Scapegoating 101

It's telling that the iconic definition of evil conservatism, for our liberal friends, is the Communist witchhunting of Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-WI). And the cathartic moment for them is moment that Robert Welch the attorney stood up to Sen. McCarthy at the Army-McCarthy hearings.

Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

Yet the one thing that senior Democratic solons have excelled at since that day at the Army McCarthy hearings in 1954 is hauling scapegoats up before a congressional committee and utterly demolishing them.

As in many things, our liberal friends completely misunderstand the point of scapegoating.

The point of scapegoating is not for the king to haul up some miscreant, whether a tongue-tied BP CEO like Tony Hayward or some hapless virgin.

The point of scapegoating is for the king himself to take up the burden of guilt and failure and offer himself as a sacrifice to the gods, offering, as our Founders might say, his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor in order to save the village, the tribe, the nation from annihilation.

That is why the theme of sacrifice recurs throughout ancient mythology. One of the most famous sacrificed gods is the Egyptian god Osiris. That is why the sacrifice of the Crucifixion is the central article of faith in Christianity. This sacrifice is the greatest sacrifice imaginable: God sacrifices his Son.

Of course, powerful kings and tribal leaders have used their power, down the ages, to avoid doing the right thing. Take Abraham. Did he sacrifice himself? Oh no. He decided to sacrifice his son Isaac. Even that proved to high a price, so God thoughtfully told him he could sacrifice a goat instead.

President Bush is a man who understood that, after 9/11, he had to do the right thing. That is why the frat boy came, in due season, to acquire all the gravitas of a sacrificed king.

He knew, I think, that doing the right thing would probably mean political immolation for him. After all, he was a child of the Sixties and lived through the Vietnam War--not to mention the Cold War. He knew how quickly people tire of a long conflict.

So President Bush laid himself down on the altar of the nation, and allowed all the mistakes and failures and hardships of his time to be personalized in himself. He did that, giving himself up to humiliation and failure, so that the nation might live.

Our liberal friends do not understand this dynamic. They do not understand that a CEO and a $20 billion slush fund is not a sufficient sacrifice for a bungled oil-spill cleanup. They do not understand that, as the nation's intellectual and educated elite--and also by virtue of the elections of 2008, the nation's political elite--it is they that must take upon themselves the mistakes of the present era.

In fact, our liberal friends seem to have learned nothing from the example of history down the ages. They do not see themselves as just another powerful elite that has come to dominate and rule a people, just as tribal leaders, kings, and emperors did since time out of mind. They do not see themselves as normal, fallible rulers, clumsily manipulating the levers of political power no better than any of the perfumed aristocrats that came before them.

They do not understand that it is President Obama that must sacrifice himself as the scapegoat for the horrible mess in the Gulf. And maybe they never will.

But we are conservatives. Fallible and fallen as we are, we know a thing or two. And what we know is that President Obama must take the fall for this one.

And one way or another, he will.

The Party of No Canard

Our Democratic friends are really keen on the idea that the Republican Party is the Party of No. They think that this is a devastating critique of the party that is currently in opposition.

Earth to Democrats: that's what an opposition party does. Say "No!"

Even Democratic pollsters Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell in the Wall Street Journal piece can't resist the meme.

It may be a partisan cliché, but the GOP is increasingly seen as the "Party of No"...

Republicans must offer a clear set of core principles, if not a comprehensive set of bold new ideas. If they do not, their hopes for winning both houses of Congress come November—a goal that is well within reach—could be dashed.

This is rubbish. Republicans don't need to do anything but yell bloody murder right now. That's all they need to do to rally people uncomfortable with Obama and Pelosi.

Let's rewind a little and look at the recent past so we can see how the Party of No tactic works in practice.

From January 2001 to July 2008 the United States had a real Party of No. Its name was the Democratic Party, and the No strategy came right from the top.

• Democrats said No to Bush's "selection."
  
  
• Democrats said No to recession-fighting tax rate cuts.
  
  
• Democrats said No to school choice.
  
  
• Democrats said No to the war in Iraq.
  
  
• Democrats said No to Social Security reform.
  
  
• Democrats said No to Fannie Freddie reform.
  
  
• Democrats said No to a corrupt Congress.
  
  
• Democrats said No to corporate lobbyists.
  
  
• Democrats said No to ineffective disaster response.

Yeah. All that negativity really messed the Dems up when they tried to capture the Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008.

Of course, strategically, the Party of No business has really screwed the Democrats. The American people didn't think they were voting for a left-liberal president and Congress in 2008. They didn't think they were voting for the Cornhusker Kickback. They thought they were voting for Change You Can Believe In.

So now the 80 percent of the American people that are not liberal are looking at a government that is completely out of touch with their hopes and fears.

And it looks more and more likely that they are going to do something about it in November.

But forget about mindless opposition. Let's talk about Core Principles. I just looked at the Amazon product page for Hayek's Road to Serfdom. As of Thursday, June 17, 2010, the the rank for this 66 year-old book is #2. Why? Because Glenn Beck featured the book on his TV show a week ago.

Imagine that. Conservative TV watchers that read books about core principles!

So how does your Party of No look now?

The Poor Suffering Millennials

Michael Barone seems to have opened a hornet's nest with his recent blog about Millennials. All he did was indulge in a mild dig at the ObamaCare provision to force health insurance to cover children up to age 26.

[C]hildren... should not be encouraged to remain dependent on parents for extended periods.

Maybe, he suggested, the ObamaCare bureaucrats should add some modest "terms and conditions" for 21-26 year-olds in the area of "late night activities" and "substantial alcohol consumption."

Millennials were not amused, and the outrage spilled onto Glenn Reynold's Instapundit.

As a baby boomer, I think millennials have a right to be upset. But think up millennials! What do you expect? The political system is bound to screw you guys. That's what politics is all about. It is a conspiracy of the old and well-connected against the young and inexperienced. As in:

Compulsory education. What would you do if you wanted to make youngsters tractable and demoralized? You'd lock them up in custodial facilities for their entire childhood and adolescence.

Academic education. Most people, studies show, learn by doing. So let's structure education to benefit kids that learn from listening to teacher and from books.

Child labor. Let's keep kids out of the labor force so they can't learn any practical skills.

Minimum wage. Let's make it really hard for people without skills to get a job. (But unpaid internships for the rich kids are OK).

Regulated labor market. Kill the common law "employment at will" concept, and tangle up the labor market with all kinds of laws to prevent employers from hiring and firing without cause. You wouldn't want an employer to take a risk on hiring some young uncredentialed nobody.

Mandated benefits. One way to keep inexperienced young people from competing in the labor market is to mandate all kinds of benefits from health insurance to unemployment to retirement. These are things that young people don't need and shouldn't have to pay for. They just make it more expensive to hire young people.

I could go on. We could discuss Fannie and Freddie, which crank up housing prices, making it hard for young people without family means to buy houses, and then devastate the economy with a credit crisis. But let's not get into that.

Let's just point out that the more power you give government the more it will discriminate against young people. That is simply because young people haven't had time to organize into special interests like older adults.

But, of course, the whole point of older adults supervising the education and indoctrination of young people is to make it hard for young people to fight their way out of their oppression. By the time that young people have figured it all out they are well into their 30s and they are getting ready to screw the next generation of young people.

Now you know why we baby boomers made such a fuss about overthrowing the "system." We didn't overthrow it, of course. We just made it worse.

Here's a concept for you, millennials. Join conservatives in smashing the cruel, corrupt, unjust, wasteful, and deluded welfare state that liberals have created over the last century to empower the educated elite and to oppress the young and the poor.

You won't regret it.

The Difference between Government and Business

I just finished reading this chilling blog on the gulf oil spill.

Briefly, it suggests that the "downhole" is damaged and that the oil is already leaking into the ground around the well. In due course the well head (weighing about 500 tons) will fall over due to abrasion in the downhole pipe and the well will start to disintegrate. Think lots more oil gushing into the gulf. Etc.

It's pretty obvious that a major cause of the accident was BP trying to cut corners and cut costs.

Well? That's what businesses do to stay competitive.

Congersmen are experts at expressing shock and outrage at this. So are lefty activists. Corporate greed, they call it.

In this they are acting like stopped clocks, right twice a day. But they say nothing when, e.g., John D. Rockefeller lowers the price of illuminating oil from $0.80 a gallon to $0.08. (In today's dollars that is $80 and $8).

On the other hand, it is clear that government suffers from the opposite problem. For instance we know, from numerous reports, that about half the kids arriving in college from high school need remedial classes before they are ready for college material.

What do public schools do about this? Nothing. And they will do nothing until the education system starts falling about our ears.

So here is my universal rule.

The difference between business and government is that business keeps cutting costs until something breaks. Government keeps doing the same old thing until something breaks.

As a complete right-wing nut-case (or right wing-nut case) I'm rather partial to the first notion. We humans proceed down the ages by trial and error. When we make a mistake, we fix it.

Obviously, BP has made a big mistake in the gulf. Today, it's time to fix it. Tomorrow it will be time to do "lessons learned," punish the innocent and let the guilty go free.

The second notion, if you like, is close to the "precautionary principle" beloved by environmentalists. Don't do anything unless you are sure it is safe. That is what government bureaucrats do by instinct because the only thing that can prevent you from getting your inflation-proofed government pension is a big mistake.

Since doing nothing can be just as unsafe as doing something, the precautionary principle is meaningless, except as a political prodding tool. But it is a universal tool for government proponents, since only people in business ever actually "do" anything.

Meanwhile we continue to refine the ancient art of scapegoating. We locate someone to take the blame for all our mistakes and disasters, and then stuff them into an oil well.

Ain't life great?

Big Government Doesn't Work

The great delusion of our modern age is that politicians and bureaucrats can run an economy just like the village Big Man in a remote village in New Guinea.

Earth to liberals: they can't. That's why President Obama, True Believer in politics and bureaucratic administration, is making such a poor fist of the presidency.

Today we have a couple of readings in big government folly. First of all, David Warren:

We learned a simple thing this week: that the BP clean-up effort in the Gulf of Mexico is hampered by the Jones Act. This is a piece of 1920s protectionist legislation, that requires all vessels working in U.S. waters to be American-built, and American-crewed. So while, for instance, the U.S. Coast Guard can accept such help as three kilometres of containment boom from Canada, they can't accept, and therefore don't ask for, the assistance of high-tech European vessels specifically designed for the task in hand.

Oh really. Who would have thought that the dear old Jones Act would still be doing its damage. (By the way, Obamis, here's a chance to blame Republicans. The Jones Act was passed in 1920 by a Republican Congress--and a Democratic president.)

Then there's Gerald P. O'Driscoll in the Wall Street Journal on the failure of regulation in the Gulf:

By all accounts, MMS operated as a rubber stamp for BP. It is a striking example of regulatory capture: Agencies tasked with protecting the public interest come to identify with the regulated industry and protect its interests against that of the public.

Of course it did. If BP followed all the rules to the letter it would never be able to drill a well.

Let's turn to the financial meltdown:

Boston University Professor Laurence Kotlikoff counts over 115 regulatory agencies for financial services. If more hands in the pot helped, financial services would be in fine shape.

Who knew? 115 financial regulatory agencies, and still we got a meltdown.

Then O'Driscoll hauls out Hayek. Friedrich Hayek, you'll remember, was the chap who identified the Knowledge Problem. To run a central-planning economy, he argued, the planner must know everything out there in the economy, so he can make decisions that usually would be made on the spot by local actors with local knowledge.

Of course, that is impossible. No planning manager, no central planning agency can possibly know enough to run an economy. The result, on a nationwide level, is the Soviet Union. On a tin-pot dictator level, the result is Venezuela, where thousands of containers of food have been discovered rotting in Venezuela's ports. Venezuela has a government food distribution and retail system.

On an industry-wide level, writes O'Driscoll:

Regulatory practice represents islands of central planning in otherwise decentralized market economies.

And the result is failure, just like at the national level. And that is why we are reading over the weekend that we won't be able to keep our health insurance as President Obama promised. Over 50 percent of health insurance plans won't meet regulatory requirements.

"Regulatory capture" is just a theory. The "knowledge problem" is just a theory. If you don't believe the theories then you have to wait for experience to confirm or deny the theory.

Conservatives maintain that these theories have already been amply proved by experience, again and again. But our liberal friends don't seem to agree.

It looks like only one thing will persuade our liberal friends of the validity of these theories: to be out of political power for a generation.

What "Mama Grizzlies?"

Gov. Sarah Palin is being too modest when she talks about "her mama grizzlies."

The only mama grizzly I see on the political radar is Palin herself.

Yeah. When that mama grizzly charges...

Conservative war-horse Pat Buchanan seems to have an eye on Palin. As a papa grizzly and political fighter who goes back to the Nixon years, you could say it takes one to know one.

It was Pat who noted, back last fall after Palin had introduced the gentle idea of "death panels" on her Facebook site, that "the lady knows how to frame an issue."

Pat, the political operative, is telling it like it is.

Now Pat's reacting to the Super Tuesday results. He muses on the MSM writing off Palin as a quitter. It reminds him of Nixon's famous farewell in 1962 when he quit politics after losing against Pat Brown, father of Jerry, in the race for governor of California. And how President Nixon ended up taking the oath of office a mere six years later.

So Palin quit as governor last year. Now look at her.

And though the media have painted Palin as a ditz, no politician in memory has conducted a more brilliant pre-presidential campaign, if that is what she is about, than the lady who calls herself "the Mama Grizzly."

Yes. She just happens to have picked a winner out of the pack in South Carolina. Nikki Haley may well be governor of a state with a key primary in 2012.

Palin endorsed Terry Branstad, a moderate, who will run for governor of Iowa in November. Iowa, let's see...

But then Palin backed John McCain against J.D. Hayworth in Arizona.

There's only one way to make sense of this mama bear's cuffing. She's backing people who will owe her in 2012. Big time.

She's aiming for the White House. That's not me. That's veteran Pat Buchanan's judgement.

Dems Whistling Past the Graveyard

Democrats are still hanging onto the narrative of January 2009, that Obama represents a "subversive force inside the governing establishment", according to Matt Bai in a New York Times Magazine thumbsucker piece. He came to power by bringing 15 to 20 million new "surge" voters to the polls in 2008, who believed that he represented something new.

But now top Democrats are upset that Obama is not being partisan enough. Pelosi & Co. want him to unload on the Republicans and fire up the base.

But that's not what brought out the 20 million "surge" voters, explains Obama's strategist David Plouffe. He is trying to organize these voters in new ways, getting past the tried and true labor-union GOTV and TV ad strategy.

Oh well, Matt Bai sums up: "[T]he one thing [Obama] will never really embody is the status quo."

Oh really? I'd say that the big takeaway this year for everyone except the Democratic Party faithful is that Obama is same-old-same-old Big Government liberal.

Why would anyone think that? Oh, I don't know. He's supported down-the-line mainstream liberal agenda items like Big Government health care and Big Government stimulus and Big Government energy policy. And he's bumbled the response to his Katrina moment. That's transformational?

Look, it was tempting for Democrats to believe that they had done something exceptional in 2008. America's first black president was a milestone. But they forgot that they got into power by being not-Republican at a moment when that is just what the American people wanted.

Having got into power, the Democrats governed exactly like the Democrats that everyone had been voting against for a generation. Sure voters wanted change in 2008. That's what you do after you've got fed up with the chaps in power.

Here's the bigger challenge for the Democrats, as divined by American Thinker contributor and recovering liberal Robin of Berkeley. She reports that her lefty Jewish friends are getting exactly what they wanted in Obama.

But her liberal Jewish friend Laura is "shell shocked."

It's no wonder that polls show Obama's support plummeting among liberal Jews. They thought they were getting a patriotic American who'd unite this country, not someone who would tear it to shreds.

Now, when I talk to Laura on the phone, she sounds shell-shocked. While she hasn't put two and two together yet (I'm working on it), she describes a spooky feeling of nameless dread.

"Nameless dread?" Anyone seen the panic button? If I were a Democratic operative I would be scared to death about shell-shocked liberal Jewish voters suffering from "nameless dread." The very best I could hope for would be that the shell-shocked wouldn't turn out to vote.

But the real danger is that I could be losing a voter like that forever. Especially if she happened to be friends with a recovering liberal like Robin of Berkeley.