Kudlow on Hastert

Never mind about Denny Hastert’s handling of the Foley incident, writes Larry Kudlow, although his performance was bad enough. It’s the failure on the big things that really demand that he should go.

I would describe Mr. Hastert's leadership of the House in general as negligent.

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Rather than a winning message of economic growth, a strong defense and optimism for the future, Mr. Hastert has given us silence.

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Tax reform has gone by the wayside. So has spending reform. So has free trade. So has true immigration reform.

So what’s the point of Denny Hastert?

Maybe there are only a few things that Congress can do. But there is always virtue in talking about what we want to do. That’s because you can’t change anything until you have ventilated it in the public square, boldly and courageously put your ideas out and pushed and pushed and pushed.

The trouble about the Bush/Hastert years is that there has been no contest in the public square, no daily effort to change the conversation in America.

Maybe it’s because the Bush team has been too focused on the war on terror. Maybe it’s because they have decided they can win elections just by getting the base out. But someone needs to be out talking to the great moderate middle, talking conservative ideas and trying to win them over with ideas that make sense for them and their families.

Because America’s best days are yet to come. And Americans need to know it.

Feeding the Underclass in Britain

Last week in Brixton, an eternally rough section of London, two teenagers were shot as they waited in line at McDonalds, according to the BBC. This week it is the turn of the pundits to tell us what it all means.

In the London Spectator Alistair Heath writes about “The Mean Streets of Britain,” the violent, lawless, and workless inhabitants of the inner cities. But the Brits seem to be resigned to it.

[I]t no longer shocks a public numbed by the regularity of it all, and disillusioned by the apparent powerlessness of the authorities to do anything about it.

And the levels of pathology are climbing into the stratosphere.

In Calton, a district of east Glasgow which epitomises the worst of underclass Britain, a boy born today can expect to live just 53.9 years, at least three decades less than someone born in London’s Kensington.

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Calton residents are seven times more likely to die a drugs-related death than the rest of the country, 61 per cent have no qualifications and 37 per cent of children grow up in workless households. Around 57 per cent of adults do not work — and with only 8 per cent registered as unemployed, most are clearly content to live on benefits.

The astonishing thing is the level of apathy over the manifest failings of the welfare state. What do you mean, “57 percent of adults do not work?” It seems that the cultural power of the liberal elite in Britain, as here, short-circuits any anger over this sort of outrage.

The thing is, we know what to do.

The problems of the underclass, while monumental, are not intractable, but would require extraordinary political will to put right, including a market-led revolution in education, a dramatic reform in welfare to make work pay, the removal of the incentives for family breakdown, a much tougher ‘broken windows’ strategy for policing, and a changed cultural message that promotes decency and respect.

Why don’t we do something? It is because anyone proposing to do something gets shot down as a racist or a fascist by the liberal elite.

So the misery of the underclass will have to get deeper.

But let us be clear. If this sort of outrage were occurring in the nineteenth century, you know, when the evil bourgeoisie was in charge, the heavens would be ringing with the bellows of outrage from our progressive friends.

It's All About Iran

I’ve said again and again that if you want to understand what the United States is doing fumbling around in Iraq, the answer is “Iran.”

As a world power the United States does not intend to allow another power to dominate the Middle East and its oil.

There will come a time when the Middle East and its oil will not be worth a pitcher of warm spit, but that time is not yet.

And so the United States has deployed its armed forces to prevent Iran from achieving its strategic aim: to destroy Israel and dominate the Middle East. Here is what Amir Taheri has to say, reviewing a book by former Iranian President Rafsanjani.

Rafsanjani seems to be planning to get control of the Iranian Assembly of Experts.

[H]e hopes to lead an anti-Ahmadinejad coalition in next December's elections for the Assembly of Experts - the body that can choose or dismiss the "Supreme Guide," the Islamic Republic's true leader.

Nobody would care about elections in a fairly poor nation of 60 million in the Middle East except for two things.

The first is that the Islamic Republic has had a secret nuclear program for almost two decades while taking the International Atomic Energy Agency for a ride. The second is that the leaders of the Islamic Republic - who felt no discomfort in discussing the use of nuclear warheads and other weapons of mass destruction two decades ago - don't seem to have abandoned their strategy for reshaping the Middle East.

And that is why the United States will be in a convenient strategic position if its troops are in Iraq when Iran goes nuclear. It makes it rather difficult for Iran to rumble across Mesopotamia and the Arabian desert and take control.

How About the 2008 Election?

Enough of the Foley kerfuffle. Let’s talk presidential politics for 2008 and the book The Way to Win by Mark Halperin and John F. Harris.

The Wall Street Journal’s John H. Fund takes a look at their book, and finds there is a lot to think about. Helperin and Harris, as Old Media mastodons, reconize that the

Old Media of TV networks and prestige publications now suffer from "fading power and diminishing options." The New Media
of cable news and the Internet are creating a
"Freak Show," they say, stripping away the
restraints and minor courtesies that used to govern campaigns and public debate.

And at the center of the freak show is good old Matt Drudge ("salacious, reckless, superficial and unfair") whose site possesses “singular power” that any candidate ignores at his peril.

One of the powers of Matt Drudge is that all the Old Media read him.

Of course, there are some of us that believe that if the New Media is a “freak show” then the Old Media is a drugged-out wreck, fueled by privilege and access and outraged at the energy and the talent of the young-uns who seem to operate on a wing and a prayer instead of the proper institutional structure of multi-level editing and fact-checking.

But the 2008 election will be quite a spectacle.

Do The Right Thing

I agree with Tony Blankley. Speaker Hastert should resign over the Foley matter. Because it’s the right thing to do.

Yes, it’s true that the real person to blame is resigned Rep. Foley. And it is true that Speaker Hastert is not Foley’s keeper. And it is true that the congressional pages are not exactly children. But then they are not exactly adults.

And I frankly dislike the bureaucratic gamesmanship we have been hearing for the last few days, with people proposing the exact bureaucratic procedure that House Republicans should have followed in protecting the congressional pages.

It is never going to be possible to devise the perfect bureaucratic procedure to “keep our pages safe.”

On the other hand, as some of the French soixante-huitards, the radicals of 1968, discovered in the end: what matters is process, the dull, boring middle class due process of democratic politics. And the crowning glory of the west is its democratic process, people acting in good faith and insisting that their side of the political divide strives to act in good faith no matter the provocation.

The important thing is to do the right thing. Denny Hastert should resign.

Rumsfeld vs. Rice on Iraq

We’re going to win in Iraq, says President Bush. But what does that mean?

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Rice have been contesting just that question, writes Rich Lowry.

[There] was a constant tension between Rice and Rumsfeld. She wanted to do more; he wanted to do less.

That is what comes out in Bob Woodward’s new book State of Denial.

According to Woodward, "Rumsfeld said strongly and repeatedly, the Iraqis need to be given the chance to fail and fall on their faces, and only then would they pick themselves up, dust themselves off and come up with solutions."

But Rice wanted to build “a classic counterinsurgency operation,” clearing out the insurgents and presenting Iraq on a platter to the new government.

For my part, I go with Rumsfeld. Every government must earn the right to hold a monopoly of force within its borders. Usually that means it must fight and win a civil war, or at least fight some sort of war.

The United States government earned the right to govern its territory by force of arms against the British and then against the South. The British government is the direct descendant of the power plays after its civil war in the seventeenth century.

And then there were the wars of German unification. Prussia earned the right to head a unified Germany by beating in war first the Austrians and then the French.

Right now, the Iraqi government is clearly a puppet of the United States. It must earn the right, by force of arms, to rule the territory of Iraq.

If “We” win in Iraq, it means nothing. The government of Iraq must win. Until then, nothing has been won.

Page Storm Reaches Hurricane Force

Could Republicans lose control of Congress over an instant message? If they do, it would certainly be the moment at which the internet went prime time.

And according to Carl Hulse and Jeff Zeleny in The New York Times, the issue is resonating with voters. Said Rep Ray LaHood (R-IL):

“The first three questions I was asked when I arrived in Peoria,” he said, “were not about immigration, the war or taxes. It was, ‘What are you going to do about the page program?’”

It’s a beautiful scandal for Democrats, because when gays are concerned its heads we win and tails you lose. If Republicans had publicized and reprimanded Rep. Foley for inappropriate contact with congressional pages before last Friday when ABC News publicized the inappropriate IM conversations that Foley had with a congressional page, then they would have been roundly criticized as the homophobe party.

Now they are being criticized for being soft on child molesters.

Well, right or wrong, there is a higher standard of behavior for Republicans in public life. To adapt the words of British Prime Minister Tony Blair: they have to be whiter than white.

And that’s how it ought to be. If House Republican leaders knew about inappropriate behavior and did nothing about it then they should resign.

Never mind the if, ands, and buts.

Speaker Denny Hastert said: “Would have, could have, should have.”

But that’s not good enough. Not good enough for Republicans.