Howard Zinn's Philosophy

Howard Zinn, a World War II bombardier and GI Bill graduate who returned his thanks to the government by damning the US in a long career of left-wing ranting, died of a heart attack at 87.

In The New York Times obituary Zinn is represented as a bit of a rogue. In National Review Online Roger Kimball finds him a monster.

Of course, in his Peoples' History of the United States Howard Zinn was basically right. Looking at the world from the perspective of a working stiff, which he was before he went to university, life is unfair. Of course the northern Europeans conquered North America, and of course it was rough for the folks in their way. When you have power, political power, you use it to reward your supporters and take it out of the people in your way. Ask a liberal about that.

The European conquerors of North America were no different than any other conqueror. They had an enormous advantage in their superior political and military technology and they used it. And it also helped that the native North Americans were susceptible to European diseases and not the other way around.

In India and Africa it was a different story, and Europeans went down like flies to malaria. And the Brits had Edmund Burke to complain about the horrid acts of their pro-consul in India, Warren Hastings.

Given how beastly governments are, it is shocking that Howard Zinn was always in favor of power for governments (fighting for the little people, of course). Surely, given the squalid tale of oppression he has to tell, the only thing to do is to limit government power. Somehow, this never occurred to him.

But now that the United States is governed by a president who is Howard-Zinn-lite, we will see the shoe on the other foot. Liberals are not longer the champions of the little guy. They are the power elite.

Our liberal friends have been using and abusing their political and cultural power for over fifty years. There is arising in the United States a rejectionist movement that hates liberal power and hates liberal oppression of ordinary Americans.

So, now that Howard Zinn has gone to his reward it may be time for a "Tea Party History of the United States." Instead of writing endlessly about the heroic radical suits that stood up for the poor and the oppressed, this new history might celebrate the folk who stood up against the liberal power machine--its corruption, its self dealing, and its sinecures--and championed truth, justice, and the American Way.

Man (ok, Woman) Bites Dog

I live by a rigid, inflexible rule. Whenever liberals attack a conservative politician as a dunce--amiable or stupid--I pay attention. I mark that conservative politician as a rising star, perhaps even called to greatness.

So I am naturally drawn, as many others have been, to Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK). Given how vigorously liberals have demonized and stigmatized her, I suspect that she is truly marked out for great deeds.

Here's the latest Palin moment. The former governor has urged the president to fire Rahm Emanuel for his recent comment about liberals being "eff-ing retarded." Writes Palin: "Are You Capable of Decency, Rahm Emanuel?"

Now, let's see, that sounds familiar. Rewind back to the Fifties and the Army-McCarthy hearings. Counsel Joseph Welch to Senator Joseph McCarthy:

Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

Golly. Who thought that Palin was a student of history? Does she even know how to read?

Notice the real brilliance here. Palin is not going after Emanuel for dissing a Republican. That's the usual political shtick. But Palin is doing something different. She is complaining because Emanuel is acting disrespectfully towards people in his own party.

How smart is that? Do you think that President Obama could think of such a brilliant move, intelligent as he is?

Sarah Palin is moving deftly into the electorate's sweet spot. She is not just talking about lowering the squabbling in Washington, she is doing something about it. She is establishing a record as a true "post-partisan," the darling of the moderates and independents who, we are told, just hate the bickering and back-biting of day-to-day politics.

Now. If you were an advisor to an up-and-coming politician, would you be smart enough to think of that? To criticize a Rahm Emanuel for trashing people in his own party?

There's no doubt that Sarah Palin was unprepared for the national stage back in the fall of 2008. But let us understand what being "unprepared" really means. It means not yet having a carousel in your head full of focus-group and poll-tested sound bites on national issues. Not yet having a quick retort to put Katie Couric in her place.

Sarah Palin may not be prepared as a national politician. Not yet. But she is a skilled politician who has worked her way up in electoral politics from city councilwoman to governor. That means something, even if her experience is in Alaska. Politics is still politics. An old hand like Pat Buchanan has written: "Of Sarah Palin it can be said. The lady knows how to frame an issue."

Think of this. Is there any skill more important for a poltician in electoral politics than framing an issue?

Liberal Ignorance (about Conservatives)

As trite as it is to bring this up. Liberals don't really know much about conservatives. And that starts with the president.

A journeyman blogger like John Hawkins posts an article like "Seven Huge Flaws in the Way Liberal Think" on a regular basis. Whether he's right or he's wrong, he's still thinking about the foundations of liberal thought.

President Obama seems to be as bad as anyone. JSF at Valley of the Shadow puts it succinctly.

President Obama has a Huffington Post understanding of the Right, or the Right as seen from the Left. Not once has he ever spoken to a Conservative to understand his or her views.

This of course is a consequence of the liberal hegemony in media and the academy. Liberals in the political class can live lives completely cut off from conservative ideas and culture. And, as you might say, they like it that way.

The problem is that politics is civil war by other means. You need to know as much as you can about the enemy. You need to know where his troops are; you need to know what he is thinking. You need to have an idea about how he is likely to react to your actions. You have to constantly work at this, because it is easy to avoid hard choices and unpleasant news.

The biggest problem with ideas is the things you know that aren't so. That is what "Seven Huge Flaws" is all about:

1. Liberals believe they can change human nature
2. Liberals believe we can talk everything out with our enemies
3. Liberals don't have enough respect for our culture and traditions
4. Liberalism is a fundamentally immoral political philosophy
5. Liberals believe merely being liberal makes them good people
6. Liberals have too much faith in government
7. Liberals have minimal interest in whether the programs they support work or not

Read the whole thing to get into the details. Hawkins is detailing the beliefs not just of liberals but of President Obama, and he is explaining the reasons why liberals know so little about conservatives.

Still, liberals are interested in power and you would think that they would do what it takes to learn about the opposition so that they can beat them and keep their power. And yet powerful dynasties decline and fall all the time.

There is still time for liberals and for President Obama to switch onto another track and avoid the train wreck that is coming in November. But the time is very short.

Fox News Most Trusted

You can understand that Fox News star Bill O'Reilly couldn't resist the opportunity to gloat a little. Public Policy Polling, a liberal polling outfit, had just released a poll on TV news pitched as:

Fox News is the only major tv news operation that more Americans trust than distrust.

Here are the results in a convenient table:

News Org.	Trust	Don't Trust	Not Sure
Fox News	49%	37%	15%
ABC News	31%	46%	22%
NBC News	35%	44%	20%
CBS News	32%	46%	22%
CNN	39%	41%	20%

If you are a liberal, I dare say, these results tell you what you have known all along, that the American people are uneducated and ignorant. How could the American people believe that Fox is a serious news organization?

If you are a conservative listening to you liberal friend railing against the stupidity of the American people, you chuckle to yourself and mutter: Go ahead, punk. Make my day.

Because for our liberal friends not to take a poll like this seriously is an act of plain foolishness. It's the news equivalent of always branding Republican presidents as dunces.

But we conservatives wish our liberal friends well. They are, after all, Americans too, although grievously corrupted by the political and cultural power they have amassed over the last century. So here is a little primer to tell our liberal friends, in a fair and balanced way, why it makes complete sense that Fox News is Americans' most trusted news network.

1. Americans tilt conservative. The poll reminds us of this: 14% liberal, 47% moderate, 39% conservative. Of course conservatives are going to prefer to get their news from a conservative source, just as liberals like to get their news from the liberal New York Times.
   
   
2. The mainstream media really overdid things in 2008. Listen: everyone falls in love, but the MSM love affair with Candidate Obama really was over the top. People notice when other people are in love. It's written all over them.
   
   
3. President Obama is governing left-liberal. His ObamaCare is classic union liberalism. It reduces life to a monthly payment and outsources risk to others. The great middle in America wants to live life, not receive a monthly benefit. His cap-and-trade is classic educated-class liberalism. It hands over the US economy to the tender mercies and the suffocating rules of the government experts.
   
   
4. Many independents reacted immediately and negatively to Obama's fiscal policy a year ago. Naturally they will look to a news organization that reflects and confirms their views.
   
   
5. Many Americans feel that President Obama is not working on the one issue that they care about. Fixing the economy.
   

And so on. There are all kinds of ways in which you can argue against this. Go ahead, it's a free country.

But liberals and Democrats should understand that there is a perfect storm brewing. This poll is a severe storm warning. It will take political ability, hard work, and sheer luck for Democrats to avoid a devastating wipeout this year. The time to start shuttering the windows and doubling up the tie-downs is now.

Don't say you weren't warned!

What's Wrong With Stocks?

The 4th quarter GDP came in gangbusters this morning, at 5.7 percent. So what's the matter with stocks? They've been in a swoon for a couple of weeks, and yawned this morning at the GDP numbers.

The answer can only be that the market doesn't see the gangbuster improvement continuing for much longer. What's the problem?

Maybe it's as simple as one word: Taxes. David Malpass looks at the outlook for small business, the engine of growth and, especially, employment growth.

The fortunes of small businesses — perhaps more than any other commercial sector — are tied to rates of taxation on the individual. And individual income-tax rates are set to jump sharply at year-end when the Bush tax cuts of 2003 expire. Put another way, on January 1, 2011, the world’s biggest tax increase ever will arrive on the doorsteps of U.S. small businesses (and a great many others).

President Obama, on Wednesday night, was congratulating himself on high-speed rail in Florida and green jobs. That sort of thing may impress the mainstream media but it doesn't impress the markets. Fancy government infrastructure projects and technology subsidies don't necessarily translate into economic growth. They are, after all, money spent on special interest goodies. If they were such a good idea, then surely business would be right out there doing it without government subsidy.

So you can be pretty sure that government hasn't a clue when it comes to selecting projects that will get the economy going.

No, the likely cause of the market's swoon is taxes, and the radical uncertainty about taxes in the future. The Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire at the end of 2010. But who really believes that Congress will really let them expire in total? With the prospect of total wipeout in November 2010 I would expect that the Democrats in Congress will suddenly discover that they really believe in the importance of small businesses, and that Joe the Plumber is a real cool guy after all.

Don't forget Joe the Plumber. He is important. Here was a guy who, on the face of it, was a loser. He was a guy that hoped one day to buy a small plumbing business. Sociologists call his type: aspirational. And Joe the Plumber reckoned that President Obama's tax plans were going to hurt him in the business he hoped to buy.

Would Joe Plumbing actually have been hit by Obama's tax plans? Who knows? But he thinks he would get hit, and that is what matters in politics.

Back in the mid to late 2000s the Democrats did a fine job of marginalizing Republicans as bigoted fundamentalists that wanted to subject the US to Biblical morality. Many secular business owners felt embarrassed at being associated with such knuckle-draggers.

But mild embarrassment is a small price to pay when they are raising your taxes by a record amount. Why, you can even get to feeling that those crazy Christians aren't so bad after all.

Anyway, the Massachusetts Miracle was not built upon the votes of fundamentalist Christians. It was built upon independents moving strongly from the Democratic column to the Republican column, and increased enthusiasm among regular Republican voters.

No doubt something will be done to sweeten the pot for businessmen this year. But meanwhile business owners all across America are confused. They don't know what to plan for.

And that is not good news for the economy.

There is no Plan B

A week ago conservatives were all in a tizzy that President Obama would do "pivot" and start triangulating, just like President Clinton did when he got into trouble in his first term.

But my takeaway from the president's first State of the Union speech is that there is no pivot. It may not be full steam ahead with the liberal agenda, but there is no turning back. Not yet.

I listened to Glenn Beck for a moment this morning, and he marveled at the ratings he was getting. Over 3 million real viewers, at 5pm Eastern, 2pm Pacific! Not prime time, not close to prime time. People are searching my stuff out, he exulted. They must be looking for what I'm selling.

And that's the point. America is in transition right now; it might look like a proverbial Chinese fire drill to liberals and the MSM. But we conservatives know what is happening. Pretty soon even liberals will be seeing a pattern.

Let's change the metaphor. We are seeing a bunch of small formations marching about the political battlefield right now. What is going on? What is the battle plan? That's the way it always looks before a major battle. And then one day the guns start to roar, and it all makes sense.

Based on his speech, President Obama doesn't see the need to change his battle plan, except to propose a derisive spending freeze that doesn't begin to roll back the huge increases in spending already in the can. That's fine, for his opponents. It means that when the deployment of forces becomes clear in September and October it will be too late to make a big change.

So the president still wants one last Big Push on health care. He still wants a push on clean energy and green jobs. He wants to throw more subsidies at the grossly oversubsidized college sector. No change. Full speed ahead.

I've written before that the welfare state will never get reformed. It will end when it hits the buffers at the end of the line, when it hits the wall.

What, you may ask, happens then? We have a recent example that gives us a clue. It happened after the fall of the Soviet Union. A Polish acquaintance told me it was sad: So many old people "eating the paint off the walls."

That's probably what will happen here when the government runs out of money. The failed government will just walk away from the old and the sick. That wouldn't matter for them if family and fraternal ties were strong. But the whole point of the welfare state is to loosen those ties, to let people neglect the hard work of family obligation and rely instead on the government dole.

So the people that will flourish after the fall will be people that didn't listen to and didn't believe the governing class's promises.

All government promises are worthless. They are made to win elections. That is all.

It was troubling that President Obama also seemed to go out of his way to insult Republicans, even in a speech that exalted the virtues of unity. And the dig at the Supreme Court's decision on Citizens United was clumsy.

In the coming months and years President Obama will have to be fast on his feet. For pretty soon Obama will be saying, as Claudius said in Hamlet:

When sorrows come, they come not single spies
But in battalions.

The speech occurs after the death of Polonius when Ophelia had gone mad.

But President Obama doesn't seem to see any single spies yet, let along whole battalions. He is just going on as the liberal scion, born and educated in the "educated class," as David Brooks call our liberal elite, doing the things that liberals do. The trouble with well-born scions is that they don't have the street smarts to navigate through the confusion and fear of troubled times.

That is the way that all dynasties fall. And the liberal dynasty of the educated class is no different.

Freezing What Mr. President?

You can tell that President Obama has been knocked onto his back foot. He's proposing a spending freeze. It will amount, apparently to $250 billion over 10 years.

Politicians always propose spending freezes when they get into a jam. It sounds good in a speech. But the key thing, of course, is "details to follow later."

Columnist Robert Samuelson isn't fooled. The spending freeze is "peanuts," a "rounding error." That's because federal spending in the next few years is estimated at about $3.5 trillion per year. A $35 billion spending cut per year would be one percent. And President Obama is proposing less than that.

Our good friends at usgovernmentspending.com show why this is derisive.

Take a look at the pie chart. The big chunks in the budget are Pensions, Health Care,and Defense. President Obama has taken these off the table. Welfare isn't going to go down, not until the economy picks up. So that means that the cuts are going to come from only 19 percent of the federal budget.

The real facts are that, in the long run, we've got to cut the "mandatory" entitlement programs. That's what President Obama was trying to do in a sneaky way with ObamaCare. He was trying to introduce rationing for Medicare. But the American people blew him away. They don't want rationing. Not yet.

But that's where the money is. Social Security and Medicare. And they will still be there next year. They will still be there in 2013 when the next president is unaugurated.

Anyone want to be president?