Scott Spiegel

In anticipation of President Barack Obama’s primetime address to the nation last night on the Iraq War, columnist Eugene Robinson wrote, “Now that the Iraq War is over… only one thing is clear about the outcome: We didn’t win.”

Actually, I can think of about 12 things that are clearer about the outcome of the Iraq War than the conclusion that we didn’t win: (1) Obama was wrong about the surge, (2) Vice President Joe Biden was wrong about the surge, (3) President George W. Bush was right to ignore Congressional Democrats and the Iraq Study Group and order the surge in 2007, (4) insurgent violence dropped precipitously after the surge was implemented, (5) if Democrats had had their way on the surge in Iraq, per Harry Reid’s declaration that “this war is lost,” it would have been lost, (6) Biden was wrong about dividing Iraq into ethnic partitions, (7) Biden is a loon for claiming that the Iraq War could be one of the great successes of the Obama administration, (8) Iraq is now the fourth-most politically free Middle Eastern country, after democracy Israel, republic Lebanon, and constitutional monarchy Morocco, (9) General David Petraeus’ Iraq surge set the model for beating back insurgents and winning in Afghanistan, (10) despite liberals’ bleating about its expense, eight years of the Iraq War—including training and preparation for the March 2003 invasion—now turn out to have cost less ($709 billion) than Obama’s useless trillion-dollar stimulus bill, (11) Bush’s popularity didn’t sink to the level that Obama’s is at now until late 2005, two-and-a-half years into the Iraq War and well into Bush’s second term, and (12) Obama’s address last night was full of bromides, revisionist history, and platitudinous prescriptions for the future that have little relation to what will actually need to be done in the War on Terror according to a fair evaluation of conditions on the ground.

But then I’m not Eugene Robinson, who recently called those who wanted an investigation into Park51 mosque supporter Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s radical ties “loudmouths,” “fraidy-cats,” and “professional victims,” dismissed Tea Partiers as racists, and called Dr. Alveeda King a “puppet” for appearing at Glen Beck’s Restoring Honor rally.

Oh, and: (13) if anyone deserves to give a triumphal speech marking the end of combat operations in Iraq, it is Bush, Petraeus, Vice President Dick Cheney, or Kermit the Frog—anyone but Obama, who opposed the war from the start and voted as U.S. senator to defund it.

And: (14) Obama has learned nothing about the danger of prematurely promising to remove our troops by a certain date and the fortifying effect this has on our enemy, as demonstrated by his declaration in his speech that we will begin removing troops from Afghanistan in July 2011 according to his preordained schedule, and by his standing commitment to remove all 50,000 troops still stationed in Iraq by the end of 2011.

Not to mention: (15) the most factual elements of Obama’s address could have been cribbed from a Bush speech on Iraq from five years ago, such as “We must never lose sight of what’s at stake.  As we speak, al Qaeda continues to plot against us,” and (16) Obama wasn’t honorable or honest enough to give Bush credit for the surge, saying only that “[N]o one could doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security,” which is about as controversial to his antiwar base as saying, “No one could doubt President Bush’s support for his family, or his love of his wife and children.”

Robinson’s liberal fantasy proclaims, “The war was on its way toward becoming a disastrous failure until the country’s Sunni minority turned against the al-Qaeda jihadists who had flooded into Iraq to fight against the hated Americans,” then adds, as an afterthought, “and Bush’s troop surge, ably led by Gen. David Petraeus, capitalized on this shift of allegiance.”  Yes, sectarian conflict facilitated conditions in which the surge could flourish, but: (17) Bush and Petraeus were savvy enough to recognize this shift in conditions on the ground, prepare a successful strategy to take advantage of it, execute this strategy despite the histrionics of Congressional Democrats, and persist until it yielded its intended results.

Give Obama credit for this: his Iraq speech was the best speech he has ever given from the Oval Office.  Of course, the only other Oval Office speech he’s given was on the BP oil spill, an address that even liberal supporters at MSNBC and The New York Times panned as amateurish and ineffective.

Bonus fact!: The Brookings Institution’s Iraq Index reports that 79% of Iraqis believe that conditions in their country will be the same as or better in 2010 than in 2009—more than you can say for residents of the United States.

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently characterized the likelihood of a resolution from upcoming U.S.-force-fed peace talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as “difficult but possible.”

He has it exactly backwards—it is easy but impossible.

“Possible” implies that both parties are on the same terrain, respect the other’s interests, and are acting in good faith.  “Difficult” implies that the two parties are far apart, but that with creativity and temerity they may be able to trade off competing interests and find win-win solutions.

“Impossible” implies that one party is inherently opposed to the interests of the other, and therefore would not negotiate in the conventional sense even if it left both parties satisfied, because the first party by definition is not satisfied if the second party is.  “Easy” implies that the first party’s demands could yield an instant solution if given up, if that party were thinking and acting rationally—or if the second party were willing and able to use overwhelming force to obviate the first party’s demands.

I think it’s safe to say that the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships are not on the same terrain, inasmuch as the preferred outcome of the conflict as expressed by Palestinians is for Jews to literally be driven off of that terrain into the sea.  Given that Israel does not wish to voluntarily self-destruct, that’s where “impossible” comes in.

If they haven’t already done so after a half-century of murderous genocidal rhetoric and blood-spattered conflict, I also doubt the Palestinians will charitably give up their demands tomorrow, which rules out “easy.”  That leaves only the overwhelming force option.

Fortunately, the Palestinians actually seem to respond rather well to that option.

The number of Palestinian deaths in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1987 is on the order of 7,500; Israeli deaths number approximately 1,500.  This disproportionate figure reflects, not the bloodthirsty, excessive use of force on Israel’s part, but their use of more sophisticated and deadly weaponry.

Israeli deaths ranged from 0 to 34 per year from 1987 to 1992.

After Israel agreed to the Oslo Accords in 1993, the number of Israeli deaths did not decline, but rather spiked at 74 in 1994 and 75 in 1996.

Following the Camp David Summit in 2000, Israeli deaths did not decrease, but skyrocketed from 43 in 2000 to 192 in 2001.

This was the same year in which the Taba Summit was held.  The next year, Israeli deaths shot up to 419.

Under George W. Bush, who subsequently ignored the futile “peace process” for the rest of his administration, since it had obviously yielded no results, Israel fought back against acts of aggression from Palestinians and their terrorists allies, thus inducing some of the highest yearly Palestinian casualty rates since the start of the conflict.

In response, the Palestinian leadership—which has proven it responds only to force, not reason—eased up on Israel: the number of Israeli casualties dropped from 419 in 2002 to 185 in 2003, and to 108 in 2004, and has been in double digits every year since 2005.

So Hillary Clinton may loftily announce, “There have been difficulties in the past; there will be difficulties ahead.  Without a doubt, we will hit more obstacles.  The enemies of peace will keep trying to defeat us and to derail these talks.  But I ask the parties to persevere.”

Barack Obama can pragmatically declare, “For any agreement to endure, peace cannot be imposed from the outside; it must be negotiated directly by the leaders who are required to make the hard choices and compromises that take on history.”

Benjamin Netanyahu can tell us, “We come to the talks with a genuine desire to reach a peace agreement between the two peoples, while protecting Israel’s national interests, chiefly security.  Achieving a peace agreement between us and the Palestinian Authority is difficult but possible.”

But anyone with a sense, not just of history but of the rigid, irrational thought system underlying Palestinian and Islamist ideology, knows exactly what a load of rhetorical crap all this is.

The Palestinians’ negotiating position recalls that of Ground Zero Mosque promoters Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife Daisy Khan, who claim they want to “build bridges” with those wary of Islam.  Sure, they want to build bridges—as long as the other side sketches the designs, supplies the materials, excavates the banks, pours the concrete, lays the deck, paves the roads, and then tosses itself off and plunges to its death.



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The landing gear of the American Airlines plane that terrorists flew into 1 World Trade Center on 9/11 smashed through an unoccupied building two blocks away at 45 Park Place where Muslims now wish to build a monument to Allah.  The engine of the plane landed in the street behind the building.

Presumably Islamist hijackers wouldn’t attack the rebuilt World Trade Center if the new mosque might be damaged in the process.  Will Obama thus be endorsing the building of the mosque as a creative, Islam-sensitive, preventive security measure in the war on terror?

It’s true that those who wish to build Cordoba House—now the swanky- and Manhattan-sounding Park51—technically have the freedom to do so, since they are purchasing the land and have the right to build whatever they want on it if they adhere to zoning regulations.

This right is contingent on the mosque’s funders not being supported by sponsors of terror from Middle Eastern countries with which we are at war—an assumption that is highly suspect and should be investigated vigorously and precipitously.  We already know, for example, that the chief sponsor of the Cordoba Initiative, which is providing $100,000 in funding for the mosque, is the radical Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who has refused to denounce Hamas as a terrorist organization.  We also know that President Obama sent Rauf, using taxpayer money, on a Middle East “good will” tour on which he will be hitting up Islamist leaders for donations for the mosque.

(Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced her preference to investigate, not the funders of the mosque, but the funders of opponents of the mosque, which leads us to the logical conclusion that she will soon be snooping around Harry Reid’s e-mails.)

Given that Muslims traditionally build mosques on territory they have conquered, a mosque near Ground Zero would be an incontrovertible statement of conquest regarding the terror attacks on 9/11.

Opponents of the mosque have attempted to prevent its construction through eminent domain laws by declaring the site a city landmark, but the New York City Council rejected that argument and allowed the project to proceed.

Mayor Bloomberg announced that building the mosque is an expression of the noblest principles of this country and that anyone who objects should keep quiet.

Last weekend, Barack Obama came out forcefully for the construction of the mosque in front of a bunch of Muslims at a White House-sponsored Ramadan dinner: “Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country.  That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan.”

Someone evidently told Obama that his instinctive loyalty to anything anti-American, especially Islamist, would probably not go over well with the rest of the country, so he backtracked the next day and announced that his strong desire to have the Ground Zero mosque built was not an “endorsement” but rather a general statement about the religious liberty of property owners.  Next Obama will be claiming that he didn’t say property owners have religious liberty—only that people have the right to express their opinions about whether property owners have religious liberty.

Hamas cofounder Mahmoud al-Zahar expressed solidarity with his ideological buds Obama and Bloomberg, claiming that Muslims absolutely, simply “have to build” the mosque there.

Members of the Cordoba Initiative may have the legal right to build, but those who justifiably oppose a mosque near Ground Zero have rights, too:

•    Construction workers and unions have the right to boycott work on the project, as New York resident Andrew Sullivan recently committed to doing (no, not that Andrew Sullivan—the patriotic one).  In the extreme, this could prevent the mosque from being built; at a minimum, it could drive up the costs of building the mosque, perhaps prohibitively, by awarding the work to higher bidding contractors.

•    Muslims who oppose the mosque have the right to boycott and refuse to attend or contribute financially to it; if enough do so, it could be driven out of business.

•    Private citizens have the right to open businesses close to the mosque that are offensive to Islamists—not to be jerks, but to make the point that Muslims are not as tolerant when we stick them in the eye by planting something culturally odious near a sacred site as we are when they do it to us.  See, for example, Red Eye host Greg Gutfeld’s plan to build a gay bar that caters to Islamic men a couple of doors from the mosque.  I also propose the following businesses: non-halal butcheries, lingerie shops, and liquor stores.

(Hey—let’s open a day care center right near the mosque, because surely Islamists oppose the notion that women might have careers and not stay home all day caring for their infants.  Whoops—Park51 is slated to include a day care center among its amenities!)

Just because those who wish to build the mosque have the legal right to do so does not mean the majority of Americans who oppose it have no legal recourse in preventing it from existing.  Call my suggestions the libertarian approach to preventing the Ground Zero mosque from fulfilling its planners’ intentions.



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Liberals have generously treated us to a motley assortment of apologia for President Obama’s economy-wrecking fiscal policies over the past 19 months:

(1) The economy is doing fine (Ezra Klein)!  We should have expected the recovery to be agonizingly slow, and it is—hence, Obama’s policies worked.

(2) The economy isn’t doing well, but it would have been doing even worse without the stimulus bill (e.g., Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s and bona fide boob).  Without a Keynesian spending orgy—or as Obama puts it, “moving the economy forward”—unemployment wouldn’t have stopped at 10% and might have risen to 12 or 13 or 15%.

(3) The economy is doing poorly, and it’s because the Democrats didn’t do enough (the ever-certifiable Paul Krugman).  The stimulus should have been much bigger, and financial regulations should have been much harsher.  To compensate we need “a second big stimulus, plus much more aggressive Fed policy.”

In contrast, conservatives have suggested the following interpretations of events:

(1) The economy is going to improve soon (Larry Kudlow).  We won’t experience a double-dip recession and growth is resuming, so we should be more optimistic.  Obama’s policies aren’t helping, but American ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit are strong enough that we can recover anyway.

(2) The economy isn’t doing well, and Obama’s policies have made it worse (every other conservative on the planet).  Wasteful spending caused our debt to skyrocket and increased the chances of inflation; government takeover of private industries and burdensome financial regulations created an uncertain climate for investing and hiring that has prolonged the recession.

(3) The economy is doing poorly, and now is the time to discuss not only repealing Obama’s policies and ensuring that the likes of them never pass again, but undoing the policies liberals have inflicted on the nation since FDR under the pretense that once they were in place future generations would be too sheepish to touch them (Paul Ryan).  The impetus from the Tea Party movement should be used to revive talks about privatizing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

So liberals and conservatives are at a bit of a standoff over the fundamental economic principles behind their political strategies.  Who’s right?

Let’s see: economists have demonstrated, time and again, using common-sense reasoning, econometric modeling, and historical data, that increasing government spending yields less economic output than if government had left that money in the private sector to be spent, invested, or saved as those who generated it saw fit.

Economists have shown that increasing marginal tax rates counterintuitively decreases the gross domestic product, especially in the years immediately following tax increases.  Obama’s chief economic advisor, Christina Romer—who just retired over a conflict between her views and the administration’s—documented the effect of this negative tax “multiplier” using empirical data in a recently published economics article.

It doesn’t matter whether we accept Klein’s view that the economy is peachy, Zandi’s view that it’s doing badly but could be worse, or Krugman’s view that it’s doing badly and needs more Obamanomics.  All are based on the false premise that more government spending, taxation, and regulation are better for the economy than less.  (Hey—don’t Keynesians believe that spending lots of money on wars is a good way to revive the economy?  I guess Krugman will be admitting he was wrong about the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts after all!)

People like Klein bemoan the fact that corporate profits are back up to 2006 levels while hiring remains slow.  Liberals present the question of our tepid recovery as an intractable metaphysical mystery incapable of being penetrated by mere humans; as Klein puts it: “That is the catch-22 of the recovery: Businesses will start hiring when the economy recovers. And the economy will start to recover when businesses start hiring.”  Answer: And both will improve when the government gets out of the way!

As for the varying conservative perspectives, which are the only ones remotely connected to reality and thus worth considering, Kudlow is right that the American economy is resilient.  Perhaps he’s slyly making the point that more optimism on the public’s part not only better reflects the state of our economy but may improve it via increased investment and hiring.  Kudlow’s perspective is largely predictive, rather than focusing on how lawmakers should bring about a faster and more permanent recovery (though he often discusses those issues as well).

Every other conservative in the world who believes that we shouldn’t stand for the “new normal” of high unemployment and unexceptional growth is correct that Democrats’ policies are making the recession worse.  Repealing ObamaCare, preventing cap-and-trade legislation, and stopping or reversing the scores of other nasty things Obama and Pelosi have planned for our economy are mandatory undertakings over the next six years.

But Paul Ryan hits the bullseye when he notes that it is desirable, necessary, and possible to go further.  Train wreck legislation like ObamaCare is worth repealing, but if Medicare and Medicaid are quickly running out of money, and Social Security is already in the red, why shouldn’t we go after every entitlement shibboleth?

What principle, applied consistently, would nudge us to nullify ObamaCare but leave Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid shiny and intact?  Did our country survive and prosper before these programs were enacted?  Would we survive and prosper if we phased them out?  Might we prosper even more in their absence?

Ryan’s proposal is far from perfect—his main argument for the Roadmap to recovery is that it will keep our entitlement system solvent, and he doesn’t discuss eradicating entitlements once and for all.  Perhaps Ryan believes that talking about eliminating entitlements is too politically risky now, when even his Roadmap is audacious by today’s standards.  But Ryan deserves credit for having gone further than anyone else in Congress in working out the details of a plan that will help the country avoid a fatal insolvency.



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In 2006 Congressional Democrats campaigned on the conceit that Republicans were corrupt up to their coke-filled noses and incapable of governing so much as a taco stand, and that the country was yearning for a breath of fresh air from the party that brought us Gary Condit, William Jefferson, Cynthia McKinney, Jim McGreevey, John Murtha, Eliot Spitzer, and Eric Massa.

After her historic transition to the position of House Speaker-elect, Nancy Pelosi promised, “This leadership team will create the most honest, most open, and most ethical Congress in history.”

Pelosi pledged to “drain the swamp” of slimy Republicans who tapped their feet in bathroom stalls, sent flirty texts to post-pubescent pages, and… what else was it Congressional Republicans were supposedly up to in 2006?

Ignoring all the scandals associated with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards in their race for the presidency and focusing only on Congressional misdeeds, and starting only with Obama’s November 2008 election, the past 21 months have brought a flurry of Democratic indiscretions:

•    Illinois Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr. is under investigation by the Justice Department regarding a taped conversation in which impeached Governor Rod Blagojevich told a staffer that a fundraiser for Jackson would donate $1.5 million to Blagojevich’s reelection campaign if President-elect Obama’s Senate seat went to Jackson

•    Senator Roland Burris was reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee for providing misleading and incomplete information to the Senate in advance of his confirmation to Obama’s Senate seat

•    Congressional Democrats rushed the $787 billion stimulus spending bill to a vote before it could be edited and violated their pledge to post it online for five days before signing it

•    Congressional Democrats self-righteously pushed for PAYGO regulations mandating that money be found in the budget for new entitlements, then ignored their own law to push through unfunded, extended rounds of unemployment benefits

•    Congressional leadership tailored the health care reform bill to include payoffs such as the Louisiana Purchase, the Cornhusker Kickback, and Gator-Aid, and removed these only after they were publicized

•    Congressional leadership attempted such tricks to get health care legislation passed as introducing the Slaughter Rule (aka “deem and “pass”), using budget reconciliation for something it wasn’t meant for, making the bill “budget neutral” by pairing six years of benefits with ten years of taxes, and deceiving on-the-fence pro-life Democrats with an unenforceable executive order banning health care funding for abortions

Last Thursday Democratic Representative Charles Rangel, former Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, was charged with 13 House ethics violations, including failure to disclose income, failure to pay taxes on his condo in the Dominican Republic, possession of four city-subsidized rent-controlled luxury apartments, use of the apartments for campaign committee operations, improper acceptance of corporate-sponsored trips to Caribbean islands, and intervention to award a tax break worth tens of millions of dollars to a major corporate donor to the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service.

Rangel has responded to the charges, for which he has been under investigation for two years, by offering reporters such open and informative replies as “Where I live and how I live? It’s nobody’s damn business where I live,” “Common sense dictates that members of Congress should not be held responsible for wrongdoing,” and “Why don’t you mind your own goddamned business?”

Rangel stepped down from his chairman post, which was taken over by Representative Pete Stark—who subsequently resigned over his own tax scandal.

Over the weekend Pelosi told Christiane Amanpour that Rangel’s role in her “most ethical Congress” was invisible to her: she referred Amanpour to the Office of Congressional Ethics, which Pelosi herself set up in 2009, saying, “I’m totally out of the loop. It is independent. It is confidential, classified, secret, whatever. We don’t know what it is.”

2010 Pelosi campaign commercial: “I can’t see rule-breaking from my House!”

This week Democratic Representative Maxine Waters, who serves on the House Financial Services Committee, was charged with three ethics violations related to the claim that she secured bailout money for OneUnited Bank, for which her husband had served on the board and whose stock he owned, and which received $12 million in funds. Like Rangel, Waters is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and chose to face a trial in the fall rather than plead guilty to the allegations.

Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, who helped allocate bank bailout funds, told Waters at the time that her involvement in the OneUnited bailout was a conflict of interest and that “You should stay out of it.”

Naturally, the mainstream media is blaming the eruption of Democratic corruption on the same cause to which they attributed the Tea Party uprising… racism!

In a story on the racial angle to the recent allegations, the L.A. Times suggested this howler of a defense: “Ethics advocates maintain that lax enforcement of House ethics rules encouraged Rangel and Waters to take defiant stands.” Next on the MSM’s apologia schedule: “Obama’s terrorism experts maintain that Bush’s lax enforcement of airline security encouraged Saudi hijackers to take defiant stands.”

Camille Paglia recently praised Pelosi’s ability to corral House troops to support the health care reform bill, even though the bill is a rotting corpse of bureaucratic sleaze and fraud: “Pelosi scored a giant gain for feminism… [She] demonstrated that a woman can be just as gritty, ruthless and arm-twisting in pursuing her agenda as anyone in the long line of fabled male speakers before her… As for the actual content of the House healthcare bill, horrors!… [T]his rigid, intrusive and grotesquely expensive bill is a nightmare.”

Apparently it’s come to this: feminists are now praising women for their ability to be as corrupt as men.



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Conservatives have been pounding their fists and screaming for decades that tax cuts stimulate the economy.  With lower taxes, investors and business owners can provide more capital for new ventures and engage in more hiring, because they know less of their profits will be confiscated to pay for things like solar panels at the White House.

Tax cuts don’t revive the economy the second they’re passed—no one, not even Rick Santelli, ever said they did.  They don’t do so a few weeks later; they don’t always do so in time for the next election.  But eventually they do.

Tax cuts trim government revenue temporarily, but soon increased growth from lower tax rates results in net revenue increases.

In contrast, tax increases—which is what the impending reversal of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts would amount to—shrink the economy by decreasing hiring and investment.  Regarding the Bush tax cuts, that’d be a combined tax increase to the tune of half a trillion dollars over the next decade.  (Pop quiz: If Rhode Island and Massachusetts’ tax structures were switched, would John Kerry still take the trouble to dock his yacht in another state, even though it would cost him half a million dollars a year in taxes?)

It’s really not that complicated.

Imagine that you run a lemonade stand and make $100 profit a day, and the Obama administration taxes you at 50%, for a government revenue total of $50.

Now imagine that the incoming Christie administration slashes that rate to 20%.  Instead of worrying about paying your bills and staying afloat, and resenting the government’s punishing your entrepreneurship, you hire more workers and eventually expand to five franchises.  At $20 in taxes per stand, you are now sending twice as much revenue to the government as before.

Leftists refuse to see the economy as dynamic and capable of expansion; they view it as a fixed pot that must be redistributed from oppressors to oppressed.

The 1990s were prosperous, not because Bill Clinton was a laissez-faire capitalist extraordinaire—though he was forced into the role of pseudo-free-marketer by Republican Congressional majorities after 1994—but because of the cumulative effect of Reagan’s policies throughout the 1980s.  Reagan campaigned on the idea of permanent tax cuts across the board and enacted them while in office; they remain largely in effect to this day.  The degree of certainty, stability, and flexibility that this consistent posture afforded investors and business owners over the next two decades should not be underestimated.

Reagan steadfastly resisted the call of Congressional Democrats and some Republicans to ramp up government spending during the early 80s recession.  Under his administration, deficit as a percentage of GDP never rose above 6.0%.  By 1987 it was down to 3.2%.

In contrast, the Office of Management and Budget expects the deficit-GDP ratio to be 10.0% in 2010 under Obama, and to barely decline in 2011.

During his presidential campaign, Obama was not shy about promising to let Bush’s tax cuts expire in 2011 if elected.  When Charles Gibson asked Obama why he would support an increase in capital gains taxes, even though raising them in the 1980s decreased revenue and lowering them in the 1990s and 2000s increased revenue, Obama insisted he would do it “for purposes of fairness.”  In other words, Obama feels obligated to make rich people suffer for the sin of being productive, even if that means poor people will suffer more in the long run.

In the spring of 2009, Obama and Congressional Democrats passed their poorly designed, massively irresponsible stimulus spending bill.  Before passage, Obama warned that without the $787 (now $862) billion bill, the unemployment rate might rise to 8.0%.

When unemployment hit 10.0% in 2010, Obama’s new tagline became, “Yes, but it’s not 12 or 13, or 15.”

Democrats’ halting efforts to offer targeted tax cuts to special interest groups as part of the stimulus bill were not convincing.  Giving a tax break to a “green” company that wouldn’t survive on its own does not create the wealth that a tax break for an independent, self-sufficient, productive company would.

Now that it’s become obvious to everyone except Paul Krugman that runaway government spending does not mysteriously create wealth, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has been caught admitting to the House Financial Services Committee last Thursday, 18 months after the stimulus bill has had a chance to work but failed, that extending the Bush tax cuts will strengthen the economy.

Bernanke was quick to walk back his statement and claim that extending the tax cuts is just one way to stimulate the economy.  (One way that works, he did not say in so many words, but give him credit for letting the genie out of the bottle.)

Since the end of last Thursday, the Dow Jones has rallied some 200 points to 10,500, after have troughed earlier in the week at just above 10,000.

Last month Obama economic advisor Christina Romer and her husband published a paper in The American Economic Review demonstrating that tax hikes hurt economic growth.  Their article included the following takeaway: “Our estimates suggest that a tax increase of 1 percent of GDP reduces output over the next three years by nearly 3 percent.  The effect is highly significant.”

Over the weekend, Republican senators revived the idea of extending the Bush tax cuts.  Now even some Democratic senators are talking up the idea, including Evan Bayh, Kent Conrad, and Ben Nelson.

So I guess tax cuts stimulate the economy after all, according to our liberal president’s Federal Reserve chairman, his economic advisor, and multiple Democratic senators.  It used to be newsworthy when we discovered that Obama’s associates and cabinet nominees were terrorists, communists, and Maoists.  Lately the scoop seems to be that a few of his cronies, if allowed to speak freely, occasionally have some sane ideas about how to run the country.



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Ben Jealous, President of the NAACP, declared at last week’s annual convention that the impetus for the Tea Party is hatred of nonwhite people and resentment of a black president.  Of the rise of the movement, Jealous announced, “Here comes the genetic descendent of the White Citizens Council, burst from its coffin.”

I don’t know if Tea Partiers are genetically descendent from the White Citizens Council or not.  (Hey—isn’t an obsession with “genetic descendents” usually associated with racism?)

What I do know is that they’re not politically descendent.

The overwhelming majority of voters and congressmen who identify as Tea Party supporters are Republicans.

In contrast, the early leaders of the White Citizens Council were Louisiana politicians William Rainach and Joseph Waggonner, Jr., justice Leander Perez, and publisher Ned Touchstone, all Democrats.  The group was formed in reaction to political activities carried out by the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, led by black Republican T. R. M. Howard.

As part of its recent campaign against the Tea Party, the NAACP posted on its website a slideshow of Tea Party rally signs bearing such patently, explicitly anti-black sentiments as “Now Look!  Nice People Forced To Protest!  This Must Be Serious,” “Obama & His Gang of Thieves = America’s Toxic Assets,” “Freeloading Illegals Are Raping U.S. Taxpayers,” “Obama Was Not Bowing.  He Was Sucking Saudi Jewels!” “It’s 1939 Germany All Over Again,” “The American Taxpayers Are the Jews for Obama’s Ovens,” and “Hang ‘Em High!  Traitors in Congress—Pelosi, Reid, Waters, Schumer, Frank, Dodd, Conyers, Kerry, Clinton, Kennedy.”

The NAACP was once, many moons ago, a pioneer in spearheading crucial and controversial civil rights work, which culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Since then, the NAACP has distinguished itself as a water carrier for every racist fringe element in society but the KKK.

The writings of former local NAACP chapter president Robert F. Williams, for example, influenced the violent tactics adopted by the Black Panthers, the far-left, quasi-Marxist/Maoist revolutionary group formed in the 1960s that sprouted the Black Power movement and instigated numerous fatal confrontations with police over the next decade.

A revived version of the group, the New Black Panther Party, started in 1989, and was soon vilified by the Anti-Defamation League as “the largest organized anti-Semitic and racist black militant group in America” and labeled a “hate group” by the Southern Law Poverty Center.

More recently, in 2000 the head of the NAACP in Dallas, Lee Alcorn, used his radio show to slam Al Gore for selecting a Jew as his running mate: “If we get a Jew person, then what I’m wondering is, what is this movement for?  [W]e need to be very suspicious of any kind of partnerships between the Jews at that kind of level, because we know that their interest primarily has to do with money and these kind of things.”

After ABC News exposed the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s incendiary racist sermons in the spring of 2008, the NAACP invited him to give a keynote address to an audience of 10,000 members at a fundraiser in Detroit, where Wright unrepentantly reaffirmed his views to a welcoming audience and accused candidate Obama of disavowing his sermons for political reasons.  (As Bill Clinton might say, Obama had a “fleeting association” with black liberation theology.)  Wright added some charming eugenics-inspired comments about how blacks and whites’ brains are different and reflect separate but equal learning styles—remarks that also met with approval from the NAACP audience.

In November 2008, members of the New Black Panther Party brandished police batons and made menacing comments toward voters outside a Philadelphia voting center.  The Bush administration filed a lawsuit against the NBPP, which resulted in a slap-on-the-wrist injunction against one of the defendants.  In June 2009, Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder dismissed the suit against the remaining defendants in the case with no explanation.  Liberal commentators have dismissed the voter intimidation incident as “street theater”—you know, like break dancing or singing James Brown tunes, only with nightsticks and paramilitary gear.

Bill O’Reilly observed, “[A] number of New Black Panthers have been shown on TV saying incredibly bigoted things.  NBPP member King Samir Shabazz even suggested that black Americans kill white babies…  One of the weaknesses of the NAACP is that it has rarely acknowledged black racism.  The organization is silent on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan.  Yet, it is outraged about the Tea Party.”

In a recent column titled “Is NAACP blind to Farrakhan & Co.?  The Nation of Islam is built on racism and lies,” Stanley Crouch highlighted the NAACP’s ongoing support for the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam and suggested that “were Jealous and the rest disturbed and vocal about [Louis] Farrakhan’s presence [in the NAACP], it would suggest some actual integrity of the sort we are not accustomed to hearing from ‘black leaders’ and ‘public intellectuals.’”

This week Andrew Breitbart unearthed video showing U.S. Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod admitting she had engaged in racist behavior toward a white farmer years earlier.  The remarks were made at an award ceremony held by the NAACP, whose audience members clapped and cheered and peppered her remarks with sounds of approval, all before they realized that she was citing her bad behavior as a mistake made on her way to embracing racial equality.

The NAACP responded to the Sherrod case by presenting video of Tea Party speakers telling audiences that tax cuts should be targeted toward whites and not blacks, and attendees shouting agreement with these sentiments.  Oh wait—no, they didn’t.

Tunku Varadarajan summed up the contrast between the two groups well: “Here we have the Tea Party, one of the nation’s most organic, Athenian, democratic movements, being attacked by a political organization—the NAACP—that is among the most sclerotic, dinosaurian, and cadaverous of America’s political groupings.”

In true “post-racial” fashion, expect Obama to hold the equivalent of a beer summit between leaders of the NAACP and representatives of the Tea Party movement, in which both sides are treated as equally morally culpable, calls are made to put aside differences, and reputations and character are obfuscated rather than clarified.



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What kind of benevolent dictator would declare his love for Britain’s stingy, depressing, complicated, cold and arbitrary National Health Service by describing it as “generous, hopeful, confident, joyous and just”?

That would be Harvard-based pediatrician Donald Berwick, who recently received a recess appointment as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services by the benevolent dictator who describes his pessimistic and stale vision for America as “hope and change.”

Recess appointments are an executive procedure used, for better or for worse, when the Senate gives a presidential appointee a difficult time during confirmation hearings—for example, when they filibuster a nominee.  Obama’s appointment of Berwick bears the distinction of having been given without a confirmation hearing having even been scheduled.

It’s as though Obama decided that the very requirement that his nominee appear before a Democratic-controlled Senate constituted an unreasonably difficult hurdle.  This isn’t a recess appointment—it’s a vacation to Bermuda appointment.

As the Wall Street Journal noted, “Circumventing Senate confirmation to appoint the new Medicare chief is part of the same political willfulness that inflicted ObamaCare on the country despite the objections of most voters.”  CBS News observed, “The debate over Berwick’s recess appointment makes clear what the White House knew all too well—Berwick may not have survived the Senate confirmation process, which would have turned into a proxy debate over health care reform.”

Berwick, who will be put in charge of the health care of 100 million Americans without so much as a public query about his plans in office, has been quoted saying, “I am romantic about the N.H.S.; I love it.”  He has called himself “an American fan” of the system, “distant and starry-eyed.”

In his London speech commemorating the N.H.S.’s 60^th birthday, Berwick delivered such pro-American pronouncements to his audience as “Do not trust market forces to give you the system you need…  I cannot believe that the individual health care consumer can enforce through choice the proper configurations of a system as massive and complex as health care.  That is for leaders to do.”

When it comes to Berwick’s affection for health care systems centered around use of death panels, apparently absence makes the heart grow fonder.  After returning home and mooning over the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, the operational arm of the N.H.S., Berwick realized that “All I need to do to rediscover the romance is to look at health care in my own country.”

That country would be the United States, which has the greatest health care system in the world, and would be a profound source of inspiration for anyone who truly loved medicine.  Berwick’s own place of employment is Harvard Medical School, where you would think there would have been a few medical advances in recent years to set his heart aflutter.

But no—Berwick’s passion is for euthanasia counseling and quality-adjusted life years.

Berwick of course has never had to live under the jurisdiction of the N.H.S.  You might call his affair with the British health care system a long-distance relationship.

Describing the supposed British backlash against American conservatives’ depiction of the N.H.S. during the health care reform debate last summer, the New York Times gushed, “A Twitter campaign, We Love The N.H.S., is still going strong, with supporters sending messages about their own good experiences.”

In fact, said campaign didn’t even last 30 days from its first Tweet to its last, and has attracted a piddly 520 followers internationally.  This is despite such helpful but unheeded administrative prompts as “What do you love about the nhs?” and “Please Retweet: 10,000 supporters visualised.”

Admittedly, the riotously popular N.H.S. does have a Facebook fan page with 3,500 members.  Then again, an ill-worded N.H.S. sign implying that contraception would be facilitated by anal rather than vaginal intercourse has a Facebook fan page with 124,475 members.  So perhaps fan counts are not such a flattering measure of the N.H.S.’s popularity.

Even the New York Times admitted that Brits “complain endlessly about the National Health Service…  They deplore the system’s waiting lists, its regional disparities in treatment, its infection-breeding hospitals and its top-heavy bureaucracy.”  I guess the grass is greener on the other side of the pond!

If Donald Berwick wants to swoon over endless waiting lists, fatally protracted wait times, diminished access to specialized care, craven efforts to shield patients from learning about or acquiring costly life-saving drugs, dismal heart attack and cancer survival rates, depersonalized patient treatment, and centralized bureaucratic decision-making about individual health care options, that’s his prerogative.  But forgive the rest of the U.S. if we aren’t quite as smitten as he is.



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It’s no coincidence that the Tea Party movement is springing up now, 235 years after the Boston Tea Party.  Barack Obama is the closest thing this country has had to royalty since King George III.

Yesterday Queen Elizabeth II visited New York City for the third time in her life and the first time in 34 years.  New Yorkers were aflutter over the prospect of royalty tramping around on gritty Manhattan soil.  QE2 addressed the United Nations and then, to cleanse herself of that demoralizing experience, did something pro-American and visited Ground Zero, where she dedicated a new park to 67 Britons who died on September 11.

Americans get keyed up over this kind of thing because it’s so alien to our way of life.  To us, a visit from the Queen is a novelty act, like Lindsay Lohan showing contrition for her actions.

While New Yorkers dutifully read up on how they should behave if they met the Queen—don’t bow or curtsy, we are not her subjects; use the title Your Majesty, then switch to Ma’am—too many Americans still haven’t learned how to stop treating Obama like royalty.

His supporters don’t exactly bow in his presence; they get rowdier than that.  They whoop and holler and sing hosannas, when they’re not crying, fainting, and melting into a pile of mush.

Royalty is the perfect metaphor for the Obama administration: symbolic figureheads who shake hands, soak taxpayers who fund their lavish lifestyles, and don’t do much besides look elegant (except when Barack is swatting flies off his face or Michelle is wearing a Mark Rothko painting).  Whereas Brits are reassured that their royal family is just for show and that there’s an actual political administration getting the work done, in the U.S. we have no such consolation in the Age of The One.  Even when Obama is touring a natural disaster area like the Gulf oil spill zone he behaves like royalty, prancing through the dunes in his silk shirt, daintily noshing lobster salad, and privately contemplating his forehand.  When Obama stepped off the plane in Huntsville, Ontario for the G8 summit, the first thing he asked his hosts was whether there were a lot of golf courses in the area.

Royalty strut around on the taxpayer’s dime, bestowing awards upon the little people who volunteer to help littler people via charity boondoggles and fundraising spectacles.  Similarly, Barack jets around the country on Air Force One speaking at union events and elementary schools, trying to convince the country to get excited because some two-bit smelting plant in Ohio was given a million-dollar grant to go green and is managing to break even instead of going bankrupt.

Royalty play expensive, individualized sports requiring fancy equipment—polo for the royal family, golf for Obama.  (I doubt the Queen would do very well at bowling, but I doubt she would denigrate retarded children after getting a dismal score.)

Royalty are bestowed with honorary titles, awards, and ceremonies based on the mere fact of their existence.  Already Obama-friendly municipalities are naming roads, community centers, and paid holidays after him, to say nothing of his infinitely premature Nobel Peace Prize.

Royalty are famous for being famous.  How else can you characterize Obama’s overnight notoriety and meteoric rise to frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination after a mere speech he gave at a convention?  Obama became well-known for being well-known—liberals fell all over themselves to prove their commitment to the cool kid before everyone else found out it was cool to support him.

Royalty believe in bogus organizations like the UN and their power to bring about change through fantasizing.  They don’t appreciate the corruption inherent in such bloated Potemkin goodwill societies and the spite harbored by poisonous partners admitted due to an unrestricted membership policy.  Naivety about the organizational structure of the UN and its inefficiency in getting anything done may stem from the fact that royalty, like Obama in his guise as a former community organizer, don’t have actual responsibilities.

Royalty are given significant power and are thrust into the public eye at a young age despite negligible accomplishments.  They have the spotlight on them for so long that they forget what it’s like to live as everyday citizens.  Similarly, Obama was elected President of the Free World in his 40s after having served less than one full term as U.S. Senator, most of which was spent running for President, and before that serving as a state Senator in which capacity his most remarked upon accomplishment was voting “Present” 130 times.  As with Obama, royalty’s assumption of power is referenced using such adulatory terms as “ascension” and “coronation.”

Royalty are depicted in solemn portraits; their countenances are ubiquitous.  Similarly, you may have seen Obama’s face reverently displayed two or three trillion times since his presidential candidacy began.

For the British, the royalty are a harmless relic, colorful fodder for tabloid speculation.  For Americans, who have lived without royalty for centuries, the mere prospect of their reintroduction should be a dangerous reminder of what happens when our leaders are worshipped instead of held accountable as public servants.

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President Obama called arguments against Supreme Court Justice nominee Elena Kagan’s confirmation “pretty thin gruel.”

That’s funny—I call no judicial experience and scant, conflicting legal theorizing in print “a short stack of hotcakes.”

We know little of Kagan’s judicial philosophy—and may know even less after her hearings this week if she has any say in the matter—but what little we know isn’t to like.  In fact, it’s enough to hold our noses at.

Kagan wrote in her master’s thesis at Oxford that “[J]udges will often try to mold and steer the law in order to promote certain ethical values and achieve certain social ends.  Such activity is not necessarily wrong or invalid.”  Years later, when challenged on these remarks, she brushed them aside, claiming she was just a “dumb” 23-year-old at the time.  (Question: Was Obama just a dumb 45-year-old when he was still attending Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s racist sermons at Trinity United Church of Christ?)

Kagan once paraphrased her boss Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall’s view that interpretation of the Constitution “demanded that the courts show a special solicitude for the despised and disadvantaged.”  Great!  Does that mean she’s on the side of corporations (the despised) and inner-city residents who want to protect themselves with handguns from break-ins (the disadvantaged)?

That’s probably a no on corporations, since as Obama’s solicitor general Kagan argued the losing position in the Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission (2010) case.  Kagan argued that corporate-sponsored pamphlets and posters could be banned before elections, because they violate campaign finance regulations.  She also claimed with a straight face that it was OK to ban books containing endorsements of candidates for public office before elections, because the FEC won’t actually enforce the ban.

Some have argued that the stances Kagan has taken as solicitor general reveal nothing about her personal views, because she is required by her job to argue the government’s position.  Yes, but was she required to accept jobs clerking for Marshall, strategizing for President Bill Clinton, and shilling for President Barack Obama?  Is it unfair to intuit that she’s a bit more comfortable implementing the visions of these liberal lions than she would be, say, clerking for Clarence Thomas?

When Obama nominated Kagan for the post of solicitor general, he boasted that she had chosen Citizens United as the first case she wanted to argue if confirmed.  So I think it’s safe to say that many of Obama’s predilections are near and dear to her heart.

And that’s probably a no on guns, since as Marshall’s assistant decades ago Kagan urged him not to hear a Washington, D.C. resident’s appeal of his conviction for owning an unlicensed handgun.  When the defendant argued that the D.C. gun ban violated his Second Amendment rights—a decision, by the way, upheld by the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. Chicago (2010)—Kagan snippily replied, “I’m not sympathetic.”

Weak-kneed conservatives keep telling us we should be quiet and support Kagan’s nomination (which is exactly what they said about Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination last summer), because she’s only replacing another departing liberal, Justice John Paul Stevens (which is exactly what they said about Justice David Souter last summer).  OK, but since when did conservatives’ Supreme Court standard stop aiming for 9 defenders of the Constitution and start settling for 4.5?

Former Wall Street Journal assistant managing editor Tunku Varadarajan gushed that in the opening statement of Kagan’s hearings she spoke “with a face that was tilted at an appropriately deferential angle, and with a voice that betrayed—to my delight—the vowels of Manhattan’s Upper West Side.  (She sounded, let us say, like a wise Ashkenazi woman.)”  That and five originalists will get you a constitutional decision!  To Kagan’s credit, at least bloggers haven’t unearthed speeches in which she announced that better rulings would presumably be made by a wise Ashkenazi woman than a Gentile man.

The RINO herd keeps telling us we shouldn’t oppose Kagan, because then venerated liberals will paint us as stubborn and argumentative.  These are the same liberals, you will remember, who last year called town hall protestors racist, two-year-old teabaggers for opposing ObamaCare.

As gratifying as D.C. v. Heller, Citizens United, and McDonald v. Chicago were, here is why conservatives must oppose Kagan’s confirmation: because we can’t afford any more such 5-4 nail-biters, to say nothing of epic disasters we have surrendered like Rasul v. Bush (2004), Kelo v. City of New London (2005), Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), and Massachusetts v. EPA (2007).



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