Sarah Palin, the Real Thing from Alaska

At first blush Governor Sarah Palin (R-AK) seems like an unlikely choice as running mate for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).

But then you get to watch her speak after McCain’s introduction today in Dayton, OH.

You immediately realize that she is a practiced and confident public speaker. And next you get the feeling that she likes being up on the stage. Unlike some other politicians we all know.

Then you run the YouTube session of her playing a talking head on Larry Kudlow’s cable show, and you realize that she ain’t no neophyte.

In fact, here’s a nickel that says she’s better when she’s off the prompter than the Great Orator himself.

Then there’s Fred Barnes’ report on Palin from last year, when he told the story of her remarkable rise in Alaska politics, marked by remarkable courage and willingness to take on the corrupt Republican establishment. For guys worried about her cojones:

In the roughly three years since she quit as the state’s chief regulator of the oil industry, Palin has crushed the Republican hierarchy (virtually all male) and nearly every other foe or critic. Political analysts in Alaska refer to the "body count" of Palin’s rivals. "The landscape is littered with the bodies of those who crossed Sarah," says pollster Dave Dittman, who worked for her gubernatorial campaign.

I don’t care what you say. It takes a ferocious political talent to do that.

No wonder that hard-core Republicans like me are fizzing with excitement. This babe maybe could take prisoners. After all, her nickname in high school was “Sarah Barracuda.”

Obama Wows His Supporters, At Least

Obama supporters seem as pleased as punch this morning after his acceptance speech at Invesco Field last night. It was indeed a historic moment as an African American accepted the presidential nomination of a major political party for the first time, 45 years to the day after Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech.

But as a conservative, I was encouraged. All along, I have been wondering if Obama had a rabbit to pull out of the hat, whether he had a passing gear that he hadn’t yet shown us.

The answer came through last night. He doesn’t. He presented himself as a solid New Deal/Great Society/Multiculti Democrat. No real break with the past. No real change, chaps.

And he may have made a tactical mistake by criticising John McCain so frequently. It seems as though The One spots that McCain has been releasing over the last few weeks have gone home, and Obama is miffed with the criticism. So that means that the wiley tactician is controlling the game.

One more thing. Obama reprised the “On Your Own” theme that Hillary Clinton raised last year, and which I criticized here.

What are you talking about, Senator? Let’s look at the projected numbers on government spending for FY 2009, the first year you would be in office.

• Pensions: $891.1 billion
  
  
• Health Care: $958.2 billion
  
  
• Education: $873.7 billion
  
  
• Defense: $806.1 billion
  
  
• Welfare: $467.7 billion
  

On your own? We, the American people who pay taxes, are shelling out for a little shy of one trillion dollars a year each on Pensions, Health Care, Education, and half a trillion a year on Welfare.

If after all that money, every year, Americans are still “on their own” then maybe it is time to deep-six the whole notion of the welfare state that you and your pals support and find another way of caring and sharing in our American nation.

Dems Just Don't Like Free Speech

First it was the outrage over the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. How dare they attack Sen. John Kerry (D-MA). Then it was conservative talk radio. What was needed, Democrats agreed, was to bring back the Fairness Doctrine.

Earlier this week, the Obama campaign vowed to make a criminal complaint against a group, the American Issues Project, that aired a commercial criticising Obama’s association with radical bomber Bill Ayers.

Today, the Obama campaign instructed its supporters to inundate with phone calls and emails a Chicago radio station’s interview of Dr. Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who has been researching the relationship between Barack Obama and radical Bill Ayres in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. At National Review they have this to say:

Obama supporters risibly complain that shining a light on the Obama/Ayers relationship is a “smear” and smacks of “guilt by association.”

That’s what liberals always say when they want to shut down somebody’s free speech.

The trouble is that liberals have convinced themselves that Swift-boat type attacks are beyond the pale, vicious smears that should be suppressed. Well, everyone feels like that when their ox is being gored. What liberals don’t get is that they are as good as anyone in the smear business. Maybe better.

But as I’ve said before: Go ahead liberals. Make my day. The more liberals try to shut down the opposition, the more they are going to fire up conservatives.

Bill is Still the Champ

What else can you say after Day 3 of the Democratic National Convention? President Bill Clinton still has his chops. He can still give a speech that keeps his listeners in the palm of his hand. What a talent! What a waste.

You can keep your John Kerrys and your Joe Bidens. They are just ordinary politicians doing their rants. Kerry showed that he was still angry that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that had the nerve to accuse him of lying just as he, over thirty years before, had accused American servicemen of atrocities. He is too humorless to understand nemesis and poetic justice. And Joe Biden? Well, he did a workmanlike job of roughing up the opposition. But who cares?

Of course, the experience of listening to Bill Clinton brought the Nineties back. What a slippery chap he is. How well he can take statistics—jobs for example—and twist them around.

Clinton boasted that in the Nineties he created 24 million jobs and in the 2000s Bush only created 5 million. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistic Household Survey there were 122 million Americans employed in January 1993 and 138 million employed in January 2001. That’s 14 million jobs, Mr. President. Then in July 2008 there were 148 million jobs. That’s 10 million new jobs since President Bush took over. Considering that there was a recession that began pretty well exactly as President Bush took office, I’d say that wasn’t too bad.

But She Just Isn't Likeable

Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) did a workmanlike job in her speech last night on the second day of the Democratic National Convention. But she didn’t make you want to like her. She evidently appeals to women of a certain age for whom the defining aspects of life are the Seneca Falls convention and the Nineteenth Amendment. They are the women who believe in the glass ceiling and male chauvinism.

(Back in the 1970s the women in my office thought it would be a wonderful idea to give me a Male Chauvinist Pig tie. What can you do with that sort of thing except be a good sport?)

Pundits like Michael Barone are saying that the speech was a good preparation for 2012. Maybe it was. Or maybe Hillary Clinton will just be a Senate institution by then.

But Hillary Clinton just isn’t likeable. And that’s like starting First and Ten with a ten yard penalty when you are playing presidential politics.

Certainly if you look back over the last several presidential races, it is clear that the likeable guy always wins.

At least Hilllary Clinton outperformed the Keynote speech. That effort by Virginia Senate candidate Mark Warner was a technocratic yawn.

The big takeaway of the night was the Karl Rove line, issued on Fox News’ Strategy Room. Obama has to show that he is up to the job, said Karl, after a learned disquisition on post-convention poll bounces. What really bothers independent voters is that they just don’t think that Obama is up to the job.

But I wish that they still ran the conventions like a convention, with reports from the Platform Committee, with a formal placing of names in nomination, and a formal roll-call vote. Politics isn’t a variety show. Or at least, not quite.

Ted's a Liberal and Michelle's a Mom

That’s what we learned at the Democratic National Convention on Monday night.

It was good to see Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) out there making what is probably his last major national speech. He gave us vintage Ted, railing at us in his hortatory style, and we were grateful for it, as the great liberal lion of our generation enters a twilight of age and disease. We honor Uncle Teddy in the autumn of his life.

Michelle Obama did what she needed to do, and did it well. She spoke as a loving daughter, sister, wife, and mother. Some have criticised this—and he knows who he is—as Michelle the Stepford Wife. Well, of course. Michelle Obama had to erase the early, angry Michelle, the stereotypical angry black liberal, and she did.

Conservatives should not sneer at this but take comfort. The fact is that when Democrats talk directly to the nation they must put aside their ugly liberal anger and their nasty liberal issues, and speak to the eternal verities.

The eternal verity for a woman is love. A woman is nothing without love, nothing without her relationships. Career, glass ceilings, and all that political tommy-rot, they are nothing. Even after a generation of non-stop feminist agitation from the heights to the obscurest corners of American life the wife of a presidential candidate still has to give a speech about herself as a lover, a lover of family, of husband, and of children.

That is not something to grumble about. It is something to celebrate.

Dems Cheer Criticism of Teacher Unions!

Have our Democratic friends reached an inflection point on eduction?

Mickey Kaus reports the unimaginable from the Democratic National Convention. He went to an education event and expected the usual EdBlob talk about change, accountability, and resources. But not a word about the teachers’ unions.

Was he wrong! People started talking about how the adults’ agenda always wins against the children’s agenda.

Then Cory Booker of Newark attacked teachers unions specifically—and there was applause. In a room of 500 people at the Democratic convention!

Then Booker went on.

The party would "have to admit as Democrats we have been wrong on education." Loud applause!

Well, this is good news, of course. Even though I have to admit to sour grapes. For thirty, forty, fifty years, Democrats have been standing in the school-house door blocking reform. And now, all of a sudden they say, OK. Change of plan. Now we are the party of education reform!

That’s when we have to remember that it’s not the adults and our memories of the political battles of the last generation that matter. What matters is the children.

McCain's Luck or Smarts?

How did he do it? How did Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) come from a campaign written off as dead a year ago to being the Republican presidential nominee that is level-pegging with the Democrat in a Democratic year?

It’s luck, writes Mona Charen.

Luck has been sitting on John McCain’s shoulder for 12 months and seems to be warming to her task as November approaches.

Then she goes on to count the ways. Immigration has faded; Huckabee took Romney out; Iraq turned around; energy prices are an issue; Russians in Georgia; Obama infatuation has begun to cool; the economy isn’t quite in a recession

But you can also make a good argument that McCain is one smart politician. He gracefully admitted defeat on immigration, positioned himself as the national-security candidate from the start, was right all along in Iraq, did a neat pivot on energy, and has shown himself to be good on his feet.

More and more, it looks like Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is not good on his feet. He needs to have the battlefield prepared for him, whereas McCain has shown that he can stay alive so long as there is an oasis of a townhall to attend on the morrow.

President Bill Clinton was another guy who was quick on his feet. And he seemed to have luck on his shoulder too. The trouble with Clinton was that he really didn’t know what to do with his talent and his luck. Maybe it’s just as well.

Let's Not Repeat The New Deal Follies

A couple of years ago Amity Shlaes wrote The Forgotten Man about the utter folly of US economic policy during the Great Depression.

First it was Herbert Hoover that helped prolong a necessary correction (ably assisted by the Federal Reserve System). Then it was Franklin Roosevelt starring in the ten year run of the New Deal Follies.

So if our political leaders want to avoid a repeat of that ten year disaster as the credit crunch continues, maybe they should may attention to Shlaes. There are five things to avoid, she writes in the Washington Post.

1. Don’t give in to protection
2. Don’t blame the messenger (i.e., Wall Street and business leaders)
3. Don’t increase taxes in a downturn
4. Don’t assumes that big government will bring back growth
5. Don’t be inconsistent

The problem is, of course, that our modern Democrats like to do all five of these things. They like protection, they like to demonize the private sector, they like to increase taxes, they like to increase spending, and they like to go off in all directions at once with new programs that may very likely work against each other, like agricultural subsidies and food stamps.

In fact, the way to get out of an economic jam is to free up the economy, lower taxes, lower wasteful spending, encourage business confidence, and make all your actions work together.

It works every time it is tried.

BritCons Challenge Labour on "Fairness"

Every conservative knows about “fairness.” That’s the line that our liberal friends use when they are ready to increase our taxes and give more money to their supporters, er, no, make that “the poor.”

But now the British Conservative Party has issued a dossier on the Labour Party’s record called “Unfair Britain”.

It takes the present Labour government to task for making Britain more unfair. On the Conservative Party website, the Tories accuse Labour of the following:

• The number of people in severe poverty has increased by 900,000 since 1997
• Mr. Brown’s stealth taxes mean the poorest now pay more of their income in tax than the richest
• The gap in life expectancy between rich and poor is now at its widest since the Victorian era
• Educational inequality is getting worse

The same thing is happening in the US, of course, but perhaps not as badly.

The purpose of this political flank attack is to twofold.

First of all, it promises that a Conservative government will seek “progressive” ends by Conservative means. That is, Conservatives will stop the folly of believing that only the government can guarantee fairness.

The other purpose is to continue the policy of “love-bombing” the fashionables who like to consider themselve progressive and sophisticated, certainly not one of your retired colonels writing grumpy letters to the conservative press.

It’s an important new initiative, and it continues the center-right strategy of insisting that you can’t get to progressive goals using government programs.

In his Sources of the Self philosopher Charles Taylor asserts that the objectives of the progressives are equality, dignity, and creativity. Progressives thought that they way to achieve their goals was to acquire political power to demolish the old order of privilege and superstition.

But they were wrong. Equality, dignity, and creativity need a government with a light hand. Until we get it, our modern society is going to get more and more unfair—for the very people that the “progressives” claim to represent.

Rick Warren's "Civil" Project

Most people agree that it was Roe v. Wade that created the Christian Right. The forcible introduction of abortion-on-demand as the law of the land by the Supreme Court acting as the agent of the educated elite created a spark. It blew up, first of all, into Jerry Falwell. He was the Christian that liberals loved to hate. Falwell’s political vehicle as the Moral Majority, a cadre lobbying group.

Ten years later it was Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson’s turn to enter the political arena. He ran for president in 1988 and brought millions of conservative evangelicals into the political process. Robertson became the Christian leader that liberals loved to hate.

In 2008, Falwell is dead and Robertson is old. It is time for a new generation of Christian leaders. After the Saddleback Civil Forum last Saturday night it is obvious who the top Christian leader is in America. He is Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback and author of the best-selling Purpose-driven Life.

Warren’s book The Purpose-driven Life first really came up on the national radar in a kidnap incident in 2005. Kidnapped by an escaped convict, 24-year-old widow and mother Ashley Smith sat down with him and they read the Bible and Chapter 33 of The Purpose-driven Life together. As I wrote at the time:

They read Chapter 33 together. For those of you without your own copy to refer to, Chapter 33 is titled “How Real Servants Act.” The epigraph reads: “Whoever wants to be great must become a servant.” Warren writes about how we talk a lot these days about leadership and very little about “servantship,” and that the real purpose to life is to become a good servant. The Point to Ponder at the end of the chapter is “I serve God by serving others.”

Then the convict released Ashley and she called 911. No need for counsellors, hostage negotiators, or SWAT teams. Not for a woman who read and practiced from The Purpose-driven Life.

Recently conservatives have worried about Warren as he has reached out to environmentalists and become, as he said at the Forum, friend to both Obama and McCain. Doesn’t he know what side he’s on?

Actually, after the Forum, it is liberals who should be worried. Warren clearly understands that, in order to make a difference, he has to use a different strategy than the previous generation of Falwell and Robertson. So this is how he opened the Forum:

Welcome to the Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency... We believe in the separation of church and state, but we do not believe in the separation of faith and politics, because faith is just a world view, and everybody has some kind of world view. It’s important to know what they are.

See what is going on here? He is using Englightenment lingo. “World view” is a term invented by Immanuel Kant. He is saying that everyone grounds their world view, including their notions of ethics and morality, on faith. It might be a religious faith or a secular faith, but it is still a faith.

And that is what gives a pastor the right to inject himself into the presidential campaign.

I’ll tell you what I think. I think this: Liberals, be afraid; be very afraid. This chap is sophisticated. He’s playing by the liberal rules. He represents the same moral majority as Falwell and the same Christian churches as Robertson. But he’s doing it without the partisan edge.

Mark my words. Liberals will soon start to hate Rick Warren, just like they hated Falwell and Robertson. But they are heading straight for the briar patch. Because this guy is smart. He won’t produce the copy that liberals used to make Falwell and Robertson into right-wing kooks. He is presenting himself to America as a moderate, and he will force liberals into the role of the heavy.

Very shortly, liberals will start frothing at the mouth over Rick Warren.

Left Tries a Bit of Swiftboating

What is “Swiftboating?” According to Wikipedia it has become a general synonym for “smear campaign.”

But originally it arose out of the successful campaign of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth to impugn the claims made by Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) about his military record, and the Democrats’ fury when they realized that they had been skunked.

In other words, Swiftboating occurs when the other guys call in question the veracity of the claims of your guy about his military service.

So the current flap about whether Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) actually prayed as he claimed during his captivity in North Vietnam is a clear Swiftboat campaign. Democrats want to discredit McCain’s claim to religiosity and bravery in his POW captivity.

And the argument that his story about a prison guard tracing a cross in the ground was cribbed from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago is likewise a Swiftboating.

Politics ain’t beanbag, as they say.

But the Gulag Archipelago claim is easy to check. According to John McCain’s site the cross incident took place in 1971 or thereabouts. According to Wikipedia The Gulag Archipelago ws published in English in 1973. So that’s all right.

But really, lefties. Can’t you put yourselves in the shoes of others at all? Can’t you get that everybody in politics is in the business of questioning other peoples’ character? You do it and we do it. We all do it because it works.

Obama's "Pay Grade"

Our liberal friends do a pretty good job obfuscating the line between law and morality when they oppose “legislating morality.” And they talk a good line about the separation of church and state. As if. As if faith and law and morality can be safely separated into neat little boxes.

So when Pastor Rick Warren questioned Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) on abortion at his Saddleback Civil Forum he carefully played the liberal game, asking Sen. Obama:

I know this is a very complex issue. 40 million abortions. At what point does a baby get human rights in your view?

Warren is asking where the secular law steps in and says, OK, at this point the right to choose is trumped by the right to life and now the state will protect this person’s life and will sanction anyone who interferes with its right to life.

This is a difficult question for a liberal to answer. I’ve asked it of liberal women in the past, and they really can’t deal with it. That’s because the liberal line on abortion carefully avoids confronting the issue. There aren’t any liberal sound bites available to help them out.

Sen. Obama is a presidential candidate, so he knows how to duck.

Well, I think that whether you are looking at
it from a theological perspective or a scientific
perspective, answering that question with specificity,
you know, is above my pay grade. But let me just speak
more generally about the issue of abortion because this
is something obviously the country wrestles with.

Pretty neat, eh? He’s not prepared to deal with the issue in the way that Warren frames it, and the only way that a pastor can frame it without falling into the traps that liberals have set up regarding the separation of church and state.

Notice the Ali Shuffle. He is not being asked for a theological perspective or a scientific perspective. He is being asked a political question. Where would you as president come down on this? Where would you draw the line?

Obama’s evasion illustrates why the recent pro-life activism recently has been about drawing the line in law. Born Alive Act? Partial Birth Abortion Act? Is it ok to kill the baby just before it’s born? Just after? We keep asking: where would you draw the line, liberals? And they don’t like it.

In my view there are two issues here. There is the legal line: cross that and you break the law. But the more important one is the moral line. We are going to have abortion, and there will be abortions on the legal side of the line. But such abortion should be safe, legal, and shameful. To coin a phrase.

A Look at the Obama Economy

You think? After three years of a lackluster Obama administration a resurgent Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) starts her presidential campaign with the rousing war cry “it's the economy, stupid.”

That's what James E. Carter & James C. Miller III think. They look back from 2011 and a lackluster economy.

Drawing heavily from his 59-page Blueprint for Change, the new president and former freshman legislator called upon Congress to increase federal spending by more than $300 billion annually and to shift more of the tax burden onto “the rich.”

Ah yes. Works every time it's tried. Tax the rich to feed the poor.

Only this isn't the Middle Ages in which feed grain taken from the rich landowners might possibly help the poor. Today we are talking about taking the investment money of the rich--money that could be invested with entrepreneurs to create jobs--and sluice it away on government programs, the programs that have done so much to turn the working class into the non-working underclass.

The combination of profligate spending and higher tax rates created a substantial drag on the economy. It didn’t help that President Obama has presided over one of the most protectionist administrations in decades. Three years into his presidency, Obama has yet to sign a single free-trade or trade-liberalization agreement. That, plus his efforts to “fix” and “renegotiate” the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), have cast a pall over prospects for significant growth in international trade.

Oh well, at least it kept the rich from making too much money.

That's the liberal line. But usually--almost always--it is the poor that suffer most when the economy turns south. That's because people with power and people with money have the resources and the power to take care of themselves in a downturn.

Even liberals have the power and the resources to take care of themselves. But the working poor, the folks with marginal skills and marginal finances get hammered.

But then Democrats like Sen. Obama really don't really care about bitter God-and-guns working class people any more. They prefer voters to stay on the liberal plantation, depedent on liberal programs for everything.

Let them learn Spanish, says Marie-Antoinette Obama.

Protect the Government University from Bigots!

You gotta love the fun that columnist Mike S. Adams is having with the administration of the University of Toledo.

The bosses at UT don’t like the idea of a Christian African American university administrator, Crystal Dixon, expressing opinions in an opinion piece in the local newspaper that would be considered un-diverse by the well-known House Un-Liberal Activities Committee.

And rightly, the administration of the University of Toledo has terminated Crystal Dixon before it gets hauled up before the House Un-Liberal Activities Committee.

Because, in the vital work of eradicating un-liberal thinking in the university, you cannot be too enthusiastic. Hate speech might break out anywhere, at any time, and provoke the end of diversity as we know it.

But, amazingly, Adams has called for President Jacobs of the University of Toledo to resign. He gives the curious reason that Crystal Dixon has been fired for disagreeing with the policy of the university to lobby the state legislature to provide partner benefits for gay employees at the university.

This is odd. Everyone knows that the First Amendment specifically excludes as protected speech any words by an uppity Christian African American that disagrees with the policy of a government university. Even so, Adams writes the following unbelievable statement:

Constitutional rights are given to individuals to protect them from governments. They are not given to governments to protect them from individuals.

This is heresy. Everyone knows that the Constitution was clearly intended to protect progressive government university officials from the religious bigotry of their employees.

Is there no justice?

Dems and Their Special Interests

The way our Democratic friends tell it, Big Oil and Big Drug are evil special interests.

But Big Green and Big Ed are noble activists and teachers. And Big Labor is just out to help working people.

It all depends on your point of view.

But Thomas Sowell takes a dim view of Sen Barack Obama’s plan to bring an end to secret ballots in union representation elections.

Labor unions have a problem. Union-represented workers in the private sector amount to less than 10 percent of the workforce and going down every year. That’s a problem—for unions, at least.

Since unions are losing the game under the current rules, their obvious answer is to change the rules. Specifically, they want to do away with secret ballots when the government conducts elections to determine whether the workers in a particular company or industry want to be represented by a union.

Sen. Obama supports the end of secret ballot elections for unions.

“I will make it the law of the land when I’m President of the United States,” Barack Obama has said to the AFL-CIO.

I wonder what the American people will think of that when the issue actually comes up on the radar?

Then there’s Big Green. Environmentalists are fanatically opposed to exploration and production of hydrocarbon resources. And so are the Democrats. Well they were, until yesterday, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi allowed as how she might allow a vote on oil drilling.

There’s no doubt that Americans want to conserve the environment. But they are not prepared to sacrifice the present to the future, whatever rich trust-fund environmentalists may say.

Then there’s education. Democrats are united in opposing reform of education through relaxation of the monopoly of union teachers.

Even the Congressional Black Caucus dares not vote for vouchers or any other form of school choice that the teachers’ unions oppose. Better to let a whole generation of black children be trapped in failing schools that employ union teachers.

Someday, the dam is going to break on all this special-interest politics. But that day is not yet. But at least we have Thomas Sowell to witness today’s errors, crimes, and injustices and to point with audacious hope to a better day for America.

How's Your Soft Power Today?

Back in the good old days the lilberal Joseph Nye regaled us with the importance of “soft power.” That’s the power of words and of culture and of diplomacy. Much nicer than the brutality of evil Bush-Cheney-neocon “hard” power which was such a disaster in Iraq.

Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is a perfect poster boy for the idea of “soft” power. Until now.

The thing about power is that power is power. It’s not kumbaya time in the old world or even in the new world. Not yet. Maybe not ever. There are still thug dictators and there are still Russian bears, and there are still politico-revolutionary regimes like Iran.

So when the Russians start a march through Georgia (the one next to the Black Sea) the liberal “soft” power doctrine looks pretty lame.

It makes things really hard, as Jonah Goldberg writes, for a candidate that falters once he gets off the script.

After the 2004 election Democrats and lefties decided they were outraged by the successful “swift-boat” campaign that successfully attacked Sen. John Kerry’s (D-MA) credentials as a war veteran. It is clear that the “Obama off the script” meme that conservatives are pushing is a campaign in the same category. Liberals are suddenly going to wake up one morming and realize that their candidate has been skunked by the eevil Republican off-the-script campaign. Or the eevil McCain “celebrity” campaign.

And they will declare that it is worse than McCarthyism.

But the fact is that Democrats are wrong on national defense. Soft power won’t do the job. Exquisitely scripted candidates won’t do the job. Inexperienced candidates won’t do the job.

It’s a dangerous world out there, full of thug dictators and power-mad revolutionaries. Our job is to stop them. And that takes power. Hard power.

Life without Newspapers Will Be Just Fine

Life is rough for the folks in the metropolitan newspaper business, and some people (OK, most of us) are ready to gloat.

Be careful what you wish for. That’s the message of Debra J. Saunders, the conservative columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Yes, fewer reporters mean fewer biased stories about lesbian immigrants fighting an unsympathetic establishment. But there also won’t be as many stories about sanctuary city policies gone bad, the latest zany law out of San Francisco City Hall or the growing bite that public employee pension systems are taking out of city and county services.

It’s natural for the folks watching their privileged newspaper industry collapse around them to imagine like Napoleon: “Apres moi, le deluge.” Or darkly warn, like David Copperfield’s boss Mr. Spenlow at the monopolistic Doctors Commons in early 19th century Britain: “Touch the Commons, and down comes the country.”

But the awful truth probably is that things will be just fine. One of the telling things about the news business is that the reporters had to unionize to keep their jobs. This suggests that there is pleny of talent out there ready to report the news. It suggests that in the natural order of things reporters and columnists would come and go, and nobody would make a career out of it.

You have to have a guild in order to keep the amateurs out.

In the future we are likely to see lots of unpaid or nearly-unpaid journalists writing the news.

And maybe that will be better than the current setup. For all the pompous insistence by the MSM that only professional journalists can speak truth to power, the truth is that the MSM behaves like puppy-dogs towards the powerful until the moment that there is blood in the water.

I expect that unpaid journalists will be a lot more courageous in speaking truth to power—and that will mean government employees and government employee unions in the future—than the current incumbents, dependent as they are on advertising revenue from controversy-shy corporations.

Lopez Lomong: US Soft Power

Our liberal friends, led by Joseph Nye and his book Soft Power, have been making a big deal lately about the importance of “soft” power, the influence of culture and diplomacy, against the “hard” power of Bush-Cheney military force.

So what do you make of Lopez Lomong, the native of Sudan’s Darfur region, an American for just 13 months, who will be carrying the US flag at the opening ceremony?

You call it soft power at work.

Even on the US Olympic team, according to Elizabeth Merrill, most people didn’t know Lomong’s history of exile from his native land and a childhood in a Kenyan refugee camp. But by the time they got to Beijing, they did. Not that Lomong was reticent or anything.

When he boarded a plane for China last week, [Lomong] told a handful of his peers, "Man, I would like to be the one carrying that flag." On Wednesday night, when team captains from each sport met in the village — some in person, some by conference call — Lomong was selected.

It’s a great American story, isn’t it? Immigrant struggles to get to the US, and then overwhelmed with pride when his country accepts him and honors him. Sends a little soft power message to the Chinese government on the question of Darfur.

Maybe Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) should spend a moment with the young athlete, who will be competing in the 1,500 meters. Said Obama to a young person earlier this week:

"America is no longer what it could be, what it once was... And I say to myself, I don’t want that future for my children."

But this is what Lopez Lomong says about America:

“Now I’m running for America and I’m grateful for that,” he said. “America is a land for everybody.”

Sen. Obama, please get a clue.

Catch 22 on Drilling

Our Democratic friends, led by Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), insist that we can’t drill our way out of high energy prices. The reason changes from moment to moment, of course. Sometimes it’s because of the “peak oil” argument, the notion that we have already passed the peak of oil production because there just isn’t that much oil left to find.

Alternatively, they argue that drilling at ANWR won’t put a dent in oil prices because it will take seven years to get the first drop of oil out. Or that the amount of oil won’t be that much so it isn’t worth drilling. You get the point.

Imagine the surprise of young intern Joel Alicea when he found an article entitled “The Effect of Opening Up ANWR to Drilling on the Current Price of Oil” by Morris Coats et al.

Guess what the article says.

If an amount of newly discovered oil is significant enough to reduce prices in the future . . . [this indirectly] reduces the current price of oil just as if there were a reduction in the marginal costs of extracting oil now.

Well, that happens to be exactly what Republicans are saying. Conservatives are claiming that the reason that oil prices have taken a dive lately is that President Bush has rescinded the federal ban on offshore drilling, so speculators must take into account the odds that oil supplies will increase in the future. This could really contribute to the debate, couldn’t it?

But here’s the twist. The article was rejected by The Energy Journal. Not orignal research, old boy.

It’s a Catch 22. Democrats go on and on about how the law of supply and demand doesn’t work when it comes to energy. But you can’t get an article refuting them into a scholarly journal because it’s not original research. Here’s what the rejection letter said to Coats et al.:

Basically, your main result (the present impact of an anticipated future supply change) is already known to economists (although perhaps not to the Democratic Policy Committee) . . . It is our policy to publish only original research that adds significantly to the body of received knowledge regarding energy markets and policy.

These days, the American people really do need to be rocket scientists. Because they only get one chance to read about important economic findings. After that, it’s too late. Vieu jeu old chap. Old news. Can’t print that sort of thing.

But it sure is convenient for economic fabulists like Al Gore and Barack Obama.

McCain and the Internet

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) don’t know nothin’ about the internet. Doesn’t even use email, apparently. And Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) has run an internet-savvy campaign. Everyone knows that.

So when McCain’s campaign put up the celebrity spot on YouTube, suggesting that Sen. Obama was a celebrity like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, the experts howled. McCain was crazy for trying to make a mark being hip.

Only now it seems he was crazy like a fox.

Celebrity Paris Hilton has issued a video in which the heir-head is lounging on a pool-side chaise lounge discussing her “hybrid” energy plan, mid-way between McCain’s oil-only plan and Obama’s conservation and renewables-only plan.

Make that young woman Secretary of Energy!

She did get one thing wrong though. Sen. McCain has recently updated his energy thinking. Now he favors an all-of-the-above energy plan that includes oil exploration, oil shale development, battery technology and renewables. So the plucky Paris was really touting McCain’s plan.

You can imagine that McCain’s Tucker Bounds was not slow to point this out.

“It sounds like Paris Hilton supports John McCain’s ‘all of the above’ approach to America’s energy crisis - including both alternatives and drilling. Paris Hilton might not be as big a celebrity as Barack Obama, but she obviously has a better energy plan.”

And according to Ann Althouse the Paris video and the McCain retort made it on the liberal morning shows.

Yep. That McCain guy is too old and too slow to figure out the internet.

Dueling Energy Futures

Republicans believe that we should let the market figure out the future of energy. Will we run out of oil? Can wind and solar make the difference? Is nuclear a viable option? Ultimately, entrepreneurs, inventors, and speculators will tell us. The government’s job is to think seriously about the rules, particularly the environmental rules.

Democrats see the future in more apocalyptic terms. They see the future as a question of saving the planet: from pollution, from Big Oil, from global warming.

So it is healthy that there is a big battle brewing in this election over the energy future. That means that the American people get to choose. Do they want to prepare for a future in which fossil fuels will be absent, and a radical reorientation of the economy will be necessary to stave off disaster? Or can we rely on the price signals of the market?

Right now, both parties are playing politics with energy. With Republicans running a Drill, Drill, Drill campaign, Democrats are willing to let their vulnerable members vote for drilling. They figure they can afford to wait, and then come back next year with a comprehensive energy policy that is long on conservation and wind and solar.

Republicans think that Democrats are just wrong, that all the apocalyptic rhetoric is just wrong. We think that Democrats and politicians are just giving in to their natural instinct to call for the moral equivalent of war.

The thing about the future is that nobody knows nothing. You can do all the predictin’ and prophesyin’ you like. But the future will turn out to be different.

That’s why Republicans prefer to let businessmen and speculators make the bets on the future. If they are wrong, then they get to pay, at least in part, for their mistakes.

In politics it is different. In politics it doesn’t matter if you are wrong, so long as you can successfully point the finger at someone else. If our Democratic and environmentlist friends are wrong about “peak oil” and global warming, it will be the American people that will pay for their mistakes.

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn Dies at 89

What can we say about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn except to say that he was a Witness. He was a witness to perhaps the greatest evil mankind has ever seen. We shall not see his like again.

Solzhenitsyn’s place in history is his witness to the horrors of the Soviet penal camp system. His Gulag Archipelago describes the gruesome islands of labor camps that were spread across the Soviet Union. An estimated 60 million people entered those camps, millions of them to die.

But Solzhenitsyn did not thunder in his witness. He could have issued a thunderbolt to rock the world. Instead he launched an earthquake. He laughed. He laughed at at evil. That is the great takeaway from Gulag. The laughter.

In the New York Times obituary we are treated to a quote from Susan Sontag.

“We were laughing and agreeing about how we thought Solzhenitsyn’s views on the United States, his criticism of the press, and all the rest were deeply wrong, and on and on,” she said. “And then Joseph said: ‘But you know, Susan, everything Solzhenitsyn says about the Soviet Union is true. Really, all those numbers — 60 million victims — it’s all true.’”

Er, no, Susan. In Solzhenitsyn’s critique of the West, made in his address at Harvard in 1978, he was exactly right.

Delivering the commencement address at Harvard in 1978, he called the country of his sanctuary spiritually weak and mired in vulgar materialism. Americans, he said, speaking in Russian through a translator, were cowardly. Few were willing to die for their ideals, he said. He condemned both the United States government and American society for its “hasty” capitulation in Vietnam. And he criticized the country’s music as intolerable and attacked its unfettered press, accusing it of violations of privacy.

But you can understand why a liberal wouldn’t have liked his critique.

Alekxandr Isayevich was, before everything else, a Russian. And it will be as a Russian, and as a Witness to evil, that he will be remembered.

Good Old Rush

Rush Limbaugh was just getting into a riff about the stupidity of Sen. Barack Obama’s plan to take money out of oil company profits and give it to people to help pay the cost of energy. It was the 20th anniversary, on August 1, 2008, of the Rush Limbaugh program on radio.

And guess who the first caller was on Open Line Friday? It was the three Bushes, President Bush 41, President Bush 43, and former Governor Jeb Bush of Florida. They called from Maine to wish Rush well on the 20th anniversary of the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.

And well they might. Rush Limbaugh and his “jaunty optimism” add up to a force of nature, and a considerable talent who talks “fun, frolic, and a serious discussion of the issues” 15 hours a week. It is Rush Limbaugh that keeps conservatism in the game even when it’s on defense.

Jaunty optimism is a powerful combination. FDR had it. Ronald Reagan had it. And, with the end of the Reagan-Bush era, conservatives need the morale-raising optimism of Limbaugh more than ever.

The mark of a true talent is to make it seem effortless. If you want to find out how difficult it is to sing like an opera singer, don’t listen to Luciano Pavarotti. He makes it sound easy. Listen to a grad student in voice, and hear the effort behind the performance. Rush is like Pavarotti. His easy blend of entertainment and political analysis is a tour de force. Nobody does it better. If you want to know how hard it is to do a radio show don’t listen to Rush. Listen to some beginner trying out his wings in the dark watches of the radio night.

A few months ago, the TV script writers went on strike and we found out, in case we didn’t realize, that the late night TV talk-show hosts are all scripted. Rush Limbaugh is not. He really does write his own stuff. Only he doesn’t write his own stuff. He just makes it up as he goes along.

It is said that God looks after children, drunks, and the United States of America. He certainly seems to have a special care for American conservatives too.

Best of luck Rush, you harmless little fuzzball, you. We appreciate your success and your influence more than you can ever know.

Beware the Hip Urbanites, Mr. Obama

That’s what Joel Kotkin and Mark Schill recommend in “Urban America: The New Solid South”.

Yes, all the fashionable people agree that hip urban living in the “ideopolises” of the Cultural Creatives of Richard Florida is the wave of the future—not to mention necessary to save the planet.

In recent months, the city-centered media such as CNN, The New York Times and National Public Radio have jumped on the urbanist bandwagon... This return to a more urbanized demography, some Democratic bloggers suggest, would assure a new liberal ascendancy.

You’d expect that, of course. But most people never in their lives go near a downtown neighborhood. They might even feel uncomfortable there. In fact, I’d guess that most Americans are a little envious and resentful of the downtown crowd. They get all the attention and, it seems, too much of the money.

Of course, it’s true that the cities are becoming more and more Democratic in the great sorting out as the middle class keeps on moving out from the city, the poor stay put where the liberals can shower them with benefits, and the hip arty crowd moves in.

But Kotkin and Schill warn that Democrats could end up owning a permanent minority, just like the long days of the great Republican ascendancy from the Civil War to the Great Depression.

Most people still grow up, get a job, get married, and have children. Anyone who has half a brain knows that to raise a family you need to get away from the poor and away from the liberals. That means out of the city and out to the outer suburbs, somewhere where the houses are cheap and the teachers and young and enthusiastic.

Barack Obama is the very personification of upscale urban hipness and liberalism. He’d probably do best by not reminding people too much where he comes from. More log cabin and less arugula.