The Other McCain : Page 2324 : "One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up."

Multilateral Retardation

Posted on March 22, 2011March 22, 2011Comments

What slapped me upside the head in Obama’s press conference yesterday was his insistence that an “international consensus” justified the attacks on Libya, and that multilateralism was a “core principle” of his foreign policy. Nothing could be more harmful, more calculated to infringe U.S. sovereignty. This undermines the proper goal of foreign policy, namely the pursuit of our national interest.

If hostile foreign powers know that the U.S. cannot go to war without an “international consensus,” then they will seek to influence or intimidate potential allies. By denying America a “consensus,” they will thereby render the U.S. military impotent, so that our interests overseas (whatever those interests may be) are at the mercy of any aggressor.

The best way to defeat a hostile coalition, as Winston Churchill pointed out in The World Crisis, is to attack its weakest member. And this is exactly how America’s enemies operate when seeking to deprive us of the “international consensus” that liberals insist is necessary for the United States to take military action. Ace of Spades points this out:

My main problem with “multilateral efforts” is that what these are always all about is France. What’s the major difference between Bush’s Coalition and Obama’s? France. France was the big hold-out in the War in Iraq. They’re on board with this one.
So while the liberal media dances in joy over this terrific new coalition, they’re really just dancing that France is on board.
Further, they get the active agent and passive object reversed — Obama did not persuade France to join the coalition. France persuaded Obama.

Read the rest of that and think about it. If France wanted to attack Moammar Qaddafi, would we have objected? I think not. But instead of fighting the Franco-Libyan War of 2011, the French recruit the U.S. to bear the heaviest burden of the war — and Obama can’t even be bothered to ask permission of Congress! An article at National Journal addresses the anger over this high-handedness:

Why is everyone so mad? Because lawmakers, like everyone else, have war fatigue, NBC says. Also, lawmakers really don’t like being left out of the loop. (Obama sent a letter to Congress notifying it that America had joined a war — two days after bombing started.) And as Robert Stacy McCain points out at the American Spectator, a lot of liberals thought Obama would restore pre-9/11 norms — Obama has held onto many Bush-era policies most hated by the left: Guantanamo Bay, secret wiretaps, the Patriot Act, etc. The controversy also shows, though, just how hard it is for presidents to give up new powers claimed by predecessors.

I don’t know whether or not this Libyan intervention is a good idea, but that’s not what the debate is about as far as I’m concerned.

What bugs me is that American public opinion seems to have drifted, almost unnoticed, into a belief that what counts most in U.S. foreign policy is whether France (or Germany or Russia, etc.) approve of our actions. When an “international consensus” has more influence over how we use our nation’s armed forces than the United States Congress . . . dude, that’s trouble. As with so much of the Obama agenda, his “core principle” of multilateralism amounts to a repeal of the American founding. After all, what did the Founders sign in July 1776? The Declaration of Independence.

While it is always best to pursue military action with the support of allies — Churchill understood that England’s foreign policy had always rested on the concept of a “Grand Alliance” to restrain aggressors — if our ability to pursue our national interest is dependent on an “international consensus,” then our nation is not truly independent.

Troubleshooting ‘Beyond the Welfare State’

Posted on March 22, 2011March 22, 2011Comments

by Smitty (hat tip Monty at AoSHQ)

Yuval Levin’s essay at National Affairs is quite well written, and well conceived. Furthermore, it’s a more reasonable conversation starter than I would produce, because it accepts the historical fact of the welfare state as a given, and proceeds to argue the case from there.

Monty moves in the direction I’d go, emphasis mine:

But one thing has become clear in the western nations since the welfare-state started in earnest after World War II: it spreads like kudzu, it encompasses and infantilizes ever-larger percentages of the population, and it beggars even the richest and most powerful countries. Leave aside questions of morality and efficacy for the moment — it is dreadfully clear that the main problem with the welfare-state is that we can’t afford it. No one can, no matter how rich or powerful.

This is the paradox of the welfare state: it will surely ruin us if left to run unchecked, yet so many people now depend upon it that we can’t stop.

However, I submit that a fuller analysis will be crucial to doing two things:

Coming up with a remedy. You can talk about the flooding all day long, but you aren’t patching much until the leak is isolated.
Obtaining buy-in to implement that remedy. Everybody hates change, especially when it involves pain, even though we all know that our welfare state buzz ends with a mother of a hangover.

On my to-read list is Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic. A brief summary mooched from Volokh:

The book argues that the Madisonian system of separation of powers has eroded beyond recognition and been replaced with a system of executive primacy (which others have called the “imperial presidency”) in which Congress and the courts play only a marginal role. Most scholars who have recognized this development have called for a return to the Madisonian system, but we believe that the rise of the executive has resulted from a recognition among political elites that only a powerful executive can address the economic and security challenges of modern times.

Not a thesis to make anyone happy, on the left or right.

How in the world is this collapse into an Imperial Presidency tied to the welfare state?
My theory is that the 1913 trifecta of:

Implementing the income tax (Amendment 16),
Turning the Senate into the Big House with every state composed of two ‘districts’, and diminishing the States as such as political entities (Amendment 17),
The godforsaken Federal Reserve (Ugliest Legislative Christmas Present Ever)

These three items were the core seeds of DOOM. Later chestnuts like the New Deal, National Security Act of 1947, Great Society, and the War Powers Resolution of 1973 are also bricks in the wall.
Among the problems to be worked in parallel are:

A large collection of weaklings who think dependency on the State is a feature, not a bug.
A national debt that we should start measuring in Astronomical Units, for all anyone can conceptualize the actual amount of money.
The notion that running a peacetime budget deficit is both somehow not a bug, but is in fact a Really Good Feature.
A vast standing bureaucracy, that, if Wisconsin is an indication, will cheerfully see the country sink in progressive debt flooding rather than let a shoring team get in there and patch anything.

Back to Levin, he is more interested in broaching discussion than going to the mat with ideas (emphasis mine):

Conservatives should therefore not expect to ever simply win the argument. Our challenge, rather, is to dominate the argument — to offer the vision that implicitly sets the tone for our common life. The key to doing so is the emergence of a policy-oriented conservatism, one able to make gainful compromises not because it is ambivalent about its own aims or tentative in its commitment to them but because it knows exactly what it wants — a thriving free society with a market economy, strong families, a devotion to country, and a commitment to the value of every life — and knows that this can (indeed must) be obtained gradually, by a mix of persuasion and proof. Such an approach must always remain grounded in the principles of American life — the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, of the Western tradition and of classical liberalism. But it must also translate those principles into policy particulars. In our politics, battles over ideas are won in practice, not in theory.

Recent decades have offered some examples of such an approach — from welfare reform to the urban policing revolution — but they have been too few and far between. There are good reasons to hope that just such an approach is now emerging more broadly on the right, and good reasons to encourage and foster its emergence.

Truly, I look to see a revisiting of 1913 with some DC plugs

no_these_are_not_suppositories — Damage control plugs are for those who's prefer to stay afloat

and a large sledgehammer. If centralization is deemed the problem, then de-centralizing will be a component of the solution. Give each State its own bank, like North Dakota, and let them manage their own housing. Let them manage the welfare of their own citizens. Let them tax their own citizens. Let the States figure out if they want to appoint or popularly elect Senators. In short, let the Federal government be federal, and quit treating the country like a single state.
I’d say that is the goal, and then be moderate in the implementation. We can’t unwind a century of error overnight, or even within two terms of the Paco Administration.

LT: Hall of Fame Sex Offender

Posted on March 22, 2011March 22, 2011Comments

When this story first caught my attention last spring, I wrote:

Wait a minute. You’re Lawrence Taylor, considered by many football commentators to be the greatest linebacker in the history of the game, and you’re meeting a pimp named Rasheed at a Holiday Inn to pay $300 for a hooker from the Bronx?

Taylor copped a plea to a misdemeanor, and his 16-year-old victim says LT got off too easy:

The underage girl who Lawrence Taylor admitted having sex with before a guilty plea to a sex charge said Tuesday that the sentence of probation given to the Pro Football Hall of Famer was too lenient.
The girl . . . told reporters after Taylor was sentenced to six years probation in a New York court that she wanted to see him got to jail.
“I am not a prostitute,” she said. “I am a victim and I am hurting. I don’t think the sentence given to Mr. Taylor is fair.”
The girl was a runaway who was sent into a hotel room with Taylor in May 2010. Prosecutors have charged Rasheed Davis with being the pimp that sent the girl into Taylor’s hotel room.
The Hall of Famer admitted paying $300 for sex.

The girl is being represented by famed attorney Gloria Allred.

If someone finds the video of LT’s Fox News appearance this afternoon, please post a link in the comments. Because watching him defend his habit of frequenting prostitutes was one of the most pathetic things I’ve seen in a while. Because I remember what LT used to be — a guy who played the game with an intense ferocity:

Watch that video: 6-foot-4 and 300 pounds, so fast, so strong, physically overwhelming the linemen who attempted to block him — dude hit so hard he broke Joe Theisman’s leg.

And now? A shameful disgrace.

The media should re-think its enthusiastic embrace of celebrity whore-hoppers like Eliot Spitzer and Charlie Sheen. Law enforcement should more rigorously prosecute men involved in prostitution, both as clients and pimps. And guys need to wake up and realize that, if you have to pay for it — whatever you’re paying for it — it ain’t worth it.

Is Charlie Sheen Really ‘Winning’?

Posted on March 22, 2011March 22, 2011Comments

Between the Fukushima crisis and the war in Libya, I sort of lost track of the important news:

So to hear some tabloid websites tell it, the TV business has basically forgotten about all of Charlie Sheen’s astoundingly bad behavior and is now in a race to get him back in primetime. CBS honcho Leslie Moonves, per the musings of Radar Online, is basically begging Charlie Sheen to come back to Two and a Half Men and has told all other parties involved in the dispute to do whatever it takes to make the Warlock happy. Meanwhile, over in Mayor Harvey Levin’s TMZ township, some of the most important brass at Fox met with Sheen and are already discussing how to find a way to have the ex-sitcom star take on Conan, Jay and Dave with his own late-night show. Sheen isn’t just winning, according to this narrative — he’s practically the most in-demand actor in Hollywood right now! But is any of this true?

What Josef Adalian then offers is just guesswork. Maybe well-informed guesswork, but still just guesswork.

And while my own guesswork is almost certainly less well-informed, I’ve got a hunch that Team Sheen is just trying to hype their guy’s profile: “Yeah, got a lot of meetings with network executives! Talking about new contracts! We’ve got CBS eating out of our hand, baby!”

Not buying it. Notoriously temperamental hooker-chasing cokehead obscenely denounces the hottest TV producer in Hollywood, then has a psychotic breakdown in public . . . annndd everybody’s just dying for a chance to work with him now? I doubt it.

But it’s Hollywood. Crazier things have happened there.

Economic Terror Plan for ‘Redistributing Wealth and Power in the Country’

Posted on March 22, 2011March 22, 2011Comments

Such eminences as Barbara Ehrenreich and Cornel West were featured speakers at Left Forum 2011, a conference held this past weekend at Pace University in New York City. Left Forum traces its history to a series of events first organized as the Socialist Scholars Conference and sponsored by Democratic Socialists of America.

The theme of this year’s Left Forum was “Towards a Politics of Solidarity,” and among the speakers was former SEIU official Stephen Lerner. His shocking presentation was captured on audio and featured at The Blaze and Business Insider. Lerner described his plan for a “10-state mobilization” against J.P. Morgan Chase beginning in May, seeking “to inspire a much bigger movement about redistributing wealth and power in the country.”

“We need to figure out . . . through direct action . . . how we are really trying to disrupt and create uncertainty for capital, for how corporations operate,” Lerner said. “There are actually extraordinary things we could do right now to start to destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement.”

Lerner, who spoke on two panels during the conference, suggested encouraging homeowners to stop paying their mortgages. Saying that 10% of “underwater” mortgage borrowers are in “strategic default” — refusing to make payments but taking advantage of delays in the forceclosure process — Lerner said if the number of strategic defaults were doubled “you could put banks at the edge of insolvency again.”

Lerner said: “[W]hat would happen if we organized homeowners en masse to do a mortgage strike? If we get half a million people to agree, it would literally cause a new financial crisis for the banks — not for us. We would be doing quite well. We wouldn’t be paying anything.”

Referring to the recent union-led protests in Wisconsin, Lerner envisioned “moving the kind of disruption in Madison . . . to Wall Street,” confronting banks with the accusation that they “stole $17 trillion.”

“We have to think about how, together, we are building something that really has the capacity to disrupt how the system operates,” Lerner said, describing “a very simple strategy” for such a disruption: “How do we bring down the stock market? How do we bring down their bonuses? How do we interfere with their ability to be rich? And that means we have to politically isolate them, economically isolate them and disrupt them.”

Advocating “brave and heroic battles challenging the power of the giant corporations,” Lerner said that he and others decided that JP Morgan Chase “would be a really good company to hate” and said they “are going to roll out over the next couple of months what would hopefully be an exciting campaign about JP Morgan Chase that is really about challenging the power of Wall Street.”

Describing a weeklong campaign of disruptive “direct action” and “civil disobedience” — tentatively scheduled for the first week in May — Lerner said the disruptive protests would “connect three ideas”: “that we are not broke, there is plenty of money”; “they have the money, we need to get it back”; and that capitalists are using New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg “and other people in government as the vehicle to try and destroy us.”

UPDATE: Lerner was fired from SEIU in November by the union’s new president, Mary Kay Henry. Lerner’s penchant for “disruptive” tactics was displayed last spring, when he organized a mass protest at the Washington, D.C., home of Bank of America official Greg Baer, and Lerner told Nina Easton:

“Millions of people are losing their homes, and they have gone to the banks, which are turning a deaf ear. . . . People in powerful corporations seem to think they can insulate themselves from the damage they are doing.”

As Easton noted, Baer is a lifelong Democrat.

UPDATE II: Linked by If You Seek Peace — thanks! Now a Memeorandum thread with more blog commentary by Kathleen McKinley at Right Wing News, Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom and Jeff Dunetz of Yid With Lid.

UPDATE III: John Sexton at Verum Serum features video of Lerner in a 2009 appearance on Ed Schultz’s MSNBC show:

UPDATE IV: Remember that SEIU was sued for harassment and blackmail last week. And referring to Lerner’s ouster last year from SEIU, Ed Morrissey says:

Apparently, the first rule of Labor Nihilist Club is not to talk about Labor Nihilist Club. The second rule of Labor Nihilist Club? Keep your hands off the union cash, dude.

UPDATE V: It might be tempting to think that Lerner is a fringe kook with no larger influence, but Sam Foster at Left Coast Rebel observes an interesting coincidence: The day before Lerner made his presentation at Pace University, the AFL-CIO announced a new protest campaign against Morgan Chase:

Hundreds of workers, religious leaders, community activists and farm worker advocates rallied and protested in 200 cities across the couintry today to demand that JP Morgan Chase respect the basic human rights of people to have decent places to live and work.
Large banks such as Chase are flush with cash and protestors demanded the bank declare a one-year moratorium on home foreclosures. The Wall Street Journal reports that Chase has $19.5 billion worth of home loans in foreclosure—nearly 7.5 percent of its mortgage portfolio and more than any other big bank.
Nearly 400 people rallied at Chase headquarters in New York City. Speakers stood on the back of a truck with banners declaring “Chase: Morally Bankrupt” and laid out the case that as a result of the bank’s reckless pursuit of profits at any cost, thousands of people have lost their homes.
Today’s protests mark the beginning of a new, intensified campaign leading up to JP Morgan Chase’s annual meeting next month.

Here is the logo of the Left’s anti-Morgan Chase campaign:

Just a coincidence, I’m sure . . .

UPDATE VI: Bryan Preston is not afraid to call this what it is: Domestic terrorism.

UPDATE VII: Linked by Bob Belvedere at Camp of the Saints — thanks! — and thanks also to Bob and another commenter for pointing out this: Stanley Kurtz has documented that it was at the 1983 Socialist Scholars Conference that Obama became a convert to Alinksy-style “community organizing.” Obama was then a Columbia University senior, and among the participants in the SSC (forerunner of the Left Forum) were Frances Fox Piven and James Cone, “theological mentor” to Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The full story is told in Kurtz’s recent book, Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism.

‘Too Good a Pleasure to Forego’

Posted on March 22, 2011March 22, 2011Comments

The quote in the headline is from Professor Glenn Reynolds about the delicious all-you-can-eat schadenfreude smorgasbord served up by liberals since St. Hopey’s War broke out Saturday. Some people seem to have forgotten the absolute viciousness of liberals during the Bush years. Last night, while doing some research, I ran across a Byron York item about Michael Moore at the 2004 Democratic convention:

“The right wing is not where America is at,” Moore said. “Most Americans, in their heart, are liberal and progressive. It’s just a small minority of people who hate. They hate. They exist in the politics of hate.”
“They’re not patriots,” Moore said. “They’re hate-triots, and they believe in the politics of hate-triotism. Hate-triotism is where they stand, and patriotism is where real Americans stand.” . . .
“I mean, they are up at six in the morning trying to figure out which minority group they’re going to screw today,” Moore continued. “The hate, they eat for breakfast. They are going to fight and they are going to smear, and they are going to lie, and they are going to hate.”

So, yeah, when a vitriolic irresponsible cretin like Michael Moore — a guy so clueless he actually thought John Kerry would be a good president — is exposed for the complete chump he is, I’m going to do everything I can to publicize his embarrassment. And hey, did I mention I’ve got a new column today at The American Spectator?

Shortly after the first U.S. cruise missiles hit their targets Saturday, the collateral damage became apparent — not in Libya, but on the home front, where liberal credibility was shattered by President Obama’s sudden resort to military action against Moammar Gaddafi’s regime. Those who had hailed Obama’s ascent as the dawn of a new age of peace, an end to the alleged “cowboy” belligerence of the Bush years, exploded with a mixture of outrage, confusion and chagrin as their hero flung the country into war in North Africa.
None was more indignant than Michael Moore. The left-wing filmmaker had spent George W. Bush’s presidency in frothing rage at Republicans whom he accused, at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, of practicing “the politics of hate.” That same year Moore released Fahrenheit 9/11, a dubious “documentary” which portrayed Bush as a secret ally of Osama bin Laden. And in April 2008, on the eve of the crucial Democratic primary in Pennsylvania, Moore publicly endorsed Obama because, he said, “the actions and words of Hillary Clinton have gone from being merely disappointing to downright disgusting.”
Evidently, in Moore’s view, Obama’s words and actions have recently gone in the same direction. Saturday afternoon, the director unleashed a torrent of mocking messages on Twitter: “We’re going to keep bombing countries until we get it right.… May I suggest a 50-mile evacuation zone around Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize?… Bombing Libya today was like an Iraq War anniversary present to ourselves!” Indeed, in an irony not lost on Moore, the attacks on Libya by a U.S.-led coalition fell on the eight-year anniversary of the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom, which liberals had long cited as Exhibit A in their case against the Bush administration. . . .

Read the whole thing, because the walk-off quote is as awesome as the flavor of fresh schadenfreude.

Movement To Kill The VampireEnd The Federal Reserve Gaining Steam

Posted on March 22, 2011March 22, 2011Comments

by Smitty

I liked Ron Paul’s book ending the Fed. Looking at the Constitutional notions of protecting liberty and private property, as well as the empirical results of the last century, the Federal Reserve seems to have been a slow motion disaster. Too much power in the hands of an unelected, opaque few, say I.

A criticism of Paul’s book is that it’s thin on describing what to do with all the blood we save in a Fed-free world. Veronique de Rugy links to Cato Institute series to give some ideas about where to go and what to do when we arrive there.

Remember: the Fed is celebrating 100 years in 2013. Let’s do that with a bit of wood right through its godforsaken, undead heart.