Teenagers Getting Drunk

Back in the good old day kids used to drink a little here and there, you know, back when we were young, writes Jane Shilling in The Times of London.  But things are a bit different In Britain today.

[T]hese days teenage social life consists of drinking to get drunk. Not fuzzy. Throwing-up drunk — and then carrying on, like the Ancient Roman. And not occasionally, but habitually.

It’s notorious that on Saturday night the downtown entertainment areas in most British towns are no-go areas for the police and filled with rioting drunken youth. 

It is also the proper role of adults to sit in judgement on The Kids.  And of course things aren’t exactly copacetic in the United States.  So what are we to think? 

Let’s look at the issue from a materialist point of view.  People take mind-altering drugs to medicate themselves, to relieve stress.  So when you see a lot of drinking and drug-taking, you are really looking at people under a lot of stress.

The US in the 1840s was a rough and ready place.  The economy was transforming itself overnight with the railroad boom.  And people drank like fishes.

Or take the 1960s.  Maybe those kids weren’t taking drugs because they were just having fun.  Maybe all that freedom—sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll—was really too stressful for most people.

Most young people seem to need the assistance of alcohol before they can face the indignity of casual sex.

And people can be stressed out by boredom.  Remember Brideshead Revisited?  There are libraries full of books about the misadventures of idle, well-born youth.

So let us assume that young people in Britain are feeling a lot of stress these days.  What could it be?  Here are some ideas:

• “Bog-standard” schools that bore them to tears.
• Fractured families.  Kids hate that, you know.
• Infantilization of youth.  Kids don’t get to do anything without adult supervision these days.
• Not enough adventure. Kids need challenge.
• Usual culprits: TV, music, movies, video games.

Really you have to wonder.  Why aren’t kids absolutely off their rockers?  Who would want to live the way kids are forced to live today?

Thomas: Confirmation Was All About Abortion

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is appearing on 60 Minutes this Sunday with Steve Kroft, reports the  Drudge Report.  Thomas has a book coming out. 

What was that rancorous confirmation battle all about 16 years ago.  Abortion, of course. 

"That was the elephant in the room... That was the issue. That is the issue that people are apparently so upset about," he tells Kroft. "[That is the issue] that you determine the composition of your Supreme Court and your entire federal judiciary, it seems now," says Thomas.

Thomas also has a few words about Anita Hill, his accuser in the confirmation hearings that he called a “high-tech lynching.”

The Anita Hill that he knew what not the shrinking violet who took ten years to pluck up the courage to complain of mis-treatment. Says Thomas:

She did not take slights very kindly and anyone who did anything, she responded very quickly.

Well, of course.  Anita Hill was an invention of the liberals, a missile intended to take Clarence Thomas out.  And it all nearly worked. 

Why Some Cultures Don't Die

What with the decline of the west—particularly the demographic collapse in western Europe—it is appropriate to ask: Why?

Or perhaps, as the Asia Times Spengler asks, why not?  For the normal thing is extinction, not flourishing.

[A] majority of the world’s cultures simply will themselves out of existence, largely through the individual decision of their members not to rear offspring.

Just like today’s welfare state Europe.

The situation in Europe is all the more puzzling because the old threat of extinction, continuous warfare, appears to have been removed.

The modern world, with few exceptions, removes the violent threat to the national existence of small peoples, yet the rate of their extinction by strictly voluntary means is faster than ever before in history.

So why do people “cease to have children, dull their senses with alcohol and drugs, become despondent, and too frequently do away with themselves[?]”  Spengler says we should understand it as “a symptom of a culture’s mortal illness.”

We see cultural illness everywhere in the world and nowhere more than in the global south.

Yet it is there that Christianity is making its strongest growth.  Why is that?

[I]ndividuals embrace Christianity when their pre-Christian culture no longer can transmit their memory as well as their genes to future generations.

They become Christians, children of God, when their culture of “clan and kindred” is collapsing all around them, as it is across the world today.

Christianity provides an abstract family, replacing the love of the kindred with the love of the church family, the memory of the clan with the memory of Christ’s suffering, and the hope for the children with the hope for salvation.

Of course, in the western welfare state, there is no need for any family because the family is replaced by the paternal/maternal state.  People can live their entire lives as selfish children.  They do not think of the future; they do not have to think at all.

They find that such a life is not worth living, or not worth sacrificing for the sake of the children. 

But life must be lived, as Burke wrote, by treating it as a covenant between the ancestors, the living, and the generations yet unborn.  That is how you create meaning in your life in the modern world where the kindred embraces the whole human race.

Fifty Years After Little Rock

The confrontation at Little Rock, Arkansas, fifty years ago, was the moment where the United States had to choose between democracy and white supremacy, writes Shelby Steele. 

It was an epochal moment.  The world has always believed in racial supremacy, my race over your race.  For two thousand years Christianity had said it was wrong.  For two hundred years the Enlightenment had said it was wrong.

And so it was that in the fall of 1957 “[President] Eisenhower enforced democratic authority over white supremacy.” The United States used its political and military power to mark the end of the age of white supremacy.

 But that wasn’t all.  

Because of television, America—and the world—got to see the ugly side of white racism.

Every day for weeks they saw white people so consumed with racial hatred that they looked bestial and subhuman. When white racism was a confident power, it could look like propriety itself, like good manners. But here, in its insecurity, it was grotesque and shocking.

And America was ashamed.  So we set to work and got busy.

The country got busy self-consciously redeeming itself. Redemption would be our big, ingenious achievement.

But what we got was not really a proper chastening, a truthful learning from our sins.  What we got was today’s busybody liberalism,

a busybody, interventionist liberalism that was more bent on erecting an American redemption than ensuring freedom. The Great Society wanted to make America look like a country in which Little Rock could never have happened. It failed because it was a venture in denial rather than in realistic social transformation.

Fifty years later, we still haven’t moved on.

There is too much invested in white guilt and black innocence, for the busybodies enjoy the power they got from the redemption movement too much to give it up.

Race Commission Out in UK

Those of you who believe that in the modern world we should judge people by the content of their character will no doubt be glad to hear that the British Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) is going out of business.

Unfortunately it is only going out of business because “its duties are acquired by the Commission for Equality and Human Rights next month,” as Rod Liddle reports in the London Spectator.

The new organisation, headed by Trevor Phillips, will co-ordinate all manner of whining on behalf of absolutely anybody who considers him- or herself to be oppressed and victimised and discriminated against by the vindictive white male hegemony.

So that’s all right.

Being a good bureaucratic institution and all, the CRE issued a valedictory report. And things are not good.

An ethnic minority baby born today is sadly still more likely to go on to receive poor quality education, be paid less, live in sub-standard housing, be in poorer health and be discriminated against in other ways than his or her white contemporary.

Oh yeah, writes Liddle, then how you you CRE chaps explain this?

A Chinese baby born today [in Britain], for example, would be much, much more likely to grow up to be better paid than his or her white contemporary.

Then there is the

‘East Asian’ community, whose performance outstrips not only the indigenous whites, but even their Chinese cousins.

Let’s look at some more info, shall we?

• A child born to an Indian family today can expect, on average, almost precisely the same educational achievements, housing, employment and good or bad health as his or her white counterparts.
• Meanwhile, Pakistani kids do slightly worse, on average, than their white counterparts but are more likely to end up self-employed and less likely to be found doing menial work.
• Black African girls are likely to do rather better out of the education system than white British boys.
• A child born to any one of the following ethnic minority groups is far more likely than a white British child to get a job in the top managerial and professional class: Indian, Chinese, East Asian, Irish [Irish? -ed.].
• A boy born to a white British working-class family will do worse at school than every ethnic minority other than those from the Caribbean, Bangladeshi and travelling communities.

All this puts a bit of a kybosh into the basic assumption of commissions like the CRE that “ethnic minorities” form a sort of undifferentiated mass of helpless oppressed people.  No they don’t.

If, for example, black African girls do rather well at school, better than white boys, and British Caribbean boys do less well, it suggests that either teachers or the education system are very discriminating about their discrimination, to a quite unbelievable degree, or that something else must be at work here.

It couldn’t be, could it, that different “ethnic minorities,” not to mention the evil white majority, have different cultural traditions and attitudes towards things like education and marriage and life achievement?

Then Why Are We Arguing?

Everyone agrees that President George W. Bush is determined to “win” in Iraq, and that the Democrats are determined to bring our troops home.

But that is not what Senator John Kerry (D-MA) is saying, according to Martin Schram.  On Meet the Press a week ago on September 16, 

Mr. Kerry was rather sharp and certainly clear in stating the Democrats’ position on the Iraq war. He did everything but call it what it really is — a two-pronged military strategy: (1) Gradually redeploy most combat troops in Iraq as Iraq’s civil war cannot be won militarily; (2) Keep enough U.S. combat troops there to defeat al Qaeda in Iraq.

And when you examine the fine print of the Democratic presidential candidates positions, you get the same result.

Barack Obama: “My plan would maintain sufficient forces in the region to target al Qaeda within Iraq.”

Hillary Clinton: “I will order specialized units to engage in narrow and targeted operations against al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations in the region.” 

You can see what is going on here.  Despite their rhetoric, the Democratic leadership is in accord with the Bush administration on what to do in Iraq.  Defeat Al Qaeda.  But the Democrats can’t admit it, because their left-wing netroots have been raised on the strict catechism of the war-is-a-cycle-of-violence religion in the academy.

We’ve said it here before.  Senator Kerry has a peculiar habit of articulating the current administration strategy as his own brilliant idea while declaring that the administration’s strategy is a total failure.

Somehow, I get the feeling that the Democratic leadership is a lot closer to President Bush’s strategy in the war on terror than they like to admit to their supporters.

'I'm a Supply-Sider' says Bush

Thanks goodness we can finally report that Bush is not in denial.  Yes, before a tough, hard-nosed audience of the nation’s top reporters, he finally admitted it, as the New York Sun reports.

“I am a Supply-Sider,” he said.

"We did it by cutting taxes. The tax cuts worked. The economy recovered. People are working. Interest rates are low." And then he said, in what will become a famous sentence, "I am a supply-sider." He said he believed that "supply-side economics, when properly instituted, enables us to achieve certain objectives."

What objectives were you thinking about, Mr. President? I’m glad you asked that. How about

"people finding work" and "hope in the economy" and "additional tax revenues."

That’s pretty brave of the president, considering that “everyone” now agrees with Jonathan Chait and his new book The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics.

It’s understandable that liberals don’t like supply-side economics.  It says that the key to prosperity is ordinary people working and starting businesses under a regime of stable property relations and low marginal tax rates.

Not a word about subsidies, tax the rich, and government programs. 

Conservatives Jumped to Support Chemerinsky

Duke University law professor Erwin Chemerinksy is about as left as you can get.  But when he got the shaft from UC-Irvine, summarily fired as Dean of the future law school before he could even take up his duties, conservative commentators sprang to his support.  And even the lefty LA Times noticed:

Righties defend dismissed lefty law dean Chemerinsky

The commentators that the Times excerpted included Hugh Hewitt, Glenn Reynolds, John Leo, Steven Bainbridge and more.

It’s good to see that conservatives are anxious to stand up for their lefty brethren.

And it’s a tribute to Chemerinsky that, left as he is, his law colleagues on the right all respect and honor him.  Partisanship has its place, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to have friends on the other side of the aisle.

After all, you never know when you might need a friend.

And now the whole affair has had a happy ending, with Chemerinsky rehired as Dean.

Dueling Health Plans

This week Senator Clinton (D-NY) announced her new approach to health care, report Patrick Healy and Robin Toner in The New York Times. Trying to avoid the fate of Hillary 1.0, version 2.0 is called “The American Health Choices Plan.”  As Healy and Toner put it:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled a plan on Monday to guarantee health insurance to all Americans, but in a way carefully designed to avoid the political flaws in her failed proposal of 1993-94.

 Not so coincidentally, Karl Rove wrote up his Rx for health care on the Wall Street Journal edit page.  Conservatives can win against Clinton’s “government-heavy” plan, he insists:

Conservatives must put forward reforms aimed at putting the patient in charge. Increasing competition will ensure greater access, lower costs and more innovation.

In case the Republican presidential candidates didn’t get the point, he proceeded to map out a seven point plan.  Call it Rove 2.0.

Well. It is clear that Clinton’s plan is a lot less disruptive than the last one.  But it will increase government control and mandates.  And by expanding “Medicare, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Federal Employee Health Benefit Program,” as Jacob Laksin points out, it will also increase the number of people with their health care subsidized by government.

There is one thing all Americans are agreed upon.  We want good quality health care.  But we quail at the idea of paying for it.

There are two approaches to health provision.  One approach is the pre-paid one, that wants all health care provided from a monthly payment.  Obviously, this approach must involve some sort of rationing.  Liberals and Democrats are in favor of this.

The other approach is self-financing.  You pay for your health care and protect your assets with a high-deductible insurance policy.  Conservatives and Republicans prefer this.

In the middle, of course, is the great mass of Americans.  These Americans just want health care when they need it.  And if Hillary Clinton proposes to make someone else pay for it, what’s not to like?

Fed Cuts by 0.5 Point

Today the Federal Reserve Board cut its federal funds rate by 0.5 point reports Martin Crutsinger of the AP.

The Fed announced Tuesday that it was reducing its target for the federal funds rate, the interest that banks charge each other, from 5.25 percent to 4.75 percent. The half-point reduction was double the quarter-point move that many economists had been expecting.

Stocks soared and the 30-year Treasury Bond slumped.  So is this good news or bad news?

Probably what it means is this.  The Fed is taking action to ease the liquidity crisis.

The question is: what about the solvency crisis?  How many financial institutions are going to be in good shape 6 months, or a year from now.

The simple answer is: we don’t know. 

Raise Taxes Why Don't You

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) is now chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.  He’s the guy who gets to change our federal taxes.  

According to Robert Novak he’s a man on a mission.

Rangel wants to make history. His staff is hard at work on an audacious plan that over the next decade would redistribute up to a trillion dollars in American income through the tax system.

He wants to raise tax rates on upper-income Americans and raise the top capital-gains tax rate up to 35 percent.

Tactically, the Democrats have done a good job over the 12 years of the Republican Congress.  With their combative rhetoric they have prevented any real reform of the welfare state. All their public-sector jobs and pensions pretty well escaped the axe.

And now that people are tired of the Republicans, Democrats have a chance to advance the frontiers of the welfare state once again.

It could be a bumpy ride, because chances are that Democrats will get into power for the first time in half a century with the economy in the tank. Don’t believe it?  Here’s the how the economy looked to the Democrats when they entered the White House on a change in party starting in 1961:

• 1961, Kennedy: economy growing nicely after 1958 recession.
• 1977, Carter: economy growing nicely after 1974 recession.
• 1993, Clinton: economy growing nicely after 1990 recession. 

Compare that with the Republican experience:

• 1969, Nixon: recession in 1969-70.
• 1981, Reagan: 1981-82 recession.
• 2001, Bush: recession in 2001.

So if Charlie Rangel thinks he’s going to raise tax rates in 2009, he’d better think again, especially if the economy starts tanking any time soon.  If Democrats start piling on new taxes and spending it could really screw up the economy, just like in 1933 to 1939.

Only back in the 1930s, nobody blamed the Democrats for their economic incompetence.  But this time it could be different.  And it could turn the American people against paying taxes just so that Democrats and their supporters could live on easy street at the expense of working America.

Politics and the Classroom

Good news from Iran, reported by Amir Taheri.  The Iranian revolutionary regime has decided to purge the universities. 

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has promised to "cleanse" the Iranian educational system of what he calls "the corrupt influence of the infidel"

This the second time that the Iranian regime has decided to purge the education system.  The first time was in 1980 when:

A committee created to "cleanse" academia purged more than 6,000 professors and lecturers, virtually destroying Iranian academia.

That will really help Iran in its program to take over the world.

Politics and education don’t go well together.  In an article about “safe lecturing” Robert Weissberg writes about the danger of offending minority students at the university with controversial course content.

an African-American student who mangles "blacks disproportionately commit more violent crimes" into "blacks are criminals" can demand that the university itself plus sundry student-based organization rectify this "offense."...  [C]rimes against racial sensibilities requires action. This is the raison d’etre for these injustice monitors and justifies salaries. To compound matters, certified victims have diplomatic immunity and can never be punished for false accusations or foolish hyper-sensitivity.

The result is that professors tend to purge anything that might be offensive from their course material.  You can’t say that the rule in the constitution counting slaves as “three-fifths” of a person for congressional apportionment was actually a device to limit the representation of slave states.  Some black kid heard somewhere that the three-fifths rule meant that the founders were racist.

Of course, the same thing happens with the feminists and K-12 education.  In their rage to force girls to be free they have utterly transformed the education system so that nothing can happen that offends their ideas of gender neutrality.

So the result is that in education today, nothing happens. Teachers can’t teach without looking over their shoulder, and content is dumbed down to make sure that the teacher doesn’t get into trouble.

It’s probably been ever thus.  But that doesn’t make it right.

Call Me Mary not Maricruz

What is happening out there, with respect to the mortgage meltdown and immigration?  Maybe a total meltdown according to a commenter at HousingBubbleBlog:

Maybe OT, but let me know what you think. I’m a high school English teacher in OC [Orange County, CA]. Some very interesting things are afoot in Anaheim public schools.

The AP in charge of scheduling says our freshmen enrollment is down 100 kids, about 5% off normal. We’ve been reading about decreasing enrollment coming through the elementary schools, but didn’t expect it to hit us so quickly.

In five classes, I SHOULD have 100-110 kids.

I have 71. Any of you familiar with OC public schools knows how low that number is.

Also, I’ve got many, many more white and asian students than ever before. I *think* what’s happening is that many of those families have downsized into our lower-middle class neighborhood.

On top of that, the recently immigrated Mexican kids seem to have *poof* vanished. (Note: I have no knowledge of their status, illegal or legal.) ALL my students, for the first time in my career, have insisted that I eschew their given names and use an anglicized version (e.g. Mary for Maricruz, Judy for Yuridia, Tommy for Tomas, etc.) instead. No one is speaking Spanish inside or outside the classroom.

This leads me to believe either (a) all the enforcement ICE has been doing is scaring the crap out of the (legal and illegal) immigrant community and/or b) people are ditching Cali for greener pastures.

Or maybe the housing meltdown has melted away all the construction jobs and the construction workers have gone back to Mexico. 

Putting the MoveOn.orgers on the Couch

All animals live by killing.  That’s the awful truth that we spend our lives avoiding.  Even your average cow does nothing but kill innocent living grasses all day.

Some people believe that they know a higher truth than the instinctive need to live and the instinctive desire to protect your own.  They believe that we can break the “cycle of violence.”  And that leads them away from loyalty to their community or nation.  As William Hawkins puts it:

Only an intense belief in a "higher truth" can lead people to turn against their own country during a war. The flowering of this strain of liberal doctrine goes back to the decades following the Napoleonic Wars.

Actually it goes back before that.  Christianity views all selfish action—let alone violent action—in a questionable light. And we can regard the tension between church and state in the Christian era as a healthy response to the problematic both of untrammeled selfishness and unrestrained unselfishness.

So the liberal reaction to 9/11 was predictable.

Liberals warned against "overreacting" to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Katrina vanden Heuvel, in the misnomered journal the Nation, argued, "The most promising and effective way to halt terrorism lies in bringing those responsible to justice through nonmilitary actions in cooperation with the global community and within the framework of domestic and international law."

Maybe so.  But the 20th century’s foremost theorist of thuggery, V.I. Lenin, had another idea.  He called people like Heuvel “useful idiots.”  And after 9/11 the useful idiots knew what to do.

The patriotic unity felt by Americans in all walks of life when the Pentagon and World Trade Center were attacked by al Qaeda had to be torn asunder as quickly as possible to conform with liberal-left ideology. Thus, groups like Moveon.org cranked up their partisan hate speech.

For the left believes not in the nation state but in “class division and hyper-individuality.”  It’s a curious combination.  People are only allowed to form communities based on class.  For the rest, we are individuals.

But sometimes reality has a way of breaking through.

The French philosopher Ernest Renan started out as a classical liberal but after his country lost its 1870 war with Prussia became an eloquent exponent of nationalism. He argued, "A nation is a living principle, a spiritual principle. ... To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present, to have done great things together, the will to do the like again — such are the essential conditions for the making of a people."

There’s nothing like having foreign soldiers in your country to concentrate the mind.

In Iraq, of course, there are foreign soldiers not just from the US, but from Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran.  And that is not counting the non-state actors like Al Qaeda.

No, history is not over, Virginia.  Not for a while.  Not in your lifetime.

Fighting for Kids in Utah

The Utah Education Association has got $3 million from the National Education Association to fight school choice in Utah.  As Ken Blackwell reports it:

The head of Utah’s largest teachers’ union promised an "ugly, mean and expensive" campaign, and the National Education Association has given her $3 million to wage it.

They are fighting against the Parents Choice in Education Act, passed by the Utah legislature and signed by Governor Jon Huntsman earlier this year.

But the pro-kid forces are spoiling for the fight.

In fact, grassroots groups like Parents for Choice in Education and child-centered school choice advocates like Dr. Patrick Byrne of Overstock.com are on the front line of this fight. They seem to have the will and fire power necessary to win this battle.

Giving parents choice in education.  It’s something well worth fighting for.

How Economic Crackpots Devoured American Politics

Conservatives and Republicans keep hoping that liberals will actually admit that supply-side economics works, that is that low tax rates and limited government is the best prescription for prosperity.

But liberals just don’t want to accept of grace and love, spurning the offer of friendship made by Sir Walter Blunt to Harry Percy in Henry IV Part One.

In fact Jonathan Chait, Senior Editor of The New Republic has just published a book rejecting the whole supply-side deal.  It’s called The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics, and it argues that Arthur Laffer (of the curve) was a lightweight, Jude Wanniski (of the Wall Street Journal edit page) was a crackpot, and George Gilder (of Wealth and Poverty) was a blind (and misogynistic) enthusiast.

Well, enough with pulling our punches, let’s get Chait’s own words from anexcept to The Big Con from The New Republic.

American politics has been hijacked by a tiny coterie of right-wing economic extremists, some of them ideological zealots, others merely greedy, a few of them possibly insane.

To add to the fun, Chait and Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, have been trading barbs in the online New Republic:

• Chait
• Norquist
• Chait
• Norquist
• Chait

 Of course, Chait is right.  Arthur Laffer is no Milton Friedman; Jude Wanniski was weird, and George Gilder enjoys bucking the liberal consensus.  And it’s true that the advocates for supply-side economics oversold their product.  That’s what advocates usually do.

The big question is whether liberals are ready to concede that they ought to back off, just a little,their philosophy of governance by program and subsidy and endlessly mucking around with the tax code. 

That is really the argument of supply-side economics.  It says that you can use government to reward your supporters and punish your opponents: politics as usual.  Boys will be boys.

But you ought to understand that when you erect confiscatory tax rates and huge subsidies that you distort the economy and reduce the prosperity of ordinary Americans.

You ought to confront, for instance, that when you send huge amounts of money to the poor it reduces their work effort and it devastates their families.  And that is not just an economic issue.  It is a moral issue.

And it is true.  Supply-side economics devoured American Politics—at least as liberals had known it.

Bush Prepares the Domestic Battlefield

We’ve said here repeatedly that the one thing that the Bush administration needs to do on Iraq is hand it to the Democrats in January 2009.  The only mistake he can make is to get the US out of Iraq before then.  Because if he does that then he gives the Democrats a generational sound-bite.  “Bush Lost Iraq.” 

But with the qualified success of the “surge” and the inability of the Democrats to demand an immediate withdrawal, Bush has achieved his strategic objective.  American troops will remain in strength in Iraq in January 2009.  Immediately after Gen. Petraeus made his report to Congress, President Bush announced a minor troop withdrawal, report Jon Ward and Sara A. Carter.

The president’s troop reduction, which will be announced in a nationally televised speech at 9 p.m. tomorrow, will be a few thousand less than the 30,000 advised by Gen. Petraeus, a White House official told The Washington Times on the condition of anonymity.

There will be some draw down, but not much.

This puts the Democrats just where the president wants them.  The party is suspended between an Angry Left that just doesn’t believe in using the power of the US armed forces for anything except rooting racists out of the South and the mainstream of America that believes the president should “make us safe.” 

And the war on terror, or World War IV, or whatever, goes on.

Could Bush Have Brought Dems Aboard?

Six years after 9/11 Jonah Goldberg reminds us that if he had written on 9/12 that six years later a Democratic presidential candidate would be “ridiculing the idea of the war on terror as a bumper sticker” or that “a third of Democrats would be telling pollsters that Bush knew in advance about 9/11” they would have called him mad.

But, Goldberg writes, George Bush must take some of the blame for the Democrats’ checking out of the war on terror. 

Bush lacked the political imagination to keep the Democrats within the tent.

This might sound unfair, but if George Bush had been a better president, John Edwards would never have dreamed of calling the war on terror nothing but a bumper sticker... That is not a sign that President Bush has adequately led the country or prepared it for the struggles ahead.

But has any president ever united the country for a great struggle unless the danger was up close and personal?  Isolationists were active right up to the day of Pearl Harbor, and Democrats checked out of the Cold War half way through. 

The fact is that the Democrats are on board in practice.  The Democratic candidates are playing to the Angry Left right now but they know that the American people expect them to deal with terrorism.  But they are afraid to actually implement a withdrawal from Iraq, at least in a way that advertises their responsibility.

The only way that the Democratic base will come inside the tent is through an utter collapse and discrediting of their secular religion.  But the whole point about a religion is that it is a closed system.  It is a program for living that is based on faith and not upon empirical verification. (And that goes for Richard Dawkins too).

The best way to bring the Democrats inside the tent is to give them the presidency.  Then we’ll find that the only problem Democrats had with the war on terror was that President Bush was in charge.

Americans Get the Big Picture

Today as Gen. Petraeus reports to Congress on the limited results of the “surge”—that it is reducing insurgent activity but not solving the political situation in Iraq, it is helpful to look at the big picture, as Michael Barone does.

He notes that independents join with Democrats in blaming President Bush for the conduct of the war in Iraq.

And he notes that independents side with Republicans in agreeing that the threat from Islamic fundamentalists will not go down once President Bush leaves office.

But you don’t see such a partisan division when the question is whether the next generation of Americans will be less safe from foreign threats than we are now. Americans agree by a 57 percent to 39 percent margin — the margin of agreement is statistically identical among Republicans (17 percent), independents (19 percent) and Democrats (18 percent).

So the American people understand that this is a long war.  But they are also frustrated by the lack of progress in Iraq.

You could argue that the real strategic purpose of the “surge” is to make sure that the Democrats get handed the Iraq hot potato in January 2009. 

What they’d like is to force Bush out of Iraq before 2009 so that they could say that Bush lost Iraq.

What Republicans want is for Democrats to put up or shut up.  And that will only happen when a Democrat is in the White House.

Then we’ll know what they really mean to do about the challenge of Islamic fundamentalism.  And that will be good for all Americans.

Being Unserious about Don Rumsfeld

If you were given the opportunity to interview former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, what would you want to ask him?  Something like this, I would think:

• What have we achieved in the last six years?
• What is the nature of the Islamist enemy?
• How do you think the US national security establishment should approach the future?
• How do you think the US military is adjusting to the reforms you put in place?
• How would you address the American people about what to expect in the future?

But that’s not what Lisa DePaulo asks Don Rumsfeld in a lengthy profile in GQ magazine.  She’s interested in the snarky stuff: “75-year-old package of waning testosterone,” “rudely banished from the kingdom,” how he sleeps at night, and so on.

Of course, Rumsfeld doesn’t really want to discuss policy in the interview. He can’t, since anything he says will be taken and used in evidence against the Bush administration.

So all we get is snarky liberal atmospherics, like what does he think about gay marriage and abortion, and how does he sleep at night.

The difference between a liberal writer and a man like Rumsfeld who has actually made life-and-death decisions is palpable.

But, of course, the liberal writer is writing for readers who have never run things or made life-and-death decisions either.  What do they want to know about Rumsfeld? 

They just want him to apologize for making them so angry.

One useful take-away.  The hardest time in Rumsfeld’s life was as White House chief of staff for President Ford.

"Because [Ford] stepped into a flying airplane, with no crew! And to come in and be his chief of staff was just a terribly difficult assignment... The environment was just polluted. It was just rotten in our country."

That’s something that it is easy to forget.  It was actually worse in the 1970s.

Mortgage Mess Hits Real Economy

Stocks are in broad retreat today on the Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly Employment Situation Summary.  As Jeannine Aversa of Associated Press writes:

Employers sliced payrolls by 4,000 jobs in August, the first such decline in four years and a stark sign that a painful credit crunch that has unnerved Wall Street is putting a strain on the national economy.

As usual, the MSM is writing about the summary’s Establishment Data, the change in employers’ payrolls, rather than the broader Household Survey.

And the Household Survey has shocking news.

Jul-Aug Change Civilian Labor Force -340,000 Employment -316,000 Not in Labor Force 592,000

These are shocking numbers.  And let’s face it.  They are probably just the beginning. 

Pavarotti: Singers on The Voice

Luciano Pavarotti, primo tenore assoluto of our times, died September 6 aged 71. Pavarotti was a baker’s son from Modena in Emilia Romagna and had a remarkable voice.  It was immediately recognizable in any recording. 

But what did his peers, the headline opera singers, think of his voice?  For that is the only thing that really matters about a great tenor: The Voice.  The London Daily Telegraph gathered some quotes.

Placido Domingo:

I always admired his divine voice, with its unmistakable timbre and complete vocal range.

Jose Carreras:

A good poker player.

Joan Sutherland:

The quality of the sound was so different. You knew immediately that it was Luciano.

British tenor Russell Watson:

His voice was so distinctive you only needed to listen to a couple of bars and you knew it was him, he had incredible power and control.

British soprano Lesley Garrett:

Absolutely everybody knew his sound. That is what every singer dreams of, that you will be known for the uniqueness of your sound. It was a pure, clear, beautiful sound, and we will simply never hear the like of it again.

Australian baritone Robert Allman:

My memories of him are of him being the greatest tenor I ever heard. The voice was so incredibly beautiful, his top register was infallibly good.

And they say that Pavarotti never learned to read music.

Chuck Schumer Doesn't Get It

Many conservatives have reacted with outrage to the remarks by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY).  Sen. Schumer asserts that the pacification of Anbar province has occurred despite the “surge” mounted by the US Armed Forces.  As Hugh Hewitt reports, to Schumer:

The inability of American soldiers to protect these tribes from al Qaeda said to these tribes we have to fight al Qaeda ourselves. It wasn’t that the surge brought peace here. It was that the warlords took peace here, created a temporary peace here.

Well, that is certainly a good partisan Democratic way of looking at it.

But let us think of this more from the point of view of Mao ZeDong, generally considered to have written the book on guerrilla warfare.  In his view the whole point of a successful insurrection was for the fighters to “swim” in the sea of the countryside.  If they did that, and obtained the protection of the rural people, then they could never be defeated.

In the Maoist approach therefore, it doesn’t matter why the Sunnis tribes in Anbar decided to switch sides.  They might have switched because the US provided assistance to them.  They might have switched because they didn’t like life under the Al-Qaeda fighters.  They might have switched because they didn’t like the Al-Qaeda fighters taking their daughters as wives.  We don’t care.

The goal of the United States is to drive Al-Qaeda out of Iraq.  To do that it is necessary to drain the swamp so that there is no water to swim in.

But maybe Chuck Schumer doesn’t get that.  Maybe he’s never read any books on guerrilla war strategy.

No reason why he should.  That sort of thing isn’t going to get him elected to be United States Senator from the state of New York.

But President Bush does read books.  And so he’s probably a bit more educated on guerrilla war strategy than Chuck Schumer.

DeLay Hammers Lauer

You have to hand it to former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.  He believes that politics is a contact sport and he doesn’t believe in truckling to the media.  Why should he?  It wouldn’t buy him anything anyway.

So when the Today Show invited him to come on and answer questions about the Republican scandals—Foley, Abramhoff, Ritter, and Craig—DeLay wasn’t buying it, as Brent Bozell III reports.  Retorted DeLay to Matt Lauer:

Well, I hate to say this Matt, but you just showed the problem, the double-standard, and you just participated in it. You listed a whole lot of scandals that involve the Republicans, but you didn’t mention one Democrat.

No! Do tell!  He went on to administer a little “larnin’” on young Matt Lauer.

There’s a difference between Republicans in trouble and Democrats in trouble, DeLay told him.

You see the Democrats re-elect the people with their problems. Republicans kick them out.

It’s fun to watch the tape on YouTube as Matt Lauer tries to have the last word and Tom DeLay won’t let him.

What’s not to like?

Yet There's a Welder Shortage

Everybody knows that the industrial sector is shrinking leaving behind a creaking Rust Belt.  The “good jobs with good wages” that sustained New York, Ohio, and Michigan are gone for good.

Then how come there is a shortage of welders?  Bill Steigerwald asked Joel Kotkin about that.  It’s a myth, Kotkin says.  Certainly the old industrial belt is in trouble.  But there are plenty of manufacturing jobs.  In fact there’s a skills shortage. 

[I]f you ask business people what is it that would really help them, they say “skills.” Machinists. Welders. It’s not like there’s a Ph. D. shortage, generally speaking. But there is a welder shortage, there’s a plumber shortage, there’s a machinist shortage. But nobody wants to talk about this.

What’s the problem?  We’re Americans aren’t we, a can-do people in a can-do country? Says Kotkin:

Cities that have lost their industrial base don’t want to talk about it, and many cities that still have it are almost ashamed of it. In one of the great historical ironies, the places where they are not ashamed of manufacturing are places like Houston and Charleston and Charlotte. But the places with the great industrial traditions, it’s almost as if they are ashamed of their lineage.

And it’s not as if the manufacturing jobs aren’t helping people move up.

One of the women I interviewed in Charleston had been working in retail making under $10 an hour. Now she’s working in manufacturing and she’s gone up to $15 or $16 an hour. She’s got some health care benefits. She’s got a skill. She feels she’s got a future.

Now there’s a concept.  And it’s not rocket science.  If you want a thriving city you need infrastructure and training so that $10 clerks can move up to $15.

You need roads that go in and out. You need modern industrial space. You need reliable electricity. You need shipping facilities. You need workers who are relatively skilled, trainable and reliable.

But Democrats aren’t interested in that any more.  They don’t like polluting jobs—call it a kind of “gentry liberalism” if you like.  And that extends to the politicians and the media.  Here we are, building fancy stadiums and light rail.  And we are looking after big headline companies.  But what about the little guy,

somebody who’s got 15 people working for him in a shop somewhere in the suburbs and would like to get to 30? What are his issues? Are they tax issues? Are they training issues? Are they regulatory issues? You’ve got to go ask! I don’t see anyone interested in that anymore.

That’s because in today’s cities the pols only need to keep the public employees happy—and the rich contributors, and the young and hip.  They don’t want to descend to the building of buses and tollways that can move people and trucks.

Instead we want to build a cute little light-rail line, so that maybe we can convince a couple yuppies to take the train to work for a couple weeks.

The real crime is that Republicans have failed to exploit this opportunity.  You’d think that they—we—could earn the votes of the would-be welders and manufacturing workers by working for highways, infrastructure, and good jobs.

Hmm, that’s odd.  That’s just what Republicans have been working for.

A fat lot of good it does us.

But the opportunity is still open.  The Democratic Party is the party of public employees, government benefits, and gentry liberals.  The Republican Party is the party of the rest of us.

Conservatives on Horn of Dilemma

Hey, this isn’t hard, insists Janet Daley in London’s Daily Telegraph.  When it comes to the great public services delivered by the welfare state you have to make your choice. 

You either believe that the state should administer the delivery of these services by controlling them from the centre, or you do not.

But, she complains, the British Conservative Party wants to have it both ways, or rather three ways, at once.

On the one hand Tory leader David Cameron want to return the right of teachers to teach.  On the other hand he wants to mandate the grouping of children by ability.  And he wants to mandate the teaching of reading using “synthetic phonics.”

Then there’s the question of who to decentralize power to: the teaching professionals or the parents.  Cameron obviously has to appeal to the government teachers.  But he also wants to return power to parents.

It’s easy to tell conservative reformers to get a clue.  But their task is gigantic.

And it starts with the basic problem that most people instinctively do believe that someone should sit at the center of society and just decide the big quesions of education and health care. It can’t be that hard, can it?

Over 160 years ago Tocqueville already understood that the natural tendency of democracy is to have the government do it.

We conservatives, who so blithely order our leaders to introduce “choice,” should get a clue ourselves.  We are asking them to do the impossible.  Well, almost.