Army Says Beauchamp Articles False

It looks like it could be time to start rolling out the long German words with respect to the anonymous New Republic Baghdad diarist now revealed as Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp.  The word I am thinking of is Schadenfreude, or taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others.  Even the New York Times is getting into the act in a modest way.  Reports Patricia Cohen

An Army investigation into the Baghdad Diarist, a soldier in Iraq who wrote anonymous columns for The New Republic, has concluded that the sometimes shockingly cruel reports were false.

“We are not going into the details of the investigation,” Maj. Steven F. Lamb, deputy public affairs officer in Baghdad, wrote in an e-mail message. “The allegations are false, his platoon and company were interviewed, and no one could substantiate the claims he made.”

And it was the Weekly Standard and conservative bloggers that raised the alarm on Beauchamp’s writings. 

Well, actually, I don’t take much pleasure in the troubles of the New Republic.  It seems to me that both Beauchamp and the editor of the New Republic, Franklin Foer, are inexperienced young men who just got in too deep.

The big lesson to learn about politics is knowing when you can lie with impunity and when you cannot.  It’s a nice point, and it takes a bit of experience to master it.

Anyway, the New Republic is a liberal title and standards just aren’t as high for liberals as they are for conservatives.  This can give liberals a false sense of security, because they are used to getting the benefit of the doubt when they get into trouble.

A New Look at the Industrial Revolution

Why did the industrial revolution begin in Britain?  And why did it begin in the decades before 1800?  Economist Gregory Clark in A Farewell to Alms has thinks he has divined the answer from centuries-old data on births and deaths and wills.  Nicholas Wade (Before the Dawn) reviews his book in the New York Times.

What happened was the the rich in Britain had more children and the violent poor were slowly squeezed out of society.  Thus British society became more peaceful and cooperative.  Over the centuries leading up to the industrial revolution the population slowly exhibited more and more of the “middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save.”  The rest is history.

Because they grew more common in the centuries before 1800, whether by cultural transmission or evolutionary adaptation, the English population at last became productive enough to escape from poverty, followed quickly by other countries with the same long agrarian past.

Before the growth of this middle-class culture, mankind was unable to escape the Malthusian Trap of overpopulation.  And indeed, agriculturalists were probably poorer and worked more hours than hunter-gatherers. 

But the result has ben a Great Divergence.  The peoples who have followed the British example have become unimaginably wealthy.  Those that have not have got poorer than ever. 

Education Fatties Won't Diet

The government education monopoly eats about $500 billion a year for K-12 education.  Check usgovernmentspending.com for the details.  And literacy hasn’t budged in 150 years.

So Newt Gingrich went on TV to tell folks to do something about it, reports Henry Payne.  Detroit seems to be as bad as anywhere.  So Newt burned in like a laser:

“The Detroit Public School system currently graduates 22 percent of its entering freshman. If you’re an African-American male, you have 73-percent unemployment in your 20s if you drop out of school.”

It may be worst in Detroit but it’s the same all over.  I talked to a twentysomething Canadian this weekend.  His mother said that she had been taught in school by nuns in India, and boy, were they strict.  “I was taught by morons,” he asserted.

As Randi Weingarten, New York teachers’ union leader puts it:  There are people out there who “just don’t care about kids.”  She means evil people who won’t vote more money for schools.

Henry Payne points to another possibility where Detroit is concerned. 

Trouble is, the locals don’t care. And no amount of bold national solutions will matter until they do.

Ignoring the staggering statistics Gingrich cited, Detroit leaders instantly manned the ramparts to shoot the messenger. Detroit Federation of Teachers President Virginia Cantrell said Gingrich should “leave Detroit alone.”

Hum.  It’s easy to take the Leninist strategy: The worse the better. 

But we are conservatives, and even liberal kids deserve better. 

Is DailyKos Really Rush for Liberals?

We right-wingnuts and hatemongers look at the output of the DailyKos with bemusement.  Because conservatives are sensitive, with good reason, about seeming negative and hate-filled and mean-spirited.  We expect to be pilloried for hate-filled rhetoric.

Yet the writers at the DailyKos (forget the commenters) spew out hate and conspiracy theories on a daily basis, observes blogger John Hawkins. 

OK.  There are always wing-nuts out there in the tall grass.  Yet mainstream Democratic politicians are going to the YearlyKos convention.

[W]hen someone like Harry Reid writes a diary on the Daily Kos or when Hillary Clinton goes to the Yearly Kos convention, it indicates that they’re comfortable associating with people who hold those sort of radical views.

Mainstream Republicans would be terrified to have their names associated with far-right websites.  So why are the Democrats so comfortable with left-wing virulence?  Hawkins writes:

Ten years ago, a liberal website that featured diarists who thought American soldiers were "morally retarded," that called for revolution, and that speculated that the President was going to declare martial law to retain power, would have been considered to be on the farthest fringes of the Left.

Yet now they think it is OK?

A conservative and Republican is bound to think that with the Kos connection the Democrats are cutting themselves off from the moderate middle that every candidate needs in order to win election to national office.

So why do they seem so comfortable with the Kossacks?  Do they know something we don’t know?  E.J. Dionne calls the Kos phenomenon the left’s answer to Rush Limbaugh.  Rush mobilized people on the right, he writes.

Democrats and liberals realized they needed a mobilizing force of their own but could not match Limbaugh’s reach on the radio. Enter the Internet, and Markos Moulitsas.

But are Democrats really short of a mobilizing force?  And is the relentlessly optimistic Rush Limbaugh really the right-wing version of the much more negative Kos community?  According to Dionne:

Democratic candidates know they owe a debt to Moulitsas. They’re paying homage to him because he has started to beat Limbaugh and O’Reilly at their own game. No wonder O’Reilly is so annoyed.

But there’s a basic difference here.  Rush Limbaugh was the first publicly partisan conservative voice on the general media.  People used to call up and wonder that he dared to say such things because they knew that you weren’t allowed to criticise and make fun of liberals in public.

On the other hand, Democrats have never lacked for partisan voices to get their message into the public square.  After all, everybody in the US in 1980 knew that Ronald Reagan was a B-movie actor who had appeared in a movie with a chimpanzee.  How did the Democrats manage to get that partisan message out without Mark Moulitsas and DailyKos?

Here’s my two cents worth.  I think that the Kos phenomenon is going to hurt the Democrats.  I think it is going to balance the party too far to the left and it is going to offend a lot of Americans, particularly moderate women.

Most average Americans are reflexively patriotic.  The relentless and often unanswered anti-Bush propaganda has had the effect of demoralizing them.  But when a Republican presidential candidate comes along and remoralizes them next year, then the political sands are going to shift. 

And Democrats may be surprised to find that the Kos connection has cut them off from the American people.

Bush Attacks Excess Dem Spending

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says it’s “only” $22 billion.  But President Bush had a different attitude, threatening to veto nine of the 12 appropriation bills, as Joseph Curl reports.

The president said yesterday he already has proposed increasing discretionary spending by 6.9 percent, but that Democrats want to add $205 billion in additional spending over the next five years.

Well, it’s about time.  Couldn’t the president have started vetoing six years ago? Perhaps the Republican Congresses weren’t as egregious in their spending plans.  But we know where Democrats stand on spending.

Although the House has passed most appropriation bills, each has added additional spending not proposed by the president. While Mr. Bush proposed numerous reductions in his $433 billion request for non-defense programs, Democrats have restored money for those proposed cuts, while also adding additional spending.

But Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) justifies the increases, saying that Bush has damaged the federal budget:

the Bush administration’s "reckless" fiscal policy has turned a $236 billion surplus into a $248 billion deficit, leaving key domestic programs unfunded or underfunded.

Say that again?  “Leaving key domestic programs unfunded or underfunded?”  Is that French for failing to throw enough money at key Democratic constituencies, or does it refer to something else?

Either way, what’s not to like?

What Voters Know That Isn't So

You can call it economic illiteracy, as John Stossel does.  Or you can talk about the The Myth of the Rational Voter as Bryan Caplan does, arguing that “most voters cast their ballot on the basis of irrational biases about economic matters.”  As Stossel writes:

People tend to acquire their wrong opinions about economic policy packaged in worldviews they inherited while growing up. They never test their views against the evidence because that would be unsettling. No one likes having his worldview challenged. So people vote for candidates who make them feel good. They vote irrationally.

Actually, I think that is unfair.  Most people do not really experience the market.  They live in market-sheltered enclaves, as employees or as government dependents.  They really do not experience the operation of capitalist economics.

But sheltered away from the market as they are, they suffer from four common-sense biases that confirm the old adage that it’s not what you don’t know, it’s what you know that isn’t so.

• Antimarket bias: people think that the market is a zero-sum game
• Antiforeign bias: people mistrust foreigners and try to protect themselves against cheap foreign goods
• Make-work bias: people think that jobs make us rich, not the products of jobs
• Pessimistic bias: “any economic problem is proof of economic decline”

Really these biases are not irrational.  They are only irrational in politicians, academicians, and businessmen who ought to know better. 

In people who do know better, but who demagogue to get votes or subsidies anyway, we are not talking about irrationalism either.  We are talking about evil.

Murdoch Gets the Prize

Yesterday Rupert Murdoch finally overcame the finicky objections of the legacy Dow Jones owners and bought Dow Jones for about $5 billion, report Richard Perez-Pena and Andrew Ross Sorkin in The New York Times. 

The decision signals the end of an era for Dow Jones and the Bancroft family, an intensely private clan that for generations had allowed The Journal to operate independently and become one of the nation’s most prominent and trusted newspapers, even as its finances deteriorated.

Now who knows what will happen.  Murdoch!

The truth, so resolutely ignored by our liberal friends, is that Rupert Murdoch is a businessman, first and last.  He wants to make money.  He has taken advantage of the fact that the introspective liberalism of the mainstream media has left gigantic market niches available for media titles occupying a center-right perspective.

But Rupert Murdoch is not the right-wing ideologue that our more fevered friends imagine.  The proof of that is that in the mid 1990s he swung his British titles behind New Labour and Tony Blair. 

Now he is reported to have established ties with Hillary Clinton and made contributions to her campaign.  Of course he has.  News media is not called the Fourth Estate for nothing.  It is entangled with politics and always will be.

What Murdoch can do with his new Dow Jones properties is make the center-right media into a world-wide force that can seriously counter the center-left media that dominates the culture today.

For conservatives that is a cheery prospect, not least because it makes business sense.