Category: Politics

Michele Bachmann and Dominionism Paranoia

Doug Groothuis, The Constructive Curmudgeon, points us to his article, Michele Bachmann and Dominionism Paranoia.  Excerpt:

There is a buzz in the political beehive about the dark dangers of Bachmann's association with "dominionism"—a fundamentalist movement heaven-bent on imposing a hellish theocracy on America. In the August 15 issue of The New Yorker, Ryan Lizza asserts that Bachmann has been ideologically shaped by "exotic" thinkers of the dominionist stripe who pose a threat to our secular political institutions. The piece—and much of the subsequent media reaction—is a calamity of confusion, conflation, and obfuscation.

Leftists are astonishingly bad at threat assessment.  To reverse the scriptural phrase, they will swallow  the imaginary gnat of 'theocracy' while straining at  the all-too-real camel of  Islamo-terrorism.

A Summary of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals

If you want to understand the Left, their tactics, their ruthlessness, and their imperviousness to ethical considerations, then you need to read Alinksy.  Summary here.  You will then understand what is behind the outrageous attacks of leftist scum bags, such as this guy, on conservatives.  They see politics as warfare, and they believe the end justifies the means.

A Note on Political Rhetoric

Is the Social Security system a Ponzi scheme?  Many conservatives so label it.  But obviously it is not a Ponzi scheme.  The intent behind such schemes is fraud.  Not so with the SS system.  If your point is that the SS system as currently configured is unsustainable in the long run, and is to that extent like a Ponzi scheme, then say that.  You will then be saying something that, in my opinion, is true.  But don't say something that is literally and obviously false if you expect to convince fair-minded people.

You may accuse me of not understanding the purpose of political rhetoric.  "The purpose is not to convince thoughtful and fair-minded people; the purpose is to fire up the lazy and largely thoughtless masses.  The purpose is to 'energize the base.'  You naively think that others share your abhorrence of loose and irresponsible talk.  They don't."

Is Obama Smart?

George W. Bush couldn't rub a subject and a verb together and come up with a clean sentence in his mother tongue.  The man lacked verbal facility.  Among many, myself included, verbal facility is a touchstone of intelligence, or rather of one sort of intelligence, verbal intelligence.  Barack Obama has it.  But there is more to intelligence than the ability to sling words while avoiding syntactic howlers.  And when it comes to this 'more,' Obama is sadly lacking.  Obama is an uncommonly good bullshitter and blather-mouth, but the content is sorely lacking.  Does he have even one concrete idea that he is willing to express publicly?  Like Bret Stephens, I don't understand why so many consider him highly intelligent:

I don't buy it. I just think the president isn't very bright.

Socrates taught that wisdom begins in the recognition of how little we know. Mr. Obama is perpetually intent on telling us how much he knows. Aristotle wrote that the type of intelligence most needed in politics is prudence, which in turn requires experience. Mr. Obama came to office with no experience. Plutarch warned that flattery "makes itself an obstacle and pestilence to great houses and great affairs." Today's White House, more so than any in memory, is stuffed with flatterers.

Much is made of the president's rhetorical gifts. This is the sort of thing that can be credited only by people who think that a command of English syntax is a mark of great intellectual distinction. Can anyone recall a memorable phrase from one of Mr. Obama's big speeches that didn't amount to cliché? As for the small speeches, such as the one we were kept waiting 50 minutes for yesterday, we get Triple-A bromides about America remaining a "Triple-A country." Which, when it comes to long-term sovereign debt, is precisely what we no longer are under Mr. Obama.

Why We Can’t Ignore Politics

Thomas Mann, Diaries 1918-1939, entry of August 5, 1934:

     A cynical egotism, a selfish limitation of concern to one's
     personal welfare and one's reasonable survival in the face of the
     headstrong and voluptuous madness of 'history' is amply justified.
     One is a fool to take politics seriously, to care about it, to
     sacrifice one's moral and intellectual strength to it. All one can
     do is survive, and preserve one's personal freedom and dignity.
  
I don't endorse Mann's sentiment but I sympathize with it. Hitler came to power in 1933. Imagine the effect that must have had on a man of Mann's sensitivity and spiritual depth. You witness your country, the land of Kant and Schiller, of Dichter und Denker, poets and thinkers, in Heinrich Heine's fine phrase, transformed into a land of Richter und Henker, judges and hangmen.

My response to Mann would be along these lines: It precisely because men of the spirit must survive and survive to create that they must be concerned with politics and with those who can kill and suppress them. You escaped to the USA, but what if there were no such country to which to escape because all of the people of high quality practised your cynical egotism, your selfish limitation to the personal?

One can take politics seriously and do one's bit without sacrificing one's moral and intellectual strength to it.  The latter, I agree, would be folly.

Conservatives in the Lead

According to a Gallup Poll dated 1 August, 41% of Americans self-identify as conservatives, 36% as moderate, and 21% as liberal.

Liberals have only themselves to blame for their poor showing.  Their extremism and reckless deviation from common sense condemn them in the eyes of most of us.  The op-ed columnists of the once-great New York Times, for example, are an extremist lot.  Have you ever read a Krugman column?  Or this morning's bit of hyperventilation from Joe Nocera in which he likens Tea Partiers to terrorists? 

A Big Victory for the Tea Party

Call it Schadenfreude, but it was certainly a pleasure to wake up this morning to the gnashing of leftist teeth over last night's Tea Party triumph.  The howling of the lefties is as music to my ears.  In his latest outburst, Paul Krugman speaks of "extortion."  Others speak of 'hostage-taking,' 'terrorism,' 'Taliban tactics,' 'arson.'  One commentator likened the Tea Partiers to Hezbollah.

This absurdly extremist rhetoric lets us know that for the Left this is a war.  But then how can we treat it as a civil debate?  They are lying about us blatantly and brazenly.  (Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist said on C-Span the other night that Republicans want to destroy Social Security.)  So we must tell the truth about them and gird our loins for the next round.  Meanwhile a bit of celebration is in order.

The Debt Debate

A U.K. commenter remarks:

Meanwhile, changing the subject completely, I fail to understand the game of 'chicken' that the two houses are playing over debt. (Wasn't there a James Dean film that started that way, with bad results?). I would be interested in hearing your views in a post.

Here are some quick thoughts.

To understand what this wrangling is all about you must understand that the USA is a deeply divided country in which the common ground on which we formerly stood is shrinking.  To borrow a phrase from Thomas Sowell, what divides us is a very deep "conflict of visions."  The conflict concerns the nature and purpose of government, its size, scope and reach, what it can and cannot legitimately do.  The Left favors, in practice if not always in theory, an ever-expanding welfare state which provides citizens with cradle-to-grave security.  Although liberals don't like to be called socialists, and will retreat to an exceedingly narrow definition of 'socialism' in order to avoid this label, their tendency is clearly in the socialist direction and they have been marching in this direction since FDR at least.  A perfect example is President Obama's health care initiative, popularly known as 'Obamacare,' which increases government control of the health care system.  Particularly offensive to libertarians and conservatives is Obamacare's individual mandate which requires citizens to purchase health care insurance whether they need it or not, whether they want it or not.  A clear indication of the 'visionary' and ideological nature of this initiative is that it is being forwarded at a time when the country simply cannot afford another entitlement program.  But this hard fact cuts no ice with the ideologues of the Left.

The Right, on the other hand, resists the expansion of government power, championing the traditional values of self-reliance, individual responsibility, and limited government.  This deep Right-Left conflict of visions plays out over a myriad of issues major and minor from guns to light bulbs to soda pop to circumcision to using federal tax dollars to fund abortion clinics, and so on.

Perhaps we should distinguish the political and the economic aspects of the conflict of visions.  What I have just sketched is the political difference, the difference as to what the polis, the state, ought to be and ought to do.  But there is also deep disagreement about economics.  The Left favors central planning and top-down control while the Right looks to a more or less free market for solutions. 

If you ask a liberal how to generate government revenue he will tell you to raise taxes while the conservative will say the opposite: lower taxes, thereby stimulating the economy.  The creation of jobs will increase income, FICA, and sales tax revenues.  Each side looks for 'facts' to support its overarching vison, which underscores the fact that what we have here is fundamentally a conflict of radically opposed visions. 

In sum, we Americans are fundamentally divided and in a way that is irreconcilable at the level of ideas.  We do not stand on the common ground of shared principles and there is no point in blinking this fact.  Left and Right are riven by deep and unbridgeable value differences.  And so any compromises that are reached are merely provisional and pro tem, reflecting as they do the fact that neither side has the power to  clobber decisively the other and push the nation in the direction in which it thinks it ought to move.

And so it should come as no surprise that there is bitter wrangling over the national debt.  Making it worse is the fact that on the Republican side there is a split between libertarians and true conservatives on the one hand and RINOs (Republicans in name only) on the other.  A proper subset of the first group is the Tea Party folks whose central animating desideratum is fiscal responsibility.  The Dems are more unified toeing as they do the leftist party line.

The Tea Party faction has rightly sounded the alarm concerning the national debt which under Obama is increasing at the rate of 4.1 billion dollars per day.  (Under G. W. Bush the rate of increase was also unacceptable but much less, around 1.6 billion per day.)  Unfortunately, their standing on principle could have disastrous effects.  I mean the principle that the debt ceiling ought not be raised.  The crucial fact here is that the Republicans do not control the Senate or the White House.  So they really can't do much.  What they can do is get themselves perceived as pigheaded extremists.  If enough ordinary Americans come to view  Republicans as obstructionists or extremist then then the Right will lose the 2012 battles and it will be all over.

The Boehner Plan is the way to go given the current political climate and the current distribution of power among the branches of government.

Charles Krauthammer has it nailed. (Get the pun?) 

Actually, Krauthammer would make a great president except that he looks like a cadaver, is bound to a wheel chair, and is a chess player.  Totally unelectable.