Obama's Summer Trip

Our chaps have been doing a good job lately investigating Sen. Barack Obama’s lack of seriousness on Iraq.

Talk-show host Hugh Hewitt says to Obama: “Meet Michael Yon. Now, Read His Book.” He is referring to Yon’s recently published Moment of Truth in Iraq.

Presidential candidate John McCain has offered to take Obama to Iraq so that he can update his 872 day old views on that embattled country.

What kind of presidential candidate would last have been in Iraq 872 days ago and counting, the conservatives ask?

Come now, fellas. The answer is pretty straightforward: A candidate who needs to keep the Angry Left quiet until he gets the Democratic Presidential nomination. He wouldn’t want to know about the success of the surge, at least not yet. Not until August.

Up until Obama clinches the Democratic nomination he must be reliably against the war and for a troop withdrawal.

But after he gets the nomination...

Well, already, having rejected John McCain’s travel offer as a cheap political trick, he is saying that he might very well go to Iraq in the summer.

Here’s a prediction. When he gets back from Iraq and his little chat with Gen. Petraeus, Obama will say, “Why, Golly Gee!”

Well he won’t say that, but he will say the equivalent in liberalspeak.

“Why did President Bush lie to me about Iraq and the facts on the ground? I have been to Iraq and I can now say that the briefings I was getting from the Pentagon were all wrong. Based on my understanding of events on the ground and my conversations with people I have met there I believe there is a chance that we can stabilize the Iraq regime and bring our troops home. But in order for this to work the Iraqi government must do better in meeting its milestones, and I will insist that all milestones be met before a single additional soldier is sent to Iraq. Despite the incompetence of the Bush administration and its failed strategy I believe that we can achieve reconciliation in Iraq, and I have a plan to achieve success, one that corrects the mistakes of the Bush administration.”

And, of course the mainstream media will swoon. Best speech on national security by an American politician in the last 50 years, they will say.

They call this sort of thing “The Turn.”

Die, Conservatives, Die!

That’s the message of George Packer in a long New Yorker piece on “The Fall of Conservatism.”

Lefty bloggers are all agog over this piece, and conservatives certainly agree in part. Obviously political conservatism in the United States is in eclipse right now.

Packer argues that conservatism has always been a divisive force. It began with the Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon and Pat Buchanan in the 1960s.

“From Day One, Nixon and I talked about creating a new majority,” Buchanan told me... “What we talked about, basically, was shearing off huge segments of F.D.R.’s New Deal coalition, which L.B.J. had held together: Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern Protestant conservatives—what we called the Daley-Rizzo Democrats in the North and, frankly, the Wallace Democrats in the South.”

Conservatives might be surprised to learn that the conservative movement was not about Kirk and Buckley, Goldwater and Reagan, but instead a election strategy cooked up by Richard Nixon, he of wage and price controls and “we are all Keynesians now.” But you find this meme popping up a lot in liberaldom.

Liberals courageously stood up to the Solid South in the 1960s, the narrative goes, and passed the landmark civil rights acts over their dead bodies. (Actually Republicans voted about 80-20 and Democrats about 60-40 in the House and 70-30 in the Senate on the Civil Rights Act of 1964.) The Democrats’ reward for that was that they lost the South. The evil Richard Nixon crafted a Southern Strategy to attract racist southern whites and so the conservative movement was born.

We pass quickly over the Reagan years with the usual talk about mainstreaming the “positions of the right-wing fringe” and staffing the government with “doctrinaire conservatives” and recommence the narrative in 2001 when Vice-President Dick Cheney decided on confrontation, according to liberal former Senator Lincoln Chafee.

“We would seek confrontation on every front. . . . The new Administration would divide Americans into red and blue, and divide nations into those who stand with us or against us.”

You can see the point here. Conservatives are a disruptive force that have hindered the natural evolution of beneficial governance and lack a serious attitude to governing.

But Packer has a point. The conservative movement had an agenda of economic reform, winning the cold war, and rolling back the administrative state. Republicans found, after the 1994 election that Americans were not interested in rolling anything back.

So, while allowing welfare reform, Democrats were able to cold-cock Republicans on school choice, on Social Security reform, and are still committed to enclosing the entire health care sector in the grip of the administrative state.

Until the American people are ready to reform the administrative state, there really is no point in electing Republicans. In that sense, George Packer is right. Republicans have “run out of ideas.” Because Republicans are not particularly interested in running with ideas to grow the government.

Turning the Terrorists

Young men are natural-born killers. They love to fight and to kill. That is why it is young men who think up millennarian schemes and revolutions, and causes based on blood and killing.

Lee Harris has written about this persuasively in Civilization and Its Enemies. The great task of civilization, he writes, is to turn the “eternal gang of ruthless men,” the natural-born killers, into the benign and productive Western team.

In a long article in The New Yorker Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower, suggests that the terrorists of Al Qaeda are beginning to turn from terror.

Partly, of course, this is because the young firebrands of thirty years ago are now older and wiser. Partly this is because the Egyptian government has done a number on the hundreds of Islamic terrorists they have held in jail for years and years.

Partly this is because of a rivalry and jealousy between Islamist leaders Sayyid Imam al-Sharif (aka Dr. Fadl) and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Partly we are talking about a general revulsion over the killing of innocent women and children.

Then there is the shame that Egypt experiences as countries like India and China, probably poorer than Egypt a generation ago, are overtaking it and showing the bankruptcy of the terrorist program.

For what, after all, have the terrorists achieved, except to create a bloodbath and provoke the Great Satan to meddle deeper and deeper in the Middle East?

But if the terrorists are turning away from indiscriminate violence, it can be nothing but good.

Eevil Wal-Mart and Healthcare

Wal-Mart is sinking its eevil corporate fangs into health care, and nobody is doing anything to stop it.

But don’t worry, someone will notice pretty soon.

Wal-Mart is hated by every liberal because Wal-Mart moves heaven and earth to prevent the unionization of its employees. You can understand Wal-Mart’s position on this. Why would they want to turn their associates into surly unionized auto workers or even surly unionzied DMV workers. Or totally ineffective unionized education workers.

And did you know that Wal-Mart has a waiting period for part-time employees before it offers them health insurance? It’s an outrage!

Now Wal-Mart is moving into health care. It is gradually expanding its generic drugs program, offering a three-month’s supply of most generic drugs for $10, according to financial columnist Jim Jubak.

But the big move by Wal-Mart is its in-store health clinics where the standard charge is $45 per visit, cash or credit, but no insurance.

In other words, Wal-Mart is applying its Always Low Prices, Always business model into health care. And they are moving into electronic health records too, so that your records will follow you around from Wal-Mart to Wal-Mart.

The big payoff is that all the other players are sitting up and taking notice.

The best thing about letting Wal-Mart do it is that the company won’t have to fix the health care system all by itself. Wal-Mart’s entry into this field has already galvanized competition from retailers such as Target... and CVS Caremark...



Some, like Target, are matching Wal-Mart step by step. Some are arguably ahead of the giant retailer. Clinic operator MinuteClinic is a CVS subsidiary that operates more clinics than Wal-Mart has opened to date.

Meanwhile the politicians are offering more subsidy (McCain) or compulsion (Obama and Clinton). As we know, subsidy and compulsion have been a great success in education, health care, welfare and everything else in which the government is involved.

You can be sure that Wal-Mart will get the blame for this eevil corporate scheme. Whatever it is that they have done, and nobody is yet sure what it is.

Meanshile we can all enjoy it as the bloated health-care industry starts to squirm.

Obama's Iran Gaffe

When a Republican makes a gaffe it’s usually a career-ender. Or at least it makes him a laughing-stock forever. But usually the gaffe is not really a mistake. It is usually something that liberals insist you are not allowed to say.

But for Democrats the rules are different. Take Obama’s Iran gaffe. Back in July 2007 on the infamous YouTube debate Obama agreed with a lefty questioner and said he would meet with the leaders of Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, etc., “without preconditions” in the first year of his presidency.

Then, as Charles Krauthammer relates,

On Sunday, he declared in Pendleton, Ore., that, by Soviet standards, Iran and others “don’t pose a serious threat to us.”

Iran was “tiny,”he said. Yet a day later, Obama said something completely different.

The next day in Billings, Mont.: “I’ve made it clear for years that the threat from Iran is grave.”

The reason that this is a problem is that it makes nonsense of any sort of consistent narrative about foreign policy. What does Obama believe? How will he formulate foreign policy? This sort of chopping around suggests that he doesn’t know what he is talking about. As the postmodernists say, you gotta have a narrative. (Actually they don’t. They say that power is justified by a narrative.)

The thing is, if Obama were a Republican he would be toast. But because he is a Democrat, and this year’s media Great White Hope, he gets a pass.

I’d say that the DriveBy media would do themselves a favor by being as tough on their guys as they are on the racist, sexist, homophobic opposition.

Because Sen. Barack Obama just isn’t ready for prime time, and it shows.

A Word from Tom DeLay

We haven’t heard too much lately from Tom DeLay, the architect, after Newt Gingrich, of the Republican capture of Congress in 1994. We know he’s a passionate conservative, but we haven’t heard too much of what he is doing.

In a recent op-ed, DeLay urges conservatives to get moving. There are plenty of good ideas floating around, he writes, and a few bad ones too. But whatever the ideas “Our core principles of order, justice, and freedom do not change.” Here’s his advice to Republicans running this year.

Republican incumbents and challengers running for Congress this year can translate the values of order, justice, and freedom into five basic principles for conservative government: winning the war; rewriting a 21st century tax code; redesigning government, according to constitutional precepts; restoring the federal judiciary to its proper and constitutional place; and, cultivating our society’s culture of life.

Let’s face it, he suggests, the future is wide open to conservatives.

Questions like “What does victory in the war on terror look like?” and “If we had to create a health care or retirement system from scratch, what would it look like?” will never be asked, let alone answered by liberals.

Why is this so? Why don’t liberals swoop down and grab the best ideas of conservatives instead of barking and snapping at every proposed conservative reform like the dog in the manger? It’s a good question. My own view is that liberals are too focused on personal agendas, particularly the chimera of “creativity,” to think seriously about political ideas.

Meanwhile conservatives can get busy.

Without the responsibilities of a majority party, minority Republicans in the House can work with leading conservatives from around the country to devise specific reforms of our health care, immigration, budget, energy, and tax systems. They can force the Democrats to go on the record about the war on terror, marriage, and the proper role of faith in the public square. Through the vote you regain your stature and credibility. Meanwhile, individual candidates from around the country can interpret conservative principles to best suit their own districts.

When will this all come to fruition? My answer is: sooner than you think. So there is no time to be lost.

The Next Batch of Rejects

A generation ago, in 1980, I went to the Republican precinct caucus to nominate George Bush for president.

But there was a bunch of unfamiliar faces there. People who looked like they ought to be Democrats. And they were all for Ronald Reagan. It turned out we were all for Reagan.

The Reagan Democrats were the last lot expelled from the Democratic Party. In 1960 the Democratic Party was unequivocably the party of the working stiff and the lunch-pail crowd. By 1980 it had become the party of elite liberals and identity client groups. University professors obligingly produced a political philosophy of identity. It more or less amounted to the marginalization of mainstream America as racist, sexist, classist, and homophobic.

In an Orwellian twist, this meant that Americans who didn’t think exclusively in terms of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation were in fact the racists, sexists, etc.

Not surprisingly, most people didn’t take too kindly to this. They still don’t.

It seems that this year the Democrats are intent on expelling the last few remaining old-line Democrats, the ones that believe in God and the First Amendment. For it seems that while the post-Sixties Democratic Party could tolerate having a few religious crazies and gun nuts around if they kept quiet, the new Obama Democrats really can’t be bothered to be polite to them any more.

“Change,” it seems, means completing the transformation that began with a bang in 1968 when the “kids” took over and marginalized the mainstream FDR coalition.

This year is shaping up to be a bad year for Republicans, and deservedly so. So the special conditions of this year’s election may mask the underlying trends. The moment of truth will come in 2010 and 2012, when the American people have to decide if they really want the federal government to be exclusively a government of liberals, by liberals, and for liberals—and their client groups.

My nickel says they won’t.