A Neo-Con Actually Says a Nice Word about Obama

It is such a rare thing to see a rabid neo-con such as Charles Krauthammer side with Obama on anything--you can tell the election is over--but here he is, approving Obama's trip to India.  (Having Krauthammer side with Obama makes me want to oppose it, but I'll try to stifle such a kneejerk reaction.)

This hegemony is the growing source of tension in Asia today. Modern China is the Germany of a century ago - a rising, expanding, have-not power seeking its place in the sun. The story of the first half of the 20th century was Europe's attempt to manage Germany's rise. We know how that turned out. The story of the next half-century will be how Asia accommodates and/or contains China's expansion.

Nor is this some far-off concern. China's aggressive territorial claims on resource-rich waters claimed by Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Japan are already roiling the neighborhood. Traditionally, Japan has been the major regional counterbalance. But an aging, shrinking Japan can no longer sustain that role. Symbolic of the dramatic shift in power balance between once-poor China and once-dominant Japan was the resolution of their recent maritime crisis. Japan had detained a Chinese captain in a territorial-waters dispute. China imposed a rare-earth mineral embargo. Japan capitulated.

That makes the traditional U.S. role as offshore balancer all the more important. China's neighbors from South Korea all the way around to India are in need of U.S. support of their own efforts at resisting Chinese dominion.

And of all these countries, India, which has fought a border war with China, is the most natural anchor for such a U.S. partnership. It's not just our inherent affinities - being democratic, English-speaking, free-market and dedicated to the rule of law. It is also the coincidence of our strategic imperatives: We both face the common threat of radical Islam and the more long-term challenge of a rising China.

Which is why Obama's dramatic call for India to be elevated to permanent membership on the U.N. Security Council was so important. However useless and obsolete the United Nations, a Security Council seat carries totemic significance. It elevates India, while helping bind it to us as our most strategic and organic Third World ally.

China is no enemy, but it remains troublingly adversarial. Which is why India must be the center of our Asian diplomacy. And why Obama's trip - coconuts and all - was worth every penny.

A Charming Bush in Denial

Former Congressman Tom Andrews on George W. Bush:

“It’s rather extraordinary: Former President Bush was on national television last night here in the US, and he said that his lowest moment, lowest of the low, was when rap artist Kanye West accused him of not caring about black people during the Katrina debacle and the failure of the federal government to respond to the hurricane disaster, when in fact you have a war against Iraq, a violation of international law and invasion that killed thousands of American soldiers, and over 100,000 Iraqis, all to go after weapons of mass destruction that did not exist,” Andrews said. “And to make it worse, you had American soldiers, 700 of whom lost their lives in Iraq because in this war of choice this administration did not think it’s important enough to provide them with the protective armor that if they had it they would be alive today. In this interview, based upon this book, the president said his lowest moment was when he was criticized by an American rap artist for his handling of the Katrina disaster. I don’t think anyone buys this. The Iraq war, most Americans now believe, the vast majority of American believe, was a tragic mistake. And the fact that it was done in the way it was done makes it even worse.”

To the contrary, I think it is very possible that Bush was most anguished by criticism of him from a black rap star. What does that show? Perhaps how utterly warped his perception of things are?  And how in denial he is about his lead role in the killing and maiming of hundreds of thousands of people through the wars he started? 

Didn't Jesus say something about judging the tree by the fruit it bears?  Evil is what evil does, and the mass murder and brutal suffering of war is simply evil, through and through.  Frankly, war is evil even when it's 'just', though Bush's wars were in no way just or necessary.

But isn't this true about every evil political leader in history?  Really, evil people can be the most charming people you'd ever want to meet.  Scott Peck wrote about that in his book People of the Lie.  Referring to the study of the evil of Naziism by the psychologist Erich Fromm, Dr. Peck (who was a psychiatrist) wrote,

Fromm's work is based on his study of certain of the Nazi leaders of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. It has the advantage over my own in that his subjects can surely be certified as evil by the judgment of history. But his work is weakened for the same reason. Because he never actually met his subjects, because they were all men in positions of high political power in a particular regime of a particular culture at a particular time, one is left with the impression that truly evil human beings were "over there" and "back then." The reader is led to believe that real evil does not have anything to do with the mother of three next door or the deacon in the church down the street. My own experience, however, is the evil human beings are quite common and usually appear quite ordinary to the superficial observer.

Hannah Arendt, in her famous book Eichman in Jerusalem, similarly wrote about how banal and compliant the Nazis were, even as they committed their evil deeds,   Interestingly, she wrote this about the Nazi Adolf Eichman:  "Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a 'monster,' but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the entire enterprise [his trial], and was also rather hard to sustain in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused to millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed and almost never reported."

The other possibility is that Bush was just a total stooge and an 'out-to-lunch' puppet of the evil forces of the government that he appointed.  And I don't dismiss this out of hand, because of one person, Dick Cheney (actually let me include Don Rumsefeld).

But either way you look at it, George W. Bush was a tragic disaster for this country and the world.

But he can be charming, no doubt.

My feeling is that this memoir is his attempt to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the American people. I would prefer that he not be rehabilitated. The wounds and suffering and death resulting from his wars are still too fresh and real. 

Honest, Real, Vital

Andrew Sullivan's initial take on the initial Simpson-Bowles debt reduction proposal is positive (as is mine):

I've quickly scanned the Simpson-Bowles draft proposal and find it extremely encouraging. It really does hit what the Dish regards as key themes for a new fiscal order: 1986-style tax reform (largely removing deductions and lowering rates); serious defense retrenchment; focusing social security on the truly needy and raising the retirement age; hard cost-controls in Medicare; a real populist attack on government waste.

It reads like the manifesto the Tea Party never published. Every detail needs thinking through and debate. Much of it is way over my head in terms of the specifics of government programs and the ability to cut them. But the core proposal is honest, real, and vital. I recommend you download and read both documents.

If I were the president, I would embrace this and urge passage of these proposals as the key domestic objective of his next two years in office. If I were the GOP, intent not on politics but on restraining spending and the debt, I would make this a joint endeavor. If I were the Tea Party, I would leap at this as a way past the old two parties toward fiscal sanity.

Saving Obama

Maureen Dowd's brother Kevin on the chances of Hillary being on the ticket in 2012 as V.P.:

I once had a Jesuit English teacher who asked for an example of irony. A classmate raised his hand and wondered if Othello mistakenly killing Desdemona qualified. The old priest shook his head, noting, “That is not irony, bud, that is tragic irony.” So it is with the idea being floated that Hillary might join Obama on a dream ticket as V.P. to save his presidency. Hillary, the only member of the cabinet with any political savvy, saving the guy that jumped line on her. I don’t think so.

The Out-Of-Control Federal Reserve

A classic description of the power of the Federal Reserve by Murray Rothbard, libertarian godfather and intellectual. It is this power which the libertarians under the guise of the Tea Party movement are seeking to both expose and somehow bring under control:

By far the most secret and least accountable operation of the federal government is not, as one might expect, the CIA, DIA, or some other super-secret intelligence agency. The CIA and other intelligence operations are under control of the Congress. They are accountable: a Congressional committee supervises these operations, controls their budgets, and is informed of their covert activities. It is true that the committee hearings and activities are closed to the public; but at least the people's representatives in Congress insure some accountability for these secret agencies.

It is little known, however, that there is a federal agency that tops the others in secrecy by a country mile. The Federal Reserve System is accountable to no one; it has no budget; it is subject to no audit; and no Congressional committee knows of, or can truly supervise, its operations. The Federal Reserve, virtually in total control of the nation's vital monetary system, is accountable to nobody – and this strange situation, if acknowledged at all, is invariably trumpeted as a virtue.

Fear and Loathing of the Tea Party by Everyone: Republicans, Democrats, Liberals, Conservatives, CNN, MSNBC, Even Fox. Perhaps They're Crazy, But Then Again, Perhaps They're Just Speaking Truth To Power.

It looks to me like both Republicans and Democrats, liberals and establishment conservatives, are dreading the Tea Party's focus on the national debt and the out-of-control government spending. 

To be honest, most liberals/Democrats really don't think debt and deficits are a big issue at all.  It seems they just think that if the national debt gets too large, well, you just print whatever money you need and pay it off, or perhaps just go bankrupt and start over again.  Most of all, of course, liberals don't want cuts in any of the large entitlement/social welfare programs that have been put in place since the beginning of the 20th century.

Conservatives/Republicans, on the other hand, are constantly talking about small government, and they really love to cut taxes.  But when it comes to actually shrinking government and cutting spending, they are basically hypocrites.  Look at the following chart and you will see that (with the exception of the last two years of Great Recession), most of the prior national debt was run up during the years of the Reagan and Bush Administrations.  Yes, that's right, it's true.

And furthermore, conservatives/Republicans love big government when it comes to military spending.  When you combine military spending/wars, cutting taxes, and not cutting spending, what you get is a skyrocketing national debt.  And that is basically what they are promising us now.

With the exception of the Tea Party and its focused coterie of libertarians.  This new force in American politics is the first political group in a long time who want to seriously grapple with our fiscal situation. 

It was amusing (and also very annoying) to watch Elliot Spitzer interviewing Rand Paul on the Parker/Spitzer Show on CNN last evening.  If anyone seems serious about cutting the deficit and balancing the budget, with cuts to every area of government, it would be Rand Paul (which is why I supported him).  But liberals like Elliot Spitzer are very afraid of people like Randy Paul, because they seriously threaten most everything liberals stand for--big government, huge entitlement programs, social programs of all kinds, central national planning, and opposition to decentralization.  And so Spitzer played 'gotcha' with Paul, to no avail.  Rand Paul would have none of it, just as I expected, and he left Spitzer looking like a sputtering fool, in my opinion.

And establishment conservatives like Mitch McConnell are also afraid of Tea Party libertarians, which is why McConnell did his very best to defeat Rand Paul in the Republican primaries in Kentucky, to no avail.  So it will be particularly interesting to see the growing conflict between the Republican establishment and the newcomer Tea Partiers.  Oh, and I can't forget to mention how much neo-conservatives like Bill Kristol and the folks at the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation fear and loath the libertarians, because they threaten their beloved wars and huge imperialist military.  Very interesting. 

And finally, it will be very interesting to see where Fox News comes down on all of this.  The last couple of days, the Fox News anchors have looked a little bewildered.

Sarah Palin and the Federal Reserve

I find Sarah Palin's recent criticism of the Federal Reserve to be both interesting and indicative.  Interesting, in that it doesn't really seem to be the kind of subject that she would take on just to rouse the public's anger.  Indeed, most people have little or no idea of what the Federal Reserve is or does;  to the contrary, it is like Churchill's description of the Soviet Union--"a puzzle inside a riddle wrapped in an enigma." 

It seems then that this is an issue of serious concern to her for principled reasons, or at least, the principles of her handlers, if there are such (and I don't know that there are).  Assuming that principle comes in here, her criticism would seem then to be indicative of what distinguishes her, and Tea Partiers like her, from other conservatives and establishment types in general.  Which is to say, a strongly libertarian critique of the US banking system and the control of the US currency exerted by the Federal Reserve.  It is the same critique that Congressman Ron Paul has been advocating for decades now, and that his son Rand, the newly elected Tea Party Senator from Kentucky, will almost surely also be pushing.

The ongoing shenanigans by the Federal Reserve--and the Wall Street banking community behind the Fed, along with their bought-off politicians in Washington from both political parties--came to the forefront during the recent Crash of 2008, which in turn led to the bank bailout called TARP of the Bush/Obama administrations, so hated by the Tea Partiers.  As a result, the smoldering distrust of the Federal Reserve has been fanned into a raging fire, and this is now coming into view with the new Republican House.  If Congressman Ron Paul becomes chairman of the relevant House committee that deals with the Fed, it is suddenly going to get VERY interesting.

Many liberals think that the Tea party is just a movement of home-spun, downhome, free-market, laissez-faire, business and wealth-loving conservatives.  Not so.  The Tea Party is, at least in part, made up of principled libertarians, who have been at odds with the financial/Wall Street establishment for a very long time, and would like nothing better than to see all of its misdeeds exposed and punished. 

If you want to read more about this libertarian view of the Federal Reserve, apparently agreed to by Sarah Palin, you can read this lengthy article by Murray Rothbard, one of the godfathers of the libertarian movement, on the history of the Federal Reserve Bank.

For a long time, the Fed has basically stiffed the Congress when it asked for information about its dealings.  I think that perhaps they are going to be more cooperative in the very near future.

Status Quo Ante

I've decided to go back to my original title for this blog....The Rude Awakening.  It just seems to resonate better with the times we are in.

The Limits of Social Conservatism

Social conservatism can be quite a good thing.  The stability of marriages and families, the reciprocity of familial duties--of husband and wife, of parents to children and children to parents--is a good thing.  The role of family, neighborhood and community in creating social bonds and harmony, and in fighting the disorder that can destroy community--disorder like crime, drug addiction, and extreme promiscuity--is a good thing.

Yet we sometimes need to be reminded of the limits of social conservatism and of the fact that classical notions of freedom and liberty--in what used to be called in the 19th century 'liberalism'--sometimes war against traditional notions of social order and custom, creating new individual possibilities.

I was reminded of this the other night as Mary Beth and I watched once again the movie 'Yentl', one of our favorite.  In this marvelous film, directed by and starring Barbra Straisand, a young Jewish girl in early 20th century Poland is yearning to study Talmud at the Yeshiva.  Yet tradition and social custom prevent her as a woman from doing that.  Instead she is supposed to get married and have children, leaving the life of the mind to men. 

Stubborn as she is, Yentl reluctantly takes matters into her own hands--cutting her hair, dressing up like a boy, and running away from home--and by dint of her own courage and effort, gains entrance into a Yeshiva to study the Jewish Law.  Eventually, she is found out (by way of falling in love with another Yeshiva student) and decides to go to a place where there is more individual freedom--America.

This is a very moving story of the universal yearning for freedom, that definitely cuts against the conservative grain of traditional life.  (It's also the underlying theme of another of our favorite movies, "Fiddler on the Roof".)  Individual freedom vs. social conformity--here is one of the great paradoxes of modern conservatism that has yet to be resolved.  Indeed, this unresolved conflict can be seen in the modern Tea Party, between the social conservatism of Christine O'Donnell and the libertarianism of Rand Paul.  Or in several social issues convulsing our nation currently: gay rights and the right to smoke marijuana, just to name two.

Rand Paul: Chip Off the Old Block

One of the happier moments for me last Tuesday was the election of Dr. Rand Paul as the new Senator from Kentucky.  (Almost as happy as the defeat of Christine O'Donnell in Delaware!)  I have believed for some time now (contrary to the 'liberal' loathing of Rand Paul, exemplified by the fact that Paul's Democratic opponent was one of three political contributions that recently got Keith Olbermann into trouble at MSNBC) that Senator Paul would bring a new perspective to Washington, as probably the first truly libertarian Senator, that would be salutary and useful in countering our growing leviathan state and imperial pretensions.

Senator Paul appeared yesterday on This Week with Christine Amanpour, and I thought he was particularly articulate, and indeed courageous, in asserting the importance of making across the board cuts in national spending, to include our bloated military establishment (a position that almost nobody on the establishment Republican and Democratic side is willing to make).

To see where Rand Paul gets his moxy, view this interesting video of his father Congressman Ron Paul being interviewed by William F. Buckley on the show Firing Line back in 1988.  In this video (the first of four), Ron Paul makes the case for abolishing the CIA, while Buckley defends it.  In fact, later in the video, Buckley comes across as fervent a defender of 'big government' as I've seen from any so-called 'liberal'.  I don't know what 'conservatism' or 'right-wing' means, if both of these men are thought of as conservative or right-wing.  There is something clearly askew about our political nomenclature.