Conservatives Obtuse on '60s Civil Rights

Why was it that Sen. Barry Goldwater voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act? A majority of Republicans in both Houses of Congress voted for it. But Mr. Conservative voted against.

William Voegeli tells how it came about.

The fact is that Bill Buckley and the National Review crowd were so anxious to roll back the New Deal and Big Government that they were blind to the need for federal brute force to end the power of the segregationist South. They hoped that the South would evolve away from Jim Crow. And they wrote cringingly embarrassing stuff about whites being for now at least “the advanced race.”

When the Civil Rights Act came up for passage two young lawyers, William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, briefed Sen. Goldwater to vote against the bill. The rest, as they say, is history.

Eventually, Bill Buckley realized that he had been wrong.

Asked by Time in 2004 whether he regretted any positions he had taken in the past, Buckley said simply, "Yes. I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong: federal intervention was necessary."

It was, writes Voegeli, “a textbook example of letting the best be the enemy of the good” and conservatives have paid for their sorry obtuseness in spades, as blacks have never after 1960 voted more than 10 percent for a Republican presidential candidate and liberals have seen the civil-rights template as the first, best, and only appropriate way to deal with social problems.

Yes, but, conservatives may retort.

But nothing. With an African American man the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party in 2008, liberals can be justly proud of their courage back in the 1960s.

President Johnson in 1964 is said to have told an aide that Democrats had probably lost the South for a generation, and he probably thought they would lose the presidency as well. In other words, he understood that passing the Civil Rights Acts would have untold consequences, many of which could hurt his party. But he did it any way because it was the right thing to do.

Whenever conservatives get a little cocky about their noble virtue versus the eternal perfidy of the liberals, it wouldn’t hurt to remember their foolishness and pusillanimity back in the decisive decade of civil rights.

Heller and "Select Militias"

The big takeaway for me on the Second Amendment case of District of Columbia v. Heller is the description of its history.

Justice Scalia writes intriguingly about what the framers and the people of the 18th century thought about the right to keep and bear arms.

Their memory was the attempt by governments to disarm the people they didn’t like. In the late 17th century their memory was of the British kings Charles II and James II and their “select militias.”

Between the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution, the Stuart Kings Charles II and James II succeeded in using select militias loyal to them to suppress political dissidents, in part by disarming their opponents.

You can imagine that folks didn’t have a very rosy memory of that time. In the runup to the American Revolution a similar thing occurred, according to Scalia. This time the British king was George III.

In the tumultuous decades of the 1760s and 1770s, the Crown began to disarm the inhabitants of the most rebellious areas. That provoked polemical reactions by Americans invoking their rights as Englishmen to keep arms.

Governments don’t disarm the populace out of a noble desire to preserve peace. They do it out of a desire to weaken their opponents.

The situation really isn’t that different today. Liberals want guns out of the hands of conservatives. They see right-wing militias under every bush. Liberals are in charge of education, culture, and the government bureaucracy and they instinctively know that it is not in their interest to have the average conservative householder armed and dangerous. Neither side is going to give up, not without a fight.

Glenn Reynolds makes this point in the New York Post today.

But winning in the Supreme Court is just the beginning of the story. Even the biggest civil-rights victories have taken years to percolate through the lower courts, often in the face of foot-dragging or outright resistance from lower-court judges, states and municipalities.

Seems like the National Rifle Association is still going to need our support.

Heller Doesn't End It

Today the United States Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller upheld the plain meaning of the Second Amendment. But obviously it didn’t end there. The decision was 5-4 in favor of the amendment and it’s likely that the next president will be a liberal.

Anyway, as we know, liberals never stop litigating. So we can see that liberal groups will start moving cases through the court system in the hope that they will ultimately reach the Supreme Court when a couple more liberal justices have been appointed to the bench. Maybe then the Court will see the light and end the slaughter of guns in the streets.

Obviously that is a concern for conservatives. We’d like to think that the gun thing was put to bed, that the Second Amendment means what it says it means, that Americans are free-born people with the rights of a free people. That is: they have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and that among these rights are the rights of self-defense.

But we know that liberals really don’t believe in rights for anyone but themselves and their clients. They are against the First Amendment if it means that conservatives can compete in the public square. They are against the Second Amendment if it means that conservatives can defend themselves from liberal-supported criminal predators.

But I am encouraged. I reckon that the attitude to take with would-be liberal challengers to District of Columbia v. Heller is: Go ahead, make my day.

If a liberal court were ever to overturn Heller then conservatives would have a “single issue” that would keep giving and giving for years.

Are You Sure, Dems?

If you scratch a Democrat this year, you will probably find someone who feels like they are waking up out of a bad dream, the bad dream of 28 years of conservative backlash against rational, progressive governance.

To put it another way, Democrats have learned nothing from the last 30 years. They still believe in top-down expert-led central government programs to organize and direct the commanding heights of the economy, politics, and the culture.

But here’s my prediction. After Barack Obama gets elected president and the Dems increase their majorities in Congress they are going to get a wake-up call. Americans really don’t know what they want, but they don’t want liberals bossing them around.

Here are four issues that show the Dems just don’t get it.

Universal Pre-K It’s not just Hillary Clinton with a lovely wrapped present of universal pre-kindergarten schooling and care. It’s Obama. Writes Terence Jeffrey about Obama’s plan to raise our kids for us:

We used to do it ourselves. Now, convinced we have better things to do, many of us leave the job to others.



Encouraging this flight from parenthood, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has proposed what he calls his "Zero to Five" plan. It is a collection of programs aimed at getting the government involved in the raising of your children from the moment they are born.

Are you really sure about that, Sen Obama? Given what a wonderful job government has done with K-12 education, do you really think that a centralized, top-down, bureaucratic approach to early childhood education is really going to be anything other than a big plum for the education blob?

Energy and Global Warming Sen. Obama has said that $5 per gallon gasoline is inevitable. He just wished it hadn’t happened all of a sudden. As Sheldon Alberts reports, Obama is against “dirty oil” like the Alberta tar sands play that is ramping up north of us in Canada.

Barack Obama on Tuesday vowed he would break America’s addiction to "dirty, dwindling, and dangerously expensive" oil if he is elected U.S. president — and one of his first targets might well be Canada’s oil sands.

Obama says "The possibilities of renewable energy are limitless." Well, yes, Senator. But until renewable energy actually comes in cheaper than fossil fuel it is just a possibility. You can’t commit the people of the United States to a possibility. And that means that you can’t commit the United States to a radical move away from fossil fuels merely on the prediction of advocates that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will have catastrophic results a century from now. What if they are wrong?

What you can do is spend a little here and there on research and on easing the development hurdles for new technologies. But a rigid top-down energy program is going to fail. “Plans are useless, but planning is essential.” That’s what President Eisenhower said about military plans. The same applies to any top down plan. It doesn’t survive the first few minutes of battle, but it’s essential to have thought and planned about the future, so you can adapt when you find out that your assumptions were all wrong.

Fairness Doctrine

Nancy Pelosi told a group of journalists recently that she was in favor of reviving the Fairness Doctrine, according to John Gizzi. It’s understandable that Democrats are frustrated by the success of Rush Limbaugh and talk radio. But the answer isn’t to try and shut them up. The answer is for elite liberals to think seriously about their agenda and about why “liberal” has become a dirty word.

Actually, Rush gives the impression that he is hoping for a revival of the Fairness Doctrine. It would make him the most popular man in America, and probably propel a Republican into the White House.

Universal Health Insurance Democrats still can’t get beyond the century-old idea of cradle-to-grave government-controlled health insurance. What will it solve? Not much. But it will create a crisis in health care that will reverberate through the political system with unknown results.

Raising Tax Rates Senator Obama is promising to raise tax rates on the wealthy, by extending the FICA payroll tax and by increasing capital gains taxes and dividend taxes. Apart from the fact that the rich are already paying a bigger share of income tax than before and the bottom half of taxpayers are paying nothing, there is the international problem. Worldwide, governments are lowering tax rates. Does Obama really think he can raise tax rates in the US without a negative hit to the economy?

All these issues tell me one thing. Democrats haven’t really tried to think about the meaning of the last 30 years of American politics. They just want to forget the nightmare of Reagan and Bush and get back to politics as usual. That means that they are in for a nasty surprise.

What's So Depressing?

Women are twice as likely to be depressed as men, writes Dennis Prager.

If that’s true, then maybe we should do something about it.

But first we have to ask: Why?

Is is patriarchal oppression? Is it the glass ceiling? Is it the lack of affordable child care?

Prager is a conservative, so he’s more likely to suggest that the problem is liberalism. And so he does.

One of the things we’ve done, as ordered by liberals, is to end the traditional culture that pressured men to curb their natural instincts for rape and violence. But we have also curbed the tradition that pressured women to curb their feelings.

Societies and parents also always knew that it was imperative to teach girls to control their natures — in particular their predilection to be ruled by their emotions. Women who allowed their emotions to rule them not only became destructive (to members of their families first and foremost), they became unhappy women.

Then, of course, women have been encouraged to curb their feminity, the natural modesty and chastity of women. Most women, I have noticed, return to femininity as they get older, taking a joy in children, pretty things, and the day-to-day texture of life. But for many, the lost years of “You Go Girl” can never be replaced.

On top of all that is the dearth of “men.” There are plenty of boys around, boys of all ages, on account of the fact that boys aren’t taught to control their boyishness.

You add all this together and what do you get?

[M]any women, untrained in subduing darker aspects of their natures, deprived of the female joy of femininity and increasingly deprived of men (as opposed to boys), are feeling the brunt of these losses. They call it depression.

Could it be? Or is the problem still that women are underrepresented in the sciences and technology?

Wright Was Almost Right

Everyone understands that messages often get garbled in transmission. Teachers demonstrate it by whispering a message to a kid at the front of the class and then getting it back from the kid at the back of the class after it’s been whispered from desk to desk.

Then there’s the old saw about the message sent from the front lines: “Send reinforcements we’re going to advance!” It ended up as “Send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance!”

So now I understand what Reverend Wright got wrong when he told his flock in Chicago that the US government deliberately injected the black community with AIDS to decimate it.

He garbled the message. What they told him was that government AID is so toxic that it could be compared to an attempt to decimate blacks.

So you could say that Reverend Wright was almost right.

But through a simple error in transmission Reverend Wright is condemning another generation of blacks to a life of blighted dreams.

Maybe Sen. Barack Obama (N-IL) will set it all right.

The Age of Anti-Heroes and Anti-Modesty

At the beginning of his remarkable book Honor: A History James Bowman defines honor.

Honor in men is bravery, the courage to stand in the line with your brothers even unto death. Honor in women is chastity. And if you think all that is old-fashioned then try calling a man a wimp or a woman a whore and see where it gets you.

So why is it that our liberal friends and their willing accomplices in the media and the popular culture make such a big deal about the anti-hero, the man who defines himself by standing against his brothers in the line? And why does it celebrate a “sexual life” for women that celebrates the idea of women acting much like men when it comes to sex?

Media critic L. Brent Bozell III notes the current glut of TV shows glamorizing prostitutes as smart, contemporary women. Writes Showtime of their hooker heroine:

She is smart, strong and confident and, like many modern women, she is struggling to balance her personal and professional life.

My guess that this is all going to collapse into a Return to Modesty. (Wow, that’s the title of a book by Wendy Shalit.)

But for some time I have been wondering what it is that women are advertising with their honor concept of chastity. I’m a man; I understand the honor as courage bit. But chastity?

A couple of nights ago I finally put it together. If you want to understand women then you must understand love. Chastity is the measure of a woman’s love and devotion.

We start with Lord Byron:

Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,
’Tis woman’s whole existence.

But sleeping around doesn’t do anything for a woman, not least because of the “loss” factor. Women mourn and grieve all lost loves, and the pain they cause pretty soon teaches them to love where they are, not where they might hope to be.

That is why Jane Austen in Persuasion makes Anne Elliot’s speech about womanly constancy the climax of the novel.

All the privilege I claim for my own sex... is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.

The minx says this, of course, in the hearing of the worthy Captain Wentworth into whose arms she will fall within the hour.

Honor for a woman is to faithfully and generously love. All they want is for their love to be appreciated.

And that, boys and girls, is why Christianity goes down big time with women, especially right now in the Global South and in China where two-thirds of Christian adherents are said to be women. You love God and God loves you back. What’s not to like?

And that is also why the present age of anti-heroic men and anti-chaste women is going to go the way of the Dodo. Men love to be heroes, and women love to be chaste. They won’t be denied for long.

The GOP Energy Raid

For years the liberals have been telling us that we needed to end our addiction to oil. We needed to do this because energy use harmed the environment. It paved over the nation. It released greenhouse gases. Anyway, there was a finite supply of fossil fuels, and pretty soon we would hit the “peak oil” moment and oil production would go into irreversible decline. And we needed a national energy plan to prepare for a future of solar power, wind power, bio-fuels, and renewables.

All along, conservatives have been saying that liberals had it all wrong. Energy wasn’t a question of fixed or finite anything, it was an expression of human ingenuity. We could keep using oil—or maybe tar sands or oil shale—for centuries into the future. Or we could build nuclear plants. Or we could develop coal. Sure, we said, the planet is heating up—for now—but we don’t know enough about the future to start making wrenching changes in energy use.

By and large the American people have been going along with the liberals on this, and it is not hard to see why. If you get your information from the TV news or from newspapers and magazines they all agree with the liberal line.

Even as recently as last weekend, Sen. Barack Obama the uniter was peddling the liberal line, saying:

We can’t drill our way out of the problem.

You see, even if we did drill, it wouldn’t make much difference, and then we have to ask ourselves “if is worth it for us to damage the environment permanently” and so on.

Of course, this sort of black-and-white thinking is exactly what Democrats are always accusing the Republicans of doing.

But the problem is that energy and environmental policy involve predictions about the future. That means that they are uncertain. That means that they are almost certainly wrong. Suppose you develop an national energy plan. Suppose it was the most brilliant energy plan imaginable. One thing would be for sure. The day after it was announced, it would be out-of-date.

How do we deal with the future in society? We make bets on the future. Entrepreneurs and investors start new companies to develop new technology. Existing companies make decisions about whether to open a mine, or drill for oil, or build a power plant. Maybe they are right. Then they will make a lot of money. Maybe they are wrong. Then they will lose a lot of money. That is what the capitalist system is all about.

But conservatives don’t get a chance to talk to the American people about this until gas shoots up above $4.00 a gallon. Then all of a sudden when we say “Drill,” the American people agree with us and say “Yeah!”.

There is no use getting resentful about this. The fact is that liberals own the culture. They get to control pretty well what is said on the air and in print. But sometimes things go wrong. Sometimes they look like they don’t know what they are talking about, like right now when they seem to be expecting the working class and the poor to suck it in so liberals can feel good about saving the planet. That is the moment when conservatives can execute a daring raid into liberal territory shouting “Drill, Drill, Drill!”

And that is what President Bush did yesterday when he called for Congress to end the ban on drilling in Alaska and on the outer continental shelf.

So maybe we will be able to stampede the Democrats into letting the evil oil companies do what they want to do, the only thing they know how to do: Drill. For. Oil.

Then we can go back to global warming, polar bear extinction, and solar and wind power, and all the other silly stuff that liberals go on about all the time.

I tell you. This ain’t rocket science.

Free the Subprime Six!

So what if Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) got sweetheart mortgages from Beltwaywide Financial, er, make that Countrywide Financial Corp. They are adults. They can take a bribe and stiff the briber as well as any men in Illyria.

But the chaps at Investors Business Daily have their knickers in a twist. It is one thing to be a “friend” of Angelo Mozilo, CEO of Contrywide, as Chris Dodd apparently was when he got mortgages at “fixed rates of 4.25% and 4.5%.” But the case of Kent Conrad is different.

Conrad didn’t even know Mozilo. But he phoned him anyway, and got a great deal: a low-interest, virtually no-cost loan to buy a $1 million beach getaway. Favoritism? No way, says Conrad.

IBD notes very little interest in this story in the mainstream media. They note that “The Democrats’ initial response has been to stall.” But they are journalists. They believe in telling truth to power.

But the problem won’t go away, and neither will we.

Have the guys at IBD no decency? Poor Sen. Conrad comes from a state that is a thousand miles from a decent beach. Ain’t he got a right to get him a beach getaway? All the other kids in the Senate have them.

The Gay Marriage Question

Now that the California Supreme Court has spoken about gay marriage, it’s time for conservatives to think.

What is it that we want? Apart from our natural conservative instinct that warns us against the innovation of gay marriage, what really is our problem?

And we should also think: what do the advocates of gay marriage want? Marriage activist Maggie Gallagher asks this latter question.

Given that the California Supreme Court (and the US Supreme Court with its Guantanamo Bay decision) demostrates that the elite’s commitment to judicial activism is still at full speed ahead, we should look at what advanced legal circles are thinking on marriage, she writes.

If a court can rule that same-sex marriage is a fundamental right (i.e., one deeply rooted in our nation’s traditions) then it can make up anything. Elite legal minds get to figure out what they think and break it to the rest of us once they’ve decided.

What the elite has decided, Maggie thinks, is that “gay is the new black.” That means that opponents to the gay agenda will be treated like the old racist South.

[O]nce the principle is in the law, the next step will be to use the law to stigmatize, marginalize, and repress those who disagree with the government’s new views on marriage and sexual orientation.

That is what they are doing in Canada already, of course. That is why Mark Steyn and Maclean’s were up before the British Columbia human rights tribunal for saying hateful things about Muslims.

In my view this progressive tide still has a ways to run. It may start to ebb if it starts if it has negative effects on the liberal elite. But that is unlikely. More likely would be the total destruction of the poor.

No, our best hope is women. All the stuff about equal rights and love in the context of marriage is a misunderstanding of marriage as a social institution, and pretty soon women are going to figure it out.

Society needs marriage because women need marriage. Women need marriage because they need a social system to bind the father of their children to them. This gives them two advantages. It protects them from sexual predation, and it provides resources for their children.

The last century has been an outlier, as women emerged from millennia of subsistence living, when all their effort was focused on bearing and raising children. Their first impulse was to liberate themselves, the “victims of the species,” from their enslavement to the three Ks, kuche, kirche, kinder.

They liked the welfare state; they liked the benefits; they liked the idea of getting away from an abusive husband. Then they liked the idea of getting away from a spouse that wasn’t sensitive to their needs for conversation and companionship.

One day soon we will see this century-long tide crest and start to recede.

Because you can make a pretty good argument that, objectively, women get treated best by a system of lifelong, monogamous, heterosexual marriage. Right now educated, professional young women are beginning this trend. Before too long it will penetrate down into the mass culture. More and more women will start to say, regarding children, that “three is the new two,” and that careers are for the birds.

If you want three children, then you need a husband.

Who Gives and Who Takes?

Who knew? Back in 2006 Arthur C. Brooks published Who Really Cares? It was a study about giving to charity. Guess who gave most, as a percentage of income? Right first time. The working poor who went to church. Who gave least? Right again. Secular liberals. Conservatives? Well, conservatives give more than liberals, and not just to church, but to secular charities as well.

Now comes Peter Schweizer with Makers and Takers. It extends our understanding of Americans beyond charitable giving and paints a broader picture of conservative virtue and liberal selfishness. Dr. Paul Kengor interviewed Schweizer.

Schweizer’s idea was to find out if conservatives were really as mean-spirited as the media reports.

[T]here is a stereotype in the media about conservatives. Basically, anyone who is conservative and holds traditional values is considered greedy, angry, authoritarian, intolerant, and selfish. I wanted to look at actual research and determine whether this was true.

Short answer: it’s not true.

The research shows that conservatives are much more outward-oriented and liberals tend toward looking at themselves. There is a sense of entitlement on the left. They are concerned with rights, but not responsibilities. The data clearly shows that.

One of the things Schweizer discovered is that more liberals think it is OK to lie.

I think it goes back to the idea of absolute truth vs. relative truth. Modern liberals are much more likely to believe that truth is relative. So if you believe truth is relative, doesn’t it make sense that you would be more likely to say honesty is a subjective thing?

And of course, as we already know, conservatives give more to charity than liberals. It even applies to high-profile conservatives and liberals.

I compare the charitable giving of Rush Limbaugh with that of Nancy Pelosi. The data is quite shocking. It will surprise a lot of people to know that Rush is not only more generous but he gives to people with real needs. Pelosi gives to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and to elite prep schools.

Really though, what is so surprising? We already know all this. Still, repetition is everything. So let’s summarize all this:

I don’t believe that liberalism really does seek the collective good. I think that modern liberalism is so attractive to people because it is an emotionally satisfying belief system that really doesn’t require much from you. Modern liberalism allows you to outsource your responsibilities. The government will take care of the less fortunate. All you need to do is vote for the right candidate and support government programs. Other than that, you are off the hook.

Makes sense to me. But, excuse me for a moment while I catch up with my charitable giving!

Liberal Lawyers Notch Another One

To conservatives the decision of the US Supreme Court to give the detainees at Guantanamo Bay access to US courts seems utterly foolish. Hey, why not let prisoners of war clog up the courts?

Actually the lefty lawyers have a simple principle. Equality. That was the justification that Erwin Chemerinsky gave in his support of the California State Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage. If heterosexuals could have marriage then equality demanded that homosexuals should too.

So it makes sense to lefties that the helpless prisoners at Guantanamo should have equal access to US courts. Equality.

Then, of course, there is the knee-jerk anti-Americanism of the left-wing bar. Writes conservative Mark Levin:

It has been the objective of the left-wing bar to fight aspects of this war in our courtrooms, where it knew it would have a decent chance at victory.

The problem for conservatives in all this is that, so great is the respect for law in the United States that respect is given to the law even when lefties are using it in their century-long campaign to destroy middle-class civil society.

That is why I say, Bring It On. With conservatives exhausted after 25 years in power, it is natural and inevitable that there should be an interregnum in which the left surges once more.

But I am confident that once the American people see what the left wants, and experience the results of leftist jurisprudence and legislation, they will reject it.

In other words, there is nothing shameful about a tactical, or even a strategic retreat.

But as we retreat let us keep our conservative coalition together. It is not just a three part coalition of social conservatives, economic conservatives, and national security conservatives, remember. It’s a six part coalition. And we need to keep it together.

If we stay together then, in four, or eight years, we will surge to victory and begin a new era of practical conservative reform.

McCain Clueless on Energy

Is John McCain really clueless on energy? Or is he just pretending?

He talked the liberal line on energy on the Today Show today. Said McCain:

The real key to this is nuclear power, alternate energy. We’ve got to, er, solar, wind, tide, develop batteries. We have to embark on a national mission, a national mission to become energy independent.

So Matt Lauer jumps in and prompts him on the move away from oil. Oh yes, says McCain, we’ve got to move away from oil and the technology is there to do it. And there’s not much we can do about oil, not with the limited supply and a cartel controlling it. And McCain thinks that energy prices could respond in the short term to a good plan on nuclear power and battery technology.

Oh really Senator.

In that case we might as well have Senator Obama as president. If you are not going to champion the free market in energy and if you are going to promote government-centric approaches like wind, solar, batteries, and nuclear power, what’s the point of voting for a Republican?

There is plenty of oil out there. In Alaska, off the continental shelves, in oil shale. Oh yes. Oil shale. There is a huge amount of oil shale in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah. Only Democrats are preventing Big Oil from developing it. We could be developing all this stuff. Only the greens tell us that it will melt the ice in Greenland, although the truth is that nobody knows. Democrats believe in this, and that is why they are united in opposing the development of hydrocarbon resources in the United States.

It looks like the greenie global warming faith is going to have to be proved against cold, hard experience. In that case, we may as well have a true believer in the White House as a muddle like John McCain.

The D'Oh-bama Factor

You have to wonder, as Barack Obama stumbles from one gaffe to another. Is he really up to the job?

In the last few months we’ve had the flap over Reverend Wright and serial statements that became inoperative. Then we had Father Pfleger. Now we have the Case of the Clintonoid Retreads.

That’s what we are talking about when we look at the chaps that Sen. Obama selected to vet vice-presidential nominee candidates.

Obama selected three people to serve on his VP committee: Eric Holder, Jim Johnson, and Caroline Kennedy.

Two of those people have ethical problems. It was Eric Holder who is reported to have waved through the controversial pardon of Marc Rich at the fag end of the Clinton administration. And Jim Johnson was CEO of government-sponsored-enterprise Fannie Mae at the start of its problems with reckless use of derivatives and questionable earnings reports. He got loans at favorable rates from Countrywide Financial Corp.

Now all these problems may just be political noise, the product of the evil Republican Noise Machine.

But when you are an experienced national politician you and your staff have your radar detecting these sorts of things. Holder and Johnson are tainted. No sensible candidate with a competent staff would have chosen these chaps to serve on a sensitive, high-profile committee. Especially a sensible candidate who was determined to change the status-quo game in Washington DC.

Liberals are Different From You and Me...

It’s like the old saying: “The rich are different from you and me. They have more money.”

So it makes sense that liberals are different from you and me. They do more whining.

Liberals whine more about everything, according to a review of the social science literature by Peter Schweizer.

A wide body of research shows that modern liberals are much more likely to complain about things in their lives. Conservatives are more content with their lives. When asked “How satisfied are you with life these days?[”] Sixty-six percent of conservatives said “very satisfied” compared with only 46 percent of liberals. Conservatives are more likely to say they love their jobs (53 percent vs. 41 percent) and even enjoy their hobbies more (63 percent vs. 51 percent). When asked by the Social Capital Survey whether they were satisfied with their income, liberals were more than three times as likely to say “not at all satisfied” — even when they earned the same as conservatives.

You expect that especially when it comes to housework, liberals whine more. Indeed “feminist women do less housework than traditional women — but complain more about it. ”

It makes sense that the champion whiners, Barack and Michelle Obama, should be heading up the Democratic Party. It takes whiners to lead a party of whiners.

Many observers believe that Barack Obama secured the liberal base of the Democratic party because he was antiwar from the beginning. But I think it’s because he mastered the art of complaining and won over the Whine Caucus. Today the Democratic party is dominated by groups making claims of victim status ” blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, unwed mothers, artists, pampered academics, environmental activists, the poor, the unemployed, animal rights activists, women, homosexuals.

You might ask, what does a guy who graduated from Harvard Law School married to a woman with degrees from two Ivy League schools have to whine about?

It’s a good question. I’m afraid I don’t have the answer. Beyond the fact that they are liberals.

Left Doesn't Like Free Speech

Everyone is properly outraged at the quasi-legal proceedings of the British Columbia Human Rights Commission in the case brought by Muslim extremists against Mark Steyn and MacLean’s, the Canadian newsmagazine.

Some Muslims disliked the excerpt from Steyn’s book America Alone published in MacLean’s a while back. But they didn’t think to sue in regular courts. Oh no, that would cost money. Instead they brought MacLean’s up on a charge of hate speech at three separate Canadian human rights tribunals. Last week their complaint was heard before the British Columbia Human Rights Commission.

Today, the editors of National Review properly express their outrage against the proceedings of the Commission last week in Vancouver, BC. You can get a flavor of their outrage from this:

Andrew Coyne, a journalist with Maclean’s, live-blogged the farce; his dispatches were as amusing as they were harrowing. The proceedings had no evidentiary rules — new evidence was routinely introduced without warning. Commissioners routinely recessed to determine the eligibility of evidence; legal representation would dash off mid-hearing to print Internet material to introduce as evidence; an “expert” witness was called whose chief credentials were academic papers on Buffy the Vampire Slayer; and still other witnesses were called under the prejudicial direction that “we anticipate that success in this case will provide the impetus for prohibiting discriminatory publications in the other provinces.”

At the granddaddy Human Rights Commission of them all, the Canadian Human Rights Commission, they have what you might call a remarkable record in the fight against the violation of human rights: “in 31 years, the CHRC has not once dismissed a charge that has been brought before it.”

It’s fun and enjoyable, isn’t it, when you can gin up your own private witch-hunting tribunal to punish people for opinions you don’t like. It confirms what we all know, but are usually too polite to say.

Lefties really don’t like free speech. Indeed, they way they see it, anything they don’t like comes under the rubrick of “hate speech,” and they have an ethical obligation to stamp it out. Why not? If you have the power, use it.

Labor Market Turmoil

The equity markets are off sharply today and you can see why.

No, it’s not that the BLS headliine employment number from the Establishment Survey is off 49,000, as published in the Employment Situation Summary.

As usual, the real story is in the Household Survey. And there you can see real turmoil in the US labor market. Let’s do the numbers.

• Civilian labor force: up 577,000
  
• Employment: down 285,000
  
• Unemployment: up 861,000
  
• Not in labor force: down 369,000
  

The net effect is that unemployment is up from 5.0 percent to 5.5 percent.

You can see what is happening. People are coming into the labor force looking for jobs, probably to increase income and avoid foreclosure on their homes, but businesses are shedding workers.

That’s what you call turmoil. Let’s hope that things turn around soon and that the Great American Job Machine gets back in gear.

What should the government do? How about stopping one wasteful and unjust program. Just one. My choice would be the ethanol subsidy. What’s yours?

Obama's Vision for America

Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) gave a speech on Tuesday obviously intended to be a curtain-raiser on the general election campaign. What did he say, and what does it mean?

In his peroration, Obama declared that we would look back on this moment generations from now.

[W]e will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.

This did not go down well with conservative talk-show host Hugh Hewitt. And you can see his point. What do you mean, care for the sick and jobs for the jobless? Aren’t we already spending trillions on all that? What kind of talk is that?

Well, it sums up the content part of his speech, in which Obama established the basic problem America faces after eight years of the Bush administration:

Bush economic policies that have failed to create well-paying jobs, or insure our workers, or help Americans afford the skyrocketing cost of college - policies that have lowered the real incomes of the average American family, widened the gap between Wall Street and Main Street, and left our children with a mountain of debt.

Hmm. What could he be talking about? But he has plenty of solutions.

On health care, he proposes to

pass health care plan that guarantees insurance to every American who wants it and brings down premiums for every family who needs it.

On Iraq he is starting to sheer away from the simple promise to bring our troops home.

We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in - but start leaving we must. It’s time for Iraqis to take responsibility for their future.

On the economy:

Change is building an economy that rewards not just wealth, but the work and workers who created it. It’s understanding that the struggles facing working families can’t be solved by spending billions of dollars on more tax breaks for big corporations and wealthy CEOs, but by giving a the middle-class a tax break, and investing in our crumbling infrastructure, and transforming how we use energy, and improving our schools, and renewing our commitment to science and innovation.

I know. It doesn’t sound much like change, but more of what Democrats have been doing ever since who knows when: spending money on Democratic voters.

And we know what Obama means by change. He means more power and more money to the educated liberal elite, more money going through the political system.

It means pumping more and more money into more and more rigid privileges and subsidies, and putting off, for another ten years, or maybe for a generation, the hard and thankless work of unwinding the vast, wasteful, and unjust welfare state. Over at usgovernmentspending.com you can see the numbers for government spending at all levels of government this year, 2008 in the United States.

Pensions: $911.6 billion


Health Care: $925.0 billion


Education: $848.2 billion


Defense: $730.8 billion


Welfare: $445.2 billion

If you were going to promise “change” you would be wanting to do something about that. But that’s not the kind of change that Sen. Obama is offering. His kind of change will merely trowel on another layer on the hardened and encrusted spending already not doing very much to help working Americans. In another ten years, all his new spending will be just as encrusted and just as ineffectual as all the moneys were are already spending.

Some day Americans will vote, not just for “change,” but for genuine conservative reform.

But that day is not yet.

Obama We Hardly Know Ye

As Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) becomes the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party today, The Wall Street Journal comments on just what an extraordinary moment this is.

Democrats are nominating a freshman Senator barely three years out of the Illinois legislature whom most of America still hardly knows.

It’s also remarkable that a major political party in the United States has chosen, for the first time, an African-American to be its presidential nominee.

But for me, the parallel with President Carter is palpable. I remember first hearing about Jimmy Carter a couple of years before the 1976 election, and I remember being impressed. But I also remember that the closer we got to the actual election the less I liked him. The concept was great; the details told a different story.

And so it is with Sen. Obama. He is an inspiring speaker who talks about “unity” and “change.” But all the details point to a conventional liberal with conventional liberal views on everything.

Every president, upon entering office, has the opportunity to make a difference on two or three big things. But on all the host of little things he is probably the hostage of his party activists, the up-and-comers who appear out of the campaign and the think tanks to take the executive-level appointments in the Executive Branch.

Up to now we haven’t heard about any Big Things from Barack Obama beyond the conventional liberal position on nationalizing health care and the conventional anti-war stance on the Iraq War.

In other words we have no information that gives us an indication that Obama, the product of a conventional elite education, will be anything other that conventionally liberal. Chances are he’ll expand government power in education, health care, and, of course, the environment. That means more rigidity, more subsidies directed at Democratic voters.

We conservative folks think that this century-long expansion of government is approaching its limits. Education is an expensive mess that produces little. Health care is an expensive mess that delivers little in life expectancy beyond what you could get with a robust public health program and neo-natal care. Pensions are unaffordable in the medium term.

We believe that the conservative ascendancy of the last 30 years gave Americans an opportunity to reverse direction and reduce government power and expense it was too late.

Now it looks like we are going to do it the hard way.

Because we cannot expect a President Obama to go back on all his supporters and change the whole direction of government. Not from what we already know about him.

But maybe he will surprise us.

MSM: What Took You So Long?

Conservatives are having a grand old time this election season watching the Clintons in eclipse.

Back in 1992 Bill Clinton was the Great Liberal Hope, and anyone who disagreed was a Clinton hater.

But now Barack Obama is the Great Liberal Hope and the Clintons are just a dynasty in terminal decline.

What took you so long, MSMers?

We could invent a poetical allusion, and talk, Dover Beach-like about the now retreating sea of faith in the Clintons:

The sea of faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d;

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating to the breath

Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

And that tells us a lot, because the notion of the Great Liberal Hope is a substitute for religion, an “immanentizing of the eschaton,” the bringing down to Earth of transcendent hope into a faith in a mortal politician.

Columnist Rich Lowry rehearses the canonical withdrawal of faith in finger-on-the-liberal-pulse Vanity Fair.

The usual audience for Clinton excuse-making isn’t listening. Witness the long, scathing profile of the post-presidential Clinton in Vanity Fair by former New York Times White House correspondent Todd Purdum. Purdum writes that it once was "easy enough to retain an enduring affection" for Clinton, despite "his indiscipline" and "his shortcomings."

Yes, it was “easy enough” back in the good old days when Clinton was the Great Liberal Hope.

But no more. Today the liberal elites have fallen out of love with the Clintons. In 2008 the Great Liberal Hope of 1992 is campaigning against the Great Liberal Hope of 2008. Now, all of a sudden, the soft focus lenses come off and the MSM gets to show us the Clintons in high-contrast black-and-white.

All in all, I’d rather be a Republican. Then you never get an even break from the mainstream media; indeed, you never expect it.

"The Metrics Pointed to Failure"

One of the key things to understand about human conflict (and that means human life in general) is that victory usually goes to the guy who gives up last.

So when you speak about Iraq in terms like this: “The Metrics Pointed to Failure,” you are missing the point.

When “you,” as Jennifer Rubin writes, are the very foolish Andrew Sullivan, you see the problem.

Of course the metrics pointed to failure. When things are going wrong, that is the time to hitch it up or quit. President Bush chose to hitch it up and double down. Now it looks like he was right.

Well, says Andrew Sullivan, no doubt the invasion was still a mistake, but it looks like it need not be a catastrophe in the medium term.

Petraeus deserves the lion’s share of the credit; luck and time and the self-defeating nihilism of the Jihadists have helped. But Bush and McCain equally merit points for pursuing the surge, even though the metrics pointed to failure. Obama needs to capitalize on these gains, not dismiss them.

“Obama needs to capitalize on these gains?” You mean, as in, take credit for them?

Anyway, General Petraeus aside, let’s get serious here. Bush is the man who made the decision, to go with the surge when everyone else (especially Andrew Sullivan) was losing their head. If the surge is a success, then Bush gets the credit.

But look for Obama to throw the anti-war left under the bus this summer after a fact-finding trip to Iraq.