Misunderestimated Again

President Bush seems to understand what President Reagan understood before him. A president has a chance to make only two or three moves on the chessboard of history. So he’d better make them good ones.

Alternatively, he can engage in fancy footwork like Third Way dancers Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, serving up eye-catching initiatives every week.

However even the best chess moves don’t necessarily look good at the time. Many people are more impressed by fancy footwork.

In his end of year piece Michael Barone reminds us why he is the dean of pundits. He just has a solid judgment. And it shows.

Before you count President Bush out, he writes, don’t forget that the first few years of every war are years of blunders and mistakes.

Franklin Roosevelt picked the right generals and admirals from the start in World War II, but the first years of the war were filled with errors and mistakes.

And now that President Bush has found the right generals, we can affirm that &ldquoAmerican troops are surely the most capable military force in history. They just need to be given the right orders.”

Another important lesson to learn from Iraq is that social transformation works easiest from the bottom up. Our media elites are obsessed with top-down politics. They would be, that is their job: to report the doings of high politics.

But the impetus for change [in Iraq] has come from the bottom up, from tribal sheiks in Anbar province who got tired of the violence and oppression of al Qaeda in Iraq, from Shiites and Sunnis who, once confident of the protection of American forces and of the new Iraqi military, decided to quit killing each other. They did not wait for orders from Baghdad or for legislation to be passed with all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed.

Why be surprised? That’s the way it works in the US.

At the beginning of the 1990s we seemed to have intractable problems of high crime and welfare dependency. Experts argued that we couldn’t hope for improvement. But state and local leaders got to work and showed that change for the better was possible.

Today, people seem to have forgotten that crime and welfare were once intractable problems. That just shows how successfully we reformed welfare and crime fighting. And how wrong the folks were who wailed about millions of children thrown into the streets.

Now it seems that President Bush has learned from the fumbles of the first years in the War on Terror Why wouldn’t he? Isn’t the US famous as a nation of can-do optimists?

What Presidents Wear

When the Duke of Wellington fought the Battle of Waterloo, he did not wear a resplendent uniform. He wore, as Paul Johnson reminds us, “dark blue civilian dress.” He was, you may say, sending a message about military might. Victory in battle is all very well, but after it’s over, we are going home to peacetime pursuits.

At the Potsdam Conference immediately after World War II, he relates

[Prime Minister Churchill] appeared in Royal Air Force uniform, one of his favorites. Marshal Stalin, as he liked to call himself, appeared in the white full dress uniform of a Marshal of the Red Army. But... Harry S Truman... wore a neat blue civilian suit.

Harry Truman served in World War I and in the reserves thereafter, but US Presidents do not wear uniform while in office. It sends an important message about the role of the commander-in-chief. The president is a civilian, and the United States believes in civilian control of the military.

But when the president visits the troops theses days, he does wear uniform. It is interesting to realize what that uniform is. Typically, it features a baseball cap—often emblazoned with the insignia of the unit or the ship he is visiting—and a baseball warmup jacket.

When the president visits the troops, he dresses like a baseball coach.

That’s an interesting message to send to the world. Think of the President of the United States as a kind of jumped-up baseball coach.

Liberal Fascism. So?

The liberals are already reaching the tipping point on Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Someone already vandalized the product page at Amazon. (Would that be an inside job?)

But what’s all the fuss about?  Liberalism comes from the same stable as communism and fascism?  Of course.  They are all reactionary movements trying escape from an alienation towards the modern age.  They are beset, as Roger Scruton writes in Modern Culture,

by those ancient and eradicable yearnings for something else — for a homecoming to our true community.

You see this in German Romanticism, in Marx, and in the “reactionary nationalism of Fichte and Gierke for whom the Volk and the Volksgeist where the primary objects of social hope.”

Our liberal friends believe in their special version of this.  They will lead us to safety in a true community of educated people, the rule of the altruistic educated middle class over the hopelessly compromised commercial middle class.

How will our liberal friends deal with the challenge of Liberal Fascism?  Probably by ignoring it.  It’s the best way.

But we can read all about it.  First, check into Jonah’s thoughts on The Glenn and Helen Show.

Is There a Conservative Future?

In this time of conservative discontent, seers and pundits are peering into the future. Will there be a conservative coalition in the future, they wonder?

Conservative pundit Tony Blankley takes a look, and wonders what it would take to keep a majority coalition going.

It would have to hold almost all of its Reagan coalition plus gain the support of at least 40 percent of the growing Hispanic vote.

And that is a tall order, considering that it usually takes at least a generation for US immigrants to become unhyphenated Americans that vote for the American party rather than the Identity party.

All that assumes that the conservatives can keep the Reagan Democrats and social conservatives. And that is pretty uncertain. If economic hard times come then expect the economically insecure to return to the Democratic Party. Says Blankley:

Although the economy remains strong, the public’s economic anxiety about the future has been building steadily during the past half-decade.

Gold stars all round to the MSM for that.

It is precisely these kinds of economic fears that Mike Huckabee is talking to... I think it is highly likely the Republican Party (as the presumed continuing vehicle for a right-of-center coalition) will have to talk persuasively to the growing economic anxiety.

Can we do it? Can we persuade the economically insecure that the worst thing they could do would be to throw in their lot with the economically Neanderthal Democrats?

It’s a challenge, at the very least.

At least history in on our side. The last two times the economy went south, in the 1930s and in the 1970s, the Democrats completely screwed up the economy (with help, it must be admitted, from the Republicans.)

Xmas at the Party of Government

You gotta love Hillary’s Xmas Card. I refuse to watch it (ok, I did watch it when I went to get the link) but Jonah Goldberg says it’s about Hillary Clinton getting all her Xmas gifts together, the ones she is going to give to you, the voter.

One is labeled "Universal Health Care," another is "Alternative Energy," another is "Middle Class Tax Breaks." And then the supposedly hilarious kicker. Wringing her hands and furrowing her brow with maternal angst, she exclaims, "Where did I put universal pre-K?"

Very droll, especially for a Democrat. After all, if you are a Democrat these things are either for you for for you to manage or to get a paycheck out of.

But Republicans have a different take. Hillary didn’t pay for those presents. We, the taxpayers, are going to pay for them. The facts are up on Rush Limbaugh’s website, forever.

Ninety-six percent of income taxes are paid by the top 50 percent of taxpayers. And that is probably before counting in the effect of the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Why be surprised? It all makes sense, given the political system in this country.

The way Hugh Hewitt tells it, the United States has a Six Party System.

The Republican Party is a coalition of the Faith Party, the Wealth Party, and the National Security Party.

The Democratic Party is a coalition of the Race Party, the Government Party, and the License Party.

Hillary Clinton is running for the leadership of the Government Party. And she is wrapping all the lovely gifts she is going to give her party rank-and-file with Other Peoples’ Money.

What’s not to like?

Don’t agree? Drop me a line.

As Hillary Clinton puts it: Let’s talk!

Reconciliation In Iraq?

Obviously something has changed in Iraq in the last year.  The question is what, and what will happen next.

Will the defeat of Al Qaeda in Iraq lead to a reconciliation between Sunni and Shia, or will the civil war resume once the US starts to reduce its forces in the year ahead?

Conservative commentators like Michael Ledeen are optimistic.

Meanwhile, the country’s leading religious leaders seem on the verge of issuing an historic document: a fatwa condemning violence. The signatories would be two towering figures, one Sunni, one Shiite.

Lefty blog posters have a different point of view. Here is talisman.

Ah, but the so-called "turnaround" in Iraq is merely one of slightly decreased violence - and only a temporary one, from most established on-the-ground accounts, which means Bush can declare "victory" while still keeping our kids over there as cannon fodder.

Actually, he might be right.  We simply do not know how the various factions in Iraq will act in the aftermath of the “surge.”

We can understand this divide.  Both conservatives and liberals want to be proven right.  Conservatives want to believe that the US was right to go into Iraq.  Liberals want to believe that it was wrong to go into Iraq.

But whatever happens in Iraq, there is still the question of Iran.

Why Is It So Cold? Maybe the Sun?

Everyone knows that the polar bears are in trouble and Greenland is about to melt because of all the global warming.

In fact, though, the world is in the middle of a cold snap, according to geophysicist (and, presumably climate change denier) David Deming.

South America this year experienced one of its coldest winters in decades. In Buenos Aires, snow fell for the first time since the year 1918...


Unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007. Johannesburg, South Africa, had the first significant snowfall in 26 years. Australia experienced the coldest June ever... In New Zealand, the weather turned so cold that vineyards were endangered.

What could be going on? Well, scientists say that it could be the Sun. Right now it’s at the end of a 22 year sunspot cycle, Cycle 23, and scientists are wondering when the next cycle, Cycle 24, is going to start.

That’s important because in previous centuries the earth’s climate has been cold when the sunspot count was low and warm when the sunspot count was high. The most famous period of low sunspot incidence was the Maunder Minimum from 1645 to 1710. That period has another name: The Little Ice Age. If you look at the link, you will see a nice little graph which labels our current period since 1950 the “Modern Maximum.”

Could that explain the increase in global temperatures.

Right now, this minute, on December 19, 2007, there are no sunspots on the sun. That’s because the one visible sunspot group has just rotated out of sight. You can check up on the sun here.

There is some indication that the next sunspot cycle has begun. The first two weeks of December showed an increase in sunspots.

What we don’t know is how active the new cycle will be. Some people think that sunspot intensity is driven by the position of the major planets like Jupiter and Saturn in the same way that tides on the Earth are driven by the Moon.

But it might be prudent to plan on a cold winter this year. Just to be on the safe side.

Ripping the Republican Big Tent Apart

Fifty years ago the US conservative movement began in a fusion between Burkean conservatives and libertarian conservatives. In the late Sixties they were joined by the “mugged by reality” neoconservatives.

Then in the 1970s the Supreme Court created the Christian Right with Roe v. Wade and added social conservatives to the movement.

These different factions in the conservative movement have not always got along, but they have learned to live with each other and to respect each other’s agenda. The poster boy for this is Rush Limbaugh. Divorced several times, he is a success-oriented conservative; yet he is respectful towards social conservatives and he is pro-life.

Having learned to live with each over the years many of us were shocked when John McCain ran for president against the social conservatives in 2000. Why would anyone want to do that, we wondered? It’s become clear, in the years since, that McCain is a national security conservative only, and just doesn’t understand, and doesn’t want to understand the other factions of the movement.

The initial first tier candidates for 2008—Giuliani, Romney, Thompson—are all fusion candidates. They may target their appeal to one faction or another, but they do not try to split the conservative movement.

But insurgents like Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee are splitters. Ron Paul is trying to create a divide between libertarians and the rest of the conservative movement and Mike Huckabee is trying to create a divide between evangelical conservatives and the rest of the conservative movement. And then there is John McCain, who still wants to split off national security conservatives from the rest of the movement.

I’m rooting for one of the uniters to win. And I hope that all of the dividers fail. Our conservative movement needs to grow. It needs to be ready and welcoming when the next troop of Americans is cast out into the political wilderness by the liberal establishment.

The various wings of the movement have broadly similar goals and the particular concerns of each faction informs and inspires the others.

We don’t want no stinkin’ dividers.

Huckabee Sucks Up to Liberals

They say that presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, despite his aw-shucks manner is a true product of Arkansas politics—like Bill Clinton.

So it’s not surprising that in his upcoming article for Foreign Affairs magazine he says just what the liberal Council on Foreign Relations would want to hear.

The Bush administration’s arrogant bunker mentality has been counterproductive at home and abroad.

You could say that.  Or you could say that the Bush administration’s steadfastness and willingness to adapt when its policy had failed is the reason that we now see light at the end of the tunnel in Iraq.  In the last year the Sunni rejectionists seem to be abandoning revolutionary politics for politics-as-usual.  They have abandoned their alliance with Al Qaeda in Iraq and are working with the US and the Iraqi government.

Frankly, I have no time at all for second-guessers.  Any attempt to do something in this world—as opposed to sitting on the fence—is necessarily a catalog of mistakes.  Every business plan is invalidated the moment it is finished.  Every political campaign is a roller-coaster of “gaffes” and mistakes.  Every war is a parade of folly.

The question for every leader always is: shall we continue on the path we have begun, or is it time to change course?

If you were right to continue on course then the fence-sitters like Mike Huckabee say you are tenacious and courageous.  If you are wrong, then you have an “arrogant bunker mentality.”

But, in fact, the Bush administration has learned from its mistakes, and has changed course when it became clear that its policy wasn’t working.

So what do you call that?

Hewitt Peels a Brokaw

Radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt is a master of the interview. His particular skill is painting a picture of a subject’s political views when the subject refuses to be categorized.

No, they say, in answer to the question about voting for Reagan or Bush. I don’t tell who I voted for. So Hewitt spends the next 30 minutes—or 60 minutes—painting an exact picture of the subject’s world view. Just so his listeners will know.

Last week Hugh Hewitt interviewed Tom Brokaw on his book Boom! Voices of the Sixties. For Hewitt, the book was predominantly about the Left Sixties, and it left out the story of the Un-sixties Sixties. But Tom Brokaw wan’t about to admit that.

No, the fact that the subjects in the book were 55-12 left of center to right of center didn’t mean anything. Anyway, Hewitt was stereotyping people.

Eventually, Hewitt asked about Richard Daley, mayor of Chicago.

HH: Right. One of the best portraits in here, because I think it’s so jarring given who he is and what he believes, is Richard Daley, current mayor of Chicago. He’s a Boomer, his son’s in the military, his dad was at ’68, and he’s frustrated with environmentalists, because they won’t let him update his airport.



TB: Right.



HH: It’s a fascinating portrait…



TB: And does he come down on the left of center?



HH: He’s left of center. Sure he is. He’s a Democrat activist…



TB: He’s a centrist. He’s a centrist. The way he runs Chicago is as a centrist.



HH: Well, of course the way he runs Chicago. But the way he’ll get Hillary the votes that she needs to win Illinois is nothing got to do with the center, is it?

You can’t do it any better than that. Sure, Dick Daley in Chicago governs as far to the right as he can. Why wouldn’t he? He wants Chicago to prosper. But when it comes to practical politics he’s a Democrat and that means electing whatever the Democrats nominate.

When you carry water for the left that means you belong on the left. Nothing wrong with that. It’s just nice to get it out in the open and not pretend.

What is the Meaning of Change?

When the Democrats talk about "Change," what do they mean? Mark Steyn wondered about that for the benefit of his readers. It’s puzzling, because, as he writes:

The Democrats are the party of stasis: on affirmative action, there can be no change; on abortion absolutism, there can be no change; even on a less cobwebbed shibboleth such as the Iraq war, there can be no change

The other day Barack Obama broke with the program and proposed on Social Security

just the teensy-weensiest little tweakette of a change to keep the wheels from coming off the entitlement bus, and immediately he got clobbered by Paul Krugman and Democrat activists as a pathetic stooge for the heartless right’s plans to get rid of the whole racket.

After all, if you are talking about Real Change, you must be talking about making a real course correction in the nation’s politics. At least that’s what I would think it would mean.

Obama’s current slogan is “Change You Can Believe In.” What exactly does that mean? Or what is it intended to mean to Democratic primary voters?

Obviously, it can mean only one thing to the Democratic rank-and-file. To them, “Change” means another government program. It means the whole progressive ball of wax, finally delivering on affordable everything. Or, as Steyn says, better than I:

more entitlements, more regulation, more incremental government annexation of health care

Not to mention more “choice” and wonders of healing from embryonic stem cells.

There’s just one problem with all this, according to Star Parker. “Life is not a defined benefit.”

Michael Novak for Romney

Readers of RMC will know that Michael Novak is one of our RMC Chappies.  That’s because of his book The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism and its notion of the Greater Separation of Powers.

So when Michael Novak comes out for Mitt Romney, we listen. He says he’s been privately for Romney for some time but the egregious bigotry of Mike Huckabee forced him to go public.  And he argues from the old biblical injunction “By their fruits you shall know them.”

[E]very one of the Mormons I have ever worked with, beginning with a great graduate assistant for one of my classes at Stanford in about 1967, have been the most well-mannered, inquisitive, competent, kind and thoughtful people I know.

Me too.  And nothing has revolted me more in this campaign season than the anti-Mormon bigotry of Mike Huckabee.

Michael Novak’s notion of the Greater Separation of Powers proposes that we think of democratic capitalism as a society of three sectors: the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral/cultural sector.

In his view these sectors should be free and differentiated like the three branches of government.  They should each have power and each use their power to jealously limit the powers of the other sectors.  It’s a powerful concept, taking the separation of powers concept from government to the wider society.

That brings us to the signature sound bite of British Conservative Party leader David Cameron: There is such a thing as Society; it’s just not the same as the State.

Because the State means the political sector takes over and totally dominates the other sectors.  But conservatives believe in a distribution of power among the various sectors of society.

Can Obama Really Solve Everything?

Many conservatives have been annoyed by the intrasigence of Democrats during the Bush years. There’s no doubt it’s been effective and deflected Republicans from overdue reforms of the welfare state.

But the Dems have come to believe in a dangerous illusion that as Jonah Goldberg puts it:

If only Democrats ran things, there’d be no war, our allies would love us, global warming would be brought to heel, and we would have universal health care, happily married gay neighbors and embryonic stem cells for everybody.

If only. Up to now Dems thought they would see Happy Days are Here Again with Hillary Clinton. Now it’s beginning to look more and more like Sen. Obama.

But the idea that returning Democrats to power is going to change things is starting to die an agonizing death.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said it best himself in Monday’s Roll Call: “Have we stopped the war in Iraq? No. Have we gotten health care? No. Have we improved education? No. But we have been able to do what we’ve done. We’ve done a lot of things.”

Yes, and a lot of the things done were pretty shabby.

The truth is, as Rush Limbaugh says, that Democrats are calling plays out of a 30 year-old playbook. Their ideas, for withdrawal from Iraq, for an intensification of government intervention in health care, don’t really move the country forwards.

And once they return to the White House, people will start to notice.

If that is what it takes to prepare the American people for genuine reform, then so be it.

We Interrupt This Message

The shocking thing about the actions of New Life Church member Jeanne Assam’s takedown of assassin Matthew Murray is the break with the narrative.

There we were, worrying about “hate speech” and the NIE assessment, whether Hillary Clinton is slipping in the race for the presidency, and listening respectfully to all the important talking heads when suddenly the story changed.

Instead of the usual liberal narrative about “hate” we had a true hater knocking off Christians in Colorado. And all of a sudden a woman takes him down—with a gun.

There was another security guard at the church with a gun, but he was dithering. Assam was a trained police officer. So she just kicked in her police training. She ran towards the gunman, shooting as she went.

Then she appeared at a press conference and talked about God’s Will.

It’s a slice of life without your usual liberal suspects, and we are not used to that.

The shocking thing about the whole incident is listening to the different world view. Said Assam at her press conference:

"God was with me. I didn’t think for a minute to run away. God guided me and protected me.


"It seemed like it was me, the gunman, and God."

Yes, we usually try to keep that sort of thing out of the newspapers. But we are used to the rhetoric of the gunman, Matthew Murray:

"You Christians brought this on yourselves," Murray wrote, [on a website]. "All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you ... as I can especially Christians who are to blame for most of the problems in the world."

Talking about God on TV. That’s controversial in today’s America. Blaming Christians for all the world’s problems. Why that’s what they teach in school.

Is Huckabee a Liberal Plant?

If you are like me you haven’t been too impressed by Mike Huckabee.  Just something about the guy.  So now that the hit-jobs are coming out, I can’t say I’m that upset.  Douglas MacKinnon even wonders whether Huckabee is a liberal plant!

If you are the eventual Democratic nominee for President in 2008, who would you like to run against? Answer: A Republican you can beat.

Never mind about horserace stuff like that.  According to Club for Growth’s Steve Stephens you should be more concerned about Huckabee’s record and a taxer and a spender.  As David J. Saunders puts it:

Anti-tax groups, like the Club for Growth, have been at odds with Huckabee for a while, and at times it’s become quite heated...

In 2003, when Grover Norquist, president for Americans for Tax Reform, criticized Huckabee’s tendency to raise taxes instead of scaling back spending, he fired back.

“What do our critics want - to rip the feeding tubes out of an 8-year-old or an elderly person on Medicaid? Grover needs to run for governor somewhere, win, and then try to govern,” Huckabee told the Washington Times. “He makes it sound so easy.”

Yes.  No doubt.  But the truth is that keeping government under control is hard work, and if you aren’t hard at work pruning then you are letting it grow out of control.

And the quote about 8–year-olds and grannies is a liberal line, not a principled conservative one.

Because to a conservative the job of looking after 8–year-olds and grannies belongs to their family.  It does not belong to other peoples’ families through the tax system.

Libs Ante Up in War on Terror

Many conservatives are angry about the naked political slanting in the latest National Intelligence Estimate.  How do we suddenly know with high confidence that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003?  But I am more sanguine.

With the NIE the opponents of President Bush within the administration have put a bet on the table.  It’s one thing to be embarrassing the Bushies with embarrassing leaks.  It’s another thing when you suddenly up and say: Hey, look, No Nukes!  All of a sudden you have actually done something, and in today’s political climate that means that you become a target.

For instance, Kenneth R. TImmerman took a look at the NIE and found something different than what he was supposed to find.

What the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran actually said for the first time in an official, United States government document released to the public, is that Iran was actively pursuing nuclear weapons in 2003.

Well!  That’s certainly something to think about!

We conservatives must realize that the battle over the war on terror is a multigenerational thing, both within and without the United States.  We can’t win in one election cycle and put it behind us.  It’s going to be like the Cold War where the Democrats played a game of now we’re with you, now we’re against you, depending on the mood in the crazy left. 

So it’s good that the liberal mid-level bureaucrats have put out their marker.  That gives our side something to shoot at.

And anyway it doesn’t change the strategic situation.  Iran is a revolutionary power that the United States wants to keep under control.  Nukes or no nukes.

Romney's American Creed

You can read the MSM’s hostility to religion any time you open a newspaper or tune into a network news broadcast.  Here’s CNN on presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s speech on religion and America December 6, 2007.

White House hopeful Mitt Romney on Thursday articulated his position on the role of religion in America, but avoided details about his personal faith.

What is it about these people?  What is it?

Well we know.  Or modern secular educated elite thinks that it has a better belief system than the one developed by our Judeo-Christian tradition and manifested in the religious culture of the United States. And you can see why.

The pluralistic non-established religions of the United States cannot be controlled by the secular educated elite.  That is why they are trying to create an established secular religion with its “teachers” and “counselors” in every public institution of education.

But Mitt Romney is an American, not a secular American.  And the danger is that he can talk, as a presidential candidate, over the heads of the media directly to the American people. 

He can appeal directly to the American tradition that goes back to the founders, the tradition that the secular educated elite want to replace.

He can talk, as he did about the first prayer breakfast of the United States of America, before there was a United States.  It happened in the fall of 1774.  Given the dark clouds of war closing in, the members of the Continental Congress felt the need to pray.  As told by Romney:

But there were objections. ’They were too divided in religious sentiments’, what with Episcopalians and Quakers, Anabaptists and Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Catholics.

"Then Sam Adams rose, and said he would hear a prayer from anyone of piety and good character, as long as they were a patriot.

"And so together they prayed, and together they fought, and together, by the grace of God, they founded this great nation.

That’s the sort of thing that our secular educated friends don’t want to hear, and they don’t want you to hear.  And if they had their way no American in public life would dare to recount that incident, at least not without irony or scare quotes.

That is why there is a culture war being fought in the United States.  It is a war between those who want to continue the Judeo-Christian culture of the United States and those who want to replace it with a secular culture.

Gingrich pushes platform in Iowa

Newt’s in Iowa and running for VP.  He’s also pushing his latest update on the Contract with America, a poll-tested set of issues called “Platform for America.”  Here’s what he’s pushing, according to Ralph Z. Hollow.

The former speaker said his appearances in Iowa this week are "about a single-page flat tax" (82 percent), a "moment of silent prayer in school" (94 percent) and the "death penalty for anyone carrying out a terrorist act in the United States" (79 percent).

Newt says that the problem is that:

this is a center-right country caught between an incompetent right-wing party and a ruthlessly organized, energized, militant, minority left-wing party.

You can’t argue with that.  But the question is: why?

My answer is that the Republican Party would like to roll back the vast government edifice, as in:

Pensions: 6.2 percent GDP
Health Care: 6.2 percent GDP
Education: 5.7 percent GDP
Welfare: 3.0 percent GDP
source: usgovernmentspending.com

But they can’t because the Democratic Party stands “ruthlessly organized, energized, militant,” ready to defend every last program to the last 0.1 percent of GDP. 

Derb Admits He's Bored With Election

The federal government makes such a mess of everything that there’s not much any of the candidates can do.  And they are good candidates. Writes John Derbyshire:

I even like some of these guys. War hero... confident and successful businessman/governor... tough no-nonsense mayor... laid-back, witty showbiz type with good conservative creds... There’s plenty to like, almost an embarrassment of riches.

Leave aside the mess in housing, the declining dollar, the mess in Iraq.  There’s immigration.  What can a president do about that?

I think we’ve arrived at a point where the president may propose, but the courts, the federal bureaucracy, the interest groups, the lobbies and trial lawyers, and the ACLU, and CAIR, and MEChA, and LULAC dispose.

So what’s the point?  Better wait until things get really screwed up.

I may be bored, like Derb, but I’m not idle.

Right now, I’m loading up data on state and local government spending into my usgovernmentspending.com site. As the billions roll by, year after year, you ask: What are these people doing with all that money?  It's just wasted, isn't it?  Every last billion.  It's all about government doing what people could be, should be doing for themselves.

And there's another thing. This is a democracy, and the way democracy works is that the other chaps get to have a go.  Especially when the other chaps are mad as hell.  So it's time for the Democrats to get back to the White House.

in the bigger picture we are playing out the string on the welfare state right now. We know, from the Reagan era, that the Democrats are not ready to talk about reform yet.  We need another decade of welfare state ineptitude and waste and self-dealing to play out before we conservatives will get the chance for another wave of reform.

It's happening in Britland right now.  Ten years ago, the Labour Party was elected on the theme of "education, education, education."  What do you think has happened?  Britain has dropped in the OECD league tables, according to the Daily Telegraph.

In reading 15-year-olds in the UK dropped from seventh in 2000 to 17th... In maths, pupils fell from eighth to 24th... In science, secondary school students in the UK dropped from fourth to 14th.

And so, wonder of wonders, the Conservative Party is rising in the polls, and leader David Cameron is starting to look like a man who could be Prime Minister.

The point is that there is a flow in the tide of events, and the best thing is to be ready when the tide is flowing in your favor.

When the tide is ebbing, it’s best to anchor and wait for the tide to turn.

Chavez Loses Vote--Just

Let’s give one cheer for the failure of President Hugo Chavez to make himself president-for-life.  Venezuelans voted down his proposed constitutional “reforms.”  As Frank Bajak reports:

Foes of the reform effort - including Roman Catholic leaders, media freedom groups, human rights groups and prominent business leaders - said it would have granted Chavez unchecked power and imperiled basic rights.

It’s a sad fact of the modern age that the folks just arriving in the city from the farm—the working class, if you like—experience life as a battle against the powerful. 

So they vote for leaders who will fight for them against the powerful.

Unfortunately nearly all such leaders end up fighting the economy and leading their people to economic ruin.

Because whatever the working class may think, the market economy gives them the best prospects for a decent life—both in the short term and in the long term.

What workers should be doing is voting for politicians who will dismantle all the economic privileges that have been put in place to help the existing elite.  But they don’t.  They think that the answer to their economic struggle is to vote for a guy who will give them privileges.

When you make a mistake like that in this world, it ends up costing you big time.  And it looks as thought Venezuelans are already beginning to experience the inevitable result of a government that meddles recklessly with the national economy.

What is unconscionable is that media, educational, and cultural elites won’t tell the people the truth: that privileges, subsidies, and government handouts harm the people they are supposed to help.

Why won’t they? Probably because they too are clueless about the extraordinary system of democratic capitalism that we have built in the last two hundred years. After all, if you wrote for a living, taught school for a living, or acted in movies or TV what would you know about the reality of making products and services for the consumer?