Democrats Spoil Presidential Politics. Again

We don’t usually do David Broder here at the Road to the Middle Class, for obvious reasons. But today he writes about the Democrats latest attempt to game the presidential primary calendar.

Call me conservative, but when I came to the United States I quickly grew to love the primary season and its calendar.

It started slow with the New Hampshire primary and slowly gathered steam until the Oregon primary and then the granddaddy of them all, the California primary when the nominees would usually be decided.

It was long enough almost to qualify as a professional sport. And about a month after the California primary would come the playoffs: the National Conventions.

But then came George McGovern, who rewrote the Democratic Party rules after 1968 and ran for president in 1972. Ever since then the Democrats have been fiddling with the rules to try and game the system. Or as Broder puts it:

When they started tinkering with their rules after the 1968 election disaster, they unleashed a fierce competition among the states to be at the head of the line, where the contests have the greatest impact on weeding the field and crowning the eventual winner.



What was lost in all this was any sense of public deliberation about the choice of the next president. In the general election, people have two months or more to evaluate two or maybe three candidates. In the early primaries, eight or 10 people may be vying. What is most needed is time -- and a place -- for them to be carefully examined.

Maybe that is just what the Democrats intend. They don’t want a process of “public deliberation.” They want a quick decision in favor of a candidate preferred by the Washington elite. And then back to business as usual.

The beauty of the old presidential selection process was its deliberation. (OK, I know, it really only lasted from 1952 to 1968.) Different states came up every week or so, and each state required a different strategy. And usually the best man won.

What I want to know is: Why shouldn’t Republicans work with the states to go back to the old schedule, celebrating the slow advance from bud to bloom throughout the spring? Democrats be damned for their hot-house forcings. Let’s watch political nature in all its loveliness, natural and organic, the Whole Foods way.

Costco vs. Wal-Mart

Some of you may have noticed that the two big box retailing champs, Wal-Mart and Costco, have differing political profiles. The Wal-Mart and the Walton family are associated with the Republican Party and union busting, while Costco and CEO Jim Sinegal are associated with the Democrats and are much more employee-friendly. Here is an ABC News puff-piece on Costco and Sinegal.

In fact there is a big difference in worker pay. Costco pays about $17 per hour and Wal-Mart pays about $10 per hour, according to Tim Worstall.

Well, that does it. Clearly Costco is higher and nobler, more sensitive and more compassionate. But how does Costco do it?

Costco has sales of $51 billion, 110,000 employees (45% part time, similar to WalMart isn't it?) and WalMart has sales (in North America) of $191 billion and 1.3 million associates. So Costco has sales of some $465,000 per employee and WalMart $147,000 per employee.

And that is the point. Costco is a warehouse store, where you buy huge sacks of stuff rather than onesies and twosies. It has a business model that requires a lot fewer employees. And when Costco delivers about 3 times the sales per employee as Wal-Mart they can afford to pay more to each employee.

But that raises the question. Is it better for Costco to hire a few people at high wages or for Wal-Mart to hire a bunch of people at lower wages? You make the call.

Unfortunately, whatever call you make, ultimately the market will decide. Because it answers the big question, the only question that really matters: what do the customers want? Do they want to buy at a warehouse store or at a Wal-Mart big box?

By the way, even though Costco is said to be a friend of labor, only 18 percent of Costco employees are unionized.

Suppose Omar Was Bombing Abortion Clinics...

The MSM reaction to the San Francisco hit-and-run motorist yesterday was Ho Hum. No need to put Afghan driver Omeed Aziz Popal on the front page with his car in front of the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco.

It’s like the Seattle gunman a few weeks ago. Nothing to report there really. Anyway, the South Asian suspect Naveed Afzal Haq supposedly converted to Christianity lately.

Then there was the North Carolina chappie, discussed by Shannon Blosser. Mohammad Reza Taheri-azar rented an SUV and drove it close to the student union at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in the hope of hitting people.

Now imagine if these oppressed Muslims were instead middle-aged white guys driving SUVs into abortion clinics.

Yes. There wouldn’t be any problem about getting their exploits on Page One. There wouldn’t be any problem about declaring their acts as hate crimes. There wouldn’t be any problem getting MSM news anchors to put on their deepest frown as they anathematized the dastardly white bigots. The horror. The outrage. The end of civilization as we know it. The right-wing hate.

But who cares about a few Jews being killed in Seattle and San Francisco?

Things You Are Not Allowed To Say: Part XXXIX

Nearly sixty years ago, feminist Simone de Beauvoir bemoaned that the female was the victim of the species. What she wanted was to become a real human being, with a life of the mind, creating, reading, and writing.

Don’t, advises Michael Noer in Forbes, marry a woman like that.

Guys: a word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don't marry a woman with a career.

Of course, the usual suspects are mortally offended at that. How dare Noer say that, they say, echoing the manipulative power of women down the ages. So Forbes got up Elizabeth Corcoran to pen a riposte.

Girlfriends: a word of advice. Ask your man the following question: When was the last time you learned something useful, either at home or work?

Er, what does that have to do with the big question that is nagging in the back of every young man’s mind? And what might that be?

It’s pretty simple. In today’s world, as a result of the feminist revolution and the cultural power of liberals, women can and do dump men for any reason (and two thirds of divorces are initiated by women). That usually means that they waltz off with the house and the kids and the husband/father gets stuck with the child-support payments.

So the question that any sensible guy would ask himself is: how do I work the odds on this unfavorable situation.

The obvious thing is: don’t marry a woman like Simone de Beauvoir or her followers. Don’t come within a country mile of Elizabeth Corcoran. Don’t marry a woman who has things on her mind other than home and children. If you are the marrying kind.

This shouldn’t be so shocking, after all. Men and women are completely different and in normal intercourse don’t have too much to say to each other. So unless they are embarked upon a shared life project—making a family, for example—then the chances are that after the sexual attraction has worn off a bit then the desire to stay together will wear off a bit. And your average feminized career women will soon be saying: shape up or ship out.

That is easy to say, but as every wise woman knows, it is a life time project to get a man to shape up and make a contribution that comes close to hers.

But this is America, land of the free and the brave, quivering under the knout of the social liberals. There are just certain things you are not allowed to say.

You are not allowed to say that career women are a problem. Didn’t you know? It’s right there in the First Amendment.

Katrina: Who's To Blame?

A year ago New Orleans and Louisiana politicians failed to mobilize for Hurricane Katrina. That was President Bush’s fault. A year later Mississippi’s recovery from Katrina is way ahead of New Orleans. And that is President Bush’s fault too.

How easy it is to be a liberal. Whatever happens, Big Business, or Republicans, or white racists are to blame. Meanwhile a river of tax monies drops into the lap of liberal politicians every day of the year and they can buy the support of the poor, again and again. With no accountability for results.

There are three reasons for the debacle of Katrina. We all know what they are:

1. If you want to know what is happening, don’t listen to the mainstream media.
   
2. If you want prompt, flexible response in emergency, don’t give the job to government.
   
3. If you want healthy, vibrant cities, spend tax dollars on infrastructure not on social programs.
   

All those rules were violated in New Orleans.

When I first came to the United States in the mid 1960s I was impressed by the heroic level of infrastructure. But then came the Great Society and the diversion of tax revenues into social programs. But it wan’t till the energy price shocks of the 1970s that government really started to skimp on infrastructure. Initially, it was a temporary thing, to get over the budget crises of the era. But the level of spending was never restored.

Today, as Nicole Gelinas observes in City Journal:

Public officials have unfortunately lost interest in such rational infrastructure investment, doubtless because entitlement spending has consumed budgets as well as politicians’ attention. As the American Society of Civil Engineers warned last year, “congested highways, overflowing sewers and corroding bridges are constant reminders of the looming crisis that jeopardizes our nation’s prosperity and our quality of life.” As entitlement spending has gobbled up the federal budget, spending on infrastructure has fallen to about half where it was as a percentage of GDP 40 years ago; state and local infrastructure spending lags as well.

Today, of course, Democrats are baying for investment in infrastructure, as if it wasn’t their complaints about “paving over the nation” wasn’t the cause of the problem in the first place.

But don’t look for them to propose backing out entitlement spending to make basic investment in infrastructure.

Suprise! Non-political Voters Aren't Political

When you are a conservative you want your conservative party to be conservative. You want it to stand for conservative ideas and policies.

There’s only one problem with that. Women. They tend not to vote on ideas, on parties, and on our side vs. their side. They vote for condidates because they like them. It’s enough to send a ideological party supporter crazy.

Just look at the polls on David Cameron, the young, new, non-ideological leader of the British Conservative Party. William Rees-Mogg takes a look at the numbers. Right now, a

YouGov poll published in The Daily Telegraph on Friday gave the Conservatives 38 per cent, Labour 31 and the Lib Dems 18.

But the party identification right now is 17 percent Conservative, 24 percent Labour. That means that the Conservatives right now are attracting the support of a ton of independents, but Labour is only attracting the support of a few beyond its base.

[Take this] opinion poll, taken by ICM and published in The Sunday Times [Sunday.] This shows that men would prefer Gordon Brown to David Cameron as prime minister by 42 to 36 per cent, but women would prefer Mr Cameron to Mr Brown by 40 to 34. This is in line with YouGov which shows a 2 per cent swing to the Conservatives since the last election among men, but a 6 per cent swing among women.

The numbers show that the Conservatives are leading among women and independents, both groups that do not vote the issues so much as their feelings about the candidates.

Now you can see why David Cameron has been concentrating on presenting himself to the voters as an appealing personality. The voters who are up for grabs are precisely the voters who are swayed by personality.

Mr Cameron is the non-party leader of his party: he identifies best with non-party voters, who are, paradoxically, the largest party.

Now it all makes sense. But if you believe in the power of ideas it is enough to make you crazy.

The Mood of the Voter in November

Somehow I think that the November elections this year are going to tell us something. And for a curious reason.

After a decade in which Democrats have kept their hearts hidden from the voters their base has decided that they just can’t take it any more. take a look at the portents

• There is the crazed partisan ruling on terrorist surveillance from federal Judge Anna Diggs Taylor that reads like its author lives in a hard left-wing bubble.
  
• There is the Stop the War candidacy of Democrat Ned Lamont.
  
• There is the union-fueled War on Wal-Mart.
  
• There is the rage of the “netroots.”
  
• There is the clenched-teeth reporting from the mainstream media.
  

After 12 years of Republican Congress and six years of President Bush they just can’t take it any more.

The question is: Does the American people agree with them? What do the folks in their monster houses think? What do the people in their mega SUVs think? Do workers think that their employers are ripping them off? Are people enraged about health insurance? Or do they think that they are rubbing along OK?

We really don’t know. Not yet.

But the election in November is going to give us a pretty good idea.

The Wages of Multiculturalism, Again

A big problem in the war on terror, Michael Barone opines, is that we are not just fighting Islam. We are also at war with the usual suspects: the western left.

[I]n terms of intentions, they are not enemies in the sense that they consciously wish to destroy our society... But they have also been working, over many years, to undermine faith in our society and confidence in its goodness. These covert enemies are those among our elites who have promoted the ideas labeled as multiculturalism, moral relativism and (the term is Professor Samuel Huntington's) transnationalism.

Then Barone writes, like a deconstructionist pro, about the notion of privileged ideas and narratives. There are people in our society who have made it their business to emphasize the bad parts of our history and ignore the good parts.

You might say that while they rail against the privileged dead white male narrative they have constructed their own privileged narrative, one that you dissent against at your peril.

But then the elite young men who declined to serve in the military during the Vietnam War set out to write a narrative in which they, rather than those who obeyed the call to duty, were the heroes. They have propagated their ideas through the universities, the schools and mainstream media to the point that they are the default assumptions of millions. Our covert enemies don't want the Islamo-fascists to win. But in some corner of their hearts, they would like us to lose.

The trouble is that necessary process of rooting out this covert enemy and refounding the American narrative of hope and optimism is going to be a long and divisive war.

And it hasn’t even got started yet.

The Wages of Multiculturalism

A benefit of Islamic terror, Shelby Steele indicates, is that it will force the west to demolish the left-wing game of oppression.

For over a century the left has used the weapon of “oppression” to mute the power of the middle class. Today that means crying “Oppression!” to mute the power of Israel and the United States.

It keeps charging Israel and America with oppression hoping to mute American power... Yet whenever the left does this, it makes room for extremism by lending legitimacy to its claim of oppression.

The extremism we are talking about is the monstrosity of anti-semitism and anti-Christianism as practiced by the Islamic fascists. And it feeds on the left-inspired pathology of white guilt.

But white guilt's most dangerous suppression is to keep from discussion the most conspicuous reality in the Middle East: that the Islamic world long ago fell out of history. Islamic extremism is the saber-rattling of an inferiority complex. America has done a good thing in launching democracy as a new ideal in this region. Here is the possibility--if still quite remote--for the Islamic world to seek power through contribution rather than through menace.

For the facts are damning. The west has given the Middle East a huge gift: the right to pump oil out of the ground using western organization and western technology and keep the proceeds. And the Middle East has poured that gift out onto the sand and spat on it.

In Britain the sands are running out on the left’s ugly little game of multiculturalism, as The Daily Telegraph is glad to observe.

In 1984, Ray Honeyford, a Bradford headmaster, was forced to retire after writing that multiculturalism was doing a disservice to children from immigrant backgrounds... Last week, in slightly more mangled language, Ruth Kelly, the communities and local government minister, said much the same thing.

That is easy to write, but in the 22 years between Honeyford’s forced retirement and Ruth Kelly’s retreat the left has terrorized the guardians of traditional white Anglo-Saxon culture, as it played out its nasty game of oppression and multiculturalism. And for what? To say, after all, that it was all a mistake.

The problem is that it is more than a mistake. It is going to cost lives, certainly tens of thousands of lives. And maybe it will cost millions of lives before all is done.

All because the left wanted to mute the power of the United States.

Robbed of Her Adolescence

The startling escape from captivity of Austrian Natascha Kampusch is the very stuff of the human condition.

After years confined in a cell she suddenly sees and grabs a chance to escape from her cruel jailer.

It’s a glorious tale of ascent from dire oppression to freedom.

But it is a tale with a twist. When Wolfgang Priklopil captured her and bundled her into a white van in 1998, Natascha Kampusch was only 10 years old.

As Kate Connolly tells the story, Natascha

was ordered to climb down some narrow concrete steps, to slip through a square hatch into a tiny outer room, and then to walk through to another door. Behind it was the dank and windowless soundproof cell that would be her home for the best part of the next decade.

Now she is 18 and weighs less than she did 8 years ago.

No doubt there have always been monsters who have confined little girls like this. But somehow, in the impersonal and anonymous cities of today, it seems too easy. That is what “privacy” really means. You can get up to mischief without anyone knowing, or having the right to know, what you are up to.

Yet if freedom has any meaning it means precisely the right to do things without asking permission.

Unfortunately, as Vladimir Nabokov prophetically taught us half a century ago in Lolita, it also means men with a taste for “nymphets” getting the opportunity to indulge their taste.

By all accounts, Priklopil kept his captive thin and nymphet-like until the end.

But now Natascha has escaped into freedom. Now she must learn to live with the challenges and the temptations of freedom.

The psychologists say she will need long-term therapy. Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?

She will still have to learn to live in freedom, poised like every other 18 year-old on the cusp of adulthood. But she must do it without the benefit of a life lived, for the last critical eight years, in the world.

Straight Talk or Forked Tongue

Look. I didn’t like John McCain in 2000. I didn’t like him running against the GOP base to the delight of the left-liberal media.

I didn’t like him taking pot-shots at President Bush in the first term, and not being much help on the tax cuts.

I didn’t like the rabbit punch at the First Amendment in the McCain-Feingold incumbent protection act.

And, if you are interested, I didn’t like the reports that he had a habit of breaking airplanes when he was in the U.S. Navy. In the RAF back in Britland they have a rule that when you wreck your third aeroplane then you are grounded. Forever.

I just don’t like people who are rough on equipment. I figure that they are likely to be careless and rough on other things in their lives.

So I didn’t like Senator John McCain’s “day at the beach” remarks. In his major speeches President Bush has been perfectly clear that the War on Terror is going to be long and painful.

OK. So I enjoyed David Limbaugh’s critique of Senator McCain. He thinks that the “day at the beach” remarks make McCain’s presidential hopes even more of a long shot than before.

The only chance he had hinged on his steadfast support for the war effort and his refusal to side with partisan Democrats who have born false witness against President Bush in saying he lied about Iraq. With his latest shameless utterance, McCain has virtually sabotaged his already dim chances for the Republican nomination — and rightly so.

So let McCain enjoy the adulation of the mainstream media. It’s about the only adulation he is likely to get—and rightly so.

A Neoconservative Lion Roars Again

One by one the great conservative voices are falling silent. The great generation of Mises, Hayek, Strauss, and Voegelin are long gone. Irving Kristol is silent, though his wife continues to write. Buckley is ageing and not as rambunctious as in his prime.

But the ageing neoconservative lion Norman Podhoretz is still roaring. And in OpinionJournal.com he gives what may be his last great contribution to this great nation. He commends President Bush’s grand strategy for World War IV and beats back the critics who claim that Bush has given up.

Not at all, he claims. Just like Ronald Reagan, Bush is a practical politician who lives by the art of the possible and the prudential.

In the 1980s pundits like Podhoretz frequently chided Reagan for his tactical retreats—that seemed like betrayals at the time. Now we have critics from the right feeling betrayed and critics from the left relieved that he has abandoned his cowboy diplomacy.

But in the end, Podhoretz writes:

what these acts of Reagan's turned out to be was a series of prudential tactics within an overall strategy that in the end succeeded in attaining its great objective.

Just like Reagan, Bush is constrained by the tactical possibilities. We shouldn’t expect miracles.

Anyway, we make a mistake when we compare Bush to Reagan. World War IV is in its Truman stage. It was Truman who set up the grand cold war strategy of containment, just as Bush has set up the World War IV grand strategy of Middle East transformation.

In 1953 the Republicans gained the White House and, despite all their criticism in the previous four years, continued the Truman grand strategy.

The great test will occur when the Democrats next win the White House. Will they turn away from the Bush strategy, as they seem to suggest and certainly want their “netroots” to believe? Or will they quietly continue the Bush strategy?

For it is not that the Bush strategy is so brilliant. It is merely the strategy of common sense. We believe in capitalism, democracy, and the rule of law. What else can we do but promote and support them throughout the world, and what else can we do but resist the forces arrayed against them?

Podhoretz concludes:

I feel safe in predicting that, like the Truman Doctrine in 1952, the Bush Doctrine will prove irreversible by the time its author leaves the White House in 2008. And encouraged by the precedent of Ronald Reagan, I feel almost as confident in predicting that, three or four decades into the future, and after the inevitable missteps and reversals, there will come a president who, like Reagan in relation to Truman in World War III, will bring World War IV to a victorious end by building on the noble doctrine that George W. Bush promulgated when that war first began.

What else would you expect Podhoretz to say?

If The Democrats Take Over Congress

Want to think of something really scary? Imagine what the Democrats will do if they regain control of Congress.

Don’t worry. Financial writer James J. Cramer has already done the imagining for you.

Think about the oil companies.

Their billion-dollar profits are just too ripe for the picking. I predict that the Democrats will propose that "old oil" — oil that was discovered years ago, before the price run-up — should be subject to a high tax because it's just found money for these guys.

Of course, that would raise the price of gasoline but who’s counting?

Then there’s Big Drug and Medicare Part D.

The Democrats will insist on screwing Big Pharma by pitting drug companies with similar drugs against each other and insisting their profit margins come down.

That will cut down the money available to research new drugs, but who cares?

Want to go on? How about legislation to punish the eevil Wal-Mart?

(1) Demand that nationwide retailers sell a much higher amount of made-in-America content, (2) ban big-box retailers from urban areas to protect small businesses, and (3) insist on a prevailing wage for Wal-Mart workers.

And then there’s coal. You can be sure that the believers in the global warming religious belief system will want to put some sort of a sin tax on coal.

Sold all your stocks yet? But what should you buy?

Cramer suggests Archer Daniels Midland. We’ll always need to keep ethanol producers in Iowa happy—so long as the Hawkeye state stages its first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses.

Are Our Children Safe?

One of our little societal problems is that, while it’s OK to attack Wal-Mart for failing to provide heroic levels of health insurance for its employees, and it’s OK to criticize the military for failing to accommodate women and gays, and it’s OK to pile onto the Catholic Church for covering up its pedophile problem, there are other institutions that seem to get a pass.

Public schools, for example. For over a generation we have known that public schools are failing to teach our children. But “our teachers” still seem to enjoy the support of the American people.

But suppose that public schools were a sink of pedophilia?

We’ve already had national scandals out of adult women teachers having affairs with minor boy students. And now there is the curious case of John Karr, confessed suspected killer of JonBenet Ramsey.

Karr is a teacher.

Writes Tom Hoopes, executive editor of The National Catholic Register, where’s the outrage?

To coin a phrase: Mr. President, Are Our Children Safe?

Imagine if the suspected killer of Ramsey were a Catholic priest. Imagine the outrage.

But, according to a report authored by Hofstra University scholar Charol Shakeshaft, the problem of sexual abuse in public schools is 100 times the problem in the Catholic Church.

As the National Catholic Register’s reporter Wayne Laugesen points out, the federal report said 422,000 California public-school students would be victims before graduation — a number that dwarfs the state’s entire Catholic-school enrollment of 143,000.



Yet, during the first half of 2002, the 61 largest newspapers in California ran nearly 2,000 stories about sexual abuse in Catholic institutions, mostly concerning past allegations. During the same period, those newspapers ran four stories about the federal government’s discovery of the much larger — and ongoing — abuse scandal in public schools.

So why is that?

The fact is that institutions like public schools, labor unions, liberal activist groups, sexual activist groups, environmental groups, etc. all get a pass from the drive-by media.

It’s not hard to understand why. Liberals in the media trust their friends in the public schools, the labor unions, etc. They know that they are on the same side.

One fine day this whole informal conspiracy of silence will collapse.

But meanwhile, America has to ask a tough question. Are our children safe in these public schools?

Soft Landing or Controlled Crash for Economy?

We are at the stage in the business cycle where pundits are talking about a soft landing for the economy. The Federal Reserve has taken away the punchbowl of cheap credit and now the question is: how bad will the hangover be?

As usual, the markets do not tell us. On the one hand home sales are declining. On the other hand, interest rates are declining. On the one hand the stock market is down. On the other hand it is off its lows.

In other words, we still don’t know what the consequence of the Federal Reserve’s ultra low interest rates followed by an unprecedented increase in the federal funds rate from 1 percent to 5.25 percent in an uninterrupted series of quarter point monthly increases.

Columnist Robert Samuelson is also properly reticent about forecasting the future. Maybe this is the end of the great credit explosion of the last 60 years since World War II, or maybe it isn’t.

In 1946, households had 22 cents of debt for each dollar of disposable income. Now they have $1.26. Behind these numbers lies a profound social upheaval: the "democratization" of debt. Everyone gets to borrow. But this process may now have reached its limits.

Or maybe it hasn’t. The thing about the future is that all you can do is place your bets. If you are right, you get to clean up. If you are wrong. Well, better not think about that.

Liberals are Different From You and Me...

They have fewer babies. That’s the finding of Arthur C. Brooks in the Wall Street Journal.
The math is pretty simple.

According to the 2004 General Social Survey, if you picked 100 unrelated politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children. If you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids. That's a "fertility gap" of 41%.

Who cares? Despite the liberal slant of Big Education 80 percent of children vote like their parents. So that means that it matters that conservatives have more babies. More conservative babies means more conservative voters.

And there are signs that babies are becoming a status symbol. Hedge fund managers are going for four to five children. Hey, they can afford it. And in Greenwich, Connecticut, they tell me, “three is the new two.”

Now you know why Democrats are all in favor of immigration, and especially illegal immigration. They figure that importing a bunch of helpless victims is the only way they can make up the liberal babies lost to abortion.

But the line on Hispanics is that they track pretty well with the native US population. You can predict their voting behavior on income. So Hispanics may well turn into a conservative voting block in the next generation.

Back to the three Ks, eh liberals! Kirche, Kuche, Kinder.

We Must Share The Risk. But How?

It’s all the fault of Big Business, writes Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker. After World War II Richard Gosser, head of a United Auto Workers Local, proposed a central fund for collecting and paying workers’ pensions, paid for by ten cents an hour from their wages.

But the employers would have none of it. They came up with the company-run defined-benefit pension plan. No way they were going to yield up control of pensions to the unions.

Management guru Peter Drucker, writes Gladwell, saw through this at once. In a 1950 article in Harper’s he exposed the company pension plan idea as a mirage.

Drucker simply couldn’t see how the pension plans on the table at companies like G.M. could ever work. “For such a plan to give real security, the financial strength of the company and its economic success must be reasonably secure for the next forty years,”

And he was right. Of course, the union pension plan hasn’t been much better. But we don’t mention such things at The New Yorker.

It’s all about the “dependency ratio,” writes Gladwell, the ratio of workers to dependents. In a young company like GM in 1950, or a young country like Ireland in the 1990s, there are lots of workers to support dependents like children and old people. So the company, or the economy, booms. But when the baby boom starts to retire, then the dependency ratio turns south. And the company walks away from its promises.

What is needed (and you knew this was coming) is that

if you pooled the obligations of every employer in the country, no company would go bankrupt just because it happened to employ older people, or it happened to have been around for a while.

Good point. But the question is: How? You can see the spirit of “universal government program” hovering above these words. But come on, that’s not going to work. We already know it is not going to work. The federal government has promised trillions in defined-benefit Social Security and Medicare that it cannot pay back.

What is needed is the system that the workers set up for themselves in the nineteenth century before progressives came along and took it away. We need a safety net of mediating structures between individual and the megastructures of Big Business, Big Unions, and Big Government. There are names for such structures: family, church, fraternal association.

In these face-to-face social organizations people really are bonded in a community of common interest that does not obtain with the three Bigs. Big Business executives do not share a common lifetime interest with their employees. Nor do Big Union leaders share a lifetime common interest with their members. And Big Government politicians only care about your vote.

So if you pool the obligations of people with genuine common interest: family members, church members, fraternal association members, then you wouldn’t have to worry about them going bankrupt and skipping town. Parents naturally want to invest in the future of their children. Church members naturally want to help the church member that has encountered misfortune. And fraternal associations were set up precisely to share the risks of the modern economy among solid, trustworthy brothers and sisters at the lodge.

But liberals came along and ripped up this system. They taught the American people instead to trust their compassion and their sensitivity.

The trouble is that liberals really did not have a fellow feeling with the workers. They wanted the votes of the workers so they could obtain political power. And they wanted the workers to be dependent on them. Why else would liberals be resisting the reform of Social Security?

The question on pension and health care defaults is not whether to socialize the risks of life. The question is: How? We’ve tried it with Big Government, Big Business, and Big Labor.

Or we could return to a method that really works.

Wal-Mart's Global Poverty Reduction Program

When the Boston Associates built the textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, they hired single young Yankee women right off the farm. When the farmer’s daughters went on to bigger and better things, the mills hired the Irish. When the Irish were too prosperous to work in textile mills the mills opened up in the rural Carolinas.

Now the textile mills are florishing in China. Many people don’t like the sweatshop wages and working conditions, Michael Strong writes. For sure, he says:

"China is the most populous country, with 1.3 billion people, most still poor enough to willingly move hundreds of miles from home for jobs that would be shunned by anyone with better prospects."

But the jobs at the sweatshops in the city pay more than twice as much as jobs in the country. Who wouldn’t travel hundreds of miles from home for that?

But for some reason, lots of people think that such disparities are a disaster.

D. Gale Johnson, an economist who studied regional inequality within China, described the enormous disparity between urban and rural workers as "the great injustice." Urban workers earn about 2.5 times as much as rural workers. Even after counting the higher cost of living in urban areas, urban workers make about twice as much. Not surprisingly, massive numbers of people are moving to the city to work in factories.

I guess that one man’s injustice is another man’s market signal.

And of course it is the demand for Chinese manufactures from the shoppers at Wal-Mart that generates the higher wages in the city.

So should we thank Wal-Mart for their global development policies and for raising millions out of poverty?

The fact is that people move off the farm into the city because they expect to make more money in the city.

And also, and this is a big deal for peasants used to working outside in rice paddies in all weather: they also expect to work inside. They really like that.

Beyond Welfare Reform

Everyone is doing their ten year anniversary pieces for the welfare reform act that President Clinton signed ten years ago today, August 22, in the summer of 1996.

And as he should, Bill Clinton writes today in The New York Times about his role in “ending welfare as we know it.”

The last 10 years have shown that we did in fact end welfare as we knew it, creating a new beginning for millions of Americans.



In the past decade, welfare rolls have dropped substantially, from 12.2 million in 1996 to 4.5 million today. At the same time, caseloads declined by 54 percent. Sixty percent of mothers who left welfare found work, far surpassing predictions of experts... [M]ore than 20,000 businesses hired 1.1 million former welfare recipients.

Bill Clinton does a good job of recounting the policy wonk details of all the government programs that were changed to help change the face of welfare. But what he does not really address is the societal question, of which welfare dependency is the tip of the iceberg.

It was over 40 years ago, as Robert Rector reminds us, that Professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned up about the collapse of the Negro family.

In 1965, Moynihan authored a report for the Johnson administration titled "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action." The... Moynihan report... looked at the state of the black family in America and argued that many of the problems commonly believed to be attributable to race and other factors were actually due to differences in family structure.



"Indices of dollars of income, standards of living and years of education deceive," reads the introduction to the Moynihan report. "The fundamental problem . . . is that of family structure."

The problem of welfare is not a problem of programs and benefits, but a problem of single parents, primarily single mothers.

But this is part of a much bigger problem, the source of which can be found in the culture of the educated middle class, the idea that the purpose of life is not to found a family and grow children into worthy, productive adults.

The educated middle class lives by the idea of creativity, of replacing the creativity of the loins with the creativity of the mind. The first idea is a family idea; it believes in creating children. The second idea is an individual idea; it believes in art and genius. It is not surprising that people who believe in individual creativity are people who don’t do much in the way of creating children.

That is the Big Problem that dare not speak its name. The problem is us: the educated middle class and our desire for individual fulfillment.

In the middle class we can afford a pathology or two, and a busted marriage or two. But the poor cannot. That is why they are poor. And we, the sophisticated middle class, have visited a murrain upon the poor of epic proportions.

The sad thing is that most of the middle class have no clue what we have done.

That is another thing about the middle class. We are clever enough and rich enough to be able to keep brutal reality far enough away to keep it from crashing in on us.

Bibi Rallies Israel

In his speech to the Knesset a week ago former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu worked to rally the people of Israel and prepare them for what is to come. He praised the bravery of the troops and the stoicism of the ordinary people who told him from their bunkers:

“Go on”, they said, “we are ready to stay in the bomb shelters for many more weeks, as long as you finish the job”.

Netanyahu used his time to make three points, to set the agenda for the future.

1. The concept of unilateral withdrawals has collapsed.
   
2. The root cause of the conflict has been finally exposed. “At its core, this is a conflict about Israel’s very existence, whatever our borders may be.”
   
3. The need for alliances
   

There is, he said a simple way to understand the conflict.

If our enemies lay down their arms, there will be no more war. But if Israel lays down its arms, there will be no more Israel.

...

I believe that the day will come when a new Cyrus will emerge in Persia to replace the genocidal Haman of our day. But until that day comes, Israel’s enemies must know: This nation is strong! This army is strong! ... and the people of Israel shall dwell in their land for eternity.

Of course, he’s only doing his job, sharing his view of the steps needed in the days to come and inspiring the people of Israel with a sense of their glorious future.

But that is what national leaders are for.

Lebanon War Not Disaster, Says Expert

Military expert Edward N. Luttwalk has always enjoyed being a contrarian, sometimes annoyingly so.

Now that everyone is talking about the defeat of Israel in the Lebanon war, Luttwalk proposes that in retrospect it won’t seem so bad. He illustrates his points with comparisons to 1973 when it seemed that Israel was almost overrun by the Syrians and the Egyptians.

For one thing, the Hezbos did not fight as well as the Egyptians in 1973. For another, Israel stopped the advance of the Arabs in 1973 the moment that it got its army formations fully mobilized. Immediately upon full mobilization of the reserves it found that it could go on the offense.

Hezbollah, he writes, did not fight that well. You can tell that by the very low casualties suffered by Israel.

When an IDF company attacked the mountain town of Bint Jbail, losing eight men in one night, that number was perceived in Israel - and broadcast around the world - as a disastrous loss.



Many a surviving veteran of the 1943-1945 Italian campaign must have been amazed by this reaction. There too it was one stone-built village and hilltop town after another, and... a company that went against them would consider the loss of only eight men as very fortunate.

And the Hezbo rocketeers were unable to fire off their rockets in concentrated barrages that might have led to hundreds of Israeli civilian casualties.

In a way, Hezbollah’s position as an unrecognized armed community has given it an enormous benefit, because it operates in the shadows in Lebanon. But the closer it comes to a nation-state actor the more it becomes responsible for the safety and security of the people in southern Lebanon, and the more it will find its actions and options constrained by its status as an official government.

Blacks, Hispanics Dip At Top NY High Schools

About ten years ago New York City set up a special program to help boost enrollment of black and Hispanics at their three top high schools. You can only get into them by passing an academic test; no racial quotas allowed. So the program provided special tutoring for blacks and Hispanics.

Trouble is that the enrollment of blacks and Hispanics at the three top high schools has been going down in spite of the special tutoring program. What’s the problem, asks reporter Elissa Gootman in The New York Times? Robert Jackson knows. He’s “chairman of the City Council education committee.”

“The statistics clearly show that black New Yorkers are being shut out... Is it institutional racism or is it something else?”

Oh no! Not institutional racism rearing its ugly head! And in New York City too, where evil white conservative institutional racists and bigots are pretty thin on the ground! How could it happen?

Actually, if you look at the graph of enrollment at the three top New York City high schools, you can see what is happening. The real story has nothing to do with black and Hispanic students.

The real story is that enrollment of Asian students is soaring and the enrollment of white students is plummeting.

Of course, that is a story of no interest to the race baiters of New York City and the earnest liberal journalists at The New York Times. But Gootman puts her finger on the real problem for the underrepresentation of blacks and Hispanics.

Now parents, educators and academics explain the racial makeup of the schools by pointing to a variety of factors, including... the hiring of private tutors by the middle class and continued use of the admissions test alone.

Well. We’d better put a stop to that, for sure. Imagine, overprivileged middle-class parents are going out without permission and spending their own money on private tutors. There’s institutional racism for you. Or is it cultural racism?

Here’s an idea to deal with this problem. New York City should have a program to regulate the price charged by private tutors. Otherwise the rich and the middle class will skim off all the good tutors and the underserved communities will be marginalized and continue to be shut out of the good schools.

What is Going to Happen in November?

The generic ballot shows the Democrats up by 10 percent or more. And the Gallup Poll’s wrong track/right track poll shows that a majority of voters think that the nation is on the wrong track.

That means a Democratic win in the mid-term elections in November, right?

Actually, it doesn’t, according to political science candidate Jay Cost.

You can’t trust the generic ballot directly, he writes.

If you correct for the systemic pro-Democratic skew inherent to the generic ballot, you will see that - as of today - it is essentially predicting a draw. And, much more importantly, the generic ballot is not to be trusted anyway because it violates certain assmptions necessary to use it to make a prediction.

The right track/wrong track question is also unreliable.

Between 1984 and 1986, voters started to feel nice and sunny about the state of the nation. Net positive ratings rose by about 15%. Did that help Reagan and the GOP? No. Their share of the two-party House vote dropped by 2.3% - and they lost the Senate.

The fact is that elections are won on election day. Will voters be voting against $3.00 gasoline? Will they be voting against the mess in Iraq? Will they be voting for better health care benefits? Will they be voting for a tougher war on terror?

We don’t know. That is why we are going to hold an election.

What is a Conservative?

What exactly is a conservative, and what is a liberal? We like to squabble about such things. Partly we want to separate the sheep from the goats, and partly we want to flatter ourselves, to define our chaps on the side of the angels, and the others... well, they are on the other side.

Young and brilliant Ross Douthat takes a swing at the definition in The American Conservative, and reminds us that the “liberals” have always had the winning hand.

Liberals are Baconists: they believe in Francis Bacon’s dictum that the ends of politics are “the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate.” A conservative, meanwhile, is anyone who either says no to Baconism, or who says yes, but only up to a point — and so conservatism embraces anyone who has jumped off liberalism’s fast-moving train at any point over the last five centuries.

More crudely, Douthat suggests that liberals (or progressives as they prefer to be known) are those who respond to the whisper first made in the Garden of Eden: “ye shall be as gods!” Conservatives have always balked at that one.

The thing is: it’s not as simple as that. Today’s liberals want to go full ahead on embryonic stem cell research and its veiled promise of immortality. Yet they also oppose genetically modified crops and declare that we must stop trying to dominate Nature in order in order that we might Save the Planet.

Conservatives, while supporting traditional marriage, are mostly devotees of capitalism and freedom, radical secular notions that exactly fit Bacon’s dictum about the conquest of nature.

So which side are you on?

Resource Bank for Defense of Marriage

Back in the 1970s gay advocates scorned “bourgeois” marriage. Now in the 2000s they are advocating “gay marriage” on civil rights grounds. And the occasional liberal court has agreed with them.

The gay marriage advocates have insisted, writes Ryan T. Anderson, that nothing about gay marriage implies polygamy or bestiality. Indeed conservatives who have argued that if gay marriage is justified on equal protection grounds then any sexual relationship can be so justified have been stigmatized as

slippery-slope reasoners, scaremongers, and bigots. After all, it was said, no one seriously argues in favor of state-sanctioned polygamy or polyamory.

But now polygamy and polyamory advocates have published an ad in The New York Times titled “Beyond Gay Marriage.” It has

more than 300 signatories include feminist icon Gloria Steinem, NYU sociologist Judith Stacey, Columbia University anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli, Georgetown law professors Robin West and Chai Feldblum... [and Nickeled and Dimed] writer Barbara Ehrenreich.

So you know that things are getting serious on the defense of marriage front.

Just in time there is a resource bank available to defend traditional neterosexual marriage and it’s on the web at www.princetonprinciples.org.

It’s entitled Marriage and the Public Good: Ten Principles and it headlines recent research on the benefit of marriage for men, women, and children. Best of all, it has a bibliography where you can get to the primary sources on marriage research.

Here are the ten principles:

• Marriage is a personal union, intended for the whole of life, of husband and wife.


• Marriage is a profound human good, elevating and perfecting our social and sexual nature.
  
• Ordinarily, both men and women who marry are better off as a result.



• Marriage protects and promotes the wellbeing of children.


• Marriage sustains civil society and promotes the common good.


• Marriage is a wealth-creating institution, increasing human and social capital.


• When marriage weakens, the equality gap widens, as children suffer from the disadvantages of growing up in homes without committed mothers and fathers.


• A functioning marriage culture serves to protect political liberty and foster limited government.


• The laws that govern marriage matter significantly.


• "Civil marriage" and "religious marriage" cannot be rigidly or completely divorced from one another.

Makes you think, doesn’t it.

Social Attitudes and Shame

Even though young people in Britain today are regularly drunk as skunks, university students would never think of driving drunk, claims Mary Ann Sieghart. “What a change in a generation!” she writes.

And social attitudes have changed for the better in other areas, too. People are abandoning their SUVs and recycling. It is not so much that the law has changed as a kind of “social revolution that may well save our planet.”

This social revolution is a tribute to the power of shame. It used to be kinda cool to drive drunk and get away with it. Today it is shameful. And as for failing to recycle! In Seattle we are well on the way to making it a crime.

Maybe there are other areas where the power of shame could save the planet.

Russian immigrant Julia Gorin clearly wants a social revolution in attitudes towards abortion. On the website of Ms magazine, she notes, you can sign a petition. “I had a abortion.” Bully for Ms.

But Julia Gorin narrowly escaped being aborted thirty years ago. It was only due to the nurse at the Soviet abortion clinic “who sensed a tinge of reservation [in my mother] and kicked her out.”

Just as well, because Gorin’s only sister was killed in a car crash in 2000.

How about setting up another petition, she suggests helpfully: “I was nearly aborted!”

One of the proud boasts of the twentieth century was its conquest of shame—or rather sexual shame. But it is clear that in the most progressive circles where sexual shame has been most thoroughly banished a host of other shames has been created: environmental shame, sexual harassment shame, SUV shame, racist shame, patriarchal shame, even glass-ceiling shame.

We conservatives should learn a lesson from this. As the consequence of legal abortion becomes more and more clear to women—and in the case of Julia Gorin’s mother it is a lack of “close people,” children and siblings, in her life—it will create an opportunity for another social revolution.

We should learn a lesson from the liberals. The key to a social revolution is not in changing laws. It is in changing attitudes.

We should work to change hearts and minds, and make abortion Safe, Legal, and Shameful.

Another Democrat Purge

You’d think that political parties would do anything to keep their supporters. But no. Politicos love to purge.

Just to keep the score Bruce Bartlett reviews the number of occasions in the last 70 years since the high water mark of 1936 when the Democrats decided to expel some of their own.

It started in 1938 when FDR tried to purge the Southern Democrats in the off-year election. It didn’t work.

As a result of the failed purge, Roosevelt found his power in Congress substantially diminished after 1938. Southern Democrats were increasingly willing to oppose him, even joining with Republicans to do so.

In 1964, after the Civil Rights Acts, the South voted for Goldwater for president but still stayed in the Democratic column for Congress.

Then Democrats drove the cold-war warriors out of the party in the early 1970s.

The Democrats finally succeeded in purging the Southern Democrats in the years after 1974.

After winning huge majorities in Congress in 1974 and 1976, they mounted a purge of Southern Democrats, removing many from committee chairmanships. The Southerners had nothing to gain by being Democrats.

So Republicans put money and talent into the South in the 1980s and began moving the South into the Republican column.

From this history, it is clear past Democratic purges have only aided the Republican Party. I suspect the purge of Mr. Lieberman may have the same effect, possibly turning what might have been solid gains by the Democrats in this fall's elections into modest gains.

Or maybe not. The Republicans have had their splits too. Teddy Roosevelt split the party in 1912, and the conservatives defeated the Rockefeller Republicans in the bitter battles for the soul of the party prior to the sunny Reagan years. Now Republicans complain about RINOs, Republicans In Name Only.

The difference between the Democrats purging Lieberman and the Republican efforts to purge Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island is that Lieberman is a Democrat who votes like a Democrat except on Iraq. But Chafee is a Republican who votes like a Democrat.

A Strategic Amplifier for World War IV

Now what? After the Hezbollah terrorists successfully held off the Israeli armed forces in southern Lebanon, where do we go from here?

An answer comes from Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales, (Ret.), writing in the Armed Forces Journal.

Think of World War I as the chemists’ war. The way that Germany kept going was by synthesizing nitrates for explosives when the supply of natural nitrates was exhausted in 1915.

World War II was the physicists’ war. It ended with a nuclear bang but the real breakthrough was in radio and radar. It transformed military operations from the very beginning of the war.

World War III, the cold war, was driven by information technologies.

But it is obvious that information technology is not going to win World War IV. The war we are in today will be won by application of the human and social sciences.

That is the theory of historian Alan Beyerchen of Ohio State University. What does it mean for the current war? Writes Scales:

World War IV will cause a shift in classical centers of gravity from the will of governments and armies to the perceptions of populations. Victory will be defined more in terms of capturing the psycho-cultural rather than the geographical high ground. Understanding and empathy will be important weapons of war... Culture awareness and the ability to build ties of trust will offer protection to our troops more effectively than body armor. Leaders will seek wisdom and quick but reflective thought rather than operational and planning skills as essential intellectual tools for guaranteeing future victories.

This will mean soldiers with much more training and education. For our goal in the Middle East is not to conquer territory. It is to midwife a cultural transformation from tribal mistrust to civil harmony. And that is not so much a military as a cultural goal.

World War IV can only be won by harnessing the social and human sciences as the essential amplifiers of military performance, just as the physical sciences were the amplifiers of past world wars.

It’s a tall order. The military mistrusts the practitioners of the social sciences and the feeling among most social scientists is mutual. Over the last century the social sciences have been deployed to amplify the power of government in domestic policy. And the social scientists loved the power and the prestige they obtained. But now we are talking about research and development to amplify and support US foreign policy. Can generals talk to social science professors? Will social scientists agree to work for the Pentagon?

It all points to an interesting future.

Now Look Who Served in the SS!

It is delicious to find out that lefty German author Günther Grass spent time in the Waffen SS at the end of World War II. That is what Kate Connolly reports.

Asked why he was breaking his silence after more than 60 years, Grass said: "It had to come out finally." He added: "It will stain me forever."

Of course, Grass didn’t volunteer for the Waffen SS; he was drafted. Still, since “[t]hroughout his career he has famously criticised those unwilling to deal with Germany's Nazi past,” one might innocently wonder a little why Grass has hidden his own “Nazi past.”

The entire left-wing campaign to make a special example of the Germans has always been drenched in hypocrisy. What, after all, can be so repellent about an ideology of race hatred when an ideology of class hatred is apparently a fine and noble thing? Class hate, race hate: what’s the difference?

Lefties have been apologizing for nearly a century for murderous regimes that are devoted to the elimination of the hated bourgeoisie. So why should they make such a big deal about a bunch of Germans who wanted to kill Jews?

(Actually we know why. The theory and practice of National Socialism was always uncomfortably close to the theory and practice of Marxian Socialism. Lefties early on found it necessary to draw a bright line between the two.)

Anyway, now we know. Lefty Günther Grass is a hypocrite. What a surprise.

Feds Want More Control Over Colleges

Are you surprised? The federal government is worried about higher education. A year ago Education Secretary Margaret Spellings set up a commission, according to Sam Dillon in The New York Times,

to examine access, affordability and accountability, to determine whether colleges were turning out students qualified to compete in the global economy.

You can see her point. The federal government pours billions of dollars into the nation’s colleges and what do they get for it?

Well, now Spellings’ commission has voted on a report in which

[i]t calls for public universities to measure learning with standardized tests, federal monitoring of college quality and sweeping changes in financial aid.

This sounds like No College Student Left Behind. Why not, after the stunning success of No Child Left Behind?

But the truth is that government intervention in education has been a disaster.

It used to be that parents stumped up big money for their children’s education. The poor even starved themselves so that their children would not have to work at the mill or go down the mine. Now parents sit around and complain as their children fail to learn at the compulsory government school.

It used to be that youngsters went to work in their teens, and struggled to get an education at night school. Now they sit around and party.

The fact is that we really don’t know what we want our education system to do. Every generation some group of enthusiasts comes along and demands that the government spends money on their pet educational project. Then they go away and another tranche of cash gets thrown down the education rathole.

But jealous legislators and bureaucratic control freaks also have an agenda. They want control. When they are spending billions on professors and administrators they want accountability. Or at least they want to call the shots.

So every five years or so they come up with another plan to assert bureaucratic control over the sprawling educational establishment.

But what is really needed is to find out what kind of education people would seek out if they were spending their own money. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about whether students “were qualified to compete in the global economy.” You could say, instead: Hey, they got a job don’t they?

If parents and students spent their own money on education then you wouldn’t need expensive commissions and draconian controls.

When people spend their own money, they get the education they pay for, and the government has no business interfering.

The Moment of Truth for "Root Cause" Politics

As we limber up to deal with the Islamist threat, writes Emanuele Ottolenghi, we need to deal with the problem right at the heart of our Enlightenment project.

On the one hand we have the benign belief in “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the context of an eternal optimism. But there is also the dark side, of the French Terror of 1793,

of the tyranny of ideas over the liberty of men, of the totalitarian regimes that sprang out of Enlightenment philosophy no less than liberal democracies did.

Over the years our lefty friends have learned to deflect attention from the bloody side of the Enlightenment. They excuse it with their “root cause” analysis. Violence is a product of oppression and unmet grievances.

Grievances arising from the troubled Middle East feed into terror. Solve them, and there will be no terror.

But why should the specific grievances of Muslims deserve any special privilege?

Should anger at high taxes, inefficient health care, poor environmental standards, or disagreeable op-eds solicit “understandable” similar responses?

Should the lefty Guardian change its editorial policy to appease the rage of right-wingers who are enraged by the opinions of its lefty pundits?

The “root-cause” argument boils down to excusing the inexcusable.
...
As for those who have “unaddressed grievances,” one thing should be made clear: as children of the Enlightenment, we believe that some values are universal, both rights and duties. Therefore, we believe in reciprocity. Those who renege on this social compact and choose not to play by the rules are beyond the pale. They must be treated accordingly.

The dirty little secret of the last century is that our lefty friends have often used the “root-cause” argument in their naked grab for power. They excuse the threats made by their violent supporters but exoriate “hate speech” in right-wingers.

But now the game is up. In the rise of Islamist fascism we have arrived at the moment of truth for “root-cause” politics and its excuses for the inexcusable.

We believe that the lefties are wrong. We believe in the West that we have a process that is adequate for addressing grievances. It is called the rule of law and the democratic process. We believe that people with grievances who resort to violence “must be treated accordingly” as thugs and fascists.

The problem we have right now is that our lefty friends are not yet willing to admit this. The result is that millions of people will be killed.

And that is an outrage.

Yes, Let's Focus on the War on Terror

Last Friday The Wall Street Journal edit page folks did a reality check.

The 8/10 terror plot failed, they wrote, because

"a large number of people" had been under surveillance, with [British] police monitoring "spending, travel and communications."

As if on cue, they continued, the Democrats came out with their usual line that “the Iraq war is a diversion and provocation” from the war on terror.

Good point. Now would they have us concentrate on surveillance? But the Democrats and the media yelled blue murder last year

when it was leaked that the government was monitoring some communications outside the context of a law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Would they have us concentrate on the terrorists’ spending? But The New York Times yelled bloody murder when it turned out that the feds were monitoring terrorists fund transfers at an international bank clearing house.

Just what would the Democrats have us focus on? 80-year-old fundamentalist Christian grandmothers?

The president’s critics

should be reminded that the British and other European legal systems generally permit far more intrusive surveillance and detention policies than the Bush Administration has ever contemplated.

In that sense, you could say, the Bush administration has been outrageously going it alone instead of cooperating with and aligning itself with our allies.

Barone on the Democrats

You can read too much into a single election. But you can read too little too.

Michael Barone reckons that the primary election that Joe Lieberman lost last week pretty well tells us where the Democratic Party in in 2006.

In Stamford, where Joe Lieberman grew up the son of a liquor-store owner, and where there are still sizeable blue-collar and black communities, Mr. Lieberman won with 55% of the vote. In next-door Greenwich, where Ned Lamont... grew up as the scion of an investment banker family, and where the housing values are now among the highest in the nation, Mr. Lamont won with 68% of the vote.

The Democratic Party is still the party of working-class America, but only just. It is therefore a party split down the middle, between voters who vote their interest as recipients of government programs and between “professional class Democrats” who vote

their ideology and, living a life in which they are insulated from adversity, feel free to imagine that America cannot be threatened by implacable enemies. They can vote to validate their lifestyle choices and their transnational attitudes.

That is the big split across America. Should we work to build a transnational world, as professional-class Democrats want, or should we keep the nation state model.

This is an important question. We know how the nation state works, with a balance of power between political power, economic power, and cultural power.

But what is the transnational model all about? It seems suspiciously feudal and oppressive in nature. The progressive class gets to decide everything and ordinary mortals had better fall into line or face the consequences.

Or am I missing something?

Flying on Hair Gel Day

Was it hair gel? Or was it a sports drink? Or was it an explosive combination of the two.

Imagine the marketing opportunity! Girl stuff mixed with boy stuff makes an explosive combination.

Oh dear! Islamist Marketing Partners already thought of it!

Seriously though, President Bush ought to get the credit for a good TSA response to the latest Islamist outrage. It was my luck to be traveling to a family reunion on 8/10, and the government response was appropriate and measured.

Somebody had dragged federal employees into the Seattle airport to direct passenger traffic and route the security lines from the ticket hall out into the parking garage and back in again.

Sooner or later, I wound my way to the head of the line, got through security and out to the gate.

Of course, by that time my flight had left. But no worries. There was another flight for Toronto leaving in 90 minutes, and I got on that one without incident. It was 90 minutes late leaving, but who was counting?

And when we arrived in Toronto, a lot of people didn’t have their bags, including me.

And that was a problem for me, because although I had my lap-top with me, the power supply was in my checked bag.

Memo to self. Never, never, never, ever again separate lap-top and power supply.

In Toronto the car rental guys had kept my car for me even though I was six hours late. Thanks guys!

And now Lady Marjorie tells me that my checked bag is on its way.

So who’s complaining? Imagine: the feds could have closed down the whole system just to be on the safe side.

Instead, they kept the great glorious air travel system running, even if it was operating in low gear. Or as we fly-boys say, with the prop stuck in fine pitch.

Just don’t expect the MSM to give any credit to the Bush administration for an effective response to a new escalation in the war on terror.

NYT: Lieberman Defeated by Moderates!

You gotta love those guys at The New York Times. How do they characterize the defeat of Joe Lieberman? Revenge of the Netroots? Soros Money Hits Paydirt? Oh no.

It’s the revenge of the moderates, they write in an editorial.

The rebellion against Mr. Lieberman was actually an uprising by that rare phenomenon, irate moderates. They are the voters who have been unnerved over the last few years as the country has seemed to be galloping in a deeply unmoderate direction.

Sorry, old chum, it won’t wash. The Lieberman defeat was a fallout from the deliberate decision of the Gore camp not to concede the 2000 election, and to stay in campaign mode.

Not surprisingly, Democrat partisans took the hint and descended into Bush hatred. Their intensity would right the wrong of November 2000. The trouble is that the Re-Defeat of Bush never happened. Bush and his evil Svangali, Karl Rove, kept winning.

And worst of all, the deepening war with radical Islam is proving the progressives wrong on the central belief in their belief system. Just meet the just demands of the oppressed, they insist, and you can say good-bye to the cycle of violence.

It doesn’t look like it, comrade. The Islamists are just angry. Period.

The defeat of Joe Lieberman has nothing to do with moderates. It has to do with angry liberals. You’d have to live and work at The New York Times to miss that.

Which Party Is Best For The Jews?

Over the centuries Jews have been by turns admitted, ejected, humiliated, and even annihilated by the peoples among whom they have lived.

They have had to develop sensitive antennae so they can detect trouble ahead.

So all over America, Jews must be wondering about whether they still belong in the Democratic Party. Because the rejection of Joe Lieberman by Democratic voters in the Senate primary in Connecticut is not a good sign.

Joe Lieberman was a good liberal Democrat, conforming on all the issues except one: The War in Iraq. And for that he was rejected by his party.

It makes sense that Joe Lieberman would support the president on Iraq. Whatever the strategic reasons for the US efforts in the Middle East, supporting Israel has to be right up there close to the top.

Now Democrats are saying: screw it.

And the opinion polls confirm it. A poll for the Los Angeles Times shows that support for Israel is much stronger among Republicans than among Democrats. Asked whether the US should continue to align with Israel:

Judgment on Israel’s Actions Reps Inds Dems Continue with Israel 64 46 39 More neutral posture 29 49 54 Side with Arabs 1 2 2

Asked for their judgment of Israel’s actions in responding to Hezbollah’s rocket attacks, voters responded like this:

Align with Israel? Reps Inds Dems Justified and not too harsh 64 37 29 Justified but too harsh 11 15 20 Unjustified 17 33 36 Israel acted properly 64 37 29 Israel did not act properly 28 48 56

I don’t know about you, but if I were a Jewish American I would be thinking about the harsh words on the American left about “neo-cons,” a veiled reference to Jewish conservatives, and I would be thinking about the rejection of observant Jew Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary. I would be wondering about changing my party affiliation.

I wouldn’t actually do anything yet, you understand. I would just be thinking about it.

US Turns a Political Corner

Last night we entered a new era in US politics. When political novice Ned Lamont defeated incumbent Joe Lieberman for the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate with the help of George Soros and the lefty “netroots” we turned a corner onto an unfamiliar street.

The “netroots” consider themselves as a political movement like the conservative movement that came to national power in 1980. They were saying in 2004 that this was their Goldwater election. Ten or twenty years in the future they would achieve their Reagan moment and become the new political majority in the United States.

That is their story, and maybe they will turn out to be right. Of course, to have a true Goldwater election they should have nominated Howard Dean, not the establishment choice John Kerry. Perhaps they will rectify the mistake in 2008.

On the other hand they may also calve off another iceberg from the great political glacier that once was the Democratic coalition. That berg would be the 9/11 Democrats who are nation-state Americans before they are partisan Democrats.

But what is pretty certain is that the Democratic Party has crossed a bridge with the defeat of Joe Lieberman. It has made a bold statement about what kind of political party it wants to be and what the party should stand for.

Whenever you take a bold step like that you take a risk. You are stepping out into the unknown and you really don’t know the consequences of that act.

Republicans hope that the netroot Democrats are marginalizing the party, and getting it off its game which must be the defense of the vast hoard of benefits and privileges that it has secured for its supporters over the last 70 years.

But what do we know? What is certain is that the party of the people is being led in a new direction by Ned Lamont, an heir of the Morgan banking fortune, George Soros, a billionaire speculator, and the single, secular, childless, college-educated, angry netroots. They will have to work hard to keep their connection with the throbbing heart of the American people.

Israel At a Crossroads?

What is going on with Israel’s incursion into Lebanon? Are they making any progress?

Caroline Glick thinks that it is all smoke and mirrors. She writes that the Olmert government is set to accept the UN cease fire and an international force in southern Lebanon. It wants to preserve the idea that the international force can protect Israel, that the same concept can be used to get Israel out of the West Bank, and that a ground war is unnecessary.

Glick thinks that Israel is approaching a revolutionary moment for Israeli public opinion. She sees the situation as similar to the aftermath of the 1973 war when Israel was nearly defeated by Egypt. Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan tried to blame the Israel Defense Force for the near debacle, but reserve IDF Captain Moti Ashkenazi launched a protest movement that succeeded in getting Meir and Dayan to resign. The movement led to the Likud victory in 1977.

There is a palpable sense in Israel that we are on the edge of a revolutionary moment. Our national leadership in the government, the IDF and the media has utterly failed us.



As we stand poised on the edge of an even larger war, the main question that hangs in the balance is what lessons the Israeli people will take from the current fiasco. Will we continue to believe their fictions, or will we find a way to abandon them and move on with leaders who understand that territory is vital, that the jihad is real, that Israel has a right to defensible borders, and that Israel is not to blame for our enemies' hatred?

There is a palpable feeling that the political sands are shifting, both in Israel and in the United States. It means, unfortunately, that life is going to be interesting.

The Last Gasp of the Real Ancient Regime

What do the terrorists want? It is still hard to understand the point of it as Hezbollah terrorists fight against a resolute Israeli nation defending its national state borders.

But back in the fall of 2005 Frederick Turner nailed it for us.

The terrorists are fighting to prevent modern democratic states from being born. They are not fighting oppressors, or representing an ethnic nation yearning to be free. Ordinary Iraqis have shown with their purple fingers what they want, and the Palestinians could do it tomorrow if they wanted. The suicide terrorists represent

the last gasp, historically, of the ancient system by which the huge majority of human beings were ruled since the Neolithic agricultural revolution.

And what they particularly want to stop is the “velvet revolution,” the peaceful revolutions we have seen all over the world since the fall of the old Soviet Union, the

nonviolent, non-ideological middle-class and skilled-worker mass movements have unseated tyrants and established democracies in an amazing range of countries[.]

That’s the way that most city people want to live and want to be governed. But the terrorists and the terror masters don’t want them to have that chance. Terror is the way that they force people back into their ethnic enclaves and the ancient culture of mistrust. It is the way that they strangle democracy in its cradle.

Turner’s idea also lets us see why the international left sympathizes, sometimes openly, with the terrorists. In their heart of hearts, the people of the left do not believe in democracy either. They only believe in a special kind of democracy, what they call “genuine democracy,” where everything is controlled by the political system. And that is not so far from the ancient system that the modern era is trying to uproot.

Forget the "Nutroots" Fantasy

Three months before an election that could be the toughest for Republicans since the Year of the Woman in 1992, too many conservatives are writing the Democrats off as “nutroots” or imagining that they are self-destructing.

Writes Dean Barnett on the Hugh Hewitt blog,

A rough conventional wisdom seems to be forming that if Ned Lamont wins tomorrow night, it will be disastrous for the Democratic Party.

He takes his cue from Lanny Davis who mourns that the supporters of Ned Lamont, the peace canididate running for the United States Senate seat of Joe Lieberman in Connecticut, are behaving like right-wing McCarthyites. And from Martin Peretz who mourns about the return of “peace” candidates of the kind that took the Democrats down to defeat in 1968 and 1972.

Then there is David Limbaugh who argues that even if Republicans are divided, the left is in worse shape.

This is dangerous stuff. The facts on the ground are that, to the average voter, it looks like things are going to hell in a handbasket. People are paying $3.00 per gallon for gasoline, and it happened on President Bush’s watch. The cheap ARM mortgages that people filled up on three years ago are exploding and it is happening on President Bush’s watch. And that is to say nothing about the “mess in Iraq” and the scary war between Hezbollah and Israel.

When the government appears to be losing control of events then it is time to vote for the other guys.

The Democrats are not going to implode, and the average voter is blissfully ignorant of the excesses of the left-wing “nutroots.” The polls show that about sixty percent of Americans think that Bush is doing a bad job, and nearly sixty percent think the economy is in the tank. And now the Prudoe oil field is falling apart.

The fact is that Republicans will be lucky to retain control of Congress this fall. Wishful thinking about Democratic implosion just makes the job harder.

Do People Need Religion To Make Babies?

Why has Europe stopped making babies, asks Frederick Turner?

Is it hardly due to pestilence or environmental degradation. It seems to be more a matter of active choice.

The reason people stop replacing themselves is, I would argue, cultural.



What, basically, persuades people not to have babies even when they have the political, social and economic stability to do so? Among the eras and nations where this phenomenon occurs or occurred one basic characteristic stands out: the loss of a transcendent future.

...

One hypothesis about demographic collapse that might be worth checking out is that it happens when a nation loses its religion.

Suppose that when you adopt a materialist worldview, thinking about humans just as special animals, you lose the idea of special meaning, a story about the beginning and the beyond, a promise of transcendental hope? That is what our modern elites are doing with their down-to-earth secular humanism and their existentialism—that every one should seek their own, authentic, path to truth, and avoid the “bad faith” of unquestioningly accepting other peoples’ opinions and ideas.

Suppose that if you hold such beliefs then you tend not to have children and people like you just fade away and disappear.

In that case, you would expect the world to be full of people with

some kind of elaborate, weird belief system involving spiritual beings, a big story or narrative about the world before they were born and the world after they die, and a code of behavior.

That code of behavior would govern everything from practical morals to the duty to the dead.

Frederick Turner has a new book coming out: Natural Religion. No doubt it explores these ideas in detail.

More Studies Say That Professors are Lefties

This isn’t news. But Critical Review has just published a couple of scholarly papers that find university professors to be overwhelmingly Democrat in political orientation.

In Faculty Partisan Affiliations in All Disciplines Christopher F. Cardiff and Daniel B. Klein demonstrate that, yes, university faculty are overwhelmingly liberal and Democrat in partisan affiliation.

But the affiliation is not uniform. Liberal arts and humanities faculties are overwhelmingly left-wing. Business faculties are almost balanced in orientation. Democrat to Republican weighting ranges “from sociology (44:1) to management (1.5:1).”

It would be interesting to know how much the affiliation correlates with government grants. Sociology, for instance, is a discipline almost completely oriented towards government organization of society. Management is almost completely oriented towards business organization. You would expect sociologists to be oriented towards government spending, and business faculty less so.

In Professors and Their Politics Daniel B. Klein and Charlotta Stern takes a look not at the party affiliation but the policy views of professors. They find that professors, both Democrat and Republican, “favor government action more than the ideal types might suggest.”

Ideological diversity (as judged not only by voting behavior, but by policy views) is by far the greatest within economics. Social scientists who deviate from left-wing views are as likely to be libertarian as conservative.

Our environmental friends have something to say about this uniformity. It is dangerous for the planet. Diversity is essential for sustainability and indeed for simple survival. So when we see uniformity and monoculture our warning flags should be posted.

The question is whether the response to this unhealthy uniformity should be a frontal attack, as advocated by David Horowitz and Students for Academic Freedom, or whether an indirect approach would be better.

We know from analysis of the business world that inward-looking institutions become, over time, extremely brittle and vulnerable to change. Their members start to extract more resources from the institution than is compatible with sustainable growth. Eventually, like the Soviet Union, they collapse without warning.

Of course universities (and indeed all the education system) operates not on a profitability model but a political support model. They attract resources not by offering a superior product and low prices but by a combination of cultural and political power. People are taught to revere educational institutions and to defer to the opinions of professors. And if you cross a college professor in the public square you find that he has ways of making life difficult for you.

The problem for the education establishment is that they are spending about seven percent of GDP, and most likely wasting about 3-4 percent. Eventually that is going to cause a problem. After all, we could use that money for something useful.

Suppose you are an earnest reformer, anxious to find money to fund your vision of a better world. As you cast your eyes around for funding, wouldn’t your gaze sooner or later come to rest upon the great special interest herds of cattle grazing in tax supported pastures and not yielding very much in the way of milk or of beef?

And wouldn’t you notice that the biggest herd of all, with the most meager yield, was the education herd?

Your Teen Daughter is On Her Way to Meet a Kid She Met Online...

Are you a mother worried about your daughter’s online chat activities? According to Mary Wakefield

Around 70 per cent of all British and American early teens have regular access to the web, says the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, and of that 70 per cent, nearly 10 per cent admit to having happily trotted off, alone, to meet up with an unknown internet buddy.

Good luck to them. But suppose your daughter’s agreeable online buddy is a pedophile? How do you stop her from exploitation? One mother figured out how to knock some sense into her daughter.

The mother found out from snooping on her daughter’s email that her she was planning a forbidden rendezvous with a boy in another town. If he was a boy. So she got up a fake profile for herself on MySpace and introduced herself to her daughter. Pretty soon they were chatting about how dreadful her mother was. And pretty soon they had set up a meeting.

The reaction, when the daughter found her mother waiting for her, wasn't pretty. She was horrified, wouldn't speak for a week — but she cancelled her assignation with the boy.

Hey, it’s just a day in the life of a modern net-savvy mom.

The Moderate Muslims Meet in Denmark

Whatever happened to the moderate Muslims? That has been the refrain ever since 9/11. When President Bush spoke of Islam as a religion of peace it was presumably to encourage the moderate Muslims to come forward and declare themselves for democracy and capitalism.

Don’t look now, but the moderates have arrived. “Islam’s Moderates are On The March,” writes Irshad Manji, author of The Trouble With Islam Today.

There is reform in Pakistan. For 30 years Pakistan has jailed women for adultery under the so-called Hudood laws.

Thanks to a vocal, but religiously respectful, campaign by civil society groups, the influential Council for Islamic Ideology recently recommended reform. That move allowed President Musharraf to begin releasing some of the 1,300 women who were in jail awaiting trial.

The liberal Muslims have been meeting in Denmark. They even met with “Flemming Rose, the editor of Jyllands-Posten and publisher of the reviled cartoons.”

And here is what a few Muslims said at the conference.

Man from the Netherlands: “We, as Muslims, need to look in the mirror instead of blaming everybody else!”


Woman from Germany: “I don’t have an identity crisis. I’m Western and Muslim and grateful to be both.”

One swallow doesn’t make a summer. But you gotta say, it’s a start.