Peggy Noonan Worries About the Short Term

In her regular Thursday column, Peggy Noonan reviews Bush’s speech at Kansas State University. She approves of his strategic, even romantic vision, but worries about the short term.

We want our president to love democracy and hold it high. But I would feel better if his preoccupations, and his public statements, had more to do with safety, homeland security and a heightened sense of the need for preparedness. I would like him to find Osama.

Actually, I would argue that the opposite is true. If you have the strategy right, you can always deal with the tactical issues, the friction and the fog of battle. But the way to win battles is to have your troops in the right place before the battle.

The notable thing about the Bush presidency has been its strategic sense. It has put in place the tax rate cuts that blasted the economy out of stasis. It has injected the United States in between the two radical foci in the Middle East, the Sunni radical Wahabis in Saudi Arabia and the Shia radicals in Iran. It has allowed Israel to advance to a unilateral division of Palestine.

The conseqence of these strategic moves will become evident in the future when the unexpected happens and battles in the War on Terror erupt. We will realize how convenient it is to have troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. We will observe the good fortune of having walled off the Palestinians into their own political and physical space.

But do not expect the world to thank President Bush for his strategic dispositions. Not now, and maybe not ever.

Boys and Books and Marriage and Abuse

In the past week we’ve seen The New Republic worry about Boys and Books, how boys just aren’t doing well in school, and how colleges are conducting an informal affirmative action program to favor unqualified boys because otherwise their male student percentage would go below 40 percent.

Then we have City Journal’s Kay S. Hymowitz observing how the only women who are sticking to marriage and children like glue are women who are college graduates, women devoted to “The Mission” of giving their children the best possible start in life.

Then we have Phyllis Schlafly observing that one effect of feminists insisting that Title IX be treated as a demand for exact equality of results in college sports is that boys don’t go to colleges that don’t have a good male athletic program.

Of course we should not forget the Nixzmary Brown story, the little girl beaten to death by her step-father, even though the government’s child protective services knew all about the abuse Nixzmary had suffered.

And we should certainly celebrate the amazing story of British barrister Constance Briscoe, cruelly abused by her mother as a girl, but taken in by a teacher in her school when a teenager, graduating out of high school top of her class and ending up a municipal judge.

What is all this telling us?

It is telling us that liberals are wrong. They told us that the big problem was that girls weren’t being properly served in school. They were wrong. Girls were doing fine. But boys were falling behind.

Liberals told us that the old traditional marriage was a thing of the past, that people were searching out new relationships, and this was healthy. But they are wrong. Now we know that homes without fathers are homes that will likely generate girls that have sex too early and boys that are violent and criminal. And more than that. Homes that do not contain their married mother and father are dangerous to children and other people.

Liberals told us that it was a terrible thing that girls were denied a chance to participate in sports. Now we are gutting youth sports to impose an artificial standard of participation.

Liberals told us that we needed government to come in and prevent abuse of children. Now we find out that government child protective services are hopeless.

There’s a pretty obvious lesson here, staring us in the face, isn’t there?

Of course. We need more funding for all those underfunded programs.

Joel Stein Doesn't Get It

Everybody is having a grand old time with young Joel Stein’s foolish oped in the LA Times.
“I don’t support our troops,” he writes. Still, when the troops come home, of course, he wants them to have the full use of the welfare state:

All I’m asking is that we give our returning soldiers what they need: hospitals, pensions, mental health and a safe, immediate return.

But please, no parades.

But Joel, you completely misunderstand the whole ethos of the nation state, you and all your liberal buddies. What those soldiers need, first of all, is to know that their nation honors their service. It doesn’t matter if they were sent off on a wild goose chase, if millions of them died for nothing. When they come back, we tell them that we honor them. Period. End of story.

Forget all the stupid welfare state nostrums of hospitals, pensions, and mental health counseling. These are men, old chum. What they need is a wife and a job. And they need to be honored.

The anti-war leaders understand this: that is why they put out those mendacious signs in the spring of 2003. “Support Our Troops: Bring Them Home.”

Guess why the Swift Boat issue was so powerful in 2004. Because it reminded a whole generation of American men why they cannot vote for Democrats. It reminded them, as if they had ever forgot, of what they experienced when they came home from Vietnam a generation ago.

But go ahead. Don’t support the troops. Go ahead and send another generation of young men into the only political party that honors them, the Republican Party.

You can gauge the depth of Joel Stein’s folly by reading the interview (or try here) he gave to Hugh Hewitt. Hewitt is turning into a ferocious interviewer. He just knows exactly how to make a liberal look like a fool. So he runs Stein through a bunch of military situations: Does he support our troops in Afghanistan? In Kosovo? He gets Stein to say that he only supports the troops in missions that he, Stein, personally supports.

But this is folly. Liberals have this fantasy that they are above the mere nation state and its patriotism, and dare one say, nationalism. Therefore they have the moral standing to pick and choose what they support.

Of course, liberals don’t extend such privileges to the rest of America. When it comes to the support of liberals and their initiatives, in the media, in the schools, in social services, and in the university, then there is no opting out. There is no right to pick and choose. Everyone must pay their taxes, and everyone must support the journalists, the teachers, the social workers, and the professors. Otherwise they are mean spirited and ultra-conservative. Or even racist, sexist, and homophobic.

Not Your Father's Economy

What is going on with the nation’s economy? Now that the era of motors and steel is going away, what does a healthy economy look like?

This question has been nagging away since about 1980 when it looked like smokestack America was finished, and the future was bleak. Instead, as we know, the economy thrived. But what was it thriving on? For the past generation we have been subjected to a neverending MSM drumbeat of layoffs and downsizings, but the economy is better than ever. We read that the median hourly wage hasn’t budged since 1973 but we see all around us the detritus of unashamed prosperity. What is going on?

That is what Mark Brown asks as Ford announces plans to lay off 30,000 workers in the next few years.

I don’t pretend to understand the economy any more.


I don’t understand how our economy can keep churning while all the good, blue-collar jobs keep disappearing, relegating more and more people to lives of earning less.

Says he:

I grew up in a railroad family in a community where the breadwinners for most of the other families worked in factories. The railroad moved the raw materials to the factories or the finished products to market. It was an easy economy to understand.

Now everything has changed.

Mark Brown is saying that the world is waiting for someone to write a book that will make the complex understandable, that will reduce our present economy down to a sound bite that politicians and media people can spout without really even understanding it.

In reality, the US economy has not changed since the industrial takeoff in the years after the Civil War. It has been continental, market driven, and always driving towards lower costs, wiping out industry after industry as new ideas and new processes appeared and undercut the old ways.

It’s just that up to now in spite of everything, you could pretend that the economy was all about sturdy workers making things and transporting them to market, rather than an abstract continental crapshoot of costs and profits and losses, of numbers and instant fortunes and terrifying bankrupties.

So, where is the genius who will peel the scales off our eyes?

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?