Obama Arriving Too Early?

According to a book by one of Obama’s staffers, after his chosen successor had lost the presidency to Donald Trump, Obama mused  that perhaps he had gone too far and had been ten or twenty years too early in his actions and policies.  While there is no way to know if the story is accurate,  the remark is typical  of the man – pompous, arrogant,  and self-congratulatory. 

It would be more accurate to say that Obama was about a hundred years too late. In the first years of the 20^th Century, while the political and economic theories of the collectivists had been fully rebutted and refuted by philosophers and economists, there was no recent or contemporary evidence of their results in practice.  It was more understandable for some people  to believe collectivism would work when  there was no place it  was being tried to any great degree. (Even  Bismarck’s Germany, probably  the most  “progressive” of the major nations,  was not far down the road with it.)

That  changed with World War I. In the aftermath of  the war, Marxists  and fascists gained control Russia, Italy, Germany,  and Spain,  and socialist or right wing authoritarian parties acquired power or influence in much of the rest of Europe.  After World War II socialists took over governments in Britain, India,  and many of the former  European colonies in Asia and Africa while Marxists took control in China, half of Korea, and parts of Africa.  

The results are well known. The Communists in Russia created a brutal tyranny which lasted over seventy years, murdered  (probably at least fifteen and perhaps far more) millions of people, and left the country poor and dispirited.  In only twelve years of their tyranny,  the Nazis started the most destructive war in European history,  murdered six million European Jews and several million others, and left Germany a smoldering wreck.  Mussolini’s fascists led Italy into defeat and ruin. After a brutal civil war, Spain stagnated for many years  under an oppressive fascist government.   The countries of eastern Europe suffered decades of oppression, brutality, and poverty under rule by Soviet-selected  Communists.  Socialists gained power in Britain after World War II and transformed the country into something of a modern Sick Man of Europe which did not return to prosperity until a move away from their ideas  under Margaret Thatcher.  India and much of what was called the Third World adopted  socialism in various degrees with bad and often disastrous results. The Chinese Communists murdered many million Chinese and created an economic and cultural disaster that abated only when officials decided to retain  communism  in name only.   Communists and other collectivists turned  Cuba, the former Rhodesia, and Venezuela into what are commonly and fairly called hellholes.  During the postwar years,  relatively free West Germany prospered while communist East Germany did not. The difference was even more striking with the two Koreas. Other examples abound.

Obama is clearly a collectivist of one sort or another. (My guess would be that he is at heart  a Marxist, though one  who for pragmatic reasons would  favor or accept  a society retaining nominally  private businesses, institutions,  associations, and ways of life but with decisive and, when useful, arbitrary power over everything in the hands of the state.) He would have been as wrong in 1918 as he is today, but  more nearly excusably so.  In that sense his  best time would have been not now or in ten or twenty years  but well in the past.

Michelle Obama on the Self-Righteous

A couple of days ago Michelle Obama said men were "entitled" and self-righteous. This is false about men in general.  However, unlike some of her other pronouncements, it is  at least connectable  to direct and intimate observation in the same way as would be a statement from Kate Upton that men can throw a baseball really fast.

A Classless Act

Class and grace are widely admired attributes related to reasonableness,  strong,  unstressed self-control and self-confidence, a sense of proportion and awareness of context, and an appropriate consideration and respect for other people.  While they are seldom encountered among politicians,  it is generally accepted that there are occasions such as the transfer of power from one president to another when even a faked display of them is useful and expected. Most presidents  and their wives seem to have understood this and behaved accordingly.  The Obamas have been an exception.

We cannot know if Barack Obama is the most arrogant and narcissistic president of the last seventy years since we cannot know his predecessors’ private thoughts. However we can observe that he has consistently behaved more arrogantly and narcissistically in public  than any of the others. He often has seemed quite unable to hide an apparent  belief that  the cosmos revolves  around him.  He has rated himself publicly as among the  greatest president of all time (always probably a smidgen behind Lincoln and sometimes maybe nosed out by Washington or  FDR but right up there) despite his many failures and his small and now likely mainly ephemeral set of accomplishments.  His penchant  for commemorating  everything and everyone with photos of himself has become a recurring joke on the internet as  has his characteristic jaw-jutting pose which to many is more than a little reminiscent of the Duce’s.  A thing circulating recently shows official  Christmas cards from presidents going back to FDR displaying views of the White House in winter together with the official card from Obama displaying a view of Obama.

So it is no surprise he is behaving as he is during the period of transition to the next administration after an election in which his policies were rejected, and his chosen successor was defeated by a crude political amateur who was opposed by many of the leaders of his own party. He has blamed  the voters, blamed  conspiracies by shifty foreigners, blamed the few outfits in the media not staffed by his sycophants  and done nothing  to oppose  efforts by  those in his party to attack the validity and even overturn the results of the election. He and those in  his  administration have gone on a pointless binge of issuing decrees and regulations when he knows most or all of them will be cancelled by the new president and his people.  One can see reasons some people see his behavior as a petulant desire to insult the Americans he so despises a few more times before leaving office.

 The prize for a single act of gracelessness though must go to his wife.  This woman who said she never cared for the country until it elevated her and her husband toward the presidency and who continually and absurdly  posed as a poor victim while occupying the White House and living remarkably opulently  has chosen to leave giving  the nation her variation of après nous le deluge  - explaining on national TV that hope for the country will end with the departure of  her and her husband.  

For many observers the appropriate response to these two comes from the old saying: don’t go away mad, just go away.   

A Helpful Suggestion

Thanksgiving traditionally is a time for Americans of all beliefs to display gratitude and appreciation  for this wonderful country and its bounty.  For many religious people it is an occasion for expressing prayerful thanks for what they see as the divine blessings which have been bestowed on this nation.  It has not been associated with politics. Yet some Democrats  suggested that this Thanksgiving people should be offering thanks to Barack Obama – not merely  for him, but to him.  The idea of families gathering around the table for their feast, solemnly bowing heads, clasping hands, and offering a blessing  to a politician may seem a little excessive to some, but one  should remember the special place Obama holds in so many hearts.

The man has done so many wrong and harmful things that those who opposed him may feel gleeful he will soon be gone and might even experience some schadenfreude over the mournful distress of his worshipful followers as the end of his administration nears.   However others believe they  should rise above that, be sensitive to the leftists’ feelings, and try to be helpful.  In that line one can try to think of a way for  Obama’s enthusiasts to  give him a boffo final  tribute in keeping with their feelings for him.    

It is well known that the Romans were among the very best at honoring their rulers spectacularly.   So Obama’s acolytes might consider  borrowing  a mixture of  the Romans’  customs and throwing him a triumph.  One can picture Obama  leading  the procession from the White House to the Capitol mounted on a Segway and escorted by  members of traditional media organizations  acting as his praetorian guard.  They would be followed in train by diplomats from Iran, Libya, Syria, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and China bearings gifts, carts with  Lena Dunham, Beyonce,  and Amy Schumer as vestal virgins and  Al Gore as Pontifex Maximus, and hundreds of   young children and their teachers marching it step and reciting panegyrics in his honor. On the steps of the capitol Nancy Pelosi would present him a garland,  and Harry Reid, in the name of  part of the senate,  would solemnly proclaim him a god.

Obama probably would love it. It would make fine TV, and it could help give his followers some closure, as they say. 

Obama 3.0?

When he left the White House, President Truman moved back to Missouri and lived with his wife in a house  which had belonged to her family – the same house they had live in after they had married.   President Eisenhower, who had spent most of his adult life in the army, retired to a farm in Gettysburg, near the nation’s most famous battlefield. Ronald Reagan, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and both Bushes returned to their home states after their presidencies.  While some of these men remained somewhat active in politics after leaving office,  none tried to continue a career as a politician.  Each seemed able to walk away and find other things to become the main interests and activities of their remaining lives.

If some  reports in the press are true, Barack Obama intends to remain in Washington after leaving office and resume a career as a political activist, perhaps functioning as a spokesman for the opposition during the next administration.  If so, besides being an undignified spectacle of an arrogant narcissist who cannot give up the spotlight and accept that his time in it has passed, it would be pathetic. For it would indicate that for this man there is nothing in life to replace politics and the desire for power and no meaningful home to go back to.  It would also be yet more evidence the nation will be well rid of him in a few weeks. 

An Imaginary Country

Think of Kipling and Mundy and consider an imaginary nation somewhere in remote Central Asia north of the Khyber Pass and beyond the Hindu Kush Mountains.  Its government is a representative democracy with a popularly elected president. The population consists mainly of Muslims, most of whom, while generally tolerant, would be loath to vote for a politician who was not a follower of the Prophet.  There are number of  Jews and a small and politically insignificant number of Christians, the latter mainly recent immigrants or the children of immigrants. For the last couple of decades the country has been plagued by acts of terroristic violence committed by Christian fanatics, both foreign and domestic, who oppose the nation’s government, leaving Christianity unpopular with many of the citizens.

 The president is a self-proclaimed Muslim, but many in the country doubt him. They point out that since politicians are unscrupulous opportunists who will  lie about just about  everything, this  one could be lying about his religion for political advantage. They consider the fact that the great majority of people who have a religion stick to one version or another of the one they grew up  in.   They note that he was raised in a Christian home in a strongly Christian nation and speaks sincerely and nostalgically of  the glorious church music and beautiful, haunting  chants of his youth with emotion he never displays when speaking  of Islam.  They observe  that  while he is always  quick to criticize Muslims and Islam in harsh terms for both present day shortcomings and for failures and brutalities going back centuries, he always speaks fondly and warmly of Christianity and reminds  people that it  is a religion exclusively of love and peace and that the terrorists are apostates perverting true Christianity.  Some see significance in the fact that the unconventional or even heretical Imam who led him to profess adherence to Islam said that he did so by presenting the faith to him in a way that was compatible with his Christian background.  Many cite the famous occasion  when the president publically spoke of his Christian faith before being corrected by a friendly interviewer and note that they have never heard anyone else make a slip of the tongue in which accidentally said he followed a religion different from his actual creed.  The president’s most devoted followers try to dismiss the doubters as fools and ignorant peasants, but every time the president speaks about religion, he gives them a little more evidence for their case.

Of course no such country exists, and none of this could happen in a real nation. In real countries all politicians are honest and straightforward about their beliefs, and no one would ever think of their pretending to believe anything they didn’t  for political reasons. 

I don’t  have a definite opinion about Obama’s religious sentiments. (I also don’t care. If he turned out to be lying about his religion, it might make him out  a little more of a scoundrel, but it would be pretty insignificant compared to all the other things.)    However  I can see that the skeptics have reasons for their skepticism.  In fact if a  completely neutral  and apolitical  observer  were a contestant on a quiz show and asked to guess Obama’s  actual religion to win a $25,000 prize, and if he based his answer on evidence rather than protestations,  he’d probably  bet with the doubters.   

Obama and "Moochers"

A few days ago at a conference on poverty Obama suggested some of his opponents read Ayn Rand and decide everyone is a moocher or parasite. While neither Rand nor any other serious thinker really needs defending from attacks by a person such as Obama, there are a couple of observations that might be useful, though of course obvious to anyone who read her works and paid attention. First she repeatedly expresses explicit respect for anyone who lives and works honestly and fairly, irrespective of income or abilities.  Also the objects of her strongest political scorn are not poor people on welfare. They are the power mad politicians and bureaucrats and the contemptible rich  who became  wealthy not by productive activity but through political pull and chicanery, which is to say people  like Obama in the first instance and the Clintons in the second. She saw through and helped others to see through the Obamas of the world years before he was born. One can see how he might find that annoying. 

Lèse-majesté ?

In the last few days  leftist supporters of President Obama have been extremely agitated over two things they see as insults to their favorite – Rudy Guiliani’s questioning whether Obama loves the United States and Benjamin Netanyahu’s giving a speech to the congress challenging Obama’s plan for an agreement with Iran on its nuclear weapons program. 

Yet Guiliani’s comments are both reasonable and reflective of what millions of Americans have already decided on their own.  Given the man’s self proclaimed Marxist background, his rather obvious festering racial resentment, his penchant for dwelling morbidly and joyously on the nation’s sins (past and present, real and imagined), and his apparent utter dismissal of the notion there might be something exceptional about a nation founded on principles of individual rights and limited government and without the lingering burdens of a feudal or despotic past, it is quite rational to conclude he probably does not care much for this place.

Neither was it inappropriate for Boehner to invite Netanyahu to  speak or for Netanyahu to accept the offer and say what he thinks about the threat from Iran. I don’t know if the danger is as great as he claims, but there is clearly some danger.  He may have an incentive to overstate it, but Obama and company seem so eager to reach an agreement that it is sensible to assume they are likely to understate it, particularly given Obama’s rather obvious affection for all things Islamic and his almost as obvious distaste for Israel.  There is nothing unreasonable about having suspicions as to whether people such as Obama, Biden, and Kerry either understand the interests of the United States or are willing to put  those interests first.  Netanyahu has done all of us a favor by stimulating controversy and demands for evidence any agreement will be a good one.

Still  the leftists are infuriated, some even besides themselves, over this.  There are obvious conjectures as to why. Insecurity over whether Obama really does like the United States would account for outrage over someone daring to ask the question. Religious-like devotion would account for anger among the faithful  over anyone seriously questioning their leader’s  actions or pronouncements.

Some are even falling back on the old cliché that people must always respect the office of the presidency. Leaving aside the way these same leftists treated the hapless George W. Bush, there is no imperative to respect the office. It is just another political position which can be filled by good people or bad ones.  One should respect Washington, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt in the awful summer and fall of 1940, Ronald Reagan during the cold war, and  others who did good things at various times. However there is no reason to respect the office as such, and certainly no reason to respect people such as Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy  Carter, George W. Bush, or Barack Obama because the held or hold it. It is a truism of management that a good boss sometimes can make a difference, but a bad one always can. That holds  true for presidents as well.  

Charlie Hebdo

There are several things to think about concerning the recent bombings at Charlie Hebdo’s offices  in  Paris. It is important to make neither too much nor too little of it. It was not an act of war. It was a criminal act committed by a small number of people. The conflict with Muslim terrorists is not a world war and not an existential threat as many conservatives assert.  (I wonder if even they really mean it,  because they generally seem content with the way the administration of George W. Bush handled the problem. A real world war and existential threat would call for giving the enemy not the mild and measured war of Bush and Colin Powell, but at least a taste of Franklin Roosevelt’s war, which is something they are not advocating.)

However this crime does  illustrate again that many Muslims are fanatical savages who have no place in a civilized order, and that much of Islam remains a religion of violence and intolerance and a danger to the rest of the world. It also illustrates the hypocrisy and fatuousness of Obama and those in his administration who are talking about responding by having a conference on “extremists” , finding themselves unable even to identify their enemy by name, apparently feeling too insecure and politically correct to call a spade a spade or even a diminutive digging utensil.   

The correct operational response to these and other Muslim terrorists is to hunt them and their material backers down and kill them, ruthlessly and remorselessly.  Those of us not in the armed forces should support those who will have to do the tough, dangerous work of eliminating these people.  The correct symbolic response is to both advocate free speech and practice free speech by doing something offensive to the Muslim fanatics’ sensibilities. People should drag out and tell and post their grossest and most tasteless rag head jokes. Theatres should present revivals of Voltaire’s Mahomet.  The cartoons from Charlie Hebdo should be in every Sunday paper. Cable networks and broadcasters should run marathons of old movies about fighting and killing dangerous Muslim fanatics – the more politically incorrect, stereotyping,  and supportive of colonialism the better. CAIR and other front groups should be lampooned and insulted unmercifully. Campus speech codes protecting Islam from insults should be violated as brutally and sophomorically as possible. Enough is enough. A point should be made. People should have good, rude, offensive fun making it.

Revoked?

There is a phenomenon in government, large businesses and non-profit organizations which some people call the affirmative action pass. It is the tacit understanding that one must not demand performance or professionalism from an affirmative action hire matching that required of those hired by ordinary means, but rather must apply lower standards to and refrain from public criticism of a person hired under affirmative action.  (This of course does not mean that everyone hired under affirmative action  is less competent or professional than the norm. Clearly many are not and would have been perfectly qualified for their positions in the absence of affirmative action and may be unfairly suspected of being less qualified than their peers because of affirmative action.  It just means that those who need the pass often get it.) 

There are various reasons for this. One is fear of getting into trouble. Part of the game in affirmative action is pretending lower standards do not lead to lower performance.  Many organizations have enforcers in human resources or diversity departments who try to make sure this orthodoxy does not get questioned without consequences. There is also often  a deeper fear, one which is often mingled with guilt, at work  – the fear of being seen as prejudiced and being labeled a racist.  Then there is the simple general tendency of people to go along with the prevailing winds and do and think what they are told.

Throughout his candidacy and presidency, Barack Obama  has been a beneficiary of something similar to an affirmative action pass. His supporters have claimed that any criticism of his performance is secretly based on racial prejudice, and too many of his opponents have cringed and eased up in ways they would not have done otherwise. Many Americans have been reluctant to give up on Obama or to hold him to ordinary standards of performance out of fear of being seen as prejudiced or guilt over not supporting the first black president. People in the traditional media have been incessant in extolling and excusing Obama and fanning up prevailing breezes in his favor.

The interesting thing in the last couple of months, is that with the scandal at the VA and the release of dangerous  terrorists in exchange for a deserter, Obama’s pass seems to have been revoked.  More people, including even people in the  traditional media, are now treating him and evaluating him on his performance more nearly as  they would any other president. That is bad news for him and his followers. 

Conflicts

“I John Brown an now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.”

In 1859 John Brown and a score or so of followers seized the armory at Harper’s Ferry with the idea of starting a revolt among  slaves in Virginia. It was a foolhardy and pointless venture from the first. It had almost no chance of success, and if it had succeeded, it would have led to a brutal suppression of the slaves Brown wanted to help and a hardening  of the opinions of those in the slave states against any thought of ending slavery.  Yet, so inflamed were passions in the country that many sensible people supported Brown’s attempt without regard to any concern for its practicality, and various mature and serious abolitionists helped fund it. Many people seemingly were ready for something to be done about slavery, even something hopeless and quixotic. Less than two years later Brown’s prophecy came true with the divided nation at war with itself in the bloodiest conflict in American history.

A few weeks ago, a crusty old rancher in Nevada defied federal bureaucrats who wanted to remove his cattle from a piece of federal land. He was in arrears on his rent and legally had no leg to stand on. Yet people all around the country rallied behind the old man, seemingly ready for someone to do something about the federal authorities’ encroachment on people and their rights, even if he was in the wrong in his particular fight. That tells us something important.

We are nowhere near the conditions of the 1850’s, and there is no present danger of armed conflict  within our society. There are reasons  to be concerned however. The divisions within the country are deep and raw, and the Obama administration has made them worse by its actions. Many of those who oppose his administration do so fundamentally and with deep concern for what is being done to their country and their freedoms. More and more people are calling the present political situation a war,  only metaphorically to be sure, but a war. And one can hear serious, sober people musing about the possibility of citizens someday having to resort to armed resistance against the government, not yet in any concrete way but not in a purely fanciful one either.

People on the left should be especially concerned. The present conflict in the country is nothing like the old disputes between labor and management where reasonable people on both sides knew they needed each other. Now many in the opposition view the welfare and bureaucratic constituencies of those now in power as a pure burden they would be better off without, and as a pragmatic matter are mainly correct to do so.  They don’t need those in those constituencies in any important way while those in those constituencies need the productive people  (a  majority of whom are in the opposition) to survive.

Prudent leftists would at all costs want to keep this from dawning on too many of those being fleeced and herded -   taking their victims for what they can and kicking them around as much as they can without making them disturbed enough to do something about it. The great risk at present for the left is that a large number of the victims are starting to notice and are becoming significantly bothered.  So such prudent leftists might  suggest to  Obama to call off the regulators, tell all the  commissars and commandos manqué in the various agencies to stand down and disband, and ease off in general.  They might  hope for the election of a Republican of the moderate sort in 2016 to help things simmer down.  Of course one cannot know how many leftists are prudent. Prudence seems to be in short supply among our present rulers.

We should all hope things can simmer down. The problems of this nation are real and serious,  but they need to be settled peaceably. Even whiffs of other possibilities are worrisome.  

Obama and Putin

Some people are wondering whether Vladimir Putin is an authentic tough  guy or only a blustering bully. He seems to be enough of a show off about his toughness that I would guess he is more the latter. The interesting thing is that it may not matter.  People of either type usually can get their way when opposed only by wimps. In the Ukraine in the last few days, he has seized territory from a European nation in violation of a treaty guaranteed by the United States, and the most Obama and Kerry have come up with is a few harsh words and some sort of so-called sanctions against twelve or so of Putin’s buddies. Putin ridiculed the response as farcical, and he was right to do so. It was also weak, embarrassing,  and pathetic.

Of course Obama’s defenders have jumped into action in his defense, often by creating a false dichotomy by pretending the only choices are between something similar to what Obama has done and risking war, and then suggesting Obama’s  critics want to go to war with Russia.  This is of course nonsense. Putin’s aggression is serious and dangerous, but it is not a cause for war, and no responsible critic of Obama has suggested it is. There are options available far short of war which are stronger than merely bleating and doing almost nothing. Russia can be punished in its international trade, its membership in the G8, and other economic areas. The United States can strengthen political and military cooperation with Russia’s former colonies in central and eastern Europe, including placing a missile defense system in Poland. There are many other possibilities as well. However, while I hope I am wrong, my money for the next two years and nine months is on bleating and doing essentially nothing. (It is not that Obama is incapable of behaving harshly. He can be quite ruthless toward Americans who oppose him politically. It is rather that he seems incapable of any harshness  toward this country’s enemies and opponents. There is way too much truth for comfort in the recent joke that the way to make Obama get  tough with Russia would be to have him pretend Putin is a successful, self-supporting, married, heterosexual taxpayer who lives in flyover country and votes Republican.)

This will make the world more dangerous and less stable. Some people around the world may suffer harsh consequences from  the American people’s almost criminal folly in re-electing this incredibly bad president in 2012. 

Thatcher and Mandela

Margaret Thatcher died this year at the age of 87. She was the first woman to head the elected government of a major European nation, serving as prime minister from 1979 to 1990. She played a major role in history and her actions were immensely beneficial to both her own country and the United States. In Great Britain she reversed many of the post-WWII trends policies which were turning that once prosperous and great nation into the sick man of Western Europe and set it on paths to recovery and prosperity. In foreign affairs she came into office at a time when the Soviet Union was advancing around the world, and the United States and its allies were losing the Cold War. The Soviets’ nuclear and other forces were growing stronger, while those of the United States and its allies remained static or grew weaker.   Many influential leaders of the foreign policy establishment on both sides of the Atlantic argued that the United States needed to accommodate itself to Soviet superiority and domination of Europe and accept second place status in the world. Almost all of them believed  the Soviet Union to be a stable, dynamic,  and  economically vigorous empire and considered  the notion of defeating the Soviets and liberating its conquered nations to be an absurd fantasy.  The facts of course turned out differently. Within a little more than a decade, the Cold War and its threat of nuclear war ended, the Soviet empire collapsed in total defeat, the nations of east central Europe were liberated, and much of the Soviet Union itself was partitioned from Russia into a number of smaller states – all without bloodshed.  It was a world historical triumph which finally ended the 20^th Century European nightmare that began in 1914 and created opportunities for a more stable, peaceful, and prosperous Europe and world.  Ronald Reagan was the main force behind this remarkable reversal of fortune in the world, and Margaret Thatcher was his strongest and most influential ally. She deserves a significant amount of the credit for making it happen, and as such did more  to help the United States than any foreign leader since Winston Churchill.

Yet when she died, the administration of Barack Obama churlishly failed to acknowledge her accomplishments or significance (or to bother with her funeral), and lots of Obama’s ideological allies seemed mainly to celebrate the fact that she was finally dead.  

  

Nelson Mandela died a few days ago at the age of 95. He was president of South Africa from 1994 to 1999. Some military strategists considered South Africa to have some strategic importance during the Cold War because of its position at the junction of the Atlantic and Indian oceans, but events in the country generally have had little effect on the United States. Before becoming president, Mandela was a leader of a revolutionary movement opposing the Boers’ apartheid regime.  Apartheid was a policy of forced racial segregation, denial of civil and voting rights to non-whites including the right to travel freely,  and harsh suppression of opposition from any source. It deserved the contempt and condemnation it received around the world. Mandela was involved to some degree with violent efforts to overthrow the government and is said to have joined the Communist party for a while. He was arrested and charged with trying to overthrow the government through violence. He spent over twenty years in prison, much  of that time in harsh conditions. The Boers eventually realized that they could not continue apartheid and released Mandela and other prisoners.  Mandela became president and presided over the dismantling of apartheid.  South Africa did not collapse into either the barbarism of Central Africa or the Marxist disaster of Zimbabwe, and Mandela deserves credit for that. It was a significant accomplishment. He ignored his socialist ideology and did not nationalize any industries or companies, and he opposed plans for oppressing the whites, even the ones who had been active in the oppressive former government. South Africa became a corrupt, crime ridden country with bitter and often violent tribal and racial conflicts, but one far more successful than most of the rest of Africa.  

To call it a real success  or to claim what happens in South Africa is important to the United States would require setting  the bar very low. That, however, is the essence of affirmative action, and likely a reason the Obama administration and its supporters in the traditional media  are serving up hagiography and treating this as an almost cosmic event. The other main reason is probably affinity for Mandela's ideology.  The contrast with their dismissive behavior when Thatcher died is interesting and telling.  

President Sharpton

It has long been clear that Barack Obama is a very bad president with a very harmful set of plans and policies for the country and a dangerous disregard for the rule of law. It has been equally clear that he is an immensely arrogant, petty, power mad, and dishonest human being. However his performance Friday in his comments about the case of Trayvon Martin  and George Zimmerman displayed such a stunning combination of cynicism, blatant dishonesty, rabble rousing,  and a vulgar demeaning of the office he holds as to be in some respects a new personal low for his time in office. He came across less as a president than as just another bitter, bigoted, classless, graceless race hustler. It really does not matter whether he was revealing truly held feelings of resentment and racial hatred or manipulatively trying to stir up black voters and deflect the public’s attention from his administrations failures, crimes, and scandals or both (which seems the most likely to me). He has crossed a line, making a mockery of his position and destroying the last part of any claim he might have had to respect based on it. You can’t claim the respect due to a Dwight Eisenhower or John Kennedy while behaving as an Al Sharpton. 

Martin, Zimmerman, and Obama

There is not much to think well of in the case of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin.  Indeed the affair highlights  things which are seriously wrong with the country – though not in the way the political hacks on television have been saying.  The worst thing this case says  about the state of the country  is that it became a national cause célèbre at all.

It was and should have remained a local police matter of no interest to the public at large. George Zimmerman, a jumpy armed resident of a neighborhood which had been plagued by robberies got into an avoidable confrontation with Trayvon Martin, a young man wandering  through the neighborhood. They fought, and during  the struggle Zimmerman  shot Martin  and killed him. Truthfully or not, Zimmerman  claimed self defense. There were no forensic evidence or witnesses to contradict him decisively. From that point it was the job of the police and local prosecutors to decide if they believed Zimmerman’s story. If they did not believe it, they had to decide if they had evidence to demonstrate its falseness beyond a reasonable doubt. If they thought they had such evidence,  they had to present it in court in such a way as  to convince a jury they were right. That should have been all there was to it. Such cases come up around the country  from time to time, leading to different decisions and verdicts depending on particular circumstances

However, 2012 was an election year, the young man who died was black, and the resident who shot him was not. So things happened differently. A remarkably unscrupulous politician who was up for reelection (one Barack Obama) seized on the case as a political opportunity and made inane and grossly inappropriate and prejudicial comments in order to fire up a block of voters. A perhaps even more unscrupulous  scoundrel Al Sharpton clamped  onto the shooting as a means of getting publicity for himself and fomenting racial discord.  Members of the traditional media obediently jumped in, and the result was to hype  the case into big news with a morality play narrative of an innocent black child gunned down by a vicious white man. (Things were  complicated  a bit when it was discovered  Zimmerman actually was classed  as Hispanic and not white. However clever journalists discovered the new category of “white Hispanic”, one oddly never applied by the same journalists to various pale hued Democratic politicians who label themselves as Hispanics, and blew right past that difficulty.)  From then on the country got months of disgraceful and hypocritical pandering, nonsense, and rabble rousing from journalists and politicians, up to and after the time of the verdict.   It wasn’t worth watching, but it was illuminating.

The point is not to side with Zimmerman or Martin, either of whom could have prevented what happened. The point is the case  should never have been turned into something where the question of members of the public siding with one of the parties arose.  

Seeing Obama Clearly

A devout Baptist expired in his sleep one night and awakened happily to find himself in heaven. While looking around and taking in his surroundings, he noticed an old, white bearded fellow outfitted in cowboy boots and a ten gallon hat strutting around, barking out orders, and generally behaving in an overbearing manner.

“Who’s that?” he asked the person next to him.

“Oh,” the person replied,  “that’s God. He thinks he’s Lyndon Johnson.”

old joke circa mid-1960’s

Change the costume a bit, and you would have a perfectly good Obama joke, fitting his  personality and ideology as well as the old one did Johnson’s. In many ways there really is not that much new or different about Obama. Regardless of the fear mongering of conservative pundits and the fantasies of his press agents in the traditional media, Obama is not a historic man of destiny, reshaping the nation  to his will. He is not Napoleon (he just has the complex). He’s not even Mussolini, despite the remarkably similar jutting of the chin. He is just a typical American leftist doing what leftists do when they get the chance, as a quick look at history can help to illustrate.

Roosevelt’s New Deal prolonged the depression and left the nation’s economy in many ways more hamstrung and regulated and its bureaucracy more powerful than today. The country was definitively far more union-ridden, and Roosevelt’s attacks on business, success,  and wealth make Obama’s seem mild.  Certainly none of Obama’s questionable or even illegal executive orders comes close to Roosevelt’s sending a whole class of innocent, loyal Americans to concentration camps by executive decree.

 Johnson’s left wing agenda and authoritarian vision were at least as grandiose as Obama’s, and he was far better at getting his plans enacted into law. He was fully as arrogant and power mad as Obama, and his corruption and abuses of power were perhaps greater. (As an aside he was probably also slightly more vulgar.)

 Though Carter’s ideology and failures are obvious and well known, people sometimes forget that the celebrated moderation of the later years of Clinton’s administration was a result of and a pragmatic reaction to political defeat. In the first couple of years when he was proposing the things he actually wanted, Clinton was about as far to the left as Obama has been. Hillarycare, his  most important proposal,  was more socialistic and authoritarian than Obamacare – Obamacare for example having, as far as we know, no provisions for criminal penalties for people selecting their own doctors.

While we can accept that some of Obama’s notions, hatreds, and desires may be unusual, his actions and behavior are mainly typical of the American left when it gets power. He is doing what leftists usually do. He is harming those leftists usually harm. He is favoring those leftists usually favor. During his first two years in office, he had the votes in congress to run roughshod at least some of the time. He no longer does. Obamacare is a mess that will have to be fixed or repealed some day. It is not permanent or politically untouchable.  His opponents need to keep their heads. He is a crafty, dedicated enemy of liberty and limited government who should not be taken lightly. He is not Attila, the booger man, or the destroyer of the republic. Those conservatives who paint him as such overate him as much as he and  his sycophants do and play into his hand. What is needed is a clear headed recognition  that he is  another dangerous  opponent, one to be taken seriously and opposed seriously, but not one to be panicked or awed by. A little less gloom and a few more good, offensive jokes might be a good place to start.

Gun Control

A reelected Obama and his allies have begun new efforts for more gun control laws. We who believe in individual rights and limited government need to oppose those efforts.

We who believe in a right to arm ourselves do so as a consequence of a belief in a more fundamental right – the right of every person to self defense. We believe that a person has a right to protect himself, his family and associates, and his property against attack. Most of us also believe that a person can and should acquire the tools and skills to do so competently and effectively, which in the present context usually means getting firearms and learning to use them well and safely.  This belief in a right of self defense is the basis of our position on the political questions of  gun control, and, at bottom, a denial of  and contempt for that right are the basis of the position of the proponents of restrictive gun control.

It is no coincidence that most advocates of gun control are committed statists. There are a several  obvious reasons for this. If one believes that the government should decide and control most or all aspects of the citizens’ lives, it is natural for him also to think that the government is competent to provide all the protection anyone should ever need. If one believes that individuals are incompetent to deal with the vicissitudes and challenges of everyday life without the direct supervision of their betters in the government, it is natural to believe that  they are also unable to defend themselves and would be better off not resisting but rather submitting and hoping for the best when threatened or assaulted. Also, for those always seeking greater and more intrusive power, a disarmed populace is easier  to rule.

This last point is very important. The founding fathers of this country recognized the value of an armed citizenry as a deterrent to tyranny. It still is, and remains so as a general principle irrespective of how benignly the government or any government may be behaving at any particular time.  Governments and the notions of those in them change over time, and this deterrence is valuable as a permanent check on changes in really wrong directions. (In the light of all the conspiracy theories going around, I probably should mention explicitly that since this is a  general principle, it  has nothing to do with one’s opinion of the character or ambitions of either Obama or George W.  Bush.)

That leads to an  immediate political question for the millions of law abiding gun owners  to ask political advocates of gun control: since we pose absolutely no threat to them, why are they so eager to disarm us?  In the absence of any convincing answer, it is reasonable to consider the possibility that at least part of the reason is that they intend us harm and want us  to become more easily manageable.   

Fiscal Cliff

The results of the recent goofy drama in Washington over the so called fiscal cliff should be a reason for optimism among those who favor lower taxes and smaller government. Yet many or most conservatives are  reacting with anger and gloom as though they had been routed by the leftists, focusing on the narrow and obvious and missing the more significant. Obama certainly won a tactical, political victory in that he got an increase in income taxes on  highly productive and successful people as he had demanded and promised his followers. However, that victory was inevitable from election day. It was guaranteed by Obama’s reelection and the political inanity of creating temporary tax rates during the Bush administration (and extending them as temporary in 2010). Obama was holding all the good cards.  The Republicans could give him what he said he wanted and raise taxes on some of the people or resist, do nothing, and give him a tax increase on everyone who pays income taxes, and one that he could blame on them to boot.  It was literally a case of heads he wins, tails they lose.

What many people are missing is that both the bill that was passed and the entire debate reflect a long term strategic trend favoring those of us opposed to high taxes and big government. We had the most committed leftist president in at least forty years, flush with hubris after his  reelection on a platform of punishing the successful, and the most he dared to propose was a change of a few hundred basis point in the income tax rates of about two percent of the population. He and his party did not attempt to raise general income and estate tax rates back to the levels of the 1990’s (which themselves  were lower than the rates after the first round of tax cuts under Reagan), even though they could have had those tax rates simply by sitting still and letting the clock run.

What Obama got was a bill that was  less than he demanded and that left him and the left in a weaker position going forward. Income tax rates were  raised on fewer successful people than he had proposed. The vast majority of taxpayers kept the present rates.  Estate taxes were limited by a five million dollar exemption  that was indexed to inflation. The alternative minimum tax was also  indexed to inflation. Income tax  rates were made “permanent” for everyone, meaning that in the future the politicians actually will have to vote to do so if they want to raise taxes. This took away the intrinsic advantage Obama had in this controversy and made future taxes increases harder to do and less likely to happen. Republicans conceded nothing on the debt limit or anything else that would have limited their ability to deal with spending in the future.  To call Obama’s victory pyrrhic is a gross understatement.  Now with taxes out of the way at least for a while, it is  time for a fight over spending. 

Of the Nitwits, by the Nitwits, for the Nitwits

Last week in Connecticut a young psychopath committed a horrific sequence of murders at a school. Opportunistic politicians are rushing in to demand new laws and regulations and calling the event a political game changer. Yet to those who think about political questions in terms of principles, this event or any other single event is irrelevant to the issues of gun control. The reasons for a thoughtful person to be for gun rights or for gun control have not changed since last Friday. The right of the citizens to arm themselves for self defense has not changed. The fact that guns are dangerous weapons has not changed. The danger of widespread availability of firearms making it easier for criminals or psychopaths to get weapons has not changed.  The desire of much of the political class to rule a disarmed populace has not changed. The function of an armed citizenry as a bulwark against tyranny has not changed.

In a world of principled and scrupulous politicians and thoughtful citizens, nothing in the debate would have changed, because great political controversies  would not be driven by the emotions of the moment or affected by emotional reactions to single events.  That of course is not the world of reality. In the real world we have large numbers of voters who decide who should be president on the basis of photo ops after a  hurricane  and posturing, yahoo politicians who cater  to such people -  acting as though they never before considered the possibility that nuts could get guns and commit crimes.  In the real world we have disgusting politicians and their cheerleaders in the traditional media capitalizing on people’s grief and shock over a crime and ghoulishly dancing on the graves of the victims  to push their agendas while nerves are raw. (An observer could fairly ask the Michael Bloombergs of the world “have you no shame?”, and could follow up by asking them  whether their opinion of the intelligence of the public is really as low as their behavior makes it seem.) In the real world, we have logrolling and  tub thumping – as with creating the TSA after September 11^th and now with a president who seems to promise he can prevent any psychopaths from committing crimes in the future. In the real world we have Governor Le Petomane and the boys deciding they had better pretend to do something about the problems in Rock Ridge because their phony baloney jobs are at stake.

It is easy to be contemptuous of the politicians for all the sick shows they put on, but we should not stop with that. After all, politicians wouldn’t be doing this sort of thing if they didn’t think it would sell. 

Bush, Akin, and Sandy

Republicans and conservatives looking for reasons why Mitt Romney lost the election might consider the trio of Bush, Akin, and Sandy.

Barack Obama spent so much time during his first term dodging responsibility and blaming George W. Bush – often falsely - for whatever was going wrong in the country that it became something of a national joke. Still much that went wrong in the last dozen years  really was Bush’s fault,  and that may include Romney’s losing the election to Obama. Polls showed that a majority of Americans thought the economy was in bad shape, and the country was heading in the wrong direction. However, polling of voters also showed that a higher percentage of voters blamed Bush for the mess, even after almost four years of Obama’s administration, than blamed Obama. This suggests a quite unusually high  residue of hostility toward Bush. It seems to be almost a parallel to the 1930’s when, despite years of continuing depression under Roosevelt, voters continued to blame Hoover for their troubles and reelected Roosevelt in both 1936 and 1940. Republicans and conservatives looking for reasons for Romney’s defeat should consider that a main reason might be that he had to run with George Bush hanging around his neck. (Even  the odd business of  so many voters telling  exit polls that Obama’s response to Hurricane Sandy influenced their decision may have been an echo of the dissatisfaction over Bush’s politically maladroit handling of Katrina. ) Bush’s legacy of unnecessary wars, increased spending, ballooning deficits, a greatly expanded federal government,  a vigorous  embracing of the social agenda of the religious right, infringement of civil liberties, and an appearance of bumbling, tone deaf political ineptitude, all capped by a once in a generation financial crisis may have been too much for his party to live down.

Then there were the social issues, well symbolized by Todd Akin, the Republicans’ candidate for the senate in Missouri, but by no means restricted to him. The case of a couple of Obama voters I know illustrates the situation well. They are professionals in their mid-thirties. She is a successful physician, and he is an administrator at a university. They have two children. She is an at least partial libertarian whose favorite economist is Thomas Sowell. He is a gun owning moderate with a number of libertarian sympathies. They are the sort of self supporting people with bright economic futures who are among those most threatened by Obama’s policies. Romney should have had to contend only with Gary Johnson for their votes. Yet they voted for Obama, or to be precise, they used a vote for Obama as a vote against the bigoted, dogmatic, ignorant, anti-science yahoo-ism they see as endemic in the Republican Party. They have mentioned gay rights, women’s choice on abortion, statements by various Republicans about America having been founded as a Christian nation with religious freedom restricted to choice among various Christian sects, claims  by some Republicans that states have a right to ban contraceptives, and of course Akin’s notions on avoiding pregnancy during rape as examples. Their objections seem almost as much aesthetic as political, since their concerns and irritation are not limited to proposals that have even a small chance of being enacted. There is evidence that they are not atypical but rather representative of many  people who voted against their interests and better judgment on economic and geopolitical questions because they could not accept what the Republicans were saying on social issues.   These people, many of whom are too young to remember the Cold War or the economy of the 1970’s, seem less likely than their elders  to hold their noses on the social issues and vote for Republicans because they are better on the economy and national defense.  They are people Republicans will need to  win elections, and it will take a some changes to get them.

Finally there was simple bad luck. Polls showed that many voters said  their decision was influenced by Hurricane Sandy, and most of them voted for Obama. One may object that only a fool would base his vote in a presidential election on photo ops after a hurricane, but that seems to be what happened. It is likely that by late October the differences between the policies, records, character, and ideologies of the two candidates had been displayed  clearly and obviously enough that most people who  thought about those things probably had made up their minds or at least decided the tradeoffs and criteria upon which they would make up their minds. That left the battle over turnout and the feelings vote. Sandy seems to have helped steer a good part of the feelings vote to Obama. There is nothing for Republicans to do about that except hope for better luck next time.