Rove on Rush

Karl Rove was on the Rush Limbaugh Program today for about 15 minutes, and spoke about what it was like to be in the White House, and work for President Bush.

Then Rush Limbaugh asked Rove what he would “like people to know about the president that they don’t know.”  Rove replied:

Look, the thing the American people need to know about him is he is just as passionate today about doing his job of protecting America and of growing the economy and being focused on big reforms that will make America better and safer and stronger in the years ahead, as he was in the day that he came in, and he walks into that office and lights up that building with — you know, it sounds corny, but it’s inspiring to work around him.  He’s got a wonderful spirit. He’s got a great sense of humor. He treats people with the greatest respect and dignity, and that goes from the guy swabbing out the floors on the first floor of the White House to, you know, some foreign head of state. He treats everybody with respect and dignity, and he sets such a wonderful tone and serves as a wonderful model for people who work around him.

That is something to think about.

But the big takeaway of the interview is the things the Rove had to say about Hillary Clinton.  He was so direct and so prepared that you might think he was conducting a campaign briefing for the Republican candidates for 2008. 

He said that, even though it is very difficult to win three presidential elections in a row, Hillary Clinton faces a huge hurdle:

There is no front-runner who has entered the primary season with negatives as high as she has in the history of modern polling.

Then he went into some of the negatives on Hillary.  On domestic policy:

Senator Clinton voted against the prescription drug benefit for seniors. Senator Clinton voted against allowing people to save tax-free for their out-of-pocket medical expenses. Senator Clinton opposes giving every American a standard health deduction so that they can deduct from the cost of their income taxes, their insurance premiums...  Yet Senator Clinton, who deems to lecture this president on health care, opposed allowing people to do either save tax-free for their out-of-pocket medical expenses, or, she also opposed — she also opposes — allowing there to be a tax deduction for people to take off their income tax costs of their insurance premiums.  She’s against having a level playing field so that the guy who has to pay for health care for his family or her family out of their own pocket, gets the same tax break the big corporations get for providing health insurance to their employees.  She’s against allowing people to buy health insurance across state lines like we routinely buy auto insurance today so you can shop for the cheapest price and the best product for your family’s needs.

Then on foreign policy:

You know, this is a woman who has been less than supportive of the policies that those men and women who are in the frontlines of the global war on terror fighting.  This is like a woman who has opposed the Patriot Act that gave us the tools to defend the homeland.  This is a woman who opposes the terrorist surveillance program that allowed us to listen in on the conversations of bad people who are calling into the United States.  She opposed the FISA reforms that would allow us to listen into communications and see the communications of international terrorists who are communicating with other international terrorists, even outside the country whose messages simply happened to flow through US telecom networks. 

What are the odds that a lot of people are going to be parsing these remarks of Rove very carefully over the next few days?

Time to Curb "Sanctuary Nation?"

The United States has laws to identify and pick up illegal aliens and deport them.  But they don’t work, reports Michelle Malkin.

The reason they don’t work is because open-borders interests have sabotaged them by restricting funding for them, objecting to them on civil liberties grounds, and pushing local and state governments to forbid public employees from checking them to verify citizenship status.

This is yet another case of America’s big problem.  Want to know what it is?  Liberals get to exempt themselves from any law they don’t like. 

It’s the civil disobedience idea.  Liberals are so ethical that they have the moral stature to non-violently violate laws they don’t like.  After all if you are ethical, and all liberals are, then it stands to reason that any law you don’t like must be immoral and unjust.

The so-called “sanctuary cities” are liberal jurisdictions where liberal councils and state legislatures flagrantly order public employees to ignore federal laws intended to empower law-enforcement to identify, capture,  and deport illegal aliens. 

As Malkin reports, the sanctuary city concept is causing Rudy Giuliani a problem right now because New York City is a sanctuary city and has been ever since Ed Koch declared it a sanctuary in 1989.

Giuliani actually filed suit against the feds when Congress passed a law that “forbade local governments from barring employees from cooperating with the INS.”

In January 2000, the Supreme Court rejected his appeal, but Giuliani vowed to ignore the law.

Some day, one day, Americans are going to have to bite the bullet and insist that liberals obey the laws, even the ones they don’t like. 

Maybe the 2008 election would be a good time to run the idea up the flagpole and see if the American people salute.

Beyond Rove, The Hard Thinking

Beyond the Rove Myth, there is reality, and Fred Barnes dishes it out.  Political advisers like Karl Rove can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. 

They can advise a candidate or a party how best to deal with a situation. But they can’t change the situation. And they can’t transform the circumstances at the time of an election.

Karl Rove can’t do magic, like make political realignments happen.  But Karl Rove certainly helped. Five elections out of six ain’t nothing.  If the Republican Party becomes the majority party again it will help to have a Karl Rove on hand.

But the real traction will come from political ideas and politicians who can speak to the American people, appeal to their better natures, and show them how to be the best they can be.

It is up to conservatives to start doing the thinking and the writing that will provide the firepower to a new generation of US politicians.

My own idea is this.  We conservatives need to bake a three-tier cake of political ideas.

• The philosophical tier, that must meet and beat the secular modernism of the academic middle class.  My candidate to lead this up political philosopher Roger Scruton who combines the conservatism of Burke and the modernism of Kant.
• The emotional tier, that must shame and blame the adolescent, diminished-responsibility culture of the academic middle class.  My candidate for this is George Gilder and his 1970s books on sexual suicide.  Yes, thirty years ago, before he got into high tech, Gilder forecast the child-dearth of the modern welfare state based on his analysis of its negation of men as husbands and providers.
• The mechanical tier, that must out-analyze and advocate at the policy analysis level.  This is actually already pretty well achieved.  Conservatives know what to do, and we have the programs pretty well outlines: privatize the welfare state with private pensions, private health care, and private education.

That’s all it takes, so let’s get going.

Now They Tell Us

The much-typed “surge” is working.  Even the global MSM is noticing, as  Instapundit Glenn Reynolds observes.  “There seems to be a lot of turnabout going on, all of a sudden,” he writes.

Exhibit A is this cover story in Germany’s Der Spiegel:

Ramadi is an irritating contradiction of almost everything the world thinks it knows about Iraq — it is proof that the US military is more successful than the world wants to believe. Ramadi demonstrates that large parts of Iraq... are essentially pacified today.

Well, do tell.  Der Spiegel’s reporter Ullrich Fichtner goes on.  It’s a story that the world doesn’t really want to hear, he writes,

a different story, a story of Americans who came here as liberators, became hated occupiers and are now the protectors of Iraqi reconstruction.

The glorious thing about the world’s hegemonic class, the international academic middle class and its bribed apologists in the center-left political parties, is that it can turn on a dime.

It can say at one moment that Bush is a liar and the worst president in history.  One week it can have a fawning media breathlessly reporting the latest political ploy of Democrats in Congress to end the war.

The next week we can have the same people writing with wide-eyed innocence, that things aren’t as bad as “everyone” thought.  Why, maybe Ronald Reagan wasn’t a complete dunce, maybe government control of everything wasn’t such a good idea after all, maybe the Americans are making progress in Iraq.

In fact, the next step is to say that Ronald Reagan didn’t achieve that much after all.  Or that if the right people had been in charge in Iraq then the whole thing could have been wrapped up much sooner.

Yes, we’ll be seeing that pretty soon.  Democrats will be elbowing people out of the way to get to a microphone to declare that they were in favor of the “surge” strategy all along and had been trying to get the stupid Bush administration to adopt it for three years without success.

What we, the great unwashed, should understand is that the people we are dealing with represent a ruling class in its declining phase.  Softened by the perquisites of power they are just trying to keep the game going a few years longer.  Almost everything they have foisted upon us has been a miserable and expensive failure: government pensions, government education, government welfare.

But by golly it has got them votes and it has got them power.

You can’t argue with that.  For now.

Karl Rove Resigns

Love him or hate him, Karl Rove is the outstanding Republican political operator of our time.  Between him and Bill Clinton it would be tough to choose. 

And think of what he achieved.  He got a rather unexciting candidate elected twice to the White House.  And he kept the Republicans in control of Congress up until the always-vulnerable second-term off-year election.

That is a stunning achievement.

Why is he leaving now?  New York Times reporter Jim Rutenberg says he had to leave now or wait till the end of the administration.

[Rove] said his hand was forced now when the White House chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, recently told senior aides that if they stayed past Labor Day he would expect them to stay through the rest of Mr. Bush’s term.

Of course the New York Times chappie can’t help salivating over the prospect of Congress calling Rove up to testify.

But from the time he leaves office, Mr. Rove will no longer have the protection of White House lawyers and will be more on his own when it comes to dealing with Congressional subpoenas.

But we Republicans hope that Rove will get some rest, write a book, and get ready to resume his life’s work.

Mr. Rove had vowed to build a lasting Republican majority, and... has portrayed the defeat in the 2006 midterm elections as a temporary setback, and said in the interview he believed Republicans were still on track for victory in the next election.

My own feeling is that it would be in the long-term interest of Republicans to lose the 2008 election.  Just like Karl Rove, Republicans need a rest—reculer pour mieux sauter as the French say.

Just wait till next year!

End of Civil Liberties?

Is the new warrantless wiretapping law passed by Congress last weekend the end of civil liberties as we know it, or just a prudent measure to allow the government to monitor terrorists?

You can guess where liberal E.J. Dionne would stand:

The episode was the culmination of a shameful era in which serious issues related to national security and civil liberties were debated in a climate of fear and intimidation, saturated by political calculation and the quest for short-term electoral advantage.

Naturally, the Wall Street Journal edit page took a different tack. 

Goaded by the ACLU and much of the press corps, many Democrats want to use the courts and lawsuits to restrict Mr. Bush and future Presidents in their ability to gather intelligence in the war on terror.

When you read the Journal’s appreciation of the bill, you can see that there are a lot of issues that E.J. passed over in silence.  Like what kind of liability that telecommunications companies might have if they cooperate with the administration in monitoring terrorists.

The intriguing issue for me is the enormous energy that is brought to the wiretapping issue.  You can see why.  Liberals and their friends on the left live in fear that one day they will need to organize the overthrow of an evil fascist Republican administration.  With warrantless wiretapping they could be easily picked up by the police for plotting revolution.  Therefore all their communications should be private and off limits to government investigators.  Just in case

After all, if a liberal were plotting revolution, it would be justified as civil disobedience and the absolute right to oppose evil right-wing fascist oppression.

But for 97.3 percent (or thereabouts) of Americans, all this fuss over the monitoring of terrorist communications is a storm in a teacup.  After all, the only kind of trouble they are likely to get into with the government is on taxes.  And the government already has the power to look at everyone’s financial activity.  And it gets everyone’s wage information routinely every pay day and on W-2 day.

The civil liberties issue that conservative really care about is the right to give money to the candidate of your choice.  But that right is currently snagged in a web of restrictions and regulation.

But liberals don’t seem to care about that.

US Tipping Balance of Power in Mideast

It’s been notable to me that the o-called “surge” in Iraq has involved US troops ganging up with Sunni militias to drive Al Qaeda out of the Sunni heartlands.  There has been very little news about US forces doing anything about Shia militias. 

According to Robert Haddick the US policy has not gone down well with Shia Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. al-Maliki has no interest in helping Sunnis.  “He sees the Sunnis whom General Petraeus is now arming as mortal enemies.”

But, of course, if the US can’t build a peaceful democracy in Iraq, then the next best thing is a balance of power in Iraq and in the region.

[T]he U.S. is pursuing a balance of power strategy in the Persian Gulf region...  Instinctively or not, it is U.S. policy to prevent any one player from achieving too much power in the Persian Gulf region.

Haddick provides quick review of the last half century to demonstrate how this has always been US strategy.  The problem right now is the power of Iran.  That means that the US wants Iraq as a counterweight to Iran.

And really, so long as oil fuels the Middle East it will be a trouble spot, and the US will want to make sure that no single power ever dominates the region.