These are exciting though scary revolutionary times, akin to the constant acrimony in the fourth-century BC polis, mid-nineteenth century revolutionary Europe, or — perhaps in a geriatric replay — the 1960s. This is an era when the fundamental assumptions of the individual and the state are now being redefined, albeit in a weird, high-tech, globalized landscape.

Radical But Well Off

A word of caution: we are not talking about hoi polloi versus hoi oligoi, or the commune on the barricades fighting the estate owners. No, not this time around.

Instead, the present attempt to remake America is the effort of the liberal well-to-do — highly educated at mostly private universities, nursed on three decades of postmodern education, either with inherited wealth or earning top salaries, lifestyles of privilege indistinguishable from those they decry as selfish, and immune from the dictates they impose on others.

Such are basically the profiles of the Obama cabinet and sub-cabinet, the pillars of liberalism in the Congress and state legislatures, the public intellectuals in the universities and foundations, the arts crowd, and the Hollywood elite. Let us be clear about that.

The Distant Poor

They are all battling on behalf of “them,” the poorer half of America, currently in need of some sort of housing, education, food, or legal subsidy, whom the above mentioned elite, in the way they live, send their children to school, socialize, and vacation so studiously avoid.  (The New York Times owners are likely to follow the cut-throat business practices of Wall Street, live in the most refined areas of New York, and assume privileges indistinguishable from other CEOs; the difference is that they so visibly care about those they never see or seek out).

Note well the term “poor.” These are not Dickensian or Joads poor, but largely Americans who by the standards of the 1940s would be considered lucky. Partly because of globalized Chinese consumer goods, and partly redistributive practices of a half-century, our current “underclass” has access to clothes, electronics, entertainment, apartments, cell phones, transportation, etc., undreamed of by the middle class of the recent past. I live in one of the poorest areas of one of the poorest counties in a bankrupt state; and those I see poor are not like those I saw 40 years ago in the same locale.

No, the revolution is not one of the abject poor and starving storming the Bastille, but of the angry and self-righteous well-off— angry as hell that the less well-off are living lives quite differently from the very well-off. (A trodden down poor person today flies standby from San Francisco to LAX; a very rich person gets into his $50 million Gulfstream — but note modernism’s paradox: the poor person’s United Airlines pilots are as good, he gets there as safely and in some comfort, and not much later as well.)

Funny Revolutionaries

Some of the revolutionaries are guided by genuine noblesse oblige. Others act out of guilt and can justify their own consumption if they “care” for a distant poorer other. Still more explain their own privilege through using government to redistribute income. A few are driven by genuine hatred — stemming from the fact that the highly educated academic or artist makes far less than the doctor, lawyer, CEO, or — heaven forbid — tire store owner, family orthodontist, or owner of a half dozen Little Caesar pizza franchises.

How can that be that the PhD who reads Old English, or the painter who emulates Pollock, or the writer who is the next Fitzgerald, or the AP teacher is given so much less by society than the crass, smug captain of industry, who reads less, has no real taste, and hardly understands his own existential dilemma? Should not salary and capital be predicated on good intentions, high education, rhetoric and argumentation, and a bit of necessary sarcasm?

Liberal Endangered Species

Over the last fifty years it was received wisdom that a liberal Democrat could not be entrusted to run the U.S. LBJ’s Great Society had largely failed. Its legacy were debts, high taxes, bloated bureaucracies, the destruction of the inner-city family, and welfare dependency.

“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?”

Hanks may not have been quoted correctly; and his remarks may have been impromptu and poorly expressed; and we should give due consideration to the tremendous support Hanks has given in the past both to veterans and to commemoration of World War II; and his new HBO series could well be a fine bookend to Band of Brothers.  All that said, Hanks’ comments were sadly infantile pop philosophizing offered by, well,  an ignoramus.

Hanks thinks he is trying to explain the multifaceted Pacific theater in terms of a war brought on by and fought through racial animosity. That is ludicrous. Consider:

1) In earlier times, we had good relations with Japan (an ally during World War I, that played an important naval role in defeating imperial Germany at sea) and had stayed neutral in its disputes with Russia (Teddy Roosevelt won a 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for his intermediary role). The crisis that led to Pearl Harbor was not innately with the Japanese people per se (tens of thousands of whom had emigrated to the United States on word of mouth reports of opportunity for Japanese immigrants), but with Japanese militarism and its creed of Bushido that had hijacked, violently so in many cases, the government and put an entire society on a fascistic footing. We no more wished to annihilate Japanese because of racial hatred than we wished to ally with their Chinese enemies because of racial affinity. In terms of geo-strategy, race was not the real catalyst for war other than its role among Japanese militarists in energizing expansive Japanese militarism.

2) How would Hanks explain the brutal Pacific wars between Japanese and Chinese, Japanese and Koreans, Japanese and Filipinos, and Japanese and Pacific Islanders, in which not hundreds of thousands perished, but many millions? In each of these theaters, the United States was allied with Asians against an Asian Japan, whose racially-hyped “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” aimed at freeing supposedly kindred Asians from European and white imperialism, flopped at its inauguration (primarily because of high-handed Japanese feelings of superiority and entitlement, which, in their emphasis on racial purity, were antithetical to the allied democracies, but quite in tune with kindred Axis power, Nazi Germany.)

3) Much of the devastating weaponry used on the Japanese (e.g., the B-29 fire raids, or the two nuclear bombs) were envisioned and designed to be used against Germany (cf. the 1941 worry over German nuclear physics) or were refined first in the European theater (cf. the allied fire raids on Hamburg and Dresden). Much of the worst savagery of the war came in 1945 when an increasingly mobilized and ever more powerful United States steadily turned its attention on Japan as the European theater waned and then ended four months before victory in the Pacific theater. Had we needed by 1945 to use atomic bombs, or massive formations of B-29s when they came on line, against Hitler, we most certainly would have.

Trumping Bush

Barack Obama has oddly done a great service to George W. Bush. Almost every issue about which the media and our elite culture once faulted Bush for has been even more applicable to Obama himself.

Bush and the Press? Obama has given far fewer press conferences; he is accessible, if the media agrees to fluff interviews and photo-ops. For Scott McClellan, substitute Robert Gibbs (Obama has of yet no pro like Tony Snow). Authentic imprecision in a president is perhaps preferable to teleprompted glibness.

Awkwardness? For “nucular,” substitute “corpse-man,” and add in Austrian-speaking Austrians and Cinco de Cuatro celebrations.

Karl Rove hardballers? Trumped again by Chicagoans like Axelrod, Emanuel, and Jarret. I don’t think Mark Foley ever accused a shouting Karl Rove of approaching him naked in the congressional showers.

Tired expressions? Try “let me be perfectly clear” and “make no mistake about it” ad nauseam.

Bush crassness? For “Yo Blair” and a back rub for Angie Merkel, imagine cheap gifts for the British, bows to the Saudis, and lies about Islamic primacy in science and discovery.

We could go on.

Bush the rude boor abroad? A poll of Europe’s leaders (privately, of course) would perhaps find German, British, Italian, and French prime ministers and presidents more favorable to the folksy dependable Bush than the aloof diffident Obama.

NATO friends in Afghanistan? The transnational Obama is no more successful in keeping Europeans at the front than was the supposedly unilateral Bush. Indeed, the Dutch are leaving and the French not sending any new help.

American popularity abroad? Polls show that Americans, at least, feel our national prestige has declined, not grown since 2009. Most worry more that allies like Merkel, Sarkozy and the Brits now doubt America’s resolve than whether we are liked by the crowds in Bali or Zimbabwe.

Is Obama on some sort of mission to rehabilitate George Bush? Each time he starts in with “reset” and “Bush did it” and “we inherited this mess,” he is achieving the opposite effect of what was intended — sympathy for the prior president.

Obama as Bush 2.0

But all this is just fluff and PR: the real Obama gift to Bush has been on foreign policy and the economy.

By December 2008, a multiyear narrative had been long established among global elites that George Bush had essentially shredded the U.S. Constitution. By enacting a series of post-9/11 anti-terrorism measures such as the Patriot Act, renditions, tribunals, Predator-targeted assassinations, and the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, as well as conducting two unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush was supposed nearly on par with the terrorists themselves.

State legislator, Senator, and then presidential candidate Obama perhaps best both played on, and helped to advance, this narrative of Bush the anti-civil libertarian, by serial criticism of almost all of the Bush protocols. Indeed, Obama was on record on everything from demanding combat troops out of Iraq by March 2008 to labeling air attacks in Afghanistan as a sort of airborne terrorism.

For every Bush protocol, one can adduce a demagogic Obama slur, as he derided tribunals, Iraq, renditions, and Guantanamo. Such posturing was relatively easy — given that an unexpectedly safe America years later had the luxury to second guess the earlier protocols that had kept it secure. Partisan cheap rhetoric, of course, was far easier than responsible governance.

Predator Obama

But then a funny thing happened. A now President Obama, responsible for the safety of 300 million Americans, adopted almost all of the Bush measures, and in some cases even augmented them (such as quadrupling the number of targeted assassinations.)

I am looking over a pile of form letters and going over emails of anguish, all decrying the cuts in state government. Indeed, I just got my regular alumnus email note from the UC system — outraged over the destruction of the university through massive budget cuts. Of course, there is very little self-reflection in all of this furor. Not one of these notices suggests, “There is no money left. It does not grow on trees. Look in the mirror.”

You, the Greedy — Not Us, the Anointed

No, nothing is much said about the gargantuan number of UC administrators, their pay, the percentage of administrative costs in the budget, the number of non-academic employees serving in the system, or any explanation why the rate of annual increase in the university budget has consistently over the years exceeded the rate of inflation — in many years at twice the rate of inflation. Taxes climb; guaranteed federal loans that pay tuition expand; state borrowing increases; standards decline; admissions increase; life is good — so why worry?

“They” did it!

Instead the modus operandi is to cite students turned away, classes canceled, programs slashed — never any sense that the first cuts should be vice chancellors, associate provosts, assistants to the president, and other top echelon administrators — absences in many cases that would not affect the quality of instruction. Slash UC administrators by 50%, make all UC professors teach 2 classes per semester (those at CSU teach 4), cut out “support” personnel in various centers, end tenure — and at least some of the crisis would ease.

From my 21 years in the CSU system, I can attest that most of the “centers for…” and “assistants to” and “offices of” could easily be terminated. Both UC and CSU have vastly increased the percentage of non-academic, non-teaching expenditures in their budgets — the expanding number of non-instructional employees subsidized by both increased taxes and the exploitive use of part-time and graduate student instructors, who teach at well less than half the pay of normal faculty and now at some campuses account for nearly 40% of the total offered units. (Remember that the next time a tenured professor rails about pay inequity at Wal-Mart).

Protests everywhere…

In general now, University of California students are furious with tuition raises, rioting even at Berkeley. Teachers are angry about cutbacks. State employee unions blast the airways with ads complaining about a scarcity of funds.

So bear with me with a bit.

The cost to attend a University of California flagship campus — room, board, and tuition — is about a third of what is charged by a private, comparable institution in California like Stanford or USC — roughly some $15-20,000 in total costs versus around $50,000 per year. Public higher education is a good deal, in other words.

California public school teachers make on average the highest salaries in the United States, several thousands higher than those in Massachusetts or Connecticut, and about $20,000 more a year than in a place like Maine or Kansas. On average, government employees, state and federal, nationwide make about 50% more (in salary, pension, and benefits) than their counterparts in the private sector. I realize that if one reaches the very top of private enterprise, one can make more than a high-earning state or federal bureaucrat; but, in general, across the spectrum, it is far preferable to work for government, besides the job security, higher pension, and better working conditions.

The problem is that we have created a strange drone mindset that manifests itself in two ways. Among elites there is almost a “Don’t touch or disturb that!” mantra. The law of the hothouse orchid reigns. Once our grubby ancestors created our infrastructure, we wish sometimes to ridicule and — use — it, less often to leave anything better behind for anyone else.

Fish, not people

We want all the dividends of industrial society, but an 18^th century wilderness at the same time. So the in-the-know people demand cheap, plentiful, and tasty food, but worry more about a three-inch fish than the farmers and farm workers who keep us alive one more day — and so divert fresh water out into the bay to keep the delta smelt alive. (Oh, I know the Gorist logic: the smelt is a canary in the mine; when he can’t get enough oxygen, then we won’t be able to drink soon.” Sorry, I suggest that communities whose treated sewage goes into the bay begin using some sort of organic toilets rather than the old flush models.)

To drive through downtown Santa Barbara is to count the amazing variety of Volvo, Mercedes, Lexus, and BMW SUVs — and wonder where the gasoline comes from, as off-shore drilling declines. You get the picture — our top echelons have become quite prissy. The redwood deck is beloved, not the falling coast redwood tree; kitchen granite counters are de rigueur, not the blasting at the top of the granite mountain; the Prius is a badge of honor, not the chemical plant that makes its batteries; we now like stainless steel frigs, but hate steel’s coke, and iron ore, and electricity lines; arugula is tasty, not the canal that brings water 400 miles to irrigate it; I support teacher unions and -studies courses in the public schools, but not with my Ivy-League bound children.

And on the other hand…

At the other end of the social spectrum, the underclass seems to be growing. I don’t expect to see much cash at mega-supermarkets in my area. Food stamps — and yet expensive food — are the norm. The school systems of California’s major cities are broken; the wealthy praise them and flee, and the poor complain about their inadequacy, but insist on the sort of identity “pride” politics curriculum and staffing that ensure the inadequacy.

Don’t mention parental responsibility; that’s either Neanderthal or racist. When I see gang bangers in San Jose or Fresno, I think two things: they like DVDs, nice cars, drugs, and the cult of male violence, but when they get hurt they show up at the emergency room and demand 21^st century medical care from the nerds they so often intimidate on the street. Is a Stanford-trained emergency doctor potential prey on Saturday night at the stop light, or a few hours later in surgery a godsend?

It is taboo to ask our failing youth a simple question, “What exactly have you done the last month to ensure your birthright to the world’s most sophisticated lifestyle propped up by advanced math, science, social stability, and political tranquility?”

It other words, our elite is becoming more elite and refined, while our non-elite is becoming more rough around the edges. But they share a disturbing commonality: both expect something that they are not willing to invest in.

Both Ways

The well-off like nice cars, tasteful homes, good food, and appropriate vacations — but not the oil, gas, coal, nuclear energy, transmission lines, timber, cement,  farmland, water pumps, etc., that bring that to them. In California we like to leave old pot-holed roads up to the Sierra as proof of our environmentalism (cheaper too), and then clog them when we wish in politically-incorrect fashion to have a picnic in the mountains. You see, the mindset of the elite Bay Area denizen is to keep California pristine, rough even, for that one day a year in the wild experience, even as it turns out most green suburbanites actually like to go the lake or beach, and get in their carbon-emitting cars on congested roads to get there.

1) Money: There is none. Every time the president talks of another billion for this, and trillion for that, the people sigh: “We don’t have it; he’s going to borrow it.” Unemployment is near 10%, so borrowing nearly $2 trillion each year makes more sense to Keynesian economists than to voters who don’t find hope by maxing out their credit cards when they lose their jobs.

Obama is weirdly oblivious to number crunching — as is true of many who have never been self-employed or had to scramble without a public salary. Yet even Hillary is now whining that her foreign policy is frozen by the fact of mounting American debt. Obama is the stereotypical great-aunt that sweeps into the Christmas dinner casually boasting about what she is going to do for this niece and that nephew, while most roll their eyes with the understanding that her credit cards are long ago maxed out — and more likely she will be hitting up relatives for loans. Americans don’t like magnanimity with other people’s money.

2)  Style: Great orators get better in their rhetoric, not worse. It turns out that the people risked a blank slate in Obama in part because in his teleprompted hope and change orations, he sounded fresh and mellifluous. Voters assumed he would wear well. But in nonstop interviews, press conferences, and conversations, the impromptu president seems no more comfortable than was an ad hoc George Bush. And just as liberals were turned off by Bush’s cowboyisms, so too conservatives are tired of Obama’s professorial, condescending sermons. After a year, the people are tired of all the “let me be perfectly clear” psycho-drama, the “make no mistake about” pseudo-tough man pose, the straw man “I reject the false choice that some would…,” and  the narcissistic “I have ordered…..my team…to.”  The boilerplate is now recognizable even to the Washington press corps. But as important, it dovetails with more disturbing propensities: there are the periodic signs of inanity like “Cinco de Cuatro” and “corpse-man;” the constant fudging on the truth of multibillion dollar new programs really “saving” money; and the surreal bowing to dictators and emperors, with the relish of turning our misdemeanors into felonies and our enemies’ felonies into benefactions.

3) Laureate Warmaking: Utopians cannot get away with quadrupling the number of targeted killings in Pakistan and Waziristan against suspected terrorists and their wives. Twangy Texans who believe that we are at “war” against non-uniformed enemy combatants logically order Predators assassinations against what they see as a ruthless, bloodthirsty radical Islamic  “enemy” in a “them or us” fight to the finish. But, again, not so Nobel Peace laureates, who want terrorists to be Mirandized, the architects of 9/11 to be tried in civilian courts in New York, and CIA interrogators to be investigated for waterboarding known mass murderers. So once you go down the path of our struggle against terrorists and jihadists as a criminal enterprise, with writs, trials, and prison sentences, then targeted killing and assassinating suspects, even from high in the sky, simply do not make sense. (Comparative morality argues that it is nicer to waterboard confessed mass murderers than to vaporize suspected terrorists.)

4) Saintly partisanship: Crass politicians can get away with the nuclear option or reconciliation. Hard-nosed Republicans senators once threatened to go nuclear with 51 votes in the Senate to get judges confirmed in the manner that once outraged liberal politicos who now are more than happy to ram through health care without 60 votes. But messiahs? Obama once gave a sermon on the dangers of mere majority rule, when he was a backbencher in the Senate and a favorite of the hard left. “Majorities” in his refined mind were then a sign of rowdy tyrannical populism. So such a parliamentarian really cannot now threaten to use a bare majority to smash through health care, not when he has assured us that he is no Harry Reid or Barbara Boxer, but rather a “no more blue/red state” “healer.” The wages of hypocrisy are usually more costly than mindless partisanship. And the more Obama talks of bipartisanship and reaching out, the more the law professor seems to go out of his way to be petulant and trenchantly “my way or the highway.”

What’s going on with race relations? I just read an account of racial tension at UC San Diego, involving largely white students  of a fraternity crassly parodying black history month. I remembered also that the Rev. Wright tapes were disturbing not just because of his lunacy, but due to the standing ovations from his congregation who were ecstatic in praise of his racist and anti-American hatred.

This week the Internet is alive with a tape of an elderly white Vietnam veteran duking it out with an African-American bully on an Oakland bus — with plenty of commentary and racial epithets from the observers on the bus. In Hawaii there is pending legislation to institutionalize racism against non-native Hawaiians, by creating reservation like federal sanctuaries to be governed by those of “pure” blood.

Yet in 2008 a multiracial electorate voted  for the nation’s first African-American president — who, in terms of racial solidarity, could only rely on 95% of,  at most, 10% of the registered voters who were African-Americans.

If harmony is measured by high-profile offices, then the country perhaps is postracial. For the prior eight years the secretaries of State were African-American. We haven’t had a white male in that post since poor Warren Christopher during the Clinton era.

Why the progress and tension at the same time? Here are some of the contradictions in matters racial.

1. Fossilized categories and programs. We don’t quite know what “race” is anymore. Intermarriage and assimilation should have made racial lines almost meaningless. Barack Obama, Valerie Jarrett, and Eric Holder talk about being black; but they are not nearly so in comparison to my Sikh neighbors in the Central Valley, who both are darker and, I imagine, have had harder childhoods. (What constitutes being “black,” or are we back to the Old Confederacy for the one-sixteenth rule?)

2. Self-identification. Choice, or rather accident, seems to determine one’s identity as much as reality: a half-Hispanic Bob Jones (mother is Linda Ramirez) might have problems convincing an affirmative action officer that he is not Italian. His exact counterpart Bob Luna (father is Hispanic) seems more “authentic.” But then what is “Hispanic” — 50% (or less?) Mexican-American heritage that must earn recompense due to “historic oppression”?

So does that include Brazilian and Chilean immigrants? Does a day on American soil and an Hispanic surname entitle one to affirmative action? (In my experience they have.) Does oppression include the Chinese 19^th-century experience, or the Japanese internment — or is the quiet truth that set-asides and “help” are predicated on group statistical failures to meet supposed norms of economic success? Darker immigrants from India don’t qualify, lighter Mexican-Americans do? And to what generation do we continue — all the way to the 4^th-generation of an intermarried Hispanic, who is, in truth, one-sixteenth of Mexican heritage? Is racial identification to be passed on like 19^th century water rights? Does a name vaguely Hispanic denote race?

3. More Incongruities. Then there are the contradictions that have reached the point of caricatures. The n-word is a felonious offense. OK — but apparently on the comic stump it can be easily voiced (only) by black comedians. (On the Oakland bus tape, the angry African-American calls his white opponent a N—-r. ). We worry about the decline in the number of black baseball players, but not about the “overrepresentation” of Hispanics?

There is no affirmative action in the NBA. The point is that any attempt to seek proportional representation seems asinine. Whites who demand diversity are applauded as being more racially sensitive than those blacks who don’t. We can’t even get the politics quite right. For a hundred years a large block of the Democratic Party enforced segregation; for twenty years many Republicans were remiss and absent from pushing civil rights; therefore, the Democratic Party is the historically protective party of minorities?

I’ve noticed that when poorer Mexican-Americans intermarry there is rarely hyphenation. That is, Gracie Galindo happily becomes Gracie Becker; but the more affluent one becomes, the more attuned to the careerism of racial triumphalism one becomes, and the more liberal one professes to be, suddenly Gracie becomes Gracie Galindo-Becker. I leave it at that, since readers can fill in all the incongruent blanks from their own experiences.

4. An Entrenched Old White Elite? Then there is the role of diversity hypocrisy on the part of the white elite. In a perfect world, any advocate of affirmative action would swear off traditional influence peddling. The liberal lawyer who sues for diversity in the work place would not call the admission officer of his alma mater to seek heft for his son’s admission; the full professor of English who was hired sight unseen through word of mouth in 1974 would not predicate his hiring vote on diversity. In other words, many of the advocates for racial preferences assume that their own wealth, class, and influence will allow themselves and their clique exemptions.

5. Then there is the youth problem. Tens of millions were born after 1980, into a world of affirmative action with no recollection of the 1960s. They have had two antithetical experiences: one, today’s youth date, marry, “hang-out” without racial stigmatization: look at the mall gatherings or high school campus, everyone is mixed up (albeit less so with African-Americans on urban campuses); and yet, this generation is really the first to go through the race/class/gender indoctrination in our schools and the sermons on diversity. I don’t think the former phenomenon of easy integration (a product of immigration, popular culture, and demography) is connected to the latter. But our youth who live integration don’t like to be lectured about it — and their angst, if not push-back, is growing.

a)    The now familiar Palin/Edwards dichotomy. John McCain was damned for picking Sarah Palin who had not finished her first term as governor, and had previously only been elected to local political offices and served on a state commission.

Her middle American ‘you betcha’ twang, NASCAR persona, good looks, and occasional deer-in-the-headlines interviews with hostile anchor people, coupled with the kids, conservative creed, Christianity, and 19^th century husband, sickened—there is no other word for it— the DC-New York punditocracy. Yes, they concluded, she really was from Wasilla. Yuk.

So we got everything in the media from the maverick McCain suddenly as cynical sell-out who settled for third-best, to Palin, the clueless Alaskan yokel.

In contrast, to this day, there is no in-depth analysis of Kerry’s disastrous pick of the first-term, uninformed Senator Edwards as his VP choice in 2004. And it took the National Enquirer to inform us of his later conspiratorial lying and bribery involving his illegitimate child—sordid facts apparently well known to—and hushed up by—the mainstream media. Remember, later presidential candidate Edwards was not just inexperienced, but as a confessed wonk, did not open a book. He was the owner of a mansion who preached about “two-nations” inequality, and he alternately used and humiliated his alternately heroic and conniving cancer-stricken spouse.

b)  The responsible Times.  For much of 2002-8, the New York Times leaked classified information about U.S. policy in the war on terror and gave up on Iraq (though John Burns, its military correspondent, was quite professional and courageous). Indeed, the serial story of Iraq was the IED, not the heroic capture of Fallujah or the stunning success of the surge. The Times gave a discount to Moveon.org to run its “General Betray-Us” ads at a time thousands of young Americans were fighting for their lives during the surge.

And now? The Times admirably sat on advanced warning of the current NATO offensive in Afghanistan; its editor emphasized that the paper was “responsible” in reporting matters of national security (i.e. the Times does not leak). Our current efforts in Helmand Province now are portrayed in the media in the manner of Patton’s WWII offensives—thank God for that.

c)   The war on terror.  For much of the Bush administration, one would have thought the Constitution had been shredded. My God—Tribunals! Renditions! Guantanamo! Patriot Act! Intercepts! Wiretaps! Iraq! Predator drones!

Indeed, for each of those ACLU talking points, then candidate Obama reflected the media outrage and damned these protocols. Yet suddenly, there is no in-depth critical analysis of these policies. Most are now kept and apparently thought by government and media to be of both utility and morality by virtue that Obama adopted them.

In some cases, rhetoric suffices.  Guantanamo is now  “virtually” closed, in the manner KSM will be virtually tried in New York. Assert rather than enact and a sort of virtual nirvana follows in the media.

Not long ago, we were to charge or investigate former administration and CIA officials for ordering the waterboarding of three confessed terrorists, among them Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the proud father of 9/11. And now? The number of Predator drone assassination missions has increased enormously. Apparently in this new age of war as a criminal justice matter, somehow the Bush-era coerced interrogations of confessed mass-murderers deserved popular outrage and were to be considered crimes, while the judge/jury/executioner sentences passed down on suspected terrorists (again, dead men need no Miranda rights)—and anyone in their general vicinity when the hellfire missile hits—are well, like renditions and tribunals, suddenly problematic.

d)  Good, then bad, DC. A year ago, government was at last working. Supermajorities were in both houses of congress. The Senate was filibuster proof, in a way the poor Republicans had not been able to achieve during the 2005 Bush efforts to reform Social Security.

Obama was on nearly every magazine cover, his visage popped up on the evening newscasts. Pundits wrote puff pieces about “inside” interviews. Health care, cap and trade, borrowing, bail-outs, more stimuli, cash for clunkers, all this and more needed no Republican input with such supermajorities in congress.

The system was working as it was designed; to paraphrase the president, ‘we won and you lost’. A recalcitrant liberal Senator here and there could always be bought off with a $300 million earmark. Polls hit near 70% approval. The Europeans went ga-ga. Government was moving again.

No, I don’t mean the classical Greeks, but their present-day counterparts.

Economists have given us all the usual diagnoses of what went wrong in a now bankrupt Greece — high taxes, tax cheating, too generous retirements, unsustainable entitlements, government corruption, and anemic demography.

Add to such socialism the natural foreign policy and collective expressions that always follow statism in the modern Western world — increased pacifism, utopian pretension, moral equivalence, cheap anti-Americanism — and we have the foreign policy expression of Greece (and much of the EU) of the last 30 years. (A citizen who believes by birthright that he is to be taken care of by the state always hates the state that can never do enough, in the fashion that the country who is taken care of militarily always hates its protector.)

In other words, Greece is the canary in the mine of the impending crack-up of the modern welfare state. It is a great gift to us all, this example. A year ago, the socialists, even as they were juggling and falsifying their books, were bragging that the Wall Street meltdown was a referendum — and capitalism was doomed. Now, the entire socialist dream is exposed and even the most ardent statist knows that there is no longer enough “others” to pay the tab.

The poor EU learned that the Greek siesta, the 10PM Athenian dinners, the state power company vans at the beaches in the workday afternoons, the kafenions full of 50-year-old men at 11AM, the angry students perpetually in the streets at each hinted reform, and the moonlighting telephone employees all came at the expense of far harder-working Scandinavian and German socialists, who apparently  now realize a nice two weeks each year on Santorini or Crete aren’t worth billions of their own Euros in rescue bailouts.

We Are All Greeks Now?

Here in California we see the symptoms of the same Greek malady as we go from one budget shortfall to the next — dream-like borrowing, raising taxes, and furloughing, in lieu of the tough medicine of cutting government payrolls, changing pension payouts, and freezing the pay of state-workers until their compensation mirror images those in the private sector.

Postmodern Western society will soon witness a real showdown, analogous to the teenager who rebels and either accepts that he is still dependent on his parents and therefore subject to the rules of the house, or runs away and implodes in a sea of drugs and street-life.

In short, how will an entitled society react when the money runs out and it learns that it must change or wither away — and all the whining rhetoric about “social justice” and “a green future” and “spread the wealth” and “redistributive change” won’t bring another barrel of oil or bushel of wheat or Douglas fir 2” x 4”?

Imagine…

Imagine a politician announcing: we are going to raise the Social Security age to 66. We are going to freeze and cut spending until we balance the budget within three years, and then with surpluses pay down the debt within 6 years. We are going to build 100 new nuclear power plants and open up the country and its shores to oil and gas production. We are going to cut back all federal entitlements and subsidies by 20% immediately. We are going to ensure enough water for agriculture. We are …

Would collective relief or revolution follow?

Just Politics?

All politicians hedge and backtrack, as the daily news proves their previous assertions and boasts wrong. That somersaulting is part of American politics. But even the most astute triangulators know when to go silent, especially in the age of the Internet when one’s past statements are so easily juxtaposed with present reality.

Consider for a minute the Joe Biden odyssey on Iraq, because it has proven a variable primer on how the political class reinvented itself depending on the current pulse of the battlefield. Biden, like others, did not merely “evolve” on the war, but at each stage of his metamorphosis, emerged as a vehement, loud advocate of an entirely new position usually at odds with his prior assertions.

He apparently felt that either his charisma might delude us, or his apparent instability might earn from us  an exemption along the lines following his unhinged statement that  FDR addressed the nation on TV as President in 1929 —“Ah, that’s just Ol’ Joe being Ol’Joe,”  or that we all suffer  from collective amnesia:

Biden’s Timeline —”Dead, flat wrong”

1990: Biden votes against the first Gulf War and Bush I’s efforts to get Saddam out of Kuwait.

1998: Biden supports Bill Clinton’s call for regime change and “to dethrone Saddam Hussein over the long haul.”

2002: Biden asserts that Saddam has biological and chemical weapons and is seeking a nuclear arsenal, proclaiming, “We have no choice but to eliminate the threat.” He then votes in October for 23 writs authorizing President Bush to remove the dictator by force if need be.

2005: Joe Biden reassures the country that we must stay in Iraq: “We can call it quits and withdraw from Iraq. I think that would be a gigantic mistake. Or we can set a deadline for pulling out, which I fear will only encourage our enemies to wait us out – equally a mistake.”

2006: Biden declares that a sovereign Iraq is not sustainable, calls for trisecting Iraq into three separate entities and demands that President Bush “must direct the military to design a plan for withdrawing and redeploying our troops from Iraq by 2008.”

He adds that “Mr. Bush has spent three years in a futile effort to establish a strong central government in Baghdad, leaving us without a real political settlement, with a deteriorating security situation — and with nothing but the most difficult policy choices.”

2008: Joe Biden forecasts, “The surge isn’t going to work either tactically or strategically. … Tactically it isn’t going to work because … our guys go in and secure a neighborhood, but because we don’t have enough troops, we have to turn it over to the Iraqis, and they can’t hold it or won’t hold it.”

Joe Biden votes for legislation to oppose the surge, declaring that, “It’s an attempt to save the president from making a significant mistake with regard to our policy in Iraq.” He reiterates that the surge will not only fail, but make things worse: “I believe it will have the opposite — I repeat — opposite effect the president intends.”

Biden later elaborates on that: “The purpose of the surge was to bring violence in Iraq down so that its leaders could come together politically. Violence has come down, but the Iraqis have not come together. …There is little evidence the Iraqis will settle their differences peacefully any time soon. I believe the president has no strategy for success in Iraq.”

Biden then tells Gen. Petraeus that he is  “dead, flat wrong.” He later concludes there is “no end in sight” in Iraq and staying is “killing us.”

2009: A Vice President Biden accepts the Bush-Petraeus plan of continuing a U.S. combat presence in Iraq, and accepts the status of forces agreement and timetable of withdrawal as negotiated with the Iraqis by the Bush administration to remove U.S. combat troops as envisioned by the end of 2011.

2010: Biden claims credit for winning Iraq: “I am very optimistic about — about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.”