Back to Basics

Judging from his appearance on MSNBC this morning, Time magazine’s Joe Klein hasn’t received the revised memo about the Benghazi attack. Klein’s still using the “Susan Rice/Jay Carney/September 16th” playbook which has since been mostly revised to purge initial claims of “the video made them do it” and “it wasn’t a premeditated terrorist attack.”

From Newsbusters:

Here were some of Klein’s astounding assertions: There are no unanswered questions about Benghazi. Ambassador Stevens had all the security he wanted. Rice’s talking points were “absolutely accurate” — it was a spontaneous demonstration by extremists. Al qaeda was not involved in the attack. Not clear that reports from Stevens asking for more security exist.

Obviously the DNI has successfully edited Klein’s brain to exclude any references to the facts in this matter:

As civil as the debate may have seemed, it was a brawl. Central to it were all the lies President Obama continues to tell about his record in office and about his challenger, Mitt Romney. And Romney would not let him get away with it. Time and again he rose to his feet to rebut and debunk those lies and I suspect a lot of people who saw him in the first debate were in agreement with him in this second debate.

In a column on Tuesday, Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens perfectly anticipated Obama’s lies. Under the headline, “To the Wavering Voter” it repudiated the Obama campaigns assertions about a totally bogus “war on women” saying, “No, abortion rights and access to contraception will not be jeopardized if Mitt Romney becomes president. Not remotely, not vaguely, not even close.”

He went through the claims that Romney would engage in another Middle East War or that the nation would become a global pariah with Romney as president. Moving on, Stephens said, “No, your taxes will not go up by a couple of grand” noting that “As for the $5 trillion tax cut the Obama campaign insists Mr. Romney is offering, Obama campaign spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter admitted on CNN that ‘It won’t be near $5 trillion,’ once deductions and loopholes are closed.”

I cite Stephen’s prescient column because, if he could anticipate Obama’s lies, than you can be sure Mitt Romney did and that was demonstrated throughout the debate. At the very end, Obama could not resist misrepresenting Romney’s earlier “47%” comment during a closed fundraising event. Romney described that as an “inelegant statement” and then repudiated it, but Obama repeated it in his closing statement.

Throughout the debate Romney called Obama a liar in the most gentlemanly way possible, but a liar he was and is.

One lie that jumped out at the very beginning of the debate was Obama responding to a college student’s question saying “Your future is bright”, adding “I want to build on the five million jobs we’ve created.” What jobs? Half of today’s college graduates cannot even find a job comparable to their educational level, if at all. And the future is most demonstrably not bright.

Romney responded with the fact that there are 23 million Americans out of work. The truth! He cited the phony official unemployment rate and said it was a lot closer to 10.7%. Obama said, “What Gov. Romney said just isn’t true.” He lied. Romney cited figures that appear daily in newspapers.

Throughout the debate Obama demonstrated how obsessed he is with class warfare, returning time and again to observations about the nation’s wealthiest class.

He lied about his energy policies and claimed that Romney’s plan was “to let oil companies write energy policy.” The absurdity of this was seen as Romney cited the cost of gas at the pump, Obama’s veto of the Canadian pipeline, and the refusal of his administration to allow drilling for oil and natural gas on federal lands. He cited the fact that the coal industry was targeted and the loss of coal-fired plants to generate electricity.

And Obama’s respond was to lie again! “Very little of what Governor Romney said isn’t true.” But it was and it is. It’s not even a secret.

My newest piece at National Review starts this way:

Would you hire President Obama as your financial adviser? Three years ago his administration invested more than $100 billion in taxpayer money to bail out General Motors. On Tuesday, the entire company, not just what the government owns, was worth less than $34 billion. By anyone’s definition, that investment is a glaring failure. Yet over the last few days the Obama campaign, in a $25 million marketing blitz, has flooded the airwaves with ads in battleground states, claiming the bailout should be counted a rousing success.
Unfortunately, assertions that “all loans have been repaid to the federal government,” that the bailout “saved more than one million American jobs,” that “U.S. automakers are hiring hundreds of thousands of new workers,” that GM is again the “number-one automaker” — all are based on creative accounting. . . .

Krugman’s piece on Friday, “Broccoli and Bad Faith,” continues his trend for polemics over accuracy or analysis.

Let’s start with the already famous exchange in which Justice Antonin Scalia compared the purchase of health insurance to the purchase of broccoli, with the implication that if the government can compel you to do the former, it can also compel you to do the latter. That comparison horrified health care experts all across America because health insurance is nothing like broccoli. Why? When people choose not to buy broccoli, they don’t make broccoli unavailable to those who want it. But when people don’t buy health insurance until they get sick — which is what happens in the absence of a mandate — the resulting worsening of the risk pool makes insurance more expensive, and often unaffordable, for those who remain. As a result, unregulated health insurance basically doesn’t work, and never has. . . .

OK, so if you wait until you are sick before you buy health insurance, you drive up the price of insurance for others. But the exact same argument exists for broccoli. If broccoli makes you healthier and you don’t eat it, you are more likely to get sick and you will shift up the demand curve for health care, raising the price of insurance.

unregulated health insurance basically doesn’t work, and never has. . . .

Krugman is well-known for his assertions. If you got rid of insurance regulations, prices would be set according to risk.

I was struck, in particular, by the argument over whether requiring that state governments participate in an expansion of Medicaid — an expansion, by the way, for which they would foot only a small fraction of the bill — constituted unacceptable “coercion.” One would have thought that this claim was self-evidently absurd. After all, states are free to opt out of Medicaid if they choose; Medicaid’s “coercive” power comes only from the fact that the federal government provides aid to states that are willing to follow the program’s guidelines. If you offer to give me a lot of money, but only if I perform certain tasks, is that servitude? . . .

The discussion before the Supreme Court was over “coercion,” not “servitude.” “Coercion” means to impose a cost on others. As any economist knows, costs are always opportunity costs. Giving up money represents an opportunity cost. But let me make it simple for Krugman: You take money from me by force and give it back only if I do want what you want me to do. That sure seems like coercion.

Is the headline accurate, or am I missing something?

First lady Michelle Obama is challenging assertions she’s forcefully imposed her will on White House aides and says people have inaccurately tried to portray her as “some kind of angry black woman.”

Mrs. Obama tells CBS News she hasn’t read New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor’s new book that characterizes her as a behind-the-scenes force in the Executive Mansion, whose strong views often draw her into conflict with President Barack Obama’s top advisers.

I remember back in the 80′s reading allegations that Nancy Reagan was an assertive control freak who butted in where she didn’t belong. Who knew that the media was only trying to falsely portray Nancy as some kind of angry black woman?

Up until this point, I was convinced that Ron Paul was a small-time grifter; seeking to pursue his opportunistic desires by running for the GOP nomination for the Presidency of the United States and that his foreign policy towards Iran– as expressed many times during GOP Presidential debates – was not only totally insane, but placed both America and Israel at significant risk.

Conversations, if that is what you want to call dueling Facebook posts, have convinced me to take a closer look at Ron Paul’s assertions that there is “war talk” afoot and that it has nothing to do with the actual threat posed by Iran against the United States or Israel.

It appears that Ron Paul’s assertion is that political forces in the United States, for reasons unknown or unstated, are using the media and political process to foment a conflict with Iran. And that the main argument centers around Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions and its potential threat to Israel and, by extension, to the United States as Israel’s only ally in the region.

Ron Paul believes, that there is no evidence that Iran has developed a nuclear weapon or is close to developing a nuclear weapon and that the United States may be lead down the garden path by talk of weapons and/or systems which may prove to be as non-existent as the fictional weapons of mass destruction which were used as the justification for the war in Iraq.

Let us put aside, for the purposes of this exploration, Ron Paul’s assertion that 9/11 was simply retribution for our actions in the region. Or that Israel is an “apartheid” nation. Or that the return to the gold standard is dangerous because you are limiting economic growth to a mined metal and assuming that other nations with large gold stocks (China, Russia, etc.) would not chose ideology over economics in causing worldwide financial chaos.

From the Council on Foreign Relations …

In the Council on Foreign Relations’ Journal Foreign Affairs (JanuaryFebruary, 2012), author Mathew Kroenig’s article “Time to Attack Iran: Why A Strike is the Least Bad Option, Kroenig posits …

“Years of international pressure have failed to halt Iran’s attempt to build a nuclear program.” – Obviously true.

“The Institute for Science and International Security, a nonprofit research institution, estimates that Iran could now produce its first nuclear weapon within six months of deciding to do so.” – Who is this group, how can their intelligence estimates be better than the CIA and other U.S. Intelligence Agencies?

“Some states in the region are doubting U.S. resolve to stop the program and are shifting their allegiances to Tehran.” – Why is the U.S. required to play policeman and protect an obvious Saudi source of state-funded Whabbist terrorism?

“Others have begun to discuss launching their own nuclear initiatives to counter a possible Iranian bomb.” – Talk is cheap and there is little reason to believe that certain nations, especially the Saudis, wouldn’t simply purchase the technology and fissile material from a third non-U.S. party, possibly China, Russia, Pakistan or North Korea.

“Inequality.”

It almost sounds like a curse word, doesn’t it?

For most of my life, American media, politics and pop culture have been defining “inequality” in the narrowest terms possible.  When the word pops-up in one of these contexts, it implies financial disparity between the “rich” and the “poor,” a disparity that is allegedly caused by grave injustices of the rich.

Nobody doubts that inequality and injustice exist in the United States, and at times the two are correlated. Yet the two concepts are not synonymous with one another, and instances of inequality do not always mean that something bad has happened.

So as the President of the United States and many other elected officials run for re-election on an agenda of “fixing” our alleged inequality problems, it behooves us all to pause and do some critical thinking.  If some types of inequality are normal and acceptable, then why do politicians insist that all inequality is a problem that requires a government solution?

Political rhetoric about the alleged injustices of inequality may temporarily allow me avoid certain adult realities. For example, if I believe the President’s assertions about the injustice of other people achieving more than I have, then I can allow myself to believe that somebody else’s success has caused my failure, which in turn allows me – at least for a while – to avoid taking responsibility for my failure. Yet this kind of chatter doesn’t help me become a better, more mature person, and it certainly does not make for productive public policy.

One of the most obvious examples of inequality without injustice is found in the events of Christmas, the holiday that many of us celebrate today. Millions of Americans – especially many parents- will be receiving far less in their traditional gift exchanging rituals than they will be giving.  There is “inequality” entailed in our receiving and giving ratios, yet we don’t mind a bit – we freely choose to give from our abundance without the prospect of “getting” much in return.

Cynics will claim that an analysis of Christmas gifting habits is no counter-example to the grave injustices of the other 364 days of the year. Yet the point here is unmistakable:  in the context of holiday gift exchanging, inequality is so normal and non-problematic that most of us don’t even recognize it.

But let’s look at the more crucial areas of our lives.  For example, let’s consider whether or not our nation is – to use President Obama’s terminology - “a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, (and) secure their retirement…”

It was a very provocative and important moment when the President raised this question on December 6th, during his now-famous speech at Osawatomie, Kansas.  And yet he never really answered it, at least not in any concise way.  He didn’t say “no, America is not a country where these things can be achieved” (which would have been a false answer), and he didn’t say “yes, America is that kind of place” either.

What President Obama did was to use the framing of his question to make several political assertions. For example, anyone who disagrees with his policies – namely the congressional Republicans – is guilty of leaving helpless American individuals to “fend for themselves” (whatever that means).

From Dorothy Rabinowitz, at Wall Street Journal:

Ron Paul’s supporters are sure of one thing: Their candidate has always been consistent—a point Dr. Paul himself has been making with increasing frequency. It’s a thought that comes up with a certain inevitability now in those roundtables on the Republican field. One cable commentator genially instructed us last Friday, “You have to give Paul credit for sticking to his beliefs.”

He was speaking, it’s hardly necessary to say, of a man who holds some noteworthy views in a candidate for the presidency of the United States. One who is the best-known of our homegrown propagandists for our chief enemies in the world. One who has made himself a leading spokesman for, and recycler of, the long and familiar litany of charges that point to the United States as a leading agent of evil and injustice, the militarist victimizer of millions who want only to live in peace.

Hear Dr. Paul on the subject of the 9/11 terror attacks—an event, he assures his audiences, that took place only because of U.S. aggression and military actions. True, we’ve heard the assertions before. But rarely have we heard in any American political figure such exclusive concern for, and appreciation of, the motives of those who attacked us—and so resounding a silence about the suffering of those thousands that the perpetrators of 9/11 set out so deliberately to kill.

There is among some supporters now drawn to Dr. Paul a tendency to look away from the candidate’s reflexive way of assigning the blame for evil—the evil, in particular, of terrorism—to the United States.

Continue reading.

Paul can win Iowa. He can’t win the GOP nomination. See, “Why Ron Paul Can’t Win.”

Folks suggested earlier that the Republican establishment would turn on Paul if he came close to securing the nomination. Again, he’s sounds too crackpot to me for that thought to even register, but this is a crazy year in politics, so I don’t dismiss an intra-party program of merciless destruction if push comes to shove.

The racist newsletter problem is bad enough, from a credibility standpoint, at least. But Paul’s foreign policy is not something he can brush off: he’s campaigning on it. To give that platform serious legitimacy by elevating its advocate as the GOP standard-bearer would be a horrible omen for the future of politics on the right. And it would also tell us something about the shape of the conservative political universe that this particular candidate could come so far into the mainstream. It would be a testament to the visceral dislike with the Obama-Democrat policy agenda, but it would also signify a mainstreaming of political isolationism in American foreign affairs. That alone would be one thing, but Paul’s ideological program is closely intertwined with the bubbling up of anti-Semitism from the fringes, and would combined horrifically with the left’s program for the extermination of the Jewish state.

That’s what bugs me most about Ron Paul and his paleoconservative brew.

See AoSHQ for a refresher.

Clueless Joe is at it again:

In an interview with Leslie Gelb in Newsweek, Vice President Joe Biden says:

Look, the Taliban per se is not our enemy. That’s critical. There is not a single statement that the president has ever made in any of our policy assertions that the Taliban is our enemy because it threatens U.S. interests. If, in fact, the Taliban is able to collapse the existing government, which is cooperating with us in keeping the bad guys from being able to do damage to us, then that becomes a problem for us.

NPR might agree with Biden, along with select NY Times op-ed contributors, but the 9/11 Commission report — the recommendations of which Biden voted “yes” on implementing — does not agree:

The Taliban seemed to open the doors to all who wanted to come to Afghanistan to train in the camps. The alliance with the Taliban provided al Qaeda a sanctuary in which to train and indoctrinate fighters and terrorists, import weapons, forge ties with other jihad groups and leaders, and plot and staff terrorist schemes. While Bin Ladin maintained his own al Qaeda guesthouses and camps for vetting and training recruits, he also provided support to and benefited from the broad infrastructure of such facilities in Afghanistan made available to the global network of Islamist movements. U.S. intelligence estimates put the total number of fighters who underwent instruction in Bin Ladin-supported camps in Afghanistan from 1996 through 9/11 at 10,000 to 20,000.

Ah, but wait — maybe Joe just didn’t want to say anything too negative about the Taliban while this is going on. Unlikely though. When it comes to keeping secrets, Biden makes Cindy Brady look like an unbreakable confidant, so those beans would have more than likely been spilled during the interview.

Read all about it in the latest issue:

(h/t Lachlan Markay, Newsbusters June 2011)