Obama's Summer Trip

Our chaps have been doing a good job lately investigating Sen. Barack Obama’s lack of seriousness on Iraq.

Talk-show host Hugh Hewitt says to Obama: “Meet Michael Yon. Now, Read His Book.” He is referring to Yon’s recently published Moment of Truth in Iraq.

Presidential candidate John McCain has offered to take Obama to Iraq so that he can update his 872 day old views on that embattled country.

What kind of presidential candidate would last have been in Iraq 872 days ago and counting, the conservatives ask?

Come now, fellas. The answer is pretty straightforward: A candidate who needs to keep the Angry Left quiet until he gets the Democratic Presidential nomination. He wouldn’t want to know about the success of the surge, at least not yet. Not until August.

Up until Obama clinches the Democratic nomination he must be reliably against the war and for a troop withdrawal.

But after he gets the nomination...

Well, already, having rejected John McCain’s travel offer as a cheap political trick, he is saying that he might very well go to Iraq in the summer.

Here’s a prediction. When he gets back from Iraq and his little chat with Gen. Petraeus, Obama will say, “Why, Golly Gee!”

Well he won’t say that, but he will say the equivalent in liberalspeak.

“Why did President Bush lie to me about Iraq and the facts on the ground? I have been to Iraq and I can now say that the briefings I was getting from the Pentagon were all wrong. Based on my understanding of events on the ground and my conversations with people I have met there I believe there is a chance that we can stabilize the Iraq regime and bring our troops home. But in order for this to work the Iraqi government must do better in meeting its milestones, and I will insist that all milestones be met before a single additional soldier is sent to Iraq. Despite the incompetence of the Bush administration and its failed strategy I believe that we can achieve reconciliation in Iraq, and I have a plan to achieve success, one that corrects the mistakes of the Bush administration.”

And, of course the mainstream media will swoon. Best speech on national security by an American politician in the last 50 years, they will say.

They call this sort of thing “The Turn.”

Die, Conservatives, Die!

That’s the message of George Packer in a long New Yorker piece on “The Fall of Conservatism.”

Lefty bloggers are all agog over this piece, and conservatives certainly agree in part. Obviously political conservatism in the United States is in eclipse right now.

Packer argues that conservatism has always been a divisive force. It began with the Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon and Pat Buchanan in the 1960s.

“From Day One, Nixon and I talked about creating a new majority,” Buchanan told me... “What we talked about, basically, was shearing off huge segments of F.D.R.’s New Deal coalition, which L.B.J. had held together: Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern Protestant conservatives—what we called the Daley-Rizzo Democrats in the North and, frankly, the Wallace Democrats in the South.”

Conservatives might be surprised to learn that the conservative movement was not about Kirk and Buckley, Goldwater and Reagan, but instead a election strategy cooked up by Richard Nixon, he of wage and price controls and “we are all Keynesians now.” But you find this meme popping up a lot in liberaldom.

Liberals courageously stood up to the Solid South in the 1960s, the narrative goes, and passed the landmark civil rights acts over their dead bodies. (Actually Republicans voted about 80-20 and Democrats about 60-40 in the House and 70-30 in the Senate on the Civil Rights Act of 1964.) The Democrats’ reward for that was that they lost the South. The evil Richard Nixon crafted a Southern Strategy to attract racist southern whites and so the conservative movement was born.

We pass quickly over the Reagan years with the usual talk about mainstreaming the “positions of the right-wing fringe” and staffing the government with “doctrinaire conservatives” and recommence the narrative in 2001 when Vice-President Dick Cheney decided on confrontation, according to liberal former Senator Lincoln Chafee.

“We would seek confrontation on every front. . . . The new Administration would divide Americans into red and blue, and divide nations into those who stand with us or against us.”

You can see the point here. Conservatives are a disruptive force that have hindered the natural evolution of beneficial governance and lack a serious attitude to governing.

But Packer has a point. The conservative movement had an agenda of economic reform, winning the cold war, and rolling back the administrative state. Republicans found, after the 1994 election that Americans were not interested in rolling anything back.

So, while allowing welfare reform, Democrats were able to cold-cock Republicans on school choice, on Social Security reform, and are still committed to enclosing the entire health care sector in the grip of the administrative state.

Until the American people are ready to reform the administrative state, there really is no point in electing Republicans. In that sense, George Packer is right. Republicans have “run out of ideas.” Because Republicans are not particularly interested in running with ideas to grow the government.

Turning the Terrorists

Young men are natural-born killers. They love to fight and to kill. That is why it is young men who think up millennarian schemes and revolutions, and causes based on blood and killing.

Lee Harris has written about this persuasively in Civilization and Its Enemies. The great task of civilization, he writes, is to turn the “eternal gang of ruthless men,” the natural-born killers, into the benign and productive Western team.

In a long article in The New Yorker Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower, suggests that the terrorists of Al Qaeda are beginning to turn from terror.

Partly, of course, this is because the young firebrands of thirty years ago are now older and wiser. Partly this is because the Egyptian government has done a number on the hundreds of Islamic terrorists they have held in jail for years and years.

Partly this is because of a rivalry and jealousy between Islamist leaders Sayyid Imam al-Sharif (aka Dr. Fadl) and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Partly we are talking about a general revulsion over the killing of innocent women and children.

Then there is the shame that Egypt experiences as countries like India and China, probably poorer than Egypt a generation ago, are overtaking it and showing the bankruptcy of the terrorist program.

For what, after all, have the terrorists achieved, except to create a bloodbath and provoke the Great Satan to meddle deeper and deeper in the Middle East?

But if the terrorists are turning away from indiscriminate violence, it can be nothing but good.

Eevil Wal-Mart and Healthcare

Wal-Mart is sinking its eevil corporate fangs into health care, and nobody is doing anything to stop it.

But don’t worry, someone will notice pretty soon.

Wal-Mart is hated by every liberal because Wal-Mart moves heaven and earth to prevent the unionization of its employees. You can understand Wal-Mart’s position on this. Why would they want to turn their associates into surly unionized auto workers or even surly unionzied DMV workers. Or totally ineffective unionized education workers.

And did you know that Wal-Mart has a waiting period for part-time employees before it offers them health insurance? It’s an outrage!

Now Wal-Mart is moving into health care. It is gradually expanding its generic drugs program, offering a three-month’s supply of most generic drugs for $10, according to financial columnist Jim Jubak.

But the big move by Wal-Mart is its in-store health clinics where the standard charge is $45 per visit, cash or credit, but no insurance.

In other words, Wal-Mart is applying its Always Low Prices, Always business model into health care. And they are moving into electronic health records too, so that your records will follow you around from Wal-Mart to Wal-Mart.

The big payoff is that all the other players are sitting up and taking notice.

The best thing about letting Wal-Mart do it is that the company won’t have to fix the health care system all by itself. Wal-Mart’s entry into this field has already galvanized competition from retailers such as Target... and CVS Caremark...



Some, like Target, are matching Wal-Mart step by step. Some are arguably ahead of the giant retailer. Clinic operator MinuteClinic is a CVS subsidiary that operates more clinics than Wal-Mart has opened to date.

Meanwhile the politicians are offering more subsidy (McCain) or compulsion (Obama and Clinton). As we know, subsidy and compulsion have been a great success in education, health care, welfare and everything else in which the government is involved.

You can be sure that Wal-Mart will get the blame for this eevil corporate scheme. Whatever it is that they have done, and nobody is yet sure what it is.

Meanshile we can all enjoy it as the bloated health-care industry starts to squirm.

Obama's Iran Gaffe

When a Republican makes a gaffe it’s usually a career-ender. Or at least it makes him a laughing-stock forever. But usually the gaffe is not really a mistake. It is usually something that liberals insist you are not allowed to say.

But for Democrats the rules are different. Take Obama’s Iran gaffe. Back in July 2007 on the infamous YouTube debate Obama agreed with a lefty questioner and said he would meet with the leaders of Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, etc., “without preconditions” in the first year of his presidency.

Then, as Charles Krauthammer relates,

On Sunday, he declared in Pendleton, Ore., that, by Soviet standards, Iran and others “don’t pose a serious threat to us.”

Iran was “tiny,”he said. Yet a day later, Obama said something completely different.

The next day in Billings, Mont.: “I’ve made it clear for years that the threat from Iran is grave.”

The reason that this is a problem is that it makes nonsense of any sort of consistent narrative about foreign policy. What does Obama believe? How will he formulate foreign policy? This sort of chopping around suggests that he doesn’t know what he is talking about. As the postmodernists say, you gotta have a narrative. (Actually they don’t. They say that power is justified by a narrative.)

The thing is, if Obama were a Republican he would be toast. But because he is a Democrat, and this year’s media Great White Hope, he gets a pass.

I’d say that the DriveBy media would do themselves a favor by being as tough on their guys as they are on the racist, sexist, homophobic opposition.

Because Sen. Barack Obama just isn’t ready for prime time, and it shows.

A Word from Tom DeLay

We haven’t heard too much lately from Tom DeLay, the architect, after Newt Gingrich, of the Republican capture of Congress in 1994. We know he’s a passionate conservative, but we haven’t heard too much of what he is doing.

In a recent op-ed, DeLay urges conservatives to get moving. There are plenty of good ideas floating around, he writes, and a few bad ones too. But whatever the ideas “Our core principles of order, justice, and freedom do not change.” Here’s his advice to Republicans running this year.

Republican incumbents and challengers running for Congress this year can translate the values of order, justice, and freedom into five basic principles for conservative government: winning the war; rewriting a 21st century tax code; redesigning government, according to constitutional precepts; restoring the federal judiciary to its proper and constitutional place; and, cultivating our society’s culture of life.

Let’s face it, he suggests, the future is wide open to conservatives.

Questions like “What does victory in the war on terror look like?” and “If we had to create a health care or retirement system from scratch, what would it look like?” will never be asked, let alone answered by liberals.

Why is this so? Why don’t liberals swoop down and grab the best ideas of conservatives instead of barking and snapping at every proposed conservative reform like the dog in the manger? It’s a good question. My own view is that liberals are too focused on personal agendas, particularly the chimera of “creativity,” to think seriously about political ideas.

Meanwhile conservatives can get busy.

Without the responsibilities of a majority party, minority Republicans in the House can work with leading conservatives from around the country to devise specific reforms of our health care, immigration, budget, energy, and tax systems. They can force the Democrats to go on the record about the war on terror, marriage, and the proper role of faith in the public square. Through the vote you regain your stature and credibility. Meanwhile, individual candidates from around the country can interpret conservative principles to best suit their own districts.

When will this all come to fruition? My answer is: sooner than you think. So there is no time to be lost.

The Next Batch of Rejects

A generation ago, in 1980, I went to the Republican precinct caucus to nominate George Bush for president.

But there was a bunch of unfamiliar faces there. People who looked like they ought to be Democrats. And they were all for Ronald Reagan. It turned out we were all for Reagan.

The Reagan Democrats were the last lot expelled from the Democratic Party. In 1960 the Democratic Party was unequivocably the party of the working stiff and the lunch-pail crowd. By 1980 it had become the party of elite liberals and identity client groups. University professors obligingly produced a political philosophy of identity. It more or less amounted to the marginalization of mainstream America as racist, sexist, classist, and homophobic.

In an Orwellian twist, this meant that Americans who didn’t think exclusively in terms of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation were in fact the racists, sexists, etc.

Not surprisingly, most people didn’t take too kindly to this. They still don’t.

It seems that this year the Democrats are intent on expelling the last few remaining old-line Democrats, the ones that believe in God and the First Amendment. For it seems that while the post-Sixties Democratic Party could tolerate having a few religious crazies and gun nuts around if they kept quiet, the new Obama Democrats really can’t be bothered to be polite to them any more.

“Change,” it seems, means completing the transformation that began with a bang in 1968 when the “kids” took over and marginalized the mainstream FDR coalition.

This year is shaping up to be a bad year for Republicans, and deservedly so. So the special conditions of this year’s election may mask the underlying trends. The moment of truth will come in 2010 and 2012, when the American people have to decide if they really want the federal government to be exclusively a government of liberals, by liberals, and for liberals—and their client groups.

My nickel says they won’t.

Message to BillG: Try Freedom in Education

Billionaire Bill Gates made a fortune in the software business, doing stuff without permission, exercising his God-given talents and revolutionizing business and society.

But when it comes to philanthropy, it’s same old, same old, according to Neal McCluskey from the Cato Institute. Gates’ strategy for education, partnered with Eli Broad of KBH Homes, is all about big government.

[A] forum sponsored by their $60 million Strong American Schools initiative last Wednesday made clear that when it comes to education, they’re backing a tired, big-government loser.

Oh dear. You’d think the new generation of philanthopists would have learned something from business. Unfortunately, it seems to be that you don’t mess with government or you’ll get your head handed to you.

How about freedom in education? At least Sen. John McCain seems to be taking some baby steps in that direction.

“[A] public education should be defined as one in which our public support for a child’s education follows that child into the school the parent chooses,” McCain’s education statement declares.

Maybe our education Pooh-bahs should learn from our economic competitors.

In education, the ascendant South Koreans consume more private schooling than the people of any other industrialized nation. Even parents in the world’s poorest slums know the score. Ongoing work by British researcher James Tooley in impoverished places like Ga, Ghana, and Hyderabad, India, find poor parents turning in droves to for-profit private schools in order to move their kids ahead.

You can read more about James Tooley here.

Could it be that we can actually trust parents to educate their children without the detailed day-to-day supervision of the state?

Probably we’ll have to, because in another generation the government education system will have run down some more, delivering less and less at a cost of more and more.

By then, educating your own children will not be just a choice, but a matter of survival.

Reality on Judicial Activism

Now we conservatives are all in a tizzy about the California Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage. How could they, we wail? How could they find the right to gay marriage in the Fourteenth Amendment? How could they turn upside down centuries of tradition and custom?

They found it because they regard the issue as a simple matter of dignity and equality. They found it because the Enlightenment proposes that anything that can’t be rationally defended ought to be regarded as a superstition. Of course gays should be able to marry if they love one another. Isn’t it obvious?

Conservatives have to understand that we are a subculture in the United States. The educated elite, which drives the culture, gets to set the agenda on most everything in the United States, and we should that’s the way it is.

What conservatives have the power to do is make life very uncomfortable for the educated elite.

Mostly, we can make it uncomfortable at the ballot box. Thus we have moved the chains on abortion and guns because Democrats have found that their support for abortion and gun control loses elections.

On gay marriage the media and the courts naturally follow the lead of liberal activists and enact their agenda. That’s what politics is all about. Conservatives only get a look in when a policy manifestly fails (and we are talking big-time failure like welfare) or because Democrats start losing elections.

Does gay marriage constitute an attack on heterosexual marriage? Will it lead to polygamy and bestiality as the alarmists insist? Nobody knows. And even if it does it may not make any difference unless the Democratic support for gay marriage starts losing them elections.

Think of this. The government education system is a mess and mostly hurts the children of minorities. But the Democrats don’t care. Because the victims of the lousy education system don’t turn around and vote for Republicans.

That’s the tragedy about the social issues. It is lower-class Democrats that suffer from the dumbing down of the culture, the sexualization of childhood, the decline of marriage. It is their lives that are blasted by social breakdown.

Surely we should be able to find a way to speak to them. But to communicate we’d probably have to talk the language of victimhood. And Republicans don’t do victimhood. We don’t believe in it.

Now She Tells Us

After the “stunning” loss of a special congressional election in Mississippi, many Republicans are “stunned.” Really, writes Peggy Noonan. On her reckoning:

You have to be stupid to be stunned by that... Most party leaders in Washington are stupid – detached, played out, stuck in the wisdom they learned when they were coming up, in ’78 or ’82 or ’94... In politics especially, the first lesson sticks.

What Republicans should have done is broken with Bush back in 2005, or ’06, or ’07, Noonan advises. It’s a bit late now. Anyway,

"Members and pundits . . . fail to understand the deep seated antipathy toward the president, the war, gas prices, the economy, foreclosures," said Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia in a 20-page memo to House GOP leaders.

I’ll say. You can say that the war is now going well, that the economy ain’t so bad. You can say that the gas prices are high because Democrats have stood on the drill rig platform for twenty years forbidding exploration for oil. You can say that the foreclosures are an ineviable result of half a century of housing subsidies.

But that is beside the point. It all happened on Bush’s watch and so the Democrats are going to run on the idea that voting for McCain is voting for a third term for Bush and his mistakes. You can’t argue with that!

In my view we must stop all this defeatism. Of course the conservative brand is badly burned right now. Of course Republicans deserve to be soundly defeated. Of course the American people think it is “time for a change.” But we’ll be back, and sooner than you think.

Conservatives believe that it is time to radically downsize the government role in education. Democrats believe that it is time to expand government education with universal pre-school.

Conservatives believe that it is time to crank down the huge government role in health care, getting most people to pay directly for routine health care. Democrats want to extend government power in health care by forcing everyone to carry health insurance.

Conservatives believe we should prospect for oil and gas, and that we should respond to any global warming by adaptation. Democrats believe we need swingeing taxes and regulation and subsidy to transform the energy economy.

Conservatives believe that we should reduce the government preseence in the social safety net, and that we should re-empower the mediating institutions of family, church, association, and neighborhood. Democrats believe we should normalize gay marriage.

These are huge differences, and both sides cannot be right. Each approach implies a vastly different approach to government and society.

Conservatives believe that we are right and that the liberals are wrong. What is more we believe that the Democratic path will lead to serious economic and social dislocation. We believe that it is not a question of “if” but “when” America gets a clue and realizes that we are right about the major issues of our time.

Win or lose in November these issues will define the politics of the next fifty years. Therefore we should not lose heart and give into despair.

Be not afraid.

Oh, and Peggy. Could you think of something helpful to contribute to the conservative narrative?

Enviro-racism

Environmentalists are racists. And sexists, and classists. Think that’s a little bit extreme?

Then read Roy Ennis of the Congress on Racial Equality. When Ennis looks at the proposals of environmentalists and global warming enthusiasts he can’t help wonder if they care about poor folks.

The Congress of Racial Equality and I care deeply about our environment. But we also care about having jobs, and affordable food, heat and transportation. We care about impoverished Third World families achieving their dreams.

Me too. You wonder about the agenda of rich environmentalists.

The fact is that you can trust rich people to look after themselves. And one of the things that rich people value is open space and freedom from “sprawl,” other peoples’ sprawl, that it. But you can’t really trust them to think of other peoples’ needs.

When the rich environmentalists want to make ANWR out of bounds to oil production, and the outer continental shelf, it means something. When they want to stop energy development to save the polar bear, it means something.

These energy takings force Americans to pay more for energy that is artificially scarce. Their economic progress is held back. They lose the jobs that energy development would create. They lose billions of dollars in royalties and taxes.

So let’s go ahead and blame ExxonMobil and Shell Oil for “price-gouging.” That should teach them a lesson. And it is bound to help the poor.

Polar Bear Threatened

With the listing of the polar bear by the Interior Department as a “ threatened” species, here’s the current state of the Stupidity Index:

• Polar bear threatened
  
• No oil drilling in ANWR
  
• No oil drilling on continental shelf
  
• No refineries built in last 30 years
  
• No nuclear plants built in last 30 years
  
• No reform of education in 100 years
  
• Huge subsidies for health care
  
• Huge subsidies for homeownership
  
• Huge subsidies for higher education
  

And so on. Of course, this is nothing new, or even extraordinary. The whole point of government is to use power to short-circuit the operation of the market and its tendency to deliver products and services that the consumers want and at the price they are willing to pay. When you go to government to get some privilege or subsidy, you are trying to do an end run on people without access to power, and do a little “rent-seeking” courtesy of your friendly local politician.

Maybe it’s just as well that Republicans are getting flushed down the toilet this year. When all these problems and stupidities back up, we wouldn’t want it to be on the Republicans’ watch, now would we?

Conservatives: Be Not Afraid

According to the opinion polls, over 80 percent of Americans think that the US is on the wrong track. But does that really mean: Go Left, asks Dennis Prager?

Well, yes it does, Dennis. The American people have two choices when they go to the polls. It’s the donkey or the elephant, and right now, they are sick of the elephant. It doesn’t matter why: Iraq war, mortgage meltdown. Americans are sick of it, and they think that it is time for a change.

The question is whether the kind of change they want is the kind of change that Democrats are offering.

If you vote for Barack Obama, you are voting for more government in health care, more government in schooling, more government in the energy industry, and more “progressive” social agenda.

My guess is that Americans aren’t in favor of all that. But they do want the troubles of the past eight years to go away.

Unfortunately that’s no way to live. There is only one way to live, and that is to follow the advice of Pope John Paul II to the oppressed nations of the Soviet Empire: “Be Not Afraid.”

In worrying about the future under a new Democrat administration, Dennis Prager sounds almost defeatist.

There is no call for defeatism. Be Not Afraid. Democrats won’t be able to destroy the nation in two or four years. In fact, a short Democratic interregnum might be the best possible thing for America.

The American people need another good look at the Democrats, and they deserve to get it. When they see what they get, the higher taxes, the bigger government, the declining schools, the higher energy prices, they’ll think again.

And then the conservative army, after a dose of the time that tries mens’ souls, will be ready for another glorious era of conservative reform.

But first we must be clear. Like is uncertain; reverses are inevitable. Be Not Afraid.

America Moving to the Middle?

Everyone says that they are fed up with the partisanship of the past decade. In consequence many people are eager to uncover signs that the partisan years are over, and that America is moving to the middle.

So along come Gerald F. Seib and John Harwood to tell us that Americans want change.

When the Wall Street Journal and NBC News surveyed voters in December, as the campaign began, almost half agreed that America needed "major reforms and a brand new and different approach" to handling problems.

Earth to Seib and Harwood: Major reform is what Republicans have been trying to enact for the last 12 years since Newt Gingrich won a Republican majority in Congress.

But major reform, if it means anything, means major changes in the way we run government. If it would mean anything it would mean changing the numbers on government spending. Here are the numbers for 2008 from usgovernmentspending.com

• Pensions: $911.6 billion
  
  
• Health Care: $925.0 billion
  
  
• Education: $848.2 billion
  
  
• Defense: $730.8 billion
  
  
• Welfare: $445.2 billion

Now, seriously, what kind of a hope do we have that any substantial change will happen in the delivery of these huge programs?

A big part of the current animus, Seib and Harwood claim, is that Congressmen no longer live yearround in Washington. When Friday rolls around everyone heads back home to the voters instead to sticking around and socializing.

But there is hope. There’s Mara Vanderslice, a Democratic operative who is trying to develop outreach to religious voters. She represents “a new wave of younger activists willing to reach across party lines for the causes they advocate.” That’s one way of putting it. But her website Common Good Strategies seems to be nothing more than a Democratic Party organ. Its mission is:

Working with the Democratic Party and non-profits on the local and national level to reach out and build authentic relationships with America’s diverse religious communities.

OK. Why not Peter Wehner, “a genial social conservative who worked for Mr. Rove in the Bush White House?” He sees, apparently, a movement among evangelicals away from abortion “toward social issues, social justice and aid to Africa.”

If you read what Peter Wehner actually writes—for instance this piece for the Commentary blog—you experience basic Republican partisan talking points.

This talk of moving to the center is just a slow-day navel piece. The level of partisanship is a measure of the political temperature: how much agitation is there for change and how much resistance is there to reform.

The partisanship of the last decade issued out of Republican desire for reform and Democratic determination to stop it. Right now, Republicans are exhausted and discouraged. So you can expect a period of quiet.

But something tells me: Not for long.

BritCon Throws Down Gauntlet

Lots of people think that British Conservative Party leader David Cameron is a lightweight. I don’t. Instead I see a strategic mind at work.

This week, after cold-cocking the British Labour Party in the local elections and scoring a huge gain in the horse-race opinion polls, Cameron wrote an op-ed for the lefty Independent: “We are the champions of progressive ideals.” He throws down the gauntlet immediately.

A painful reality is dawning on Labour MPs: in its longest unbroken period in office, Labour has done little to advance progressive ideals. A government that promised social justice and economic efficiency has in fact delivered neither, to the dismay of the Labour Party. Instead, it is the Conservative Party that is the champion of progressive ideals in Britain today.

Look, he writes, nobody can deny that income redistribution has done a lot to alleviate poverty. But “those methods have now run their course.”

The returns from big state intervention are not just diminishing, they are disappearing.

In other words it is time for the left to admit that just throwing money at the poor doesn’t help the poor. It is not lack of money that causes deprivation, it is lack of character. Something else is needed, and Conservatives know what it is.

[W]e will use the modern mechanisms of civil society – whether it’s businesses that can really help get people trained and ready for work, social enterprises that get people permanently off drugs, or charities and community groups that can give couples the support they need when relationships come under pressure. For us it’s about the whole public realm, not just the public sector.

As David Cameron has said, time and time again: “There is such a thing as society. It’s just not the same thing as the State.” By forgetting that truth, first enunciated by Edmund Burke over two centuries ago, the progressive dream has guttered out into fumbling darkness. But there is a way out.

If you care about poverty, if you care about inequality, if you care about the environment – forget about the Labour Party. It has forgotten about you. If you count yourself a progressive, a true progressive, only we [the Conservative Party] can achieve real change.

The latest opinion poll has the Conservative Party ahead of the Labour Party by 49% to 23%. Talk about kicking a guy when he’s down.

The Happiness Quotient

First he discovered that conservative religious people give more, in Who Really Cares? Now Arthur C. Brooks is writing about happiness, according to Maggie Gallagher, and the happiest people are—wait for it—religious conservatives.

Really, this should surprise nobody. We know that the worst thing in the world is to have nothing to do and nothing to contribute. Naturally, conservatives are happier than liberals.

For Brooks, one of the great surprises was the enormous "happiness gap" between political liberals and political conservatives that has persisted over the last 35 years.
...
Of course, conservatives are more likely to be religious and to be married, both important contributors to happiness. Religious liberals, for example, are happier than secular liberals, but neither group is nearly as happy as people who say that they are both religious and conservative. Fifty percent of religious conservatives are very happy and just 5 percent are not too happy.

Freedom, according to Brooks, makes people happier. But people are also happier when they live under “moral constraint.”

What makes people happy is freedom and community. That seems a paradox. How can you be free and yet bound into a community that may shame you and judge you?

That’s how liberals think. We conservatives know better. You make yourself happy when you are free to bind yourself in loving service to others. As Minette Marrin wrote back in 2001: compassion and community without compulsion.

Somehow that notion has a familiar ring.

Last Refuge of a Liberal

Great news! Hillary Clinton, fighting for the people against the elites, vows to smash OPEC, according to Geoff Elliott.

"We’re going to go right at OPEC," she told supporters in Merrillville, Indiana. "They can no longer be a cartel, a monopoly that get together once every couple of months in some conference room in some plush place in the world, they decide how much oil they’re going to produce and what price they’re going to put it at.



"That’s not a market. That’s a monopoly," she said, saying she would use US anti-monopoly laws as well as the World Trade Organisation to take on OPEC.

Bless my buttons. You mean to say that one-size-fits-all health care Hillary has found a monopoly she doesn’t like? I thought that Democrats were all in favor of high energy prices because we need to conserve on our wasteful use of non-renewable energy and save the planet and stop global warming.

Listen, honey. Oil prices are high because you Democrats have been standing in the gas-station forecourt stopping the oil companies from doing what they are born to do. When Big Oil wants to drill for oil you tell the oil guys they can’t. Not in Alaska, not in the Gulf of Mexico, not deep offshore. When Big Oil wants to build a new refinery, you say no deal.

And now you want to blame OPEC for high energy prices?

Who was it who said: “Populism is the last refuge of a liberal.”

So it’s come this. In her last desperate bid to get the nomination for President of the United States, Hillary “politics of meaning” Clinton is demagoguing on energy.

Listen America. If you want low energy prices there is one thing you should never do. Never, never, never vote for a Democrat.

Now It's the Vast Elite Conspiracy

That Hillary Clinton is some smart girl. It was she, ten years ago, who fearlessly deployed her super-sniffer conspiracy detector during the Clinton impeachment scandal. She found nothing less than a “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy” determined to drive her husband out of office.

When you work hard at something, you get to be pretty good at it. This last month, according to David Brooks, Sen. Clinton has discovered a vast elite conspiracy. This cabal of naysayers have conspired to pour scorn on her proposal to enact a gas tax holiday. On ABC’s This Week,

[Host George] Stephanopoulos asked her to name a single economist who thinks a tax-holiday plan would work, and the daughter of Wellesley and Yale took the chance to shove the geeks into their lockers: "I’m not going to put my lot in with economists."

David Brooks had to admit a certain admiration for Sen. Clinton’s brazen conversion to the practice of populist demogoguery.

This wasn’t just shameless spin, it was shamelessness with a purpose. Clinton signaled that she wasn’t going to concede even an inch to the vast elitist conspiracy. She wasn’t going to feel guilty about ignoring the evidence. She was going to stomp on it, flay it and leave it a twisted mass of jelly quivering on the ground. She was going to perform the primordial duty of an alpha dog leader ’” helping one’s own.

Thus all of a sudden the most liberal member of the United States Senate, Sen. Obama, gets to look like a moderate. While Clinton believes in raw power, Obama gets to look like a politician who believe in the power of communication.

They are imperfect messengers for their creeds. Clinton rails against “Wall Street money-grubbers,” but her policies are often drawn from the Wall Street wing of the party. Obama talks about postpartisan compromise in the abstract, but rarely in the particular.

The problem is that America’s problem is not a lack of raw power or a lack of communication. It is an excess of raw government and its obsession with power and the appeasement of powerful and/or vocal interests.

Don’t look to Sen. Clinton or to Sen. Obama if you want a solution to that problem. Not that either of them could possibly be called an elitist.

Changing the Terms of the Debate

After the Conservative Party’s local election win in Britain last week, Janet Daley asks: what next?

The answer, she writes, involves reframing the debate. Gordon Brown (and liberals here in the US) want to say that the choice before us is

between a party (his) that believes in "doing things" - taking people out of poverty, unlocking talent, etc, etc - and one that would prefer to "walk away" and leave people to get on with it.

No, no, no. Conservatives have got to insist on a different debate. Government can’t take people out of poverty, except in a temporary way.

[T]he state cannot "lift" people out of poverty (except in the most temporary sense), only people themselves can do that; that government cannot unlock talent, it can only get out of its way; that the surest way to keep the number of helpless and incompetent to an absolute minimum is to reduce dependency on the state as much as possible.

On the contrary, “caring for people means allowing them to take responsibility.” Because if you don’t let people take responsibility you turn them into political vegetables. That is fine for vegetables. But for people it is wrong.

Employment: Household Survey Up Big Time

Here we go again. The Labor Department’s Employment Situation Summary released today shows employment down by 20,000 jobs—if you look at the Establishment Survey, the data obtained from employers.

But if you look at the Household Survey, the survey of people, asking them whether they are employed or not, then you get a different story, a radically different story. In the Household Survey employment is up by a shattering 362,000 jobs. This number comes about equally from a reduction in unemployment of 189,000 and an increase in the labor force of 173,000

So which do you believe? The headline “jobs” reported by the mainstream media or the Household Survey data?

Really, we are getting two ccompletely different stories. The employers are reporting that we are in a recession, and the nation’s households are reporting that we are getting out of a recession.

The difference is pretty significant. Who is right? Tune in for next month’s exciting episode.

Congress Can't Do Nothin' Right

Thank goodness for one thing. What with the spiraling increase in food prices the leaders of our beloved Congress are going to fight for the people against the powerful on ethanol.

They are going to lower ethanol subsidies, according to Stephen Dinan.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer allowed as how this was a case of “unintended consequences.”

"The view was to look to alternatives and try to become more dependent on the Midwest than the Middle East. I mean, that was the theory. Obviously, sometimes there are unforeseen or unintended consequences of actions," Mr. Hoyer, Maryland Democrat, told reporters yesterday.

Well, why don’t we go a bit further and say that whenever Congress enacts a subsidy it is almost bound to screw things up.

It’s just that when you start playing the subsidy game with energy and food you have a much better chance of creating a mess than, say subsidies for college.

That’s because there is an open market for energy and food. But college is a witch’s brew of privilege and rent seeking that simmers away in a back room.

Actually, college subsidies—including subsidies paid to students and subsidies paid directly to colleges—probably directly hurt people in just the same way as etehanol subsidies divert food-producing cropland into ethanol production. But the effects are more difficult to tease out, and don’t have the headline potential of soaring fuel and soaring food prices.

OK. Congress is going to take a baby step back to energy sanity. Now let’s do something serious about energy. Let’s drill for oil. Let’s open up the ocean for drilling. And let’s start building nuclear plants again.

After all, even the “consensus” scientists now say that global warming catastrophe is a little further off than they thought.

They’d have to. Global temperatures haven’t risen in ten years.