Is the Corruption Finally Catching Up with Liberals?

Remember back in 2006?  Liberals and the media were all wigged out about Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.  You can get the flavor from Wikipedia:

The federal investigations into Jack Abramoff and his political and business dealings are among the broadest and most extensive in American political history, involving well over a dozen offices of the FBI and over 100 FBI agents tasked exclusively to the investigation.

And what had Abramoff done?  Well, among other things he was lobbying for Indian casinos.  And so the voters properly wiped out the Republicans in the 2006 midterms.

But what about Democratic corruption?  Well, never mind that the media tend to tag Republican corruptocrats with and "R" but leave off the party affiliation where Democratic corruption is concerned.  The fact is that the media don't tag normal pay-for-play influence peddling as corruption, so long as it advances the liberal agenda. Medicare and Medicaid and welfare programs are rotted with corruption; nobody cares.  Solar power and wind turbines are drenched in subsidy, paid for by taxpayers and ordinary electric utility customers.  And the winners are politically connected individuals and corporations.  Then we have well-connected liberal billionaires like Tom Steyer.  He's putting money into politics to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline, but wouldn't you know he "has long had a stake in a rival pipeline called Kinder Morgan."  Actually Kinder Morgan is a massive pipeline/terminal corporation.  Tom's invested in San Francisco's Mission District and wouldn't you know Nancy Pelosi has pushed transit and infrastructure improvements to help.

The point is that if you are a liberal lady and you read The New York Times and listen to NPR it would be really hard for you to get the idea that fracking is safe, that Tom Steyer made lots of money building coal plants in Indonesia, that the 800-pound gorilla in the room on global warming is not Big Oil money but billions in government grants to go-along-to-get-along scientists.  Nice liberal ladies know nothing except top-down benevolent programs from credentialed experts and government bureaucracies advocated by social-justice non-profits.

The problem is that government is force.  All government programs are attempts to replace the velvet glove of voluntary cooperation with the mailed fist of force.  And force ain't pretty. When you look beneath the propaganda and the PR you get to see incompetence and corruption.  You can usually keep the lid on, especially if you have a mainstream media that believes that liberals and progressives have their hearts in the right place.

But eventually, the lid blows off.

Over the next two years we'll see a lot of lids blow off, and the nice liberal ladies are going to be confused and demoralized.  Nobody told them, you see; they had no idea.

Welcome to the world, liberal ladies.  We conservatives do not propose limited government because we are mean-spirited bigots.  We believe in limited government because all power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Yeah, power even corrupts liberals.  We believe in limited government because we believe that force is very seldom needed in day-to-day human affairs, except in the defense against enemies foreign and domestic.

It's a shame, really.  In January 2017 the US will wake up with a Republican president and a Republican Congress, and liberal ladies will be asking each other how it could have happened.  After all, they will say to each other, nobody I know voted for the Republican.

It will have happened because nice liberal ladies believed what they were told, and didn't think to ask questions, didn't think to step outside their liberal bubbles so that they might accidentally encounter non-liberal reality.

But for the rest of us, the next two years will be a bracing experience.  Maybe we can actually hope for change.  Not just any old change, but change for the better.

But one thing is for sure.  It ain't gonna be easy.

Is It World War? Or Not?

With the turmoil in the Middle East, there are two possibilities.  Either this is the end of the world as we know it, or it is not.  Either the ISIS fighters will take over Iraq, or they won't.  Either it's the end of the Pax Americana or it isn't.  Either Islam is going to take over the world, or it isn't.

It's the difference between the Mongols, that spread westwards across the Asian steppe to the borders of Europe, and the Boxer Rebellion in China that was defeated by western forces at the turn of the 20th century.

The Boxer Rebellion was an anti-western movement in China that rose up in 1898.  Of course, they didn't call themselves "Boxers;" they called themselves the "Righteous and Harmonious Fists."  It was a movement of young men driven to desperation by the dominance of the western powers in China at the end of the 19th century.  The Boxers thought that they were invulnerable to western cannons and rifles.

Then there were the Ghost Shirt dancers of the North American plains, also in the late 19th century.  The dancers, driven to desperation by the western migration of the white man, thought that their shirts had magical properties that would protect the wearer from western bullets.

There are some -- I am thinking of chaps like David Goldman -- that interpret the upsurge in Muslim terrorism as a movement of desperation, similar to the Boxers and the Ghost Shirters.  On this view the suicide bombers and ISIS fighters are fighting a desperate rearguard action against western culture and dominance.

Of course, it also happens that backward but aggressive fighters overwhelm a more powerful empire that has gone soft.  The Mongols defeated the Chinese in the 13th century (admittedly during a time of troubles).  The British barbarians came to India in about 1700 and dominated that vast and populous subcontinent for the next two centuries.  The Germans rose up in Europe during the 19th century, lost two world wars, and still ended up dominating the continent. Anything can happen.

Everybody is worried about Vladimir Putin's Russia.  But Russia's economy runs on selling hydrocarbons.  Everybody is worried about the Middle East.  But without oil, the Middle East would be a poverty-stricken desert.  Everybody is worried about China, but China is about to enter a demographic death spiral, courtesy of the One Child policy.  Nobody is worried about India, but then they never are.

The point is that we don't have a clue what is going to happen.  We don't know if the US will descend into entitlement program chaos, or a war between the races or a war between the religions, or a war between the classes.

In all this chaos fear there is probably only one thing that Americans can agree upon.  President Obama is probably the worst president ever.

But he sure has succeeded in getting Americans' attention.  That might be the best thing ever.

Is There Blood in the Water?

Here we are coming off a weekend when Hillary Clinton criticized President Obama on foreign policy. The president's former Secretary of State said that "Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle." Oh yeah.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) criticized the president on harsh interrogation techniques at the CIA. She's "An institutionalist who has repeatedly sought to defend congressional power."  Oh yeah.

So now a few Democrats that want to establish centrist cred are joining those obstructive and mean-spirited wascally Wepublicans who have been cynically creating gridlock and opposing our Lightworker president for the last four years.

And there are faint, oh so faint, indications that the folks in the liberal media, the storied "Democratic operatives with bylines" are starting to stir.

What could be going on?

I will tell you what is going on.  The Democrats are looking around the next bend in the river and they are seeing and hearing a wave election that will deliver the U.S. Senate to the Republicans.

In other words, there is blood in the water, and when there is blood in the water the normally docile domestic sharks that can be disciplined by a sharp blow on the nose, according to sources in the US Special Forces, are starting to thrash into a feeding frenzy.

Yeah.  Where were they when it mattered, when lies were being told about Obamacare, stupid stuff was going down on climate change, when "soft power" was all the rage in foreign policy?

I'll tell you where they were.  They were going along to get along.  They were responding like little puppy-dogs when a White House aide started shouting at them on the phone when they made a teensy-weensy criticism of the president.

Hey, but let's not be angry.  Let's not be despondent.  It probably had to be this way.  The American people don't know nuttin' about economics, about politics, about limited government, about the best way to grow the economy.  And in normal times there really isn't any bandwidth for a conservative message to balance the lefty cheerleading from the Democratic operatives with bylines.  The facts and reality may be conservative, but politics and religion are all about an ideal and perfect world.  So people aren't going to listen to a conservative message until democracy has given them what they want, good and hard.

So now the Blessed Moment of Hope and Change is over.  Now President Obama has a 40% approval rating.  Now voters are angry, even to the extent of disliking their own congressman.  "Everything is terrible" and "for the first time in 25 years, [pollsters find] that a majority of people disapprove of the job their own Congress member is doing."

Golly.  How could that have happened?  It couldn't be a failure of the ruling class from Obama to dogcatcher, could it?

Because, as everybody knows, anyone that opposes President Obama must be a racist, sexist homophobe.  By definition.

Until there is blood in the water.

Let's Have a Right-on Production of Verdi's Aida

Yesterday I was driving south through Oregon to visit with my daughter and family at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon.

Started by a high-school teacher in the 1930s the Shakespeare festival has become reliably liberal over the years, and why not: that's what its audience of 50-something liberal women wants.  So we've had a woman CEO as Julius Caesar and a succession of predictably liberal contemporary plays. Recently the festival developed an American Revolutions project.  But nobody ever submitted a play with a "conservative perspective."

As I drove south I started thinking.  First I thought about how beautiful this country is, how breathtakingly beautiful and how I love it.  Then I thought about Aida.

That's because I was listening to Aida on my smartphone.

And I thought: Imagine a super-trendy production of Aida!  No, it wouldn't be some predictable liberal thing with Aida as a man, or the Pharoah dressed up as the Koch Brothers.  No, this one would be Speaking Truth to Power, the only real power in America: liberal power.

Now the plot in Aida goes something like this: Young Radames is sent off to battle with the Ethiopians, and the Pharaoh's daughter Amneris is in love with him.  Unfortunately, Radames is in love with a pretty little Ethiopian slave Aida.  Wait!  From what I have seen of young East African women they are tall and stuningly beautiful.  Anyway, Amneris suspects something is going on and, when she finds out that the slave Aida is her rival, plots to deal with her rival.  Wouldn't you know it turns out that Aida is also the daughter of a king, the captured Amonasro, king of the Ethiopians, and when Amonasro sees his daughter he gets her to deliver intelligence on the Egyptian army from Radames.  Amneris gets wind of this so it's curtains for Aida and Radames.  Except for the fact that Amneris gets to execute the love of her life, and then she's sorry.

Here's my right-on version of Aida that is set up for telling truth to liberal power.  The Pharaoh is the President of Egypt University and the Chief Priest that sends everyone off to war is the Chief Diversity Officer.  Amneris, of course, is the Dean of Women's Studies and Radames is a young professor about to get tenure.  Aida is a young graduate student that's really a closet Christian, daughter of Amonasro, president of the awful Christian college across town.

Well, you can imagine what the feminist Amneris, Dean of Women's Studies, is going to do, especially with her power over graduate student Aida and with Radames' application up before the tenure committee.

Just saying.  But it's my conceit that the good folks at Ashland couldn't even conceive of a right-on adaptation like this, let alone actually dare to do it, let alone dare to "challenge" their audience of 50-year-old liberal women.

Why not?  Because the whole speaking truth to power was always bullshit.  It was not about speaking truth to power, it was about delegitimizing and marginalizing and "challenging" mainstream bourgeois culture and replacing it with liberal activist culture.  It was about smashing the patriarchy and destabilizing capitalism.  It was about reining in the culture of freedom and teaching people that they'd better bow to the liberal gods or they would never get tenure.

Oh well, it's good to have fantasies.  Imagine a world where Americans were allowed to make fun of their rulers.  Like, oh, back in the Bush era.

Now it's time to go have lunch with my daughter.  This evening we'll go to a production of The Tempest. 

Oh brave new world that has such people in it.

Watch Democrats Break Apart

Every political party is a coalition of interests, and some of those interests conflict.

That's why political analysts tell us that a political coalition usually forms from interests out of power. They are united by their separated grievances. But once the coalition gets into power then the conflicts start to surface.

For ten years now, we have all agreed with Judis and Teixeira in The Emerging Democratic Majority that Democrats owned the future with the whammo coalition of minorities, women, educated and youth.

That was then; this is now.

Let's take immigration.  There is a gaping hole of interest between African American and recent-immigrant Hispanics.  It is encapsulated by this pithy remark from Instapundit Glenn Reynolds on a complaint that comprehensive immigration reform would be "disastrous" for blacks, particularly low-skilled African American men.  Says Reynolds:

When we had a (very modest) crackdown on businesses hiring illegals here in Knoxville, businesses quickly replaced Mexican workers with black workers.

 There's a double problem here for Democrats.  In the first place Hispanics are souring rapidly on Obama because of the economy; no doubt that's why Obama is dangling immigration before them.  But African Americans are also feeling betrayed, even if they can't or won't admit it.  They thought that America's First Black President would change everything.

Don't forget that the "yoof" is buried in student debt and in Colorodo Democrats seem to need to terrify women that Republicans want to take away their birth control pills. Well, you never know with those Wascally Wepublicans!

There may be a lesson here.  When you break America up into activist-led silos, each of them curdling with some activist-stirred grievance, then you shouldn't be surprised that you end up breaking America up into warring activist-led factions.

Let's get back to first principles. The whole point of the single-language nation state is that it scrambles the warring tribes together into a single nation of people.  People come out of their collective tribes and live as responsible individuals; they leave their tribal grievances behind and live under the faith that if they get a skill and offer it to the market and work hard then they will find some kind of decent prosperity and their children will reap the reward of their efforts.

I get the point of left-wing activism.  There are some people left behind; there are many people just trying to catch up.  There is injustice in the world.  It may be OK to take people that are not yet ready to become responsible individuals and fold them into collective organizations like labor unions, where they submerge their individual self in a collective. But that's a temporary fix; the modern world works on responsible individualism, and will keep doing so until we come up with something better.  If you lower your sights and join a collective then you are giving up your birthright in freedom.  You have taken the by-road into neo-serfdom, and the people that led you into that have led you into a diminished life.

I give our liberal friends the benefit of the doubt; it's a noble thing to fight for the oppressed.  But when you give the government extraordinary powers to fight injustice you'd better understand what you are doing.  You are saying that voluntary cooperation between social animals has failed and now the only resort is force. It's hard to understand this, because the corpus of left-wing thought is so huge and so tangled that few people really get what it all adds up to.

In my view, one of the few lefties that has really worked to face the truth is the grand old man of German thinking, Jürgen Habermas.  He recognizes that the great modern systems, from science to business to government, are inherently dominatory.  He wants to balance the power of the systems with the countervailing power of a peer-to-peer "discourse ethics." In other words, you can't just roll over your political opponent with name-calling and street power; you have to engage your opponents as peers with a legitimate opposing view.

Brave words!  But note the gorilla in the room.  Discourse ethics cannot work until the Alinsky-believing left-wing activist gets to be named and shamed every time he unleashes the all-purpose pejoratives like racist, sexist, homophobe.

Meanwhile, watch the Democrats try to keep their coalition together as its members start to wake up to their irreconcilable differences.

"How Can You Tell a Racist?"

Here's an All American one-liner for you.

Question: How can you tell a racist?

Answer: Shhh! You're not supposed to say!

Put it this way.  If you are an African American and you have the cultural power to tell a racist they are a racist then I submit to you that the reign of the racists is over.

Put it another way.  Would you, as a Negro back in the Jim Crow South have dared to call Democratic National Committeeman Bull Connor a racist to his face?

Fast forward to today.  Would you, as a white American with a job in a big corporation, dare to call Attorney General Eric Holder a racist to his face?  You know you wouldn't, because you want to keep your job.

OK, let's back up a bit.  We've been told over and over by our liberal friends that blacks can't be racist because they don't have the power.  Here is Michael Eric Dyson making the point.

I have a proposal.  If you have the cultural power to run around branding other people with political pejoratives, then you are the problem, not the other people.

If liberal race activists have the cultural power to run around calling white people racists, and their white targets are cringing in fear, then I say that white racism isn't a problem any more.  Case in  point is some-time presidential candidate Reverend Jesse Jackson who's made a good living shaking down corporations for race crimes.  Ditto Reverend Al Sharpton.

When feminists run around calling people sexists, it is they that have the power, not the cringing patriarchs.

When gays run around calling people homophobes, it is they that have the power, not the cringing traditionalists.

When liberals in general run around calling people McCarthyites and fascists, it is they that have the power, not the cringing right-wing nutcases.

When GOP candidates are trying to tell blacks and Hispanics in a kind of reverse Sally Field: Hey, we like you, we really like you!  It is not the GOP that is in the catbird seat.

All this is by way of a corollary to my recent post: "I Will Defend Americans Against the Bullies!" You see, it's all very well for the Next President of the United States to take out after the liberal moral bullies.  But when the liberals counterattack with "who are you to judge" or some such rubbish, the president needs a comeback.

He can say, in responding to the response to his anti-bullying remark about some celebrity liberal moral bully: Hey, if that spokesman has the cultural power to come out and call Mr. Ordinary Working-Class White Voter a sexist, then I'd have to wonder if sexism is no longer an existential problem needing government force and a battalion of sex-equality enforcers to rectify.  Just saying, dear White House press corps.

You see, dear liberals, I'd say that when some liberal activist lets loose with some bullying accusation and the net result is that the other guy is cowering in fear, I'd say that says something about the relative power of the activist and the Alinskyite target.

Yet the lefty Frankfurt School says that the goal of critical social theory is: "a form of life free from unnecessary domination in all its forms."

I'd say, just between you and me, that moral bullying by liberal activists is one of the "forms" of "unnecessary domination" that any honest and ethical leftist project would be sworn to fight and struggle against.

So let's do something about it.

Penetrating the "Relativism" Smokescreen

There's a piece in the online American Spectator today that blames liberal "relativism" for the debacle of the Obama foreign policy.  Here liberals had been telling us that the world would be a better place if we stopped insisting their our way was best, and accept the idea that other ways, other cultures, deserve equal consideration. On the contrary, Virginia, there is good and evil.  Writes J.T. Young:

Few areas so starkly juxtapose good and evil as does the global community. Devoid of the political correctness permeating America — and often even civilized behavior itself — international relations often offer a no-holds-barred quest for self-interest that disregards the costs to others. Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and Russia all meet this low standard. 

The thing is that all this relativism stuff is just a political tactic, designed by the lesser lights of the Frankfurt School as a diversion to take the eyes of liberal critics off the ball.  Liberals do too believe in good and evil.  And how.  But to implement their vision of the good they need first, as an operational necessity, to degrade the authority and the power of the western spirit of democratic capitalism.

All the believers in the left believe in enlightenment and emancipation and liberation.  But there is a dividing line between the revolutionary left and the establishment left.  The revolutionary left believe that it is the historical role of revolutionaries to seize political power and then spread enlightenment, emancipation and liberation with political power and government programs.   The establishment left believes that it is the historic role of educated people like them to preside over society and spread enlightenment, emancipation and liberation with political power and government programs.

The decisive actor for both wings of the movement is the activist that identifies an injustice and then mobilizes the marginalized into a political struggle to fight that injustice, to enlighten them to the fact of their domination and then to emancipate them from their servitude or liberate them from their marginalization with political power and government programs.  That is why the Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder, says that he is proud to be an activist.

If there were any truth to the assertion of relativism, it is negated by the cult of the activist.  There is no cultural relativism for the activist.  There is simple injustice, the rule of the rich and powerful over the poor and weak.  There is no argument in favor of the rich and powerful; they are simply evil, and anyone that argues against the activist is a racist, sexist, homophobe, and a fascist.  And a hater. Activists adhere to a simple, naive morality.  The activist is right and good and the activist's opponents are evil and wrong.

Our job, we Americans that want to live and let live, is to lance the boil of activism, to deflate their absurd pretensions, and penetrate the truth of liberal relativism to reveal underneath the simple calculus of power that drenches liberalism: the crude idea that you can solve the problems of the world with politics, which divides people, and government, which is nothing other than force.

And President Obama might have said, if he had a clue:  Government is not the name for the things we choose to do together, as Barney Frank has said.  Government is the name for things the ruling class of the day imposes on society and groups and individuals by force.

There is a name for the things we actually freely choose do together: society.  British Prime Minister David Cameron: "There is such a thing as society.  It's just not the same thing as the state."