What the NYT Wouldn't Print

The flap over The New York Times refusing to print an oped by John McCain is a gem. Their refusal to print McCain’s responding to an Obama oped published last week is the sort of thing that conservatives love.

And the absurd rationale offered by the NYT editor was a gem. David Shipley didn’t like the oped because it didn’t mirror Obama’s oped but instead criticized Obama.

But now the New York Post has published McCain’s oped and concerned voters can compare the two political documents side by side.

I’d have to say that Obama’s oped is the more tendentious. After all, he has to wriggle through the fact that he thought that Iraq was lost a year ago, and now it turns out that it isn’t.

The difference in narrative is substantial. Writes Obama:

Ending the war is essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and Al Qaeda has a safe haven. Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he writes, says that we can’t step up the effort in Afghanistan until we draw down the troops in Iraq.

That’s true, but now that we are winning in Iraq we can spare the troops needed in Afghanistan. And that is exactly what President Bush proposes to do.

McCain points out the obvious. Obama doesn’t seem interested in winning.

I’m dismayed that he never talks about winning the war - only of ending it. But if we don’t win the war, our enemies will - and a triumph for the terrorists would be a disaster for us.

That is true. Obama does not mention the word “win” in his oped. But when you are in a war, it’s a question of winning or losing. When Obama says he would “pursue a new strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan,” you have to ask: Well, what’s the point of those combat brigades? Are they there just to pursue a strategy or are they there to win the war?

Thirty years ago, liberals insisted that the US “end” the war in Vietnam. That meant, in fact, losing the war in Vietnam. It took Ronald Reagan to turn the US around and erase the defeat in Vietnam with a “surge” that ended up winning the Cold War and putting the Soviet Union on the ash heap of history.

Do we have to go through the whole process again with the war on Islamic extremism?

Obama and Berlin

Politicians are creatures of their staff. And this becomes even more so as we climb the food chain to the presidential level.

So when we say that President Bush is clueless, we are really talking about the quality of his staff. Their job is to make him look good. Of course, he hired them, so it’s his fault if they screw up.

In the current flap about Obama’s speech in Berlin, we should keep this in mind. We can’t really expect Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) to know all about the gaffe factors associated with making a speech at the Brandenburg Gate or at the Siegessäule.

But we should expect that his staff to be up to speed on the symbolic meaning of the Brandenburg Gate, built at the end of the eighteenth century with Viktoria looking east (to the greater Prussia created during the wars of Frederick II). And we should expect his staff to know about the Siegessäule, a column erected to the victory of Prussia over Denmark in 1862 and very much associated with the rise of imperial Germany.

Obviously, they don’t.

Maybe, of course, all this navel scratching about German monuments and their association with the Second Reich and the Third Reich is just twentieth century stuff. We are the ones we have been waiting for and all the Prussian militarism and Nazi stuff is so yesterday.

Of maybe it indicates that the Obama staff are narrow, arrogant, and shallow. And that the Obama administration will also be narrow, arrogant, and shallow.

A Good Denier Day

First a note to our readers. The American Physical Society wants you to know that the paper published by Lord Monckton and the posting by Jeffrey Marque does not represent a change in APS policy. On the APS home page:

The American Physical Society reaffirms the following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body, the APS Council, on November 18, 2007:



"Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate."

Whew! That was close. Why, as Dr. David Evans writes in The Australian:

The world has spent $50 billion on global warming since 1990[.]

And a lot of that money has been spent on scientists. Even so, more research is needed, as any scientist will tell you.

The flap over at the APS is over a forum posting. The editor of the forum on Physics and Society made an announcement:

With this issue of Physics & Society, we kick off a debate concerning one of the main conclusions of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body which, together with Al Gore, recently won the Nobel Prize for its work concerning climate change research. There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution.

One of the kickoff articles is by the controversialist Lord Monckton, “Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered,” and carries a red banner on the APS site:

This article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article’s conclusions.

Leaving aside the Council of the American Physical Society’s disagreement, Lord Monckton argues that the assumptions of the UN’s IPCC are incorrect. The climate is probably not senstive to changes in CO2.

One of the tell-tales of anthropogenic forcing ought to be a hotspot in the earth’s atmosphere at the equator, writes Lord Monckton. Only trouble is: It ain’t there. Dr. Evans:

The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever.

However, and this is important, don’t forget the warning notice at the top of Lord Monckton’s article:

The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article’s conclusions.

That’s something to think about. The $50 billion in research money, I mean.

Liberals' Race Crutch

Affirmative action opponent Linda Chavez comments today on a boringly same-old-same-old race poll conducted by The New York Times. Guess what. African Americans are convinced that the US is racist.

But the interesting part of the post is the comments section. There’s Scott:

I am a bureaucrat in a big city welfare department. I am constantly amazed at the level of racial hostility I see in my black co-workers, including those with graduate degrees who earn over $100,000 a year. rom listening to these folks, one would think we are living in Alabama in 1955.

Why not? Race resentment has been a goldmine for blacks. Then there’s Shefali, from India.

I live in Austin, Texas. In my neighborhood, it’s about 45% white, 25% Hispanic, 10% Asian and 20% black. Over the Fourth of July my next door neighbors had a cookout. Everyone was invited. Many people were away visiting family, but of the people who were around, almost everyone - Latino, Asian, white - showed up. But the blacks stayed away.

So blacks don’t want to integrate with the rest of America. But why should he apologize for white racism?

[A] lot of blacks seem to have a tribal mentality. It’s sad, but I don’t see how I, an immigrant from India, can be to blame for their suffering as slaves, etc. My ancestors were treated horribly by the British but I have had English friends and I don’t blame modern Brits for the cruelty of their forefathers.

Maybe he has a point!

Maybe in a few years, after the bloom is off the Obama rose, the Democratic Party will end up as the party of the Cultural Creatives and the African Americans. Everyone else will have MovedOn to the party that ended slavery, ended stagflation, ended the Cold War, and liberated Iraq.

Everyone Doesn't Do it

Everyone agrees, don’t they, that candidates appeal to the base in their primary campaigns and then they tack to the center when it’s time for the general. Agreed?

And nobody has done that more completely and ruthlessly than Sen. Barack Obama (B-IL). As Tony Blankley writes:

[I]f there are two things people know about Barack Obama, one of them is that he recently has changed his positions on abortion, gun control, capital punishment, FISA laws, the status of Jerusalem, faith-based federal programs, public financing of his campaign, welfare, NAFTA and free trade, the surge in Iraq, and his commitment to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his Trinity Church, among other public policies.

But just a minute. Just how much did presidential candidates do this sort of thing in the past?

Let’s review a few. Candidate Bush campaigned as a “compassionate conservative” right through the 2000 election cycle. And then there was Ronald Reagan:

Who can forget Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign, when he came out for tax cuts, lower social spending and more military spending in the primary, only to back away from those policies in the general election when he famously said: "I got a little rhetorically over-excited during the primary. On closer examination, President Carter seems to have built up our defenses sufficiently. We will have to see about those tax cuts; we may need the revenues for more social spending."

Not!

Writes Blankley:

I am not aware of anything remotely comparable to Sen. Obama’s recent reversals of positions.

So what is going on? Here’s a theory. You need to bear sharp left to win the Democratic nomination because of the crazy left. But you can’t possibly win on the left’s agenda. So every Democratic candidate has to tack, more or less, to the center to get elected.

That is the reality. But to cover it up (not to us, but to itself) the mainstream media makes up the notion that everyone does it.

Rush Limbaugh says: Liberals can’t win by being themselves. But it’s worse than that. Liberals can’t even be themselves to themselves.

The Business of Government Isn't Business

President Calvin Coolidge famously proclaimed that “the business of America is business.”

Unfortunately some people evidently misheard him. They thought he meant that government should get into business.

Please. Government does everything badly, including making war and legislating. Yet helpless and abject failure doesn’t seem to matter too much when government keeps to war and law enforcement.

The last thing that anyone should think of is getting government involved in business.

But when Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) thinks that he can help out the banking regulators, or when political careerists think they can run GSEs like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, then even the man on the street can see that something ain’t right.

It seemed like a dandy idea to set up a government agency back in the Great Depression to create a secondary market in mortgages with the Federal National Mortgage Assocation. And then in 1968 it seemed like a great way of reducing the budget deficit to spin Fannie Mae off as a quasi-public agency and create Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae as competitors.

But when the teetering mortgage giants need a bailout to prevent global financial meltdown, then something has gone wrong.

That something is the very idea that a government-sponsored enterprise can ever be run in a businesslike fashion where the risks are properly understood and managed.

Look at it this way. Two recent Fannie Mae notables were James Johnson, an aide to Democrat Walter Mondale and now a Washington power broker, and Jamie Gorelick, Deputy Attorney General in the Democratic Clinton administration and creator of the famous wall that hindered the intelligence agencies from connecting the dots before 9/11. What in tarnation do pols like that understand about finance?

Now take a look at the obituary of Dennis Weatherstone, former head of JP Morgan Chase. Weatherstone was the son of a clerk who never went to college but rose to sit in the chair of the greatest banker of all time, J.P. Morgan.

“If you can’t understand it, don’t do it,” was one of Weatherstone’s maxims. When Morgan’s bright young men invented new trading instruments and deal structures, they were allowed three short attempts to explain them to him; if they failed, their projects did not proceed.

Can you imagine Jim Johnson or Jamie Gorelick saying that to some brilliant young man at Fannie Mae? Why, you have staffers to do that sort of work.

Government has no business in business. It should stick to wars and moral equivalents of wars. They can even be fun—for the politicians. But business is grunt work. Why don’t you Olympian gods leave it to ordinary mortals?

What About the Real Problem with Obama?

The oh so sophisticated New Yorker has a picture of Obama and wife on the cover, depicting what they assume is the right-wingnut slur of Obama as a Muslim and his wife as a chic radical guerrilla.

As usual, the sophisticates miss the point. Conservatives worry more about Obama’s out-of-touch Hyde Park elitism, the curious access he seems to have had to City Hall divorce records of opposing candidates, the unsavory connections like Tony Resko, and the general not-ready-for-prime-time aroma of his public pronouncements.

But don’t mind us. We’re just a bunch of mean-spirited, racist, homophobic Swiftboating extremists.

And then there’s the real problem with Obama, that he seems to represent the one last Big Push for big government. Liberals know best, you know.

It is ordinary rank-and-file Democrats that will have to pay for his hubris, the hubris that he has picked up by osmosis from his life in the liberal bell jar.