NYT: Bush Reads Books! But...

We all know that President Bush is an ignoramus. So when it is reported that the First Lady gave him a copy of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao: The Untold Story and that the president actually read it, what are we to think?

Have no fear, The New York Times’ own Elizabeth Bumiller is there to help us out.

Apparently, when Unions-bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel was visiting the White House conversation included reference to Chang and Halliday’s Mao which “has been embraced by the right as a searing indictment of Communism.”

Well, that is good, in a way. “But.” (You knew that was coming.)

But [Andrew J. Nathan, a specialist in Chinese politics at Columbia University], who last year in The London Review of Books criticized what he called the authors’ vague and inaccessible sourcing, said that the biography presented Mao as a “comic-book monster,” with little explanation of the psychological, sociological and historical forces that allowed him to rise.

Oh no! So the ill-educated and intellectually naive President Bush, lacking a proper understanding of the psychological, sociological and historical reality of Mao’s time, might get the wrong message out of the book. This, it must be admitted, is a real danger.

Although there is no real danger of, say, President Bush getting the eroneous idea that Mao was a chatty sort of chap who liked hanging out with students so much that he invited them all to come and visit him in Beijing one day in 1966.

No. The real danger is that President Bush might come to the conclusion that Mao was a fiend who starved millions of Chinese to death in the 1950s so he could export food and buy weapons and technology from the Soviets. And we can’t have that.

But not to worry, says everyone’s favorite historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin. The president probably was just reading for recreation.

"To be honest, I’m not sure that it’s so weird for him to be reading this," said Doris Kearns Goodwin... "partly why presidents read is the reason that we all read: to relax, to replenish our energy and to go into another era and another time."

Anyone else detecting an odor of nauseating condescension here?

We wouldn’t want to get boxed into admitting that President Bush was a serious man with a serious grasp of world history, would we?

Did Hillary Blunder on Race?

Hillary Clinton made a great gift to the nation when her absurd Hillarycare went down in flames in 1994 and helped elect a Republican Congress. Is she trying to do it again?

Shelby Steele thinks that maybe her “plantation” speech in Harlem on Martin Luther King Day could rank right up there in the blunder department. He writes that pandering is not just a question of going to a black church and playing the race card. It requires a certain finesse, of the kind possessed by Bill Clinton but not by Senator Clinton. Blacks might come away from her speech with the wrong message:

Does she really see us as she projects us--as a people so backward that our support can be won with a simple plantation reference, and the implication that Republicans are racist?

Steele has developed an important take on the race question in The Content of Our Character, A Dream Deferred and White Guilt. He presents the race issue as a dance between black shame and white guilt.

Yes, you cannot understand the race question merely as a matter of white guilt and the need for atonement. There is also the question of black shame. First there was the shame of enslavement itself, but after the Civil Rights revolution a new shame emerged, the shame of backwardness. Blacks were propelled into elite institutions by affirmative action and found that they were ashamed by their lack of preparation and savoir faire.

Every immigrant group feels this shame, but blacks felt it more keenly because of the peculiar nature of their entry into the public square. They responded to the experience by self-segregation, staying out of full participation in the middle-class experience, held back by the shame of backwardness.

Democrats have played this situation for all it is worth, but Steele wonders if the game is up. When blacks have got over their shame, then what will be the point of voting Democratic?

The politics of black uplift was once an idealism, but today it has become the work of hacks, tired apparatchiks and petty demagogues looking for power. And there, on TV last week, as if to illustrate this truth, was the specter of Mrs. Clinton and Al Sharpton embracing at the podium, mere captives of power making the tired charge--via an encrusted plantation metaphor--that Republicans are racists. What exhaustion! And what evil, to labor so hard at keeping blacks mired in grievance. Kind of reminds one of a plantation, though here the harvest is surely grievance rather than cotton.

Every immigrant group has arrived, exulting, in the promised land, and then sunk back in shame at their nakedness and lack of competence in the shining city on a hill. But every group has also, after a generation or two of gestation, been reborn into the full American experience of self-governing competence when they finally screwed up the courage to cast their shame aside.

Maybe, with the impetus of Hillary Clinton’s “plantation” speech, blacks will realize that it is time to accept their full citizenship in this great land, as it dawns on them that it been there in plain sight for a generation, waiting for them to summmon the confidence to pick it up.

Hybrid Tax Cuts for Rich Liberals

It isn’t enough that liberals make out like bandits working for the government earning 40 percent more than ordinary working stiffs earn in the private sector.

They also make out like bandits when it comes to buying cars.

When the Seattle liberal buys a new Toyota Prius hybrid, the federal government will kick in with $3,400 in tax credits.

Nothing quite like tax cuts for the rich, eh? According to Richard Burr,

The average household income of a Civic hybrid owner ranges between $65,000 to $85,000 a year; it’s more than $100,000 for the owner of an Accord. The median income of a Toyota Prius owner is $92,000; for a Highlander SUV owner $121,000; and for a luxury Lexus SUV owner it’s over $200,000.

The trouble is that the hybrids don’t really save that much gas. So people that buy them are not really saving that much in fuel. But they are making an important fashion statement. And since liberals make their livings spending your money on their liberal clients, they don’t really find it too hard to justify spending some more of your money on environmentally sustainable fashion statements for themselves.

By the way, who’s going to pay for disposing of all those toxic hybrid batteries?

Do Not Expect School Choice, Ever, From Left

The movement to roll back the government education monopoly has received a check recently with the decision of the Florida State Supreme Court, reported by Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters, that voucher programs are unconstitutional because they violate the requirement that the state provide

by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education."

It is infuriating, because you know in your heart that a liberal court could easily find emanations and penumbras in such a sentence to justify any number of liberal initiatives in education that cut against the grain of popular will expressed by the state legislature. For instance, they could say that the founders never meant “public school” to mean government monopoly school but any school sponsored, funded, or run by approved liberal non-profit foundations.

The fact is that the left will oppose school choice to the last illiterate child. In Britain, this logic is in the process of destroying Prime Minister Tony Blair’s education reform bill, as David Green reports.

In Britain, the sticking point is “selection.” Britain’s Labour Party left cannot abide the notion of schools selecting their own students. In part, this instinct is justified. Britain used to have a selection test at age 11 which determined whether a child would go to a college prep “grammar school” or a vocational “secondary modern” school. Every one has a tale of an adult whose life was ruined by the failure to make it to grammar school.

But there is a worse evil than selection. And that is monopoly government bureaucratic schools, the kind of schools we have in Britain and in the United States, utterly dominated by producer interests and utterly free from responsibility for outcomes. School choice changes all that and forces the monopolists to start serving the consumers. David Green shows how school choice is working in Sweden:

The voucher system has resulted in an increase in independent providers. Before the reforms, independent schools in Sweden accounted for less than one per cent of pupils and few of those received any government funding. According to the Swedish National Agency for Education, there were 565 independent schools in 2004/05, accounting for 11 per cent of the 4,963 schools overall. An independent study found that competition from independent schools has improved results in state schools. Moreover, it has been found that new independent schools are more likely to be established in areas of under-performing state schools serving disadvantaged children.

Well now. You mean to say that these evil voucher financed schools are actually seeking out the tough areas serving disadvantaged children? How could that be?

Then he goes on to tell how school choice is working in the United States.

All this is fine, of course. It’s good that we are slowly making progress on the school choice front. But meanwhile, millions of poor children are being left behind, while we slowly and fairly roll up the power of the governmente school monopoly.

The question is: Where’s the outrage? Our liberal friends have always specialized in the expression of outrage about social injustice. Interesting, isn’t it how the liberal lions fail to roar when the injustice benefits their core supporters, the vast and powerful education establishment.

Remember the old Sherlock Holmes story about the dog that didn’t bark? He didn’t bark because he knew the murderer.

But never mind that. Let us remember this. On school choice, we will win. The secret to winning has always been and always will be to win the hearts and minds of the mothers of America. Some day, un bel di for you opera fans, the mothers of America will wake up and realize they have been had. They will discover that they are angry, and they will tell their friends. And then it will all be over bar the shouting.

The Next Generation of Fatherless Boys

It isn’t much fun, but someone has to report on the pestilence unleashed by the culture war, the plague of fatherless boys. So here’s a report from England by Shaun Bailey, a youth worker in London.

Bailey lives and works in a neighborhood where a lawyer, Thomas ap Rhys Price, was recently robbed and then brutally murdered.

The individuals concerned bear total moral responsibility for their crime. No one made them do it. But we should also look at the failure of our society. For I witness every day a generation of young people who live in a culture that celebrates violence openly. They - and many other young adults - have grown up in a world where there is little censure, where no one - no teacher, no parent, no friendly face in the community - tells them what is right and what is wrong.

What is wrong? Well, we conservatives already know. Single parenthood, for a start. A generation ago, Bailey writes, young women were positively encouraged to venture into single-parenthood. But of course, then they find out just how hard and discouraging it is to raise children on your own.

The government encourages it. Young girls know that if they get pregnant and have a baby, “they will get a flat.” So single motherhood is an opportunity. In the United States, the sixteenth birthday of a young woman, the day she could qualify for a government-subsidized apartment, was called “liberation day,” according to George Gilder in Men and Marriage. It was the day she could get liberation from the chaotic household of her mother and the dangerous young men there and get her own place, and her own baby.

It is the same with benefits. These people are not stupid. If the state offers them money for doing something, they will do it. It is as simple as that. I hear them talking about it, I hear them discussing how much they can get. And I see them change their behaviour. Why have the father move in with you if it means that you will get less from the Government?

You have to feel that people are not stupid. The people ensnared in the welfare trap are eventually going to do something to get out of it. And the people who have built the welfare system are going to realize that it was all a dreadful mistake.

Aren’t they?

The Index of Economic Freedom 2006

What’s the best way to turn a poor nation into a rich nation? Richard W. Rahn asks this rhetorical question. Is it:

(A) Insist the world’s rich nations transfer substantial wealth though massive foreign aid to the poor nations?

(B) Insist all nations adopt policies that would make them as economically free as the top 10 freest economies today?

We sexist, racist, classist, homophobic conservatives know the answer to that. The answer is (B).

Which are the 10 freest economies today? Here’s the answer from the Heritage Foundation’s executive summary.

1. Hong Kong

2. Singapore

3. Ireland

4. Luxembourg

5. Iceland

5. United Kingdom

7. Estonia

8. Denmark

9. Australia

9. New Zealand

9. United States

Interesting isn’t it? The big surprise is Ireland, which fifteen years ago suddenly deregulated its economy and scaled back government spending, becoming within five years a celtic tiger, so that its per capita income is now higher than the United Kingdom. And don’t forget Estonia. They call it e-tonia now, with its flat tax and its burgeoning high tech economy.

I don’t know about you. But I think that the position of the United States down at No. 9 with Australia and New Zealand is shameful.

Come on President Bush. Come on Republican Congress. Come on conservative activists. Let’s do something about this!

We’re No. 1. Aren’t we?

Birgit Nilsson Dies: End of an Era

She died on Christmas Day 2005, aged 87, in the village in southern Sweden where she was born in 1918. And it appears that the Swedes had her memorialized and put into the earth before the rest of the world knew what had happened.

Birgit Nilsson was the biggest star singer in the bright star-studded age of singers: the years after World War II when the world had Flagstad, Callas, and Nilsson all singing at once. And that was just the dramatic sopranos.

She wasn’t a very good actress, and she wasn’t a particularly expressive singer, but she had a huge golden voice, a really big golden voice. Writes Jay Nordlinger:

A few years ago I was talking to a famous opera singer about Nilsson, and this lady was waxing rhapsodic about that incredible sound. “It was so loud, it blew your hair back! It rattled your bones!”

One of today’s major sopranos is Seattle’s Jane Eaglen. She writes:

When I went to the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, England, to study singing, my background was as a pianist, so my knowledge of opera was limited. My teacher, Joseph Ward, told me he thought I would sing Wagner’s Brünnhilde one day, which meant nothing to me, so he told me to go to the library and listen to "The Ring" conducted by Georg Solti and with Nilsson singing Brünnhilde. It would be safe to say that within five minutes I was hooked and my life changed forever. To think, as an 18-year-old, that one day I would sing this amazing music that the most incredible human voice I had ever heard was singing didn’t seem possible.

To memorialize Nilsson in Seattle, opera director Speight Jenkins had Eaglen sing the Liebestod (love death) from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde—right in the middle of a performance of Die Fledermaus.

You can get The New York Times obituary here, and The Daily Telegraph obit here.

We young punks never got to hear her in the flesh. But we have the recordings, of which the centerpiece is the Solti Ring in which Nilsson sings Brünnhilde. I used to have it on vinyl. Now I have it on CD.

It should be on your iPod.