From my son- advice for Romney: "I’ve had my successes and my failures for sure, but I’ve never succeeded by blaming the other guy which is all we’ve heard for four years….."
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Culture counts. (See 1 below.)
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Here is a video showing the '08 campaign rhetoric of President Obama and his accomplishments over the last 3 1/2 years.
So much for the hope and change. Yes, you got plenty of change, got left holding the bag on un-achieved hope and paid a lot for a bad deal whose ultimate cost will be born by those yet born.
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There is a growing likelihood Netanyahu and his Cabinet will simply announce a peace deal and let the Palestinians suck it up. (See 2 below.)
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Jews may be umbilically attached to Democrats and they owe a lot to Truman but the political genesis regarding Israel began with Republicans! (See 3 below.)
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Bush tax cuts were not the problem but failure to pay for the war certainly was immoral as it was when Johnson was president. The real problem was the housing debacle which can mostly be laid at the feet of Chris Dodd and Barney Frank and their like minded supporters who were all in bed with the housing twins - Fannie and Freddie.
Facts, all too often, get lost in the heat and battle of politics , the lies of politicians and the ignorance of voters.(See 4 below.)
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Knowing when to stop attacking the bee hive is wise but for a pinata president that may never happen. (See 5 and 5a below.)
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This absolutely needs re-posting because it not only aptly describes the many Obamas' but also , perhaps, tells us something about ourselves and the type of Americans we are becoming and who appeal to us as we lower our standards.
As I have said time and again: "When all else fails lower your standards."
(See 6 below.)
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Bush tax cuts were not the problem but failure to pay for the war certainly was immoral as it was when Johnson was president. The real problem was the housing debacle which can mostly be laid at the feet of Chris Dodd and Barney Frank and their like minded supporters who were all in bed with the housing twins - Fannie and Freddie.
Facts, all too often, get lost in the heat and battle of politics , the lies of politicians and the ignorance of voters.(See 4 below.)
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Knowing when to stop attacking the bee hive is wise but for a pinata president that may never happen. (See 5 and 5a below.)
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This absolutely needs re-posting because it not only aptly describes the many Obamas' but also , perhaps, tells us something about ourselves and the type of Americans we are becoming and who appeal to us as we lower our standards.
As I have said time and again: "When all else fails lower your standards."
(See 6 below.)
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Dick
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1) Why Bonn Is Not Athens
Rudesheim, Germany — This week I am leading a military-history tour on the Rhine River from Basel, Switzerland, to Amsterdam. You can learn a lot about Europe’s current economic crises by ignoring the sophisticated barrage of news analysis and instead just watching, listening, and talking to people as you go down river.
Switzerland, by modern standards, should be poor. Like Bolivia, it is landlocked. Like Italy, it has no real gas or oil wealth. Like Afghanistan, its northern climate and mountainous terrain limit agricultural productivity to upland plains. And like Turkey, it is not a part of the European Union.
Unlike Americans, the Swiss are among the most homogeneous people in the world, without much diversity, and they make it nearly impossible to immigrate to their country.
So Switzerland supposedly has everything going against it, and yet it is one of the wealthiest nations in the world. Why and how?
To answer that is also to learn why roughly 82 million Germans produce almost as much national wealth as do 130 million Greeks, Portuguese, Italians, and Spaniards. Yet the climate of Germany is also somewhat harsh; it too has no oil or gas. By 1945, German cities lay in ruins, while Detroit and Cleveland were booming. The Roman historian Tacitus remarked that pre-civilized Germany was a bleak land of cold weather, with little natural wealth and inhabited by tribal savages. Race does not explain present-day national wealth. From 500 B.C. to A.D. 1300, Switzerland and Germany were considered brutal and backward in comparison to classical Greece and Rome, and later, to Renaissance Venice and Florence.
Instead, culture explains far more — a seemingly taboo topic when economists nonchalantly suggest that contemporary export-minded Germans simply need to spend and relax like laid-back southern Mediterraneans, and that the latter borrowers should save and produce like workaholic Germans to even the playing field of the European Union.
But government-driven efforts to change national behavior often ignore stubborn cultural differences that reflect centuries of complex history as well as ancient habits and adaptations to geography and climate. Greeks can no more easily give up siestas than the Swiss can mandate two-hour afternoon naps. If tax cheating is a national pastime in Palermo, by comparison it is difficult along the Rhine.
I lived in Greece for over two years and often travel to northern and Mediterranean Europe and North Africa. While I prefer the Peloponnese to the Rhineland, over the years I have developed an unscientific and haphazard — but often accurate — politically incorrect method of guessing whether a nation is likely to be perennially insolvent and wracked by corruption.
Do average passersby throw down or pick up litter? After a minor fender-bender, do drivers politely exchange information, or do they scream and yell with wild gesticulations? Is honking constant or sporadic? Are crosswalks sacrosanct? Do restaurant dinners usually start or wind down at 9 P.M.? Can you drink tap water, or should you avoid it? Do you mostly pay what the price tag says, or are you expected to pay in untaxed cash and then haggle over the unstated cost? Are construction sites clearly marked and fenced to protect pedestrians, or do you risk walking into an open pit or getting stabbed by exposed rebar?
To put these crude stereotypes more abstractly, is civil society mostly moderate, predicated on the rule of law, and meritocratic — or is it characterized by self-indulgence, cynicism, and tribalism?
The answers to these questions do not hinge on race, money, or natural wealth, but they do involve culture and the way average people predictably live minute by minute. Again, these national habits and traditions accrued over centuries, and as much as politics or economics, they explain in part why Bonn is not Athens, and Zurich is not Naples, or for that matter why Cairo is unlike Tel Aviv or why Mexico City differs from Toronto.
There is one final funny thing about contemporary culture. What people say and do about it are two different things. We in the post-modern, politically correct West publicly pontificate that all cultures are just different and that to assume otherwise is pop generalization, but we privately assume that you would prefer your bank account to be in Frankfurt rather than Athens, or the tumor in your brain to be removed in London rather than Lisbon.
A warm sunset with an ouzo on a Greek-island beach may be more relaxing than schnapps on the foggy Rhine shore, but to learn why Greeks will probably not pay back what they owe Germany — and why they do not believe that they should have to — take a walk through central Athens and then do the same in Munich.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.
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2)
Israeli Official Weighs an Imposed Palestinian Border
Ronen Zvulun/Reuters
A Palestinian herding sheep against the backdrop of a Jewish settlement near Jerusalem. Settlements are among the stumbling blocks in stalled peace talks.
By JODI RUDOREN
Published: May 30, 2012 New York Times
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TEL AVIV — Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Wednesday thatIsrael should consider imposing the borders of a future Palestinian state, becoming the most senior government official to suggest bypassing a stagnant peace process.
Mr. Barak’s statement urging consideration of what he and many Israelis call “unilateral actions,” without offering any specifics, echoed an emerging chorus of political leaders, analysts and intellectuals who have said that Israel needs to put in effect its own settlement to the Palestinian crisis. Though the Israeli government continues to call for negotiations toward a two-state solution, the drive for a one-sided approach also received a boost on Wednesday from the Institute for National Security Studies, a respected research center that is close to the military and security establishment.
Mr. Barak called for “an interim agreement, maybe even unilateral action,” during a conference sponsored by the institute here. Referring to fears that Jews will become a minority in their own state, he added, “Inaction is not a possibility.”
“Israel cannot afford stagnation,” Mr. Barak said. “It will be a difficult decision to make, but the time is running out.”
Calls for direct action are based on the arguments that negotiations are no longer feasible because of enduring political divisions on both sides and the changing dynamics inspired by the Arab Spring, which demand that leaders take more populist positions in line with anti-Israel public sentiment. But some advocates of this approach have also said that they believe the door should remain open to negotiations, suggesting that unilateral steps could be phased in over many years and be designed, in part, to give Israel a stronger hand in final status talks.
The Palestinian Authority has opposed any effort by Israel to decree the contours of its territory and abandon a negotiated settlement on a wide variety of issues, including the future of Jerusalem. The Palestinian Authority, however, did take its own unilateral steps last fall, when it pursued United Nations recognition, something it is considering doing again. Israel has criticized such efforts for stepping outside the bounds of negotiations. The Obama administration has strongly opposed unilateral action by either side, and some senior Israeli officials have worried that such a move by Israel could provoke an uprising by Palestinians.
“The core issues of the conflict can only be resolved by direct negotiations,” Daniel B. Shapiro, the United States ambassador to Israel, said Wednesday. Nabil Abu Rudaineh, a spokesman for the Palestinian Authority, also objected to the call for unilateralism, saying, “This policy won’t lead to a solution and would prolong the conflict. It will end the idea of the two-state solution.”
Both Mr. Barak and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the security conference that they, too, preferred a final-status solution of two states for two peoples, and that the broad unity government they formed this month presented a unique opportunity for a peace deal. But many here see bilateral negotiations as all but impossible and are seeking a new paradigm.
Mr. Barak, who briefly spoke about the Palestinian conflict at the end of a wide-ranging lecture, did not offer any specifics by design, according to a senior aide who said later that “what he’s talking about is the importance of taking action.”
Shaul Mofaz, the Kadima Party leader whose alliance with Mr. Netanyahu this month created the supermajority of 94 out of 120 members of Parliament, has advocated creating an interim Palestinian state on 60 percent of the West Bank, with settlers offered incentives or being forced to leave their homes.
A new Israeli organization called Blue White Future, which supports a two-state solution along the 1967 borders, penned an April Op-Ed page article in The New York Times saying that “through a series of unilateral actions, gradual but tangible changes could begin to transform the situation on the ground.” From the right, Naftali Bennett, a high-tech millionaire trying to form a new political party, in March sent 5,000 opinion leaders his plan for Israeli annexation of large swaths of the West Bank known as Area C, where most settlers live.
And Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian pollster, wrote this month that “unilateral steps by both sides could provide an alternative” to what he sees as a “growing one-state reality.” At Wednesday’s conference, Shlomo Brom, a retired general who leads the research center’s program on the Palestinian conflict, presented a paper calling “the unilateral route the only remaining course of action.”
“We can start talking about a permanent agreement,” Mr. Brom said, “but we believe we will start talking about the transitional arrangement very quickly and prepare ourselves to implement unilateral moves.”
Amos Yadlin, a former chief of military intelligence who now runs the institute, called it “the best of all evils.
“If a miracle happens and we can reach a negotiation and reach an agreement, this institute will be happy to take all of its papers and burn them,” Mr. Yadlin told the audience of about 200 of Israel’s leading security officials and intellectuals. “We are going to shape the reality of the two states. Everybody believes in it. Let’s advance it without conditioning it on the agreement of the Palestinians. We have to take the initiative in our own hands.”
But critics of the unilateral approach abound, many of them citing Israel’s 2005 disengagement from the Gaza Strip and the takeover two years later by the militant Hamas faction.
“How come there are people who are ready to think about such a dangerous idea after the complete failure of the unilateral disengagement from Gaza?” Gideon Sa’ar, Israel’s minister of education, asked in a statement on Wednesday, adding that Mr. Barak, who is close to Mr. Netanyahu but not a member of his Likud Party, represented a minority view in the cabinet and coalition.
Robert M. Danin, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an adviser to Tony Blair on the Middle East, called unilateralism “very problematic.”
“What political entity would emerge in the aftermath of your withdrawal?” Mr. Danin asked. “What are you getting for giving up land? Why would you want to uproot 70,000 settlers, or halt settlement activity, for nothing?”
Ziad Abu Zayyad, a former Palestinian Authority minister who is co-editor of the Palestine-Israel Journal, told the Israeli audience that continued settlement activity in the West Bank “undermines any possibility of disengagement.”
“We are negotiating about the West Bank and you continue eating the West Bank slice after slice, slice after slice,” Mr. Abu Zayyad said. “If I see that the Israeli government cannot evacuate outposts, can anyone convince me that it will be able to evacuate settlements?”
Asked about the unilateral proposals, a spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu referred to the prime minister’s speech on Tuesday evening in which he called for a return to bilateral talks. “Chances are not always repeated in history, in political history, but it exists now,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “Negotiations for peace need two sides. One side is there.”
By Wednesday afternoon, Moshe Yaalon, a deputy prime minister, had taken the stage at the conference to say that unilateral steps are a disincentive to President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority “to come to the table.”
“We as a government say O.K., we have a strategy, we’re ready to sit to the table if there’s a partner,” said Mr. Yaalon, the minster for strategic affairs and former chief of the Israeli Defense Force. “When we retreat or withdraw, we show weakness.
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The Israel Lobby’s GOP Past
Jewish voters are a reliable Democratic bloc. But the Republican Party established the first platform on Israel—and brought the Democrats along.
By Lee Smith|
The influence of the late Benzion Netanyahu over his son Benjamin, the prime minister of Israel, is perhaps the most over-discussed Oedipal theme in the psycho-history of international affairs. But as it turns out, the late Netanyahu’s political influence seems to extend much further than his immediate heirs. According to a new book, Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Vote” and Bipartisan Support for Israel, by Sonja Schoepf Wentling and Rafael Medoff, the scholar who is now being remembered for writing one of the 20th-century’s most significant works of history was also a practical man of political action who helped pioneer Washington’s Jewish lobby.
In the early 1940s, Benzion Netanyahu met with members of Congress and other political players to solicit American support for Jewish causes, including the creation of a Jewish state. He became such an important figure on Capitol Hill that in helping to draft the Republican political platform in the 1944 presidential campaign, he forced the other party—the one led by FDR—to match it and thereby created a bipartisan consensus on what was at the time called the “Palestine issue.”
“He had meetings with Hoover, Robert Taft, Claire Boothe Luce, Alf Landon,” said co-author Rafael Medoff. But Netanyahu’s reasons for reaching out to GOP figures had little to do with strict ideological alignment. Mainstream Jewish leaders who had built up close relations with Roosevelt avoided cultivating relationships with the president’s political rivals out of loyalty, sympathy for his domestic policies, and in many cases disdain for the Republicans. Netanyahu made no bones about targeting the Republicans. To him, it made obvious political sense. “The key element of Netanyahu’s political strategy was to form relationships on both sides of the aisle,” Medoff told me. “It’s conventional wisdom to do it now, but it wasn’t back then.”
Netanyahu arrived in Washington in 1940 as part of an entourage headed by Ze’evJabotinsky, who would die in August of that year in New York. The Revisionist Zionist leader had come to the United States to promote the idea of a Jewish military unit that would fight alongside the allies, as the Jewish Legion he inspired did during World War I, and to plead for the rescue of European Jews from the Nazis and for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.
The Revisionists feared that the Roosevelt Administration felt no sense of urgency in addressing their issues—and worse, that the Jewish leaders who controlled access to the White House were loath to pressure the president. Mainstream American Jewish leaders like Rabbi Stephen Wise had built close relationships with FDR’s White House and didn’t want to damage their standing with a man who, by 1940, had already been president for eight years. And so rather than pressure the president, they effectively insulated him from criticism.
For instance, according to Herbert Hoover and the Jews, when British Prime Minister Winston Churchill visited the United States in 1943, the New Zionist Organization of America—the American wing of the Revisionist movement, where Netanyahu was executive director—ran a full-page ad in the New York Times demanding that “since the British had failed to fulfill the Balfour Declaration’s promise to facilitate creation of a Jewish national home, they should surrender their mandate over Palestine.” Wise and others, according toMedoff and Wentling’s book, were appalled; FDR and Churchill were apparently enraged.
Not surprisingly, the GOP found Netanyahu and his cause a useful instrument with which to beat up on their Democratic rivals and perhaps strip some of the Jewish vote away from the Democrats—a tactic today’s GOP still uses, only with Netanyahu’s son. Nonetheless, asMedoff and Wentling explain in the book, “in addition to the hope of attracting Jewish votes for their party’s candidates, Hoover, Taft and the other Republicans who proved receptive to Zionist appeals appear to have genuinely believed in the merits of the cause.”
Republicans’ reasons for doing so haven’t changed much over the last 60-plus years. Some were moved by pity or guilt over the West’s failure to prevent the Holocaust; others, perhaps a majority, embraced Zionism because of their Christian faith; and yet others, as the authors interestingly explain, believed “that a Jewish state would serve a pro-American bulwark against Soviet penetration in the Middle East.”
This last is worth noting in comparison to one of the many rationales given by American policymakers at the time for not supporting the creation of a Jewish state. For example, Gen. George Marshall, Truman’s secretary of State, feared a Jewish state would serve as a pro-Soviet outpost in the region. “It’s ironic that people like Marshall, who helped run the U.S. alliance with Stalin, should assume that anyone getting practical help from the Soviets was going to be a communist,” said Douglas Feith, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and previous under-secretary of defense for policy under George W. Bush.
As Feith explained, that justification for not supporting the creation of Israel was likely just cover for more fundamental reasons. The State Department put a lot of stock in the fact that there are more Arabs than Jews—and the former have oil. Some State Department staffers, especially among the Arabists, were just plain anti-Semitic. Still, it’s worth wondering how much the Republicans’ early connections with Netanyahu and the Revisionist movement would influence their later appreciation of Israel as a strategic ally.
While many American liberals, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, mourn for the Israel of their childhood, a plucky quasi-socialist underdog governed wholly by Labor Zionists, and lament the rise of a right-wing leadership constantly at war with its neighbors, U.S. conservatives see something else in the current Jewish state. What Republicans prize is a hard-charging, militarily superior liberal democracy with a thriving economy driven by a high-tech industry and a public that can always be counted on to support the United States. In other words, what Republicans like about Israel is based largely on Jabotinsky’s vision of the Jewish state: hawkish, free-market driven, and oriented toward the West.
If the Republicans seem to cherish Jabotinsky’s vision, that’s also due to the efforts ofBenzion’s son, Benjamin. “The current phenomenon of GOP support for Israel got a major boost when Bibi became prime minister in 1996,” said Feith. “He came to the U.S. and gave a speech before a joint session of Congress calling for Israel to get weaned off of U.S. economic aid, and Republicans swooned. Jesse Helms said something along the lines of: That was the best speech a foreign leader had given to congress since Churchill. This built up Israel’s image as tough and self-reliant.”
And yet Medoff points out that Netanyahu’s appeal isn’t limited to Republicans. He notesBibi’s latest speech to Congress last May and the dozens of ovations awarded him by Republicans and Democrats.
“In my many interviews with Benzion Netanyahu,” says Medoff, “he never commented on policies of his son. But it’s safe to assume that his sons learned much of their politics at the father’s knee, and you can see a certain parallel. You look for friends and political allies anywhere and everywhere.”
It’s conventional wisdom that it’s the Democrats who have always been the Jews’ greatest allies and most ably represent their views, from domestic policy to foreign affairs. And with good reason: The Democrats certainly get the majority of Jewish votes, without fail. ButasHerbert Hoover and the Jews reminds us, it was the Republicans who got there first in helping to establish a formal Israel platform.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3) Bush’s tax cuts didn’t get us in this mess
BY STEVE HUNTLEY
With the presidential campaign gathering steam, the voters are going to be fed a lot of baloney before Election Day. One of the biggest humdingers now coming your way: The Bush tax cuts are responsible for the mess the country is in.
A recurring theme in President Barack Obama’s attacks on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his tax policies is: “We can’t go back to the same policies that got us into this mess.”
President George W. Bush’s tax cuts did not cause the fiscal crisis of 2008. Our economic calamity came in a housing meltdown — the result of years of administrations of both parties encouraging variable-interest, no-interest, little or no down payment, and no-document or liar loans that flooded people into homes they couldn’t afford under traditional mortgage lending practices.
To its credit, the Bush administration twice advanced reforms to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, major players in pushing bad loans. Each time it was blocked by powerful Democrats, Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut. Frank famously said he wanted the two quasi-governmental agencies “to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidizing housing.” Even after the home-ownership explosion was starting to be revealed to be a house of cards, Dodd declared, “These two institutions are fundamentally, fundamentally strong.”
So far, “rolling the dice” on the two “fundamentally strong” agencies has cost the taxpayer $150 billion. No wonder the Wall Street Journal calls Fannie and Freddie the “toxic twins.” The irony is that Frank and Dodd not only escaped responsibility for their roles but they foisted blame for the housing bust on high finance and authored a 2,000-plus-page bill to pile new regulations on banks and other financial institutions.
No doubt, Wall Street played an egregious role in the housing bubble, but the bottom line is that, absent the millions of bad mortgages, the speculators would have had nothing at which to throw billions of dollars in risky bets.
We can debate the merits of tax cuts vs. tax increases and spending reductions (actually slowing the growth of Washington’s profligacy) vs. government “investments” all day long, but we won’t be talking about the root causes of the housing crisis that precipitated the Great Recession.
Home sales finally may be showing signs of life, but that’s not because of anything the administration has done. Its efforts to rescue “underwater” homeowners who owe more than their houses are worth have been ineffective. The free-market system is slowly wringing out these bad loans. Still, it’s more than a little troubling that nearly four years after the bubble burst, no one has an accounting of all the sour loans.
Conflating the housing bust and the Bush tax cuts is a way to distract the voters from the failure of the administration’s nearly trillion-dollar stimulus and other policies to right the economy. Distraction is also the goal of attacking Romney’s record at the equity firm Bain Capital by focusing on its few failures. The actual Bain record is one of 80 percent success in rescuing ailing firms and building new businesses, adding jobs and creating wealth for investors, millions of them in public pension funds.
Best advice to voters: Keep your eye on the Obama record on the economy.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------5)President Obama and his wife, the health nanny in chief, obviously don't know when they've gone too far in their crusade to socialize and Obamatize America.
They couldn't stop pushing for the Obamacare mandate that would force religious organizations to pay for coverage of abortion-inducing drugs, contraception and sterilization for their employees regardless of the institution's moral or religious objections.
Now the Obamas are sorry. They've awakened the sleeping giant -- the Catholic Church. And they're going to pay the political price.
Last week the University of Notre Dame and 42 other Catholic institutions sued the administration to overturn the mandate, which would also apply to all employees of a church's social services, such as schools, hospitals and food banks.
It's not just a bureaucratic fight over who Barack and Michelle think should be forced to provide contraception for their employees -- without fees or co-pays.
The mandate is an attack on the First Amendment's protection against federal meddling in religion. As Notre Dame President Father John Jenkins wrote, what's at issue is the freedom of a religious organization to "live its mission."
In addition to the lawsuits, U.S. bishops have called for all Catholics to engage in 14 days of "prayer, study, catechesis and public action" on religious liberty from June 21 to the Fourth of July.
The Obama campaign, which didn't count on such a forceful response by the Catholic Church, has managed to give Republicans a huge gift in the middle of a presidential campaign.
By standing up to the Obama administration on moral grounds and engaging it on an important social issue, the church has in effect joined forces with Romney. It keeps him from being distracted by issues designed to make him look anti-women and allows him to concentrate on what ultimately will make or break his campaign -- economic issues.
The Obama Blunder is also going to hurt him with Democrat voters. It'll only make it harder for him to recapture the votes of all those working-class Catholics in Ohio and western Pennsylvania, where the Obama thrill is already gone.
Meanwhile, the blunder also greatly helps Romney with Hispanics, who are predominately Democrats and virtually all socially conservative Catholics.
Hispanic voters usually focus on a single issue -- immigration reform -- and that is never good for Republicans. But the church's revolt against one of Obamacare's most oppressive rules has taken immigration off the table and given Hispanics a principled reason to vote for a Republican president.
Mr. and Mrs. Obama still don't get it. Only hours after the Catholic bishops announced their legal challenge, the first nanny was stumping in Cleveland and talking tough about Obamacare.
"You can tell people how, because we passed health reform, insurance companies will now have to cover preventive care -- have to. Things like contraception, cancer screenings, prenatal care -- and they have to do it at no extra cost. People have to understand that's what that fight was for."
That's what the Obamacare fight was all about -- promising voters that companies and organizations will "have to" provide health care to their employees "at no extra cost." The Catholic Church, which hasn't exactly been a good ally in the war against big government liberalism, has learned that Obamacare's rules about employees being provided with "free" contraceptives apply to them too, and they don't like it
All I can say is, "Go, bishops. Give the Obamas hell."
5a)The Best Defense of Capitalism?
It Protects Human Dignity.
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But the best defense of capitalism has nothing to do with wealth.
Nor does it involve success and opportunity, although those are undeniable benefits of a free market.
The best defense of capitalism is that it provides the single most reliable method for protecting something far dearer: human dignity.
So argues author Father Robert A. Sirico in his new book Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy.
In this remarkable and important book, Father Sirico says:
"Have you ever seen a photograph of the earth at night? Lights are scattered across the globe, wherever human beings live and work and prosper. But there is a strange blank shape at the top of the Korean peninsula, all the more remarkable because the lower half of the peninsula, South Korea, is a blaze of luminosity. The dark patch above it is socialist North Korea, where the people live in such desperate poverty that their country is dark at night....
The illuminated lower half of the peninsula offers us a vision of what the world looks like with freedom—the freedom to create, prosper, and, as is so obvious, even to illuminate. But you also have in that photograph an image of what the world might look like were the torch of human liberty to sputter out, casting civilization into darkness....
History shows that societies with a consistent respect for the sanctity of private property and other economic rights also tend to have relatively intact cultures, along with rising standards of living not just for the wealthy but also for the middle class and the poor.
Everywhere it has really been tried, capitalism has meant creativity, growth, abundance and, most of all, the economic application of the principle that every human being has dignity and should have that dignity respected.
And please don't tell me the free market is a myth simply because it has never existed in a pure form anywhere. Tell that to my grandfather. He came over to America with $35 in his pocket, yet almost all of his thirteen children went on to become middle class. Capitalism, rightly understood and pursued, has lifted untold millions out of abject poverty and allowed them to use skills and talents they would never have discovered, and to build opportunities their grandparents never dreamed were possible. The free economy is a dream worthy of our spiritual imaginations."
As Father Sirico points out in Defending the Free Market, we cannot allow the Left to dismiss and disparage capitalism or they will destroy our free economy and something much more precious: our liberty
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As the campaign heats up, one problem is that we continue to meet lots of different Barack Obamas — to such a degree that we don’t know which, if any, is really president.
I think the president believes that private-equity firms harm the economy and that their CEOs are at best indifferent and sometimes unsympathetic to the struggle of average Americans. I say “I think” because Obama has himself collected millions of dollars from such profit-driven firms, and uses their grandees to raise cash for his reelection. Cynical, hypocritical, or unaware? You decide.
I think the president is in favor of publicly funded campaign financing but against super PACs; but again I say “I think” because Obama renounced the former and embraced the latter. Are Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, and preventive detention constitutional necessities or threats to our security? Some of Obama’s personalities have said they are bad; others apparently believe them to be good.
One Barack Obama crisscrosses the country warning us that a sinister elite has robbed from the common good and must atone for destroying the economy. Another Barry Obama hits the golf links in unapologetically aristocratic fashion and prefers Martha’s Vineyard for his vacation. So I am confused about the evil 1 percent. Obama 1 feels they have shorted the country and must now pay their fair share, while Obama 2 feels they are vital allies in helping the poor by attending his $40,000-a-plate campaign dinners.
Barry Obama respects those who make billions from Berkshire Hathaway, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Facebook, but Barack Obama does not respect those who make billions from oil, farming, and construction. Is Wall Street the source of our national problems or the source of the president’s political salvation? There is an Obama who runs against a prep-schooled mansion-living member of the elite; there is another Obama who was a prep-schooled mansion-living member of the elite.
I thought one Obama swore to us that borrowing $5 trillion was vital — Keynesian pump priming, stimulus, averting 8 percent–plus unemployment, and all that. But now another Obama claims that his serial $1 trillion deficits are proof not of “growth” of the sort that improved GDP and reduced unemployment, but rather of fiscal discipline that stopped reckless Republican spending. So Obama over the last four years brought both austerity that checked wild Bush spending, and also Keynesian growth that snapped us out of the Bush lethargy? Spending is saving? Record deficits are record fiscal restraint? Lots of Obamas keep talking about civility and bringing us together; but lots more Obamas talk about punishing our enemies, emphasizing racial differences, and formally organizing supporters by racial groupings. An angelic Obama lectures about the end of red-state/blue-state divides; a less saintly Obama refers to xenophobic clingers, typical white persons, stereotypers, and arresters of children on their way to ice-cream parlors. I recall that once upon a time Obama derided fossil fuels, bragging that “millions of new green jobs” would accrue from subsidizing wind and solar power and “bankrupting” coal companies, as energy prices would accordingly “skyrocket.” But then once upon another time, Obama bragged that on his watch we are pumping more oil than ever before, apparently because private firms ignored his pleas and drilled despite his efforts to shut down leasing on public lands. So we are to credit Obama for stopping oil leasing on public lands, which forced greater production on private lands, while being impressed that he lost billions subsidizing doomed solar and wind companies? When the government fails to promote new energy, that constitutes success because those outside the government then must do more? Do the various Obamas represent both the good but failed intention and the bad successful one? Unfortunately, the paradoxes involve more than just the usual flipflopping of all politicians. They strike to the heart of who is, and is not, Barack Hussein Obama. The fringe Birthers made outlandish claims for years that Obama was not born in the United States and therefore was not eligible to be president. But suddenly, after nearly four years of his presidency, we discover that for over a decade and a half Obama’s own publicity bio listed him as Kenyan-born. Why and how did this happen — given that authors customarily write their own autobiographies and have annual opportunities to edit them? Did Obama think that to fudge an identity might make his book on a mixed-race heritage more saleable in 1991, and then himself more exotic as a state legislator and senator in the ensuing 16 years — but for some reason not as a presidential candidate? What is real and what is not? The Obama “composite” girlfriend who sort of existed and sort of did not? Was there one Obama named Barry and another who became Barack, one with the middle name Hussein that was taboo to utter in the campaign of 2008 and another with the middle name Hussein that after January 20, 2009, was supposed to resonate in the Muslim world?
One Obama was the constitutional-law professor at the prestigious University of Chicago; another was a part-time lecturer who never published and was rarely seen or heard at the law school. One Obama was a brilliant Harvard Law Review editor; another never wrote an article. One Obama had the highest IQ of any entering president and was indeed the smartest man we ever elected commander-in-chief; another Obama proved it by not releasing his college transcripts. One Obama is the fittest and most energetic of recent presidents; another Obama is the most secretive and reluctant about proving it through the customary releasing of medical records.
To be fair, Barack Obama wrote a memoir explaining how he had no identity, given the absence of his father, the serial trips of his mother, and his need not to be biracial, but sometimes black, sometimes white, in the manner that he had to be and not to be part of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Chicago community, and to vote present in the Illinois state legislature in order to be for and against what you must be for and against. Dr. Barack and Mr. Obama can both dutifully attend worship services “every Sunday” at Trinity United Church of Christ and emulate the pastor’s writing and speaking — and yet only occasionally drop in, to get married and to hear sonorous platitudes about self-help and healing.
Is Obama just the usual chameleon politician? Or is Obama emblematic of postmodern America, where there is no truth, but, like an Elizabeth Warren or a Ward Churchill, we legitimately are who we declare we are — and then again are not what we are when we choose not to be? Or is Barack Obama not a metaphor for much of anything other than the fact that it is harder to be president of the United States than to be at Harvard or Chicago Law School, the Illinois legislature or the U.S. Senate, where everyone declared that you did everything by doing not much at all?
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NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institutionand the author most recently of The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom
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