Gay Marriage Conservative Tokenism

The Colorado Independent posted a muckraking essay today smearing Focus on the Family for its purported $727,000 in contributions to the Yes on 8 campaign in California: "Focus on the Family Vastly Outpaced Mormon Spending on Proposition 8."

Commenting on the piece (with its scandalous aspersions to alleged Mormon extremists), I saw a new term of repudiation at Pam Spaulding's: "the fundievangelical movement." Spaulding also attacks Focus on the Family as an "evil, Bible-beating, anti-gay organization."

All that for exercising First Amendment rights through the political process? Of course, Spaulding applauded the Stalinist intimidation tactics of the No on H8 activists who are mapping the names and ZIP codes of financial backers of the California initiative, so she's consistent in her totalitarianism.

But what about the "young turks" at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen? You wouldn't think a bunch of rising intellectuals would stoop to Pam Spaulding's level of rank demonization, right?

Well, think again:

The true driving power behind the anti-gay marriage movement resides in a community with many names. For the sake of simplicity I’ll return to the tried and true Religious Right (and the Religious Right’s red headed stepchildren, the Mormons).

Couching their anti-gay agenda in Christian dogma, the Religious Right has been successful in essentially swimming up stream against the march towards equality for homosexuals. While homosexuality is enjoying more social acceptance now than during any other period in American history, the Religious Right is also enjoying successes in actively inhibiting homosexual rights, enacting constitutional gay marriage bans in a number of states.

This would seem counter-intuitive at first, after all, if gays are moving up in the world, how is it that they are suffering setbacks on things like their right to marry?

This extraordinary piece continues with this eye-opening proposal:

What makes a marriage sacred? That answer is different for many people. People of faith are likely to reply that the sanctity of their marriage is divined from the authority of their God. For those who are without faith, they are more apt to say that the sanctity of the marriage resides in the marriage itself, and the common union between the two partners involved. Further, of the faithful, the devout churchgoers may say that their unity is blessed by their God through their church, while those who are of faith but skeptical of organized religion may decide that the church does not bestow that happy blessing, but God gives it to them anyway.

The point that I’m getting at is that in a country where everyone is free to choose what they believe, the sanctity of marriage is something that is not universal, but is instead unique to the situation. I have a coworker that feels that God blesses both his marriage and mine. I personally believe that God has nothing to do with it, and the sanctity of my marriage comes from the fact that my wife and I are stubbornly attached to each other.

The solution? Simple. Abolish all marriage.

Abolish all marriage? Okay, let's just overturn thousands of years of social custom for the sake of the self-proclaimed "right" of a tiny oppositional minority of the population to be married

But I've dissected the left's gay marriage totalitarianism every which way since last November. What interests me here is that the proprietors of Ordinary Gentlemen are ostensibly conservatives. Yep, these folks are supposedly among the "young turks" Robert Stacy McCain identifies in his essay, Young Turks and Gay Marriage." Or, as Helen Rittelmeyer puts it:

I would add ... that support for same-sex marriage has become a mark, not only of defeatism, but of self-conscious tokenism among young conservatives. Being publicly pro-SSM is the quickest way for a young journalist to signal that he's one of the right-wingers it's okay to like. Haven't they heard that it's better to be feared than loved? Or, to put it less glibly, the real respectability of a solid argument is preferable to the worthless respectability one gets by being on the Harmless Right.

It's an interesting demographic, this young, harmless conservative tokenism, except I don't think these folks are all that harmless. Their effluence just works to feed progressive bull to the media's Obamatons. Besides, as cowardly as these folks are, their musings chum the waters for more dangerous folks like RAWMUSCLEGLUTES.

The bulk of the guys at Ordinary Gentlemen are supposedly of Burkean persuasions and libertarian leanings (Kyle Moore, the author of the abolish marriage proposal above, is liberal). But a regular reading of the posts shows little deviation from the godless licentiousness seen on the nihilist left - indeed, these guys are pretty much atheists through and through. For all the long-winded "intellectual" dialog, the page offers mostly unexceptional commentary, the type that's routinely available on any number of the more tasteless blogs found across the netroots fever swamps. The Ordinary Gents are all into bashing neoconservatives and excoriating pro-lifers. The blog's mission is to encourage "internal" debate, but frankly that sound a bit incestuous, and with the public's Obamessianism already starting to fade, this league's honeymoon likely winding down as well.

Suleman Octuplets Could Cost Taxpayers Millions

Via the Los Angeles Times:

Nadya Suleman has 14 children, including newborn octuplets. She has no job, no income and owes $50,000 in student loans.

Still, the 33-year-old Whittier woman said she's confident that she can afford to raise her huge family, insisting she can do it without welfare. In an interview Tuesday with NBC, she said she could use student loans to make ends meet until she finishes graduate school and gets a job.

But Suleman faces what are likely to be millions of dollars in medical bills alone, and it's increasingly likely that taxpayers will foot many of those bills.

Her family is eligible for large sums of public assistance money. Even before she gave birth to the octuplets Jan. 26, Suleman was receiving $490 in monthly food stamps, and three of her children were receiving federal supplemental security income because they are disabled.

Lowell Kepke, a spokesman for the San Francisco office of the Social Security Administration, said that a single parent with no income qualifies for up to $793 a month for each child with a physical or mental condition that results in "marked or severe functional limitations." That money is used for support and maintenance of the family, and Suleman would not be required to specifically account for how it is spent.

If Suleman's disabled children received the maximum payment, she would get nearly $2,900 a month in state and federal assistance, including the food stamps.

I will never discount the miracle of life that is God's gift of the octuplets. But I'm having a really hard time seeing how the sense of responsibility of the mother and the fertility specialists just disappeared. The most important decision when thinking about bringing a child into the world is how the family will pay the costs, from prenatal care to delivery and hospital expenses, and then, of course, for the rest of a safe, secure, and healthy life. I don't believe Nadya Suleman is completely in her right mind when she suggests she'll soon be fully be able to care for these children without any outside/public support whatsoever (as she claims at the piece).

I think this is more than a deeply troubling issue at the individual psychological level. There's a social breakdown here along the way, in terms of expectations, medical guidance and advisement, and of a social welfare system that enables such extreme childbearing decisions altogether.

I pray these children have a good life. The first photos of the octuplets are here.

Jeremy Lusk, 1984-2009

While reading the newspaper this afternoon, I came across the Los Angeles Times obituary for Jeremy Lusk, 24, who died yesterday from injuries sustained at a freestyle motocross competition on Saturday:

Jeremy Lusk, star of a daredevil sport known as freestyle motocross and a popular action sports hero, died early Tuesday from head injuries suffered during a crash Saturday at a competition in San Jose, Costa Rica. He was 24.

Lusk, a Temecula resident, had been in a medically induced coma, with swelling of the brain, at Calderon Guardia Hospital in San Jose. A spokesman at the hospital said he suffered severe brain damage and a possible spinal cord injury.

Nicknamed "Pitbull" because of his tenacity on a motorcycle, Lusk was injured after failing to fully rotate a back-flip variation while soaring over a 100-foot jump.

He slammed headfirst into the dirt on the landing ramp's down-slope. It was reminiscent of a similar crash he endured while attempting the same trick during the 2007 X Games at the Home Depot Center in Carson, but Lusk walked away from that incident.

The trick involves extending the body away from the motorcycle and grabbing the seat as the motorcycle is upside down, then pulling back aboard as the motorcycle is righted before landing. Lusk clearly had trouble getting back on the seat, and some witnesses said swirling winds within San Jose's Ricardo Saprissa Stadium may have been a factor.

Despite the danger associated with freestyle motocross, Lusk is believed to be the first pro rider to have died from injuries suffered in an FMX contest, though several have incurred serious injuries.

Lusk, who was born in San Diego in 1984 and had been riding motorcycles since he was 3, turned pro at 19. He was coming off his most successful year.

The rest of the obituary is here. Video courtesy of Bitten and Bound.

My thoughts and prayers go out to the Lusk family.

Progressive Redistribution Stimulus

Matthew Yglesias, commenting on Brink Lindsey's new policy paper, "Paul Krugman's Nostalgianomics: Economic Policies, Social Norms, and Income Inequality," reveals the underlying redistributionist goals of Democratic fiscal and social policy:

... the generic “progressive” idea is that we should have a more progressive tax code that spends more money on egalitarian social welfare programs. That’s not a return to the 1950s. It’s an effort to ensure that the gains of the past 30 years worth of policy shifts are spread more equitably ... In principle, the pie could be redistributed (through tax-and-transfer or tax-and-service) such that everyone winds up with more pie than they had before ... rather than giving huge additional pie slices to the richest people.

While Yglesias' analysis focuses on the income gaps resulting from information-driven technological change, it's interesting how this idea of "more money on egalitarian social welfare programs" is essentially the foundation for the Obama administration's $800-plus billion stimulus plan.

As Michael Hiltzik notes at today's Los Angeles Times, " the federal government moved forward Tuesday on the most ambitious economic recovery plan since the Great Depression." Whereas Hiltzik's point of departure is Franklin Roosevelt (who was regulatory and stimulatory) the left's is Lyndon Johnson (who was paternalistic and redistributionist). A quick perusal of the House Appropriations Committee's press release, "Summary: American Recovery and Reinvestment," clearly indicates that economic stimulus and market rebuilding are side notes underlying the big government rationale at the heart of the program. The legislation is loaded with social spending on child development, health care appropriations, Indian affairs, education (including Head Start), not to mention energy and the environment and a range of other expenditures of varying degrees of logical relation to the immediate goal of "budgetary stimulus."

All of these things are ostensibly good and needed initiatives. But for Democrats to continually use the economic crisis and catastrophic fearmongering to justify movement toward the party's larger state-socialist redistributionist agenda is fundamentally dishonest and it violates the trust of the American people.

We know what the Democrats want from government. It's be nice if they'd have a little more integrity in selling their economic program for what it really is.

Britain Capitulates to Muslim Extremism

Geert Wilders, the Dutch filmmaker and parliamentarian, has been banned from entering the United Kingdom by British authorities, who cited his presence a serious threat to society. Wilders was scheduled to show his film, Fitna, to the House of Lords.

Lord Nazir Ahmed, the first Muslim life peer in Britain's upper chamber, threatened to bring a mob of 10,000 Islamists to storm the Parliament.

Melanie Phillips puts things into perspective:

So let’s get this straight. The British government allows people to march through British streets screaming support for Hamas, it allows Hizb ut Tahrir to recruit on campus for the jihad against Britain and the west, it takes no action against a Muslim peer who threatens mass intimidation of Parliament, but it bans from the country a member of parliament of a European democracy who wishes to address the British Parliament on the threat to life and liberty in the west from religious fascism.

It is he, not them, who is considered a ‘serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of society’. Why? Because the result of this stand for life and liberty against those who would destroy them might be an attack by violent thugs. The response is not to face down such a threat of violence but to capitulate to it instead.

It was the same reasoning that led the police on those pro-Hamas marches to confiscate the Israeli flag, on the grounds that it would provoke violence, while those screaming support for genocide and incitement against the Jews were allowed to do so. The reasoning was that the Israeli flag might provoke thuggery while the genocidal incitement would not. So those actually promoting aggression were allowed to do so while those who threatened no-one at all were repressed. And now a Dutch politician who doesn’t threaten anyone is banned for telling unpalatable truths about those who do; while those who threaten life and liberty find that the more they do so, the more the British government will do exactly what they want, in the interests of ‘community harmony’.

Wilders is a controversial politician, to be sure. But this is another fateful and defining issue for Britain’s governing class as it continues to sleepwalk into cultural suicide. If British MPs do not raise hell about this banning order, if they go along with this spinelessness, if they fail to stand up for the principle that the British Parliament of all places must be free to hear what a fellow democratically elected politician has to say about one of the most difficult and urgent issues of our time, if they fail to hold the line against the threat of violence but capitulate to it instead, they will be signalling that Britain is no longer the cradle of freedom and democracy but its graveyard.

Israeli Vote a Setback for Obama and Anti-Israel Left

Check out the Washington Post's report, "In Israeli Vote Results, A Setback for Obama":

President Obama's ambition to move quickly on Israeli-Palestinian peace suffered a significant setback yesterday with the rightward shift apparent in nearly complete Israeli election results, analysts said.

While the centrist Kadima party appeared to eke out a victory, the right-wing Likud party more than doubled its seats and an ultra-nationalist party made big gains, increasing the prospect that a government uninterested in peace talks will emerge from the post-election efforts to form a governing coalition. Even if Tzipi Livni, the head of Kadima who has vowed to negotiate peace with the Palestinians, manages to cobble together a coalition after weeks of negotiations, many experts predict she will be hamstrung by her coalition partners ....

Administration officials said yesterday they would not comment pending official returns, but many key players have long and difficult memories of dealing with the Binyamin Netanyahu, the Likud leader, when he was prime minister during the Clinton administration. It is no secret that U.S. officials would prefer to deal with Livni, who as foreign minister spearheaded unsuccessful talks with the Palestinians in the waning days of the Bush administration.

The prospect of a Likud-dominated government has sent Siun at Firedoglake into an anti-Israel fit, complete with wild generalizations and insinuations of American atrocities in Iraq:

While the final results are uncertain, they are all too clear – no matter which candidate wins in the end, the leadership will be one of the hawks. Livni, who not so long ago was trumpeted as the new “progressive” option, has since done everything she could to prove herself as bloodthirsty as her brethren. Netanyahu’s thuggish but oh so popular posturing set the bar the others decimated Gaza to meet. Neither direction offers hope of genuine and just peace ....

As we’ve watched with horror the Iraeli attack on Gaza and the resulting devastation of lives and homes, we may have forgotten how closely that devastation mirrors the results of our war on and occupation of Iraq. Gaza, already debilitated by the Israeli blockade, faced three intensive weeks of brutality while we have maintained our destruction of Iraqis and their society, already debilitated by our sanctions, over years. Yet the results are horribly similar.

It'll be very interesting to see U.S.-Israeli relations evolve with Netanyahu in power (if it comes to that), pressing the U.S. from the right, while the hardline pro-terror factions in the U.S. hammer the Obama administration from the extreme left.

Senate Approves Economic Stimulus

You've got a trio of GOP senators who voted with the Democrats in today's Senate approval of the economic stimulus package in Washington. The New York Times reports:

The Senate approved its bill most along party lines, by a vote of 61 to 37, with three Republicans joining 56 Democrats and two independents in favor. (There is one vacancy in the Senate, from Minnesota, and Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, a Republican nominated to become Mr. Obama’s Commerce Secretary, did not vote.)
The opposition of most Republicans underscored insurmountable disagreements, over both economic and political philosophy, in addressing the recession.

Supporters of the stimulus measure said that only a towering effort by the government to create jobs and spur economic growth would be able to stop the downward spiral in the economy, spur a recovery and avoid a prolonged deflationary period.

Republicans Susan Collins and Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, voted with the administration.

Look for a conservative backlash against these three led by folks like Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin (and more).

Personally, I can't imagine a Republican of any integrity or renown voting for this utterly unprincipled spending boondoggle. There's no sound economic basis for passing legislation that throws in every favored interest-group spending item under the sun. George Will noted last week that the Democrats included everything in the bill but the kitchen sink, and then they threw the sink in there too. More troubling, President Obama's catastrophic fearmongering represents a total abdication of principled leadership. He mounted an ad hoc "bumbling pulpit" to frighten Americans into supporting a program that majorities have already rejected as economically unsound (the public backs tax cuts over spending).

This is a preview of things to come, of course. We've seen three weeks of incompetence, impropriety, and ideological extremism. There's little here that's reassuring for traditionalists who want targeted spending and tax cuts to grow the economy. Nor is there anything here for people of upstanding values - regular people trying to hold fast in a time of uncertainty - that reflects their honesty, decency, or hard work.

This is despicable bailout socialism of the worse kind.

Obama's Census Power Grab

Here's Michael Barone on the controversy over Barack Obama's centralization of the Census in the Oval Office:

So now it's been announced that the White House will oversee the Census. Of course, the president has ultimate authority over cabinet officers (that's the unitary presidency theory that Democrats hated up to but not beyond January 20), and I am not prepared to charge that Emanuel or anyone else in the White House is determined to diabolically cook the Census books in search of gains for the Democratic Party or the Black or Hispanic caucuses. And we have the integrity of Census statisticians to rely on; they favor sampling on grounds that commend themselves to academic statisticians, but also have shown, in the 2000 Census, that they will adhere to those standards in the face of political pressures to the contrary. Nonetheless, as someone who got great joy when my parents in 1951 (when I was 7) bought a set of encyclopedias with the 1950 Census figures (I had only had access to the much outdated 1940 Census figures), I'm going to keep an eye on this one.

Barone lays out the unconstitional case against Obama's power grab, but be sure to check out John Fund's piece today at the Wall Street Journal, "Why Obama Wants Control of the Census":

President Obama said in his inaugural address that he planned to "restore science to its rightful place" in government. That's a worthy goal. But statisticians at the Commerce Department didn't think it would mean having the director of next year's Census report directly to the White House rather than to the Commerce secretary, as is customary. "There's only one reason to have that high level of White House involvement," a career professional at the Census Bureau tells me. "And it's called politics, not science."

The decision was made last week after California Rep. Barbara Lee, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, and Hispanic groups complained to the White House that Judd Gregg, the Republican senator from New Hampshire slated to head Commerce, couldn't be trusted to conduct a complete Census. The National Association of Latino Officials said it had "serious questions about his willingness to ensure that the 2010 Census produces the most accurate possible count."

Anything that threatens the integrity of the Census has profound implications. Not only is it the basis for congressional redistricting, it provides the raw data by which government spending is allocated on everything from roads to schools. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also uses the Census to prepare the economic data that so much of business relies upon. "If the original numbers aren't as hard as possible, the uses they're put to get fuzzier and fuzzier," says Bruce Chapman, who was director of the Census in the 1980s.

These kind of power plays are exactly what critics of Barack Obama expected: A new politics of identity, cloaked in the ethereal political messianism of the promise of hope and change. But this is back to the future of affirmative action redistricting and big government spending set-asides.

Maybe Barone needs to take a closer look at that unconstitutionality argument? Maybe we all do?

Geithner Plan to Top $1.5 Trillion

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is said to have prevailed over internal rivals during the administrations debate and planning for the next stage of the bailout. According to the report from Stephen Labaton and Edmund Andrews, Geithner won out "against some of the president’s top political hands."

This is going to be one costly success. At this morning's Washington Post reports, the Geithner plan may top $1.5 trillion:

The gravity of the financial crisis confronting the Obama administration will come into stark focus today when officials unveil a three-pronged rescue program that may commit up to $1.5 trillion in public and private funds, and possibly more, lawmakers and other officials said.

In announcing the plan, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner will not ask Congress for more funds than the roughly $350 billion that remain in the Treasury Department's original rescue package for the financial system, though congressional sources said such a request could come later if the new programs are unsuccessful. The rest of the money would come from other government agencies, such as the Federal Reserve, as well as private-sector contributions.

A senior administration official warned last night that the ultimate cost to taxpayers has not been determined. Several of the programs have not been finalized, and most are designed to ultimately return money to taxpayers.

Geithner plans to announce a public-private partnership that would seek to finance the purchasing of toxic bank assets that are at the heart of the credit crisis, officials and congressional sources said. These sources briefed by Treasury officials said the program may initially raise $250 billion to $500 billion in public and private funds to offer low-cost financing to encourage investors to buy the toxic assets. An administration official said the proposal is still subject to a public review and may not take final shape for several weeks.

A second initiative will broaden the scope of a Federal Reserve program aimed at unclogging the markets for auto, student and other consumer loans. That initiative may expand to as much as $1 trillion, using $100 billion from the Treasury's rescue funds, and include aid for commercial real estate markets.

That's some big money. No wonder President Obama's reduced to pleading "catastrophe" with every breath he takes.

See also, Powerline:

Have you noticed, too, that as Obama tries ever more desperately to sell his porkapalooza, his claims for it expand? Originally he said it would save or create 3 million jobs. Then for a while it was 3-4 million. Tonight Obama's consistent claim was that the porkfest will create 4 million jobs.

I noticed, but hey, you've got to bump up the need to justify the price ...

(Un)Trusting President Obama

Here's President Obama's opening remarks from tonight's press conference:

We find ourselves in a rare moment where the citizens of our country and all countries are watching and waiting for us to lead. It is a responsibility that this generation did not ask for, but one that we must accept for the sake of our future and our children’s. The strongest democracies flourish from frequent and lively debate, but they endure when people of every background and belief find a way to set aside smaller differences in service of a greater purpose. That is the test facing the United States of America in this winter of our hardship, and it is our duty as leaders and citizens to stay true to that purpose in the weeks and months ahead. After a day of speaking with and listening to the fundamentally decent men and women who call this nation home, I have full faith and confidence that we can. And with that, I’ll take your questions.

Dan Riehl has some fair and balanced thoughts on the meeting:

Obama's a talented speaker ... He's also incredibly disingenuous as to the causes for our current problems. The Bush tax cuts did not cause them and even Obama fans have enough sense to know that.

I simply don't believe this president. He lied during the primaries and the general, and he's going to play doom and gloom until he gets what he wants now.

Check Memeorandum for more commentary. I'll have more tomorrow ...

On Snark and TBogg

The other day, in response to my essay, "How New Deal Policies Prolonged the Depression," TBogg of Firedoglake left this in the comments:

Be careful what you wish for Donald. I would hate to see the definition of a "socialist" become: " a pro-victory associate professor who lost his job because the state didn't get enough stimulus money".

And I'm not being snarky.

Best of luck to you.

TBogg says he's "not being snarky."

Okay, then what is he being? He's certainly not being caring or compassionate. That's not his intent at all, since his entire blogging schtick is snark.

TBogg, for example, in "F-Me Pumps," smeared Alaska Governor following last October's vice-presidential debate - where she was wearing red high-heels - as an Alaskan hillbilly, the political personification of Amy Winehouse's no-nightlife sluts. TBogg's also had a longrunning hostility to Townhall's young conservative commentator, Ben Shapiro. Ridiculed as "Virgin Ben," TBogg has attacked Shapiro for his sexual abstinence, and when Shapiro got married in Israel last summer, TBogg wrote a post entitled, "Mazel Tov! Now why don’t we do it in the road…", saying "The Virgin Ben, had gone Full Metal Conjugal back in July with his new bride, the now Mrs. Probably Not A Virgin Ben ...

And now TBogg claims that his comment at my post wasn't "snarky"? Well, perhaps a little childish excoriation wasn't up to the task needed to take me down more than a few notches, that is, to destroy me for speaking truth to Democratic power.

I'm halfway through reading David Denby's, Snark, a book on the increasing corrosion of public discusion in American life. Now, I'm no fan of Denby. In a later section of the book, in a chapter devoted to Maureen Dowd, he slams the New York Times columnist for the inadequacies of her snarky essays in attacking President George W. Bush, who Denby calls a tyrant (and then pleads that he's not comparing President Bush to "Hitler").

That said, in Snark, Denby is judicious in his analysis, and the book's worth a look for those still sorting out the venom of a life of political blogging. Denby, by the way, is not attacking satire or spoof, irreverence or irony. He's especially not taking on hate speech or Internet trolls. Denby sees snark (which is the use of malicious sarcasm) as a "pinkeye" infecting the national conversation.

In his historical review of snark, Denby says some of those who professionally attack others intend their words to be strong enough to "make their victims disappear - go away, give up, even kill themselves."

This, then, perfectlly captures TBogg's comment above.

I'm one neoconservative blogger who "just won't die," and when I'm actually strengthened by the abuse and invective from folks like TBogg, they'll abandon snark to just sow fear - in this case job loss for a professor like me employed by the state community college system.

It's not just, "How dare you ridicule the Democratic socialist agenda? Don't you know that you'll lose your job?" It's "I hope and pray you lose your job you wingnut freak, and that you die in the wet gutter of the unemployment lines. We've had it with neocons like you who've raked this country over the coals with war and economic catastrophe." TBogg's beyond just flipping conservatives the bird of dismissal. His intent here is to feign serious concern - "Best of luck to you" - in disguise of the dark spells of death and destruction.

This is what's at the heart of the left. Both sides do snark, of course, as Denby indicates to full extent in is book.

But people like TBogg have truly abandoned any modicum of divine grace and reason for the witch's spell of contumely and ridicule. This is the faux humor of secular demonology. It's not for fun and laughs. It's to denigrate and destroy those whose values and ideas stand in the way of the left's progressive nihilism that's seeking a chokehold on the vitality of this nation.

Partisan Opinions on Israel's Elections

Here's a follow-up to my post this morning, "Israel, Terrorism, and the Well-Intentioned Left."

Caroline Glick argues that Israel's national elections tomorrow are the country's "most fateful" ever:

In late 2006, citing the Iranian nuclear menace, Israel Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman joined the Olmert government where he received the tailor-made title of strategic affairs minister. At the time Lieberman joined the cabinet, the public outcry against the government for its failure to lead Israel to victory in the war with Iran's Lebanese proxy Hizbullah had reached a fever pitch. The smell of new elections was in the air as members of Knesset from all parties came under enormous public pressure to vote no confidence in the government.

By joining the government when he did, Lieberman single-handedly kept the Olmert government in power. Explaining his move, Lieberman claimed that the danger emanating from Iran's nuclear program was so great that Israel could not afford new elections.

But what did he accomplish by saving the government by taking that job? The short answer is nothing. Not only did his presence in the government make no impact on Israel's effectiveness in dealing with Iran, it prolonged the lifespan of a government that had no interest in forming a strategy for contending with Iran by two years.
In light of this fact, perhaps more than any other Israeli politician, Lieberman is to blame for the fact that Israel finds itself today with no allies in its hour of greatest peril. Had he allowed the people to elect more competent leaders in the fall of 2006, we might have been able to take advantage of the waning years of the Bush administration to convince the US to work with us against Iran ....

In 2006, Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu took it upon himself to engage the American people in a discussion of the danger Iran poses not only to Israel but to the world as a whole. In late 2006, he began meeting with key US governors and state politicians to convince them to divest their state employees' pension funds from companies that do business with Iran. This initiative and complementary efforts by the Washington-based Center for Security Policy convinced dozens of state legislatures to pass laws divesting their pension funds from companies that do business with Iran.

Netanyahu also strongly backed the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs' initiative to indict Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as an international war criminal for inciting genocide. Both the divestment campaign and the campaign against Ahmadinejad have been Israel's most successful public diplomacy efforts in contending with Iran. More than anything done by the government, these initiatives made Americans aware of the Iranian nuclear threat and so forced the issue onto the agendas of all the presidential candidates.

Instead of supporting Netanyahu's efforts, Livni, Barak and Lieberman have disparaged them or ignored them.

Because he is the only leader who has done anything significant to fight Iran's nuclear program, Netanyahu is the only national leader who has the international credibility to be believed when he says - as he did this week - that Israel will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. Likud under Netanyahu is the only party that has consistently drawn the connection between Iran, its Palestinian, Lebanese, Iraqi and Afghan terror proxies, its Syrian client state and its nuclear weapons program, and made fighting this axis the guiding principle of its national security strategy.

Read the whole thing (here) for Glick's criticisms of Tzipi Livni and Ehud Barak.

Now, compare Glick to Glenn Greenwald:

Israel is holding its national elections tomorrow. Not only is it virtually certain that the right-wing militarist Benjamin Netanyahu of the Likud Party will become the new Prime Minister, but it is highly likely that the ultra-right, anti-Arab nationalist and West Bank settler Avigdor Lieberman of the racist Yisrael Beitenu (Israel Our Home) Party will perform scandalously well. Polls show Lieberman’s party winning between 15 to 20 of the 120 seats in the Knesset, perhaps even surpassing Israel’s Labour Party for third place and even an outside change for second place. Lieberman’s party will form a vital component of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition and will secure a key Cabinet post for Lieberman himself ....

In February, 2000, Austria held a national election in which the far-right, anti-immigrant party of Joerg Haider stunned the world by attracting 26% of the vote and becoming a part of the ruling parliamentary coalition headed by the Austrian People's Party (though Haider himself had no position in the government). This is how the United States reacted to those results:

The United States is temporarily recalling its ambassador from Vienna following the swearing in of a new coalition government that includes the far-right Freedom Party. . . .

Speaking at a news conference in Washington, Mrs Albright said: "We have decided to limit our contacts with the new government and we will see whether further actions are necessary to advance our support for democratic values."

The U.S. wasn’t the only country to punish Austria for this outcome:

Israel has recalled its ambassador and has announced that Joerg Haider, the party's figurehead, will not be allowed into the country.

"Israel cannot remain silent in the face of the rise of extremist right-wing parties, in particular in those countries which played a role in the events which brought about the eradication of a third of the Jewish people in the Holocaust," a foreign ministry statement said.

The Haider/Lieberman comparison isn’t perfect. Haider had made a handful of stray reprehensible comments which were anti-Semitic or even sympathetic to former Nazi Party members, but the platform on which he actually ran had nothing to do with that. It was the standard nativist, anti-immigrant cant sweeping much of the European Right at the time. Arguably, though, Lieberman’s Arab-hating bile is even worse. Whereas Haider, an Austrian citizen, was demonizing foreign immigrants seeking to enter the country, Lieberman himself is an immigrant to Israel and is demonizing citizens who have been Israelis far longer than he has.

The U.S. already pays a very substantial price for its decades-long, blind and one-sided support for Israeli actions. The New York Times yesterday published an Op-Ed from Alaa Al Aswany -- an obviously pro-Obama, pro-American Egyptian describing the pervasive anger in Egypt that has already arisen towards Obama as a result of his deafening silence on the Israeli attack on Gaza ....

If, as it appears, the face Israel is now choosing for itself is that of Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman, then the cost to the United States of ongoing, one-sided support for Israel is going to skyrocket, and the need for serious change in U.S. policy towards Israel will be even more acute.

Now, readers can behold the contrast between a neoconservative commentator - Glick - and a far-left progressive/civil libertarian commentator - Greenwald - and judge for themselves.

Glick opposes Lieberman on political and policy grounds, and sees him as weakening Israeli national security. She supports Netanyahu because he's made the most successful "public diplomacy efforts in contending with Iran."

In contrast, Greenwald attacks Lieberman as a "far-right extremist," portraying his positions as analogous to Austria's neo-Nazi Freedom Party. To top it off, Greenwald used the methodology of guilt-by-association to impugn the credibility of Benjamin Netanyahu, who may well form a governing coaltion with Lieberman.

This hysterical smear is then used as a basis for the United States to repudiate the Israeli government.

Now, recall this morning's post, where Gary Novak asked, "At what point do those who participate in the normalization of evil cease to be useful idiots and become evil themselves?"

Consider Greenwald's post a test-case for Novak's query.

Newsweek as Journal of Opinion

It's been coming for some time now, but as the New York Times reports, Newsweek magazine is undergoing a big makeover, essentially transforming itself into a journal of opinion:

Newsweek is about to begin a major change in its identity, with a new design, a much smaller and, it hopes, more affluent readership, and some shifts in content. The venerable newsweekly’s ingrained role of obligatory coverage of the week’s big events will be abandoned once and for all, executives say.

“There’s a phrase in the culture, ‘we need to take note of,’ ‘we need to weigh in on,’ ” said Newsweek’s editor, Jon Meacham. “That’s going away. If we don’t have something original to say, we won’t. The drill of chasing the week’s news to add a couple of hard-fought new details is not sustainable.”

Newsweek loses money, and the consensus within its parent, the Washington Post Company, and among industry analysts, is that it has to try something big. The magazine is betting that the answer lies in changing both itself and its audience, and getting the audience to pay more.

A deep-rooted part of the newsweekly culture has been to serve a mass audience, but that market has been shrinking, and new subscribers come at a high price in call centers, advertising and deeply discounted subscriptions.

As readers here may recall, the shift at Newsweek to a journal of opinion is already well underway. The magazine's still newsy and glossy, but its recent marquee essays would be right at home at the American Prospect or Washington Monthly - that is, hardline leftist outlets for big government advocacy and the culture of anything-goes nihilism.

Recall, Newsweek's big cover story last month, "The Religious Case for Gay Marriage" (which was a disaster, as I pointed out at the time).

Also, Jon Meacham's essay this week on the growth of big government, "We Are All Socialists Now," is even worse, being an essay that's founded in a degree of journalistic dishonesty that seems to have been emboldened by the election of Barack Obama.

Only time will tell if Newsweek's making the right decision.

I doubt the reading public needs more left-wing editorial sources. Other newsweeklies are making changes as well (U.S. News has gone monthly in print, but is aiming to keep a major online news presence), so we'll see how the American print media shakes out even further going ahead.

As longtime Newsweek reader, I'm simply dismayed that the route to survival for the magazine is to sell-out its credibility as an objective news source by attempting to rescue itself by pigging-backing off of Obamesssianism.

Israel, Terrorism, and the Well-Intentioned Left

Here's an interesting set of readings on Israel and terrorism worth mentioning:

Michael Totten's got a "A Dispatch from the Border with Gaza," which includes this passage on Colonel Miri Eisen's strategic assessment on the Palestinian rocket threat to Israel:

I visited Sderot and the Gaza border region again with some of my colleagues on a trip organized by the American Jewish Committee. IDF Colonel Miri Eisen accompanied us and gave us the Israeli perspective on what was happening ....

Colonel Eisen held up a map that showed which cities in Israel would be under attack if the same kinds of rockets flying out of Gaza today were being launched from inside the West Bank.

Every major population center in the country would be under attack except Haifa. Yet Haifa is within Hezbollah's rocket range out of Lebanon in the north. When Hezbollah fired its medium-size Katyusha rockets at Haifa in 2006, Haifa was on fire and emptied of people and cars. It was like a city at the end of the world. It's possible, though very intolerable, to live under Qassam rocket attack. It isn't possible to live long at all under Katyusha rocket attack.

If this nightmare scenario ever unfolds, Israel will be in a fight for its life.

In quoting, I've skipped over a lot of the text, plus photos, so be sure to check the link.

Also worth reading is the exchange at the Wall Street Journal, "Terrorism, Evil and Mourning a Pearl of Great Price." Be sure to check the link. Bill Moyers responds to Judea Pearl, but the final letter from Gary Novak of San Diego is something worth considering:

Judea Pearl's opinion piece effectively poses a question many well-intentioned leftists who take their enlightenment for granted have never considered: At what point do those who participate in the normalization of evil cease to be useful idiots and become evil themselves.

Facebook Wake-Up Call

I just got a Facebook invitation this morning. This is about the fourth one I've received, and they come with this message:

Hi Donald,

I set up a Facebook profile where I can post my pictures, videos and events and I want to add you as a friend so you can see it. First, you need to join Facebook! Once you join, you can also create your own profile.

Thanks,
______

I haven't joined up yet, but only out of procrastination. Still, the report from TechCrunch on Facebook's deceptive claims as a social-networking safe haven are interesting: "Wake Up Call: Facebook Isn’t A Safe Haven":

Facebook just turned 5 years old. But a week that should have been filled with reflection and good times was instead marred by a series of breaking news reports detailing sex scandals, phishing, and other malicious activity on the world’s largest social network.

In his blog post announcing the 5-year milestone, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that “Facebook has offered a safe and trusted environment for people to interact online, which has made millions of people comfortable expressing more about themselves.” But is Facebook really as safe as everyone seems to think?

The peice recounts a number of sexual-lurking and other dangers in the news this week, then continues:

Since launching in 2004, Facebook has benefited from its public perception as a safe, clean site - especially compared to its biggest competitor, MySpace. Whereas MySpace allows users to customize their profile pages with graphics and audio (sometimes to the point of making them obnoxious), Facebook has maintained a more pristine environment, which certainly helps bestow a feeling of safety.

Facebook is also theoretically more secure. When it first launched, only users with valid university (.edu) Email addresses could sign up. Over the years the site expanded to allow high school students, and eventually opened up to everyone. But each group of students or coworkers is still segmented into different ‘networks’ - you can’t browse through anyone’s profile unless you belong to their university or company network, usually verified through Email. These roadblocks add up to make creating fake profiles more of a challenge, but as we’ve seen in the last week, they can be overcome.

Perhaps most important to note is Facebook’s relatively good security record up until this point. Parry Aftab, an independent online security expert who heads WiredSafety, says that there have been fewer sexual predator attacks on Facebook than its competitors and that her studies have found its security measures to exceed those seen elsewhere. She also notes that in general, users have behaved better on Facebook, and that teenagers have reported that they “feel safer” on the site.

But Aftab says that given how quickly Facebook has grown - it jumped from 100 million users last August to over 150 million users today - she isn’t surprised that some registered sex offenders slipped through the cracks. In her words, “if you have 150 million users, you’re going to have all kinds of bad people”.

So what measures can Facebook take to maintain its wholesome image?

Read the whole thing. It's an interesting piece for parents with social networking kids. My oldest boy's mostly logging on for Apple iPod downloads songs all the time (not Facebook, etc.), and I'm usually sitting right next to him on the other laptap in our living room, but we've all heard the horror stories ...

Gay Marriage Terrorism

I've written quite a bit previously on the Stalinist intimidation tactics of No on H8 activists. So, it's no surprise to see the diabolical depths to which the left will sink in threatening marriage traditionalists who exercized their rights via the political process in last November's election.

Check this out from the New York Times (via Memeorandum):

FOR the backers of Proposition 8, the state ballot measure to stop single-sex couples from marrying in California, victory has been soured by the ugly specter of intimidation.

Some donors to groups supporting the measure have received death threats and envelopes containing a powdery white substance, and their businesses have been boycotted.

The targets of this harassment blame a controversial and provocative Web site, eightmaps.com.

The site takes the names and ZIP codes of people who donated to the ballot measure — information that California collects and makes public under state campaign finance disclosure laws — and overlays the data on a Google map.

Visitors can see markers indicating a contributor’s name, approximate location, amount donated and, if the donor listed it, employer. That is often enough information for interested parties to find the rest — like an e-mail or home address. The identity of the site’s creators, meanwhile, is unknown; they have maintained their anonymity.

Eightmaps.com is the latest, most striking example of how information collected through disclosure laws intended to increase the transparency of the political process, magnified by the powerful lens of the Web, may be undermining the same democratic values that the regulations were to promote.

With tools like eightmaps — and there are bound to be more of them — strident political partisans can challenge their opponents directly, one voter at a time. The results, some activists fear, could discourage people from participating in the political process altogether.

All Americans have the right to participate in the political process through campaign contributions and interest group activism. Still, I simply cannot find a legitimate reason for the left to threaten marriage traditionalists in this way. I've debated folks on the left on precisely this issue. They say boycotts and targeting are perfectly acceptable methods given the historic discrimination faced by gays and lesbians. I'm not convinced. I've noted previously that there's little credibility in comparing the homosexual marriage agenda to the black American freedom struggle, but that's the analogy radical leftists want to maintian.

I hope I'm wrong, but I won't be surprised when gay radicals (see here and here, for example) explode their own 16th Street churches in a remake of the violence against black Americans in the 1960s. Note that this time, the radical left will be on the side of terror, not freedom.

(P.S: Notice how the hosts of "eightmap" have kept their identities private, just like any true underground terror cell would.)

**********

UPDATE: Here's this from "Kathy" at Liberty Street, who is also writes for Comments at Left Field:

I think this is very creative and ... very neat. This is an appropriate use of technology and it brings openness and transparency to a part of the political process.

Speaking Truth to Democratic Big Government

Here's how the Los Angeles Times described the Democratic majority's economic stimulus package last week:

With Congress moving toward passage of an $800-billion-plus economic stimulus plan, big government is back. Unabashed. With a vengeance.

The stimulus is bigger than the Pentagon's entire budget. It's more than the United States has spent on the war in Iraq. And its hundreds of provisions reach into almost every aspect of American life - including workers' paychecks, local schools, digital television and modernizing medical records.

Perhaps not since the Great Depression has Congress set out to expand and redefine so dramatically the government's role in the economy, all in one bewilderingly complex blueprint.

Now, this morning's Washington Post reports that a number of top economists concur on the virtually unprecedented scale of the left's stimulus agenda:

With Congress moving closer to adopting a $820 billion stimulus package and the Obama administration poised to unveil a new bank bailout plan, economists say that the federal government is taking its biggest role in the economy in a generation.

States that once aspired to blaze trails independent from Washington are turning to it for money, banks and businesses that once decried regulation now are seeking federal capital, grants or tax cuts and individuals are looking for tax relief.

"This is a seismic shift in the role of government in our society," said Allen Sinai, chief global economist for Decision Economics. "Those who believe the government can be an effective, positive instrument for good will have another chance to try it," said Sinai, a political independent.

To reiterate Sinai's comment above, this is indeed a "seismic shift," and it foretells a major reorientation of the relationship between government and the individual in society.

Yet, there's a fundamental level of disingenuity in all of the public debate on this. People do not like identifying the ideological implications of this shift to unprecedented state expansion. When conservative commentators attacked the Democrats in 2008 as "socialist" for their big government planning, on health care, tax increases, and government regulation, the left-wing media and bloggers attacked them with an existential ferocity.

This week's cover story at Newsweek continues the essential dishonesty, "We Are All Socialists Now." Authors Jon Meacham and Evan Thomas name not President Barack Obama and the Democrats for our current shift to a European socialist state, but ... wait for it ... George W. Bush:

The U.S. government has already—under a conservative Republican administration—effectively nationalized the banking and mortgage industries ....

We remain a center-right nation in many ways—particularly culturally, and our instinct, once the crisis passes, will be to try to revert to a more free-market style of capitalism—but it was, again, under a conservative GOP administration that we enacted the largest expansion of the welfare state in 30 years: prescription drugs for the elderly.

This is so dishonest, it's almost sick. Republicans in Congress, during last year's bailout debate, wanted to use big government to rescue markets (and base conservatives howled in disgust every step of the way). Democrats today want to use big government to expand the welfare state to levels that put the Great Society to shame.

The left, in other words, wants to nationalize markets in furtherance of its ideological and programmatic foundations. A look at the House Appropriations Committee's press release, "Summary: American Recovery and Reinvestment," with its smorgasbord of big goverment, pork-barrel spending largesse, should put to rest talk of conservatives as creating the "biggest expansion of the welfare state in 30 years." The Johnson administration created Medicare in 1965. Both parties have accepted the need to support the health care of American retirees.

But recall it was also the same "conservative GOP administration" that campaigned for an entire year, unsuccessfully, for the privatization of Social Security as the marquee program in a conservative shift to an "ownership society." The Wall Street Journal laid out the scope of the Bush administration's vision in its essay, "In Bush's 'Ownership Society,' Citizens Would Take More Risk":

President Bush's campaign to revamp Social Security is just the boldest stroke in a much broader effort: To rewrite the government's social contract with citizens that was born of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and expanded by Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.

In what Mr. Bush calls an "ownership society," Americans would assume more of the responsibilities - and risks - now shouldered by government. In exchange, the theory goes, they would get the real and intangible benefits of owning their own homes, controlling their retirement savings, and using tax credits or vouchers to shop for education, job training and health insurance.

The emphasis would be on the individual, supplanting a 70-year-old approach in which citizens pool resources for the common good - and government doles out benefits. In the Bush vision, the nation's social safety nets would still exist, but on a smaller scale, targeting the most needy. Others would move to private-market alternatives of their own choosing.

I have seen really nothing in the last year of economic turmoil to convince me that conservatives have abandoned the lost hopes of the Bush administration's vision for an even greater society of individualism and prosperity.

And if there's any evidence that hopes for an opportunity society have been abandoned, it's in the the priorities of the current Barack Obama administration, who has called the challenges facing the country today unequaled in history, and he's announced an unprecedented agenda for massive governmental change to avoid a "catastrophe."

So, while folks may indeed take issue with Republican craveness at Wall Street bailouts - as well as the party's larger historical capitulation to the welfare state since Barry Goldwater's defeat in 1964 - at the most basic level of ideology, today's left is on the cusp of achieving it's wildest dreams of the quasi-Marxist Europeanization of American life.

It's time for a little honesty about all of this.

Two Weeks of Obama's New America

Melanie Phillips, discussing President Barack Obama's first two weeks in office, asks, "America - what have you done?" After cataloging the president's multiple missteps, his ethereal mirage of propriety and rectitude, and not to mention the administraion's abandonment of clarion calls for "hope and change," here's the payoff line:

I have argued before however that, given Obama’s radical roots in the neo-Marxist, nihilist politics of Saul Alinsky, it is the undermining of America’s fundamental values that is likely to be this President’s most strategically important goal. I have also suggested that, since this agenda is promoted through stealth politics which gull the credulous middle-classes while destroying the ground upon which they are standing, his second-tier appointments should be closely scrutinised.

Phillips then goes on to discuss Obama's selection of David Ogden for deputy Attorney-General. Ogden has argued apparently that "it was an unconstitutional burden on 14-year old girls seeking an abortion for their parents to be notified - because there was no difference between adults and mid-teens in their ability to grasp all the implications of such a decision."

America, what have you done? is right...

How New Deal Policies Prolonged the Depression

There's an interesting, albeit typical, meme this weekend across the leftosphere suggesting that the easing of Democratic public works spending in the late-1930s was the main causal factor precipitating the "Roosevelt Recession" of 1937-38.

Responding to Senator Mitch McConnell's remarks this week that "big spending programs of the New Deal did not work," Glenn Thrush wrote yesterday:

Lots of historians, economists and bloggers disagree of course, saying that the Depression was, in fact, eased by FDR's programs - and the "Roosevelt Recession" of the late 30s was the result of his scaling back on public works too quickly.

Thrush's post set off a round of rebuttals to Senator McConnell's thesis.

Steve Benen parrots Thrush:

It's especially interesting to hear McConnell say WWII improved the economy. How, exactly, does McConnell reconcile this? FDR's government spending didn't help the economy, but FDR's government spending for a world war did help the economy? As Krugman recently explained, World War II was an "enormous public works project ... which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy's needs."

But check out Matthew Yglesias:

To be precise, the historical record shows that throughout FDR’s first term, the country was on a path to recovery—albeit from a very low point. Then there was a recession-within-a-depression associated with efforts to return to McConnell-style policies of fiscal restraint. By 1940, things were much better than they had been in 1932. But still, as he says, not very good. Thus far we don’t have a very solid case against stimulus spending. And now things get worse. The conclusion McConnell wants is that “big spending programs” couldn’t help fight the Depression. But World War II was, among other things, a huge spending program.

I just love how Democrats love wartime spending when it works to make the case for big government. Amazingly, all those attacks on out of control deficit spending disappear upon change of party control in Washington. Even Yglesias himself included a $1.2 trillion projected budget defict for 2009 as part of the "wreckage" of the Bush administration!

As for public works spending and the 1937 recession, let's check in with economists Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian, and their essay, "How Government Prolonged the Depression":

Some New Deal policies certainly benefited the economy by establishing a basic social safety net through Social Security and unemployment benefits, and by stabilizing the financial system through deposit insurance and the Securities Exchange Commission. But others violated the most basic economic principles by suppressing competition, and setting prices and wages in many sectors well above their normal levels. All told, these antimarket policies choked off powerful recovery forces that would have plausibly returned the economy back to trend by the mid-1930s.

The most damaging policies were those at the heart of the recovery plan, including The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which tossed aside the nation's antitrust acts and permitted industries to collusively raise prices provided that they shared their newfound monopoly rents with workers by substantially raising wages well above underlying productivity growth. The NIRA covered over 500 industries, ranging from autos and steel, to ladies hosiery and poultry production. Each industry created a code of "fair competition" which spelled out what producers could and could not do, and which were designed to eliminate "excessive competition" that FDR believed to be the source of the Depression.

These codes distorted the economy by artificially raising wages and prices, restricting output, and reducing productive capacity by placing quotas on industry investment in new plants and equipment. Following government approval of each industry code, industry prices and wages increased substantially, while prices and wages in sectors that weren't covered by the NIRA, such as agriculture, did not. We have calculated that manufacturing wages were as much as 25% above the level that would have prevailed without the New Deal. And while the artificially high wages created by the NIRA benefited the few that were fortunate to have a job in those industries, they significantly depressed production and employment, as the growth in wage costs far exceeded productivity growth.

These policies continued even after the NIRA was declared unconstitutional in 1935. There was no antitrust activity after the NIRA, despite overwhelming FTC evidence of price-fixing and production limits in many industries, and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 gave unions substantial collective-bargaining power. While not permitted under federal law, the sit-down strike, in which workers were occupied factories and shut down production, was tolerated by governors in a number of states and was used with great success against major employers, including General Motors in 1937.

The downturn of 1937-38 was preceded by large wage hikes that pushed wages well above their NIRA levels, following the Supreme Court's 1937 decision that upheld the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act. These wage hikes led to further job loss, particularly in manufacturing. The "recession in a depression" thus was not the result of a reversal of New Deal policies, as argued by some, but rather a deepening of New Deal polices that raised wages even further above their competitive levels, and which further prevented the normal forces of supply and demand from restoring full employment. Our research indicates that New Deal labor and industrial policies prolonged the Depression by seven years.

Today's leftists seem to be overlooking arguments like this (although they can't pass up the chance to trash McConnell). What's interesting is how these folks almost universally cite Paul Krugman (and just Paul Kruman) as their source of authority, as did Josh Marshall as well, a few days back, in an attempt to smear Republicans as obstructionist.

But what do you know?

Via Memeorandum, here comes Krugman now with a just-in-time take down of the "centrists" in the Senate who have cut some pork out of the Democratic stimulus package, which was apparently, "already too small." On top of that, Firedoglake's got a follow-up smear against this "gang-of-four," Senators Collins, Specter, Lieberman, and Nelson, who have used their "power to deny Americans between three-quarters and one and a quarter million jobs."

Smells like more calls for "Stimulus Socialism" to me?

As always, I'll have more later ...

Afghanistan: Graveyard of Islamist Extremism

Last week's Newsweek cover story featured a sensational Fareed Zakaria essay comparing Afghanistan to Vietnam: "The analogy isn't exact. But the war in Afghanistan is starting to look disturbingly familiar."

The analogy is, of course, that the U.S. might well lose the Afghan war. After toppling the Taliban in 2001 amid warnings that the American military, like all previous great powers, would be bogged down in the "graveyard of empires," the U.S. is again on target for another quagmire.

Upon reading Zakaria, I was immediate struck by another analogy: Opponents of the Iraq war made the same argument from 2003 to 2006, that the war in Mesopotamia was "America's next Vietnam."

Taking up the new round of Vietnam analogies, Max Boot responds in his essay today, "Deja vu in Kabul":

It is striking the extent to which the arguments now being made about Afghanistan were previously made - and discredited - in the case of Iraq. The only thing we haven't heard yet is a proposal to dismember Afghanistan into mini-states. But with Joe Biden in the White House, we can expect that brainstorm to pop up soon.

Actually, another "Joe" has been brainstorming, but in the direction of victory. In his Wall Street Journal essay yesterday, Senator Joseph Lieberman argued that the real quagmire in Afghanistan will be al Qaeda's:

... there are already whispers on both the left and the right that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires, that we should abandon any hope of nation-building there, additional forces sent there will only get bogged down in a quagmire.

Why are these whisperings wrong? Why is this war necessary?

The most direct answer is that Afghanistan is where the attacks of 9/11 were plotted, where al Qaeda made its sanctuary under the Taliban, and where they will do so again if given the chance. We have a vital national interest in preventing that from happening.

It is also important to recognize that, although we face many problems in Afghanistan today, none are because we have made it possible for five million Afghan children - girls and boys - to go to school; or because child mortality has dropped 25% since we overthrew the Taliban in 2001; or because Afghan men and women have been able to vote in their first free and fair elections in history.

On the contrary, the reason we have not lost in Afghanistan - despite our missteps - is because America still inspires hope of a better life for millions of ordinary Afghans and has worked mightily to deliver it. And the reason we can defeat the extremists is because they do not.

This, ultimately, is how the war on terror will end: not when we capture or kill Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar - though we must do that too - but when we have empowered and expanded the mainstream Muslim majority to stand up and defeat the extremist minority.

That is the opportunity we have in Afghanistan today: to make that country into a quagmire, not for America but for al Qaeda, the Taliban and their fellow Islamist extremists, and into a graveyard in which their dreams of an Islamist empire are finally buried.

Obama's Stimulus Alarmism

Here's President Obama's message to nation today, via YouTube:

I've written previously on the Democrats' sky-is-falling stimulus alarmism, but Fred Barnes nails it, arguing that Obama sounds like Al Gore on global warming:

The more the case for man-made warming falls apart, the more hysterical Gore gets about an imminent catastrophe. The more public support his bill loses, the more Obama embraces fear-mongering. "The failure to act, and act now," the president said last week, "will turn a crisis into a catastrophe."

The "catastrophe" meme is reprised again at the video.

Sexual Subtext in Obamessianism

Conservatives have made a cottage industry out of ridiculing the Democratic-left for its freaky cult of Obama. But seriously, in reading Judith Warner's essay on "dreams of Obama," we can see that it's much, much worse than previously imagined:

The other night I dreamt of Barack Obama. He was taking a shower right when I needed to get into the bathroom to shave my legs, and then he was being yelled at by my husband, Max, for smoking in the house. It was not clear whether Max was feeling protective of the president’s health or jealous because of the cigarette.

Ed Driscoll responds to this, saying:

Who dreams of having the President of the United States in their shower while their spouse is yelling at him for smoking? Worse, who admits to this in public?

Yep, it's a bit freaky, but note that Warner sought feedback on this via e-mail inquiries, and the results indicate a pandemic scope to the left's psychological disfunction:

Many women — not too surprisingly — were dreaming about sex with the president. In these dreams, the women replaced Michelle with greater or lesser guilt or, in the case of a 62-year-old woman in North Florida, whose dream was reported to me by her daughter, found a fully above-board solution: “Michelle had divorced Barack because he had become ‘too much of a star.’ He then married my mother, who was oh so proud to be the first lady,” the daughter wrote me.

But read the comments at the post, where thankfully not everyone's lost their minds:

Thank goodness I skipped the fantasy stage and went straight to contempt , oh, sometime back in 2007 when I was about 80 pages into the carefully packaged story line of “Dreams from My Father.” The man is a phony, through and through. Just about every word he speaks is hollow.