Obama. A Gift from the Gods

In a thumb-sucker about the managerial shortcomings of the Obama White House, John Fund surfaces the worries of Democrats, that "chaotic implementation" of Obamacare could "could become the biggest political liability Democrats will face in next year’s midterm elections."



Don't set your sights too high, Mr. Fund.  How about: the train wreck of Obamacare implementation could result in the biggest electoral meltdown since the Republican Party nearly destructed in the Great Depression.



Because the meltdown of Obamacare is going to be personal to the millions of women who want to keep their healthcare arrangements and who spend half their lives discussing their healthcare experiences and procedures with their friends.  That's why President Obama told Americans again and again that if they liked their health insurance they could keep it.



But now there's a good chance that not only will people not be able to keep their health insurance but everything about health care will be thrown into a maelstrom.



It's been telling this week that Obama campaign guru David Axelrod has been on TV saying that the government is just too big for one man to supervise.  The HotAir guys were right on it.

What’s significant about Axelrod’s defense of O is that he’s pointing to the size of government as a structural reason for why scandal might proliferate, which is downright Reaganesque as a critique of the federal leviathan. The bigger the government gets, the less accountability there’ll be. That’s conservatism 101.

The problem for conservatives is that, most of the time, the administrative welfare state sorta kinda rubs along.  Sure the dollar has been reduced to $0.02 in a century by the repeated need to get the government out of a jam.  But people still get their Social Security checks.



But suppose that the complete centralization and bureaucratization of health care leads to a meltdown?



Imagine that Mitt Romney had won the presidential election and the Democrats had kept the Senate.  Then any problems with Obamacare implementation would be cried down by the mainstream media and Democratic lawmakers as all the fault of Romney, who didn't care who dies, as in Joe Soptic's wife.  One-term president anyone?



Look, the American people had a choice in 2012.  They could go with the man that had spent his entire life fixing dysfunctional organizations or they could go with the president who was not Mitt Romney.  Anyone who knows anything can see that a turnaround is needed and that the administrative welfare state is heading for the rapids.



But the American people said No.  We ain't ready for strong medicine, not yet, they said.



OK, fellas.  If you don't want to respond to the writing on the wall, how about getting slapped upside the head.  That is what the meltdown of Obamacare will mean, and it has the potential for a sea-change in US politics.



In that scenario the current scandals -- Benghazi, the IRS, and the AP wiretaps -- are just icing on the cake, warmup bouts for the Main Event.

Dear Liberals: About Your Politics of Hate

I dare say that, after a month of two of denial, liberal pundits will start asking: How could this happen to good people like us?



Let me help.  The answer is simple.



Racists, sexists, bigots and homophobes.



No, I don't mean that racists, sexists, bigots and homophobes did this to you.  I mean that liberal politics, which marginalizes anyone that disagrees with the liberal ruling class as a racist, sexist, bigot or homophobe, is the problem here.  Let me quote conservative writer Harry Stein.

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.

Gee, I forgot the Gosnell part of all this; that would be important to well-born feminist editors.



The point is this.  When you so easily brand your political opponents as evil monsters, it becomes very easy to decide that they don't deserve a place in the public square.  It becomes easy to, e.g., hold up applications from Tea Party groups for 401(c)(4) status at the IRS.



Mike Adams, conservative professor at the University of North Carolina goes further.  He reminds his readers that the political correctness/multicultural culture at our nations' colleges actually teaches young people to be ruthless warriors in the political wars.

Many were shocked to learn that IRS agents actually targeted conservative advocacy groups for heightened scrutiny when making decisions concerning their tax exempt status. I don't know why so many people were shocked. This is what university administrators have been doing for nearly twenty years. I've been writing about it for over ten years because I know that what you see on the campus today is what you will see in the broader culture tomorrow.

What is more, the students that show ruthlessness towards Christians and conservatives and white males get rewarded by the powers that be.  And if they cut a corner or two, hey, no worries!



So of course when these young skulls full of mush get out into the real world of liberal activism they just do as they have learned.  They sicc the IRS on the ordinary Americans that have formed Tea Party groups -- and then they sneer at the rubes for their naivete in actually following the rules.



(If they are dumb rubes then how can they be dangerous extremists?)



And that's the problem with the Alinsky culture.  You see, it's one thing to be a speaking-truth-to-power activist making the powerful follow their own rules, and going after people rather than institutions because people hurt easier.  But when you become the government then doing the Alinsky is simple injustice -- rank, raw, cruel injustice.



So let's do the full Eisenhower on this.  If you don't know how to solve a problem, make it bigger.



The real problem is that, with the Death of God in the ruling class, our liberal ruling class has made politics their religion.  But when you integrate politics and religion and add in the economy for good measure, what you get is totalitarianism.



I just happen to have been writing about that only yesterday.  The problem, as I define it, is the need for "Separation of Secular Church and State."  In the Founding Fathers' vision, there should not be an establishment of religion.  Good point.  But what about secular religion, like socialism, fascism, environmentalism (saving the planet)?  The problem is just the same.  You really don't want moralists as government officials legislating their morality on the rest of us.



But liberals don't get that.  Just try it on a liberal friend.  They don't realize that when they rail about "hate" groups they are talking about themselves.  Because politics is division, and it divides with hate, as in: "I hate Republicans and everything they stand for."

Separation of Secular Church and State

Sometimes I have to agree with liberals.  The writers of the US Constitution were living in another age. They just could not foresee how things would change and make the constitution obsolete.

Take the First Amendment and the Jefferson corollary.  The whole idea of preventing an "establishment of religion" and enforcing a separation between church and state is just so 18th century, darling.

Because now the problem is the establishment of secular religion.

There's a British chappie who has penned a conventional-wisdom book about the decline of religion.  In God is Dead: secularization in the West, Steve Bruce argues that people are just less interested in religion.  He writes:

I expect the proportion of people who are largely indifferent to religious ideas to increase and the seriously religious to become a small minority.

Of course, if you define religion narrowly as "believing in a transcendent God" Bruce's attitude might be partly right, although the Islamists would disagree.  But if we are talking broadly about ideas and communities and rituals in which people construct a faith about the meaning of life and what to do about it, then Steve Bruce is bound to be completely wrong.

And the proof of it is that as soon as the philosophers and the philologists drove a stake through the heart of God in the early 19th century the world became flooded with secular religions.  There was Fourierism, Saint-Simonism, Comte's Religion of Humanity, Marxism, Socialism.  And that was just in the 19th century.  Now we have feminism, environmentalism, identity studies.

If we take the universal Catholic Church as our model, we can see the replication of its forms and structures in all the secular religions.  They have the sacred founder that is in the process of divinization.  They have their holy scriptures.  They have their orthodoxy, the systematic doctrine of the faithful.  And they have ways of enforcing the orthodoxy.  In our mild modern case we have "political correctness" that shames and marginalizes people with incorrect opinions.  Other secular religions refined the prototypical Spanish Inquisition into the KGB.  Then there is the church of the faithful.  Every left-wing group organizes its little community of the faithful just like the local enthusiastic Christian church.

And then there is ritual.  The preferred ritual of the modern secular religion seems to be the "peaceful protest."  While Christians gather weekly in church or attend evening Bible study the secular religious attend organization meetings and gather in frequent peaceful protests where they wave placards and chant secular-religious slogans.  In the old days, and recently in Wisconsin, they sang hymns like "Solidarity Forever."

The Founding Fathers determined that it was not a good thing for a single Christian sect to get its hands on political power through establishment as a state church and support through taxation.

But tell your liberal friend that her liberalism, as expressed through the liberal teachers at the local government school or at the local government university, amounts to an establishment of secular religion and she will object.  No, no.  We are not talking about religion, but ideas.

Quite so.  But as soon as you organize ideas about the meaning of life into some sort of system you have already a proto-religion.  And if you add to that proto-religion the power of the state then you are all ready to start legislating your morality.  So when liberals start regulating the food laws and regulating sugary soft drinks, when liberals mandate recycling and composting, we are talking about an established church legislating its morality.

Remember?  Rules about diet were big in the Old Testament.

Of course, as a conservative, I'm particularly irritated about liberal secular-religionists imposing their morality on me.  Hey, they are goring my ox.

But I think there's a bigger issue.  The whole idea of proscribing an establishment of religion was precisely to avoid any one sect or world-view from getting too much power.  The Founding Fathers realized that a successful society needed to keep an open conversation in the public square.  Society needed to prevent power mongers from monopolizing the public square with their own brand of religion, whether a God religion or a secular religion.

And that hasn't changed at all.

What If Romney Had Won?

Since we are entering full-scale second-term scandal mode, what with Benghazi and the IRS scandal, it's worth stepping back to think about what things would be like if Mitt Romney had won.



We would have divided government and a combative media looking for every opportunity to brand Romney and his policies as cruel and unfeeling.  Because that's what political liberals do, whether in the mainstream media, in the activist groups, or in elected office.



But now we are going to see four years of developing scandals and coverups.  The mainstream media won't like it, and will have to be dragged kicking and screaming to cover it.  But the protracted nature of the experience will energize conservatives and Republicans and demoralize Democrats and liberals.



That makes it much more likely that the 2014 midterms will see a switch in the Senate to GOP control and much more likely that 2016 will be a change election, rather than a Four More Years election.



The downside is that the nation's politics and economy will drift for four more years, as the Obamis are forced to concentrate on fighting investigations and sub-poenas and running belated coverups instead of actually governing.



I know.  That could be a good thing if it prevents them from wreaking more damage to the economy and to society.  Hopefully it won't be worse than the 1973-74 period when inflation spiralled upwards ending in a nasty recession.



But the encouraging thing is that by November 2016 the American people, even including perhaps the emerging Democratic majority of women, minorities, and young people, will be thoroughly fed up with the Obama administration that promised Hope and Change and a fundamental transformation of America.  The partisans will not blame their hero of course.  They will suspect that over-zealous underlings or dark forces "done him in."  They will think that President Obama had good ideas but was betrayed by forces beyond his control.



But if Romney had won they would be blaming him for anything that went wrong, because that's what the mainstream media would be telling them.



Then there will be the moderates and the independents.  They will not be so forgiving.  They will see that everything has gone wrong, from home prices to health insurance.  And they will think it is time for a change.



Will they be ready, in 2017, for a Republican president and a Republican Congress to cut spending, fix the entitlements, and cauterize the crony capitalist economy?  Who knows?  But it is up to the winning Republican candidate to persuade them.



And we will be, at least, four more years into the fracking energy revolution.

Mother's Day Meltdown

Remember the Saturday Night Massacre in the Nixon Administration?  It was October 10, 1973 and the Watergate scandal was going critical.



President Nixon wanted to fire Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor, but Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned rather than do the dirty deed.  Finally Solicitor General Robert Bork agreed to do it.



Last week, in the run-up to Mothers Day the troubles of the Obama administration went critical.  Let's call it the Mothers Day Meltdown.  It was the week that the smoking Benghazi scandal caught fire as the mainstream media finally woke up from their partisan naps to realize that some bad stuff went down on September 11, 2012, when the Obama administration was dithering around wondering what to do about an Al Qaeda attack.  How could that be when supposedly Osama bin Laden was dead and Al Qaeda was on the run?



The mainstream media is finally waking up to realize that the Benghazi talking points present its shining Obama administration as a bunch of small-minded dissemblers, telling a tawdry lie to get out of a jam in the weeks before the November election.  You read media types saying: "Oh wow! And we thought Benghazi was just a Republican partisan witch-hunt."



Really.  And I have a bridge to sell you.



The other side of the Mothers Day Meltdown is the Friday afternoon admission by the IRS that a rogue office in Cincinnati was unfairly harassing the applications of conservative groups for 401(c) status as non-profit organizations.  Well, what a surprise!



No doubt in the months ahead we will be asking: "What did the White House know and when did it know it."  Don't hold your breath.  No doubt the whole business is fully protected with circuit breakers and "deniability."



But really, it doesn't need a conspiracy.  It all goes back to Thomas à Becket and the king complaining "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"  When four courtiers obliged, and murdered him in the cathedral, the king got all huffy and upset.



Yes, I'm sure that nobody in the White House actually told the black ladies in the IRS Cincinnati office to bear down on any organization with "tea party" or "patriot" in its name.



Heck, they didn't need to.  After all, the black ladies had their local Reverend Wright telling them about the racists in white Amerikkka.  They had MSNBC railing against evil conservatives.  Why shouldn't they do their bit for the First Black President and rid him of his turbulent enemies?



Back in the 2000s conservatives used to rail against President Bush because he didn't fight back against the daily calumnies against his policies and his person.  Maybe President Bush knew something that his partisans foolishly didn't.  If he'd sicced Karl Rove for a verbal attack on his enemies then some mid-level official in some department somewhere might decide to do his "bit" to help out the president.



Of course, if some bitter clinger in the IRS office in red-neck Texas back then had decided to start targeting groups with "progressive" in their names, the whole media world would have erupted.



It all goes to show that liberals are a lot less smart than they think they are.  The reason that you limit government is that all power corrupts.  The reason that presidents try not to be too partisan between elections is that it sets American against American.  And while it's the nature of politics that in each election you divide the nation into Us and Them, you are well advised not to continue the divisiveness and run a permanent campaign.  You might end up dividing the nation into a civil war.



I wrote a week or so ago about the end of the Democrats' decade-long Big Push.  The bigger question is whether it is 1942 with Army Group A strung out in the Caucausus and a flank attack developing against the Sixth Army before Stalingrad.



My guess is that the Democrats are in for a disastrous four years.  The economy is a mess, Obamacare is coming, inflation will be rearing its ugly head.  People will decide it is time for a change.  And the Democrats' "emerging majority" will suffer a bad case of the flu and stay home on election day.



But a week is a long time in politics.

Republicans Doing the Right Thing

Way back, 39 years ago, when President Nixon was impeached in the House of Representatives for lying about Watergate, three Republican senators went down Pennsylvania to tell the president that he had to resign rather than face trial in the US Senate.  The three senators were Jim Buckley (R-NY), Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), and Hugh Scott (R-PA).



By the way, Hillary Clinton was a young staffer on the House Judiciary Committee during Watergate.



Were those three senators patriots,  asks F.H. Buckley?  Nah.  Patsies.



Because 20 years later, when President Clinton was impeached in the House of Representatives for lying about Monica Lewinsky, Vice-President Al Gore went down Pennsylvania Avenue to hold a pep rally for the impeached president and encourage him to fight on.



What was the point of Republicans doing the right thing and telling President Nixon to go if the Democrats won't to the right thing when a Democratic president breaks the rules



Now, of course, we have a new presidential scandal, about the Obama administration lying about the killing of a US Ambassador in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012.  So what should Republicans do?



They should do the right thing, even if the Democrats won't, and even if the "spectacle of the Dems on the Committee trying to save Hillary was sick-making."



Politics is a rough game, and the Clintons play it harder than most.  But there is no percentage for Republicans and conservatives to play the Clinton way, and here's why.

• The Clinton hardball and the Obama Chicago way require willing accomplices in the media to echo their statements and excuses and accusations.  Republicans can never get that kind of support.  So hardball doesn't work.


• Liberals and Democrats believe in politics like a religion.  The political game of Us against Them gets transformed into the religious battle of Good against Evil.  So politics for them is a battle of Good against Evil.  Conservatives and Republicans don't believe in the salvific effect of politics.  For us, the drama of good and evil takes place outside politics.


• Conservatives and Republicans are "People of the Responsible Self."  We believe that each of us, individually, is responsible to God, to our self, to our families, our neighbors, our country for our actions.  That means that it is difficult to justify questionable means to obtain a noble end.

Anyway, life and politics do not stand or fall on tactics.  There are bigger things in play than the way you throw a punch on the playground.



The bigger thing is that, however the Clintonistas and the Obamis play their games and coverups over Benghazi, the failure in Benghazi points up the bankruptcy of the see-no-evil foreign policy of the Democrats.  Obama bin Laden is dead, but Islamism is still a totalitarian ideology that a nation like the United States should name and oppose.  The question should be: what are the appropriate means to this end?



The bigger thing is that the Democrats are pursuing a disastrous economic policy that will end in tears --either in inflation or in financial crisis.



The bigger thing is that the Democrats' refusal to reform government entitlements and the rest of their creaking bureaucratic government programs is going to lead to real widespread hardship among Democratic voters when the government runs out of money.



So the right thing to do is to be formulating policies and messages to deal with the coming disasters, to solve them competently and with the least amount of hardship to the American people, including even the foolish Democratic voters that keep voting for the free stuff that, soon enough, will stop.



And if, in the future, a Republican president lies to the American people and covers it up, we can only hope that there will again be three Republican senators with enough honor and principle to go down Pennsylvania Avenue and tell the president it's time to go.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs and Politics

Conservatives are always worrying about being out-politicked by the liberals.  Here's Daniel Henninger at The Wall Street Journal noticing that liberals are at work trying to defuse the youth jobs issue while conservatives argue with each other over immigration.

In Campaign 2012, Barack Obama promised the youth vote a rose garden. What they've got instead, as far as the eye can see, is an employment wasteland. 

So what are liberals doing about it?  They are trying to defuse it.  But really, they don't have an answer.  There's a study from the Center for American Progress, "The High Cost of Youth Unemployment," that, well, throws up its hands.

While this problem won't go away soon, the Times piece [on the CAP report] suggests how it will be explained away. The problem is global (true), and the "root causes" include low educational achievement (true, just don't mention the teachers unions) and not enough retraining. To help, we also could ease those parts of "the regulatory thicket without societal benefits" (translation: hands off ObamaCare). Other than that, economists find all this youth unemployment "a very big puzzle." Hmm. 

This sounds as though the liberals are still in throat-clearing mode on jobs.  Meanwhile Sen. Ted Cruz is running this all-hat-and-no-cattle tweet about Obama and jobs.  How long can it be before the MSM is trying to sideline Cruz as an extremist "bomb-thrower"?



Look.  Conservatives don't get to talk directly to the "yoof."  Liberals have the kids' liberal teachers, liberal college professors, liberal script-writers, liberal musicians.


But there comes a time in the life of every young person when they have to wonder about the story that the adults have told them.  Then, and only then are they ready for a new narrative.  By 2016 every intelligent young person will surely be wondering what went wrong.



Another thing.  The remarkable Hillary Clinton will, apparently, be running for president in 2016.  She will celebrate her 69th birthday just days before the election.  Leading a Clinton machine that is now over 20 years old.  They say that a national political figure has a shelf life of about 20 years.



My guess is that the US voters in 2016 will be thinking that it is "time for a change."  I don't see the youth vote getting all excited by a figure from the past.  I don't see the minority vote getting all excited after the disappointments of 8 years of Obama.  But I do see the gun people being all riled up.  And I do see the beginnings of a sea-change on the abortion issue.  Here's a touching story about a man who was nearly aborted by his 17-year-old mother in 1975.  When mother and son talked about it here's what went down.

She asked if I could forgive her. I answered, “Yes, with all my heart.”

Yeah.  Think about it, young 'uns and old 'uns.  There is one remarkable thing about not being aborted.  You get to play Jesus and tell your mommy that you forgive her for thinking about abortion.



The coming years are going to be so serious that the usual liberal tactics just aren't going to do the job for them.  Because the American people are going to be face to face with the most awful problems.



But the main problem is pretty simple.  After a century of the welfare state western society is all gummed up with the great inflexible entitlements and privileges that rigidify everything from the economy to the individual working lives of people.  The only way forward is to dissolve these encrusted corrosions and privileges.



In practice this means that the next political genius has to figure out how to persuade the grannies not to do the Charlton Heston line: You can take my Medicare out of my cold dead hands.



The promise of capitalism is that it will shower us all with prosperity, but only if we surrender to its mandate of permanent economic revolution.  There is no sacred right to a lifetime job, no right to a permanent pension, no right to intimidate other people out of a job.  Everyone must surrender to the daily orders of the market.  This commandment is encoded in the idea of the "invisible hand" that we should all first work to serve others in order to obtain our sustenance.



But government is force, politics is division, and so political leaders have always tempted people with the idea that they have a right to demand their rights and impose them on the rest of the nation.  This always ends up as a bureaucratic system, and system is domination, so every government intervention ends up as coercion and domination, replacing an old injustice with a new one.



I don't think that the liberals will be able to finesse this problem with fancy footwork and a compliant media much longer.  By 2016 the US voters will be in a nasty mood, and they won't be dutifully singing in the choir like they did in 2008.



But you never know.