Cameron Speaks, Media Underwhelmed

David Cameron gave a speech in Tooting, London on Monday, “Our Society, Your Life,” and the conservative press was unimpressed.

Cameron spoke of his political philosophy, the idea that there is such a thing as society, it is not the same as the state.  The idea is one of social responsibility.

Social responsibility means that every time we see a problem, we don’t just ask what government can do. We ask what people can do, what society can do.

And he drew a dividing line between the Conservative Party and Gordon Brown’s Labour Party.  “We believe in social responsibility, he believes in state control.”

That’s all fine and good, says  The Daily Telegraph.

Mr Cameron’s philosophical generalisations are certainly compelling and could provide the basis for effective opposition, and the next few months will require specifics and the hard-headed resolve to defend them.

But are the specifics important, or is it the atmospherics?  The nasty truth is that political parties win because the voters are ready to throw the other party out.   When Ronald Reagan was elected president in the United States it was because the voters were utterly fed up with Jimmy Carter and they decided in the last week of the campaign that, despite the reputation Ronald Reagan had as a bomb-thrower and a flake, that they would give him their votes.

Maybe all David Cameron has to do to win the next election after 10 plus years of Labour is to seem like a safe pair of hands and let voter fatigue do the rest.

Democrats and Taxes. Again

The Democrats plan to solve the problem of the Alternative Minimum Tax (it hurts the rich in Democratic states) with a tax surcharge on the rich nationwide.  Share the suffering.

And now they want to raise taxes on the private equity guys, according to Larry Kudlow.  Well, they are just making too much money.

Do they know what they are doing, he wonders?

Ironically, all this is happening while low-tax Reaganomics is spreading worldwide. Hence, this would be the exact wrong moment for U.S. politicians to raise taxes and impair American economic competitiveness.

One fine day, the Democrats will realize that they have to harmonize US tax rates with the rest of the world, indeed that it wouldn’t hurt to have tax rates lower than the rest of the world.

But it looks like they will have to learn the hard way.

But don’t worry.  The Democratic suits won’t suffer.  They will get theirs.  It’s you and I that will have to pay the price of their tax-raising follies.

Reid's "Incompetent" Gaffe

So Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told Joint Chiefs Chairman Peter Pace that he was incompetent, and then the lefty bloggers denied it. According to Michael Goldfarb, quoting a semi-lefty blogger, Reid said:

Pace is also a yes-man for the president and I told him to his face, I laid it out to him last time he came to see me, I told him what an incompetent man I thought he was.

It’s interesting how Reid illustrates the no-win situation of the US military where Democrats are concerned.  For doing what the president wants he’s a yes-man.  But imagine what would happen if Pace had actually rebelled against the president’s policy (particularly if the president were a Democrat).  Then we’d be hearing about the civilian control of the military and the danger of the military industrial complex. 

But really, the dispiriting thing is that Reid can go on like this until the cows come home and he’ll never  pay a price.

The rules are simple.  Democrats always get a pass.  You could look it up.  It’s in the constitution.

Hollywood and Abortion

Politically, we all know that Hollywood is pro-abortion.  But, with the release of Knocked Up, several commentators have noticed that Hollywood seems very reticent to celebrate abortion in its movies.

Gerard Baker writes:

In Knocked Up, the very word is avoided completely — the closest is when one of the characters suggests maybe the heroine should have a procedure that rhymes with “shmashmortion”.

It is not just in Knocked Up, and feminists have noticed, Baker points out.

They point out that in Hollywood, for decades — in everything from Sex and the City to Parenthood — women confronted with an unplanned pregnancy almost always choose to keep the baby.

Actually, that’s not quite true.  The 1999 move The Cider House Rules celebrated abortion, or at least illegal abortionists, and it grossed $56 million.

But Cider House Rules, you could argue, was an art-house film, whereas Knocked Up ($73 million after two weeks) is a movie marketed as the general unwashed.

Baker wonders if Hollywood’s reluctance over abortion tells us something.  Maybe we all know that abortion is a bad thing, whatever we say, and so we don’t want to be confronted with it when we’ve checked out for a bit of fantasy at the movies.

I’m convinced that we will some day come to view it in the way we now view slavery, a moral abomination that generations simply became inured to by usage and practice.

That’s a thought.

The Germans, of course, have no such squeamishness. In Edgar Reitz’s vast panorama, Heimat, the cellist heroine undergoes an illegal abortion in The Second Heimat on camera and nearly dies.  But she was impregnated not by the noble artistic hero but by one of couple of rich kids.  So that’s different.

CAFE: Bad Ideas Never Die

Back in the 1970s our august Solons thought it was time to issue a ukase to the auto companies and tell them what gas mileage their cars should get. 

The result was that station wagons disappeared and people gravitated to minivans, SUVs, and light trucks, because they had a less stringent gas mileage requirement.

Actually, the minivans, SUVs, and light trucks were and are bigger and heavier than the evil gas-guzzling station wagons they replaced.

Now the Democratic Senate is proposing to raise overall gas mileage to 35 mpg including light trucks.  Do these people understand what they are doing?  They are proposing to legislate people out of their big minivans, SUVs, and trucks.

Enter the law of unintended consequences. James H. Burnley writes.

Regulatory schemes like CAFE can come with a number of unintended consequences — things like putting smaller, sometimes less-safe vehicles on the road; pricing some vehicles beyond the reach of many Americans; and artificially creating winners and losers in a highly competitive environment like the auto industry.

And the chance is pretty good that another CAFE lurch upwards will do for GM and Ford, which are capitalized at about $10 billion each compared to over $200 billion for Toyota.

Look Democrats, why not just confine your foolishness to handing out subsidies to your alternative energy friends?   

Don’t get into things that can’t be solved by ordering people around, holding hearings, and repeating flashy acronyms.

There isn’t a magic hybrid solution here, ether.  Accelerating 4,000 lbs of SUV up to 60 mph takes a ton of energy.  Braking it to a stop uses up a lot of energy too.  Hybrids really only work for liberals driving in yeasty urban neighborhoods, not for average Americans driving on the freeway.

Russia: Coming to Terms With Reality

Russians want to believe that their country is great.  But the trouble is that it is not, writes Strategy Page.  Even in the days of the Soviet Union its greatness was an illusion.

In the early 1990s, when economists and accountants got the first good look at the Russian economy since the early 20th century, it was found that the Russian GDP was about four percent of the U.S. GDP.

But what an illusion!  The Soviet Union flexed its muscles and paraded weapons in Red Square, and we all believed.  The trouble is that the ordinary Russians believed too.

The really bad news is, most Russians are still not aware of how screwed up their Soviet era military was.

They thought that the brutality and incompetence of the Soviet era military was normal and inevitable.  And they remember how the Red Army beat the Germans in WWII.

Unfortunately the Germans probably beat themselves in WWII—and Stalin was not afraid to throw an entire generation into the meat grinder in order to win.  And it didn’t hurt that the US motorized the entire Red Army with Lend Lease.

Now we are back to the old, old game.  The rest of the world wants to contain Russia, but “to many Russians, the West is still out to destroy them.”

That’s an illusion too.  The ugly truth is that the West doesn’t give a damn about Russia.  It just wants to contain it.

Blair Whines About Media He Helped Create

It really is too bad of Tony Blair to complain about the savagery of the modern media.  After all, it was Bill Clinton and he that created and developed to a fine art the modern “war room,” ready 24-7 to demolish the opposition.  And it is George W. Bush and David Cameron that are trying to find a way beyond the ferocious Clinton/Blair campaign methodology that is based on a win-at-all-costs approach to politics.

In his speech today he characterized the media, according to George Jones, as a “feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits.”

That reads exactly the way that the Republican Party experienced the Clinton politics of personal destruction and the Conservative Party experienced the Blair media bulldogs like Alistair Campbell.  The Clinton/Blair war rooms operated on the Al Davis principle:  “Just Win Baby.”  And it didn’t matter what they said and who they destroyed in order to get to the finish line first.

The tragedy is that both Clinton and Blair entered office with a media in love with them.  Once elected they didn’t need the politics of personal destruction.  But once they had got the war room genie out of the bottle and had seen what it could do for them they could never bring themselves to put it back.

So when Blair’s New Labour Party got into office it governed on the basis of constant media-friendly “eye-catching initiatives.”  Governing, the deadly dull business of making things work, came a very definite second. 

Now Tony Blair leaves office whingeing about the unfairness of it all. The real unfairness is the legacy of ten years of Labour Party domestic policy: a huge increase in public spending but very little in the way of genuine reform.

What a waste.