Here’s one of those videos that proves that your memory is spot on — back in the day, everybody was really, really young.
You will see a 25-year-old Paul Ryan, early in his career as a, well, career politician, appearing on C-SPAN as legislative aide to then-Rep. Sam Brownback.
This is the sort of programming that people are talking about when they make fun of C-SPAN. If the date had been a decade or so earlier, I would have sworn all three of these kids — Ryan, the Democrat, and the moderator — were on Quaaludes. It’s like a contest to see which one can make the other two fall asleep first.
Of course, this is probably as excited as young Paul Ryan ever got, since the topics were the budget, Medicare and Medicaid. It’s… eerie to see him and these other two kids, dressed up like Daddy and looking and sounding every bit like participants in student government. I keep expecting the next topic to be the frat that’s on double-secret probation. Except that it never gets that interesting.
My favorite parts? When Master Ryan predicts Medicare will be “bankrupt” by 2001, and when he mentions a news story by “Knight Ridder,” which still existed then.
There will always be those who perceive violence in racial terms, from whites who are angrily convinced that the media underplay what they perceive as an epidemic of black-on-white violence to blacks who immediately call a protest rally when a Trayvon Martin is killed by a man with light complexion.
Bureau of Justice Statistics data show that from 1976 to 2005, white victims were killed by white defendants 86% of the time and black victims were killed by blacks 94% of the time.
Then there is the matter of who is dying. Although the U.S. murder rate has been dropping for years, an analysis of homicide data by The Wall Street Journal found that the number of black male victims increased more than 10%, to 5,942 in 2010 from 5,307 in 2000.
Overall, more than half the nation’s homicide victims are African-American, though blacks make up only 13% of the population. Of those black murder victims, 85% were men, mostly young men…
The carnage is rendered more tragic, although not in the Greek sense, by the fact that most killings are over “nonsense,” as Hillar Moore, the district attorney for East Baton Rouge Parish, put it in the above-referenced story.
I wasn’t familiar with Newsday columnist Lane Filler. Maybe The State runs him all the time, and I never noticed before. But when my friends there ran him yesterday, I found a good reason why in the 7th graf:
And Romney dodged the splashy picks that could have backfired like a 1986 Yugo: South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who, honestly, makes Sarah Palin look presidential, and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a smart guy who is, unfortunately, best known for a State of the Union rebuttal in 2009 that would have garnered last place at a grade school Optimist Club speaking contest.
It’s nice to see someone outside SC picking up on the obvious. This guy needs to ditch Newsday and head down to Washington. I don’t think they’ve gotten the word there yet.
I had to groan when I saw the headline saying that the Obama campaign was accusing political opponents of using “Swift Boat tactics.” That’s because, not having been in a coma the past eight years, I know that when Democrats say those words, they’re not referring to the use of light watercraft to fight the Viet Cong in the Mekong Delta. If only they were.
Instead, as we all know full well, they’re invoking charges brought by a group called “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” which raised questions about John Kerry’s war service. Democrats to this day so deeply resent what that group did that they have turned “Swift Boat” into a verb, one that refers to actions they regard as mean, nasty, unethical, uncalled-for and generally beyond the pale.
I am unable to agree with Democrats on this because, well, that group raised questions I was wondering about myself (such as, where are the scars from those wounds that sent him home?). But as a nonveteran, I felt I had no moral standing to raise them. I mean, maybe he did get to go home quicker than other veterans, but he was still there longer than I was.
So I initially sort of appreciated veterans publicly asking those questions, no matter with whom they were affiliated. But in the end, that discussion got into a lot of petty back-and-forth accusations about exactly what happened when and who did what to whom, and the whole thing wasn’t really helpful, and just left a general sour taste behind. And I’d just as soon not have such things front-and-center in a presidential election.
But I don’t see it the way Democrats do. So I groaned when I saw the words.
But then I read on, and saw what elicited the phrase.
The Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund seems to exist primarily to call into question, as we head into the home stretch of the election, any credit the President might received for killing Osama bin Laden. (That is far from the only question it raises, but that’s the one with the emotional punch.) And that is just beyond cheesy. It’s too petty for words.
This is nursery-school playground-taunt territory. Clearly, whoever was president at the time this happened gets a certain amount of credit for what happens on his watch — just as he gets the blame when it goes wrong. Jimmy Carter didn’t make that Iran rescue mission fail, but he certainly took the rap for it.
Mr. President, you did not kill Osama bin Laden, America did. The work that the American military has done killed Osama bin Laden. You did not.
It’s easy to believe, in the moment he says that (at 6:55 into the above video), that this guy has been a Tea Party spokesman. He evinces that certain disdain-that-dare-not-speak-its-name that TPers seem to reserve entirely for this particular president.
But aside from the tone — I mean, come on. Nobody in the country is stupid enough to think the president personally suited up, went along on the mission and shot bin Laden himself, and no one in the country has tried for a second to make anyone think that. The simplest voter in the country would laugh at the proposition. So in what way do you suppose that the president is in any way trying to take anything away from the super-soldiers who carried out this amazing raid? Perhaps the most laudable thing the president is congratulated for having done was choosing to send in the SEALs as opposed to copping out with a bombing raid. And if you don’t think it took political courage to make that decision, you don’t know anything about politics or special ops, whatever your resume says.
I go further than that. My initial reaction was that hey, that Obama is a lucky guy to have been in charge on this particular watch. But as I learned more and more about the decision-making process that preceded the operation, I saw multiple points at which the wrong decisions could have been made, and POTUS made the right calls, even when very experienced smart people in his administration were doubting that was the way to go.
The bin Laden operation, furthermore, fits within an overall pattern that had distinguished the Obama administration well before that night in Abbottabad — a sharp increase in aggressively pursuing our nation’s enemies, in Pakistan and wherever else they hide.
Of course, the fig leaf this group is offering for its pettiness is that it is objecting to the very fact that I know as much about the long-term operation as I do. It’s accusing this administration of leaking government secrets for the purpose of its own political aggrandizement. (Which presents an interesting contradiction: If the administration is leaking actual, true intel, and that information shows the president in a good light, then how do you say the president doesn’t deserve credit for what happened?)
That’s a serious charge. I’ve seen no evidence that national security has in any way been compromised in this instance — but of course, I don’t have enough access to classified information to know for sure.
But I do know this: As I mentioned above, this president has been far more aggressive than any recent predecessor in using deadly force to take out terrorists, making George W. Bush look almost timid by comparison. While I have applauded the president for this, I acknowledge such an unprecedented pattern of aggression calls, in a liberal democracy, for a certain amount of sunshine. We need to know, at least in general, about the way the president makes decisions.
By the way, I’m not outraged at the parties who appear in this group’s video, which is the centerpiece of the campaign. I don’t doubt their sincerity. There is a fundamental cognitive disconnect between people who devote their lives to serving their country in the more sensitive parts of our national security apparatus, and people who are elected and directly accountable to the voters of this country. The national security types live by operational security, and have a tendency to see any kind of public disclosure of what they do as a close cousin to treason, rather than the exercise of political accountability. Political figures can indeed go too far in the service of self-interest. But even legitimate disclosure, the kind of thing a political leader should disclose, will not be acceptable to people who, just as legitimately, define their success in large part by their ability to keep secrets.
My beef is with the people who put this piece of emotionally-charged propaganda together, and released it at such a moment. The release of this video, at this time, would make the charges in the video itself about the president’s timing in announcing bin Laden’s death rather laughable. Except, you know, there’s nothing funny about it. (And I don’t even quite follow the logic that it was somehow politically advantageous to the president to announce the success of the operation immediately. If he’d done it a week later, as they suggest, he’d have gotten just as big a political boost.)
The amount of information that is appropriate for keeping a president accountable will always be debatable, and we should engage in it energetically, to the extent we can do so without damaging the very security we seek to protect (ah, there’s the ironic rub).
Security officials and members of both parties in Congress have sharply criticized leaks about classified operations under Mr. Obama, and some Republicans have complained about news briefings on the Bin Laden raid and assistance to filmmakers making a movie about the operation.
The next sentence reminds us of something else the group pointedly ignores:
But the administration has also overseen an unprecedented number of prosecutions for press disclosures, and in June, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. directed two United States attorneys to investigate leaks discussed in the Opsec video.
The petty way this group has gone about conducting its political offensive makes me less inclined to take it on faith that they know things that I do, and those things make the president look bad.
Perhaps the verb for this, going forward, should be “Opsecing.” No, that doesn’t look right. “Opsecking?” Nah. Still needs work…
On Fox News, commenting on Joe Biden’s Danville “Put Y’all Back in Chains” gaffe, Sarah Palin observed: “If that’s not the nail in the coffin, really, the strategists there in the Obama campaign have got to look at a diplomatic way of replacing Joe Biden on the ticket with Hillary.”
It is seldom that you get such good quotes from the pot about the color of the kettle.
Then again, you know you’ve made a gaffe when Sarah Palin is suggesting you might have chosen your words more judiciously. That’s like Charlie Sheen suggesting you might have a substance problem.
But perhaps we should cut her some slack. Vice presidential candidates whose comments prompt everyone in the vicinity to wince uncontrollably for several minutes is a subject no one knows better than Palin. Maybe she and Biden were better matched than we thought.
After the selection of Paul Ryan to fill the VP slot on the ticket (prompting such exciting merchandise as this button!), it is hard not to think back to August 2008, when everyone was cheering Palin as a game-changer. And she was a game-changer, in the sense that Godzilla is a city-changer. Say what you will about Paul Ryan and the potential risks of having to engage in a Serious Mature Debate of his policies, everyone admits one thing about him: He’s no Sarah Palin. If anyone sets off the trademark “Mayday! Mayday! The Veep’s Saying Something” alarm this year, it’s Biden.
Well, nothing, strictly speaking. There’s no direct connection, anyway. But bear with me…
Some time ago, as you’ll recall, I expressed my pleasure when Rep. Ryan used the word “subsidiarity,” a favorite concept of mine arising from Catholic social teaching, coupled with my dismay at the odd way he used it. The word (to me) refers to the principle that in any system — governmental, economic, what have you — functions should be left to the smallest, most local unit that can competently perform them, with larger entities only performing the functions that can’t be carried out by the smaller units. Applied to government, that means the federal government should only perform those functions that can’t be effectively carried out at the state or local level, and so forth. It’s sort of related to what was for a time popularly called “devolution,” but with differences.
But fellow Catholic Ryan startled me by interpreting the principle as meaning functions should be performed by private entities other than public ones — which is convenient for him politically, but not the way I’ve understood it.
I’m not the only one who sees Ryan’s use of the term as misleading, if not outright wrong. I ran across this a couple of days back. Carrying it further, here’s a piece further explaining the problems with “small-government” libertarians trying to claim subsidiarity as their own. For one thing, it points out, “Subsidiarity is a communitarian philosophy.” Well, yeah.
But there there are those, including some Catholic clergy, who would defend the Ryan interpretation of subsidiarity. I was led to this knowledge by Paulie Walnuts.
I’m a big fan of the Internet Movie Database. I have the app on my iPhone, and can’t watch a movie on television without constantly turning to it to answer such questions as “Who’s that actress?” or “What else has she been in?” or “Was this directed by…?” Sometimes I go from there to Wikipedia for elaboration.
I read on, and was told that there’s a very interesting reason why he is so convincing as this sort of character:
Before turning to acting, Sirico was reportedly a fast-rising mob associate of the Colombo crime family, serving under Carmine “Junior” Persico, and had been arrested 28 times. There is a Sopranos reference to this fact when Paulie says, “I lived through the seventies by the skin of my nuts when the Colombos were goin’ at it.”[3] In 1967, he was sent to prison for robbing a Brooklyn after-hours club, but was released after serving thirteen months. In 1971, he pled guilty to felonyweaponspossession and was sentenced to an “indeterminate” prison term of up to four years, of which Sirico ended up serving 20 months. In an interview in Cigar Aficionado magazine, Sirico said that during his imprisonment, he was visited by an acting troupe composed of ex-cons, which inspired him to give acting a try.[4] According to a court transcript, at the time of his sentencing, he also had pending charges for drug possession.[5] Sirico appeared in a 1989 documentary about life, The Big Bang by James Toback, in which he discussed his earlier life.
Father Sirico
Interesting, but what does it have to do with the definition of “subsidiarity?” Well, continuing to read the “Background and Career” section, we see that “His brother, Robert Sirico, is a Catholic priest and co-founder of the free-market Acton Institute.”
Rule of Law and the Subsidiary Role of Government – The government’s primary responsibility is to promote the common good, that is, to maintain the rule of law, and to preserve basic duties and rights. The government’s role is not to usurp free actions, but to minimize those conflicts that may arise when the free actions of persons and social institutions result in competing interests. The state should exercise this responsibility according to the principle of subsidiarity. This principle has two components. First, jurisdictionally broader institutions must refrain from usurping the proper functions that should be performed by the person and institutions more immediate to him. Second, jurisdictionally broader institutions should assist individual persons and institutions more immediate to the person only when the latter cannot fulfill their proper functions.
On their face, I wouldn’t argue with those assertions, although it’s odd that subsidiarity is being described in terms of an individual’s relationship to the state, rather than between larger and smaller governmental entities. Quite Ryanesque. Here’s how subsidiarity is further interpreted by a writer on that site:
One of the key principles of Catholic social thought is known as the principle of subsidiarity. This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In other words, any activity which can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State.
This is why Pope John Paul II took the “social assistance state” to task in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus. The Pontiff wrote that the Welfare State was contradicting the principle of subsidiarity by intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility. This “leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending.”
In spite of this clear warning, the United States Catholic Bishops remain staunch defenders of a statist approach to social problems. They have publicly criticized recent congressional efforts to reform the welfare system by decentralizing it and removing its perverse incentives. Their opposition to the Clinton Administration’s health care plan was based solely upon its inclusion of abortion funding. They had no fundamental objection to a takeover of the health care industry by the federal government…
So I read that, and I thought, “Where have I seen subsidiarity used that way?” Which brought me to the man of the hour. Paul Ryan would no doubt feel very comfortable with the ideas espoused by “Paulie’s” brother, or at least by the organization he heads. But that’s the only thing they have in common, that I know of. If you were hoping for something more, I’m sorry.
We think of Paul Ryan as an über-libertarian on fiscal issues and as a social conservative. What I didn’t know anything about until this morning was how he stood on the most urgent questions a commander in chief faces — which is pretty critical in the event that Romney is elected, and something happens to him.
One expected the opinion writers of The Wall Street Journal to be hugging themselves with pleasure over Ryan’s fiscal notions. But today, Bret Stephens writes in the Journal about a speech Ryan gave to the Alexander Hamilton Society last year in which he expressed himself on foreign policy. Here’s the speech, and here’s the column. An excerpt from the latter:
Here, in CliffsNotes form, is what the speech tells us about Mr. Ryan. First, that he’s an internationalist of the old school; in another day, he would have sat comfortably in the cabinets of Harry Truman, Jack Kennedy or Ronald Reagan. Also, that he believes in free trade, a strong defense, engagement with our allies—and expectations of them. Also, that he wants America to stay and win in Afghanistan. Furthermore, that he supports the “arduous task of building free societies,” even as he harbored early doubts the Arab Spring was the vehicle for building free societies.
It tells us also that Mr. Ryan has an astute understanding of the fundamental challenge of China. “The key question for American policy makers,” he said, “is whether we are competing with China for leadership of the international system or against them over the fundamental nature of that system.”
Within the speech itself, perhaps the most cogent observation is that the United States doesn’t have the realistic option of fading as a world power the way Britain did, and the way so many on the left and right would like it to do:
Unlike Britain, which handed leadership to a power that shared its fundamental values, today’s most dynamic and growing powers do not embrace the basic principles that should be at the core of the international system.
Now, that’s the sort of thing I agree with. What I don’t agree with is that we have to do all the things Ryan wants to do domestically in order to afford the kind of global position that we can’t afford to surrender. Which takes us into all sorts of other debates that I’m sure we’ll get into before the election…
Anyway, that’s where he loses me. What I didn’t get from the column, and did get from the speech itself, is that for Ryan, the need to maintain U.S. responsibilities in the world is yet another excuse for doing what he wants us to do on the homefront. Of this, I am unconvinced. I agree we have to get our fiscal house in order. I don’t necessarily believe his ideas are the way to do it. Bottom line, we get back to where we started — in his case, his view of America’s role in the world is that of an über-libertarian on fiscal issues…
Stephens is less divided in his admiration. In part, he admires Ryan for setting out clear ideas without any of the softened edges with which presidents must speak, giving little consideration to the fact that House members with no diplomatic responsibility are far freer to speak frankly on such matters.
The truth is, I have generally agreed with the actual actions Mr. Obama has taken as commander in chief (although my views on Afghanistan more closely track Ryan’s). And those speak louder than words, however stirring.
For instance, Stephens likes the way Ryan talks tougher about the Chinese. But it is Barack Obama who has shifted future defense planning toward the Pacific Rim with China in mind, and recently decided to send Marines to Australia in keeping with that strategy.
In any case, this is the beginning of a learning process about Ryan. Although I’m already inclined to agree with Stephens that, in terms of ideas at least, the GOP ticket seems upside-down.
Yes, for a presidential candidate who leaves everyone somewhere between cold and lukewarm, Paul Ryan is the perfect running mate: Someone beloved by both the Tea Party and the Club for Growth.
For those of you color-blind in that range, Nikki Haley is a Tea Party Republican, while Mark Sanford is a Club for Growth Republican. Nikki makes hearts go pitter-pat at snake flag rallies; Sanford sent shivers of pleasure down the spines of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. The shorthand distinction: One is populist, the other not.
By contrast, the least helpful, indeed most idiotic, thing I’ve seen on the Ryan selection was in the HuffPost: “David Axelrod: Paul Ryan Pick Evokes Memories Of Sarah Palin.”
That headline was a bit misleading. To his credit, all Axelrod was saying was that then, too, one saw excitement among the base. But what Axelrod is missing, or intentionally underplaying, is the breadth of Ryan’s appeal. Not just Tea Party — Club for Growth, too.
Of course, no one in his right mind would suggest Palin and Ryan live anywhere near each other on any measurement of intelligence or gravitas. The one famous for “I can see Russia from my house!” basically doesn’t live on the same intellectual planet as the one current officeholder in American who has ever, to my knowledge, used the word “subsidiarity” in a sentence — for which I honor him, even though his emphasis in using the word would not have been mine.
With Ryan, there’s a bonus, from Romney’s perspective: He gets the cultural conservatives, too, which is a whole other part of the base that casual observers sometimes erroneously lump in with the others. Since Romney isn’t beloved of any of these groups, Ryan brings much that he needs.
This morning, the Palmetto Family Council got so overexcited that it Tweeted this:
We now have a solid pro-life ticket for President… Mitt Romney Picks Pro-Life Rep. Paul Ryan as VP Running Mate…http://fb.me/DVLjuPF0
Um… are you sure about that folks? I mean let’s see… this is Monday… Is Romney pro-life on Mondays?
The Democrats seem a bit shaken up as well. I suspect that, however much they may trash the Ryan selection publicly, they know he’s about as good a pick as Romney could have made. The reasons they give to think otherwise are weak. Politico reported this morning that “On his three-day bus tour, Obama will hit Paul Ryan as a leader of GOP opposition to the farm bill…” To which my reaction was, um, isn’t that kind of a good thing?
The only gamble is, how well does Ryan play among us swing voters? That remains to be seen. But I suspect he’ll do as well on that score as anyone else Romney could have chosen that his party would have accepted.
I’ve got all these blog posts I’ve been meaning to write for weeks, and I need to catch up. Here’s one…
Way, way back on July 17, I attended an event over at the local AARP headquarters. It was a policy discussion of Social Security. The format was that we watched a couple of experts debate what to do about SS on a video feed, and then discussed it amongst ourselves. It’s been so long I forget who all was there, but some of them were Kester Freeman, former head of Palmetto Health; Peggy Hewlett, dean of the nursing school at USC; Mac Bennett, head of the local United Way; John Ruoff of The Ruoff Group; and Mary Kessler, director of the Capital Senior Center. There were about six others.
Our discussion was moderated by Jonathan Peterson, author of Social Security for Dummies. Really. I liked that.
The “experts” on the video feed were David John of The Heritage Foundation and Virginia Reno of the National Academy of Social Insurance. They spoke from predictably left and right perspectives. Guess which was which.
We were given a lot of data for coming up with our own solutions. I sort of knew what I thought we should do, but the data were helpful in confirming me in my opinion.
You can review some of the data at this website — although in a quick scan of what’s available there, I didn’t find it quite as helpful as the workbook we had at our session, which spelled out what each policy proposal would do. You might have fun, though, programming your own Social Security solution.
What’s my solution? It’s so easy, it’s pathetic that Washington seems so helpless on this issue:
Eliminate the cap on the payroll tax. That would fill 86 percent of the funding gap in the program. As Peterson said when I said this, it’s the closest thing to a “silver bullet,” if you can overcome the objections to doing it.
Raise the full retirement age to whatever you have to raise it to to get the other 14 percent. Raising it incrementally to 68 by 2028, and you fill 18 percent. So you’d have money left over. Ta-dahhh!
These two steps are no-brainers. It’s ridiculous that there’s a cap to start with, and the full retirement age should reflect the realities of modern longevity.
I’ve heard objections to eliminating the cap. All of them are ridiculous. This “tax increase,” as opponents call it, is nothing more than simply seeing to it that everyone pays the same tax all year — which is what 94 percent of the working population does already.
The cap right now is $110,100. Only 6 percent of the country earns more than that. Everyone below the line pays the 6.2 percent tax all year. People who make more get to a point in the year when they get a nice tax break — in fact, they no longer pay at all the tax everyone else keeps paying. And it is nice. I can tell you, as someone who used to get that break (starting at a time when the cap was much lower than it is now). It was nice to get a few hundred extra bucks just before Christmas. But if you’d taken it away from me, I wouldn’t have complained, because I thought it absurd that I got it. I certainly didn’t need it. I hadn’t in any way earned a special break that people who made less money didn’t get. It was regressive as hell, and I knew it.
What’s the worst thing that someone losing the cap would suffer? He’d have to pay the same tax he paid the rest of the year, only all of the year. He’d be fine. And no, it wouldn’t be a disincentive to earn more — it would still only be 6.2 cents of every dollar.
Another stupid objection: Lifting the cap would mean millionaires could retire on $150,000 a year. So? Big deal. It would fix the system, and we ought to do it now.
I could present objections to raising the retirement age and knock them down, too, but I’d rather move on to your comments.
FYI, next week AARP has invited me to another one of these discussions. This one is about Medicare…
The first look at featured speakers [for the Republican National Convention in Tampa] also includes South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez.
The keynote speaker and others will be named closer to the Aug. 27-30 event, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus said in announcing the headliners, whom he called “some of our party’s brightest stars, who have governed and led effectively and admirably in their respective roles.”
If those are the criteria, why is South Carolina’s governor on the list? Has this Priebus person paid any attention at all to our state in the last year and a half? Probably not. Stupid question, I suppose…
But, take heart. The piece goes on to suggest, sensibly enough, that being on this list means one is not on the list of vice presidential possibilities:
Romney has not named his vice presidential running mate, though that person will get a prime-time speaking slot. Noticeably absent from the headliner list are several VP contenders: former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.
The VP decision is expected any time now, perhaps as soon as this week when Romney kicks off a multistate bus tour….
Let’s certainly hope that’s the case (although think about it — just how hard would it be to change the speaking schedule after the veep selection is made? the depressing answer is, not hard at all). But with political parties, one never knows. The last thing we should expect from them is reasonable behavior.
As you know, one of the banes of my existence is the far-too-large group of people in our country who HATE government, and do nothing but bad-mouth it.
I take it personally, as an American. It offends my patriotism, because the great glory of this country is our system of government. It’s not free enterprise, as wonderful as that is and much as that goes hand-in-hand with, and is encouraged and supported by, our system. It’s not the land, as beautiful and varied and bountiful as that is. It’s not the people qua any identifiable group of people, in any kind of racial or cultural or nationalistic sense (you can’t identify an American with a DNA test, the way you can a person of Japanese heritage, for instance), because our people come from every other country on Earth — which really is the one greatest thing about the American people — we are universal, and represent the aspirations of all peoples, the world over.
No, it’s the system that we founded here, which made everything work together — the free economy, the sprawling land, the aspiring people from everywhere, seeking something better. It’s self-government, on the grand scale. It’s representative democracy; it’s that we are the first and still foremost example of liberal democracy on the planet. It’s the Constitution, federalism, checks and balances, separation of powers, the Bill of Rights, free elections.
It’s one thing for a subject of an absolute, medieval monarch to hate government, as a thing that takes from him and oppresses him, a thing into which he has no input, and over which he exercises no control. Or a citizen in a totalitarian dictatorship.
But to “hate government” in this country is to hate ourselves and the wonderful thing we have wrought.
Yeah, I know — the government haters will say that it’s just the particular size of the government at a given moment (which is always now) that they hate, or the policies under the present officeholders, and that they love, they adore, their country.
Yeah, well… occasionally their habits of thought betray those protestations.
I saw it today on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal. It went with a run-of-the-mill, boilerplate piece of the sort that you read all of the time in the Journal. It was headlined, “What Obama Didn’t Learn From the 1990s,” and the subhed elaborated, “The economic growth of the 1950s, the ’60s and the Clinton years had many causes. But one of them wasn’t high marginal tax rates.”
Not a thing wrong with that piece. I disagreed with some of it, but thought it made some good points. In any case, that’s what we’re supposed to do as Americans — argue energetically for this policy and against that one. That’s one of the rights, even obligations, guaranteed us under the American system. (At this point the libertarian ideologues will jump in and say these rights are endowed by our creator and not the gift of a government, and they’d be right, rhetorically speaking. But good luck exercising those rights, here or in most of the rest of the world where such rights are enjoyed, if not for the system our Founders had the wisdom to set up.)
The problem was with the artwork that went with the piece.
It’s one of those moments when you wonder whether any of the editors involved in producing that piece and putting it on the page, and proofing it, and putting it on the website, stopped at any point to think to themselves, Wait a minute: We’re portraying Uncle Sam as a BAD guy. A fat, evil bully, smirking with malice as he takes away the money of a good American (here portrayed as a white guy in a business suit — no doubt one of the “successful investors and risk-takers” mentioned in the column). Did that not occur to anyone, and did he or she not get a sinking feeling? (Sort of the way the guy portraying a Nazi in this comedy skit suddenly realized he had a skull on his cap, and wondered, “Are we the baddies?”)
Yeah, I know — the illustrator was thinking of Uncle Sam as representing the “government,” which in the ideology that predominates on that editorial board is an entity that does nothing but take, and get in the way.
But while Uncle Sam is defined by Wikipedia as “the American government,” the part that speaks to me most is American. And he’s more that just the government. The name comes from U.S., which is the United States. Uncle Sam is US, our country. He’s always been understood that way. Those recruiting posters wouldn’t have been very powerful if they had simply been understood as some mean ol’ government agency wants you — he stood then, and stands now, for our country.
If you want to know why both sides keep the Culture fires stoked, Joe Wilson makes it clear in this release:
Liberals want to control private industry. Let’s take only the most recent events that have occurred as examples.
First, yesterday was Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day. Why? Because liberals are attacking a private company for using its funds to support the traditional family.
Millions of Americans believe in the traditional family, but Americans also believe in free speech. Chick-fil-A can and should be able to support Christian organizations if it chooses, but liberals won’t be happy until all American businesses toe their liberal line.
Then, we have President Obama telling American business owners that they didn’t build their businesses. Why? Because he wants to tax businesses even more than current tax rates to supply his overspending.
Businesses and all Americans benefit from infrastructure and education. But education and infrastructure do not exist without the taxes from our businesses and our citizens either. Instead of tearing down the ideals of the free market, we should be encouraging entrepreneurs and other business owners to hire, grow, expand, and innovate. Because when businesses grow, our roads, our bridges, our students, and all Americans benefit.
So what are liberals telling us? Don’t stand up for what you believe in. Don’t try to take credit for your hard work. That’s apparently the American value system that liberals want, but I reject.
It’s all about separating you from your money. It’s difficult for me to believe that anyone in this universe is foolish enough to think that the way to show support for Chick-fil-A is to send money to Joe Wilson, but apparently this sort of thing works, because both sides keep doing it.
At first, I thought this was the influence of longtime dairyman and Senate Majority Leader Harvey Peeler, since it came from his Senate Republican Caucus. I remember when Harvey used to pass out cow-shaped erasers over at the State House. (Or was that his brother Bob? No, I believe it was Harvey.)
Now, I see it’s something else. Sigh. The Kultukampf does go on, doesn’t it?
Dang. I heard something about this flap on the radio the other day, and it reminded me of something else entirely that I wanted to share here on the blog, and now I can’t remember what it was.
Would Total Information Awareness have stopped James Eagan Holmes?
You perhaps remember the fuss. That program by the Defense Department was curtailed when the Senate voted to revoke funding amid a privacy furor in 2003. The project had been aimed partly at automatically collecting vast amounts of data and looking for patterns detectable only by computers.
It was originated by Adm. John Poindexter—yes, the same one prosecuted in the Reagan-era Iran-Contra scandal—who said the key to stopping terrorism was “transaction” data. For terrorists to carry out attacks, he explained in a 2002 speech, “their people must engage in transactions and they will leave signatures in this information space.”
The Colorado shooter Mr. Holmes dropped out of school via email. He tried to join a shooting range with phone calls and emails going back and forth. He bought weapons and bomb-making equipment. He placed orders at various websites for a large quantity of ammunition. Aside from privacy considerations, is there anything in principle to stop government computers, assuming they have access to the data, from algorithmically detecting the patterns of a mass shooting in the planning stages?…
This not only evokes 1984, but the department of “pre-crime” envisioned in “Minority Report.” Which should send all sorts of shivers down the sensitive spines of libertarians.
But a legitimate question is being posed here. Since such data is being mined, should not someone be on the lookout for transactional patterns such as those Holmes engaged in? Guy suddenly isolates himself from society (a step leading to what I call the Raskolnikov syndrome), buys several rapid-fire weapons and lots and lots of ammunition? If it’s possible for such patterns to raise red flags, then shouldn’t it, if it can prevent the deaths of innocents?
In passing on this question, I’m not thinking in terms of having the cops bust down doors and file charges against people for having raised red flags. But I do think it might be worthwhile to have a chat with someone displaying such signs, to ascertain what is going on — or perhaps making the people in that person’s life aware of what’s happening, to empower them to intervene if they see fit. That could go a long way toward snapping some potential killers out of their trip down the rabbit hole.
As the columnist asks of the NSA: “Did it, or could it have, picked up on Mr. Holmes’s activities?” And if not, why not? And if it did, what should it have done?
The truth is, the election has already been decided in perhaps as many as 44 states, with the final result coming down to the half-dozen states that remain: Virginia and Florida on the Atlantic Coast, Ohio and Iowa in the Midwest, and New Mexico and Colorado in the Southwest.
But of course not everyone in those closely divided states will make an electoral difference. We can almost guarantee that 48 percent of each state’s voters will go for Obama, and another 48 percent will decide for Romney. And so the whole shootin’ match comes down to around 4 percent of the voters in six states.
I did the math so you won’t have to. Four percent of the presidential vote in Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico, and Colorado is 916,643 people. That’s it. The American president will be selected by fewer than half the number of people who paid to get into a Houston Astros home game last year—and my beloved Astros sucked last year; they were the worst team in baseball. Put another way, there are about as many people in San Jose as there are swing voters who will decide this election. That’s not even as many people as attended Puerto Rican cockfights in the past year—-although there are obvious similarities.
And, oh, the lengths we will go to reach those magical 916,643. The political parties, the campaigns, the super PACs (one of which, the pro-Obama Priorities USA Action, I advise), will spend in excess of $2 billion—mostly just to reach those precious few. That works out to $2,181.87 per voter—or as Mitt Romney might call it, pocket change…
There’s nothing wrong with the election being decided by we few, we unhappy few, swing voters. What’s awful is that your favorite swing voter, founder of the UnParty himself, yours truly, is not among those whose vote counts. On account of how, during my lifetime, the overwhelming majority of my fellow South Carolinians have done some extreme swinging of their own, switching from never considering voting for a Republican to never considering voting for a Democrat.
Which is a shame. Since we have now totally blown our status as the state that picks the eventual nominees (the Republican ones, anyway) by that Gingrich snit back in January, it would be really nice if the nation had to hold its breath to see which way we choose to go.
Inglis blowing bubbles during his speech. Yes, he was making a point, but it would take too many words to explain it here. You had to be there.
Don’t know whether you read Bob Inglis’ op-ed piece in The State the other day or not. An excerpt:
There is important work to be done in order to realize the full potential of South Carolina’s advanced-energy sector. We need less government and more free enterprise. Some clean-energy technologies are more cost-effective than fossil fuels, and others are not there yet. But even the most cost-effective clean fuels still routinely lose out to more expensive fossil fuels. Why? Because the energy market is not a free market.
Speaking at the Clean Energy Summit is timely for me because, a few days ago, I launched the Energy and Enterprise Initiative, a national public-engagement campaign to promote conservative solutions to America’s energy challenges. One of our first efforts will be to convene forums around the country, much like the summit, that bring together economists, national-security experts, climate scientists and interested citizens to explore the power of free enterprise to solve our nation’s energy challenges. We’re going to be saying that, given a “true cost” comparison, free enterprise can deliver muscular solutions to our energy and climate challenges — solutions far better than clumsy government mandates and fickle tax incentives…
In case you wonder how Inglis gets to being an environmentalist from the perch of a dyed-in-the-wool conservative (which shouldn’t be puzzling — conservatives should by their nature want to conserve the environment, if words have meaning), here’s an example of how it works for him: The problem now, he explained, is that different sources of energy don’t compete on an even, market-driven playing field. For instance, the true cost of gasoline is hidden. If the full costs of our military operations in the Mideast were attached directly to the price of gasoline (as we in the Energy Party think it should be), “we’d beat a path to the Prius dealership.”
First, I’d like to know whether this Penn State thing is over yet. Oh, I know it will never be over in terms of what happened to the victims of that pervert coach. May God ease their pain. I just want to know whether, now that he has been duly convicted, the bulletins will stop coming on my iPhone, and interrupting me as though war had been declared, as though what happens or doesn’t happen to a college football program in a whole other part of the country from me were of earth-shattering importance. Which it isn’t. I think it reached the height of absurdity on Saturday (or was it Sunday?) when I was awakened (I like to sleep late on weekends) by bulletins telling me that this Joe Paterno person’s statue was being taken down. Really. A statue.
As of this moment, there are four recent bulletins still available on my phone from The New York Times reaching back nine days. Two of them are about Penn State (one is about the Colorado shootings, the other about the new Yahoo CEO). I still have five WLTX bulletins, going back about two days (WLTX has a low “bulletin” threshold) . Two are about Penn State, one of them being about said statue. Another is also about college football, telling me that former Gamecock coach Jim Carlen has died. The other two are actually about things that people in the community might need to know about urgently — the standoff in Five Points on Saturday.
Now, another question…
The most recent bulletins to pester me had to do with this morning’s decision by the NCAA as to how it would punish Penn State, in the wake of last week’s finding of a long-term coverup.
First, what the NCAA did not do: It did not close down the football program. If you want to say the program was rotten because of the cover-up, it seems that would be a logical thing to do. But they didn’t. Whatever.
But what grabbed my attention was among the steps taken against the program was that “all victories from 1998-2011 have been vacated,” to which I went, “Huh?”
Excuse me: Did those players win those games or didn’t they? If they won them, they won them. If they didn’t win them, they didn’t win them. Period.
I Tweeted that out early today, and one reader immediately responded to agree with me. But others started arguing. Beth Padgett, editorial page editor of The Greenville News, explained, “Games won Wins don’t count,” which may make sense to football fans, but not to me. I replied, “You’ve lost me. Probably because I’m not fan, don’t understand the mystique. Facts are facts. Wins are wins. Not that I care…”
Garrett Epps responded to my assertion that “they either WON those football games or DIDN’T, regardless of the unrelated, horrible things some coach did,” with a one-word question: “unrelated?”
Absolutely, said I. Over here, some coach did horrible things. Over there, some kids won some games. One fact is not dependent upon to the other. He responded, “Glad we cleared that up. Sanduskywas NOT defensive coordinator for a number of years? i was confused. Thought he was.”
OK, so… is the theory that without this guy, they wouldn’t have won the games? We know that? How? All we know is what happened.
And to me, whether some kids won some games they played in is a fact that has no moral content whatsoever, good or bad. I could not care less who won those games. But I do know absurdity when I see it. And saying they didn’t win games they did win, for whatever purpose, is an absurd lie. We don’t get to say that the North lost the Civil War because (in South Carolina’s estimation, anyway), William Tecumseh Sherman was a terrorist, and Ullyses S. Grant was a drunk. They either won or they didn’t. (And they did. So, you know, time to take down that flag, boys.)
Saying Penn State didn’t win games it did win is like the NCAA deciding to “punish” the program by declaring the players took the field in yellow uniforms instead of blue. It’s just not true.
OK, so, from what little I know about college football, I’m guessing that statement would really hurt Paterno where he lives. If, you know, he lived. But he’s dead. You can’t do anything to hurt him. And as an attempt to do so, this denial of what happened is pretty lame.
I mean, as long as we’re changing history, why not wave the same magic wand and declare that all those kids were not abused by Sandusky? I’ll tell you why not: Because it would be a cruel mockery. Of course they were abused, and that pain will never go away. And it seems extremely unlikely that it would be assuaged in any way by pretending that Paterno’s team didn’t win those games.
After noting that failing to have the U.S. Olympic team’s uniforms made in this country was a serious missed opportunity, Peggy Noonan raises the other problem, which has occurred to me whenever I’ve seen photos of these ridiculous togs:
But that isn’t the biggest problem. That would be the uniforms themselves. They don’t really look all that American. Have you seen them? Do they say “America” to you? Berets with little stripes? Double breasted tuxedo-like jackets with white pants? Funny rounded collars on the shirts? Huge Polo logos? They look like some European bureaucrat’s idea of a secret militia, like Brussels’s idea of a chic new army. They’re like the international community Steven Spielberg lined up to put on the spaceship at the end of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
Americans wear baseball caps, trucker hats, cowboy hats, watch caps, Stetsons, golf caps, even Panama hats and fedoras. They wear jeans and suits and khakis and shorts and workout clothes. The Americans in the now-famous uniform picture look like something out of a Vogue spread where the models arrayed on the yacht look like perfect representatives of the new global elite.
Our athletes aren’t supposed to look like people who’d march under a flag with statues and harps and musical notes. Also, the women’s uniforms make them look like stewardesses from the 777 fleet on Singapore Airlines.
The failure of the uniforms is that they don’t communicate: “Here comes America.”
They communicate: “Chic global Martians coming your way.”
Amen to that, Peggy.
I saw a photo in the WSJ the other day showing the uniforms, and at first I thought sure they were on male fashion models — you know, the kind who are distinguishable from the female models only by slightly larger jaws, with neither gender looking entirely like normal, healthy humans? The effect was heightened by the fact that they were wearing clothing no normal person would wear.
I was shocked to learn they were actual American athletes. I’m still not sure the cutline was right. So maybe it was entirely the uniforms that made them look so unreal.
A note about the perils of being a movie critic in the age of polarized fandom.
I may have saved my life without realizing it by liking “The Dark Knight Rises” sufficiently—or disliking it with sufficient restraint—to have my review categorized as “ripe” rather than “rotten” on Rotten Tomatoes, a popular website that aggregates movie and DVD reviews. For those of us who write about movies to provoke discussion, these reductive categories are awfully silly, but they’re also symptoms of the love/hate, either/or ethos of contemporary discourse. In the realm of the Internet, as well as talk-radio and politics, that discourse has been growing ever more poisonous, and now the poison has contaminated Rotten Tomatoes. Earlier this week the website was forced to shut down its user comments on “The Dark Knight Rises” when negative reviews—officially adjudged “rotten”—by two of my colleagues, Christy Lemire and Marshall Fine, provoked floods of vile responses that included death threats.
Batman movies may be a bit of a special case, what with fanatical fanboys trolling the Internet to root out negative opinions of their supersolemn hero. But the Dark Knight’s acolytes don’t have a monopoly on intolerance of dissent. They’re part of a rising tide that threatens to drown Internet discussion in shrill opinion. The editors of Rotten Tomatoes have the right to excise such clearly intolerable comments, and the responsibility to improve procedures for screening out new ones. Once that’s done, however, the comments function should be fully restored. Free speech for the many shouldn’t fall victim to abuse by the few.
Wow. If the shootings had NOT happened last night, I would simply have agreed with him about the decline of discourse, particularly on the Web.
As things happened, this is particularly startling.
By the way, the way I learned of this horror was particularly unsettling. I mentioned earlier today having trouble sleeping last night, worrying because my daughter was ill in a faraway country. What sleep I got was punctuated by the sound of my iPhone receiving bulletins about the shootings. The first bulletins confused me — how could there have been a shooting at a mall in the wee hours of the morning? It was only later — 5 a.m. or so — that the more complete bulletins mentioned the midnight showing of this film, so that I understood. To the extent that you can understand anything like this.
On the national level, it’s the Republicans touting high unemployment and blaming it on President Obama.
On the state level, it’s the Democrats who eagerly greet each piece of bad employment news, only they blame it on the local Republicans:
Representative Leon Stavrinakis Statement on Spike in SC Jobless Rate
Charleston, SC – South Carolina’s jobless rate rose to 9.4% in June from 9.1% in May, while Charleston County’s unemployment rate rose significantly from 7.9% last month to 8.5% in June. Charleston State Representative Leon Stavrinakis released a statement in response:
“These unemployment numbers are troubling and unacceptable for the Charleston area and the state of South Carolina as a whole. As the nation’s unemployment rate continues to drop or hold steady, South Carolina’s rate is going in the wrong direction and at an alarmingly fast rate. Perhaps Governor Haley should stop her international travels and simply attending every press opportunity she can find so she can actually put real time and work into creating jobs in South Carolina. The last place potential businesses want to relocate is a state led by a Governor who is only interested in being a celebrity, cutting education, and refusing to invest in infrastructure. We can also be sure that Governor Haley’s recent budget attacks on existing South Carolina industry are not helping our ability to attract and recruit jobs to our state. It is time for Governor Haley to quit stalling and present the legislature with a comprehensive jobs plan. If she refuses to give us a plan, I suggest she take a look at the plan I released months ago, which to date she has not indicated she has even taken the time to read.”
###
Funny how things can look so different from Columbia (or Charleston) than they do from Washington.
