Libertarian Leanings

The Pelosi Strategy

We'll probably discover that her argument persuaded a few more Democrats to vote for the health care takeover.

Mark Steyn Channels Libertarian Leanings

Libertarian Leanings, August 5, 2009:

But let's be realistic.  The objective of Obama and the Democrats is not health care reform.  The objective is an enduring progressive congressional majority that they hope to achieve by forcing Americans into a dependence upon progressive government for life supporting medicines and medical care.

Libertarian Leanings, August 15, 2009:

Neither Clinton nor Obama care in the least what gets passed, as long as it gives progressive politicians control over special interests and their money.  Health care reform and climate change legislation are designed for maximum political control, which means there is one thing we can know with a certainty.  Whatever comes out of this health care reform exercise, the least likely is a better health care system.

Mark Steyn, March 6, 2010:

Yes. Because government health care is not about health care, it’s about government. Once you look at it that way, what the Dems are doing makes perfect sense. For them.

But not for the rest of us.

"Iraqracy"

In the midst of violence that killed at least 36 people, Iraqis held their third democratic election since since Saddam Hussein was ousted from power in the U.S. invasion of 2003.  Millions cast votes.

Iraq's Independent High Electoral Commission said voter turnout was estimated to be 50 percent or more in all but one of the 16 provinces for which statistics were available.

Ballots were being counted Sunday night, and final tallies not expected until March 18.

Diplomats have said Iraq is unlikely to be able to form a government for several months as no single voting bloc is likely to emerge dominant.

Abbas Hussein, his index finger coated in purple ink, signaling he had voted in Mansour, a Sunni district of Baghdad, told Agence France-Presse: "We don't care about the bombs. The people will vote."

No single political coalition is expected to win an outright majority in the 325-member parliament, but the coalition that wins a plurality will eventually form a government.  It is expected to be a contentious affair in an unconventional democratic system that U.S. Central Command commander Gen. David H. Petraeus has dubbed "Iraqracy."

It's All About the Strategy

The progressive case for health care reform has moved on to the discussion of strategy.  Reconciliation is the morally correct course, they charge, to defeat "the small-mindedness of the GOP."

The health care debate, with opponents crying socialism about reform that is patterned after classic moderate Republicanism, has exposed the small-mindedness of the GOP. The party’s reconciliation hysteria may not be its worst moment of this episode, but it is its most pathetic. That opponents have had to lean so heavily on a completely trumped-up objection speaks volumes about the overall strength of their case. 

But let's look at the cases.  Progressives argue that we must lower our health care costs and provide better health care to more people.  Republicans and other Americans are skeptical that any of the plans put forward by Democrats will accomplish any of this.  And with good reason.  The Wall Street Journal explained in an article from last November.

The typical argument for ObamaCare is that it will offer better medical care for everyone and cost less to do it, but occasionally a supporter lets the mask slip and reveals the real political motivation. So let's give credit to John Cassidy, part of the left-wing stable at the New Yorker, who wrote last week on its Web site that "it's important to be clear about what the reform amounts to."

Mr. Cassidy is more honest than the politicians whose dishonesty he supports. "The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment," he writes. "Let's not pretend that it isn't a big deal, or that it will be self-financing, or that it will work out exactly as planned. It won't. What is really unfolding, I suspect, is the scenario that many conservatives feared. The Obama Administration . . . is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind."

Why are they doing it? Because, according to Mr. Cassidy, ObamaCare serves the twin goals of "making the United States a more equitable country" and furthering the Democrats' "political calculus." In other words, the purpose is to further redistribute income by putting health care further under government control, and in the process making the middle class more dependent on government. As the party of government, Democrats will benefit over the long run.

The progressive goal, often stated, is a single payer system.  Republicans argue that health care suffers under a single payer system, and we're a short hop away from it if Obama's "reforms" are enacted.  The public option is an important step toward that goal.  When progressives aren't denying that they intend to create a single payer system, they're claiming that single payer systems work just fine. 

This morning a London Sunday Times article lays out for us just how well a single payer system works in the real world.

DAMNING reports on the state of the National Health Service, suppressed by the government, reveal how patients’ needs have been neglected.

They diagnose a blind pursuit of political and managerial targets as the root cause of a string of hospital scandals that have cost thousands of lives.

The harsh verdict on the state of the NHS, after a spending splurge under Labour between 2000 and 2008, raises worrying questions about the future quality of the health service as budgets are squeezed.

One report, based on the advice of almost 200 top managers and doctors, says hospitals ignored basic hygiene to cram in patients to meet waiting-time targets.

It says “several interviewees” cited the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells [NHS Trust in Kent where 269 deaths during 2005-6 were caused by infection with Clostridium difficile bacteria].

“Managers crowded in patients in order to meet waiting-time targets and, in the process, lost sight of the fundamental hygiene requirements for infection prevention,” the report stated.

There were subsequent failings at health trusts in Basildon in Essex, and Mid Staffordshire. Filthy wards and nurse shortages led to up to 1,200 deaths at Stafford hospital.

At the New York Times and the Washington Post there isn't much interest in these aspects of health care reform.  According to the mainstream press on our side of he water it's all sunshine and blue skies, and it's all about the strategy.

Does anyone believe this?

Occasionally Peggy Noonan writes with some degree of perception, although it seems rare to my mind.  I was about to give up on her latest offering in the Wall Street Journal after she had said of Obama's first year in office,

What a disaster it has been.

At best it was a waste of history's time, a struggle that will not in the end yield something big and helpful but will in fact make future progress more difficult. At worst it may prove to have fatally undermined a new presidency at a time when America desperately needs a successful one.

America does not need a president who is determined to turn the country into a socialist Utopia to be successful, and it is utterly foolish and silly of Noonan to hope he succeeds at it.  But further on Noonan managed to stumble onto the right question, the question of Obama's credibility.

In his speech Wednesday, demanding an "up or down" vote, the president seemed convinced and committed—but nothing he said sounded true. His bill will "bring down the cost of health care for millions," it is "fully paid for," it will lower the long term deficit by a trillion dollars.

Does anyone believe this?

Exactly.  As we await the latest version of reform, the latest ploy for government takeover, can anyone seriously think this is going to be a cost saving exercise?  No one believes this, not even the people who support Obama's health care takeover.  For them a bankrupt America is a small price the rest of us should pay so that progressive pretensions of social justice can be satisfied.  For the rest of us, Obama's health care extravaganza is an impending disaster that must be prevented from destroying the last best hope that is America.  But nobody believes it's going to save us any money.

Bill and Hillary

The following post was originally published on Pajamas Media.

It’s bizarre. Why does President Obama insist upon driving public option health care legislation through Congress when voter opposition to it is at an all-time high?

Unhappiness with Obama and the other leading Democrats is so high that a national tea party movement has virtually brought the Republicans back from the electoral grave. The president’s job approval numbers have been in a year-long slide. In almost every election since he took office, Democrats have gotten trounced.

Yet he continues to push extraordinarily unpopular policies. Could it be the advice he’s been getting?

In the face of this disastrous performance by President Obama and the Democrats, the Clinton team has been actively advising that they keep doing what they’re doing. It’s as if Bill Clinton has just discovered that his beloved party is firmly in the clutches of the extreme left, and he’s decided to encourage their leaders to drive themselves into the proverbial ditch.

The one exception has been Lanny Davis, former special counsel for Bill Clinton, who on the day after Martha Coakley lost to Scott Brown in the Massachusetts special election wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal arguing that the left was to blame for her defeat. What, he wondered, had become of the party of Bill Clinton?

We liberals need to reclaim the Democratic Party with the New Democrat positions of Bill Clinton and the New Politics/bipartisan aspirations of Barack Obama — a party that is willing to meet halfway with conservatives and Republicans even if that means only step-by-step reforms on health care and other issues that do not necessarily involve big-government solutions.

Why is Davis the only former Clintonista to take aim at the left? You might think the others would join in, including Bill Clinton himself, especially since he has so much in common with Barack Obama. But that just isn’t happening.

Like Obama, Bill Clinton won his presidency by campaigning as a centrist. Clinton called himself a New Democrat, but once inaugurated he veered left, and for the first two years of their “co-presidency” the Clintons promoted Hillary’s health care reform plan. That lasted from 1992 until the 1994 midterm elections, at which time voters, for the first time in decades, elected a Republican majority to Congress rather than hold still for nationalized health care.

Those midterm elections were cataclysmic in their impact, causing the Clinton administration to dramatically switch gears. HillaryCare, which had been the primary Clinton administration focus for two years, was shoved aside and forgotten. Bill Clinton turned on a dime, very suddenly becoming the centrist president his campaign promised he would be.

Transformed, he went on to enjoy two very successful terms in the White House as a New Democrat — passing landmark welfare reform, signing the North American Free Trade Agreement, and balancing the budget for the first time in decades.

Sixteen years later, as history stands poised for a repeat, the former president has advice to offer the current president. This time around, it’s ObamaCare that has people so stirred up they put a Republican into the Massachusetts Senate seat that had been held for 46 years by Democrat Ted Kennedy. The irony of it is priceless. Massachusetts voters elected Scott Brown because he promised to be the 41st vote, the vote that torpedoes Ted Kennedy’s lifelong dream of nationalized health care. And in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 3 to 1 margin, it was not a close vote.

In similar circumstances, Bill Clinton listened to the voters. But in late November Bill Clinton paid a visit to Senate Democrats and urged them to pass President Obama’s health care reform bill. He told them the political consequences for Democrats would be grim if they didn’t, and the rewards would be great if they did.

Addressing the Democrats at their caucus luncheon, Clinton noted the grim consequences of his own failed reform effort in 1994: Democrats lost control of Congress in the November midterm elections, health-care costs skyrocketed, and the uninsured rate continued to rise.

The worst thing would be to do nothing, he said. Granted, this was well before Scott Brown rocked the political landscape, but as the dust settled from the Massachusetts aftershock there was no moderation of the Clinton message — and in fact Clinton team members were moving to reinforce it.

Within a few days former Clinton political consultant Paul Begala wrote an article for the Huffington Post that urged Democrats: “Pass the Senate Bill, Please.” It was a challenge. Man up, you wussies.

You’re going to get the attack anyway, you may as well get the accomplishment. I don’t mean to be rude, but if health care is the kiss of death, you’ve already been kissed.

On that very same day the Financial Times carried an editorial by James Carville, chief political strategist for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. He advised Democrats to just blame George W. Bush for all of their problems.

Democrats would not be playing the blame game with one another for the loss or for the health care debacle if they had only pointed fingers at those (or in this case, the one) who put Americans (and most of the world) in the predicament we’re in: George W. Bush.

Blaming Bush is just what President Barack Obama has been doing for his entire first year in office, and it isn’t working anymore. While paying lip service to bipartisanship, Obama has restated his promise to keep pushing his own brand of health care reform — opposite of what Bill Clinton himself had done.

Why? Hillary.

Bill Clinton has been engaged in the kind of politicking that would have been considered unseemly not so long ago. Former presidents just don’t do politics after serving two terms in the White House, but Bill Clinton is not like other former two-term presidents. It’s still possible, though not necessarily probable, that he could be back for another two terms at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, this time as first gentleman to the first woman president of the United States.

In the Clinton strategy for getting there, three elements emerge. First is to attack the left. Lanny Davis launched the first wave, blaming the left for Martha Coakley’s defeat in Massachusetts and calling for the more centrist New Democrats to save the party.

The second element of the strategy is to goad the leading leftist Democrats into ramming their policies down American throats. Bill Clinton, Paul Begala, and a host of others are pressuring Obama, Reid, and Pelosi to keep pushing that health care legislation, and don’t worry that the majority of voters oppose it. Those tea party Americans are too dumb to know what’s in their own best interest, and it’s up to the left to impose it on them.

The third piece is Carville’s finger of blame. After more than a year listening to Obama blaming George W. Bush for all of America’s problems, the message is losing its potency. It’s just another way for the left to insist that it bears no responsibility for anything ever. The laser-like focus on avoiding their own blame for past problems convinces more and more people that Democrats haven’t the slightest clue and even less interest in really solving problems. Instead, any legislation to make its way through this leftist dominated Congress is designed first and foremost to strengthen their grip on power.

If Democrat leaders diligently follow the Clinton team prescription, by the time November 2010 rolls around they will be intensely unpopular. The tea party faithful will be incensed and motivated, and the left can expect to get an historic shellacking on Election Day.

But Hillary will have no connection to that defeat. She stands ready to step in as that New Democrat Lanny Davis is looking for. By opposing the far left of her party she might even tap into tea party outrage at the leftist assault on our liberties, our health care, and our free market economy. She could offer herself to tea party independents as the New Democrat alternative to a return to Republican rule.

Hillary Clinton will be running for president. A challenge to Obama in 2012 is not outside the realm of possibility, but it would be very risky. Failing to win the nomination in 2012 would most likely kill her chances for a run at it in 2016. She’ll do it only if Obama’s poll numbers continue to slide.

The Clinton team is helping those numbers along.

Inevitably - Price Controls

The Massachusetts prototype for ObamaCare is running into a little trouble.  Costs are spiraling out of control, and so Deval Patrick is proposing to rein them in – with mandated price controls.  This is what we can expect when Obama's plan kicks in.

Last month, Democratic Governor Deval Patrick landed a neutron bomb, proposing hard price controls across almost all Massachusetts health care. State regulators already have the power to cap insurance premiums, which Mr. Patrick is activating. He also filed a bill that would give state regulators the power to review the rates of hospitals, physician groups and some specialty providers. Those that are deemed too high "shall be presumptively disapproved."

Mr. Patrick ad-libbed that he had "a whole bunch of pals here who are in the health-care field, and I saw the color drain out of their faces." Little wonder. The administered prices of Medicare and Medicaid already shift costs to private patients while below-cost reimbursement creates balance-sheet havoc among providers. Now the governor wants to import these distortions to save the state's heavily subsidized insurance program as costs explode.

t doesn't even count as an irony that former Governor Mitt Romney (like President Obama) sold this plan as a way to control spending. As with all new entitlements, the rolling cost crisis began almost immediately. For fiscal 2010 taxpayer costs are $47 million over budget, in part due to the recession, and while the $913 million Mr. Patrick requested for 2011 is a 5% increase over 2010, spending has grown on average 6.7% per year.

Meanwhile, average Massachusetts insurance premiums are now the highest in the nation. Since 2006, they've climbed at an annual rate of 30% in the individual market. Small business costs have increased by 5.8%. Per capita health spending in Massachusetts is now 27% higher than the national average, and 15% higher even after adjusting for local wages and academic research grants. The growth rate is faster too.

Those data come from granular studies about the Massachusetts health markets published recently by the state.

Why do we have to keep learning these lessons over and over again?  

The goal is to engineer a cheaper system through brute force so government can pay for health care for all. What inevitably suffers is the quality of care for individual patients. Thirty states imposed hospital rate setting in the 1970s and 1980s. Except for Maryland, every one of them eventually eliminated it—including Massachusetts, in 1991—partly because it didn't control costs.

And partly because it killed people. A 1988 study in the Journal of New England Medicine found that the states with the most stringent rate-setting had mortality rates 6% to 10% higher than those that didn't.

Silly me.  I lapsed for a moment.  I shouldn't speak as if this government health care industry takeover has anything to do with health care.  This is about political reform.  This has always been about building an enduring progressive majority.  ObamaCare will drive health care costs through stratosphere.

In the Ideological Battle of the Decade Mainstream Media Won Big

The following post was originally published on Pajamas Media.  I thought it relevant to republish it at his time in light of the apparent intentions of President Obama and congressional Democrats to proceed with a national takeover of the health care industry.

It was the advent of low cost, high speed internet access that did it. The shift from dial-up to cable started taking off at just about the start of this past decade, and the unforeseen result was that for the first time major newspapers and TV networks were in a serious fight to defend their turf.  Encroachment by internet news providers and pundits was pushing the mainstream media (MSM) into a battle over who gets to shape public opinion.

The mainstream media had won their control over the news because they owned the means of reaching vast numbers of people.  Suddenly, advances in internet software and network technologies made it possible for just about anybody to publish to a worldwide audience.  Grassroots journalism was born.  With the rise of the internet as a resource for news and information, skepticism over the accuracy and reliability of mainstream reporting grew, and by the middle of the decade bloggers and internet news websites had cut significantly into MSM's influence.  But from the perspective of January 2010 it’s clear. At the end of the decade MSM had won out, successfully imposing its political will on the country.

Two huge stories signaled the that internet had arrived as an alternative to the print and broadcast media.  On January 17, 1998 a news aggregation website, the Drudge Report, published a blockbuster story. It was a story that Newsweek Magazine had tried to kill.

Web Posted: 01/17/98 23:32:47 PST -- NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN

BLOCKBUSTER REPORT: 23-YEAR OLD, FORMER WHITE HOUSE INTERN, SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT

**World Exclusive**
**Must Credit the DRUDGE REPORT**

At the last minute, at 6 p.m. on Saturday evening, NEWSWEEK magazine killed a story that was destined to shake official Washington to its foundation: A White House intern carried on a sexual affair with the President of the United States!

The DRUDGE REPORT has learned that reporter Michael Isikoff developed the story of his career, only to have it spiked by top NEWSWEEK suits hours before publication.

This was huge. In an earlier day when the press made a story disappear it was gone. But now suddenly a major news magazine spiked a story, and it didn't go away. And that wasn’t the end of the bad news for MSM.

In September of 2004 an icon of broadcast news took a direct hit, compliments of the internet.  CBS News anchor Dan Rather had aired a 60 Minutes story alleging that the Republican candidate for president, George W. Bush, had been guilty of insubordination and AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard. According to Rather, family influence had kept him out of trouble over it, and he claimed he had the documents to prove it.  CBS put them on their website everybody could get a close look at them. Bad move. Scrutiny began almost immediately. Within hours this comment appeared on Free Republic, setting off a series of events that brought Dan Rather's broadcast career to an early finish.

To: Howlin
Howlin, every single one of these memos to file is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman.

In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing, and typewriters used monospaced fonts.

The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. They were not widespread until the mid to late 90's. Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn't used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang systems that were dominant in the mid 80's used monospaced fonts.

I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old.

This should be pursued aggressively.

47 posted on Wednesday, September 08, 2004 11:59:43 PM by Buckhead

In those two stories, two MSM strategies for “shaping” public opinion had been effectively hamstrung. In the first instance, the story on Drudge, a major news magazine was caught trying to kill a story. In the second, a network news anchor had been caught fabricating a story.  In each case media partisanship had been starkly revealed. Cover up the dirt for a Democrat. Make up some dirt about a Republican. 

But getting caught didn't turn the media from what they still believed their mission to be – to promote a progressive agenda.  It meant they had to be more careful.  They could no longer bury a story and expect it to stay gone, and they had more careful with their facts. Old formulas weren’t working the way they used to, but the mainstream media still had the loudest voices around, and they were still as partisan as ever.

“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. In conflict tactics there are certain rules that [should be regarded] as universalities. One is that the opposition must be singled out as the target and 'frozen.”

- Saul Alinsky

From the start his 2000 campaign for the presidency George W. Bush was a target. He was Republican when the press was overwhelmingly Democrat – a forgivable sin if he lost, but he didn't. That made him the target.  He refused to cave in when Al Gore played the race card, charging that racially motivated voter intimidation suppressed the African-American vote at Florida polls during the 2000 election. When Gore demanded selective recounts in heavily Democratic Florida counties, Bush fought back. In a case that went all the way to the US Supreme Court Bush won. Immediately liberal pundits declared Gore the should-have-been winner and Bush the illegitimate president.

The media even conducted its own recount, and found that except with the most liberal interpretation of voter intent, Bush still won. He was still the illegitimate president. A year later after all the recount dust had settled, Dan Keating and Dan Balz of the Washington Post reported:

Had Bush not been party to short-circuiting those recounts, he might have escaped criticism that his victory hinged on legal maneuvering rather than on counting the votes.

Then came 9/11. For a rare, brief moment the country stood united behind President George W. Bush. He inspired us all when he stood with his arm across the shoulders of a tired fire fighter in the rubble of what once was the World Trade Center.

"I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon."

The Bush presidency was transformed. His new mission was the defense of the United States and the American people.  The War on Terror was under way.

Ridding Afghanistan of the Taliban was the no-brainer.  What to do after that presented the more difficult question, but Iraq was in almost everybody's mind.  In years leading up to 9/11 prominent Democrats had gone on record: Saddam Hussein posed a threat that had to be stopped. Regime change in Iraq was US policy.  As late as eight months prior to 9/11, a Washington Post editorial warned of the danger posed by editors Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

[O]f all the booby traps left behind by the Clinton administration, none is more dangerous – or more urgent – than the situation in Iraq. Over the last year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with, or calling attention to, the almost complete unraveling of a decade's efforts to isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction…

A week after the World Trade Center towers collapsed in New York the Bush administration began to consider taking steps against Saddam Hussein.

On Sept. 19 and 20, the Defense Policy Board, a prestigious bipartisan board of national security experts that advises the Pentagon, met for 19 hours to discuss the ramifications of the attacks of Sept. 11. The members of the group agreed on the need to turn to Iraq as soon as the initial phase of the war against Afghanistan and Mr. bin Laden and his organization is over, people familiar with the meetings said. Both Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Mr. Wolfowitz took part in the meetings for part of both days.

But while the group agreed on the goal of ousting Mr. Hussein, they presented a range of views, including a discussion of the many political and diplomatic obstacles to military action.

''If we don't use this as the moment to replace Saddam after we replace the Taliban, we are setting the stage for disaster,'' Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House and a member of the group, said in an interview.

Members of the bi-partisan Defense Policy Board included Harold Brown, President Jimmy Carter's defense secretary; former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger; R. James Woolsey, director of central intelligence in the Clinton administration; Adm. David E. Jeremiah, the former deputy chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; former Vice President Dan Quayle; and James R. Schlesinger a former defense and energy secretary.

This letter to the editor of the New York Times was fairly typical of the climate. 

Published: September 25, 2001

To the Editor:

Re ''U.S. to Publish Terror Evidence on bin Laden'' (front page, Sept. 24):

War on terrorism must go well beyond Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. While I am prepared to be patient and to give our president as much latitude as he needs to proceed, I will consider this war a failure if one year from now Muammar el-Qaddafi still runs Libya and Saddam Hussein still runs Iraq.

Decisive military action against Libya and Iraq will defang world terrorism much more effectively than killing bandits in Afghanistan.

SERGE LURYI

Setauket, N.Y., Sept. 24, 2001

A country at war had rallied behind its president from Texas, and the mainstream media were temporarily unable to attack their prime target.  There was no choice but to rally along and wait for an opportunity.  It would come a year and a half later.

"An organizer… does not have a fixed truth -- truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing”

- Saul Alinsky

By March of 2003 Bush had made his case. Congress voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq. But then a remarkable turnaround occurred. It seems once regime change in Iraq was no longer hypothetical, it was no longer Saddam Hussein who had to be stopped.  Opponents were seeking ways that George W. Bush could be stopped. They found an opening in sixteen words from the 2003 State of the Union address.

“The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

A year and a half after traveling to the African nation of Niger on behalf of the CIA's counter-proliferation experts, Joseph C. Wilson 4th, former ambassador to Iraq wrote an editorial column for the New York Times.  He accused the Bush administration of ignoring his findings and twisting intelligence in order to justify the invasion of Iraq. 

The British government published a "white paper" asserting that Saddam Hussein and his unconventional arms posed an immediate danger. As evidence, the report cited Iraq's attempts to purchase uranium from an African country.

Then, in January, President Bush, citing the British dossier, repeated the charges about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium from Africa.

The next day, I reminded a friend at the State Department of my trip and suggested that if the president had been referring to Niger, then his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I understood them.

[...]

The act of war is the last option of a democracy, taken when there is a grave threat to our national security. More than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq already. We have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons.

Media luminaries picked up the story.  Tim Russert in an appearance on Imus in the Morning spoke in grave tones about the seriousness of such a thing — that a president might falsify intelligence to make a case for war. The media herd followed.

But the verbal report that Wilson had given to the CIA on his return from Africa bore little resemblance to the editorial he wrote for the Times.  If anything, the ambassadors report corroborated Bush's charge.  A July 11, 2003 statement by Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet said,

He reported back to us that one of the former Nigerien officials he met stated that he was unaware of any contract being signed between Niger and rogue states for the sale of uranium during his tenure in office. The same former official also said that in June 1999 a businessman approached him and insisted that the former official meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss “expanding commercial relations” between Iraq and Niger. The former official interpreted the overture as an attempt to discuss uranium sales.

Ultimately the media had to admit that Wilson had not “debunked” the sixteen words from the 2003 State of the Union. A Senate intelligence committee report and the British Butler Report concluded that accusations of Iraqi efforts to get uranium from Africa were “well founded.”  But once the Wilson column was published Democrats and their allies in the media began an all out campaign to expose Bush duplicity.  Bush tricked us into invaded Iraq for the wrong reasons. Bush lied. Soldiers died. The intelligence had been twisted.

“The organizer must first rub raw the resentments of the people...”

- Saul Alinsky

In January of 2004 the US Army informed the media that allegations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were the subject of a criminal investigation that had been under way since late 2003. In February the military announced that 17 soldiers had been suspended, and in March that charges had been filed against six. That investigation resulted in eleven criminal convictions of soldiers involved in the abuse.

In addition to the criminal investigation the Army opened an Article 15-6 inquiry into the conduct of the 800th Military Police Brigade, the unit in charge of Abu Ghraib.  The results of that inquiry were made public in May of 2004 in a report by Major General Antonio Taguba.  Between January and March the media showed little interest in the reports.

In April 2004, 60 Minutes II made it the subject of a broadcast and a feeding frenzy was on. The New Yorker published an article by Seymour Hersh, Torture at Abu Ghraib, that asked “How far up does responsibility go?” Between late April and early June, the New York Times ran a front page story about the abuse at Abu Ghraib on 34 out of 37 days.

Leading Democrats piled on. Senator Ted Kennedy had an answer for Hersh. "Shamefully we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management, U.S. Management." By implication the abuse was systemic and authorized at the highest levels of the administration.

During the summer of 2005 the media and Democrats were bent on proving systemic abuse. Speaking of American soldiers stationed at Guantanamo, Senator Dick Durbin compared them to Nazis. Stories of abuse reached worldwide audiences. Michael Isikoff published an item in Newsweek claiming that interrogators had desecrated the Koran by flushing it down a toilet. Somehow it never occurred to Isikoff that a book might not fit down a toilet. Newsweek formally retracted the story, but not before at least sixteen people were killed in rioting throughout the Middle East.

But the passions were inflamed against George Bush. He was al Qaeda's best recruiter, they said.

By 2006 the media had turned their attentions to secret programs that had been implemented to fight the war on terror. In late 2005 the Washington Post reported on the existence of secret CIA detention facilities, also known as “black sites”. A month or so later, the New York Times reported the existence of the NSA surveillance program in which international telephone traffic was monitored. It became commonly referred to as the, “warrantless wiretap” or the “domestic” surveillance program since one side of the phone call could be in the US. In 2006 the New York Time, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post all published stories revealing the existence of terrorist finance tracking program.

While all of this was getting play in the media as more threatening to American civil liberties than protective against terror, the insurgency in Iraq was on the rise. Democrats and their media allies behaved as if the insurgents were deaf and blind. An insurgency prevails by the perception that its violence can't be stopped. The media focused their efforts on the 2006 midterm elections, unconcerned that they were no longer neutral observers. Here is a sampling of headlines – by no means complete –all from the Washington Post and all from the first weeks of October.

• Facing Reality in Iraq
  
• Blind Into Baghdad; Like scenes out of "Desperate Housewives," the war room machinations of the White House.
• Bob Woodward and 'State of Denial'
  
• How to Lose a War; The Bush administration's mismanagement of Iraq has been chronicled in shocking detail.

By late 2006 it was clear that the surge in insurgent violence in Iraq had to be countered by a surge in US forces in Iraq. The troop surge was accompanied by a change in strategy from force protection to counterinsurgency. Leading Democrats deemed it a failure even before any troops were in place. In April 2007 Harry Reid said the troop surge was not working and the war was lost.

"I believe myself that the secretary of state, secretary of defense and — you have to make your own decisions as to what the president knows — (know) this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday," said Reid.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would not cut off funding for the troops even while declaring the war a blunder.

Democrats will never cut off funding for our troops when they are in harm's way, but we will hold the president accountable. He has to answer for his war. He has dug a hole so deep he can't even see the light on this. It's a tragedy. It's a stark blunder.

But the surge did not fail. The surge troops were finally in place by mid 2007, and a steady decline in the level of violence in Iraq began.

By the end of the 2008 presidential primary season, the war in Iraq was largely over. Presidential candidate Barack Obama, when put on the spot by Bill O’Reilly, was forced to admit that it “succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated.” But General David Petraeus, architect of the surge, anticipated it. And George Bush, who put General Petraeus in command, anticipated it.

But the media campaign had done the job of shaping public opinion. What began seven years earlier amid bi-partisan agreement, that Saddam Hussein represented a threat to the United States that could no longer be ignored, turned into an extraordinarily successful campaign to poison the Republican brand and George W. Bush.  The saddest part was how media coverage had turned a victory of epic proportions into a tragedy, a blunder, a war undertaken for the wrong reasons.  But the fact remains.  Against the odds a true parliamentary democracy has been established in Iraq.

And so the media stopped bringing it up.  The 2008 presidential campaign was heating up and new targets were on the horizon.  Sarah Palin found herself in the cross hairs. The disparity in treatment by the press between Palin and Barack Obama was almost laughable. Hoards of reporters dashed off to Alaska in search of anything with which to smear Palin and her family. Nothing illustrates the contempt of media elites towards Palin (and Republicans) as the joke David Letterman made at the expense of fourteen year old Willow Palin.

"One awkward moment for Sarah Palin at the Yankee game," Letterman said, "during the seventh inning, her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez."

Contrast Palin coverage to the obsequiousness accorded Obama. The New York Times reporter Jeff Zeleny asked President Obama at a press conference,

“During these first 100 days, what has surprised you the most about this office? Enchanted you the most from serving in this office? Humbled you the most? And troubled you the most?”

The absurdity of the media coverage would be something to laugh about until you look at where it has gotten us.  In 2000 George W. Bush promoted the concept of the ownership society.  His domestic programs were aimed at empowering the individual, and to do that he planned to lower taxes, reduce regulation, improve the education system, and reform government programs that encouraged dependence.  The War on Terror took the Bush presidency in a different direction, but it was the media campaign against it that did the country the most harm.

It wasn't enough to oppose policies in good faith.  Bush was attacked on his integrity.  By cutting marginal tax rates Bush was accused of giving away tax revenue to his rich friends.  The failure of US intelligence to accurately determine the state of Iraq's weapons programs was the media's evidence that George Bush lied and exaggerated to make his case for war.  The war itself was said to be personal, since Saddam Hussein had launched an assassination attempt at Bush the elder.  Saddam Hussein, once considered such a threat that US policy supported regime change in Iraq, had become the victim to Bush. 

The campaign had been so successful that anything Bush had ever proposed or supported was tainted by association.  The Republican brand was in ruins.  When the financial crisis struck, naturally it was blamed on Bush.  It was the lax regulation of Wall Street firms not the fraud and lax lending standards promoted by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that caused it all. 

The backlash has been furious.  The super majority that voters gave Democrats out of exhaustion from everything Bush has led the country to a precipice.  Bank bailouts have been used as leverage for government control of executive compensation.  The auto industry bailout has given the federal government and the United Auto Workers union ownership of auto companies.  Barack Obama even demanded regime change at GM, forcing Rick Waggoner to step down as CEO.  Worst of all the government is about to embark upon a takeover of the health care industry.  And all of it opposed by a majority of voters.

Although the left leaning media have driven the country further left than it has ever been, the chances of it remaining there are pretty slim.  Those who would once have been called "the silent majority" are now "the tea party" and they are not so silent.  No where has their impact been more pronounced than in Massachusetts, the bluest of blue states.  The special election for the Senate seat once held by Ted Kennedy was expected to go to Democrat Martha Coakley in a cakewalk.  She lost to Republican Scott Brown.  But the battle is far from over.

At this moment small-L libertarians and conservatives are resurgent, but there is an awfully long way to go to get the country re-focused on promoting individual liberty, responsibility and empowerment, instead of greater government control and entitlements.  And that's because, at this moment, at the end of this first decade in the new millennium, the mainstream media are the victors in their ideological fight against conservatism.

Voter Disapproval of Obama at Its Worst

Voter reaction to the Obama's vaunted health care summit is driving the Rasmussen Presidential Approval Index into the dirt.  It now matches the lowest it has ever been at -21.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Saturday shows that 22% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-three percent (43%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -21. That matches the lowest Approval Index rating yet recorded for President Obama.

The only other time the Approval Index was this low came in late December as the U.S. Senate prepared to approve its version of health care reform (see trends). Most voters continue to oppose the proposed health care plan.

The Presidential Approval Index is calculated by subtracting the number who Strongly Disapprove from the number who Strongly Approve.

Driving The Left Into a Ditch?

My latest article is up on Pajamas Media.

The Clintons' legendary penchant for triangulations takes a Machiavellian turn as the midterms approach.

Read more...

Americans Can Speak for Themselves

So says Froma Harrop.  But apparently Harrop is as deaf as a post, because she can't hear what we're saying.

Have you voted on any of the Democratic health care reform plans? Me neither.

No such vote was ever taken. But with coordination that the Rockettes would envy, Republicans insist that "the American people have spoken" on the matter, and they want the proposals killed.

House Republican Leader John Boehner: "The American people have spoken, loudly and clearly: They do not want Washington Democrats' government takeover of health care."

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell: "The American people do not want this bill to pass."

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele: "The American people have spoken. The White House hasn't heard their message."

Quite a coincidence, these guys saying the same thing on the same day. No matter. What they're saying is nonsense.

Actually, Ms. Harrop, I did vote, and I voted against all of the Democrats' health care plans.  I did it by contributing to the Scott Brown for Senate campaign. 

ObamaCare Health Care Summit - Kickoff and Reaction

Congressman Paul Ryan from Wisconsin was the Republican leadoff hitter at Obama's health care summit yesterday.  Ryan argued very effectively that ObamaCare would "bend the cost curve" up instead of down.

Over the course of the entire 6-hour summit, neither Obama nor any of the the rest of the Democrats were able to respond to Ryan's argument with any kind of credibility.  You can see it in the next clip of Frank Luntz and his healthcare focus group, which appeared last night on Hannity.

The first clip comes via Hot Air. The second clip comes via Logistics Monster.

Rubio's "Incendiary" Message

Writing in The New Republic senior editor John B. Judis warns about the "threat" posed by Marco Rubio.

But using his own life story, he framed the choice facing Americans in a way that evoked the contrast between his Horatio Alger capitalism and Obama’s or Nancy Pelosi’s socialism. America, he said, “is the only country in the world where today’s employee is tomorrow’s employer. And yet, there are still people in American politics who, for some reason, cling to this belief that America is better off adopting the economic policies of nations whose people immigrate here from there.”  

Rubio wasn’t referring to immigrants from the capitalist Philippines or Costa Rica, but those, like his own family, who came from socialist Cuba. “Do I want my children to grow up in the country that I grew up in or do I want them to grow up in a country like the one my parents grew up in?” he asked. The audience knew immediately what he was saying—and the choice he was posing—but his incendiary message was implicit and softened by the insertion of his biography.

What absurd lefty hysteria, to imagine the concept of employees eventually becoming employers, an "incendiary message." 

Questions That Don't Occur to Lefties

In light of the current liberal mindset which blames Wall Street greed and predatory lenders for the current sad state of our economy, Thomas Sowell presents a couple of questions.

Take Wall Street "greed." Is there any evidence that people in Wall Street were any less interested in making money during all the decades and generations when investments in housing were among the safest investments around? If their greed did not bring on an economic disaster before, why would it bring it on now?

As for lenders, how could they have expected to satisfy their greed by lending to people who were not likely to repay them?

Since our leftist congressional majorities can't think of anything but more government regulation to remedy this depressed economic state of affairs, we should expect it to drag on for years.

A Liberal Almost Gets It

Susan Estrich is beginning to face up to what's really the matter with Democrats and what's really the matter with Obama's grand plan for health care reform.

The White House is trying to treat the problem with its health care proposal as a communications problem.

It's not that people don't want the plan; they just don't know how great it is. Our fault, says the president, for not communicating more effectively.

Not so fast.

[...]

I'm all for letting people with pre-existing conditions buy affordable insurance. But letting a slew of older, sicker people into any pool will dramatically increase premiums for everyone in that pool. (What did they say about letting everyone into the pool with federal workers?) So you have to make the young, healthy people join, too, or the costs will be exorbitant.

So, hypothetically, now everyone has insurance — either they pay for it, or we do. Then what happens? Everybody gets more health care. Just exactly how does that save us money? Just exactly how do we pay for it?

Cost controls? In order to get refills for my arthritis medicine every month, I have to get pre-approval each time from the insurance company, which this week has taken most of the week. I always get the approval, of course, because this is medicine you don't stop taking after a month or two. If the insurance company saves money, it's only because making the pharmacist jump through more hoops sometimes means I miss a dose or two. This cannot be what they mean by cost control.

Get rid of unnecessary tests? I'm not really into unnecessary tests. It's getting the necessary tests approved that causes so much trouble.

Paying doctors and hospitals less to give us more? That's bound to work…

Ms. Estrich is giving her fellow Democrats credit way beyond their due.  It's her unspoken assumption that Democrats are simply mistaken.  Somehow Democrats don't quite understand that the current health care takeover plan can't possibly do what they tell us it will do.  But they understand.  You can tell. 

You can tell from the two different stories.  Progressives have one narrative for public consumption: nobody will ever need to worry about their health care, ever again.  But the other discussion, the one that occurs when progressives speak with each other, is all about political strategy.  In that discussion progressives are quite candid about who are primary beneficiaries of health care reform.

PITTSBURGH - Former President Bill Clinton told an audience of liberal online activists Thursday evening that the nation has “entered a new era of progressive politics” that could last for decades if Democrats can pass ambitious measures such as health care reform and climate change.

But we, the stupid people, are gumming up the works by asking questions.  How will this plan reduce costs?  Will it lower costs enough to pay for all this expanded coverage?  Where is the money coming from if it doesn't?  What about the side effects?  Are there other ways we could accomplish the same thing? 

I suppose it's gratifying to find at least one Democrat, Susan Estrich, who's pondered those questions.  But the Democrats in Washington don't have any answers because the questions have nothing whatever to do with the health care legislation they're trying to pass.  It's a political strategy, stupid.  Progressives hope to create dependency on a scale to feed an enduring progressive majority for the next 30 or 40 years.

That's the part that Ms. Estrich needs to get.

George Will at CPAC 2010

George Will spoke at CPAC 2010. The video is below. You'll want to turn up the volume on your computer to hear it, but it's well worth the listen.Get ready for an entertaining thirty minutes.

The Constitution and Freedom

Fox contributor Judge Andrew Napolitano created a five part series on the U.S. Constitution that can be found at Freedom Watch On Fox. Here is the first in that series.

I ran across the video at The Tea Party Patriots' Contract from America.  Follow the link and vote your own top ten Tea Party priorities for America.

The System Worked

No, I'm not quoting Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano who famously claimed, "The system worked," when it was actually other airline passengers who overpowered the Christmas Day bomber.   No, I'm talking about Charles Krauthammer responding to the progressive peanut gallery who've taken to chirping that America is ungovernable.

It's 2010, and the first-year agenda of a popular and promising young president has gone down in flames. Barack Obama's two signature initiatives -- cap-and-trade and health-care reform -- lie in ruins.

Desperate to explain away this scandalous state of affairs, liberal apologists haul out the old reliable from the Carter years: "America the Ungovernable." So declared Newsweek. "Is America Ungovernable?" coyly asked the New Republic. Guess the answer. 

[...]

Leave it to Mickey Kaus, a principled liberal who supports health-care reform, to debunk these structural excuses: "Lots of intellectual effort now seems to be going into explaining Obama's (possible/likely/impending) health care failure as the inevitable product of larger historic and constitutional forces. . . .But in this case there's a simpler explanation: Barack Obama's job was to sell a health care reform plan to American voters. He failed."

He failed because the utter implausibility of its central promise -- expanded coverage at lower cost -- led voters to conclude that it would lead ultimately to more government, more taxes and more debt. More broadly, the Democrats failed because, thinking the economic emergency would give them the political mandate and legislative window, they tried to impose a left-wing agenda on a center-right country. The people said no, expressing themselves first in spontaneous demonstrations, then in public opinion polls, then in elections -- Virginia, New Jersey and, most emphatically, Massachusetts.

Gridlock in our American constitutional system of government is a feature, not a bug.

Big Trouble For Democrats

A CNN poll found 52% believe President Obama doesn't deserve to be re-elected!  The results are the same whether pollsters are asking all Americans or just registered voters.

An eye-opening result from the new CNN/Opinion Research survey:

6. Do you think Barack Obama deserves to be reelected, or not?

All Americans
Yes: 44%
No: 52%

Registered Voters
Yes: 44%
No: 52%

It's worse for congress.

The reelect numbers for members of both parties in Congress are slightly worse (41% yes, 56% no for Dems and GOP among registered voters), and the GOP leads the Democrats by 2 points in the generic congressional ballot, 48 to 46.

And there's even more bad news for congressional Democrats.  President Obama is planning a rescue mission.  He'll be hitting the campaign trail on their behalf.   Good luck with that.

With high-profile Democrats already bailing out of re-election campaigns - Sen. Evan Bayh's decision on Monday to drop out of the race in Indiana brings the number of retirees to five - Mr. Obama is putting his popularity and fundraising prowess on the line as he tries to help his party hold the majority in the Senate.

Local Republicans are salivating at the prospect of Mr. Obama dropping into town to campaign for their opponents.

President Obama campaigned for Martha Coakley in Massachusetts; Scott Brown won.  He campaigned for Jon Corzine in New Jersey; Chris Christie won.  He gave up on Creigh Deeds in Virginia when it became apparent that Deeds would be absolutely crushed by Bob McDonnell.  He made a pitch to Olympic Committee for a 2016 Chicago Summer Olympics; Rio de Janeiro will host those games.

Obama's help on the campaign trail is just what Republicans are hoping for. 

A Meaningless Distinction

Hillary Clinton says the Iranian theocratic dictatorship is being supplanted by a military dictatorship.

She said the Obama administration believes that the Guard is supplanting the government of Iran. "That is how we see it. We see that the government of Iran, the Supreme leader, the president, the parliament is being supplanted and that Iran is moving toward a military dictatorship," said Clinton, who arrived Sunday in Qatar, where she spoke at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum.

Clinton expanded on her Iran remarks before the students as she flew to Saudi Arabia on Monday afternoon. She told reporters traveling with her that she believed the current civilian leadership was too "preoccupied" by the opposition protests to recognize the creeping coup by the guard, and it was unclear if the clerical and civilian leadership could "begin to reassert itself."

Among the signs of a military dictatorship that she saw, she said the current government "is a far cry from the Islamic Republic, which had elections and different points of view within the leadership circle. "

Right.  That's the same Iranian theocracy that called in the snipers when confronted with a differing point of view back in September.  What's really happened is that the Obama administration has finally awaken to the fact that trying to negotiate with Iran was always a useless exercise.  The "creeping coup" is a better explanation for Obama than admitting to the creeping realization that he was wrong from the start.