Liberals Against the Tide

Last week the US Supreme Court decided a Kentucky death penalty case. It ruled that a three-drug sequence for execution by lethal injection was not cruel and unusual punishment. But a day later, to the delight of the New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse, Justice John Paul Stevens “renounced the death penalty.”

Er, not to put too fine a point upon it, Your Honor, but the death penalty is the law of the land. You are sworn to uphold it.

Did you know, by the way, that liberal groups are working like mad to stop Ward Connerly’s Civil Rights Initiatives, coming up for a vote in four states in November? They are contesting the initiative in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, and Nebraska. But they are not arguing on the merits. Oh no. As Harry Stein writes in City Journal:

Knowing that such anti-preference initiatives enjoy strong public support... the activists have zero interest in waging these fights on the merits. Rather, their goal is to keep the initiatives off the ballot by any means necessary, up to and including political chicanery and outright physical intimidation.

Let’s see. Missouri. Reminds me of the Missouri Compromise. Nebraska. Reminds me of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Sound familiar? They should. They were fateful milestones on the road to the Civil War back in the early to mid nineteenth century.

Then, as now, an intransigent minority was putting road blocks in the way of civil rights. In those days, before the Civil War, the political argument was over allowing slavery in the newly-admitted states. Now it is an argument over when, if ever, we are going to stop race-based preferences in government employment, contracting, and schooling.

Here’s what I suggest to you liberals. Play fair. Don’t try, as Justice Stevens is apparently trying to do, to subvert the will of the people with shenanigans on the Supreme Court. The people are strongly in favor of a death penalty.

Don’t try, as these lefty groups are trying to do, to trip up Ward Connerly and his Civil Rights Initiatives. The whole point of democracy is that the people get to decide. If they are wrong, then it is probably better to let them have their way and experience their mistake for themselves.

But if you hold up the will of the people, and dam up their clearly-expressed preferences in tactical shenanigans then the chances are that when the dam bursts, as it will in the end, it will end up flooding the fruited plain with a raging river. And that’s not good for anyone.

Obama's Three Unforced Errors

Government is always the rule of the few over the many. Always.

You may think that is obvious, but a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to convince us otherwise. Politicians, for example.

But if government is always the rule of the few, then politicians are always elitists. That puts politicians in a bit of a box because the royal road to winning elections is to convince the voters that “s/he cares about people like me.”

That is why Senator Obama’s three recent unforced errors could be so damaging. They spoil the tear the comfortable illusion that Obama the elitist is OK because he cares about people like me.

They also penetrate the veil of illusion that the Democratic Party maintains that it is the party of the little guy, civil rights, and patriotism despite all the evidence to the contrary.

In the Bittergate (or Bitterquiddick) incident we have Obama treating the working-class whites of Pennsylvania as objects. It’s true his remarks were, from an elite point of view, understanding and thoughtful. But they still showed that for Obama, the working-class whites are the Other. The Democratic Party is supposed to be the party of the “little people.” Bittergate seemed to suggest that it was not.

In the Rev. Wright controversy another veil was punctured. Democrats are supposed to be the party of civil rights. This has been more and more difficult to maintain over the years as Democrats have supported race-based policies and condoned the frank racism of black leaders. Democrats didn’t need to have the racist Rev. Wright in the news.

In the Ayres/Dohrn flap voters are being reminded that the domestic terrorists of the 1960s are considered Just Folks in the Democratic Party. Most Americans, particularly white male Americans don’t get a pass like that. Imagine a Republican candidate with pals in the Ku Klux Klan or militia guys like Timothy McVeigh. Voters don’t need to be reminded that the reflex of many elite Democrats is to Blame America First.

Rush Limbaugh this morning says that none of this matters to Obama supporters. For them, Obama is a likeable chap who believes in the future. The past is the past. Forget it.

As usual, Rush is right. The question is whether the Obama image of a likeable uniter working for the future is getting a little tarnished of late.

Because the truth about Obama is that he is the representative of an old and discredited politics of the past.

The Way to Rise in America

Today America’s thoughtful Mom, Peggy Noonan, muses over the Obama setback, the end of the honeymoon and the revelation of Senator Obama as a normal politician.

The problem is his obvious inexperience, a problem for older voters. “They are not hostile to his race, they are skeptical of his inexperience.”

But then she writes a little about the charge of elitism, which is obviously particularly grating for Michelle Obama, child of a working-class home. How could she be possibly branded as elitist?

But America is full of people who started low, rose high and internalized what the right people think, which is another way of saying what the elites think. To rise in America is to turn left, unless you are very, very tough or protected by privilege of the financial or familial kind.

She is right, of course. You can rise in the United States in the flyover country of business, but you don’t really “rise;” you don’t exist in the way that a rising star in politics, media, culture, or academia exists.

That’s because politics, media, culture, and the academy are all solidly liberal and solidly closed to people who “don’t think like us.” The female university administrator Jane Canney put it so well, according to Mike S. Adams. She didn’t want to invite black conservative Star Parker to speak at the university, she said, because she just didn’t feel “comfortable” with the sponsors, the Young America’s Foundation.

There you have the challenge for the next generation of conservatives. It’s not that the liberal go along to get along culture is corrupt, although it is. It is not that the liberal menu of political issues is stale and harmful to ordinary Americans, although it is. It is not that the liberal-staffed government sector is dysfunctional and wasting dollars by the trillion, though it is. It is not every time you turn around you are being bothered by a liberal health Nazi, a liberal safety Nazi, or a liberal climate-change Nazim, although you are.

The problem is that a conservative of good will has a terrible struggle developing and sustaining a career in the public square against the “disomcomfort” of the reigning liberal administrators.

That is something we must change.

Dems Get Tough Questions

Democratic partisans are outraged today after ABC’s Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos asked tough questions at the Dem debate the previous night in Philadelphia.

Tom Shales in the Washington Post.

It was another step downward for network news — in particular ABC News, which hosted the debate from Philadelphia and whose usually dependable anchors, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, turned in shoddy, despicable performances.

The problem is that they were asking questions about Bittergate and Sixties lefty terrorist William Ayres.

Hugh Hewitt liked the debate.

Senator Obama looked terrible last night —halting and apologetic, constantly on the defensive even though Gibson and Stephanopoulos did not press him beyond a follow-up or two on his most damaging associations with Pastor Wright and William Ayers.

What do you think? Was Hewitt watching the same debate as Shales?

Hewitt has been making a point recently of running audio clips on his show featuring halting ad libs by the Great Unifier. I guess that is what you call “defining” the candidate of the other side.

Of course, the Democrat partisans are right. What does it matter if Obama sat on a board a decade ago with William Ayres? Obama is what he is and you shoudn’t convict him of guilt-by-association.

But we would appreciate a little fair play and consistency.

After all, every Republican officeholder in the land knows that if he accidentally stood next to David Duke at an airport check-in counter 30 years ago, he is automatically a racist. If he did that he’s gone. No complaint about guilt-by-association, no trial in the court of public opinion. No need for that; no time for that. He’s gone.

At NRO, Jim Geraghty has a message for Sen. Obama

Welcome to the big leagues, rookie.

But, dahling, this is all so sophomoric!

McCain: Dem Tax Increase is "Change"

We knuckle-dragging bitter-end conservative Republicans have been worried about John McCain. And for good reason. He opposed just about every sensible economic policy that President Bush put forward. He opposed the recession-fighting tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. Just what planet was he on?

Yes, of course. Beltway, Third Rock from the Sun.

But now that he’s the presumptive Republican nominee for president he’s coming home to the logical, epistemological, and moral reality of being a Republican candidate for president.

The reality of being a Republican candidate is that, if Republicans aren’t for tax cuts, then what’s the point of the Republican Party?

So John McCain in his economic policy speech Monday started out by riffing on “change.”

[M]any in Congress think Americans are under-taxed. They speak as if letting you keep your own earnings were an act of charity, and now they have decided you’ve had enough. By allowing many of the current low tax rates to expire, they would impose — overnight — the single largest tax increase since the Second World War. Among supporters of a tax increase are Senators Obama and Clinton. Both promise big "change." And a trillion dollars in new taxes over the next decade would certainly fit that description.

So he’s going to lower the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, extend the Bush tax cuts, eliminate the AMT, and he’s signing onto the alternate flat tax concept that’s been floating around.

What we need is a simpler, a flatter, and a fair tax code. As president, I will propose an alternative tax system. When this reform is enacted, all who wish to file under the current system could still do so. And everyone else could choose a vastly less complicated system with two tax rates and a generous standard deduction.

So that’s all right.

But the real long-term job is making a start on dimantling the liberal patronage state. You know what I mean (2008 numbers):

• Pensions: $911.6 billion
  
  
• Health Care: $925.0 billion
  
  
• Education: $848.2 billion
  
  
• Defense: $730.8 billion
  
  
• Welfare: $445.2 billion

Compassion or no compassion, there’s a lot of pure patronage in there and not a lot of money helping people.

But don’t expect John McCain to do much about that.

Theocracy Here We Come!

Liberals have been worrying for six years about the looming theocracy. Well, it’s obvious. Bush is a Christian. Jesus is his favorite philosopher. And he went on a Crusade in Iraq.

Now he’s the first president ever to greet a pope on his landfall in the United States. “Bush Cozies Up to Pope.” That’s the subhead of an ABC News article about the pope’s arrival and Bush’s decision to go out to Andrews Aif Force Base to greet him.

It’s the first time that Bush will leave the White House to greet a foreign dignitary[.]

Two and two makes four. ’Nuff Said.

The point of Pope Benedict is not Bush or theocracy, or even the issue du jour, the Church’s sex abuse scandal.. It is his clear and direct strategy to revive the mission and the spirit of the church. Christianity is the religion of love. That is why the pope’s first encyclical was titled “Deus Caritas Est,” or God is Love. Then there was the second encyclical, “Spe Salvi,” or Saved in Hope.

Now the pope is coming to the United States, the most religious and most Christian modern nation in the world. In fact, religious adherence has increased in the United States in the modern era instead of decreasing, as it has done in Europe, according to Finke and Stark in The Churching of America

Do you think this guy has a Message or something?

Liberals' and Obama's God Problem

A liberal friend confided the other day that Democrats were having a problem communicating with the American people about God.

I replied: Well of course. Liberals champion the Enlightenment. Their political party, the Democratic Party, is the secular party.

That is essentially what Senator Obama confirmed to a group of well-heeled San Francisco liberals when he excused the “bitterness” of working-class voters in Pennsylvania and the rust belt.

It’s not surprising that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment. . . .

And it’s not surprising that Obama would say this to a bunch of San Francisco Democrats. That’s what elite liberals believe and what they say to each other in their faculty lounges, in their activist meetings, and in their liberal churches.

In this view of reality, of course, liberals are the enlightened ones that are able to mediate between the cruel world and the helpless bitterness of their victim constituents. Liberals compassionately provide programs to ease the pain.

Against this “conventional wisdom,” to use the words of the most conventional liberal of them all, John Kenneth Galbraith, are the words of a Chinese man, a “Dr. Wu.” His words are retailed by David Aiken in Jesus in Beijing, a study of Christianity in China.

(It is an astonishing story.)

For years, decades, “Dr. Wu” said, the Chinese people have wondered what made the West so powerful. What was it, the magic bullet that had allowed the upstart West to dominate and humiliate China, the Middle Kingdom, most ancient and most glorious of civilizations?

At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West is so powerful.

Obviously there is a powerful disconnect between “Dr. Wu” and the conventional liberal position, shared by presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), that religion is merely a superstition for frightened and bitter minds.

But that just raises another question. What is it about Christianity that makes it so powerful? And if it so powerful, why are liberals driving it out of the public square?