Misunderestimated Again

President Bush seems to understand what President Reagan understood before him. A president has a chance to make only two or three moves on the chessboard of history. So he’d better make them good ones.

Alternatively, he can engage in fancy footwork like Third Way dancers Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, serving up eye-catching initiatives every week.

However even the best chess moves don’t necessarily look good at the time. Many people are more impressed by fancy footwork.

In his end of year piece Michael Barone reminds us why he is the dean of pundits. He just has a solid judgment. And it shows.

Before you count President Bush out, he writes, don’t forget that the first few years of every war are years of blunders and mistakes.

Franklin Roosevelt picked the right generals and admirals from the start in World War II, but the first years of the war were filled with errors and mistakes.

And now that President Bush has found the right generals, we can affirm that &ldquoAmerican troops are surely the most capable military force in history. They just need to be given the right orders.”

Another important lesson to learn from Iraq is that social transformation works easiest from the bottom up. Our media elites are obsessed with top-down politics. They would be, that is their job: to report the doings of high politics.

But the impetus for change [in Iraq] has come from the bottom up, from tribal sheiks in Anbar province who got tired of the violence and oppression of al Qaeda in Iraq, from Shiites and Sunnis who, once confident of the protection of American forces and of the new Iraqi military, decided to quit killing each other. They did not wait for orders from Baghdad or for legislation to be passed with all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed.

Why be surprised? That’s the way it works in the US.

At the beginning of the 1990s we seemed to have intractable problems of high crime and welfare dependency. Experts argued that we couldn’t hope for improvement. But state and local leaders got to work and showed that change for the better was possible.

Today, people seem to have forgotten that crime and welfare were once intractable problems. That just shows how successfully we reformed welfare and crime fighting. And how wrong the folks were who wailed about millions of children thrown into the streets.

Now it seems that President Bush has learned from the fumbles of the first years in the War on Terror Why wouldn’t he? Isn’t the US famous as a nation of can-do optimists?

What Presidents Wear

When the Duke of Wellington fought the Battle of Waterloo, he did not wear a resplendent uniform. He wore, as Paul Johnson reminds us, “dark blue civilian dress.” He was, you may say, sending a message about military might. Victory in battle is all very well, but after it’s over, we are going home to peacetime pursuits.

At the Potsdam Conference immediately after World War II, he relates

[Prime Minister Churchill] appeared in Royal Air Force uniform, one of his favorites. Marshal Stalin, as he liked to call himself, appeared in the white full dress uniform of a Marshal of the Red Army. But... Harry S Truman... wore a neat blue civilian suit.

Harry Truman served in World War I and in the reserves thereafter, but US Presidents do not wear uniform while in office. It sends an important message about the role of the commander-in-chief. The president is a civilian, and the United States believes in civilian control of the military.

But when the president visits the troops theses days, he does wear uniform. It is interesting to realize what that uniform is. Typically, it features a baseball cap—often emblazoned with the insignia of the unit or the ship he is visiting—and a baseball warmup jacket.

When the president visits the troops, he dresses like a baseball coach.

That’s an interesting message to send to the world. Think of the President of the United States as a kind of jumped-up baseball coach.

Liberal Fascism. So?

The liberals are already reaching the tipping point on Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Someone already vandalized the product page at Amazon. (Would that be an inside job?)

But what’s all the fuss about?  Liberalism comes from the same stable as communism and fascism?  Of course.  They are all reactionary movements trying escape from an alienation towards the modern age.  They are beset, as Roger Scruton writes in Modern Culture,

by those ancient and eradicable yearnings for something else — for a homecoming to our true community.

You see this in German Romanticism, in Marx, and in the “reactionary nationalism of Fichte and Gierke for whom the Volk and the Volksgeist where the primary objects of social hope.”

Our liberal friends believe in their special version of this.  They will lead us to safety in a true community of educated people, the rule of the altruistic educated middle class over the hopelessly compromised commercial middle class.

How will our liberal friends deal with the challenge of Liberal Fascism?  Probably by ignoring it.  It’s the best way.

But we can read all about it.  First, check into Jonah’s thoughts on The Glenn and Helen Show.

Is There a Conservative Future?

In this time of conservative discontent, seers and pundits are peering into the future. Will there be a conservative coalition in the future, they wonder?

Conservative pundit Tony Blankley takes a look, and wonders what it would take to keep a majority coalition going.

It would have to hold almost all of its Reagan coalition plus gain the support of at least 40 percent of the growing Hispanic vote.

And that is a tall order, considering that it usually takes at least a generation for US immigrants to become unhyphenated Americans that vote for the American party rather than the Identity party.

All that assumes that the conservatives can keep the Reagan Democrats and social conservatives. And that is pretty uncertain. If economic hard times come then expect the economically insecure to return to the Democratic Party. Says Blankley:

Although the economy remains strong, the public’s economic anxiety about the future has been building steadily during the past half-decade.

Gold stars all round to the MSM for that.

It is precisely these kinds of economic fears that Mike Huckabee is talking to... I think it is highly likely the Republican Party (as the presumed continuing vehicle for a right-of-center coalition) will have to talk persuasively to the growing economic anxiety.

Can we do it? Can we persuade the economically insecure that the worst thing they could do would be to throw in their lot with the economically Neanderthal Democrats?

It’s a challenge, at the very least.

At least history in on our side. The last two times the economy went south, in the 1930s and in the 1970s, the Democrats completely screwed up the economy (with help, it must be admitted, from the Republicans.)

Xmas at the Party of Government

You gotta love Hillary’s Xmas Card. I refuse to watch it (ok, I did watch it when I went to get the link) but Jonah Goldberg says it’s about Hillary Clinton getting all her Xmas gifts together, the ones she is going to give to you, the voter.

One is labeled "Universal Health Care," another is "Alternative Energy," another is "Middle Class Tax Breaks." And then the supposedly hilarious kicker. Wringing her hands and furrowing her brow with maternal angst, she exclaims, "Where did I put universal pre-K?"

Very droll, especially for a Democrat. After all, if you are a Democrat these things are either for you for for you to manage or to get a paycheck out of.

But Republicans have a different take. Hillary didn’t pay for those presents. We, the taxpayers, are going to pay for them. The facts are up on Rush Limbaugh’s website, forever.

Ninety-six percent of income taxes are paid by the top 50 percent of taxpayers. And that is probably before counting in the effect of the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Why be surprised? It all makes sense, given the political system in this country.

The way Hugh Hewitt tells it, the United States has a Six Party System.

The Republican Party is a coalition of the Faith Party, the Wealth Party, and the National Security Party.

The Democratic Party is a coalition of the Race Party, the Government Party, and the License Party.

Hillary Clinton is running for the leadership of the Government Party. And she is wrapping all the lovely gifts she is going to give her party rank-and-file with Other Peoples’ Money.

What’s not to like?

Don’t agree? Drop me a line.

As Hillary Clinton puts it: Let’s talk!

Reconciliation In Iraq?

Obviously something has changed in Iraq in the last year.  The question is what, and what will happen next.

Will the defeat of Al Qaeda in Iraq lead to a reconciliation between Sunni and Shia, or will the civil war resume once the US starts to reduce its forces in the year ahead?

Conservative commentators like Michael Ledeen are optimistic.

Meanwhile, the country’s leading religious leaders seem on the verge of issuing an historic document: a fatwa condemning violence. The signatories would be two towering figures, one Sunni, one Shiite.

Lefty blog posters have a different point of view. Here is talisman.

Ah, but the so-called "turnaround" in Iraq is merely one of slightly decreased violence - and only a temporary one, from most established on-the-ground accounts, which means Bush can declare "victory" while still keeping our kids over there as cannon fodder.

Actually, he might be right.  We simply do not know how the various factions in Iraq will act in the aftermath of the “surge.”

We can understand this divide.  Both conservatives and liberals want to be proven right.  Conservatives want to believe that the US was right to go into Iraq.  Liberals want to believe that it was wrong to go into Iraq.

But whatever happens in Iraq, there is still the question of Iran.

Why Is It So Cold? Maybe the Sun?

Everyone knows that the polar bears are in trouble and Greenland is about to melt because of all the global warming.

In fact, though, the world is in the middle of a cold snap, according to geophysicist (and, presumably climate change denier) David Deming.

South America this year experienced one of its coldest winters in decades. In Buenos Aires, snow fell for the first time since the year 1918...


Unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007. Johannesburg, South Africa, had the first significant snowfall in 26 years. Australia experienced the coldest June ever... In New Zealand, the weather turned so cold that vineyards were endangered.

What could be going on? Well, scientists say that it could be the Sun. Right now it’s at the end of a 22 year sunspot cycle, Cycle 23, and scientists are wondering when the next cycle, Cycle 24, is going to start.

That’s important because in previous centuries the earth’s climate has been cold when the sunspot count was low and warm when the sunspot count was high. The most famous period of low sunspot incidence was the Maunder Minimum from 1645 to 1710. That period has another name: The Little Ice Age. If you look at the link, you will see a nice little graph which labels our current period since 1950 the “Modern Maximum.”

Could that explain the increase in global temperatures.

Right now, this minute, on December 19, 2007, there are no sunspots on the sun. That’s because the one visible sunspot group has just rotated out of sight. You can check up on the sun here.

There is some indication that the next sunspot cycle has begun. The first two weeks of December showed an increase in sunspots.

What we don’t know is how active the new cycle will be. Some people think that sunspot intensity is driven by the position of the major planets like Jupiter and Saturn in the same way that tides on the Earth are driven by the Moon.

But it might be prudent to plan on a cold winter this year. Just to be on the safe side.