Obama's Israel Dilemma

This article sets out the settlement issue quite clearly: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/opinion/22judt.html?_r=1 The price we have paid (and go on paying) for Israel's sins seems sometimes even to exceed the price the Israelis pay. Is it possible for an ally to also be our greatest foreign policy liability?

Trade-Offs

The Waxman-Markey bill is an inefficient and deceptive response to a real problem. But, the republicans did nothing when they had their chance, and foresight trails consequence. Instead of the less intrusive, more market-based and more transparent type of emissions mitigation plan that the republicans could have mustered and passed we get the democratic plan: Bureaucratize It!

Some New Animals

http://www.esquire.com/the-side/feature/new-air-force-drones-in-pakistan-061709 I do not believe exploding flies and exploding snakes are necessarily good things to have in the world. They may eliminate the possibility of successful guerilla warfare--a form of human liberty that birthed this nation. And, as weapons increase in power, freedom is leeched away either by the government or by the condition of anarchy.

Insanity Unloosed

Notes from a professor at the Naval Academy: http://www.hometownannapolis.com/news/opn/2009/06/14-47/Guest-Column-The-cost-of-a-diverse-Naval-Academy.html Apparently the military brass thinks that the most important aspect in the training of Navy and Marine officers is well-balanced racial diversity. Not competence, not leadership, not patriotism--instead we prioritize racial politics above all these things and thereby sacrifice lives and treasure and, perhaps, victory. Also, I think this program has been unconstitutional since 2003. Part of the problem is that the guys at the top of the military hierarchy these days are just spineless bureaucrats who never saw combat--they all came in after Vietnam and they're just careerists--not leaders. And they're letting political corruption and bullshit political correctness corrode our military efficiency. Not only do they fail to fight this trend, they boast of it as if it's a success. Success for whom? Worthless bureaucrats and convocations of resenters. And neither political party makes a peep in face of it. I wonder which would be the better option: secession or Australia? I might prefer secession since that way I'd have a chance to shoot some of the people who rendered secession necessary. Hey, maybe the Palins aren't as dumb as I thought--after all, they have been known to show up at meetings of the Alaska secession movement.

Iran Policy

http://townhall.com/columnists/charleskrauthammer/2009/06/19/hope_and_change_-_but_not_for_iran/page/full/

 

Apparently Krauthammer has forgotten what happened to Iraqi Shia and Kurds when Bush I encouraged them to rebel against Saddam. They rebelled, Saddam crushed them, Bush I sat stupidly watching. The same would happen here, and our overt support would provide Khamenei with the excuse that he wasn't merely crushing Iranian rebels--he would claim that he was crushing American puppets. This latter excuse would fly high among Iranians, and dissent from the regime would be discredited for a generation. Krauthammer is simply dead wrong on this question. He is ignorant of Iran and making cheap, shallow criticisms of a careful and considered policy posture.

 

Here is a discussion of the issue on Charlie Rose which includes Bush's Iran expert making essentially the argument I make above:

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10385

Obama's Foreign Policy

http://www.detnews.com/article/20090616/OPINION01/906160319/1008/opinion01/Earnest-goodwill-doesn-t-substitute-for-foreign-policy

This doesn't seem especially coherent to me. He calls Obama a Wilsonian idealist, but then says that he hasn't changed Bush's foreign policy except at the margins. In other words, he talks like an idealist and acts like a realist? And this means he lacks a foreign policy? Reagan talked of abolishing nukes. Was he an idealist without a foreign policy? Bush II tried to democratize the Middle East (surely an idealistic notion). Was he an idealist without a foreign policy? In the end, most ambitious presidents discover that they have less power to alter the course of world history than they would like to think or boast of.

Israel is not an ally. It is a disease our political system has contracted from the Israel lobby. Unless that nation can demonstrate symbiotic characteristics with respect to our body politic, it ought to be flushed out of our system and left to seek some other host.

 

Neither Clinton nor Bush accomplished anything with N. Korea either--it is a virtual protectorate of China. On Iran a little discretion is advisable since our interference is unlikely to help the opposition at this juncture (as Bush's Iran expert Mr. Burns argued on Charlie Rose recently).

 

Just because certain ideologues in this country are shrieking that Obama is weak does not make it so--and hopefully their misguided efforts will be properly dismissed by our adversaries as those nations reformulate their strategies in face of the new administration. But, BO really should give up on the "apologize for America" shtick.

Obamite Moderation

Here is what the Left would like to hear from Obama: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090629/dugard He has declined to bow to either the left or the right on Israel thus far, but has taken a harder line than Bush in areas (especially the settlements) where the Israelis are clearly lying and cheating.

More Health

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2009/06/14/george-will-tells-dirty-little-secrets-universal-healthcare

Pretty clean counter-arguments from Mr. Will. My only disagreement with him is relatively minor: most people actually are too stupid to determine what a competitive health plan is. However, this is of limited consequence since the vast majority have their plans selected for them (or narrowed down) by their employers or the government.
 

Obama knows that even the smallest, most modest "government option" on health insurance opens the door to an almost inevitable socialization of the system, however gradually it may occur. A government option will destroy competition and grow ever larger--and the larger it gets, the more people it covers, the more voters will support it, creating a self-sustaining cycle of continuous growth. Entitlements last forever because none of their natural predators can match them--their vicious cycle of growth and influence confers immortality.  

 

The AMA knows this and is running hard against it. Their problem is that the status quo sucks, with no good options to rectify it. Between greedy doctors, greedy lawyers, incompetent bureaucrats, and patients with no incentive to restrain costs--we spend an enormous amount on health care for results that, on the whole, are no better than countries that spend half as much and which, as a result, have a competitive advantage in business. But, you can't bring doctors under control without second-guessing them or putting them all on salary. The lawyers, at least in theory, keep a lid on the problem of incompetent, dangerous, and negligent doctors. Bureaucracies attract incompetent, unmotivated people, then fail to incentivize them properly--and are never efficient in managing complex systems. Most patients are too stupid to respond effectively to incentives even when they're in place. It's very difficult to do much about any of these four problems, and very little has been done. Obama has talked about restricting doctor's options through cost-effectiveness analysis, and about reducing legal costs and defensive medicine costs by limiting malpractice suits--a good start if he can make it happen. But, his plans will make the bureaucracy problem much worse and probably do nothing for the incentive issue.

On Health Reform

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/business/economy/14view.html?ref=health I think this paragraph is key to the problem, and the main reason why reforms of the health system as a whole have yet to happen, despite the huge cost burden the system now inflicts: "Of course, we have not made such Medicare spending cuts yet, and there are few signs that we will. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 67 percent of Americans believe that they do not receive enough treatment and that only 16 percent believe that they have received unnecessary care. If the Obama administration covers more people with government-supplied or government-subsidized insurance, the political support will broaden for generous benefits, their continuation and, indeed, expansion of current expenditures." Essentially, people become dependents and develop a dependency psychology--they come to prefer safety and ease to freedom and power. At the end of the process, you get Europe, that is, stagnancy and weakness. Europe has been ripe for conquering and eager for submission ever since it was socialized in the 30's. Most of the continent transitioned directly from a class-determined social system in which the great majority had neither power nor responsibility directly to socialism in which the same basic conditions prevail--the lack of freedom and responsibility. Only America saved it from itself: we reversed the tide in WWII (which was a socialist tide), we held the line against full socialization during the Cold War, and the ongoing Muslim influx simply represents a new opportunity for Europe to surrender.

A Court-Jester

"Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge (Miriam) Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice (Sandra Day) O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure that I agree with the statement. I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."  Sonia Sotomayor

 

The last sentence, of course, is asinine. However, the lead-up is common sense, even if jurists rarely admit to this reality. But, it's the narrow, leftist, group-identity obsessed version of the common sense notion that different experiences lead to different opinions. A broader version would note that people of the same sex and ethnicity may also have highly divergent life experiences that help to form different bases for their opinions. She also discounts the value of intellect and professional competence, though I admit these are generally of less consequence in the political rulings with which she seems primarily to be concerned.

 

The Supreme Court's decisions are either political or technical. Disagreements usually arise on the political questions, howsoever they may be disguised behind more or less clever facades of euphemistic rhetoric and irrelevant technicalities.

 

I think other parts of the speech from which this quote was pulled are equally disturbing. Elsewhere, she basically makes an argument (which I might add is poorly constructed as a matter of pure logic and full of holes even half-wits can see) for imposing ethnically-based quotas to determine who should sit on the federal bench--and, presumably, by extension, to determine who should obtain all other government offices. Never mind who is actually qualified on individual merit for such appointments--for every uptick in the Hispanic percentage of the population, more Hispanic judges must be appointed. This consists with her ruling against the New Haven firefighters, whose system of promotion based on individual achievement she curtly tossed out the window: apparently, in promotions, color is more important than competence. In short, she has limited faith in meritocracy and blithely privileges group rights over individual rights--thus undermining two of the essential principles upon which this country is founded--and on the application of which principles we had been making constant improvements until the socialist breakthrough into the mainstream in the 1960s.

 

Politically, she's a member of the party of resentment.

Intellectually, she's too mediocre to inflict much influence on the Supreme Court beyond that granted by her single vote.

The Risks of Nationalizing GM

Any bets on which economic sector might be nationalized next? Health care? Energy? Walmart? This is a good editorial on the GM situation: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/02/opinion/02brooks.html The one point to which I would take exception is the implicit assumption that the Feds will hold on to their stake for a prolonged period. I doubt it. Such a continuance would be flagrantly against our traditions and public displeasure would accumulate. Also, GM will be a much smaller company in a couple of years and therefore of less economic and political consequence than ever. Ford has staked out the moral high ground and it will use it against corrupt support for GM if necessary. But, the key failure is well-defined by Brooks: the Obama plan bows and scrapes before the entrenched interests that destroyed the company. Management is mediocre, the unions parasitic. The plan does nothing to change this reality, leaving us with the likelihood that our collective investment in GM will turn to mud.

Corruption by Ethanol

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124389966385274413.html

This policy is the predictable result of violating a fundamental principle: government should not select the means of achieving pollution reduction; it should confine itself to determining the scope of the reduction and the maximum cost to the economy. Bush the First followed this principle in establishing the highly successful and efficient sulfur emissions-trading regime in the early nineties. They did not mandate which technologies coal plants had to implement. They simply set a price on the emissions and let the private sector figure out the best way to reduce emissions. But, these morons today are trying to micromanage environmental policy and they are failing. This is a bipartisan failure, by the way. And it is induced as much by political corruption as it is by outright stupidity. Yet, given the ever present temptations of large scale corruption and the Democratic tradition of grotesque misapprehension of free market economics, I suspect we will see more of this costly stupidity in the grand cap-and-trade program currently in the offing.

The Left and Reality: An Untenable Connection

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwIQmWSh6ds

Apparently Obama believes that because he possesses rhetorical skills superior to Bush's he can juke the public and convince them that his plan is a move toward a constitutional detention regime. Renaming the process does not constitutionalize it. Maddow does a fine job breaking down into digestible pieces Obama's inconsistencies.

 

This is a good explication of the dilemma Obama has inherited (watch from 2:55 on):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsT1vw_EGOg&feature=related

This is the actual qoute from Justice Brandeis that the professor attempted to paraphrase:

 

"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

 

I think this warning applies to Bush and to Obama. Of course, the latter, as a former "professor" of constitutional law, ought really to know better. And maybe he would, if he had actually been a professor instead of the beneficiary of a sinecure with the title of "professor." What Obama does not mention is the reality of a trade-off here. Do you want to play nice and adhere to the constitution or do you want to risk some blowback from deporting and potentially releasing some of these guys? Like Bush, Obama wants to have it both ways. But the contours of the constitution will not succumb to inventive euphemisms.