Liberals are Different From You and Me...

It’s like the old saying: “The rich are different from you and me. They have more money.”

So it makes sense that liberals are different from you and me. They do more whining.

Liberals whine more about everything, according to a review of the social science literature by Peter Schweizer.

A wide body of research shows that modern liberals are much more likely to complain about things in their lives. Conservatives are more content with their lives. When asked “How satisfied are you with life these days?[”] Sixty-six percent of conservatives said “very satisfied” compared with only 46 percent of liberals. Conservatives are more likely to say they love their jobs (53 percent vs. 41 percent) and even enjoy their hobbies more (63 percent vs. 51 percent). When asked by the Social Capital Survey whether they were satisfied with their income, liberals were more than three times as likely to say “not at all satisfied” — even when they earned the same as conservatives.

You expect that especially when it comes to housework, liberals whine more. Indeed “feminist women do less housework than traditional women — but complain more about it. ”

It makes sense that the champion whiners, Barack and Michelle Obama, should be heading up the Democratic Party. It takes whiners to lead a party of whiners.

Many observers believe that Barack Obama secured the liberal base of the Democratic party because he was antiwar from the beginning. But I think it’s because he mastered the art of complaining and won over the Whine Caucus. Today the Democratic party is dominated by groups making claims of victim status ” blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, unwed mothers, artists, pampered academics, environmental activists, the poor, the unemployed, animal rights activists, women, homosexuals.

You might ask, what does a guy who graduated from Harvard Law School married to a woman with degrees from two Ivy League schools have to whine about?

It’s a good question. I’m afraid I don’t have the answer. Beyond the fact that they are liberals.

Left Doesn't Like Free Speech

Everyone is properly outraged at the quasi-legal proceedings of the British Columbia Human Rights Commission in the case brought by Muslim extremists against Mark Steyn and MacLean’s, the Canadian newsmagazine.

Some Muslims disliked the excerpt from Steyn’s book America Alone published in MacLean’s a while back. But they didn’t think to sue in regular courts. Oh no, that would cost money. Instead they brought MacLean’s up on a charge of hate speech at three separate Canadian human rights tribunals. Last week their complaint was heard before the British Columbia Human Rights Commission.

Today, the editors of National Review properly express their outrage against the proceedings of the Commission last week in Vancouver, BC. You can get a flavor of their outrage from this:

Andrew Coyne, a journalist with Maclean’s, live-blogged the farce; his dispatches were as amusing as they were harrowing. The proceedings had no evidentiary rules — new evidence was routinely introduced without warning. Commissioners routinely recessed to determine the eligibility of evidence; legal representation would dash off mid-hearing to print Internet material to introduce as evidence; an “expert” witness was called whose chief credentials were academic papers on Buffy the Vampire Slayer; and still other witnesses were called under the prejudicial direction that “we anticipate that success in this case will provide the impetus for prohibiting discriminatory publications in the other provinces.”

At the granddaddy Human Rights Commission of them all, the Canadian Human Rights Commission, they have what you might call a remarkable record in the fight against the violation of human rights: “in 31 years, the CHRC has not once dismissed a charge that has been brought before it.”

It’s fun and enjoyable, isn’t it, when you can gin up your own private witch-hunting tribunal to punish people for opinions you don’t like. It confirms what we all know, but are usually too polite to say.

Lefties really don’t like free speech. Indeed, they way they see it, anything they don’t like comes under the rubrick of “hate speech,” and they have an ethical obligation to stamp it out. Why not? If you have the power, use it.

Labor Market Turmoil

The equity markets are off sharply today and you can see why.

No, it’s not that the BLS headliine employment number from the Establishment Survey is off 49,000, as published in the Employment Situation Summary.

As usual, the real story is in the Household Survey. And there you can see real turmoil in the US labor market. Let’s do the numbers.

• Civilian labor force: up 577,000
  
• Employment: down 285,000
  
• Unemployment: up 861,000
  
• Not in labor force: down 369,000
  

The net effect is that unemployment is up from 5.0 percent to 5.5 percent.

You can see what is happening. People are coming into the labor force looking for jobs, probably to increase income and avoid foreclosure on their homes, but businesses are shedding workers.

That’s what you call turmoil. Let’s hope that things turn around soon and that the Great American Job Machine gets back in gear.

What should the government do? How about stopping one wasteful and unjust program. Just one. My choice would be the ethanol subsidy. What’s yours?

Obama's Vision for America

Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) gave a speech on Tuesday obviously intended to be a curtain-raiser on the general election campaign. What did he say, and what does it mean?

In his peroration, Obama declared that we would look back on this moment generations from now.

[W]e will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.

This did not go down well with conservative talk-show host Hugh Hewitt. And you can see his point. What do you mean, care for the sick and jobs for the jobless? Aren’t we already spending trillions on all that? What kind of talk is that?

Well, it sums up the content part of his speech, in which Obama established the basic problem America faces after eight years of the Bush administration:

Bush economic policies that have failed to create well-paying jobs, or insure our workers, or help Americans afford the skyrocketing cost of college - policies that have lowered the real incomes of the average American family, widened the gap between Wall Street and Main Street, and left our children with a mountain of debt.

Hmm. What could he be talking about? But he has plenty of solutions.

On health care, he proposes to

pass health care plan that guarantees insurance to every American who wants it and brings down premiums for every family who needs it.

On Iraq he is starting to sheer away from the simple promise to bring our troops home.

We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in - but start leaving we must. It’s time for Iraqis to take responsibility for their future.

On the economy:

Change is building an economy that rewards not just wealth, but the work and workers who created it. It’s understanding that the struggles facing working families can’t be solved by spending billions of dollars on more tax breaks for big corporations and wealthy CEOs, but by giving a the middle-class a tax break, and investing in our crumbling infrastructure, and transforming how we use energy, and improving our schools, and renewing our commitment to science and innovation.

I know. It doesn’t sound much like change, but more of what Democrats have been doing ever since who knows when: spending money on Democratic voters.

And we know what Obama means by change. He means more power and more money to the educated liberal elite, more money going through the political system.

It means pumping more and more money into more and more rigid privileges and subsidies, and putting off, for another ten years, or maybe for a generation, the hard and thankless work of unwinding the vast, wasteful, and unjust welfare state. Over at usgovernmentspending.com you can see the numbers for government spending at all levels of government this year, 2008 in the United States.

Pensions: $911.6 billion


Health Care: $925.0 billion


Education: $848.2 billion


Defense: $730.8 billion


Welfare: $445.2 billion

If you were going to promise “change” you would be wanting to do something about that. But that’s not the kind of change that Sen. Obama is offering. His kind of change will merely trowel on another layer on the hardened and encrusted spending already not doing very much to help working Americans. In another ten years, all his new spending will be just as encrusted and just as ineffectual as all the moneys were are already spending.

Some day Americans will vote, not just for “change,” but for genuine conservative reform.

But that day is not yet.

Obama We Hardly Know Ye

As Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) becomes the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party today, The Wall Street Journal comments on just what an extraordinary moment this is.

Democrats are nominating a freshman Senator barely three years out of the Illinois legislature whom most of America still hardly knows.

It’s also remarkable that a major political party in the United States has chosen, for the first time, an African-American to be its presidential nominee.

But for me, the parallel with President Carter is palpable. I remember first hearing about Jimmy Carter a couple of years before the 1976 election, and I remember being impressed. But I also remember that the closer we got to the actual election the less I liked him. The concept was great; the details told a different story.

And so it is with Sen. Obama. He is an inspiring speaker who talks about “unity” and “change.” But all the details point to a conventional liberal with conventional liberal views on everything.

Every president, upon entering office, has the opportunity to make a difference on two or three big things. But on all the host of little things he is probably the hostage of his party activists, the up-and-comers who appear out of the campaign and the think tanks to take the executive-level appointments in the Executive Branch.

Up to now we haven’t heard about any Big Things from Barack Obama beyond the conventional liberal position on nationalizing health care and the conventional anti-war stance on the Iraq War.

In other words we have no information that gives us an indication that Obama, the product of a conventional elite education, will be anything other that conventionally liberal. Chances are he’ll expand government power in education, health care, and, of course, the environment. That means more rigidity, more subsidies directed at Democratic voters.

We conservative folks think that this century-long expansion of government is approaching its limits. Education is an expensive mess that produces little. Health care is an expensive mess that delivers little in life expectancy beyond what you could get with a robust public health program and neo-natal care. Pensions are unaffordable in the medium term.

We believe that the conservative ascendancy of the last 30 years gave Americans an opportunity to reverse direction and reduce government power and expense it was too late.

Now it looks like we are going to do it the hard way.

Because we cannot expect a President Obama to go back on all his supporters and change the whole direction of government. Not from what we already know about him.

But maybe he will surprise us.

MSM: What Took You So Long?

Conservatives are having a grand old time this election season watching the Clintons in eclipse.

Back in 1992 Bill Clinton was the Great Liberal Hope, and anyone who disagreed was a Clinton hater.

But now Barack Obama is the Great Liberal Hope and the Clintons are just a dynasty in terminal decline.

What took you so long, MSMers?

We could invent a poetical allusion, and talk, Dover Beach-like about the now retreating sea of faith in the Clintons:

The sea of faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d;

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating to the breath

Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

And that tells us a lot, because the notion of the Great Liberal Hope is a substitute for religion, an “immanentizing of the eschaton,” the bringing down to Earth of transcendent hope into a faith in a mortal politician.

Columnist Rich Lowry rehearses the canonical withdrawal of faith in finger-on-the-liberal-pulse Vanity Fair.

The usual audience for Clinton excuse-making isn’t listening. Witness the long, scathing profile of the post-presidential Clinton in Vanity Fair by former New York Times White House correspondent Todd Purdum. Purdum writes that it once was "easy enough to retain an enduring affection" for Clinton, despite "his indiscipline" and "his shortcomings."

Yes, it was “easy enough” back in the good old days when Clinton was the Great Liberal Hope.

But no more. Today the liberal elites have fallen out of love with the Clintons. In 2008 the Great Liberal Hope of 1992 is campaigning against the Great Liberal Hope of 2008. Now, all of a sudden, the soft focus lenses come off and the MSM gets to show us the Clintons in high-contrast black-and-white.

All in all, I’d rather be a Republican. Then you never get an even break from the mainstream media; indeed, you never expect it.

"The Metrics Pointed to Failure"

One of the key things to understand about human conflict (and that means human life in general) is that victory usually goes to the guy who gives up last.

So when you speak about Iraq in terms like this: “The Metrics Pointed to Failure,” you are missing the point.

When “you,” as Jennifer Rubin writes, are the very foolish Andrew Sullivan, you see the problem.

Of course the metrics pointed to failure. When things are going wrong, that is the time to hitch it up or quit. President Bush chose to hitch it up and double down. Now it looks like he was right.

Well, says Andrew Sullivan, no doubt the invasion was still a mistake, but it looks like it need not be a catastrophe in the medium term.

Petraeus deserves the lion’s share of the credit; luck and time and the self-defeating nihilism of the Jihadists have helped. But Bush and McCain equally merit points for pursuing the surge, even though the metrics pointed to failure. Obama needs to capitalize on these gains, not dismiss them.

“Obama needs to capitalize on these gains?” You mean, as in, take credit for them?

Anyway, General Petraeus aside, let’s get serious here. Bush is the man who made the decision, to go with the surge when everyone else (especially Andrew Sullivan) was losing their head. If the surge is a success, then Bush gets the credit.

But look for Obama to throw the anti-war left under the bus this summer after a fact-finding trip to Iraq.