Liberal Hall Pass Expires

It must be the longest-lived get-out-of-jail-free card ever. For all my adult life liberals could get away with things that would sink a conservative in a minute.

Did FDR skirt the law on a bunch of stuff? Too bad. Did Lyndon Johnson have bolt holes in the Capitol where he could entertain young women? Hey, panty waist, what's your problem? Was JFK running girls through the White House like an escort service? Did Bill Clinton lie about sex? Did Anthony Weiner?

Yes, it's come to this. Finally, a Democrat is being held to account for his lies. The hall pass has expired.

What it took was the whole panoply of new media and a tough take-no-prisoners new generation of center right media mavens, epitomized by Mr. "Big," Andrew Breitbart, and his BigGovernment.com, BigJournalism.com and the rest of the Big websites. Actually, of course, the Breitbart empire is minuscule. The "Big" thing is a joke, son.

Thanks, Andrew. You won one for the Gipper.

When you think about it, this couldn't have come at a better time for conservatives. We are going into an election season when many of the Democrats' ideological chickens will be coming home to roost. Everything that the Democrats know that isn't so is crowding in on them. Whether it is Keynesian inflationism now revealed as bankrupt, or crony capitalism with unions and green energy corruptocrats wasting tens of billions of dollars, or the headline entitlements running out of money, the message is all the same: Democratic ideas stink.

Underneath the progressive carapace of caring and compassion is a bare-knuckle culture of compulsion, a faith in power and a will to dominate. Politics is power, government is force, and anyone that wants to increase government spending is someone that kneels at the throne of power for the chance to crack heads with the billy club of force.

We conservatives, we few, we happy few, believe that mankind is born onto this earth for something higher, something better that the crude rule of force. We believe that humans are social animals, not just regimental animals. And that is why we fight the corrupt liberal culture of compulsion and its endless hypocrisies.

"See the USA"

I think it was Dinah Shore that sang the good old jingle, "See the USA in your Chevrolet." Yes, it was. And a grand idea it was.

Now unannounced presidential candidate Sarah Palin is doing the same and everyone who is anyone is sniffing with nose high in the air. "Unschooled," says Charles Krauthammer. And the mainstream media is all upset that she's not laying on full campaign services for them on her current bus tour.

It's comical. One of the great acceptable national fibs is a candidate for president affirming that he "hasn't decided" whether to run for president. It's all supposed to be good fun and an inside joke between the candidate and the media.

But with Sarah Palin, it's supposed to be scandalous.

Look fellahs. It seems pretty obvious to me that it makes no sense for Gov. Palin to become a full-fledged candidate right now. She does much better flitting around on a royal progress pressing the flesh and demonstrating that she knows more than the average liberal about American history.

The campaign professionals are convinced that she's not running because she hasn't set up a campaign organization on the ground. OK, that's their view of the elephant.

But I suspect that when Palin actually announces for president, people will be running to her, begging to be allowed to set up a campaign organization in their state or city. Not to mention that there is a Palin organization in place already. It is called the Tea Party and I suspect that Palin has pretty good connections with that unorganized organization.

In all the fuss and feathers of the coming months, the thing to keep in mind about Sarah Palin is that she is a seasoned and resourceful elected politician. Anything else is reckless misunderestimating.

Mistake of 1937, Mr. Krugman

Sooner or later, President Obama is going to go for the long bomb to try to get his team over the goal line in 2012. With a Republican House, good luck with that, Mr. President. The economy for 2012 is probably already baked.

Conservatives have argued that the trouble with the president's economic policy is that it has boosted uneconomic things like ageing Detroit automakers and state and local governments and frank money printing instead of cutting taxes and wasteful spending, clearing away the detritus of the old boom and preparing the ground for new growth.

But liberal columnist Paul Krugman is worried about the "mistake of 1937."

For you young 'uns, a bit of history. The New Dealers cranked up a huge pre-election boom in 1935-36 that boosted the deficit and federal spending in real 2005 dollars from $72 billion in 1934 to $107 billion in 1936. The federal deficit was 4.76 percent of GDP in 1936. Then the Feds took a breather in 1937 and reduced spending to $98 billion in 1937. Combined with tighter monetary policy this brought on a nasty recession and the Dems lost 70 seats in the 1938 midterms.

So you can imagine that Paul Krugman is nervous. The Dems ran their stimulus in 2009-10 and now the stimulus is running out of gas. Maybe they shoulda waited a couple years!

The "mistake of 1937" notion misunderstands the problem. The New Deal of 1933-36 wasted billions of treasure on politically motivated crony capitalism and wars on businessmen and made the US a more expensive place to do business. They passed the Wagner Act to make union labor much more expensive. They passed Social Security and the 2 percent tax on payroll started in 1937.

The "mistake" was not in 1937. The mistake was in 1933-36.

In our case the mistake was the government-sponsored boom in housing that pumped trillions into risky mortgages that are now underwater. The second mistake was throwing good money after bad with subsidies for the wasteful and the politically connected. We are not going to get out of the mess until the housing market clears and the underwater mortgages start to float again.

In case you were wondering, that's what QE1 and QE2 and probably the QE3-to-come are all about. They are trying to devalue the dollar so that house prices will go up and "reflate" asset values.

Liberal attack dog Paul Krugman is baying at the moon. The American people are going to have to pay for the mistakes of their political leaders, and we might as well get it over now. Chances are that the cost will only get bigger the longer we put it off. And since the problem goes back to Democrat-favored economic policy mistakes, it is right that Democrats should take the blame.

When Nations are in Trouble

When people are in trouble they reach back to the tried-and-true ideas of their past. They instinctively grasp for a reed in the turbulent current of the rapids. If selfishness and recklessness seems to have piled you up on the rocks then maybe the answer is sobriety and faithfulness.

Nations do the same. When Germany lost World War I it couldn't believe that "the most advanced nation in the world" could be in such trouble. So Germans reached back into the past, to the idea of the old German nation united by blood. And it returned to the atavisms of blood and soil, particularly the conquest of Lebensraum in the East, echoing the Drang nach Osten of the previous millennium--the Teutonic knights, the conquest of Prussia.

The result was an even worse disaster.

Now the US is in trouble and people are looking back to the past for things that worked. And that is where American exceptionalism comes in. For when Americans think about going back to the past it means going back to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Emancipation Proclamation. Our glorious past is not atavistic, Blood and Soil, but modern, the bright shining city on a hill of the great American Revolution and its stunning political institutions. And there is the example of Alexander Hamilton's implementation of the Dutch financial system of hard-money central bank providing a solid foundation for the bond and stock markets.

When a populist politician like Sarah Palin goes on a nostalgia tour she visits Mount Vernon, the Liberty Bell and the founding documents: America before it was corrupted by the Big Government of the educated elite, America of Alexander Hamilton's "perfect system" before it was mucked up by the easy money chaps.

Or, if we look back a mere generation we can return to the solutions to the 1970s stagflation implemented by President Reagan.

President Obama and the Democrats are folks that ever hanker for another New Deal. They think that the New Deal was the great solution to the problem of the Great Depression of the 1930s. After all, that's what liberal historians have been telling them for 70 years. So they implemented an economic program that they thought would repeat the best of the New Deal. Problem is that they are wrong. The New Deal was not economic salvation but an economic disaster that kept the Depression going for years. You could look it up in Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man or at my own US Stuck on Stupid.

As stagflation rears its ugly head and gathers momentum in the next year Americans are going to be looking desperately for new leaders and the new leaders will be looking at solutions from out of the past. Fortunately, in this exceptional nation, unlike the poor bloody Germans, there are solutions in the past that really work. Cut regulations. Cut tax rates. Cut spending and put the funding of the National Debt on a sustainable basis. Get back to the principles of the Founding.

Funny thing. It's worked every time it's been tried.

Who Will Bell the Cat Obama?

Writes Victor Davis Hanson: it is becoming clear how the president intends to run for reelection.

Obama’s campaign will focus on three general themes: a) the 2008 meltdown of the economy on Bush’s watch; b) conservative heartlessness in gutting cherished entitlement programs; and c) racial bias behind any criticism of Barack Obama.

Let's shorten this down even further.

1. Blame Bush
2. Conservatives are heartless
3. Conservatives are racists

So the question is, who would be the candidate that would best neutralize those themes? Mitt Romney? Well, the Obamis are already neutralizing him as the author of RomneyCare in Massachusetts. No point in electing a guy if he basically agrees with the president on health care. Tim Pawlenty? Well, he's a nice guy but he's a racist underneath. Bound to be. He's white isn't he?

But then we come to Sarah Palin. Blame Bush? I don't think so. Palin will hang the economy around Obama's neck. Heartless conservative? Why do you think Palin's second book was called America by Heart? Why do you think that Palin is running around the Northeast in a "One Nation" bus, and holding Pizza Summits with Donald Trump. (Wasn't it convenient that Palin was pictured looking towards the camera and Trump looking away but clearly listening carefully to Palin?)

But the biggest thing is race. Here is why the race card isn't going to work on Palin.

The fact is that it is Obama that has to tread carefully on the race issue. He can't afford to look like the big black man roughing up a delicate white woman. Yeah, I know. It's the hoariest racial stereotype since Othello and Desdemona. But the whole point about stereotypes is that they resonate in our hearts and unconscious minds.

Of course, what with the inflationary monetary policy and the uber-regulatory state and the jobless recovery, Obama may already be toast.

Still. Sarah Palin looks like a winner to me. Call her the darling of the white working class. Oh gee. I guess I already did.

NY-26 and Splitting the GOP Vote

The fact is that it is not too hard to split the Republican vote. In 1992 Ross Perot did it (with or without help from the Clintons). And in the NY-26 special congressional election a perennial Democratic candidate, Jack Davis, ran as a "Tea Party" candidate, spent millions of his own money, and gave the election to the Democrat.

Frankly, I'm not sure that this is as big of a problem as Clark Judge thinks it is. Why? Because the tactical win that Democrats get from splitting the Republican vote doesn't help them strategically. So Bill Clinton won the 1992 election with the help of Ross Perot. But by governing way to the left of the electoral center he set up the massive Republican win in 1994, which gave the Congress to the GOP for the next 12 years with a hiccup in 2001-02.

So the Democrats managed to split the Republican vote in NY-26 in a special election in May 2011. Maybe President Obama can demagogue the Mediscare issue for a reelection win in 2012. But the facts on the ground are still facts. Medicare is heading for the rapids. The whole federal budget is heading for the rapids. Pretty soon there will be no more money.

If the Democrats really care about seniors they would be working to craft some kind of a bi-partisan deal to repair Medicare's finances in the long term. If they really cared they would get the government out of Medicare except for direct vouchers for those that need them.

But that is not how Democrats think. They are politicians; they think in terms of winning the next election. And the way to win elections is to get people scared. The way to keep peoples' votes long term is to keep them dependent.

The only problem that Democrats have is that the majority of the American people don't want to be complete dependents on the government. So the only way they can win is to gin up special situations. They must destroy George W. Bush in order to win back the Congress in 2006. They need a complete financial meltdown in 2008 to get inexperienced Barack Obama past the finish line. They need a fake-a-rama Tea Party candidate to win a special election.

But in the end the US is a center-right country. And all the political shenanigans in the world can't change that. They just make it more difficult for the American people to get where they want to go. And that's a shame.

Remember the Fallen

The men and women that fell in America's wars did not, usually, die protecting their homeland. They died for an idea.

The prime example is Memorial Day itself, the memorial of those that died on the battlefields of the Civil War. The question at issue, directly or indirectly, was the question of plantation slavery, a modern capitalist idea first developed by the republic of Venice and brought to hideous perfection in the sugar plantations of the West Indies and the cotton plantations of the Deep South.

So it has been ever since. The Spanish-American War was about colonialism; World War I was siding with Western European democracy against Central European authoritarianism. World War II was a battle against fascism--a secular religion that collapsed society into the national state. Then came the Cold War, the battle against communism--a secular religion that collapsed society into the national state. Now we are battling against the last holdouts against democratic capitalism, the Islamic extremists of the Middle East.

All those that fell in those wars all fell for the idea that we should blend political and economic power rather than allow one or the other to dominate.

Of course, the United States is not a paragon of virtue. It has not always pursued its vision to make the world safe for democratic capitalism with perfection. It has succumbed to the temptations of power; it has got into quarrels that it should have kept out of. But the U-turns of the Obama administration, on Iraq, on Guantanamo, on renewing the Patriot Act, have proved that US foreign policy is not just ginned up by right-wing cliques, but part of what America means.

The United States of America is a commercial democratic republic and it instinctively uses its power to nudge the world in the direction of democratic capitalism. It can't make everyone into democratic capitalists, but it can show how well it works, and it can make life difficult for thug dictators and thug activists throughout the world that raise a flag against the Pax Americana.

In the day-to-day slog of this work it often seems like nothing changes. And then you look around and notice that Germany is the leading democratic country in Europe, the Soviet Union doesn't exist. And you notice that India and China, those ancient civilizations that took 20th century detours into socialism and communism, are trying to make up for lost time in bringing the benefits of capitalist prosperity to their peoples.

Remember the Fallen. They did not die in vain.