else this holiday season, read this. It is not cheering, exactly, but it is, after its fashion, bracing. For it not only makes good on its subtitle, explaining “Why the Reid Bill is Unconstitutional,” it also lays bare the coercive heart of the bill.

Really, the whole essay is worth reading, but here are a couple of snippets to set your heart beating:

On the one hand, the Reid Bill depends on a combination of huge general tax increases, which is coupled with special levies on industries such as medical-device and pharmaceutical companies. These tax revenues are then used to fund subsidies for large segments of the population in order to allow them to purchase qualified health-care plans that are sold through a set of State Exchanges that the Reid Bill creates. In order to prevent these subsidies from flowing through to the various health-insurance issuers, the Reid Bill imposes extensive obligations on any health-insurance issuer or health-plan provider that wishes to participate within the system in order to keep them from capturing subsidies meant for others. The effect of the subsidies is to increase the level of health care that will be demanded in the United States. The effect of the regulations is likely to be to impose huge costs on various health-insurance companies as they struggle to meet the influx of demand when they are at the outer limit of their capacity.

There are at this point enormous uncertainties about how this entire scheme will play out. My view is that it will prove ruinous on all three fronts. The general public tax increases will be so sharp that it is unlikely that they will generate additional revenues. The subsidies will be so large that the demand for medical services will be left largely unsatisfied, so two consequences are likely. First, an increased queuing for various health care services is to be expected. Second, there will be increased pressure to exclude large groups of people from the system, on the lines of Massachusetts’s recent decision to cut from its system 31,000 legal immigrant aliens (who pay taxes but do not vote).