What Politicians Really Think

A political "gaffe," according to Michael Kinsley, is when a politician tells the truth. It is like an actor "breaking character."

In Britain today, in the middle of their General Election campaign they, are enjoying a "gaffe" committed by Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Brown was accosted by a 66-year-old Labour supporter who asked him about "immigration from Eastern Europe, tuition fees and the national debt." Brown handled the woman pretty well, but was overheard later describing her as "a bigoted woman."

Shades of Barack Obama describing the Pennsylvania voters in small towns that lost jobs years ago.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Politicians are a funny lot. On the one hand they claim to care about the people and their needs. On the other hand they ruthlessly exploit them and divide them in their election campaigns. And behind their backs they sneer at them or patronize them.

The joke is on the politicians, of course. Voters wouldn't care about immigration if the politicians ran a sensible immigration policy and if there wasn't such a demand for low-skilled workers created by the welfare state. Voters wouldn't care about the debt if politicians had done their job properly and refrained from gunning the economy to buy votes. Voters wouldn't care about free trade if the politicians hadn't created subsidies for powerful industries that allowed them to ignore the global market trends. And voters wouldn't care about race if politicians didn't inject "racism" into everything.

What this all adds up to is a corrupt and cynical elite that ought to have been pitched out of power half a century ago. They've bribed the electorate on the one hand, and betrayed them on the other. They talk about the short-term vices of corporations but they themselves never think beyond the next vote and the next election.

Power is power, and powerful people hang onto power, in politics, in culture, and in the commanding heights of the economy.

In the short term, of course, powerful people get what they want: money, power and the love of beautiful women. But in the long term all powerful people manage to do is stave off the inevitable. And that only makes the inevitable adjustment--or explosion--bigger than it needs to be.

What a shame.

Announcing: usfederalbailout.com

Last week I read a solid article by Nicole Gelinas in Investors Business Daily: "Wall St. Bailouts Would Be Invited, Not Prevented, Under Dodd's Bill". Gelinas is a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute.

So, you say? Dog bites man. Presumably that's the whole point of the Dodd bill: to make Wall Street go cap in hand to the politicians when they get into a mess selling the government's paper. What's the deal?

Here's the deal. The article included a table that listed all the outlays and guarantees that the Feds have made to bail out the finance industry and others since the liquidity crisis of August 2007. You might be interested to know that the total in outlays and guarantees is just a little north of twenty trillion dollars. Yes, that's trillion with a "T".

I gotta have that, I said.

Fortunately, the numbers are easily available from the website of the Special Inspector General for TARP (SIGTARP). SIGTARP issues a quarterly report to Congress, and Gelinas got the numbers from there.

Bingo! I went to the SIGTARP website, downloaded a couple of pdf files, and voila: usfederalbailout.com, now a TARP bailout page at usgovernmentspending.com. Naturally the site uses the world-beating technology of usgovernmentspending.com to present the information in an appealing and compelling fashion just like its sister sites.

However, modesty prevents me from coming up with a single bottom line number like Gelinas because, in my view, outlays and guarantees are apples and oranges. So I have come up with three numbers:

1. Actual Federal Outlays in securities purchased and money loaned to bailed-out corporations.
2. Net Federal Outlays including repayment of loans by the bailed-out beneficiaries (for the big banks have mostly paid back their emergency loans).
3. Federal guarantees. That's the big number, rather like the unfunded liability of Medicare. It starts with the guarantee for Fannie Freddie bonds at $5.5 trillion.

Of course, the site is still under construction, and I have to update some numbers from the St. Louis Fed.

But if you want to know how much all these numbers add up to you'll have to go to usfederalbailout.com. The exercise will do you good.

Now I want to know why the domain usfederalbailout.com was available for little old me. Ain't anyone paying attention out there to all this except me and Nicole?

Dividing Lines: Dems on Immigration

Politics is all about dividing lines. You win elections by drawing a dividing line that gets you 51 percent of the votes. The British Labour Party won the last three elections in a row on the dividing line of "Labour investment vs. Tory cuts."

A corollary is that if you want to divide the American people then you should call in the politicians. They'll do the job for you better than anyone.

Byron York writes today about a new dividing line. The Democrats are dumping the energy bill in the Senate for an immigration bill. The Obamis think that the only way to get the base out this November is to draw a dividing line on immigration.

President Obama hopes to increase Hispanic voting and fire up the Democratic base to avert potentially disastrous Democratic mid-term losses across the country.

You think? I'd say that they are more likely to fire up the Tea Party base and provoke a wipeout. That's the risk in dividing lines. You may find out that you drew it in the wrong place. After all, Hispanics, like most Democratic voters, are concentrated in a few areas. The ones that aren't concentrated probably aren't as passionate about immigration.

I say good luck to President Obama. He is probably the most divisive president in modern history and he is either going to transform America or he is going to ruin the Democratic Party for a generation.

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds gets to the heart of this in a link to a piece by Francis Cianfrocca on the Tea Party Movement: Cianfrocca writes about the problem of central planning, its misallocation of resources and its magnification of corruption (you think?):

The endpoint of central planning, if not outright failure, is a much deeper and more intractable division of society into haves and have-nots. After promising a better world for everyone, the progressives will end up creating a society that is more polarized than ever.

Let's generalize this a bit. The endpoint of putting anything into the political sector is to divide society. That's what we've done on education, on welfare, on health care. We have encouraged people to compete in the public square for government subsidies on education, on health care, and on welfare. And they do.

If we want to make America a better society, we've got to heal the divisions. That means that we've got to take politics out of as many things as possible. The science is settled on this. Researchers have found that by putting Americans in a room together to solve a problem they will almost always work together and compromise on a deal that gives everyone something of what they want. It's a win-win kind of thing.

But in politics, it's win-lose, and the loser goes away angry, muttering "wait until next time!"

That's the point of limited government. You limit the power of government and you limit the opportunity of politicians to divide us.

Obama a Socialist? Whatever.

Celebrated author Jonah Goldberg has a think piece in Commentary. "What Kind of a Socialist is Barack Obama?" he asks.

After a lot of thinking he decides that "neosocialist" is as good as anything. But what's wrong with "liberal fascist," Jonah, after the title of your bestselling Liberal Fascism?

But I think Jonah is trying to be too clever. Barack Obama is just the latest in a long line of political leaders that want to use political power to make society conform to their enlightened ideas.

People that go into politics are people who like to wield power. The purpose of law and constitutions is to limit that power. Because, in their own minds, there is no limit to the power they should seek and use--for the betterment of mankind, of course.

It used to be, in the agricultural era, that an elite of landed warriors ran the place. Their idea was to increase the amount of land they controlled, since land was the only source of wealth. War was what they knew, and war was what they did: war on each other and war on the peasants that grew the food that made them wealthy.

Now we have the "educated class" and they want things their way too. The only way they seem to know is through government power.

It will, of course, end in tears, or more likely mass graves. Because there is a limit to what force can achieve. After you have fought off the Huns or the Mongols and after you have tamed the latest generation of lower-class male youth, there's not much that government can usefully do.

The thing about government, all government, is that is goes bad fast. Because it is a system of winning election and rewarding your supporters, it is inherently corrupt.

So it doesn't matter how many left-liberal commentators you have singing your praises, your government-centric economy is inherently corrupt, inherently wasteful, inherently unjust.

You can see it in spades with the Obama administration. Everything President Obama has done has reeked of corruption, waste, and injustice. It started with the $787 billion stimulus that was nothing but a slush fund for Obama supporters. It continued with the GM and Chrysler bailouts in which the bondholders got shafted in favor of the unions that supported Obama's campaign. It reached an apogee with the corrupt bargain of the corrupt, wasteful, and unjust ObamaCare bill.

Now the Obama administration is pushing a financial reform bill that will vastly increase political (not regulatory) control over the finance industry.

I've said now for years that we needed Obama. We needed him so that the American people could decisively upchuck him and his style of big government politics.

Then we begin the noble task of getting government and government force out of the vital social tasks before this nation. We need to get government force out of health care, out of education, out of welfare, and out of retirement.

There is a simple reason why this is important.

It is because, as philosopher Ringo Starr says, "Everything the government touches turns to crap."

It's just not a good idea to have the education of children turn to crap. It's not a good idea to have grandma's health care turn to crap. It is not a good idea to have the relief of the poor turn to crap.

But I repeat myself.

Silence on Fannie and Freddie

It's good to learn that General Motors and Chrysler are doing well and are paying back their bailout loans, made through the federal government's TARP fund.

You'd think, from the MSM coverage, that all is hunky-dory. Why, according to the administration, the total cost of TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Fund, will only be $127 billion.

The administration expects the total cost of TARP to be less than $127 billion, though Mr. Allison [from the US Treasury] said improvements at American International Group Inc. and General Motors Co. could change that figure.

Erm. So why aren't we hearing anything about Fannie and Freddie, the government-sponsored mortgage giants, once the ATM of former administration officials, and now in government receivership?

OK, here's a report from Peter J. Wallison in The Wall Street Journal.

Losses at Fannie and Freddie are expected to be $400 billion. The latest estimate from the Congressional Budget Office is $381 billion. But maybe the Obama administration knows something we don't know.

Last Christmas Eve, Treasury removed the $400 billion cap on what the government might be required to invest in these two GSEs in the future, and this may tell the real story about the cost to taxpayers. In typical Washington fashion, everyone has amnesia about how this disaster occurred.

Yes. If you talk to your liberal friend, amply informed by The New York Times, he will have very little grasp of the Fannie Freddie debacle.

And that's the way it's supposed to be. Don't inquire too much about the many government messes that liberals have dreamed up over the years and are too proud to admit failure. Don't inquire too much about the bottomless pit that we taxpayers are committed to dig for the politicians who promised affordable housing for people that couldn't afford it.

And what about the bondholders at General Motors and Chrysler that got haircuts? We are not talking about the stockholders. The are risk-takers. We are talking about widow-and-orphan bondholders. The happy-talk news items and GM and Chrysler aren't talking about that. They are talking about GM and Chrysler repaying the government, not the bondholders.

There's a quote from Ringo Starr, the Beatle, that seems to address all of this. According to the philosopher from Liverpool:

Everything the government touches turns to crap.

No kidding.

Rush as Svengali?

Liberal women are starting to regret voting for Obama, according to blogger Bookworm.

But they are afraid. They are afraid that if they start listening to Rush he will hypnotize them--just like Svangali! When she's riding in the car with a liberal friend, Bookworm suggests turning on Rush. "No, no, I don't want to do that."

So here we have a woman who realizes that she made a mistake voting Democrat this election, who is open to conservative news (I believe her when she says she watches Fox), yet who assiduously avoids any contact with Rush. Incidentally, this was not a one time-0nly conversation. I had virtually the same conversation with two other regret-filled liberals.

How about that "regret-filled liberals?"

I think there is an important lesson here for conservatives. Don't frighten the horses. These liberal women are afraid. They are afraid they have made a terrible mistake. In particular, I suggest, they are afraid they have elected a president who is going to embroil the US in conflict, and women like to avoid conflict.

Remember. First we got the security moms. It looks like Bookworm was one such. Now it is time for the... er, well what do we call them? Hope-and-change moms?

The thing to remember about women is that they need to do the right thing. That's not because they are bad but because they are good. A woman's honor is her chastity, which means being clean and good, and doing right by the other women in her community of women.

Obama seduced these women by promising a world of sweetness and light. But he is delivering a world of conflict and Chicago Rules bullying. Women hate this sort of thing.

And even worse, Obama is threatening the well-being of the mothers and the children of women in America.

Stepping back to the larger picture, the reason that politics has become all about being "nice" is women. Back in the old days when only men voted, politics could afford to be bare-knuckled, with fighting firemen the backbone of the old Tammany Hall machine in New York City. Men love that, but women hate it, and women have the vote.

Also, women are more suggestible. So politics is now all nicey-nicey.

Except that Obama politics is not nicey-nicey, but bare-knuckle, f-word, Rahm Emanuel street fighting.

No wonder the Democrats are trying to smear the Tea Party movement as violent and racist. So far, the Tea Party has been remarkably hospitable for women. It has been friendly and full of laughter, and many of its headline figures are women. But if women can be encouraged to believe that the Tea Party is violent and nasty, why then they will be afraid to get involved.

Just like they are afraid to listen to Rush.

The Year of the Race Card

Although our Democratic friends appear to be in the catbird seat, passing universal and mandatory legislation over the opposition of the American people, don't forget that their power rests on a very shaky foundation.

It rests on scaring African Americans and Jews to death.

The simple fact is that you cannot get 90 percent of people to agree on anything unless you scare them to death. That's why you typically only get 90 percent electoral majorities in thug-dictator countries.

The reason that African Americans vote 90 percent for Democrats is that Democrats scare them all the time with the race card.

They have to. Otherwise they couldn't win a presidential election. Ever.

That's what James Taranto is talking about.

Since 1964, blacks have voted overwhelmingly Democratic. If Republicans were able to attract black votes, the result would be catastrophic for the Democratic Party. Even in 2008, the Democrats' best presidential year since '64, if the black vote had been evenly split between the parties (and holding the nonblack vote constant), Barack Obama would have gotten about 48% of the vote and John McCain would be president.

Guess what. The same thing applies to Jews. The reason that American Jews vote so heavily for Democrats is that Democrats scare them all the time with the Christian Right.

Political and religious leaders have always done this sort of thing. But it was all supposed to stop with the Sixties and the Civil Rights era.

Of course it didn't. And the reason is not that Democrats are evil, but because they got themselves in a jam. There is no way they can win power without striking fear into the African American heart.

One fine day, of course, African Americans will break out of their cultural ghetto and discover that people really don't care about them one way or another.

But Democrats can't allow them to find that out. Not until they have found a new victim class to ride to power.

Is it possible that this year, in their desperation to avoid a total wipe-out in November, the Democrats will jump the shark on race, and that African Americans will come to realize that they have nothing to fear but fear itself?

Here's hoping.