Scott Spiegel

In the spirit of the decade-long procession of Eastern European and Middle Eastern upheavals in which oppressed peoples have gathered en masse to protest the brutality of their tyrannical leaders, I hereby suggest we christen the current Wisconsin uprising the Government Cheese Revolution.

We gave poetic names to recent revolts based on the colors of their countries’ flags or their native specialties, such as the Rose Revolution, the Cedar Revolution, the Tulip Revolution, the Green Revolution, the Jasmine Revolution, and the Lotus Revolution.  Wisconsin markets its cheddar as being orange, and protestors have filled the state capitol wearing ugly orange Working Families T-shirts, but unfortunately the Ukraine has already snagged the title “Orange Revolution.”

Newly elected Governor Scott Walker and the freshly majority Republican Wisconsin state legislature recently proposed a bill that would eliminate the ability of most public sector union members to collectively bargain.  It would prevent unions from forcing members to pay dues, require annual secret ballots on whether to remain unionized, and ask members to contribute a pittance toward their lavish pensions and health care plans.  The bill would help obviate Wisconsin’s projected $3.6 billion 2013 budget deficit.

Wisconsin public employees have demonstrated their rock-solid work ethic and indispensable contribution to the community by calling in sick to gather at the capitol and dub the governor Hosni Mubarak and Adolf Hitler.  Due to thousands of teachers’ absence from work, the largest Wisconsin public school districts have been closed for almost a week.

Last Thursday, the day of the scheduled union bill vote, all 14 Democratic Senators rode a shuttle bus out of state to hide in a secret location in Illinois.

The legislators included Julie Lassa—mother of two small children, six months pregnant with a third—who thought it was a better idea to be on the lam during her third trimester and leave her toddlers at home than to show up at work.

Meanwhile, classy public employee demonstrators have been putting those trashy Tea Partiers to shame by savagely beating drums, sitting Indian-style throughout the capitol corridors, and deliberately blocking people from passing.  Pro-union rabble rousers have left the capitol grounds littered with flyers and trash and have massed outside Republican Senators’ homes to scream threats at them.

Some of the more civil and respectful signs at the capitol rally have read: “Walker Terrorizes Families,” “Wisconsin Dictator Must Go,” “Scott Walker = Adolf Hitler,” “Midwest Mussolini,” “Why Do Republicans Hate People,” “Raping Public Employees Is Not The Way To Balance The Budget,” and “Don’t Retreat: Reload,” the latter including the same crosshair symbol over Walker’s face that had liberals up in arms when it was found on Sarah Palin’s website after last month’s Tucson shooting.

Other signs included the delightful encomiums “Al-Qaeda Scott,” “Walker Blows Koch,” “Scott Walker: The Reason We Need Planned Parenthood,” and “Heil Walker!”

Regarding the ubiquitous Hitler references, one protestor explained to a reporter, “First you take away the unions, and then you take away the Jews…  That’s where it starts.”

If some African Americans object when gays talk about their struggle as a civil rights movement, I wonder: how do Wisconsin’s Jews feel about protestors comparing minor pension plan adjustments to the Holocaust?

State Republican legislators have bravely refused to water down the bill and have demanded that Democrats return to the state for an up-or-down vote.

Naturally, liberals from coast to coast are reflexively defending the Wisconsin protestors.  Apologists for the Cheddar Deadbeats include New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who extols the glories of unions and the protestors’ cause without bothering to mention that Wisconsin public employees are treated to extravagant pensions and health care plans few private sector workers would dream of.

President Obama and the Democratic National Committee have been sending their 2008 campaign supporters and union cronies to Madison to help with the AstroTurf uprising.

Obama’s support may make this the first revolution in history in which a nation’s Commander-in-Chief has provided material reinforcements to the protestors to help quash the opposition party.

The Government Cheese Revolution is also probably the first revolt in which medical doctors have glided through the crowds offering fraudulent sick notes to protestors, encouraging them to claim “mental anguish and distress” over the bill and the need to congregate with similarly situated victims to alleviate their symptoms.  One doctor dispensed with any pretense of medical jargon and simply told a reporter, “Everybody is sick—of Scott Walker!”

Since Wisconsin public employees’ actions are indistinguishable from a strike, which government unions are legally barred from carrying out, I have a solution for putting a peaceful end to the Government Cheese Revolution.

Namely, fire every Wisconsin public sector employee discovered to have obtained a false sick note to skip work and attend the protests.  That ought to rid the state payroll of the worst of the riffraff.

Then make them find employment in the private sector, where they can learn just how the rest of the country lives.

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• Rasmussen poll shows Walker winning standoff with unions, Dems (hotair.com)
• Highlights of the last 8 days of following the Wisconsin protests here on the Althouse blog. (althouse.blogspot.com)
• Wisconsin Union Talking Points: More Myths Than Facts (biggovernment.com)
• Wisconsin governor standing firm (bbc.co.uk)
• The Republican Obama? (geneveith.com)

Call Monday’s 2012 budget release the St. Valentine’s Day Non-massacre.

President Obama’s budget director Jacob Lew announced on Monday that he was presenting Congress with a budget that would compel the nation to “live within our means, but also invest in the future.”

Can we leave out “but also invest in the future”?

Why does Obama always append damaging clauses to seemingly responsible proposals?  Is it so that when he fails to do what he should—have us live within our means—and merely does what he wants—spend, spend, spend—he can say he at least kept half his promise?

In a press conference defending his proposal, Obama scolded Republicans about the need to have an “adult conversation” with him on the budget and stop being “impatient” about his failure to deal with entitlement reform.

Obama is enormously proud of the fact that he has pledged to freeze domestic spending for the next five years.  Since that means freezing spending at 2010 levels, which were 22% higher than bloated 2008 levels, Obama has done the equivalent of freezing the national diet at Michael Moore’s instead of Alec Baldwin’s.

Even Obama’s spending freeze applies only to non-defense discretionary spending, which makes up just 15% of the federal budget.  His proposal does nothing to address reform of Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security.

Everyone knew that the bipartisan deficit reduction commission Obama sanctioned last year to “study” the federal debt and make recommendations was window dressing.  Obama never had any intention of following suggestions that were unpalatable for his base, such as raising the retirement age for Social Security or means-testing Medicare.

But the $3.73 trillion 2012 budget, and projected $1.65 trillion 2011 deficit, Obama unveiled on Monday set staggering, all-time records that shocked even his supporters.

Obama’s 2012 budget will cause our federal debt to jump from $14.2 trillion to $15.5 trillion, which will render the federal debt greater than the size of the entire U.S. economy for the first time in history.

By 2013, the federal debt will equal 106% of the U.S. economy.  That rosy scenario, by the way, will happen only if the next two years see the U.S. economy roaring back to life and demonstrating much higher growth than in recent years—which the Obama administration, with complete, non-self-serving objectivity, is absolutely certain will happen.

By 2016 the federal debt will swell to $21 trillion.

Obama claims his administration’s proposed 10-year budget outline makes “tough choices and sacrifices.”  What, specifically, does his budget sacrifice?  The expectation that he will ever get serious about our national debt?

Perhaps one sacrifice is Obama’s pledge to reduce funding to lower-income people to pay their heating bills.  How many of you realized there was a federal program in place to help poor people pay their heating bills?  I propose that if the average American didn’t even realize he was subsidizing a federal program, then trimming it doesn’t count as a sacrifice.

In defending their budget, Obama and Lew have displayed the air of surly teenagers who want to show their parents just how much they’ve suffered under the repressive rules of the house, rather than responsible adults who want to solve a problem.  Lew whined on Monday, “It’s important to note that we’re beyond the easy, low-hanging fruit.  We’re reducing programs that are important programs that we care about.”  (“But Mom, I made my bed—why do I have to clean my whole room?”)

Obama’s budget is so elephantine—no pun intended—even liberals are embarrassed by its sheer cowardice and unresponsiveness to financial conditions.  Obama’s deficit commission chairman, Democrat Erskine Bowles, complained that the budget is “nowhere near where they will have to go to resolve our fiscal nightmare.”

To the extent Democrats care at all about cutting spending, of course they want to slash defense appropriations.  Fine—but defense spending makes up only 20% of the federal budget, even with two ongoing wars.  Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other “mandatory” programs make up more than 50%, and “discretionary” programs like the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency make up another 20%.  If we agree to cut defense spending 10%, could we get Democrats on record favoring a piddly 5% cut in entitlement spending?

During the third 2008 presidential debate, when moderator Bob Schieffer asked the candidates what they would cut from the federal budget, Senator John McCain declared that he would use a “hatchet,” then get out a “scalpel” to finish the job—a response Senator Barack Obama ridiculed as too radical.

How about a hatchet, then a machete to catch everything we missed with the hatchet, then a 60-ton M1 Abrams tank over anything left standing?  Will Democrats finally get the message about the crisis we face after that?

As Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels put it in his speech at CPAC last weekend, “Our morbidly obese federal government needs, not just behavior modification, but bariatric surgery.”

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Related articles

• Obama’s proposed budget is the opposite of what the American people want (thehill.com)
• America’s ‘moment of truth’ on spending (cnn.com)
• Obama budget fails to curb entitlements, GOP says – Boston Globe (news.google.com)
• “Obama Budget Proposal Kicks Off Battle Over Spending Cuts, Tax Increases” and related posts (moneymorning.com)
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If Hosni Mubarak is a crooked card dealer guaranteed to stiff anyone who plays at his table, most conservatives’ reaction to the events unfolding in Egypt has been to throw their support to the house rather than pro-Western Egyptian protestors, simply because the latter might not win the game against the Muslim Brotherhood.

In the early 1990s, when the U.S.S.R. disintegrated and Soviet provinces began deposing their Communist overlords and electing pro-reform leaders, I must have missed the barrage of sworn affidavits from fringe groups in every Eastern European state promising they would never attempt to form voting blocs that would influence their nations’ parliaments.

I don’t recall President Reagan speaking out against demoralized Eastern bloc peoples who yearned to breathe free, telling them to zip their lips, stay home, and put up with political oppression, because neo-Communist groups might someday try to swoop in and fill the power vacuum.

The number of conservatives who have been getting it wrong, and liberals who have been getting it right, on Egypt is embarrassing.

For example, Mark Levin claims that the Eastern European revolutions were different, because those nations had a “tradition” of democracy before they were enslaved by Communists.  Oh?  So no nation can become democratic unless it was democratic at some point in the first place?  Doesn’t that preclude half the world from ever becoming democratic?

When did the political party that won the Cold War decide it would be prudent to wave the white hankie and let monsters—I mean sweet, dear friends of the U.S.—like Mubarak stay in power over the wishes of their subjects?

If Mubarak were to stay in office, as most on the right are demanding, he would be unlikely to unilaterally meet protestors’ demands to institute freedom of the press and assembly, release hundreds of incarcerated political prisoners, and revoke the never-ending so-called emergency laws that give the Egyptian government perpetual unchecked power to crack down on anyone deemed a threat to its rule.

But a new leader—even Mubarak’s recently named vice president, Omar Suleiman—would have a plausible excuse to implement new policies, and the changing of the guard would allow Mubarak to save face.  Such pro-liberty developments would be especially likely if buttressed by the support of Egypt’s armed forces, which have pledged not to fire on the Egyptian people and have so far come down firmly on the side of the anti-Mubarak protestors.

Mubarak may be the new Iranian Shah of 1979, and President Barack Obama may be the new President Jimmy Carter, but that doesn’t mean the Muslim Brotherhood is the new Ayatollah Khomeini.

The Muslim Brotherhood, evil as it is, has 100,000 supporters in a country of 80 million, about .1% of the population.  Recoiling in mortal terror over the possibility of the Brotherhood managing to take over Egypt is like worrying that the Natural Law Party will win the U.S. presidential election and force everyone to practice transcendental meditation.

Even if the Brotherhood is better organized than most other political groups in Egypt, the bad example of Carter supporting the toppling of the Shah only to let him be replaced by the Ayatollah serves as a valuable warning that the West cannot let just anyone take Mubarak’s place.

As I wrote last week, the problem with our administration’s reaction to the turmoil in Egypt isn’t that Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are doing too much—it’s that they’re doing too little.  They should not only encourage this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring down a dictator, but work with regional players, pro-Western dissident groups in Egypt, and opposition leaders (excluding the treacherous Mohamed ElBaradei) to ensure that power is transferred to the right people after Mubarak goes.  They should threaten to freeze military aid and withhold recognition of any new Egyptian government that does not meet certain preconditions such as honoring Egypt’s existing peace agreement with Israel.

No one agrees more than I that neither Egypt nor any Middle Eastern country would be safe with anything like the Muslim Brotherhood or any other faux-moderate, terrorism-supporting, Sharia-loving group close to the reins of power.  The fact that Obama would even speak to members of such an organization other than to tell them to get the hell out of the way is a deep, disfiguring scar on his foreign policy.

But when you’re playing a high-stakes game like regime change, sometimes you have to roll the dice and take a risk; you can’t always guarantee the outcome.  The Right should man up, encourage pro-Western forces to exert their utmost influence on Egypt, and stop lecturing Egyptians to accept the status quo of tyranny and terror.

Conservatives would do well to remember these words from George W. Bush’s second inaugural address: “The great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations.  The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it.  America’s influence is not unlimited, but fortunately for the oppressed, America’s influence is considerable, and we will use it confidently in freedom’s cause.”

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Related articles

• Don’t Kid Yourself About the Muslim Brotherhood (powerlineblog.com)
• Wikileaks Cables Show Egyptian Government Exaggerated Fears Of Muslim Brotherhood (alternet.org)
• Conservatives Acted As Mubarak Stooges By Pushing Muslim Brotherhood Storyline (oliverwillis.com)
• Leaked Cables: Egyptian Government Stokes Fears of Muslim Brotherhood (propublica.org)
• Banned Brotherhood holds crisis talks with Egyptian authorities (rt.com)

Liberals mocked George W. Bush’s “Forward Strategy of Freedom,” sneering that it was corny and idealistic, wouldn’t work, and didn’t suit exotic, backward, brown people who wouldn’t know what to do with liberty if it fell in their laps.

In the years since U.S. forces ousted the Taliban in Afghanistan and deposed Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the world has beheld a remarkably long line of popular uprisings in Middle Eastern and Eastern European states that has thoroughly vindicated Bush’s approach.

Four months after U.S. Marines took Baghdad in Operation Iraqi Freedom, a quivering-in-his-boots Muammar Gaddafi acknowledged Libya’s responsibility for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing and paid billions in compensation to relatives of victims, and to those of the UTA Flight 772 bombing and the Berlin discotheque bombing.

Three months later we witnessed the Rose Revolution in Georgia, in which the public protested against rigged parliamentary elections, removed President Eduard Shevardnadze, and installed reformist Mikhail Saakashvili.

In 2004 we watched the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, in which protestors kept Viktor Yanukovych from assuming office as Prime Minister after fraudulent elections and instated pro-reform Viktor Yushchenko.

In 2005 we observed the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, in which citizens rioted to protest the assassination of pro-Western former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, the presence of tens of thousands of Syrian troops, and the rule of a pro-Syrian government.

Days after the Cedar Revolution, we had the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, in which protestors ousted corrupt President Askar Akayev.

In 2009 we monitored the Green Revolution in Iran, in which thousands of citizens rioted over the rigged presidential election that kept Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power.

In December 2010 we saw the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, in which protestors ousted secular autocrat Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the first ever peaceful removal of an Arabic leader.

Earlier this month in Yemen, protestors marched in Sanaa and called for the removal of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.  Protestors in Albania demonstrated against Prime Minister Sali Berisha.

Over the past week, millions of protestors in Egypt have rioted in Cairo, Alexandria, and Suez, demanding the ouster of autocratic leader Hosni Mubarak and the release of hundreds of political prisoners.  Mubarak has since fired his cabinet and claimed he will not run again after serving out the final year of his current term, but has not responded to protestors’ demands.

Egyptian protestors modeled their protests after Tunisia’s, which in turn were made possible by the chain of protests and regime changes leading back to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Given Egypt’s size and prominence in the Arab world, deposing Mubarak would likely spur a wave of protests against other autocratic regimes in the region.

So what has Obama’s response been to all of this activity in his first two years in office?

Why, his response has been to cozy up to Soviet-influenced Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, illegitimate Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, Islamist Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, genocidal Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and autocratic Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak.

Obama has been courting tyrants in fulfillment of the self-defeating strategy of “engagement” with the world’s most brutal, unreformable despots.

Unfortunately, he has offered less encouragement for those trying to overthrow these despots.

When Iranians rose against the mullahs and were slaughtered in the streets, Obama dawdled a week before raising an eyebrow over the carnage.

When Tunisians rose against their autocratic government, Obama waited until the deposed president had safely fled to Saudi Arabia, then preached “calm.”

Now Obama’s tepid response to Mubarak has been to murmur, “What is needed are concrete steps to advance the rights of the Egyptian people”—as if Mubarak and the rest of the world didn’t know that.  Obama has failed to call for Mubarak’s resignation, free elections, or a pro-liberty government, or to spotlight Egypt’s abysmal human rights record, out of fealty to the fallacious notion that Egypt is a reliable U.S. ally and must be appeased.

There are grave concerns over what types of leadership would replace those deposed in Tunisia and Egypt, including Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood that would try to creep in and institute Sharia.  But the original demonstrators—not the riffraff who want to loot and steal, not the convicts released from jail, not the Brotherhood—were grassroots and pro-liberty.  The impulse of any genuinely pro-freedom Egyptian protestors is to be commended, not discouraged.

I have a problem with anyone who would tell everyday Egyptians that they’re not allowed to protest because their “allies” aren’t sure whether a new government would be better or worse than the current horrid one.  Anyone who could look in the eyes of courageous Egyptians who want to live in freedom from censorship, repression, and fear of their government and tell them to shut up and go home does not care whether Egyptians ever have freedom.

Contrary to popular opinion among many conservatives, Obama has not been doing enough to encourage and guide such popular revolutions while in office.  The U.S. should be standing up for freedom-seeking protestors and working with regional players to capitalize on power vacuums to ensure that pro-liberty governments take office.

Sadly, Obama’s approach to the flurry of popular uprisings has been, not to condemn tyrannical governments and encourage pro-liberty regimes, but to waffle on regime change and coddle dictators.

Every time Obama fails to stand up for liberty abroad, he discourages oppressed peoples from toppling the tyrants who rule them.

Obama’s policy is the opposite of Bush’s.  It is a Backward Strategy of Oppression.

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Related articles

• Egyptian regime begins to reveal its strategy (guardian.co.uk)
• Egyptians angry at U.S. for not backing protests (sfgate.com)
• Million to march in Cairo protest (rt.com)
• Egyptians wary of U.S.’s shifting position on Mubarak (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Freedom’s March: Egypt at the Tipping Point (american.com)