Is Bush Exhausted or Just Resting?

Which is it? Is the Bush Administration finished, exhausted? Or is the wily poker player just sitting back faking out the political opposition?

Talking with Hugh Hewitt, the indefatigable Mark Steyn, (perm), asserts that the Bush Administration won’t do anything about Iran.

I think it does seem to me exhausted. And in a strange way, a lot of the things that he's getting into trouble with over the moment, like the $3 a gas pump, is, I think, a reflection of...it doesn't even have the sort of strength of will to drag its own party with him.

But over at The American Thinker Thomas Lifson reminds us not to forget that President Bush had a reputation at Harvard as “a very avid and skillful poker player.” And in case you forgot, Bush is a Harvard MBA.

He is a trained strategist, an MBA graduate of Harvard Business School, where he learned that the point of having a strategy is to win when it counts, not just to feel good about yourself at every moment of the process.

That’s “strategery” to you and I. Lifson likes to call the strategic-poker-player Bush

persona "The Crawford Kid." It is an identity the President probably would never embrace, because keeping it secret keeps his opponents unwary. But they will never learn. Contempt for the President and their own ego-maintenance demands will not let them recognize reality when they are outsmarted.

The thing to remember is that politicians are not like you and I. They enter politics because they like risk and they like to win. A crisis like Iran or like $3.00 gasoline creates a chance for some action. And maybe a chance to win.

"Make Price Gouging Illegal"

Ever since Maria Cantwell was elected to the United States Senate from the Soviet of Washington she has kept a pretty low profile. And a good thing too, since she got elected spending her own money from Real Networks stock options that, after the NASDAQ tanked, she didn’t have. But that’s OK. Hillary Clinton helped her out.

This year she is running for reelection so she has cudgelled her brain to come up with an issue that will resonate with the voters.

What do you think would go over real good? Price gouging! Yes, that should do it. So Sen. Cantwell is pushing a bill to make price gouging illegal.

Now you’ve worked for a private company, for at least a couple of years, Senator. How would that work?

Never mind. Her price-gouging gimmick is getting her on TV shows like Hardball so that when the the voters complain:

It makes me angry that the prices keep going up for no apparent reason other than the profit of the gas companies.

She can say, with a straight face that, given where the American public is right now

they want something done immediately. And that’s why we need a federal bill to make price gouging illegal.

Well now, Senator. And how would a law against price gouging have any effect immediately? And how exactly would you define price gouging so that it kept honest businessmen, assuming there are any, out of jail?

And what needs to be investigated is whether supply is being artificially manipulated, whether it’s being suppressed or shipped overseas for lower profits, only to have higher profits at home because there’s less supply. And until we have good transparency in these oil markets, we’re not going to be able to give consumers the confidence that prices aren’t being manipulated.

You know, Senator, what with the futures markets and what with spot prices and all, I’d say that the oil business, at least outside of the national oil companies of OPEC, is about as transparent as you can get. But that isn’t really important, does it? Not compared to the importance of getting reelected.

It’s a pity that Senator Cantwell didn’t seem to have time on Hardball to talk about increasing energy supplies. You know, boring things like drilling for oil and building new oil refineries and nuclear plants. Could that be because she has never voted to increase oil supply in her liberal Democratic life? And nuclear: isn’t that like dangerous, and stuff?

Jane Jacobs: Celebrating the City Street

Jane Jacobs was a writer celebrated both by liberals and conservatives. She died April 25 in Toronto, aged 89. In her celebrated Death and Life of Great American Cities she punctured the confident movement of urban renewal that was bulldozing entire urban neighborhoods to cure “urban blight.” Liberals liked her because she bashed the rich. Conservatives liked her because she championed the old and the traditional.

She also belonged to that extraordinary time around 1960 when a clutch of major non-fiction books were published to universal reception: “Death and Life of American Cities,” “Silent Spring,” “The Other America,” “The Feminine Mystique,” “Growing Up Absurd,” “The Affluent Society,” and “Unsafe at Any Speed.”

In the New York Times Douglas Martin speaks of her four recommendations for city environment:

"Death and Life" made four basic recommendations for creating municipal diversity: 1. A street or district must serve several primary functions. 2. Blocks must be short. 3. Buildings must vary in age, condition and use. 4. Population must be dense.

In NRO conservative G. Tracy Mehan claims Jacobs for conservatives.

Flourishing city diversity, of the kind that is catalyzed by the combination of mixed primary uses, frequent streets, mixture of building ages and overheads, and dense concentration of users, does not carry with it the disadvantages of diversity conventionally assumed by planning pseudoscience.

Mehan claims Jacobs as a Burkean. But you could also categorize her as a rebellious libertarian.

"City air still makes free the runaways from company towns, from plantations, from factory-farms, from subsistence farms, from migrant picker routes, from mining villages, from one-class suburbs," wrote Jacobs.

We can hardly say that she succeeded in stopping the elite passion for remaking cities in its own highly educated and highly evolved image. “Urban Renewal” was replaced by “New Urbanism” and now “Smart Growth.” The theme is constant—bulldozing people around to suit the aesthetic preferences of the educated elite.

But there is a curious contradiction in Jacobs’ womanly celebration of the vibrant city. The single-purpose suburb, against which she rails, was created by women. They wanted to get away from the danger and the bustle of the city so they could raise their families in peace and quiet.

Blair in a Pickle

You think that President Bush is in a mess. Prime Minister Blair is in meltdown. This week three separate scandals hit the fan. And next week are the British local elections.

The first problem is that the National Health Service is running over budget and so hospitals are laying off doctors and nurses. It’s got so bad that Health Secretary Patricia Hewett was booed by nurses at a convention.

But that was just the light relief. The big deal is that the British prisons have been releasing foreign prison inmates and that over a thousand of these “former inmates were “lost” between an incoherent Prison Service and an inept Immigration and Nationality Directorate,” according to the London Times. Some of them went ahead and committed rapes and murders.

You might wonder how the Brits expect two branches of the Home Office to communicate with each other, and you would be right. It is unconscionable to expect government employees to do much more than just show up. But still. Don’t these bureaucrats have any shame?

Scandal Number Three is really not worth worrying about, except that it is a question of ethics and all that. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott has been having an affair with his civil-servant secretary. “[T]his relationship between a prominent politician and a civil servant in his office was unprofessional as well as unethical in other respects,” says the Times. Lucky he isn’t a corporate CEO, but merely a politician. Then he would have had to resign.

The conservative press are, of course, enjoying the meltdown of New Labour immensely. It merely demonstrates the essential unseriousness of the Blair regime: all spin and no substance.

But the British people thought that Blair would be different.

Iran a Threat But Iraq Wasn't

It’s easy to write that now. In the left-wing Guardian Jonathan Freedland writes that:

That the Iraqi peril was a phantom, all but the pro-war diehards now concede. On the current menace posed by Iran, there is no such consensus.

Iran is a country that experts agree could have nuclear weapons in a short while.

But it is surely relevant that Iran is led by a man who cannot let a week go by without issuing an annihilationist threat to one of his regional neighbours.

Well, you expect this sort of thing from left-wing commentators. But looked at from a strategic viewpoint, the attraction of an Iraq invasion was that it was next to Iran. Iran was always the problem, even back in 2000/2001. But when you are doing military operations you have limited options. Iraq was a threat to neighboring states, including of course Israel and it was doable. Hence the decision to invade Iraq.

I suspect that if you could have got into the meetings in the months after 9/11 you would have heard, again and again, that Iraq was only the start. What was needed was to contain Iran.

Of course, when and if we do something about Iran then the lefty media will say that Bush Lied about that too. Iran was never a threat, they’ll say. And Bush knew it.

Raise the Storm Signals

A big worry, if you worry about big things, is this. Does the current explosion in commodity prices mean another economic blowdown like 1979-82, when the world, led by the United States and Europe, experienced “stagflation?” Are we going to see a replay of the Carter years when we had inflation and recession at the same time?

William P. Kucewicz takes a look at the numbers, and asks: is the runup in commodity prices a monetary phenomenon or a response to economic growth?

Don’t worry, he says. The numbers show that it’s an economic response, not a monetary phenomenon.

Well, it’s nice to be so sanguine about it, but I took a look at the graphs in his article and I don’t get it. It looks to me as if the world is heading for a big economic slowdown resulting from the huge increase in commodity prices of the last few years. And just what was the global economic boom driven by other than the huge increase in credit when the Fed started fighting recession in 2001/2002?

Here are the interesting numbers. Economic growth towards the end of 2005, worldwide, has almost stalled out. Global capital spending is still increasing even though global economic growth has been slowing since late 2003.

What the numbers say to me is: Expect a sharp decline in economic growth, a stall in capital spending, and a sharp drop in commodity prices. And then start wondering where the bottom is going to be.

Sounds a bit like 1980 all over again.

Why Are Bush and Cameron Going Green?

President Bush opened the year by confessing that America was “addicted to oil.” It was obviously no throwaway line. He has repeated it, most recently in his speech Monday on renewable fuel sources in which he said that

[T]he prices that people are paying at the gas pumps reflect our addiction to oil.

Meanwhile British Conservative Party leader David Cameron has made a point of moving the Tory Party greenwards, installing a windmill on his London house and buying a Lexus Hybrid. Last week he went to the Arctic to hug a husky. He’s setting up a new

approach to climate change, part of the new green revolution that the Conservative Party is intending to lead.

For starters, he’s going to propose a Carbon Levy on polluters.

If conservative politicians are talking like this then they must be looking at polls and focus group results that tell them to go green or go out of business.

President Bush’s speech “was a sad example of political capitulation by a former Texas oilman who certainly knows better,” writes James K. Glassman He should know that

America is no more addicted to oil than it is addicted to bread, to milk, to paper, to water, to computers or, in the immortal words of the late Robert Palmer, to love.


We use oil -- and other unmentioned but implied addictions like coal and natural gas -- to generate energy that powers our cars, heats our homes, lights our cities, runs our factories. By the standard of what they do for us, fossil fuels are pretty cheap. They provide enormous industrial leverage.

And if fossil fuels one day run out, or if global warming really does melt the glaciers and flood the lowlands—a very big if—then humans will adapt.

So what is going on? Why are conservative politicians capitulating to the watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside, socialists in drag?

The problem is the “mmmmhh” factor. What’s that? It’s the sound that the fifty-something liberal Seattle women were making all around me on December 6, 2005. They were listening to photographer Subhanker Banerjee tell them about the beauties of the Alaskan North Slope at a Seattle Arts and Lectures special event held at Benaroya Hall. And whenever Banerjee would tell them what a shame it would be to spoil the North Slope by drilling for oil in ANWR, several of them would moan “mmmmhh.”

They weren’t speaking in tongues but they were certainly having a religious experience.

The educated elite in the Anglosphere may not believe in God any more, but they do have a religion, and that religion provides them with the universal human need for meaning, for apocalyptic fear, for sacrifice, and for redemption from sin.

And best of all it is a religion with costs, an essential ingredient in a thriving religion according to sociologist Rodney Stark.

You don’t mess with peoples’ religion. Every politician knows that.