Pelosi's Un-Americans

You'd think that US politicians would have learned by now not to accuse the opposition of being un-patriotic. So why are House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer coming out and calling the opponents to ObamaCare "un-American?"

However, it is now evident that an ugly campaign is underway not merely to misrepresent the health insurance reform legislation, but to disrupt public meetings and prevent members of Congress and constituents from conducting a civil dialogue.

Oh, silly me. The chaps who started the un-American thing 50 years ago were Republican McCarthyites. Nobody could accuse a Democrat of using McCarthyite tactics. Nancy Pelosi is a card-carrying liberal. Nobody could accuse her of fascistic tendencies.

More and more, it is becoming clear that Nancy Pelosi is out of her depth. She just doesn't understand the "high game" and thinks she is still playing thug-level big-city machine politics. Republicans couldn't ask for a better opponent.

Glenn Reynolds has articulated the situation best.

The truth is that for my adult lifetime, "protest" has been a kind of Kabuki engaged in by organized groups on the Left with help from the press -- as in the recent bus tour of AIG executives that was organized and paid for by an ACORN affiliate and in which the protesters were heavily outnumbered by the media, who nonetheless generally treated it as an "authentic" expression of populist discontent.

Now, all of a sudden, conservatives have erupted into genuine "out-of-doors" political activity, and liberals are calling it "unruly" and "astro-turf." They are questioning its legitimacy. These are the guys who have made an art form out of rent-a-mob "peaceful protest."

I'd advise my Democratic friends to be careful. In politics you want to avoid waking sleeping dogs. You can get the people to put up with a lot of abuse from government. They will grumble and complain, but not do anything about it. But when you provoke a populace into rebellion, then you have bought yourself a peck of trouble. Once people get aroused it becomes very difficult to get them to go home again.

Back in the 1950s liberals were delighted to be accused of being "un-American." It put them on the side of the angels over a dispute (communists spies in government) in which they had a lot to answer for.

Today, conservatives should be delighted that clumsy liberals like Nancy Pelosi are reaching for the patriotism button. It will rile up center-right Americans like you wouldn't believe, and unite conservatives, libertarians, and Christian conservatives into a single, powerful coalition. That is terrible news for liberals because this is a center-right country, and the only way that liberals can get things done is by keeping the right divided.

My judgment is that we have a generation of liberals in power today that don't really have first-class political minds. They have had it too easy, for they have never had to defend their ideas against a hostile media. Unlike your average conservative.

We are going to see, in our time, a great liberal unraveling. It began with the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Liberals had told us how bad it was for politicians like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to lie. Liberals had told us that the rules over the treatment of women had changed and that the old double standard was over. Then along came Bill Clinton, treating women like objects, and lying about it.

So liberals said it was OK. Everyone lies about sex, they said.

In the Obama era we will see a bunch of other liberal sacred cows sacrificed to political convenience.

That is why conservatives make such a big deal whenever Obama throws someone "under the bus." Modern liberalism is reduced to mere political convenience, even as it continues to recite the shibboleths from its long-departed era of idealism with ever increasing emphasis.

So go ahead Nancy Pelosi. Call me un-patriotic. Make my day.

The Liberals and the "Unruly Mob"

For years and years our liberal friends have written sensitively about "peaceful protesters" and marches for justice.

They understood the rage that drove the workers and the civil-rights activists, the feminists and gays, to the streets. The earnest faces of the ordinary Americans driven to the streets were a verdict on America's failure to live up to its promise.

But now that peaceful protesters are attending the town halls of Democratic representatives and senators, our liberal friends are singing a different tune.

Senior Democrats are talking about "unruly mobs."

It almost reminds me of the "middle-class riot" that occurred during the Counting of the Chads in Florida 2000.

What is going on here? All of a sudden our liberal friends are fulminating about "the mob!" They sound like British Tory squires expostulating from their gentlemen's clubs in London. Or 19th century American robber barons exclaiming about labor agitators threatening the extra dividend.

Anyway, what is this mob are we talking about? Everything that I've seen about the spirited town hall participants says: Middle-class America. Are liberals now saying that the great middle class is a bunch of radical provocateurs out to create a disturbance of the peace?

And what about the police that are being used by the upper class to limit the right of peacable assembly? How long are they prepared to act as the stooges of their liberal masters?

I'll tell you. If liberals think that the mild reactions to their cruel and unjust takeover of health care are the work of "unruly mobs," I'm here to say this.

You ain't seen nothing yet.

Greetings from Rejkyavik

Yes. Here we are on a dull rainy morning in Reykjavik, Iceland, reporting from the 4th Floor Hotel's wireless connection, after an overnight flight on Icelandair from Seattle.

Night is by courtesy. Since the flight went above the Arctic Circle, it never quite got dark in the plane; there was always a tinge of dusk/dawn in the north.

But what a surprise as we descended through the clouds into Kevlavik Airport. There, out at sea, was a cruise ship. You mean to say the cruise ships come to little old Iceland? Yes, they do, according to the taxi driver on the way into Reykjavik. Above 50 ships will call this year, and maybe 80 next year. They call at Reykjavik and the east side of Iceland, and then head north to Spitzbergen before cruising down the coast of Norway. Some ships even cross over to the east coast of Greenland.

What's the economy here in Iceland, you ask? Tourism (up sharply this year), fish, and aluminum. The cheap geothermal power means they can afford to do aluminum smelting. And then there's oil.

What, you say? I thought the world was running out of oil. Not in Iceland. There's oil off the east coast and they are drilling in the strait between Iceland and Greenland. More oil than the North Sea fields, the taxi driver says.

It's now 9:00 am, and the other hotel guests are coming into the restaurant for breakfast. There's breakfast for all here. Cold cuts for the Germans, baked beans for the Brits, and good healthy stuff for the Americans. And fish for the Icelanders.

Is Opposition to ObamaCare "Astroturf?"

The current line from the president, the Democrats in Congress, and the "state-run media" is that the apparent grass-roots opposition to the president's healthcare proposals is in fact "Astroturfing."

For those of you not yet up the minute on the latest political jargon, here is the definition from Wikipedia. It is a top-down political (or PR campaign) that is

seeking to create the impression of being spontaneous "grassroots" behavior, hence the reference to the artificial grass, AstroTurf.

The term was apparently invented by Texas US Senator Lloyd Bentsen.

Thus, our Democratic friends are presently trying to sell the notion (from the top) that the angry constituents barracking their Democratic representatives at local townhall meetings are not spontaneously organized from the grass roots, but in fact artificial "astroturf" organized from the top down.

(The Dems should know about astroturfing. Many of their activist organizations are organized and funded by the billionaire George Soros.)

Today, InstaPundit Glenn Reynolds has lots of links about the controversy, here, here, and here.

So which is it? Well, my instinct is that the opposition started spontaneously, and was not initially organized by GOP leaders in Washington. But now, of course, the bigwigs have latched onto the grass-roots phenomenon and are flogging it for all they are worth.

Here's what I think is happening. A whole bunch of folks that weren't too politically motivated in the last few years and who got kinda disappointed by the Bush administration are now, all of a sudden, fighting mad.

Now why would that be?

It's simple. The Obama administration is taking dead aim at their pocket-books. All of a sudden we are looking at major tax increases.

When you really get down to it, politics in the United States is pretty simple. If the Democratic Party doesn't stand for more spending, what's the point of it? So the Democrats always stand for more spending. If the Republican Party doesn't stand for tax cuts, what's the point of it? So the Republicans are always strong on tax cutting. Elections are about the clash of these opposing notions.

What with the Reagan and Bush tax cuts, the average Republican-leaning voter hasn't felt that they had a dog in the race recently. Taxes were reasonable, house prices were going up, jobs were plentiful. They were relaxed about a little increased spending. Why not? We could afford it.

But now things have changed. Not only is the economy in trouble, stocks and house prices in the tank, but the Democrats are proposing tax increases to sustain their bloated patronage state.

That is going to hurt a lot of people, and re-inject rage and energy into Republican Party politics.

You can call it "grass-roots" or you can call it "astroturf." Take your pick. It is still real, and you ain't seen nothing yet.

Obama = Joker = Racism?

This is not a post-racial presidency, Virginia. Not a chance. It was always obvious that as soon as President Obama got into a jam that our liberal friends would start playing the race card. And so they have.

Someone has been putting up posters in Los Angeles and elsewhere featuring the president as The Joker--as played by the late Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. According to Thomas Lifson in The American Thinker, it means the end of the fantasy,

It is starting. Open mockery of Barack Obama, as disillusionment sets in with the man, his policies, and the phony image of a race-healing, brilliant, scholarly, middle-of-the-roader.

You could easily see what was coming next. Racism! Yes, the usual suspects are accusing the president's critics of being racist. From Toby Harnden in the British Daily Telegraph:

The liberal tabloid "LA Weekly", which depicted George W. Bush, the former president, as Dracula on its cover in 2004, denounced the Obama-Joker poster as virulently racist.

"It has a bit of everything to appeal to the drunk tank of California conservatism: Obama is in white face, his mouth (like Ledger's Joker's) has been grotesquely slit wide open and the word 'Socialism' appears below his face," wrote its blogger Steven Mikulan. "The only thing missing is a noose."

This is an important warning to conservatives everywhere. As things go south for President Obama our liberal friends are going to get increasingly desperate. They will reach for the race card again and again. Conservatives will have to learn how to respond with the appropriate degree of courage and scorn. Fortunately there are examples of appropriate scorn that we can use.

1. Joseph Welch to Senator Joseph McCarthy: "You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
2. Dirty Harry to a punk: "Go ahead. Make my day."
3. Rhett Butler to Scarlett: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

I tell you. What's not to like?

But there is a serious side to this. For too long, decent Americans have been afraid, afraid to be tagged as racists. This must stop. Because there is one thing you need to defend freedom, justice, and the American Way. And that is courage. In America in 2009, in 2010 and beyond, if you are going to defend freedom you are going to need the courage to risk being called a racist.

The Injustice of the Welfare State

There seems to be a rising tide of outrage sweeping the nation. It is directed at the unjust plan of President Obama and the Democrats in Congress to nationalize health care.

Whatever the merits of the plan, it will clearly not let Americans alone in their current health arrangements. It will nudge them, and pretty soon shove them, into a one-size-fits-all government program.

There are no doubt many reasons inspiring the Democrats towards this goal. Let us at least acknowledge the idealism behind the politics: the desire to give to every person, regardless of means, a decent health care free of financial worry.

We may perhaps be excused for thinking our liberal friends rather like Dorothea Brooke, for whom "every [notion] is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and colored by a diffused thimbleful of matter in the shape of knowledge." It's a wonderful thing to imagine life freed of its fears and its dangers: but is it possible? Would it even be life?

The problem is that between the wish and the result is a monstrous injustice. And it is an injustice that lays heavily upon every one of us.

The welfare state is an injustice that is forced upon the rich, the middle class, and the poor.

For the rich, who shoulder most of the tax burden in these modern times--both as a fraction of their income and as an overall fraction of the taxes collected--the injustice is simple. Their money is taken away from them and spent by the political system. That means they have less money for houses, movables, objets d'art and investing in their businesses. Perhaps we should not care too much about all that. But it is true that all that money would go into jobs of one kind or another. And maybe it would be better spent by the rich than by the politicians.

The welfare state is also unjust to the middle class. It forces them to buy education from the government, and it shoves them into the health-care options, retirement provisions, and insurance subsidized or compelled by the political system. A mother might want to send her child to a special school adapted to the special needs of her child. That is hard to do when you are paying school taxes. A family might want to save up to buy a business. That is hard to do when you are forced to save for retirement using the government's Social Security system, and forced to provide for unemployment using the government's unemployment taxes. Saving up to buy a business is no different from any other saving. But the government says no. First you must pay into our system. Then, if you have anything left over, you can contribute to your own plans for the future.

But this is mere bagatelle. For the rich and the middle class, the welfare state's injustices are light to moderate. It is the poor that really suffer from the welfare state.

Perhaps the most significant burden on the poor is the one-two combination of compulsory education and child-labor laws. If we really cared about the poor we would provide simple schools that provided basic literacy and numeracy, and then we would let the kids start work at ten or twelve. And the terms of work would be simple. No complicated taxes and requirements. Just work compensated by payment in cash or in kind.

Yes but what about the poor getting into college and becoming doctors and lawyers. If they leave school at ten, they will never get to college! Look nobody is forbidding the poor from getting an education. All we are saying is that the poor shouldn't be forced to go to school, and shouldn't be prevented from working.

The poor are not like you and me. They live by informal exchange of favors and labor. Maybe this month a family has a crisis, so the kid must be pulled out of school to help his parents. But the formal economy works with rigid rules and substantial taxes. No way can an employer afford all the taxes and employment rules when operating a small business in the inner city.

But right now the poor are screwed every which way. The police don't police; the garbage isn't picked up; there are street people hustling illegal businesses all over. Businesses have to pay off the politicians to get any services at all. And people with connections get all the money for grants and subsidized loans.

There's a word to describe how we got into this frightful mess. Liberals. Liberals wrote all the laws to create social benefits that all have their unintended consequences. The trouble is that when the economy has to pay for an expensive health sector and an expensive education sector then the taxes that go to pay for it crowd out the marginal businessman and worker. You end up with an economy that works pretty well for the middle-class worker with a half-decent education. But everyone below that level finds themselves struggling, forced to live and work in the informal economy, and they can't figure out why.

This is the great Question of our age. We want everyone to enjoy the benefits of material prosperity and the health and freedom from want and fear that it provides. But surely there is a better way than the bossy, interfering way of our liberal masters.

Yet here we are, about to ratchet up the bossiness index with a huge, central, bureaucratic mess of a health program that will put the government's nose even further into our lives. It will increase the marginal tax rate on all Americans and push the poor further into the informal, underground economy.

There's got to be a better way.

"What's In It for Me"

Did you know that the insurance companies are to blame? That's the current tactic for President Obama and Nancy Pelosi as they try to rescue their floundering plan for a government takeover of health care.

According to Sheryl Gay Stolberg and David M. Herszenhorn at The New York Times:

Congressional Democrats and leading advocacy groups are laying the groundwork for an August offensive against the insurance industry as part of a coordinated campaign to sell the public on the need for reform.

It's a cunning ploy. Having got the insurance companies more or less on board, now the politicians decide to box them in on the last lap.

The administration's problem is that there is nothing in the current plan for the average American. Almost all Americans have health insurance. So the Dems are going to insist that the evil insurance companies remove their limitations on pre-existing conditions. Says David Axelrod: "Our job is to help folks understand how this will help them." As the Times as it:

With Republicans making headway by casting the legislation as a costly government takeover, Democrats have decided they must answer the question on the minds of those now insured: “What’s in it for me?”

The joke is: How can it possibly be the fault of the insurance companies? They are just about the most regulated industry in the United States. Whatever they do must already have the imprimatur of government.

Still, I heard from two different people over the last week about the perfidy of the insurance companies, so the Democrats must be on to something.

But hey! If we want to stop the insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions, let's do it!

But here's another idea. Let's do the opposite. Let us permit the insurance companies to offer any kind of policy they want, without the inclusions that politicians force them to include. Then people could buy simple insurance against big, but unusual, risks, and pay for day-to-day care out of pocket.

I know. Dream on.