Obama and Abortion at Notre Dame

If you were the leader of a pro-abortion party and you scored an invitation to a university that symbolizes the pro-life position, what would you say?

The answer is pretty obvious. You would de-emphasize your pro-abortion policy actions and emphasize the importance of everyone honoring other peoples' positions on high-profile moral issues.

Then you would go back to Washington DC and resume business-as-usual.

And that is what President Obama did when he spoke on May 17 at the University of Notre Dame.

So I think it is missing the point to suggest that Obama was lying through his teeth, as Rush Limbaugh did on Monday, or that Obama scored a major triumph, at William McGurn does in the Wall Street Journal.

The fact is that liberals are in strategic retreat on abortion, for the polls indicate that Americans are slowly becoming more pro-life. It's not hard to see why.

It's the reality of the thing. If you are a woman, there is one thing that you really ought to take seriously. Making babies. You can for a while, understandably, exult in the liberation of the sexual revolution which allows you, for the first time, to control your baby-making. But you find, in time, that this control is a poisoned chalice. Why? Because you find that you are controlling your fertility not for yourself but for your sexual partner.

It's foolish for women to go to bed with a man unless he has already made a commitment to love her forever. Because otherwise she's just a piece of meat to him. And it's easy for dead meat to get diseased.

It's foolish for women to build a life that doesn't include marriage and family. Even if you are the cleverest woman in France, like Simone de Beauvoir, what profiteth a woman if she gain the whole world, but lose her "partner" to a bevy of mistresses--and no children?

Right now, as the high tide of pro-abortion politics begins to turn, the poster boy for abortion can afford to make generous speeches at a Catholic university. Later on in the retreat our Democratic friends won't be so calm and collected.

As my Greek friend says: You only know what your dog is like when it is being hunted.

Fixin' to Go Wrong on Obama's Watch

We've said it before, and we'll say it again. The whole point of electing an Obama adminstration is so that liberals can get to do some really stupid things, and live out the deluded fantasies they have cooked up in the liberal bell-jar.

And then we can upchuck the whole thing: Obama, Pelosi, big spending, the works.

Victor Davis Hanson reads the through the ingredients. He reviews six different issues:

• Rule of Law. Strong-arm bailouts and bankrupties are not good. They mean that political power is substituting for the rule of law.
• Energy. The Obama policy is to say No to the common sense of going for natural gas and oil and nuclear while alternative energy technologies ramp up.
• Debt. You can't make the numbers add up without actual confiscation, so the whole thing will "blow up in the administration's face."
• National Security. "Very schizophrenic. W[e] keep FISA, Patriot Act, rendition, military tribunals (Gitmo for now?), Predator attacks, Iraq and Afghanistan, while we trash their Bush origins," etc.
• Civil Discord. Obama is sowing disunity.
• Race Relations. More discord. The president invokes race wherever he goes.
  

You can see what is going on here. Obama is sowing the whirlwind. And yet all he is doing is executing on the standard liberal playbook.

Where will it end? It will end, in my view, sooner than we think. The Democrats exploited a tactical advantage in 2005-2008 as they played on the American people's natural discomfort with an unpopular war, and executed on a cynical cold-cock politics to stop any reform of their clunking welfare state.

But now they own the store. And Americans are already organizing in opposition to Obama's knee-jerk liberal policies.

The American people deserve better than this.

Palin Speaks the Language of Women

The Republican Party is known as the Daddy Party--a little rough and gruff at times. Everyone knows that the Democratic Party is the Mommy Party. It will try to make everything better with a check.

What Republicans and conservatives need, I've written, is a Mommy Conservatism. But it ain't easy.

How do you persuade the moderate white middle-aged woman voter to sign onto reform? You are asking her to change a government school system that is all she has ever known. You are asking her to agree to health system changes that will confuse and annoy her aging mother.

After watching the YouTube video of Sarah Palin's Right-to-Life speech in Evansville, IN, I'm here to say that Palin is one that can lead us to a woman-centered conservatism.

At least, she knows how to speak the language of women.

Most women don't think in the strident language of male politics. They think in terms of the "dilemmas" they have faced in their lives.

And that is how Palin spoke in Evansville, reported by the Washington Post.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told an antiabortion audience in Indiana on Thursday night that, "for a fleeting moment," she considered having an abortion after learning that her son Trig would have Down syndrome.

The experience, she added, "now lets me understand a woman's, a girl's temptation to maybe try to make it all go away."

Ultimately, Palin said, she decided she had to "walk the walk" concerning her long-standing antiabortion views.

This is the way that women talk. This is the way that conservatives need to talk. And if conservatives learn how to approach women as women, appreciating and respecting the "dilemmas" of a woman's life then we will earn the right and the support we need to reform the welfare state.

And make it not just a woman-friendly thing, but a human-friendly thing.

Changes at Road to the Middle Class

We've decided at Road to the Middle Class to surrender to progress and go to Google's Blogger for our blogging platform.  

The reason is two-fold.

• The RMC comments feature never really worked very well.
• It's much easier to manage the blog and to post using a fully-featured blogging platform instead of home brew.

So now roadtothemiddleclass.com changed.  New blog posts are now hosted at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.  Comments are hosted at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com. 

But this doesn't mean much change to you, the user.  That's because, through the magic of xml feeds, you can still read the latest blogs on the home page of christopherchantrill.com  as though nothing had changed.

And you can still click the "comments" link at the bottom of each blog post.  And you can still click the "more" link on recent blogs to see the full post.

The difference is that now, when you want to see a full post or you want to comment and you click on a link, you'll be redirected to americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.  

But what do you do when you want to get back to christopherchantrill.com?  No problem.  Just us the menu across the top of the page at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com, just as you would at  roadtothemiddleclass.

Sounds simple.  But you may encounter problems.  If you do, be sure and make a comment below, or email us.  Then we can fix the problem.

"They Don't Like It Up Them"

Everyone enjoys dishing it out. If you are in power it is great fun tarring your opponents as negative and unpatriotic. But you hate their pre-revolutionary rage. If you are out of power it is great fun to poke at the corruptions and abuses of the government. But you hate the way that the government uses its power to reward its supporters and shut up its opponents.

In the British sitcom, Dad's Army, Corporal Jones expressed this universal hypocrisy as: "They don't like it up them."

So you'd expect our liberal friends to be outraged that there exist people in the United States not exactly enamored of President Obama. Even Camille Paglia, conservatives' favorite liberal, is outraged now that Obama Derangement Syndrome is rearing its ugly head.

I was utterly horrified to hear Dallas-based talk show host Mark Davis, subbing for Rush Limbaugh, laughingly and approvingly read a passage from a Dallas magazine article by CBS sportscaster David Feherty claiming that "any U.S. soldier," given a gun with two bullets and stuck in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden, would use both bullets on Pelosi and strangle the other two.

I agree. It is tasteless, and worrying in its violent intensity. But where were you, Camille, when your chaps were actually making movies about the assassination of President Bush? Not as outraged as conservatives, I'd imagine.

Camille had just seen the 1960s movie, Seven Days in May, a liberal fantasy about US military chiefs staging a coup. And she is outraged that Obama is not being given his due:

I am generally happy with Obama's eagerness to tackle long-entrenched social problems, although there is sometimes a curious disconnect between what he says and what he does. The degree to which Obama is or is not a stealth socialist remains to be seen. But it's about time an ambitious young leader shook up the stale status quo.

Notice what she is saying between the lines. It's time that someone shook up the status quo, but based on current form, it doesn't look like Obama is the one. Even so, She is not giving up on him yet.

Personally, I have been surprised by the vigor of the anti-Obama grass-roots, especially because it seems to be genuinely spontaneous, rather than "astroturf" planted from on high.

But then I was surprised by the 1994 Republican revolution too. I thought it would be the off-year in Clinton's second term before people would start wanting to throw the rascals out.

Let's not rush into any premature judgments. The next item on the agenda is the special election in California May 19, when voters are being asked to raise taxes. Hugh Hewitt thinks that the voters may be about to send a loud raspberry to their California state government leaders. Then we'll see.

"They don't like it up them."

It's Obama's Budget Now

Years ago, back in the 1980s, neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol said: Enough of this green-eyeshade conservatism, where conservatives carefully balance the budget after every Democratic bender. Conservatives should go to Washington to cut taxes and when it's time for the Democrats to return to power they should make sure that the government is broke.

The last green eye-shade Republican was President George H.W. Bush. He raised taxes in a recession and got tossed out by a rebellion in the Republican ranks.

But President George W. Bush was smarter. He left the federal government absolutely flat broke, and left his successor with a bunch of nasty choices.

Candidate Obama had promised the moon to his supporters: health care for those disinclined to pay for it; yet more money for government education, and lots of lovely grants and renewable energy for environmentalists.

But the trouble is, what with the recession and the bank-bailout and the auto bailout and the state-and-local government bailout, is that there just isn't the money there for all that stuff.

So if President Obama was smart he would have entered office realizing that, like it or not, Democrats had to put on the green eye-shades and get the government's finances back on an even keel. He would have said: I tried. I tried to find the money for the vital investments we must make in the Democratic faithful. But the money just isn't there. Those Wascally Wepublicans left the nation in the lurch, and I must get us out of the ditch.

Then, after a couple of years of cuts, he could go for broke with lots of lovely new programs for the Democratic faithful just in time for the next presidential election.

Instead he kept to his original spending agenda, piled a trillion dollars of extra pork on top, and still promised to fix the economy.

The numbers don't add up, and you can see why if you look at the full FY10 budget, released by the Government Printing Office yesterday, and loaded on usgovernmentspending.com last night.

Take a look at the numbers. The Defense budget is not going to go down, despite the fervent yearnings of our liberal friends. Tax collections are cratering, particularly the corporate income tax. And of course, health care costs are going to continue to climb ever upwards.

What is needed is retrenchment. But retrenchment goes against the very DNA of a Democrat.

But here's the rub. If the Democrats don't do it, then someone else will. The Tea Party movement is a movement of ordinary folks that are just fed up with the liberal gravy train. They know that there's a lot of loot swilling around, and they know that they aren't getting their share. And they are damned if they are going to fork out more money so that liberals can continue to enjoy their government sinecures and pensions while they look uneasily at their 201k accounts and put off retirement.

They weren't born yesterday. They can see politicians preparing to raise taxes, and they can see the poor helpless poster boys being rehearsed backstage.

Here's my guess. When President Obama comes to the American people asking for more taxes, they are going to tell him to get lost. And Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, and any other Democrat that doesn't keep their head down.

But meanwhile, check out the facts at usgovernmentspending.com and usgovernmentrevenue.com. They are fresh and new with the latest budget data.

Politcal Power and Money Power

One of the themes of the Democratic Party since its founding by 1812 war hero Andrew Jackson is a trust in political power over economic power. It means nothing to a Democrat to ride roughshod over property rights in the service of some greater end than mere money-making.

The trouble is that there is a big difference between political power and economic power.

Political power is all about power. Economic power is a reward for service. Unless a business learns to serve the consumer it cannot wield economic power. Its economic power lasts so long as it serves the consumer.

It is when business gets enmeshed in politics that its troubles begin. Because politics is not about serving the consumer, day in and day out. Politics is about power.

The auto companies are a sad witness to the destructiveness of political power, for the auto companies are host to a political entity, the United Auto Workers union. And the union has systemically looted the auto companies for over half a century ever since World War II. And they have done it with the encouragement of Democratic politicians.

Today the auto companies are bankrupt. So what does the Democratic Party do, led by President Obama? It straight-arms the secured creditors and gives a large minority interest in the company to the United Auto Workers union.

Rich Galen pointedly asks how this is different from the expropriation of oil service companies by President Chavez of Venezuela.

The "state firm says lower oil prices mean the contractors are being paid too much" so Chavez went for efficiency and simply seized the services companies and now the state-owned oil company owes them … nothing.

Well. It is certainly politically efficient to dodge paying the piper. But as the Fram oil filter guy says: You can pay me now or you can pay me later.

The problem with political control of the economy is that politicians and their aides know nothing about running successful companies.

That is why Fannie and Freddie were such a disaster; they were run by men and women from the Clinton administration that knew nothing about mortgage banking. But they did know a lot about lobbying Congress.

That is why the oil industry in Venezuela is a disaster. It is run by Chavez appointees, men who may be brilliant at political activism. But they are lousy at getting the heavy oil of Venezuela out of the ground and off to market.

The tragedy of expropriation politics is that the very people who cheer at the expropriation of the hated capitalists are the people that suffer first when the capitalists lose confidence and the economy tanks.

And that is what will happen to the US as the Obama administration continues its random walk through the economy making decisions based on short-term political expediency instead of long-term consumer needs.