Category Archives: Politics

A Tale of Two Cities

May 20, 2013 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
You could have knocked us over with a feather from an organically-fed free range chicken when we learned that Portland, Oregon, does not have fluoridated water. This surprising tidbit came to us courtesy of the Slate.com internet newsmagazine, which reported about an upcoming referendum on a proposal to begin adding fluoride to the city’s water supply, and it caught our eye because our very different town of Wichita, Kansas, had voted last November to reject a similar plan.
The local pro-fluoride forces made much of the fact that only four other large American cities don’t use the stuff, an obvious attempt at peer pressure, but we can’t recall them ever mentioning Portland is one of them, perhaps because Portland is widely considered such an impeccably hip civic peer that it was assumed no one would be embarrassed by the association. Slate, a news outlet also widely considered impeccably hip, is clearly confounded that such a paragon of progressive politics as Portland hasn’t embraced the practice and seems slightly flustered by the realization that the city’s progressivism is the reason why.
Among the groups the joining the cleverly-named Clean Water Portland coalition to lead the resistance to fluoridation are the Pacific Green Party, Nutritional Therapy Association, Organic Consumers Association, the Oregon Association of Acupuncture, and the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, although Slate takes pains to claim that the lattermost group is the “only local organization representing people of color that has come out against fluoride” and tries for the first time in the history of liberal journalism to dismiss the group’s political significance. Judging by the boisterous behavior described at town hall meetings and other political events it seems that the grassroots opposition to the initiative is similarly counter-cultural in its leanings. Slate reports with apparent alarm that the anti-fluoride forces are also joined by The Cascade Club, “a local libertarian think tank,” as well as the Kansas Taxpayers Network, described as “a far-right group that recently merged with the Americans for Prosperity,” but it concedes that the anti-fluoridation campaign in Portland carefully eschews conservative rhetoric and that “Such tactics would never work in this liberal city.”
The leftward opposition to fluoridation does not come as such a surprise to us, as all of the relatively small band of Occupy Wall Street sorts in the otherwise proudly un-hip town of Wichita were also adamant in their objections. Groups such as the aforementioned and Kansas Taxpayers Network were more prominent in the local debate, and naturally had no reluctance to couch their arguments in unabashadly conservative terms, but the far-lefties around here were an influental part of the alliance. We couldn’t help teasing the ones we’re friendliest with, regaling them with our imitation of Sterling Hayden’s “fluoride is a commie plot” speech from “Dr. Strangelove,” but they took it in good humor and for the most part seemed to get along with their unlikely allies.
Another unlikely alliance sprang up on the other side of the debate, with the more upscale liberals joining with the more moderate conservatives in citing the consensus of the academic establishment and insisting that Wichita get in step with the rest of the country. Upscale liberals and moderate conservatives are always very much impressed with the consensus of the academic establishment, and around here they’re both very sensitive to perceptions that we’re out of step with the rest of the country, so perhaps it wasn’t such an unlikely alliance. Fluoride advocates such as the Slate reporters tend to overstate the unanimity of scientific on the subject, and fail to mention such dissenting research as a study from oh-so-respectable Harvard University that links fluoride to a decline in human intelligence, but there does seem to be enough of a consensus for the people who are cowed by that sort of thing.
The far left, though, for all its faults, retains an admirable skepticism of establishment opinion. Slate explains that the anti-fluoride campaign in Portland relies on “attachment to the environment and natural health care, as well as the current mistrust of pretty much all institutions.” That last cause is the one that allowed the far- left to work so peacefully with its far-right counterparts on the anti-fluoride campaign here, and it could point the way to alliances on other issues. Wichita also had a referendum a while back on the city government’s sweetheart deal with some out-of-town hotel developers who had taken a strange interest in local politics during the preceding fund-raising efforts by some local politicians, and the crony capitalism deal was soundly defeated with votes from conservatives appalled by the cronyism and liberals offended by the capitalism. The same coalition on a national scale could help eliminate all the public-private boondoggles buried in the stimulus bill and various other Obama initiatives, although it will be hard to pry even the most far-left activists away from their party loyalties. If they can ever be made to understand that the essence of the liberal project is to further empower the institutions they distrust, however, anything is possible.

– Bud Norman

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Elsewhere in the News

May 17, 2013 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
There are only so many stories that even the most avid news-reader can follow, and lately they have been the ones about the various scandals afoot in Washington. These are important matters, and provide the amusing spectacle of White House officials flailing about as they deal with the first press scrutiny of their careers, but it is necessary to step back and take note that everything else is also going to hell in a handbasket.
Thursday brought bad economic news, with jobless claims rising and housing starts falling, and provided a reminder that unemployment remains high, growth slow, and the national debt mounting. Such sad statistics will cause the Federal Reserve to keep printing money at the frantic pace that has led to record highs on the stock market, which in turn has led to some strangely happy talk in the few stories that are reported, but other needed economic reforms are unlikely to become a national priority until the inevitable downturn. The sluggishness of the economy was a widely ignored story even before the current scandals began to dominate the news, with everyone in Washington preferring to talk about same-sex marriage or gun control or who was wearing what at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, even though it remains of some interest to the millions of Americans who are out of work or seeing their incomes fall further as prices rise.
It will be briefly noted deep within the pages of the more staid newspapers that the House of Representatives voted once again to repeal Obamacare, and the story doesn’t deserve much more attention given that it will fail once again in the Senate and that it would be vetoed by the president in any case. This means that Obamacare will continue to provide businesses with strong incentives not to offer employees more than 29 hours of work to any employee or to have more than 49 of them around, among its many unfortunate economic effects, but as previously noted that sort of thing is no longer considered newsworthy. Obamacare was more prominently mentioned in reports that the same woman who is at the center of the Internal Revenue Service’s scandalous targeting of conservative groups is now in charge of the agency’s enforcement of the health care law’s numerous tax provisions.
The distraction of the various scandals might provide an opportunity for congress to pass an immigration reform bill that would otherwise provoke greater public resistance. Several politicians in good standings with conservatives are backing a plan proposed in the Senate, and Democratic constituencies such as unions and blacks that have reason to oppose are apparently being kept in line, but there are widespread doubts that the promised border enforcement will ever happen and those distracting scandals do little to inspire trust. Given the fact of the aforementioned millions of Americans who are out of work there is also reason to question the wisdom of bringing even more millions of people into the workforce, but that once again raises those economic subjects that no one seems to want to talk about.
A short White House visit by the Prime Minister of Turkey, who was in town to talk about the deteriorating situation in Syria before heading off on a trip to Gaza that the Americans had asked him not to take, took up just enough of the news to remind readers that pretty much all of the international scene is also dismal. At a rain-soaked news conference the president agreed to increase pressure on the Syrian dictator, although he avoided any further mention of his widely-ridiculed “red line” declarations, and then wound up fending off questions about Benghazi, the IRS, and the Justice Department’s snooping around in the Associated Press’ phone records. No one wants to talk about that foreign policy stuff, either.
On a more positive note, no one wants to talk about whatever it is that the president wants them to talk about. Things have gotten so bad that even The New York Times reports that “Onset of Woes Casts Pall Over Obama’s Policy Aspirations.” The Gray Lady seems to regard this as an unfortunate development, but it might be best that can be said of a bad situation.

– Bud Norman

After the Scandals

May 16, 2013 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Each of the various scandals swirling around Washington are important on their own terms, as well as a source of guilty pleasure to right-wing bastards such as ourselves, but they will also have important implications in the policy squabbles that will continue long after the accusatory headlines have faded.
The Internal Revenue Service’s outrageous targeting of conservative groups, for instance, will now figure in at least two ongoing debates. Advocates of the flat tax, the fair tax, and other simplified tax systems have always claimed their proposals would eliminate the possibility of such politicized IRS actions, among other advantages, and the argument is made stronger by the latest revelations. Critics of the Obamacare law were concerned from the outset about how it grows the size and scope of the IRS, which will be empowered to enforce the controversial individual mandate and its host of new taxes, and those critics will also become more persuasive in their attempts at repeal.
A Justice Department probe that sought a suspiciously broad range of phone records from the Associated Press will affect a broader debate about the media’s peculiar relationship with the government in much the same way. It might even affect the media’s previously adoring perception of the government, potentially having all sorts of ramifications on the next few years of politics, and it might even affect the public’s perception of the much-maligned conservative news sources. Past Justice Department scandals, ranging from the decision to let the New Black Panthers loose on voter intimidation charges and stonewalling the Fast and Furious fiasco, could also be seen in a newly harsh light.
Continuing revelations about the incompetence that led to the Benghazi tragedy and the dishonesty that followed it will similarly inform future discussions of foreign policy. Those who argue for a more frank resistance to radical Islamists, rather than the sort of cultural relativism that would appease them with the imprisonment of anyone who dares criticize their views, will surely be bolstered in their efforts.
The cumulative effect of all the scandals can only create a greater public skepticism about the government’s abilities and integrity, which in turn affects everything. Almost every political issue pits those who would expand the size, scope, and cost of government against those who would limit it to the traditional essential chores of national defense, issuing a sound currency, enforcing contracts, security the liberties of the people, and a few modest attempts at promoting the general welfare. The latter group might not prevail, but they will be energized and the scandals can only help their cause.

– Bud Norman

A Hard Day on the Job

May 15, 2013 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment
Anyone who has ever endured a tough week on the job can almost, but not quite, feel sorry for Jay Carney.
The boyish White House press secretary has been having an undeniably hard time of it lately, what with his boss suddenly beset by scandals ranging from the multi-layered fiasco of the Benghazi terror attack and its aftermath to the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of opposition groups to a Justice Department that has been spying on the Associated Press, and the embarrassing spectacle of Carney flailing about as he struggles to provide a plausible explanation for all of it would ordinarily induce pity in a sympathetic soul. Even so, Carney is more to be scorned than pitied because he is so obviously out of practice.
At Tuesday’s news briefing Carney was aggressively grilled by the assembled reporters about all of the aforementioned issues, and the poor fellow seemed quite taken aback that anyone in the media would be guilty of such brazen lese majesty as to ask a question at a press conference. His surprise is somewhat understandable, given the polite behavior of the press during such past scandals as the New Black Panthers’ kid-glove treatment, Solyndra and other “green job” boondoggles, Fast and Furious, the presidenlavish lifestyle, and assorted failures such as the stimulus and the broken promises of Obamacare, but Carney should have foreseen that those reporters’ instinctive pugnaciousness would eventually assert itself. The press still isn’t nearly so adversarial as it has been during Republican administrations, but on Tuesday they at least stopped being obsequious.
In a previous week’s news conference Carney had insisted that the scrubbing of any mention of an al-Qaeda terror from the government’s official explanation of the Benghazi attack and substituting some fanciful nonsense about a spontaneous popular reaction a little-seen YouTube video was only a “stylistic” and “not substantive” change, but the reporters on Tuesday were stubbornly cynical about the claim. Even such stalwart supporters as The New Yorker and The Washington Post are starting to treat Benghazi as a story that reflects poorly on the administration, and Carney had a rather stunned look on his face when the reporters were so unenthused about his denunciations of the Republicans for taking an interest in the death of an ambassador and four other Americans.
The same rudeness attended the matter of the IRS harassment of conservative groups, which has offended civil libertarian sensibilities to the point that some news media have been using the N-word — Nixon — to describe the scandal. Carney gamely insisted that he and his boss were also appalled that an agency under executive branch control would do such nasty things to groups that the president had vilified in countless speeches. Although the press wasn’t so ravenous as it was about George W. Bush’s 30-year-old National Guard attendance records, it was more than inquisitive enough to rattle Carney. He boldly asserted that the White House had nothing to do with the scandal, but added that all he or the president knew was what they read in the papers. A reporter from the Bloomberg news service, of all places, asked how Carney could be so certain of the White House’s innocence if he didn’t know any more than what was being reported, and Carney responded with a flustered “I think I can say that I feel confident in that, but, I you know, I don’t have any.”
Harsher questions were asked about the Justice Department’s snooping around the phone records of the Associated Press, an action that everyone in the press is taking personally. The press has been badly mistreated for many years by the Obama administration, which has kicked reporters off airplanes for insufficiently enthusiastic editorials in their papers, denied access on an unprecedented scale, stonewalled investigations into various matters, and even kept a reporter in a closet during a vice presidential appearance, but the assault on AP seems to have at last caused a rift in the longstanding love affair between the president and the press. More respectful treatment might be accorded at the next presidential news conference, which might be many healing months away, but the reporters had no reluctance to beat up on Carney over the matter. Unaccustomed to such treatment, Carney wound up using the word “unfettered” a dozen times when explaining the president’s commitment to a free press.
The president’s high opinion of a free press is likely based on an assumption that it would it always sing his praises, and it remains to be seen if he will be as tolerate when the press is critical. Those reporters might fall back in line if it appears that efforts are redounding to the benefit of the Republican party, but in the meantime Jay Carney should get used to working for a living.

– Bud Norman

A Civic Chore

May 14, 2013 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment
Life is full of rude awakenings, but few are so cruelly impolite as being forced out of a perfectly comfortable bed at 7:30 a.m. in order to report for jury duty. Being so very civic-minded we nonetheless roused ourselves at that unfamiliar moment of the morning on Monday and presented ourselves for service at the Sedgwick County Courthouse by the mandated time of 8:30 a.m., bleary-eyed and brain-cloudy despite two cups of coffee, and proceeded to do our patriotic duty by somehow staying awake through a cheesy informational video and an interminable wait to be tossed into a jury pool along with 47 of our randomly-selected fellow citizens. Justice surely cannot be properly administered at such an ungodly hour of the morning, we mused as the hours ticked slowly by, but ours is not to question the peculiar workings of the American court system.
The judge admonished all the potential jurors not to discuss the case, and we will heed his order even though we are unlikely to wind up on a jury, as we are the obviously opinionated sorts that the attorneys with the weaker case are always quick to discard, but in any event at this point we know nothing of the case worth discussing. We mention the early morning ordeal only by way of explaining the scantiness of today’s report. Jury duty has not only jarred us from the nocturnal writing rhythm that typically propels our pen to the high standards of this publication, it also deprived of the usual afternoon’s slog through the news in order to find something to rant about. On our drive home for a brief lunchtime nap we heard a few minutes of Rush Limbaugh, who seemed quite agitated about something or another, but otherwise we spent the day frustratingly out of touch with the world’s events.
Nine hours of waiting around the courthouse reading an old P.G. Wodehouse novel in between listening to our pool mates answer questions about their marital status and the ages of their children left us exhausted, but upon returning home we somehow summoned the energy for a quick glance at the always-intriguing headlines on The Drudge Report. There were more outrageous details about the Internal Revenue Service’s systematic harassment of conservative activist groups, a story that had already outraged us, and a new tale that the government has also been snooping through the phone records of the Associated Press. The government’s animus toward the tea party is easily explained, as these groups as so extremist they would severely limit the government to a size that taxpayers are willing to fund, but we could not readily discern why the government would take such an untoward interest in the phone conversations of such reliable defenders as the Associated Press. It’s like the occasional stories of Great Britain or Israel spying on the United States, or at least like it used to be back when we had strong alliances with those countries, and it will be interesting to see how the story plays out. The Associated Press dispatch about the scandal seem understandably miffed, and if this signals the end of a beautiful relationship we suspect the government agents responsible will eventually regret their actions.
Depending on events we might be back to our usual routine by Wednesday, and we hope you will bear with us in the meantime. The news doesn’t always imbue a sense of civic responsibility, but we will press on.

– Bud Norman

A Sorry State of Affairs

May 13, 2013 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment
Monty Python’s Flying Circus once presented a skit about a man who was convicted of mass murder but apologized so profusely for “petty atrocities” that the judge, jury, and even the prosecuting attorney insisted he be let off scot-free. It is never a good sign when the government of the United States of America reminds of a Monty Python skit, but that bit of absurdist comedy was recently brought to mind by the Internal Revenue Service saying how very sorry it was that organizations associated with the Tea Party movement and other groups opposed to administration policies were targeted for scrutiny.
No one will be charged with a crime, or even fired, and no compensation to the aggrieved parties will be made, but the IRS has offered a most heartfelt apology. The mea culpa comes just prior to the release of an inspector general’s report that senior officials in the agency knew of the practice since 2011, after years of repeated indignant denials to the press and congressional investigators, and despite their present insistence that only low-level workers in far-flung regional offices were involved, but it would require a most hard-hearted cynicism to doubt the agency’s sincerity. The IRS no doubt feels this professed remorse deep in its bureaucratic soul, and for much of the press and a large segment of the population with the same loathing for conservative activists this will likely suffice. Anyone with a sense of fair play, however, should insist on more tangible consequences.
Although it might not rise to the level of mass murder, abusing the awesome power of the IRS to harass citizens for their legal and constitutionally-protected political views is a most serious matter. A similar allegation was one of the articles of impeachment that forced the resignation of President Richard Nixon, and at the very least a similar ignominy should befall anyone more recently involved in the practice. Hearings will be required to find out how who was involved in the abuse of power, regardless of how high in power they might be, and to what extent the practice was countenanced by political signals from even higher above. The Tea Party movement was targeted for harassment by the IRS at the same time it was being subjected to constant denunciations and slurs of racism and extremism from politicians who despised its efforts to restrain government power, echoed constantly by news and entertainment media eager to blame the movement for every momentarily unexplained act of violence, and there is reason to suspect a coordinated government effort to quash a dissident political movement.
Nixon used the IRS to harass groups that he felt were fomenting the riots were destroying American cities at the time, which does not mitigate the seriousness of the crime, but it does exacerbate the seriousness of the IRS harassing a movement that was not only peaceful and not at all destructive but remarkable for its orderliness and cleanliness. The tea party movement only represented a threat to the constant growth of government, and government that uses it powers of taxation to punish them owes all of its citizens more than an apology.

– Bud Norman

Insufficient Outrage

May 9, 2013 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
More information about the Benghazi terrorism attack was revealed to a House investigative committee on Wednesday, and like everything that was already known about the deadly fiasco it was damning to the Obama administration. Many questions remain unanswered, but at this point the president and his supporters can only wonder how severe the political damage will be.
It should be very severe. After bombing an odious but largely defanged dictator out of power in Libya, and without any of the congressional or United Nations approval that liberals usually demand, the administration sent American diplomatic personnel into the ensuing chaos without the security arrangements that longstanding State Department rules require. Numerous impassioned requests by the highest ranking of those personnel for more security were repeatedly denied, on cables carrying the signature of the Secretary of State, even as the ominous date of Sept. 11 approached. When a terrorist group attacked the consulate in Benghazi on that date and murdered the ambassador and three other brave Americans, normal response procedures were ignored, the president went to bed in order to be fresh for a fund-raiser in Las Vegas, and military units that might have been able to save those under attack were told stand down. Afterwards the president and other members of his administration repeatedly lied to the public that the deaths occurred during a spontaneous demonstration rather than an al-Qaeda terror attack, in service of a broader lie that al-Qaeda had been vanquished. The lie made a scapegoat out of an American who had exercised his constitutional rights by making a little-seen video about Islam, and the filmmaker was soon imprisoned on a parole violation charge that would have surely been overlooked if not for the administration’s dishonest vilification of his work. Investigations into such misfeasance and malfeasance were subsequently thwarted by administrative stonewalling and outright bullying of people with embarrassing information to divulge, and we’re sure we have left out some other disgraceful aspect of the scandal.
In our time a president was forced to resign in disgrace and another was impeached for matters that were trivial by comparison, yet it now seems unlikely that Obama will suffer no such consequences. House Democrats made a half-hearted effort on Wednesday to blame the whole matter of Republican-inspired budget cuts, even though the figures and an internal State Department investigation have refuted such nonsense, but the White House has thus far been content to act as if the matter were a minor mishap of no interest to anyone but their most embittered enemies. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously dismissed a question about her failure to investigate the incident by indignantly asking “What difference, at this point, does it make?” White House press secretary Jay Carney recently characterized the four deaths in Benghazi as something that “happened a long time ago.” Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland added a morbid twist to this insouciant line of defense by musing during Wednesday’s hearings that “Death is part of life.”
Such an audacious response might just work, given the lack of interest among much of the media. Despite the bombshell revelations from Wednesday’s hearings, the big stories of the day on the hourly radio updates were a murder conviction in Arizona and the ongoing investigation of three kidnappings in Ohio. Influential media such as The New York Times and The Washington Post have lately been paying a grudging amount of attention, but without the undisguised outrage that marked their coverage of the minor brouhahas that have afflicted past administrations. More openly partisan outlets have happily echoed the administration’s claim that any attempts to draw attention to the ineptitude and dishonesty are mere political point-scoring. It worked well enough to get the administration through the last election, although the facts known even then were infuriating to anyone paying attention, and it is depressingly possible that it will work well enough to get Hillary Clinton past the next election.
A few bold Republicans in the House seem determined to keep the story in the news, though, and the conservative media will do their best to help. These efforts might not succeed in bringing down the administration, but the president’s critics can take some solace in knowing that there is nothing about the Benghazi story that can help the president.

– Bud Norman

The Least Bad Choice

May 8, 2013 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment
Sometimes life offers only bad choices. Such was the case in Tuesday’s special election for South Carolina’s first congressional district, where the ballot offered voters a choice of Elizabeth Colbert Busch or Mark Sanford.
The district has been reliably Republican for decades, and went for Romney by 18 points in the past presidential election, but Democrats around the country were nonetheless hopeful about their chances. Such optimism was based in part on the assumed appeal of Democratic nominee Busch, a university administrator and political neophyte with a semi-famous brother, but mostly on a widespread distaste for Republican nominee Sanford, a former governor who resigned in disgrace following the disclosure of an extra-marital affair.
Other politicians have recovered from similar shenanigans, but they were Democrats and they weren’t running in a southern Republican district. Sanford’s scandal had also included official lies about his whereabouts during one liaison with his Argentine mistress, campaign money spent on a cover-up, a seeming lack of contrition, and a widely popular wife. Although Sanford used all the right religious language about repentance and redemption, he has continued the relationship with the other woman and during the campaign he was accused by his still-angry ex-wife of violating a court order by making an unapproved visit to her home. Democrats had reason to believe that Sanford could be beaten for the first time in his career.
Their faith in Busch, on the other hand, was probably misplaced all along. Her complete lack of political experience was expected to provide a refreshing contrast to the tainted career politician, but it resulted in an ineffective strategy of dodging interviews with the press, refusing to take clear stands on such important issues as the repeal of Obamacare, and amateurish stump campaigning. Being the brother of sneering cable television comic Stephen Colbert was supposed to provide a South Carolina sort of glamour and bring in national fund-raising, but it also seems to have raised suspicions that her vaguely-stated politics were secretly as sneeringly left-wing as her more famous sibling’s. Her own arrest record from her own failed marriage many years ago was politely ignored by much of the state’s media, but word seems to have gotten out enough to do some damage.
As it turned out, Sanford won again and it wasn’t very close. The most likely explanation is that voters figured they had two bad choices so they might as well go with the one who was most loudly promising to restrain federal spending. With the only other options being a Green Party candidate who was presumably to the left of Busch or not voting at all, it seems that the voters of South Carolina’s first congressional district did the best with what they had.

– Bud Norman

Pomp, Circumstance, and Tyranny

May 7, 2013 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment
The last time we were asked to address a commencement ceremony was way back in ’77, when our high school graduating class bestowed the honor. All we can remember of the speech are the jokes, the most obvious of which went over well enough, but we’re quite sure that even at such a tender age we weren’t so very stupid as to tell people not to fear tyranny.
That was the advice President Barack Obama offered to the graduates of Ohio State University on Sunday. After warming up the crowd with a few jokes of his own, mostly about football and other topics of local interest, Obama eased into his theme of citizenship. Much of it was typical commencement address fare, full of highfalutin and inoffensively vague statements about participating and persevering and so forth, and much of it was a typical Obama stump speech, extolling the many wonders of big government and such rhetorical flourishes as the Founders leaving us “the tools to do big things and important things together that we could not possibly do alone.” What caught our attention, however, was the typical swipe at the president’s critics.
“Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works,” Obama said. “They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.”
The president did not name these critics, although his audience was surely curious to know. Despite a steady diet of talk radio, conservative news outlets, and the company of fellow right-wingers, we can’t think of anyone who argues that democracy should be replaced and rule entrusted to some enlightened elite. We used to hear such talk often from our liberal friends, but that was back when a Republican was in the White House and we suspect those are not the people Obama was talking about.
There are plenty of people who argue that the government is becoming increasingly separated from the people, that it is sometimes sinister and at the root of many problems, and they make a strong case for gumming up the works, but we have never heard them say that the people can’t be trusted. We believe that certain individual rights should be constitutionally protected from the proper will, so perhaps the president meant us, but the Founders also gave us that tool and we expect that even Obama will be eager to use it when the topics of homosexual rights and abortion come back around.
If tyranny isn’t lurking around the corner, it is only because this country has traditionally been on guard against it. Immutable human nature compels those in power in to seek more power, and only the resistance of a stubbornly independent people can’t prevent them from doing so. Obama has not proved an exception to this rule of history, and it is hoped that even a stadium full of college-educated twenty-somethings will be wary.

– Bud Norman

Red Lines in the Water

May 6, 2013 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Can’t anybody here play this game? An exasperated Casey Stengel famously asked that question of his hapless ’62 Mets as they limped to a 40-120 record, but it could just as easily be asked of America’s foreign policy team.
With Syria’s mass-murdering regime under attack from various Islamist rebel groups as well as Israeli air strikes aimed at the weapons Iran is shipping through that country to Hezbollah, and with Syria making veiled threats of escalation and Iran urging its neighbors to join in the fray, now is a good time to review the administration’s evolving relationship with these countries. It all began with proper respect for Syria and Iran, of course. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went so far as to laud Syrian dictator Bashar Assad as a “reformer,” and President Barack Obama was so eager for that bound-to-be-constructive dialogue with Iran that he politely ignored a popular uprising that might have succeeded in toppling the troublesome theocracy with a bit of American encouragement. After years of being spurned the administration at last abandoned the courtship with both countries, and adopted a tougher tone in occasional statements which culminated in Obama’s now-infamous “red line” declaration.
“For the Syrian government to utilize chemical weapons against its people crosses a line that will change my calculus and how the United States approaches these issues,” Obama announced at a news conference, later adding with his best poker face that “I’ve meant what I said.”
Syrian translators probably had some difficulty figuring out what calculus had to do with it, but they had no trouble conveying to Assad the message that Obama had promised to take some sort of action or another if chemical weapons were used against the rebels. With evidence emerging that Assad went ahead and did it anyway, apparently figuring that Obama did not mean what he said, administration officials are now busy explaining why no action is going to be taken. They’re demanding an exceedingly high standard of proof that chemical weapons have been used, and it seems that nothing less than a full confession will suffice, but they’re also anonymously leaking to the press that the president’s remark was “unscripted” and accidentally left out the “nuance” that president was referring to chemical weapons attack that caused mass fatalities. Another aide offers a more fran assessment of administration attitudes, telling the New York Times “How can we attack another country unless it’s in self-defense and with no Security Council resolution. If he drops sarin on his own people, what’s that got to do with us?” Perhaps such nuances will have a deterrent effect on the likes of Assad, and be similarly frightening to any adversaries that might be tempted to cross declared lines on Taiwan, the Korean peninsula, the U.S. border and elsewhere, but it seems unlikely.
Even without a telepromptered script Obama must have known, as he promised some sort of action or another, that were no good options left in Syria. All of the rebel groups that remain in the fight are Islamist, and although the Obama administration has been happy to assist the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood in its takeover of formerly friendly Egypt it does not seem to be eager to replicate that success in still-hostile Syria. Allowing Assad to gas his way to victory is not a good option, either, but it is hard to imagine Obama rousing his himself to another Middle Eastern war, much less the nation or NATO, even with an unlikely Security Council resolution.
The Israelis might handle it, but reports indicate that they aren’t even telling the United States what they’re going to do until they’re doing it. While Syria and Iran were being treated with open-handed appeals for dialogue the Israelies were receiving finger-wagging lectures about housing policy, calls for negotiations starting at the suicidal ’67 borders, and snubs to their Prime Minister, so their reluctance to consult the administration is understandable. Conspiracy theorists will speculate about some covert cooperation, but the overting distancing that both countries are doing with one another sends a message that America cannot deter its friends any more than it can deter its enemies. Like drawing lines that are not intended to be enforced, and the continuing revelations of bungling and duplicity in Benghazi, it makes one wonder if anybody here can play this game.

– Bud Norman

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