Who is Afraid of Big Government?

There is no reason to review all the standard reasons why the American people are terrified of an all-powerful federal or state government. The case has been made in thousands of elegant treatises and books, and is best reflected in the Constitution and the written work of the Founding Fathers.

But let me list a few other, less elegantly expressed worries, many anecdotal in nature.

1) Juvenal’s “Who will police the police?”

One of the scariest things about government is its exemption from laws by virtue of its monopoly on lawmaking and enforcement. I see this every day, from the mundane to the profound.

Go to any downtown in America, and one can see how some supposedly efficient, job-creating con-artist once promised a new hotel, stadium, or enterprise zone, then convinced the city council to steal land from some and hand it over to others (e.g., him) — and left an ungodly mess in his wake.

That power to condemn creates a real paranoia in our own lives. While we can defend our homes from the intruder, there is no remedy against eminent domain, especially once we have lost faith in the collective wisdom of those who flock to political office.

On the more mundane level, this week I saw the following examples of government exemption. A local police car randomly did a running stop at a 4-way intersection (should I have called 911?); a city bus driver (very common) cell phoning against California law (report him to the cop running the intersection?); a city garbage truck spewing trash out its top as it sped down Freeway 41 (call his cousins at the state EPA?).

We are all routinely pulled over for any of the above infractions. But the larger the government, the more its power, and so the more its employees feel that they are royal and exempt from enforcement. In other words, big government creates millions who feel the law does not pertain to themselves. Ask Tom Daschle, Duke Cunningham, Chris Dodd, or Timothy Geithner. The result is an increasingly lawless society.

2) The Power of Envy

Government service offers veritable tenure and steady wages for the price of bypassing the American dream of “getting rich” in the private sector. Most follow the odds and realize that a federal bird in the hand is better than two in the private bush.

Yet legions of government (and often union) employees by needs must audit often far richer others, whether at the IRS, the county planner’s office, the zoning authority, or the state regulator. And here the public auditor can, by virtue of his unassailable position, quite easily stymie his private sector upstart counterpart.

A few examples from my own modest experience: Going into the DMV to deal with SEIU T-shirted employees is to face petty humiliation and impediment. I watched dozens of hurried customers stand in line while bored employees at the window lackadaisically redirected them to other bored employees. The subtext was “You need my form and stamp, so calm down, take a deep breath, and wait on my time. It’s not like I have to work for your rat-race company.”

Two years ago, the IRS sent me an “urgent” letter about supposedly not reported W-2s (one thing I learned from my late mother is never, never short the IRS, and so I usually overpay). My accountant in about 2 minutes showed me how an auditing clerk (or computer) had screwed up. He wrote an explanatory letter.

I worried (I didn’t have the demanded supplemental fee) for about 3 months. And then matter-of-factly, 90 days later another letter arrived — admitting the matter was now resolved and I need not pay anything. No apology or explanation. In other words, a single government official was able to try to extort thousands (I am sure many thousands who get such letters are terrified and just pay the bogus supplemental) without explanation. No one in private business can quite get away with that. (I am sure the employee, who hits a button to print such form letters demanding more money, never has his pay docked when the request is shown to be invalid). When the inanimate gasoline pump claims we must pay for 20 gallons for an actual 10 pumped, the gas station owner goes to jail.

I am all for codes, building inspectors, and plant regulators, but an excess of such investigators quickly creates a priestly class who take their own frustrations out on supposedly better off others.

One of the sad characteristics of contemporary Western society is the tendency to embrace noble lies. These are assertions and acts that don’t square with reality, with what we see and hear—and are voiced for apparently noble social purposes. Here are a few politically-incorrect examples.

1)  Debt and Deficits. At our current rate we will very soon pile up between $18 and $20 trillion in accumulated national debt. We use the euphemism “stimulus”, talk of massive borrowing in terms of percentages of GDP, and casually pontificate about “inflating” our way out of the debt. The  fact is that the borrowing is now so massive that there is no way to pay back what we owe without massive cutbacks in accustomed services, and a probable decline in the apparent standard of living. I say “apparent” since many of the essentials that we are accustomed to—everything from sophisticated psychiatric counseling for long-term inmates, frivolous law suits, duplicate and needless medical procedures, to government employee expense accounts, farm subsidies, or grants to the arts and media—are not that essential and will gradually begin to disappear. Raising taxes will be in the short-term offered as a solution, but it won’t for long increase net aggregate revenue since it will eventually discourage economic activity.

And we lack both the patience and guts to cut taxes, and then use the long-term larger revenue stream, coupled with massive spending cuts, to balance the budget. In short, we will invent euphemisms like “stimulus” and “furlough” as the money runs out, and Americans adjust to a lower standard of living. One can already drive in rural central California and see roads that are cracked and full of potholes, random dogs that are not licensed, and thousands of trailer-rentals on blocks and garages-turned-into-rentals, as the government has given up on its old regulation and let large swaths revert to the 1940s and 1950s. I fear that any sixth grader from my 1965 primary school down the road could have read far better than an average contemporary high school graduate of my local community. This decline is not inevitable, given an expanding population, the prior investments of noble generations, continually evolving technology, and spreading globalization, but it is inevitable given the therapeutic culture, and present high-tax, high-spend, redistributive  gospel of the present government. No one on either side of the political divide simply says the present borrowing is staggering, unsustainable, and must be paid back by real sacrifice. So we lie on, as if Greece should be our model.

2) Israel. We are inundated with constant talk of the “Middle East crisis” and “the need to restart the peace process.”

Why? Is there a new Goldstone report on Tibet? Are the American people sleepless over the divided city of Nicosia? The brutal Turkish occupation of Greek Cyprus? The rough Russian annexation of Ossetia? The callous treatment of Muslims by the Chinese?

Of course not. A noble lie is that there is a “Mideast crisis” at all. “Occupied land” is not unusual. Palestinians are no more refuges than Cypriots or Tibetans. The IDF is far more moral a military force than the Russian or Chinese or Turkish army.

The reality? Hating Israel as a unique aggressor is simply predicated on five unspoken truths: 1) rampant anti-Semitism (one can hate Jews by the loftier notion of being “anti-Zionist”; 2) fear of radical Islamic terrorists; there are apparently no radical Tibetans hijacking planes or blowing up Madrid train stations due to Spanish ties with communist China; 3) oil, oil, oil. The Cypriots cannot enlist the Greeks to withhold 500 billion barrels of oil in the Aegean from world markets. If such a fantasy were true, Nicosia would be on the front pages; 4) Israel is Western, like the U.S., and in a most un-Western neighborhood, so hating Israel is a mechanism of hating the U.S. on the cheap; 5) demography. If there were a billion-person Orthodox community energized by a half-billion Greek-speakers, we most certainly would wish to solve the “Cyprus crisis”.

The truth? Money, fear, and age-old hatreds all are masked by “principles” and “morality.”

3) Illegal immigration.

Do the math on remittances—$50 billion a year sent back to Latin America; perhaps $20-25 billion sent from California alone, mostly from illegal aliens.

The following thought will get one censored as cruel and inhuman: millions of California residents, here illegally, without English or high-school diplomas, somehow manage to rely in part on state subsidies for food, housing, education, legal help, and transportation to free up cash in the  billions to be sent southward to Mexico.

In addition, much higher per capita rates of illegality, from gang activity to DUI arrests, characterize far too many of the illegal alien community, requiring state investments that outweigh the often argued advantages of increased sales taxes, Social Security deductions supposedly not drawn upon, cheap wages for unskilled labor, etc.

In other words, to suggest that a very sophisticated society is spending billions to educate, incarcerate, and treat millions from the former Third World is forbidden. And the corollary is even more bizarre still: millions risk their lives to flock northward to the United States, even as the premise of multiculturalism in the schools, affirmative action in the workplace, and the chauvinism manifested in popular culture is somehow that an oppressive Eurocentric America “owes” penance. Historians two centuries hence will remark on the anomaly of the notion that millions of Mexican nationals both wish to emigrate to the United States, but simultaneously once here to  voice grievances against the culture they so wish to join—sort of like the old demonstrations against Prop. 13 when protestors used to wave the flag of the country they did not wish to return to and trample the flag of the country they so eagerly wished to remain in. A modest proposal: to send money to Latin America, one here without legal documentation would either pay a 10% surcharge on the transaction or show proof of catastrophic health care insurance.

OK — Here’s the conclusion to the saga of Obama. I left off with Chapter Four and why the Obama locomotive went off the rails after only a year.

Chapter Five — The Verdict Is Still Out

So here we are after a year with the president below 50% in the polls, the progressive dream for a bit stalled, and the media uncertain whether to press ahead with their Ministry of Truth homage, or to bail before Obama shreds their last vestiges of disinterested credibility and takes them down with him. Or is that an overstatement?

I confess I am not entirely confident that this third great attempt in the last three decades to become Europe can be so easily stopped (and yet in just 12 months we saw the greatest decline in popularity of any first-year president in poll-recorded history).

So why the doubt?

The enormous borrowing for a time may spark an inflation-driven expansion timed to coincide with the November election. GDP growth will accelerate while worries about mega-deficits, stagflation, and persistent unemployment will, for a while, be put off to 2011. Much of the TARP money will be released in late summer, and it will create a temporary uplifting effect, analogous to the final binge of a soon to be maxed-out credit card.

We also have not quite yet seen the bitter pushback: expect a renewed “Bush did it” offensive, the promiscuous playing of the racial card to stifle dissent, and stimulus money lavished on everyone from train aficionados to solar panel producers. Do not underestimate either the role of the SEIU or Acorn-like groups during registration and balloting in key close run congressional races.

Americans have never given up on a president so early.  To do so would mean to a majority of voters not merely that they were wrong, but terribly wrong. To admit that is difficult; to admit that so early is terribly difficult.

While much criticism is made of the president’s scripted eloquence, his reliance on the teleprompter, his unease with repartee, his awkwardness in question and answer, nonetheless he is skilled with the teleprompter, and much of his message to many of the people can be teleprompted.

After all, that is in part how a two-year senator got elected in the first place. And as a rhetorician, Obama is skilled in weaving alternate realities. For you reader, his recent exegesis of his broken promises to put the health care debate on C-SPAN (it was sort of aired, didn’t you know that, dummies) was preposterous. But admit as well that such a bold alibi came right out of the mouth of Saruman in his Orthanc — mellifluous, assured, seamlessly shameless. It would make even Tartuffe proud. Obama’s art is more than just teleprompted eloquence.

Chapter One — The Liberal Hope and Dream

I think our Obama collective story will some day be written something like this. The leftwing anointed vision of America got stalled with the failures of the Great Society, and the high tax, big government discontent of the 1970s and 1980s.

Abroad after Vietnam, the gospel that America was the problem sputtered out — with the fall of the Soviet Union, the rejoicing in Eastern Europe with the liberation from communism, the market reforms of China, and the general rise of a murderous radical Islam, coupled with the later 9/11 attacks.

In short, doctrinaire liberalism, now to be recast as progressivism, was in trouble. About all that could be hoped for in lieu of ideological governance were entrenched liberal congressional enclaves, which served traditional Democratic constituencies — and offered occasional opposition to conservative excess and corruption of the Abramoff sort.

Jimmy Carter was simply too inept, self-righteous, and inexperienced to retake Rome from the barbarians. A gifted Bill Clinton might have; but he was too savvy for subservience to an unpopular ideology, too enslaved instead to his multifarious appetites and too malleable and worried about Bill Clinton to be a principled avatar of hope and change.

So the media, academia, the unions, the foundations, and the elite on Wall Street kept waiting for the Great Stone Face to appear — the saintly deliverer who would at last have the requisite skill and pedigree to bring a benevolent liberal statism to the unwashed, who for so long in their ignorance and selfish, petty agendas had resisted what was good for them.

Chapter Two — The Perfect Storm

Then the unexpected occurred without warning. The Iraq War was successfully demagogued as Vietnam redux. Indeed, we still apparently think it was lost, and the surge a failure. The Republican Congress by 2006 was mired in corruption. After eight years of Republican rule, conservatives of the base had tired of 50/50 deal making that had resulted in more big government and big deficits.

John McCain almost seemed more interested in losing majestically to our first serious African-American presidential candidate than conducting a hardball successful campaign. He too had alienated his base in the past, and many never forgot it, as their lackluster emotional and financial support attested.

Barack Obama, in contrast, offered to many an irresistible win/win proposition: centrist, bipartisan governance, and absolution for past sins through the election of a president of color. That Obama was young and patterned himself after JFK in his eloquence and pizzazz made a nice antithesis to George Bush’s tongue-tied speeches. And that the world promised that they would like us again only made it all the sweeter for the gullible.

Chapter Three – The Ascension

So Obama came in, quickly shed his thin centrist exoskeleton, and started in on the long promised bigger government agenda. In short order, we saw the absorption of some of the private sector, attempts at statist health care, and appointments that reflected an equality-of-result philosophy, mandated and enforced by a guardian class of Ivy-League technocrats, immune to the protocols they enforced on ignorant others, although, unlike Plato’s overseers, subject to no harsh regimen.

All politicians fudge on their promises. But this president manages to transcend the normal political exaggeration and dissimulation. Whereas past executives shaded the truth, Barack Obama trumps that: on almost every key issue, what Obama says he will do, and what he says is true, is a clear guide to what he will not do, and what is not true. It is as if “truth” is a mere problem of lesser mortals.

1. Obama now rails against a pernicious Washington and its insiders: ergo, Obama controls Washington through both houses of Congress and the White House, and wants to expand Washington’s control over the auto industry, health care, energy, student loans, transportation, etc.

2. Obama bashes the Supreme Court on weakening public efforts to curb campaign contributions. Therefore, we know Obama has done more than any other president in destroying public campaign financing by being the first presidential candidate in a general election to refuse public funds — in confidence that he could raise a record $1 billion, much of it from big moneyed interests on Wall Street.

3. Obama calls for a freeze on government spending and deplores deficits. Hence, we know that the possible $15 billion savings in some discretionary spending will not affect the Obama record budget deficits that will continue to grow well over an annual $1.5 trillion a year — as Obama piles up the greatest budgetary shortfalls in any four-year presidential term in history.

4. The president calls for the Guantanamo Bay detention center to be closed within a year of his inauguration, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the architect of 9/11, to be tried in New York. Accordingly, we know that Guantanamo won’t be closed within a year and KSM won’t be tried in New York.

5. Obama issues four serial deadlines in autumn 2009 for Iran to comply with non-proliferation accords. Presto — we know that Iran will get the bomb unimpeded by U.S. opinion.

6. Obama promised an end to earmarks and lobbyists in government — of course, we assume, then, that lobbyists will be ubiquitous among his presidential appointments, and there will be thousands of earmarks.

7. Obama announces that he will end the war in Iraq by removing all combat brigades by August 2010. As a result, we understand that George Bush long ago signed an agreement with the Iraqis for a joint agreement on removing U.S. combat forces by August 2010.

8. Obama laments that his fall in popularity resulted from a failure to communicate directly with the American people. We conclude as a result that Obama has given more interviews, radio and TV appearances, and stump speeches than any first-year president in history.

9. Obama reiterates that “this is not about me.” That reflects the fact that he has employed the first-person pronouns “I,” “me,” and “my” more than any prior president.

10. Obama assures on eight occasions he will televise all health-care deliberations on C-SPAN. This is clear proof that nothing will be televised as debate occurs behind closed doors, punctuated by votes purchased through $300 million bribes and state exemptions from federal statutes.

I think we could see what was coming. This presidency has about as much subtlety in plot as a grade-B western, soap opera, or teen-age tantrum.

Stage One: A lackluster McCain candidacy, the September 2008 meltdown, weariness with eight years of Bush incumbency, conservative anger over spending, liberal furor over Iraq, a toady media, and Republican congressional corruption all led to a 50/50 electorate that was open to being mesmerized by Obama’s rhetoric and the dream of the nation’s first African-American president.

With congressional majorities, a compliant press, soaring public support, a soon-to-be President Obama was convinced, as he had been convinced by his success in the Ivy League, in Chicago, and in the Senate (surely praise in Cambridge means those in Toledo would be similarly wowed), that he had a left-wing mandate and he could hope and change his way to almost anything he wanted — thin record, self-contradictions, constant inconsistencies, and general confusion be damned.

The hard left was salivating that at last they had an effective delivery system that could usher in a long awaited European socialism.  So what followed was predictable: In his hubris, Obama cast off the campaign mask of moderation. Thick and fast came proposals for state-run health care, government take-overs, talk of nationalizing the student loan program, bailouts, mega deficits, more borrowing as stimulus, multicultural mea culpas abroad, loony symbolic appointments, and promiscuous talk of higher income, payroll, inheritance, and health-care taxes, but only on “them.”

In other words, we saw in a trendy, new cool form, the age-old attempt to institutionalize an equality of result, as freedom and liberty give way to mandated egalitarianism and fraternity.

But wait — two thorny problems arose.

(1) The country not quite yet is left-wing, but voted for Obama for the perfect-storm reasons outlined above. Anyone who had read the history of America could see that it was always a different sort of place than France, Germany, or Sweden — at least for a while longer.

(2) So to ram down a left-wing agenda, the thespian Obama would have to continue his role as the bipartisan healer, centrist, reformer, purple-state uniter, transracial unifier, etc. But, alas, instead old habits die hard; and the public soon began here and there to get glimpses of the old reality behind the new mask.

The wages of years with Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers, the easy path through the Ivy League, the Axelrod at our throat politics, and the snow job that had wowed deans, philanthropists, and tony suburbanites all reappeared. How could they not? Still, if one is going to hypnotize the electorate to sleep-walk them into Belgium, then one cannot in Pavlovian fashion revert back to hard-left idolatry.

So even as Barack Obama sought to convince the farmer, plumber, and insurance agent to accept state health care, a landscape of windmills, and an EU-foreign policy, he slipped back into his old self. Thus we got the nut Van Jones and his racist, truther bombast. Anita Dunn praised Mao. Commissars at the NEA boasted of the new Caesar.

Stimuli were in part apportioned on red state/blue state agendas.

The Skip Gates incident prompted the president to trash the police first, and get the facts second. Creditors were politically rescheduled for bailed-out businesses. The president thoughtlessly weighed in on everything from the Special Olympics and the tea party movement to Fox News and America’s purported sins.

Suddenly we were no longer exceptional, but the Muslim world in fact had jump-started the Renaissance and Enlightenment. The old bad guys — Ahmadinejad, Assad, Castro, Chavez, and Putin — earned new kind talk; the prior president was reduced to contemporary satanic status. Readers, you can cite far more footnotes to these now run-of-the-mill absurdities.

Says It All

1) A new poll revealing a vast majority of investors see Obama as anti-business.

2) Obama declaiming on what he has done and what he will do to create jobs.

3) After a year Obama still has not yet figured out that his promiscuous talk of higher income, payroll, health care, and inheritance taxes, serial demonization of finance and business, and all sorts of new regulations, create a psychological climate in which the employer pulls in his horns and decides to ride things out — and this individual reaction is being repeated millions of times over, energized by the pique at everything trivial from Van Jones to apologies abroad to “Bush did it.”

What Did They Expect?

Now that the voters of Massachusetts have splashed our hypnotized young god back into his own reflecting pool, it is almost surreal to follow the left’s sudden petulance and occasional hysteria — akin to the climate of 2005-6 among some of the right when the once pro-Iraq War neocons began bailing and heading for the exits.

Then some of the most vehement pro-war sounding zealots suddenly swore that they had never supported the invasion at all. I think I called it at the time “my victory; your defeat” to explain their chameleonism between 2003 and 2006.

This present liberal bloodletting will continue, as Obama’s polls dip even more, and the next liberal Coakley appears in the political cross-hairs.  The left neither quite understands the populist outrage nor would have a clue how to deflate it if it did. (One of the most painful things to watch was Obama’s anti-Scott Brown stump speech: a perfect storm of gaffes in which he showed no knowledge of Brown’s record, slipped into his faux-black-pulpit cadences, did the old “Bush did it” whine, made silly jokes about pick-up trucks [can one imagine Obama driving up and down Illinois in one?], and reflected once again the Obama brand of thinking that the people are deluded and must be warned by a philosopher-king not to do what is not  good for them.)

There is a pent-up fury that is a dividend of a year’s bad economic news, the constant presidential condescension, and the hubris of false hope and change — and we have not seen the extent of it yet. The people are weary of being talked down to as if they don’t understand climate change, as if they don’t get the inside scoop on deficit spending, as if they can’t appreciate the brilliance of massive new government entitlements, as if they need moral sermons hourly on their race/class/and gender shortcomings, and as if they can’t quite fathom why KSM, the terrorist warrior who planned the killing of 3,000 Americans and declared al-Qaeda at war with us, must be tried like a bank robber in New York. (Perhaps during the Battle of the Bulge we should have shipped back captured German saboteurs to New York for trials.)

We, the Ignorant

Meanwhile on planet earth I was thinking of Secretary’s Chu’s warning that our farms in California would “dry up and blow away” as today I chained sawed limbs from a week of horrific storms and flooding, and prepare tomorrow to go to Huntington Lake to dig out 10 feet of snow from the house.

Our populists seem to be shouting back at Washington, “We’re tired of you – at least we don’t cheat on our taxes, at least we pay our bills and don’t call maxing out the charge card ’stimulus,’ and at least when we say we are going to do something, we do it.”

Republicans must be gleeful as an inept Obama in some sort of delusion now claims that the prairie-fire pushback dovetails with his own Ascension in 2008. Oh yes, Barack — those who voted for a conservative in Massachusetts surely are the same sort of angry voters who turned out in droves for your hope and change mantra.

The Democratic statist transformation suffered a sudden earthquake in Massachusetts last night. How can we measure the severity of the upcoming reaction aftershocks?

 The subsequent damage will depend on the magnitude of the next round of shaking—a 7 aftershock ensuring rubble, a 1 suggesting that rebuilding can proceed.

 So here is our reaction aftershock scale. (I think a  5-6 is the most likely, a 1 very improbable).

7.0 Obama brings in Pelosi and Reid to plot strategies about dealing with a deluded electorate, and so emulates a defiant Jimmy Carter—complaining about a crisis of national confidence while pressing ahead with socialized medicine, cap and trade, amnesty, more spending and greater deficits. When all that is passed, we will all, to use the President’s words, “suddenly” appreciate the magnitude of His genius and sacrifice on our behalf. We will hear Obama orate about Lincoln’s and FDR’s “difficult” first year on their way to historic achievement analogous to Obama’s to come. Bottom line: Massachusetts was a warning to hurry up and get the Obama deal done.

6.0 The liberal base, and White House insiders, adopt a bunker mode and start leaking off the record quips about the inadequacy of Democratic losing candidates and meaningless symbolic votes, while trashing Bush/Cheney and Rush Limbaugh.  They begin turning on centrists and moderates as sell-outs and turncoats.

5.0 Axelrod, Gibbs, Emanuel et al. start talking about the “middle-class” concern about jobs, lack of health care, and the economy, citing Coakley’s defeat as sign of the continual middle-class anger at the Bush debacle and the inability of government to address the people’s needs. “Change” takes a long time.

It’s the lying, Stupid?

“Lie” is a rather harsh word; the noun and its verb form leave little to context or extenuating circumstances. So I use it sparingly.

But I know no other word for President Obama’s long string of “misstatements,” especially the blatant ones about closing Guantanamo within a year of his inauguration or serially declaring that he would insist on health care debate airing live on C-SPAN.

How odd that the liberal block is quiet that once coined “Bush lied, thousands died” (even when the CIA  and Defense intelligence was accepted by both parties and in sync with what the Arab world and Europe were insisting upon [recall the charge of a supposed naïve Bush taking us to war against a  nut who would gas our troops marshalling in Kuwait.]). In any case, not telling the truth has a lot to do with sinking polls

So I don’t quite buy the liberal lament that the people will support Obama when the economy improves.

It was roaring in 2005-6, and still Bush was unpopular — given the violence in Iraq and the administration’s inability to articulate our objectives there. And even when Iraq was winding down in 2008, polls still showed persistent American anger at the media narrative of a botched Katrina, the insurgency in Iraq, and a “jobless recovery.”

No, the American people are losing confidence in Team Obama because quite simply they are tiring of being lied to, and treated like children in need of Ivy-League Platonic guardians.

Yes, they intrinsically liked Obama and put away for a time their suspicions that he had not come clean on his real ideological intentions, his radical leftist past, his intimate association with the creepy Rev. Wright, and his partisanship that had made him the most liberal senator in the Congress.

Let us count the ways

But almost immediately, Obama, again, in Platonic fashion, began to say things that could not be possibly true. Remember the categories.

1)   The bait and switch lies. Here, we, the eager voters, were told that there are no more bad blue/red state dichotomies. We are a purple America. Instead, we immediately witnessed the demonization of the supposed “rich” (I say supposed, because the Buffet/Gates/Turner plutocrat is exempt), who are not “patriotic,” do not wish to “spread the wealth,” and must “pay their fair share.” Almost immediately Obama’s Bush became America’s Emanuel Goldstein — an Orwellian figure constructed to unify the people around an evil predecessor incapable of a single positive act — whether keeping us safe for over seven years from another 9/11-like attack, freeing 50 million from the Taliban and Saddam, or generating enormous national wealth from 2002-08.

Some deluded voters in November, 2008, went for Obama on promises of a new kinder, gentler politics. They got instead the most partisan, nasty Chicago politicking in memory.

2)   The “noble” lies. These are untruths aimed at the common good. In Cairo, we were told Muslims did all sorts of wonderful things in the past like invented printing and sparked the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Why not fabricate and exaggerate when the intentions are global ecumenicalism?

Remember the new tactic of assessing job losses by “jobs saved”? And why not, since we wish to bolster our spirits and believe that our borrowing was not wasted on pork-barrel insanities, rather than “investments” that created “millions of green jobs” that otherwise would not have existed?

And we must believe that health care reform as envisioned by the Obama massive state assumption of private insured care will save “trillions in waste and fraud.” Believe that, and at last the dream of “universal health care” is obtainable.

Remember the phrase “using all our resources” during the high energy prices of the 2008 campaign? Obama then was a centrist who would drill, develop nuclear, look for more gas, burn coal — all to tide us over as we waited for the dream of Van Jones. That too was a noble lie, necessary for we fools to cling to, while the anointed fashioned a “green” cap and trade future for us, whose efficacy  we could not quite yet fathom.

3)   Tactical lies. Then there are the tactical lies to achieve the desired ends in “that was then/this is now” fashion. Turn to Orwell’s Animal Farm for the right landscape. Health-care debate on C-SPAN/health care debate behind congressional doors. Taxes on Cadillac health plans were an inane McCain idea/taxes on Cadillac health plans are a way to eliminate waste and fraud; stupid, clueless Bush was pushing unpopular social security reform that 65% of the people didn’t want/wise, hip Obama is pushing noble health care reform that 65% of the people don’t want. The list is endless and started in 2007 with public campaign financing as good for dark horse candidates/public campaign financing as bad for front-runner cash cows.

Apparently two or three “let me be perfectly clear”s and 3-4 “make no mistake about it”s — when prefaced to something like “no more lobbyists in government” or “posting legislation well in advance on the internet” — make it all so.

There are a number of things we simply no longer talk about. The silence is partly due to intellectual laziness. Or maybe it is because of political correctness—or even attributable to ignorance and the absence of curiosity.

In no particular order, I list five propositions that simply have become taboo.

1). Illegal Immigration and California

There are dozens of recent exposés on the California mess. The “I accuse” themes—all quite accurate—are well known.

(a) The state propositions have hamstrung the legislature, and resulted in almost no free choices anymore in budgetary decision.

(b) The legislature—due to partisan gerrymandering, the unnecessarily large number of legislators in an unnecessary bicameral system, and term-limits—is inexperienced, captive to special interests, and increasingly incompetent.

(c) State employees have taken over the state: they are paid far above the national average, not accountable, and almost impossible to fire when found to be incompetent. The state pension system is unsustainable. Pay cuts, lay-offs, or furloughs loom.

(d) The nation’s highest income, sales, and gas taxes have driven out the most productive residents—to the tune of 3,500 a week—to no-tax or little-tax neighboring states.

OK— agreed, and I have written all that myself in various articles. But there is another problem never raised in polite company.

California, by most estimates, has somewhere between 40-50% of the nation’s illegal immigrants. That may mean 5-7 million residents here illegally, most without English, documentation, or high-school diplomas. This makes the practice of assimilation into the middle-class a multigenerational process over decades, rather than in the past, when immigrants came in fewer numbers and more often legally.

The state ranks 47-48th in most studies of the achievement levels of the nation’s schools, mostly due to millions of entering students who do not speak English well, if at all.

Of the some $50 billion in remittances that leave the U.S. each year to Latin America, perhaps $20 billion come from California residents, draining the state of capital, and ensuring that the donors will be in need of state health, education, housing and food supplements. California’s taxpayers, in essence, subsidize Oaxaca and Jalisco—that may be humanitarian, and worthy of praise, but it is costly nonetheless, and perhaps beyond the financial resources of the majority of the population.

I’ll pass on increased per capita rates of crime, gangs, etc. that are considered too illiberal to mention. But if studies are correct that anyone who comes north, without English, legality, and education, over his life-cycle will have to draw somewhere between $50,000 and $70,000 more in entitlements than he contributes in various taxes, and if we were to prorate that on an annual basis, and if we were to multiply that by several million, then one can envision an annual outlay of several billion in state expenditures.

Instead, illegal immigration is never much cited as a contributor to California’s fiscal implosion. To mention all this is considered racist. Yet, to take one instance, the cost of incarcerating the state’s illegal aliens alone exceeds the budget of the new UC Merced, a campus intended to serve mostly minority communities of the central valley.

The solution? Allow only legal immigration. Base admittance to the U.S. mostly on skills and our own need for expertise and capital. Trust in merit, and ignore the race and origin of the would-be immigrant.

2) Iraq

We are tired of Iraq and have Trotskyized it out of our existence, given the huge cost and 4,000 dead.

But consider: not a single America died in Iraq in December (38 murdered in Chicago during that period); three have been lost this month (24 murdered so far this month in Chicago).

Some random thoughts. The surge was a brilliant success.

The heroes are relatively ignored. They are U.S. forces who served in Iraq, of course; Gens. Odierno and Petraeus (recall what he endured from Hillary Clinton and MoveOn.org in his Senate inquisition); civilian analysts like Fred Kagan and retired Gen. Keane; and, of course, a demonized George Bush—attacked by most of his former supporters, the majority of pundits and columnists, those Democrats who had voted to authorize the war, many of the Iraq Study Group members; and by a cadre of retired “revolt of the generals” officers.

Yet for some reason, very few senators (cf. the You Tube videos of the debates of October 11-12, 2002) who gave impassioned pleas, authorizing 23 writs to go to war, have ever quite explained why they flipped—and what they think now of both their original support, and their subsequent opposition.

A Harry Reid (“the war is lost”) or Barack Obama (out of Iraq by March 2008 and the surge “is not working”) have never subsequently suggested that they were wrong at a time when our troops desperately were trying against all odds to save the fragile country.

Nor has anyone questioned the conventional dogma that Iraq empowered Iran, supposedly by removing the demonic Saddam. (Yet consider the liberal logic: we were wrong to remove a monster because he was a useful balance-of-power monster [ignore the genocide of the Kurds, Marsh Arabs, etc];  yet we deplore prior administrations for giving the same monster some aid in his war against Iran.)

In fact, mass demonstrations and unrest now take place in an isolated Iran, not so much in a democratic Iraq. The latter is proving more destabilizing by its open broadcasting and word of mouth freedom to Iran than Iran is to Iraq by its savage use of terrorism. (What will happen to conventional wisdom, if there comes a day when Iran is constitutional, along with Iraq and Lebanon?)

No one has officially said they were wrong in alleging “No Blood for Oil.” But we got no oil from Iraq. The price rose after we invaded. The Chinese, Russians, and Europeans got the contracts in free and fair bidding.

(Contrast Saddam’s rigged pre-war, quid-pro-quo oil concessions to the corrupt French). There was no Halliburton conspiracy to steal resources. The left often now, mirabile dictu, accuses us of being naïve in bleeding to give others the resources that they once accused us of wishing to steal. Barack Obama still talks of Iraq as a mistake, even as he quietly ignores his own prescriptions to have gotten out by early 2008, and to have stopped the surge—and continues to follow the Petraeus/Bush plan.