Playing Gotcha Over Gaza
Reading Paul’s comments on the Gaza situation, I was moved to drop him a personal note, which in retrospect I think is worth sharing. I hope he doesn’t mind:
“The Israelis are living Europe’s future. Some right-wingers take glee in it, because so many Jews have a double-standard about Israeli harshness towards Moslems, and European or American self-defense of their nations against similar or comparable threats. Part of me wants to say that I will advocate towards Israel the same standards Jewish neocons advocated toward Serbia in Kosovo. But that’s not at all fair to the people in Israel, most of whom had nothing to do with the hysterical anti-Serb campaign. I won’t use Israelis as a whipping boy for my anger at Americans like Alan Dershowitz. I don’t believe in collective guilt.”
“God help all the innocent civilians on either side. I hope I don’t live long enough to see this happening in Paris or Vienna.”
“I pray your friends and family over there are spared, and that a two-state solution can at least be tried--if only to test one way or another whether co-existence is possible. If it fails, then it’s time for harsher measures on Israel’s part, akin to our removal of the Apaches. God forbid it come to that.”
There’s Something About Harry
About the appointment by Gov. Rod Blagojevich of Roland Burris to the U.S. Senate, somebody big is lying, big-time. It is either the governor or Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Last week, Reid declared that he would not permit Burris, the African-American elder statesman of Illinois politics, to fill Obama’s seat, or even to enter the Senate chamber, though no one had suggested Burris is other than an honorable and able public man.
Reid declared Burris “a tainted appointment,” not because of any ethical defect of his, but because of the cloud over the governor who had appointed him.
Saturday, however, the Chicago Sun-Times reported, in a story sourced to the governor’s office, that Reid personally phoned Blago on Dec. 3, six days before the scandal broke, to urge him not to name any of three high-profile candidates for the Obama seat.
On the Reid blacklist were, according to the source, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., Rep. Danny Davis and State Senate President Emil Jones.
What do the three have in common? All are black.
Reid reportedly urged Blagojevich to pick either state Veterans Affairs Director Tammy Duckworth or Attorney General Lisa Madigan.
What do these women have in common? Neither is black.
As Prince Riley, a senior consultant to Burris, told Politico, “It’s interesting that all those who are viable are white women and the ones who are unacceptable are black men.”
It sure is, Prince--if the story is true.
Confronted by David Gregory on “Meet the Press,” Reid called Blago a liar and said he thinks Jackson would make a fine senator. Said Reid:
“This is part of Blagojevich’s cloud. He’s making all this up. I had a conversation with him. I don’t remember what was in the conversation, other than the generalities that I just talked about. I didn’t tell him who not to appoint. He’s making all this up ...”
However, this brings us back to the contents of a conversation Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel reportedly had with Blago, also before U.S. Attorney Pat Fitzgerald busted the governor for allegedly hawking Obama’s seat to the highest bidder.
Valerie Jarrett, Barack’s confidante, had by then withdrawn.
Rahm reportedly told Blago he should choose from one of three names: Duckworth, state Comptroller Dan Hynes and U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky. Rahm then reportedly called back to add Lisa Madigan.
All four are white. Conspicuously missing from Rahm’s list were all four black candidates: Jackson, Davis, Jones and Burris.
Are Blago or his people all lying? The truth is on Fitzgerald’s tapes.
As Gregory pressed Reid, whose re-election in 2010 in Nevada is no sure thing, the majority leader suggested his feet were not so set in concrete and he may be open to a deal with Burris:
“I’m an old trial lawyer. There’s always room to negotiate.”
The deal being talked about is that Reid may let Burris take the seat if he agrees not to run in 2010. For the fear Democrats have is that no black male in Illinois can for sure hold Barack’s seat.
Now, if any such deal is what Reid has in mind, one hopes Burris will slap it away. He has as much right to be in the Senate as Harry Reid does. And for Burris to enter that body as a professed lame-duck would mean that not only would he be last in seniority, he will have neutered himself.
Reporters need to get to the bottom of this. Did Reid and Rahm convey to Blagojevich that Jackson, Davis, Jones and Burris were all unacceptable? Or is the governor’s office putting out malicious lies against Rahm and Reid? Again, the truth is on the tapes. And the ball is in Blago’s court, as Reid has all but openly called him a liar.
Incidentally, can one imagine the firestorm if Mitch McConnell, GOP leader, was reported to have called members of the Republican National Committee and told them all the candidates for party chair were acceptable, except for Ken Blackwell of Ohio and Michael Steele of Maryland, the two African-Americans?
McConnell would suffer the fate of Trent Lott, the GOP leader who in 2002 had to resign his post over a toast to 100-year-old Strom Thurmond. Lott observed that Strom had run for president on the Dixiecrat ticket in 1948, that Mississippi had voted for him and that, had Strom been elected, we might not have all these problems.
Lott was maliciously accused of endorsing the segregationist stand Strom had run on, 54 years before, though Lott never voted for segregation, and Strom’s voting record had been consistent for decades with that of other Southern conservatives.
Al Gore, whose father, Sen. Albert Gore Sr., stood beside Strom and voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, called Lott’s remarks racist and urged his censure by the Senate.
Let us see if the media, and his colleagues, are as tough on Reid as they were on Lott.
Pre-Canine Counseling
This week I try to boost the birth-rate with my observations on how having some children really CAN be beneficial to your dogs. Share it with your childless friends!
Dumb is the New Smart--The Perversions of Modern American Education
An earlier version of this essay was delivered at the H.L. Mencken Club’s Annual Meeting; November 21-23, 2008.
Under the general topic of malevolence, wickedness, and evil, a vocabulary exists for self-imposed harm, for example, self-mutilation or self-abuse. But such words always denote individuals—not collectivities—inflicting harm. It is almost unthinkable that, say, an entire ethnic group would knowingly injure, let alone kill itself. Masada or Jonestown-like incidents are so riveting since they are so exceedingly rare.
Let me suggest a third form of evil-doing that combines both elements: a group—not an individual—deliberately hurting itself. To simplify, we’ll call the pathology Social Kevorkianism, after the infamous Dr. Jack Kevorkian, inventor of the suicide-facilitating machine. Its defining element is the pursuit of destructive policies whose injurious collective nature is patently observable, and, of the utmost importance, behavior continues regardless of demonstrable harm. Serious destruction is now welcomed by recipients though they might not fully understand its evil character and perpetrators may believe themselves blameless.
We are not inventing new terminology for its own sake, the phenomenon really does exist, and if one had to identify a place where it thrives, it would be blacks “helping” educate other blacks who struggle academically. This is not the usual “lets try it since it might work” desperation that infuses today’s educational reform menu (for example, charters, vouchers, merit pay for teachers, phonetics etc.). Those measures are certainly plausible and may even occasionally perform as advertised. We are talking about crackpot panaceas all championed by blacks themselves, whose foolishness is indisputably apparent, nostrums that have repeatedly proven disastrous and, critically, their application are guaranteed to exacerbate the educational woes of African Americans.
It is, unfortunately, a bountiful catalogue and includes such well-known, black-lauded toxic “cures” as Afrocentric instruction, inculcating inflated self-esteem at the expense of genuine academic accomplishment, treating street slang as a bona fide language (Ebonics) so as not to stigmatize the inarticulate, insisting that black teachers be hired as role models regardless of competence, litigation to bestow diplomas on those incapable of reading them, forced racial integration for zero academic gain even if this pushes white taxpayers out, and demanding racial quotas when expelling or otherwise punishing troublemakers. For higher education, add vacuous vocationally worthless majors like Black Studies, lowered admission standards to ensure a mismatch between a student’s ability and the college, giving credit for remedial work to inflate graduation rates, teaching blatant feel-good falsehoods as “history,” whose net benefits are decidedly negative.
One might think that these poisonous panaceas would sufficiently debilitate struggling blacks for all eternity, but, as they say on late night TV infomercials, wait there’s more.
Dr. Jack is as busy as ever and his latest black-endorsed “debilitator” contraption is transforming troubling, anti-academic achievement behavior into “giftedness.” This is far more than Newspeak “war is peace” dishonesty; this imposes genuine harm under the guise of kindness. So, rather than punish Joe Gangbanger for violent insubordination, some black educators “solve” the problem by twisting his noxious outbursts into something more laudatory—giftedness! And, if outsiders object, naively insisting that disorderly conduct totally subverts learning, defend this reconstructed reality as culturally valid, a lifting of the accomplish-killing stigma beleaguering black youngster. No matter the miscreant will leave school illiterate despite his or her alleged “talents.” Nor does it matter that this “helpfulness” so as to gloss over impertinence will drive decent, committed teachers out of the profession. The battle is over cosmetic, supposedly helpful labeling, and the costs be dammed even if the casualty is one’s own supposedly cherished racial or ethnic group.
Some Background
The battle for racial equality in education has bed many chapters, but the most recent installment concerns access to programs for the intellectually gifted. These are small potatoes in today’s educational colossus, typically just a special class overseen by a specialized teacher though in some large cities there are math and science high schools. They seldom exceed 5% of all students, and unlike those mired in poverty consuming social services, let alone the physically or mentally disabled, these students hardly drain the school’s budget. A cost/benefit analysis might show these programs to be an incredible bargain—push little Mr. Brains a bit harder, wait twenty years, and voilá, the iPod.
To an intellectually unsophisticated outsider, however, a gifted program must appear almost magical and thus worthy of forced entry. Children enter these programs and then, in some mysterious way, attain super test scores, are admitted to Ivy League schools, and then earn big bucks. That this accomplishment flows from superior innate intelligence, diligence and relentless parental pressure typically goes unnoticed—one “gets” this fantastic capacity merely by showing up as if one grows into a hulking Hercules simply by visiting an NFL weight room. And here’s the problem that sets Dr. Kovorkian in motion: blacks and Hispanics are severely under-represented in these programs while Asians are grossly over-represented. So, since these experiences “bestow” immense economic advantages for those admitted, and since all education-related advantages should not racially discriminate, it therefore follows that blacks and Hispanics should get their “fair share” of these magical, life-enhancing opportunities.
The idea of proportional access to gifted classes may even seem a natural historical progression, the next logical step in racial progress. But, here’s the obstacle: entrance requires demonstrating superior intellectual ability, usually via an IQ test, and blacks and Hispanics just cannot surmount this test-based hurdle. How, then, is this impediment to be overcome? New York City has tried special tutoring for blacks and Hispanics to help them pass the entrance exams for top-notch math and science high schools, but it failed. Elsewhere a court order has done the trick. In some instances abolishing these programs altogether solves the problem though this only angers white and Asian parents who want these programs. Alternatively, black and Hispanic children might be pushed to study harder so as to extract every benefit from their cognitive abilities. But, given a choice between being a grind and what Dr. Kevorkian might offer, the ingenious Doctor comes to the rescue.
New and Improved Definitions of Gifted
How might struggling, even barely literate black students come to be labeled gifted? Just leave it to Professor Donna Ford, holder of an endowed professorship at the Peabody School of Education, Vanderbilt University, and a renowned, well-published expert on gifted education for African Americans. In 2008 she won the Distinguished Scholar award from the National Association of Gifted Children. Ford begins by claiming that no universally accepted precise definition of intelligence exists, so almost anything can be “intelligence.” Fuzziness established, Ford then asserts that black children can be gifted though not according to existing flawed definitions. In particular, blacks are disproportionately endowed with certain under-recognized, under-appreciated abilities qualifying them as intellectually superior. These include a knack for expressing emotions, a language rich in imagery, a skill at improvisation, a superior sense of rhythm, a flair for humor, expressive body language among other “gifted” attributes. This hardly exhausts black giftedness and she compiles multiple commendable “black cultural styles” to be added to this stellar inventory, notably spirituality, oral tradition, harmonious communalism, and expressive individuality.
But, if these black youngsters are so gifted, why are academic outcomes so pitiful? No problem, according to Professor Ford. Without a scintilla of data Ford claims that black students learn to be under-achievers by being sensitive to social injustices, astutely witnessing the contradictions between academic learning and life experiences or growing wary of the school promoted meritocratic ideology. Academic under-performance is further compounded by ubiquitous racism, negative stereotypes among teachers and school administrators, and if these were inadequate to thwart academic mastery, black students come to see the racial, class and gender discrimination in both their schools and the larger society. Still, a skeptic might inquire, are blacks intellectually up to par, as measured by traditional tests, with all those striving Asians and whites flooding gifted programs? Of course they are, Ford responds. Traits traditionally defining “gifted,” i.e., aptly solving complex problems, these are all there, she blithely asserts, and at requisite if not superior levels, but “…may be hidden due to substandard educational experiences.” In other words, struggling African American students are hidden diamonds in the rough and, for good measure, possess innumerable other “gifted” traits certifying them superior candidates for admission to all those elite classes inexorably leading to Yale or Harvard.
If Professor Ford were the only proponent of this wacky giftedness, matters would not be so bad. In reality, she is only one voice in a much larger “We’re all gifted!” chorus. The sainted hero in this adulteration enterprise is Howard Gardner (who is white), a frequently honored, endlessly cited, Harvard education professor. His theories of intelligence are ubiquitous in the new and far more inclusive gifted literature. Gardner posits eight “multiple intelligences”: linguistic, visuospatial, logical-mathematical, musical, interpersonal, intra-personal and bodily-kinesthetic (this list grows as Gardner discovers additional “intelligences”). These terms reflect his definition of intelligence as a “psychobiological” ability to solve problems or create products of value in a culture. Note well, they reflect a particular culture, not universal adaptability, so among the Navajo, a talented basket weaver is considered “intelligent.”
To embrace this formulation potentially certifies everybody as “gifted” and thus, in effect, with all the prestige that comes with being a Harvard professor, Gardner subverts the historically understood idea of gifted education. These eight traits also may only be the first step, so the expansive possibilities are huge, particularly since everyone craves to be “gifted” one way or another. The slow-witted parent with an average child can now invoke a celebrated Harvard professor’s prestige to get her middling offspring upgraded—can’t-sit-still-junior with his big mouth is off the charts when it comes to intrapersonal skills!
When Dumb is the New Smart
This is a recipe for educational calamity, and for all parties, black and white and everything in between. A full autopsy of Dr. Ford-Gardner-Kevorkian’s patient would uncover multiple patient-debilitating pathologies, all inimical to genuine education. But, we can only highlight a few items from the lab report. Clearly, twisting patently obvious academic deficiencies into something called a black learning style or other commendable traits all having zero to do with anything intellectual ensures a truly rotten education for these newly-minted wizards. This is cultural relativism applied to schooling—everything is a laudatory talent, a standing set of excuses to avoid hard work. Imagine a black youngster struggling to write, never an easy task for anyone, and a degree of painful coercion may be necessary. Now, however, escape from drudgery is simple—he or she can now just explain that he comes from an oral tradition and, so, learning to write is unnecessary, sort of like pushing an Eskimo to learn surfing. This phony giftedness also undermines self-discipline, patience for slogging through boring material, keeping quiet and all else that goes into studiousness. A classroom filled with raucous, undisciplined children is not what it seems; it is, according to Dr. Ford, an classroom teeming with the “spontaneous self expression” so characteristic of gifted blacks. Meanwhile envision a precocious shy young ten year old capable of college-level math trying to coexist with a bunch of loud talkative boys obsessed with break dancing (bodily kinesthetic intelligence, according to Dr. Gardner).
It gets worse. This praised sensitivity to racial justice, hidden racism and incapacitating inequality will transform any school into a Garden of Earthly Litigation Delights. Nothing can escape racially sensitive scrutiny and, rest assured, acrimony will thrive. The newly identified gifted, according to Professor Ford, might see invisible racism everywhere while disagreeable facts become learning-destroying stereotypes. If too many blacks fail an algebra exam, seek out the hidden whiteness of algebra so as to dismiss the unwelcome outcome. Why suffer teachers imposing Shakespeare when allegedly talented students can devise plays showcasing ghetto humor and spontaneous rap-style soliloquies? If too many “disobedient” blacks are sent to the Vice-Principal, demand that the Vice-Principal be work-shopped so as to acquire a keener understanding of how blacks possess the gift of impulsive physical playfulness.
The awaiting tribulations hardly stop here. With a distinguished black educator (and their white allies) “proving” that blacks are just as gifted as whites, what administrator wants to risk litigation when black parents demand entry to this wondrous, prosperity-generating benefit? What school superintendent anticipates going to court and defending IQ tests as culturally fair when opposing well-credentialed “experts” explains that black students have stellar IQ’s but these scores are obscured by society’s racism? Now, obstacles pushed aside, the rush to enter the gifted classroom is on.
Unfortunately, forcing the academically unqualified into classes far over their heads will inevitably subvert learning for everybody, including African Americans. The newcomers, regardless of their hidden intellectual brilliance, will be befuddled and those admitted by conventional criteria (top 5% of the IQ distribution) will grow bored as teachers dumb down lessons to push everyone to a litigation-avoiding passing grade. Extra funds may go towards hiring “black gifted” specialists to devise unique curriculums for these diamonds in-the-rough. A parallel apartheid-like gifted program may have to be instituted. Ironically, smart whites and Asians will interact with students who re-enforce the notion of black intellectual insufficiency and witness firsthand how educators lie when covering up clumsy social engineering. Such dilution and dishonesty cannot be hidden by devious Newspeak, and the parents of the authentically gifted may soon jump ship.
Now picture these Professor Ford-certified “gifted” students leaving school and entering the workforce. The prognosis is not good. It is one thing to survive a school run by accommodating administrators terrified of government lawsuits but quite another to thrive in profit-driven enterprise. Offering up the once sanctioned excuses—I’m an emotional, non-logical person; I’m better with tasks requiring rhythm; I overslept due to negative stereotypes—will ring hollow. Such “gifted” students-turned-employee will probably also be litigation magnets, perceiving discrimination and unfairness everywhere, just like they learned from Professor Ford and her minions. Nor will these new employees, thanks to delusional beliefs about their (hidden) intellectualism talents, accept the inevitable failures that any job brings. After all, they came to understand that it was not their fault if trigonometry or chemistry was gobbledygook; this stuff was only giftedness for the Asians and whites down the hall, and not required for those in more culturally sensitive gifted settings. In a nutshell, these bogus gifted workers may now enjoy lifetime incapacitation thanks to Dr. Ford-Kevorkian’s assistance.
Assessing the Damage
It is simple, as we have done, to castigate those harming people of their own stripe under the guise of uplifting them. Nor is it easy to sympathize with a semi-literate unemployed youngster who voluntarily feasted on the menu of Afrocentric education, self-esteem über alles, and gross historical inaccuracies offered as “speaking truth to power,” all of which brought a degree in Black Studies from a college offering remedial high school courses for counterfeit college credit. That the young man or woman interprets black-facilitated ineptitude into possessing special gifts, all the while citing famous professors and their research, is only the dessert in a banquet of foolishness.
Still, a wise bystander might reasonably plead with Dr. Ford and her followers to stop pushing this nonsense, to instead tell these struggling students that kinetic activity is not intellectual accomplishment or that they are not really gifted. But what can be done beyond these well-intentioned admonitions? The answer is, not much. In medicine Ford’s or Gardner’s foolishness would be labeled quackery, deceptive advertising and perhaps banned from the marketplace as injurious. Or, cigarette-like scare labels may be appended to this “we’re all gifted!” literature saying that it may cause stupidity is inhaled. But, education is not medicine and it is unthinkable that consumer protection laws might be applied to what transpires in the classroom. Educational snake oil is First Amendment protected and Dr. Kevorkian’s device only requires a publisher sensing a burgeoning market, and all appearances, this market thrives.
There is, however, a totally different perspective. These debilitating but welcomed panaceas are comforting measures to medicate what must be agonizing tribulations. While a troubled individual might drown his sorrows in alcohol or gluttony, academically struggling African Americans prefer inflated self-praise, falsified history, deceptive, labeling and similar delusional tricks to reduce the distress of repeated failure. In pharmacological language, Afrocentric education, elastic definitions of gifted, and all the rest are pedagogical Prozac. This is absolutely understandable, almost unavoidable. Imagine belonging to a racial category always found at the academic bottom, the object of numerous failed, hugely expensive government remediation efforts and whose sorrowful school performance is routinely spoken of as the nation’s number one problem. Distinguished government commissions exist for the sole purpose of reversing your chronic incompetence while fresh-off-the-boat Asians zoom past you on reading and spelling tests. Battlefront reports are inexorably terrible—low test scores, dreary graduation rates, violence-plagued schools and, the mother of all insults, when blacks begin attending a school, non-blacks flee.
It is no wonder, then that when a charlatan arrives to certify your “giftedness” though in ways incomprehensible or invisible to whites, the message is gladly swallowed. And, a “shape up and get off the therapeutic fantasy” will go unheeded for the simple reason that the “shape up” alternative is often unappetizing though it may, in fact, enhance genuine academic accomplishment. Exceptions abound, and more can be accomplished with the available talent, but for most African Americans, current educational attainment levels will not be reversed, so one must find ways of tolerating the pain.
In the final analysis, then, this massive self-inflicted harm is irreversible and, no doubt, Dr. Jack is hardly finished. Ford, Gardner and all the others will wildly inflate “giftedness” and other self-inflicted debilitations will probably multiply. Gresham’s’ Law certainly applies—bad education will drive out the good—and the disorder afflicting blacks may be contagious. To be frank, most American parents and students, including many whites, crave cheap praise for mediocre educational accomplishment—we are not only all above average, we are all truly gifted.
The Evergreen Scam
The Tenants-In-Common business has done it again. Much like the U.S Advisors/CBRE imbroglio, this new scandal involves a cheesy cast of characters, fraud, and senior citizens as targets.
This time around, the offender is Evergreen Realty, led by its huckster senior partner, Luke McCarthy. Good at marketing to the old and unsophisticated, Luke has failed miserably in the questionable purchase and management. The property currently under the microscope is the Campus Lodge Apartment complex in Tallahassee, Florida. Evergreen management has even admitted to fraudulent statements by the seller when they purchased the property for the unsuspecting investors—the same kind of gross lack of due-diligence that was so common during the heady days of the real-estate boom.
The appeal of TIC investments was the ability of retirees to sell personal existing properties and re-invest in another real estate situation with a fixed income. Without paying capital-gains tax, they could accomplish this tax-free investment under the current ruling of the 1031 law.
Campus Lodge was billed as “High Quality Collegiate Living” garden apartments in Tallahassee, Florida. The property prospectus claimed a 7.1% for the investors, a total return of 10% by year six, and a hands-free management for the investors.
What happened? Nothing!! Evergreen cut the dividend to 2% 18 months ago—way before the financial crisis. And then, discontinued any dividends after the sub-prime bust. The promised students didn’t materialize, and the incumbent property management team was fired for poor performance and cost overruns.
Presently, Evergreen is scrambling to fill the Campus Lodge rooms with anyone willing to pay the rent. With the questionable “student business” gone, Evergreen is taking anyone looking for a roof over their heads. Adding insult to injury for the senior investors, there’s a threat of foreclosure and a request for a capital call of a half million dollars. The latter for physical improvements, because Evergreen let the property go into disrepair. Where is this money going to come from? Many of these senior investors no longer have the earning capacity to generate these funds.
Luke McCarthy, the master of double-talk, has done nothing to relieve the investors of this horrific fraud and mismanagement. And, how could he when he’s three thousand miles away? In fact, he has stepped away from this calamity and relegated all of his recovery responsibilities to his subordinates. When asked what are they doing to accomplish results, they retort with, “We’re working very hard.” What does this mean? Luke and his crew have fleeced his well-intentioned senior investors once again.
Bernie Madoff has some good company.
A Governor for Change
As a congressman and now governor, South Carolina’s Mark Sanford has had one primary guiding principle his entire political career--limited government. Not just limited government rhetoric, the sort of lip service paid by milk-toast Republicans to pacify their Right-leaning base, but genuine, strict, fiscal conservatism with the guts to back it up. If you ever need a good illustration of just how duplicitous the GOP can be, just take notice of how frequently SC Republicans get angry at Sanford for daring to actually represent the limited government principles they pretend to. It’s as if they’re saying, “C’mon Mark, you didn’t really think we meant all that conservative stuff, did ya?” Luckily, Sanford does mean it, which to some, makes him dangerous.
Inside Hitler’s Bubble
This guy lost a lot of money on Lebensraum:
[hat tip: Michael Gracie]
Time to End the Second Prohibition
Salvation was in the air. Repeal, also, was in the air. Two weeks before, the lame-duck Congress had turned a somersault and voted the amendment to the Constitution ending Prohibition. The wets were making merry with applejack, bathtub gin and prohibition hooch. “Beer by Easter,” they cried. Forty-one legislatures were in session for the chance to approve the wet amendment and to slap taxes on beer and liquor to save their empty treasuries… The country, the states, the towns needed money – something to tax. And liquor was the richest target. “Revenue,” said one commentator, “unlocked the gates for Gambrinus [beer’s patron saint] and his foaming steed.”
~John T. Flynn, writing about the eve of Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration in March 1933 in The Roosevelt Myth.
America’s First Prohibition, on alcohol, ended in 1933, not because it failed—although it most certainly had. Not because the murder rate in America’s cities doubled during 13 years of the “noble experiment.” Not because the enforcement of a law that attempted to prevent people from doing what they went on doing anyway had corrupted the police, courts, legislatures and businesses of the nation. Not because Prohibition handed a share of the economy to a criminal underworld that grew richer than U.S. Steel without paying a penny in tax. Nor because the federal prison population swelled by more than five hundred per cent to accommodate all those who were caught (a small percentage of the offending total) producing, importing, selling and drinking the devil’s liquid.
No, it ended because the Great Crash of 1929, the banking crisis that followed, the loss of tax revenues from business that had gone bust and millions of workers without jobs made it too expensive. The Great Depression killed Prohibition, because the United States just couldn’t afford it.
When Barack Hussein Obama assumes office on January 20th, he should remember the precedent his party set in 1933 and end the Second Prohibition, on drugs. This will create an immediate tax windfall to give the Treasury back more than it lost on Iraq, the bank bailouts and the annual subsidy to Israel. It would also relieve the American taxpayer of the burden of enforcing laws that Pew Center on the States’ Public Performance Project estimated [pdf] cost federal and state governments $20 billion a year. Not a bad savings, when times are tough, especially when the so-called “war on drugs” is failing as surely as the crusade against alcohol did 80 years ago.
The architects of both Prohibitions made sweeping claims for the good they would bring to the American public—an end to the addiction and penury associated with alcohol and narcotics. Both promised to reduce crime on the premise that, once the country had rid itself of chemical self-harm, no more drunks or junkies would commit crimes while in a state of inebriation. That isn’t quite how it worked, however. Crime went up, as criminal killed one another and innocent civilians to control the illegal market. Corruption increased as criminals used their vast wealth to buy judges, prosecutors, cops, city councilmen and the occasional senator. Most American politicians now admit having smoked marijuana in their youth, but that has not stopped them from passing more laws to put the next generation of children into prison. This was no different during the first Prohibition. H. L. Mencken wrote that every city hosting a Republican or Democratic national convention during the 1920s saw its alcohol consumption rise by several hundred per cent for that week. The lawmakers didn’t respect the law, and the usually law-abiding public followed their example.
The great Chicago columnist Mike Royko wrote in 1973 about Swastek’s Tavern, which stayed open throughout Prohibition. Stanley Swastek told Royko how his father, John, stayed in business with the help of Captain Daniel (Tubbo) Gilbert, “a political badge who became known as the world’s richest cop”: “In those days, he was in charge of the district station. He’d come in here and if we took in $10, he figured his share was $20. No wonder he was the world’s richest cop. He could have retired on what he took from us.” Tubbo was not the only one shaking down the saloon keepers, and there are many cops today who take money to look the other way when the goods arrive from Bolivia, Columbia, Mexico, and the hash fields of northern California. Why should that money go to crooked cops rather than to the Treasury, which could spend some of it on drug rehabilitation, education and medical care? Why should narcotics be sold from the backseats of Cadillacs rather than under license from pharmacies?
Legalizing marijuana, heroin, cocaine and other modern equivalents of 1920s gin would not only bring in revenue, it would save billions. The United States has the largest prison population on earth with 2.3 million souls behind bars. Admittedly, things could be worse. If everyone who took a drug illegally were caught and put away, there would be thirty-five million of us doing hard time. Prisons already cost $50 billion a year, but 100% enforcement would raise that to something like $750 billion. And the taxpayer, even in good times, cannot afford that. Instead enforcement has been as selective as the choice of lynchee at a Ku Klux Klan jamboree: white Americans may represent 72% of the drug-taking public, but black Americans comprise 37% of those arrested—and a staggering 42% of federal penitentiary population there for drug crimes.
Repealing the Second Prohibition would save a lot of time and money for the prison service. It might even leave them time for the usually unpracticed remit to rehabilitate. (The US has the highest rate of prison re-admissions in the world.) But other government agencies would benefit as well: U.S. Customs, the Coast Guard, the Drug Enforcement Agency (which could be dissolved), the U.S. Army in South America, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (which might do something about kidnapping, extortion and bribery instead), every local police force in the 50 states and the Treasury’s own police would no longer waste time and resources hunting for bags of weed and powder.
How much longer will the American taxpayer, who is already paying for Goldman Sachs, the chicanery of Bernie Madoff and the ineptitude of Detroit, afford to subsidize a crusade against his fellow citizens who don’t care whether taking drugs is approved by Washington’s elite or not? Joe Taxpayer would be a lot richer if his government gave the Fabulous Freak Brothers the same break it gives Joe Sixpack.
This time, stupid, it is the economy.
A Good European
The European Union’s new figurehead believes that climate change is a dangerous myth and has compared the union to a Communist state.
The views of President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic, 67, have left the government of Mirek Topolanek, his bitter opponent, determined to keep him as far away as possible from the EU presidency, which it took over from France yesterday.
The Czech president, who caused a diplomatic incident by dining with opponents of the EU’s Lisbon treaty on a recent visit to Ireland, has a largely ceremonial role.
But there are already fears that, after the dynamic EU presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy - including his hyper-active attempts at international diplomacy over the credit crisis and Georgia as well as an historic agreement to cut greenhouse gases - the Czech effort will be mired in infighting and overshadowed by the platform it will give to Mr Klaus and his controversial views.
[...]
Tensions recently erupted between Mr Klaus and Brussels when a private meeting with senior MEPs descended into a slanging match after they presented him with an EU flag and said that they were not interested in his Eurosceptic views.
Mr Klaus responded: “No one has spoken to me in this style and tone in my six years here. I thought these methods ended for us 18 years ago. I see I was wrong.”
This led to a counter-attack from Mr Sarkozy in the European Parliament. He told MEPs: “The president of the European Parliament should not be treated like this and Europe’s symbols should not be treated like this, whatever people’s political engagement.”
Mr Klaus returned to the row over Christmas in a Czech television interview. “I dare say that these people represent the height of anti-Europeanism. They have absolutely no right to wave Europe in front of our face,” he said.
There has been further sniping, not least from the French, that the Czechs do not have the clout or the capability to lead the EU as it faces the key challenge of the financial crisis. Mr Sarkozy has threatened to convene meetings of the 16 member states of the Euro during the Czech presidency because the Czechs do not have the single currency.
Nor does Mr Sarkozy believe Prague has the ability to deal with an increasingly restive Russia, which is threatening an arms race over US plans for missile defence radar in the Czech Republic.
The Czechs are also one of just three EU states not to have passed the controversial Lisbon treaty, which has enraged Mr Sarkozy after his drive to revive the document. Mr Klaus continues to lead Czech opposition to a treaty he likens to Communist centralism.
He is undeniably popular with Czech voters, having been Prime Minister from 1992-97, overseeing the harmonious break-up with Slovakia, and president since 2003. An economist who spent much of his working life at the Czechoslovak State Bank during the Iron Curtain years, he became active in politics as a champion of free market economics after 1989 and is said to keep a photo of Lady Thatcher, who he greatly admires, on his desk.
“The fact that Klaus holds these views makes it difficult to run the presidency,” said Robin Shepherd, senior fellow for Europe at the Chatham House think-tank.
“Klaus is not the head of government...but he is the public face of the Czech Republic.”
Auster’s Anger
Having already received several frantic notes about Taki’s comments concerning Israel’s campaign against armed Hamas members and other targets in the Gaza region, perhaps I should go public before these mounting inquiries get out of hand. In the case of Taki’s sworn enemy Larry Auster, there may be nothing that I could possibly say to placate his Achilles-like wrath. Larry scolds even the Israeli Right for their timid Zionism. In his oft-stated view, the Jewish state should have already expelled or killed all of the Arabs under its control, but their own politicians have held it back. Moreover, Larry has told me more than once, that, if I were indeed a friend of Israel, I would keep my distance from this website. The fact that I have been professionally marginalized at an advanced age by both Lefts, that is, the neocon and the less obnoxious Left, should not even matter. If I were acting properly, I would happily write just for myself (or perhaps for myself, my two pet dogs, my grandson, and our cleaning lady). At the very least I should have cut off my ties to that evil Greek socialite who funds our website. He is an anti-Semite who foams at the mouth, the proof of which is that he dared to compare the Israeli attack on Gaza to the Nazis’ assault on the Warsaw Ghetto.
Although my sympathies in the current military confrontation are generally with the Israelis (my son-in-law’s parents, who live near Ashdod, are in Hamas’s missile range), I find nothing appalling about the offending observation. The Israeli Left routinely makes the same charge against Israeli hawks, and my wife, after having read Taki’s screed, confessed she was “entirely in agreement.” The first prime minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion, repeatedly invoked the Nazi comparison in his remarks about Menachem Begin. It seems that Begin’s rightwing Zionist faction (to which Rahm Emmanuel’s father belonged) took aid from the Nazis against the British during World War Two.
My older son drew the same comparison that Auster slammed Taki for making in a phone conversation with me yesterday. And he seemed equally steamed up over Middle Eastern affairs. But my middle daughter, who is married to the Israeli officer whose parents live within Hamas’s missile range, naturally takes a very different view. To give my own two cents: The Israelis are justified in going after an enemy that broke a cease-fire by showering Israel’s inhabitants with missiles. On this general point I can’t blame them. Unfortunately the residents of Gaza live in squalid, impoverished conditions, and neither the Israelis nor the Egyptians want them to leave that squalor, if they intend to go to either country. I fully sympathize with those who are reluctant to take in a population rife with terrorists and violent agitators, but I’ve no idea how this situation can be improved as long as the people who are now being pounded remain isolated, without employment, electricity or running water.
But the major problem I and others have with Israel is its American well-wishers, that is, the neocons and “movement conservatives” who are defending it. The pro-Israeli propaganda emanating from the usual shriekers and sycophants has become so nauseating that my stomach turns every time that my wife turns on FOX (I no longer take the initiative in doing so) or every time that I am foolish enough to open up the New York Post. I can’t imagine how even Rahm Emmanuel’s terrorist father could sound more bellicose than that patrician-looking equivalent of John Podhoretz, John Bolton (yes I know that Bolton’s dad was a Baltimore fireman), or that moronic imitator of minicon ranting Sean Hannity.
But the ones who never fail to take the cake for Zionist hysteria are the columnists Ralph Peters and Victor Davis Hanson, noise-polluters for whom any critic of any Israeli action at any time is showing the “usual anti-Semitism.” Peters and Hanson are into their customary practice of inspiring the Israelis with examples of other democracy-boosting in the past, such as the unloading of atomic weapons on the “Japanese militarists.” Hanson, as Tom Piatak reported yesterday, already has the Israelis locked in mortal combat with “religious fascists.” Can the invocation of Sherman’s march to the sea, the incarceration of Japanese-Americans or the war against Kaiser Bill be close behind?
If these should be my allies in a campaign against Taki, I’ll leave them to Larry Auster, as people whom he should get to know better. From my observations it seems that the “conservative movement” has ostracized him as much as they have me. For all of his invectives against Israel’s enemies, the most impassioned Zionist war-hawks in the US, next to himself, will have nothing to do with poor Larry. This should send him a message (but I doubt that it will) that it is better to disagree amicably with Taki than to try to please our real enemies. Those enemies lead zombie armies that are not allowed to think for themselves on issues that matter.
Two more predictions
After a chat with a contributor, I’d like to add two more New Year’s predictions, which are actually related to the 2012 eleciton but which, I believe, will start to pan out over the course of ’09. First, Mark Sanford will become the new hero of the Ron Paul Revolution netroots and eventually its leader and spokesman. He will run for president in 2012.
Sarah Palin will leave politics and join the ladies of “The View.”
Fascists, Fascists Everywhere
First, fascism is revealed as the driving force behind American liberalism. Next, it is shown to be the motive for buying American cars. Now, Victor Davis Hanson tells us that Hamas is motivated by “religious fascism.” It seems that American commentators have an irresistible urge to sound like an outraged hippie watching his marijuana stash being confiscated by the police. Where next will the malign influence of fascism show up?
Burundi Follows Harvard
The rush to clone human embryos and cannibalize them for parts was somewhat slowed by the prospect that adult stem cells might make this process unnecessary. That didn’t stop Harvard from setting up a cutting-edge laboratory designed to--well, cut the little people up. Now it seems that the witch doctors of Burundi and Tanzania have been reading their Harvard alumni magazine.
Minimal Prognostications
Since my fellow contributors have done a marvelous job of offering various predictions about the New Year, I shall offer only a brief list of my own:
1) Prominent neoconservatives will fax their resumes to the Obama administration, offering the president the same skill and sophistication in foreign policy which led to success in Iraq
2) The Lincoln Bicentennial Commission will officially declare that President Obama has fulfilled Honest Abe’s attempts to make the republic a more perfectly egalitarian union
3) A small cadre of paleoconservatives and paleolibertarians will dare to fantasize about piecing together a coalition against the neo-liberals and neoconservatives entrenched in DC, even though they are severely divided on trifling issues like the bail-out of the Big 3
4) Canadian leftist nationalists who have spent eight years decrying the ideological hegemony of Caesar Augustus Bush will desperately embrace any idea or afterthought that drops from the Obama White House
5) The works of Ann Coulter will continue to outsell those of Russell Kirk among young GOP activists
6) More books on the decline of western civilization will be written; a few will even be read.
Happy New Year!
Save Your Candles—the Dark Ages Are Coming!
Editor Richard Spencer has asked me—and indeed all the Takimag gang—to record our predictions for the coming year, but I have to say that I take this to mean he wants us to get our fingers moving and write something–because all punditry is prediction, in an important sense. Every time one advocates a particular policy, or descries another, the author is predicting a certain outcome, good or bad: the question is, which policies will win out in the battle of ideas. As we look at the incoming administration, especially in the context of trends that have been building over time, a certain scenario begins to emerge, with the first act unfolding on the domestic stage:
1) Get ready for the coming hyperinflation, and the collapse of the dollar. The trillions President Obama plans on spending to “cure” our economic malaise will prove poisonous to the dollar, with hyper-inflation the inevitable result. Whether this reaches Weimar levels remains to be seen, but one can easily imagine all sorts of unpleasant Weimar-like consequences.
2) A barrage of legislation that aims to stop capital flight, including draconian economic controls on the movement of money across borders and the erection of a steep tariff wall in the name of “national economic security.” By the end of the year, we will have so many economic “czars,” each in charge of their own economic sector/fiefdom, that the Obama-ites will have to appoint a Czars-of-all-the-czars.
3) The Israeli offensive in Gaza is but a prelude to a series of IDF military actions, including a possible third Lebanon blitz and action against Syria—the weakest link in the chain of pro-Palestinian regional actors. The whole point of this extended exercise is to involve the US, militarily. This will lead logically to the fourth not-so-great expectation:
4) The return of military Keynesianism—To hear Paul Krugman and the other left-liberal economic gurus tell it, all we have to do is spend our way out of the doldrums, and that will do the trick. It doesn’t matter what we spend it on: it could be pyramid-building, for all they care. Just as long as we “jump-start” the economy with a “stimulus” of freshly-printed greenbacks—that’ll do the trick. And in the meantime, there will be plenty of jobs in Washington for ambitious young “planners” and other disciples of Saint Keynes, whose purview will be devising imaginative methods of expanding the ranks of government workers. As Pat Buchanan pointed out, this is the dreaded “earmarks” raised up to a way of life.
Inevitably, this orgy of spending will include – and perhaps even come to be dominated by—increased military appropriations. After all, there are only so many bridges one can build across the same river, and the accompanying rash of corruption sure to ensue is going to put a cap on this kind of spending. One can always cloak cronyism and two-hundred-dollar wrenches under the general rubric of economic collateral damage—a regrettable but necessary byproduct of ensuring the national security.
5) Preparations for war usually result in … war, and there are several candidates for 2009. The first is Iran, which will undergo a prolonged diplomatic, political, and economic assault before facing the prospect of American bombs falling on its cities. This, however, may not to out to be the main theater of American aggression in the coming year: Afghanistan, and Pakistan, will see major efforts by the US to complete a mission that has already failed, and which no one is quite clear about any longer. The US-Indian relationship will grow, perhaps formalized by a pact, and, in all likelihood, a visit by Hillary Clinton—not Obama—tothe region.
What the situation requires, however—the economic situation, that is – is the invention of another Major Threat. Whether that turns out to be Russia, as the neocons would like, China, as the labor unions would prefer, or al Qaeda, again, by pulling off some spectacular 9/11-like operation, is an open question. Not to mention the possibility of another non-state actor usurping al-Qaeda’s role as global villain, the possibilities are manifold—and frighteningly plausible. As for me, I’d place my bets on Russia: as in the Clinton era, expect large-scale US government-sponsored efforts to penetrate Central Asia.
An increasingly antagonistic relationship with China is also in our future, especially after the Chinese government orders state-owned enterprises to call in their American debt and off-load all those T-bills. If and when it comes, that is the conflict that will see the AFL-CIO, the neocons, both major political parties, and a good proportion of the paleoconservatives in the ranks of the War Party. The Taiwan lobby, an old mainstay of the cold war conservative movement, will make a comeback, as the Republican party “mainstream” makes a completely implausible and unsuccessful effort to win over “working class” voters.
By the end of the year, plans for a US withdrawal from Iraq will be put on indefinite hold, as its “discovered” that Iran has infiltrated the Iraqi government at the highest levels, and US soldiers are call in to halt an alleged coup attempt by pro-Iranian officers and militiamen. Iraq will increasingly become a battlefield in an ongoing proxy war between the US and Israel (operating in Kurdistan), and Iran. Allegations of Iranian interference in Pakistan, and even Afghanistan, will be raised, including by the Clinton state department, and we’ll be subjected to another long campaign by the War Party to target Tehran for destruction.
All in all, the prospects for liberty, and peace, in 2009, might be charitably described as dim, although bleak seems more precise. My advice to my readers: save your candles--the dark ages are coming. But, hey, I’m willing to be pleasantly surprised. As I sit here, far removed from the hustle and bustle of the cities, gazing up at a redwood whose tip is lost in swirling mist, the illusion of my own exemption from the onrushing disaster persists. Perhaps its just a defense mechanism imposed by the structure of the human mind, the same safety valve that blocks out the certainty of death and the ultimate tragedy of human existence. In any case, whatever it is, it feels right–and that’s all I can ask for the moment. So, in spite of my rather grim prognosis of the future we face, I can say, with equanimity–Happy New Year, fellow Taki-maggers. May the gods protect you from the coming dark age, as they have so far–thank Fortuna!—spared me.
Plunder and Parasites
It seems Prof. DiLorenzo is not pleased that I made fun of his post stating that anyone who buys a new American car “is a chump, a sucker, a fool, a loser, and a fascist,” and advising anyone who “value[s] living in a free society at all” to “[g]ive the middle finger to anyone you see driving a new ‘American’ car.” This was a “tongue-in-cheek” comment, according to DiLorenzo, the jollity of which I did not appreciate because I am a “Humorless Paleocon Plunder Supporter.”
I can understand DiLorenzo’s irritation with me. If I wrote the type of nonsense he did, I certainly wouldn’t want anyone else drawing attention to it. But his second post displays the same vitriol as the first, claiming that I think “it is a good idea to tax the shirts off the backs of working class Americans outside of Detroit and give the money to automobile industry plutocrats, union bosses, and their terminally inefficient, inept, lazy, and uncompetitive [sic], unionized work force.” “Plutocrats,” “plunder,” and “selfish parasites,” in the words of DiLorenzo’s ideological ally Kevn Gutzman. Why do libertarian ideologues insist on using the same clunky language their Marxist opponents do? Even though Marxists and libertarians disagree on who is the “worker” and who the “parasite,” do adherents of economic determinism naturally use the type of language brilliantly mocked by the Simpsons, back when that show was still funny?
But humorless supporter of plunder that I am, I must respond to some of DiLorenzo’s misconceptions, tongue in cheek or not. First, I do not speak for Takimag. In fact, my position on federal loans to the American auto industry was sharply criticized by managing editor Richard Spencer and contributing editor Paul Gottfried. It’s true that Richard encouraged me to make my arguments, but a libertarian like DiLorenzo should approve of that.
Second, as I pointed out in my intitial post, it’s not clear why DiLorenzo is so angry at Ford, which hasn’t received any federal loans at all. And I don’t think that a $17 billion loan to GM and Chrysler constitutes “tax[ing] the shirts off the backs of working class Americans outside of Detroit,” especially when the last such loan given by the federal government to an American auto company was paid off early, with interest, and the costs to the taxpayer from the collapse of the American auto industry would likely vastly exceed the amount of the loans given to GM and Chrysler. (Of course, Americans in Michigan will be taxed just as much as Americans outside Michigan to fund these loans, non-working class Americans will be taxed alongside their working class counterparts, and the American auto industry is hardly confined to Michigan). Actually, I was quite pleased with the column DiLorenzo dislikes, which was cited by both Pat Buchanan and John Derbyshire. I was on the cutting edge of plunder supporters, you might say.
The CEOs of GM and Chrysler have agreed to work for a dollar a year under the terms of the federal loans their companies received, which might take them out of the “plutocrat” category for the time being, and DiLorenzo is simply wrong about the “terminally inefficient, inept, lazy, and uncompetitive, unionized work force” the American automakers use to make their cars. Third parties who measure the productivity of North American auto plants find those plants at least as efficient as their foreign competitors. And by the end of the current UAW contract, the average wage for an autoworker employed in an American plant will be lower than the average wage in the foreign plants operating in America.
But why would facts matter to DiLorenzo? Like any good ideologue, he knows what makes the world work, and all he needs to comment on any current situtation is to put that situation into its proper ideological box. Thus, he is perfectly comfortable opining about an industry of which he knows nothing, inadvertently exposing his ignorance to anyone who doesn’t subscribe to his particular ideology. If failing to go along with DiLorenzo as he heaps scorn on the Americans who make and drive American cars makes me a “humorless paleocon plunder supporter,” so be it.
Do As I Say…
On the eve of the New Year, Gov. Rod Blagojevich, charged with conspiring to sell the Senate seat of Barack Obama, put the ball back squarely in the court of a Democratic Party that had disowned him.
Blago named Roland Burris, former attorney general of Illinois and first African-American ever to win statewide office, to fill the vacated seat. National Democrats and their media auxiliaries went berserk.
This governor, thundered the New York Times, “has taken his hubris to new heights and the misery of Illinois citizens to new lows.”
This appointment “will not stand,” raged Majority Leader Harry Reid.
If the distinguished 71-year-old lawyer arrives to take his seat, Reid threatened, the Senate will slam the door in his face.
But who is truly showing hubris here? And under what authority and with what justification would Reid deny Burris his seat?
There is not the slightest hint Burris did anything unethical or illegal to win this appointment. Nor is there any doubt as to Gov. Blagojevich’s right to make the appointment. He is still governor of Illinois. He has not been convicted of anything. And he not only has the right but an obligation to carry out his duties, one of which is to appoint candidates to fill empty seats in the U.S. Senate.
As for Burris, his qualifications are surely superior to those of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, whom Democrats have been pounding New York Gov. David Paterson to appoint to Hillary Clinton’s seat.
Before now, Kennedy has shown zero interest in public office or a public life. She has been lax in voting and shown nothing in the way of political substance since being hailed as the next senator.
Who is to say Paterson’s motives in considering Kennedy are superior to Blagojevich’s motives in naming Burris?
Blagojevich must not appoint anyone, we are told, because he is charged with conspiring to sell Barack’s seat, and the evidence is on the wiretap tapes cited by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.
But here in America, even a governor is innocent until proven guilty. And what exactly do those tapes show, other than that Blago and his chief of staff engaged in crude and corrupt talk about getting rewarded with campaign contributions or high office for Blago in return for giving someone the Senate appointment?
Using vile language and ruminating on selling a Senate seat may be sins, but they are not necessarily crimes. Moreover, there is evidence Blago may have been engaged in boastful beer talk and little more.
Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. says he talked to the governor for 90 minutes about the Senate seat but was never solicited. Nor did he offer anything. Obama aides Rahm Emanuel and Valerie Jarrett both talked to Blagojevich about the seat, and Rahm talked to his chief of staff.
Neither claims to have been solicited for any kind of bribe.
Yet, if Blago were going to sell the seat, the obvious party to sell it to is the man with the power to appoint ambassadors and Cabinet officers, or to convince others to hire Blago: President-elect Obama.
Yet, from all we know, nether Barack nor anyone on his staff ever offered anything illicit to the governor, nor were they asked for anything. Where is the body of the crime?
If Blago and Burris hold firm, this is going to get interesting.
Here we have an African-American elder statesman of the Democratic Party, an honorable and distinguished man, appointed by the governor according to law and the Constitution, to fill a Senate seat. There has been no hint of illegal consideration asked or given by either the governor or Burris.
Yet Harry Reid, who presides over a Democratic caucus of some 60 senators, with not a single black member, is going to refuse this black man a seat to which the law entitles him?
One hopes Burris will stay firm and march up to that Senate, and, if nothing else, expose the hypocrisy.
Our president-elect is from a party that champions busing to integrate public schools but bypasses D.C. public schools to send his girls to exclusive private schools in far northwest Washington.
We have a Democratic Senate that champions affirmative action. Yet not one white male Democratic senator, in a caucus that has not a single black member, has ever volunteered to step down and let the governor of their state replace him or her with an African-American.
Not one. That would be liberals leading by example, not exhortation.
If Democrats believe our institutions of power should look like America, why don’t they make their Senate caucus look like America? Why do not a dozen Democrat senators resign, to be replaced by 12 appointed black Democrats, giving one-fifth of all Democratic Senate seats to a minority that gave Barack 97 percent of its vote and Barack and Joe Biden one-fourth of all the votes they received?
Why does not Gov. Paterson follow Gov. Blagojevich’s lead and name an African-American of Burris’ stature to the U.S. Senate?
Fellas, let’s start practicing what we preach here.
A Few predictions
An enterprising member of our literary- academic establishment will soon be writing a book about how Lincoln invaded the South in a desperate attempt to prevent Hitler’s accession to power. Apparently the CSA was teeming with Nazi precursors, as Arthur Schlesinger once observed in The Vital Center, and now a book that will be highly praised in the national press will make the same point through several hundred pages. There may also be a bestseller this year (if one does not already exist) showing how Bach’s Magnificat encapsulated the plan for Hitler’s Final Solution, which was also cleverly hidden in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and, most egregiously, in Frau von Bismarck’s night pot.
Sarah Palin’s popularity among Republicans will continue to soar, and especially after she insists on firebombing Teheran in punishment for Iran’s failure to enact anti-discrimination laws for women. Sarah will also give a speech, calling for a League of Democracies that would embrace the entire solar system, and which would go beyond the now outmoded notion of “global democracy.” Her son-in-law’s mother will be caught in flagrante delicto, distributing drugs to the governor’s family (I suspect that’s already happened). The drug-imbibing first lady-in-law of Alaska will then be given a suspended sentence on the condition that she enters a rehab center on the North Pole.
The media will continue to slime Bush with the hope of diverting attention from the ineptitude of his successor in getting the economy back on track. But GOP loyalists have no need to worry! Ob will continue to be pounded (as he was earlier this week in the New York Post) for being reluctant to go to war with Islamo-fascist Iran. Perhaps by the end of this year, however, the new president will start acting like a Republican.
The only permissible political positions will continue to be leftist ones, namely the opinions of left-liberals and neocons. The usual types will continue to pollute our civic discourse, unless something truly apocalyptic occurs. I can’t imagine what that would be, but if Rupert Murdoch goes bankrupt, American political thinking might become more hygienic. And oh yes, Muslim Fundamentalists will continue to pour into European cities, while European governments continue to yammer about racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia. The response of our “conservative” media will likely continue to be “Let them all in but please teach them about human rights and the Holocaust!” What did the ancients say about quis vult perdere, prius dementat?
This website will continue to be a voice crying out in a leftist wilderness. But we may soon be able to trade in our slingshots for medium-range missiles. Hope springs eternal even for grizzled paleo warriors.
I would offer further predictions if I could think of any more, but at my age the past look a lot more eventful than the future.
2009 Predictions
I have little to add to the intelligent predicitons offered by Richard Spencer, John Zmirak, and Jack Hunter. Those who are right about America’s condition will continue to be ignored and marginalized, and those who are wrong will continue to dominate our national discourse. Obama will continue George Bush’s free spending ways, and then some, but the the American people will blame Bush for our economic woes, partly because the media will continue to serve as Obama’s cheerleader. The left will continue to make progress in remaking America in its image, while the “mainstream conservative” opposition continues to ignore, belittle, or mishandle important cultural and social issues. The United States will continue spending money we don’t have to inject ourselves in conflicts that are none of our concern, despite the preference of most Americans for a foreign policy more in line with George Washington’s than George Bush’s. I also suspect that John Paul Stevens will finally resign from the Supreme Court, giving Obama a chance to place another leftist on the Supreme Court, and that most Senate Republicans will roll over and play dead, as they did for Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Since all of this is rather gloomy, I will go out on a limb and make an optimistic prediction. Being a lifelong Cleveland sports fan gives me little reason for optimism. I was ten months old the last time a Cleveland team won a championship, when the Browns beat the Colts to win the NFL championship in 1964. Since that time, Cleveland teams have either been awful--as the Indians were throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s and the Browns have been since the franchise returned in 1999--or prone to losing in spectacular, heartbreaking fashion. But this year I predict that LeBron James will lead the Cavaliers to win the NBA Championship (and win the NBA MVP honors he should have won last year). James is the most dominating Cleveland athlete of my lifetime--I am too young to remember Jim Brown--and he knows that great athletes lead their teams to championship victories. This will be the first year LeBron does that.
The Year of the Pinata
After a year as bad as 2008, trying to imagine what God’s permissive will—or incipient wrath—has in store for us this year seems almost churlish, or masochistic. Should I lay out a series of catastrophic events in our nation’s politics, economy and culture, I might seem like I’m challenging God: “I bet You can’t top this. Go ahead, make my day.”
In a country where William “Wrong About Everything” Kristol is still a pundit, where school systems still focus on “teaching self-esteem,” and Keanu Reeves is still permitted to make movies, I’d rather not tease the Lord. What we do to ourselves is bad enough. Why provoke the omnipotent entity Who invented tapeworms, piranhas, and menopause?
So I’ll lay out my predictions for 2009 with humility and in the spirit of repentance, focusing on the evils that are of our own making, which God will simply permit—leaving aside those which He will visit upon us through the means of avenging angels. M’kay?
Self-Inflicted Evils Occurring by Divine Permission:
Spending. The U.S. government will continue to try to electrify our dead-frog economy by spending money it doesn’t have, doubling down like the gambler on the Baton Rouge riverboat who uses the handy ATM machine on the boat to mortgage his house. (I’ve seen such machines myself—but happily had no assets I could squander.) Unwilling to let people lose jobs that are unproductive or outright destructive— like trading derivatives in the finance industry—the DLC-types who are running things will continue down much the same path as the Enron/Worldcom Republican hucksters they’re replacing. (Personally, I’m for sending troops down to Wall Street and marching all those “suits” out into the rice paddies.) Afraid of seeming “soft,” Obamodites won’t even make the most obvious, rational cuts—namely in our bloated and useless Defense budget. As Republican hacks still reminisce about Reagan’s popularity (not his policies), the Democrats will keep on dreaming that they can repeat the “successes” of FDR. They don’t even realize, much less admit, that Roosevelt prolonged the Depression by imposing Mussolini-esque controls on the economy. As real economists know, what pulled us out of the Depression was World War Two. It’s not that socializing a quarter of our economy for the duration was a rational means of restoring prosperity. But when you win a war that destroys the economic base of most of the other advanced countries on earth, so your industries have no competitors, your people will prosper for a while. (We might consider trying this again, of course….) The Democrats will pursue the logical implications of consumption sector Keynsianism, pushing America ever-closer to the point of ungovernability. Barring a miracle that wakes up some members of the once-responsible sectors of society, we’re headed toward the fate of Argentina in the 1990s—but an Argentina with nukes, which is “too big to fail.” You know, just like the USSR….
Trade. Attempts at neo-protectionism will founder on naked fear: We cannot provoke the Emperor. In fact, we can’t even ask the Chinese nicely to change the policies that have helped eviscerate our manufacturing sector. Itself afraid of political turmoil, the Chinese government will keep its currency devalued, taking advantage of that culture’s longer time-preference—its willingness to delay gratification. So the Chi-Coms will continue to keep their people working very hard, stashing away wealth (instead of consuming it) to buy up American debt—making the bet that we’ll never default. (The Chinese have that one weakness: they do love to gamble.) Even as China’s purse-strings reach ever further into our economy and entangle us in each other’s affairs, count on neoconservative ideologues to push for the U.S. to offer unconditional backing to the most hawkish, suicidal elements in Taiwan seeking independence. This is roughly as prudent as Winston Churchill’s brief, bright idea in 1940 of declaring war on the Soviet Union, and allying Britain with Finland.
Foreign Policy. Expect more feel-good, low-cost interventions along the lines of our attack on Yugoslavia. Instead of “boots on the ground,” we’ll pursue the “Death Star” strategy where we promote peace, equality, and the universal Hegelian triumph of Western liberty by nuking foreigners from orbit. In Iraq, we will continue to draw down forces, sending them to an even more futile mission in Afghanistan. The whole point of Afghanistan, as our rulers don’t seem to realize, is that it’s a country you want your enemies to control—so they can waste their substance trying to herd all those army ants, while you destabilize the place through selective sabotage. Or better still, ignore it.
Immigration. Already declining because nobody’s building houses, and out-of-work accountants are mowing their own dang lawns, this issue will drop off the political radar for a while. If the numbers of illegals decline, it might perversely become much easier to offer an amnesty to the smaller numbers still in the country, as a “humane” solution that “saves money” we’d otherwise have to spend deporting them. Once naturalized, these people will all invite in their brothers and elderly parents to use our hospitals and collect the last few pesos left in the Social Security system. The pace of multiculturalist activity will increase, as the “need” of immigrants for Hmong-speaking gym teachers and nurses fluent in Yucatec makes national suicide our ultimate growth industry. (See Evelyn Waugh’s novella Love Among the Ruins, where the only popular and efficient State agency is the Ministry of Euthanasia.)
I reckon that’s enough for now. With policies like this, we citizens of Sodom don’t really need to await the fire and brimstone. We will perish through hype and flimflam.
A happy Feast of the Circumcision to one and all.
2009: The more things “change”…
Some predictions:
1) After writing multiple columns that convince the Obama administration the U.S. must invade Iran to rid them of any nuclear capabilities, we will not only find no nukes--but New York Times‘s Bill Kristol will receive yet another promotion.
2) After writing the The Connection 2: My Bad, It Was Actually Iran That Orchestrated 9/11, The Weekly Standard‘s Stephen Hayes will be given his own show on FOX News.
3) Sen. Joe Lieberman will introduce legislation officially declaring Iranian President Moammar Ahmadinejad as the “next Hitler.”
4) Talk show host Sean Hannity will discover that Obama’s mailman in Chicago was guilty of marital indiscretions, and will harp on the president’s questionable character for harboring such associates every day for a solid four months.
5) Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney will start laying the groundwork to campaign for Ted Kennedy’s former Senate seat by declaring his support for gun control, abortion rights, and amnesty.
6) Affirmative action GOP rising star, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal will become most popular amongst Republicans who once thought it silly anyone might vote for Obama because he was black.
7) Pat Buchanan will continue to be right about almost everything.
8) Ron Paul will continue to be right about almost everything.
9) After supporting both the unpopular invasions of Iraq and Iran, speechwriter David Frum will continue to warn that the greatest danger for the Republican Party would be to embrace the “isolationism” of Buchanan or Paul.
10) The New York Times‘s David Brooks will warn that South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s dangerous rhetoric about “economic conservatism” and “fiscal responsibility” should have no place in the modern GOP.
11) South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham will serve as the favorite middle man between the neoconservatives and the Obama administration, earning him the nickname “neo-concierge.”
12) There will be no “change.”
2009 is gonna be a humdinger
I’ll begin with what’s on everybody’s mind—money. Alas, I share none of the optimism of my colleague Tim Worstall, who’s predicted a swift U.S. recovery. The country Tim describes—a land blessed with a free economy, mountains of capital and saving, and a government that leaves well enough alone—sounds like a wonderful place to live in. Unfortunately, the Land of the Free is ruled by a president who, while guarding us against the dangers of “socialized medicine,” has recently nationalized large portions of the banking, housing, insurance, and auto sectors. The government is working very hard to prevent exactly the kind of economic cleansing we need. What also leads me to believe that a recovery is a long way off is that America is a capitalist power without much, well, capital. Since Americans save next to nothing, consumption and investment have been financed by borrowing, mostly from the Chinese and oil-rich Arabs. And it strikes me as highly unlikely that, much as Baron Münchausen pulled himself out of the swamp by his own shirt collar, we’ll be able work our way out of debt by taking on more debt.
Speaking of China, it is the Communist power that clearly has the freer economy, and which, I predict, will pull out of the global downturn fastest—and will soon end its dependence on Uncle Sam. 2009 will be the year Beijing de-pegs the RNB from the greenback, allowing it to fly high, and begins to find plenty of new consumers for its country’s products outside the U.S.A. We’ll also soon hear murmurings among national leaders and central bankers, faint at first, then much louder, about dropping the dollar as a reserve currency.
As for America, I suggest you activate your anti-gloom resistance shields if you have them. Sure, the Dow might pop up 20-25% percent, and perennial bulls will talk up the “recovery”—but who cares when gold is trading at $2000 an ounce and the dollar has fallen through the floor.
I think we’ve already heard the death knells of the bull market in stocks (lasting for the lamentable tenure of Allan Greenspan) as well as the bugle calls of a new, even more profitable bull market in commodities, particularly those that can be exported. Following Jim Rogers, I predict we’ll start to see some interesting media stories about industrial farmers buying Masaradis, while former hedge managers are paging through dog-eared copies of Das Kapital at their local hipster coffee shops.
As for politics, Barack Obama still remains a mystery. Steve Sailer concludes his magnificent biography of the man, America’s Half-blood Prince, observing,
[T]he American establishment has been so intellectually enfeebled by political correctness that for two years we’ve all been fed a steady diet of David Axelrod’s implausible campaign concoction starring the author of Dreams from My Father as the Great Race Transcender. All these months, our elites barely mentioned (or even noticed) the subtitle of the “postracial” candidate’s autobiography: A Story of Race and Inheritance.
And in their obsession with Obama’s post-racial diversity-ness, the media also neglected to take seriously the kind of pomo Marxism Obama clearly has as his intellectual starting point. When tape surfaced of Obama speaking only eight years ago about the Supreme Court’s inability to “break free from the essential constraints… [of the] Constitution” in order to better “redistribute” wealth” to “dispossessed peoples”—pretty standard Fanon-esque racialized Marxism—the media assured everyone that he didn’t really mean it. Well…
None of this is to say that Obama doesn’t have it in him to be the kind of non-divisive, non-partisan, anti-Sharpton president of his white supporters’ hopes and dreams. For one thing, as Steve points out many times his book, Obama’s likes to imagine that whenever he gets personally promoted, the world has achieved great racial progress. Thus upon being elected, and before having actually done anything, Obama announced, “Change has come to America!” And Obama was able get on with the work of securing his position with the Powers That Be in Washington, making nice with the Clintonites and even a Clinton. One could hope that throughout the next eight years, Obama could spend countless hours reminding us of the inherent greatness of a country in which a Kenyan goatherd could go to Harvard, have an “unlikely Romance” with a Kansan anthropologist, and sire the country’s “first black president” etc. etc.—and then policy-wise, not do much of anything. Sounds good to me!
And perhaps if Obama had been elected, as was Bill Clinton, during one of Greenspan’s asset bubbles—with wealth and contentment flying high—we could have been blessed with a do-nothing, talk-a-lot president. But Obama got elected after all the bubbles have popped, and I thus think he’s gonna be radical, really radical. (And in many ways, it’d be hard for him not to go crazy after Bush and Paulson’s massive interventions in the fall.)
It’s already been made clear that Obama will indulge in some New Deal nostalgia with his big infrastructure development plan—having this dispossessed people dig ditches, that disposed people fill them up again—but I also expect some “21st century” socialism as well. Look for the collapsed and renationalized Fannie and Freddie to return with a vengeance, with new lending standards that will make the old ones seem draconian. Efforts will be made to “guarantee” 401Ks (that is, the government will offer the public the privilege of having their investments confiscated) and Obama will transform them into a Ponzi scheme much like social security—with retirees get funded by current workers. And then there’ll be the bailouts. The New York Times will come to Washington, and perhaps some other “conservative” papers, like the New York Post, will tag along to make the groveling fair and balanced. But all of this will pale besides the spectacle of the Las Vegas hotel owners entering Congress pleading for cash to save this great American industry. 2009 will be the year we deserve—that is, it’ll be a total circus.
The Voice of Reason
Over at the LRC blog, Thomas DiLorenzo has written a post exemplifying calm reason and cool logic. Says professor DiLorenzo: “Anyone who buys a car from Ford, GM or Chrysler from now on is a chump, a sucker, and idiot, a loser, and a fascist. . . .Give the middle finger to anyone you see driving a new ‘American’ car if you value living in a free society at all.” Leaving aside the fact that Ford has not actually received any federal loans, DiLorenzo surely has a point. After all, what possible reasons could there be for buying an American car other than stupidity or latent fascism? And what other reasonable response is there to seeing someone driving an American car, other than extending your middle finger toward the driver?
A Prediction for 2009
Or, if things turn really nasty, for 2010, maybe 2011. The US will be the first of the major economies to emerge from recession*.
No, this isn’t just because the US was the first of the major economies to enter it either. There’s a lot of talk currently (and a lot of misdirected action alas and alack) about fiscal boosts, extra spending and the like. And everyone is sure that their plan will put the people back to work. But it’s one of the insights of the Austrian School of economics that there’s actually a mechanism by which new jobs are created: entrepreneurs. People setting up new businesses to try out new products, new ways of doing things.
We’ve currently a lot of people in finance, in construction, possibly also in auto making, who aren’t going to be needed or desired in those sectors for years to come, if ever. The way they’re going to get back to work (and one way we could say that a recession is over is that there’s no longer any notable unemployment) is when people figure out how to use that labor and all the other resources being freed up by not being used in finance, construction and so on. The people who will figure that out will be those entrepreneurs.
America I think has more would be entrepreneurs than any other country I’ve ever lived in. It most certainly has the finest financing mechanism for new companies, all those Angel Networks and Venture Capitalists. It also throws the fewest roadblocks in front of someone wanting to start something new and has the best system to clean up the failures (as, inevitably, most new ventures do not succeed). It’s partly social, partly legal, partly financial and partly economic, but the US is the best place in the world for nurturing the ambitions of entrepreneurs. And since it’s going to be entrepreneurs that dig us out of this mess it’s going to be America that comes out of this mess first.
* This does depend on one proviso, that the current batch of politicians don’t repeat the darn fool sillinesses that the ones back in the 30s tried nor come up with some new lunacies all of their own.
The Gaza Massacre
While Gaza is being bombarded by American-made F-16’s, here’s some food for thought: During the German occupation of Greece, the occupiers posted the following rules: If any German soldier was found murdered, 10 Greeks would immediately be rounded up at random and executed; if there was a repetition, the number would go up to 100. This draconian measure was not put into effect until the very end of the occupation in 1944, well after the Italian collapse of 1943. Communist agitators would go into what they thought were conservative neighborhoods—in other words, well-off precincts—spot a drunken German soldier, kill him, and then beat a hasty retreat. The next day innocent people would pay the piper. At times, the German high command rescinded the order, as it became obvious what was going on.
Switch to Gaza 64 years later. Since 2005 Israel, which is still punishing the original inhabitants of the lands it rules or occupies, has killed 150 Palestinians for each Israeli killed these last eight years. Just think of it. Seventeen Israeli lives have been expunged by the murder of 2550 Palestinian ones. That’s doing much better than the Nazis. And Elliot Abrams, son-in-law of neocon propaganda minister Norman Podhoretz, who’s ensconced in an office deep in the bowels of the White House, calls Hamas “terrorists” and urges even more severe punishments. In 2006, Israeli artillery fired a dawn barrage of shells, supposedly against militants in the Gazan village of Beit Hanoun. The guns missed. Seventeen members of a Palestinian family, the Athamnehs, died in their pajamas, cut to pieces by fragmenting 6-inch howitzer shells. The Israelis did not even issue an apology.
So where is Obama on this one? I’ll tell you where—trying to stay out of the way of AIPAC and the Israel lobby that dictates American foreign policy in the Middle East.
I’ve never been a friend of Islam; however, it’s always been perfectly clear to me that the Israelis are the ones sowing terror and the Palestinians are the ones besieged. The American people have been so brainwashed, they have it the other way round.
George McGovern Conservatives
In the The American Conservative, Dan McCarthy presents as a hero of the antiwar Right former South Dakota senator and onetime Democratic candidate for the presidency, George McGovern (1922- ). From Dan’s account, it seems that McGovern is a “temperamental conservative, an antimilitarist, and a committed decentralist,” and the GOP, by demonizing his person, has rendered itself “repellant” to “most Americans, including many conservatives.” Moreover, the decision made by the neoconservatives to bolt the Democratic Party, over McGovern’s candidacy, in 1972, brought an unnecessary can of worms into the Republican camp. While driving the party they entered on domestic issues toward the left, the anti-McGovern neoconservatives talked the GOP into embracing a recklessly interventionist foreign policy. GOP operators were also not incidentally able to reconstruct the image of McGovern, from a critic of the Vietnam War into a pacifist-appeaser—and a perpetual punching bag for the likes of Sean Hannity and the Kagan boys. The neocon war against McGovern, which the GOP took over, with a neocon brain-trust, has dominated Republican national elections. Last month, these campaigning tactics (alas) came a cropper, when the “McGovern coalition” trounced an archaic reproduction of the Cold War liberalism of the 1970s.
Dan’s argument is not entirely original, and another antiwar critic of the neocons and the party they captured, Bill Kaufmann, has been making it for decades. Part of this critique is undoubtedly true. Those neoconservatives who entered the GOP and soon became its puppet-masters were, indeed, fixated on the McGovern candidacy and what it portended for American politics. They were also far from silent about what they expected from the party and movement they would soon be guiding: a decidedly pro-Zionist foreign policy, and a Scoop Jackson approach to dealing with the Soviets, one that stressed human rights and helping Soviet Jews leave Russia. It is also the case, as Dan points out, that NRO and other movement conservative organs treat GOP presidential opponents as caricatures of George McGovern. This mythmaking has served the same function for the GOP as the war on the ghost of Herbert Hoover did for the Democrats after the Great Depression.
But there are two points on which Dan’s argument breaks down. One, not all neoconservatives entered the GOP, at the time that Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz did in 1972. Many of them, such as Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer, stayed in the Democratic Party in order to maintain their group’s leverage there. A insightful essay by Jacob Heilbrunn, also in TAC, shows how this system of cooptation works. In the most recent electoral contest, the neocons divided their forces among three candidates, once the campaign of their preferred candidate, Rudolph Giuliani, had floundered.
Although Hillary and McCain thereafter became the neocon favs (and the neocons even created fresh support for Hillary among easily manipulated GOP voters in order to stop Obama), the neocons had loads of resources on the winning side. They had prominent allies in the Obama camp, who would push their party-line after Election Day. Without always arranging for a division of forces, the neocons have prospered by working both parties at the same time.
Two, McGovern was at least as bad as some of the neocons claimed he was. Domestically, he was never a “decentralist” but on the Democratic Party’s left. Already in 1969 he used his clout in the party to introduce quotas for women and blacks at Democratic presidential conventions. He also actively worked to impose racial and gender quotas on all enterprises receiving government funds, and he enthusiastically backed and even hoped to expand Johnson’s Great Society programs. Although while in business years later, McGovern offered some strictures about economic regulations, such complaints were not characteristic of his behavior as a senator. McGovern was also an early backer of the Equal Rights Amendment and an enthusiast for one of Sarah Palin’s favorite forms of government control, Title Nine, which forbids “gender discrimination.” Lest anyone think that McGovern has recently changed his spots, it might be helpful to look at his book that came out this month, Abraham Lincoln. This part of a left-liberal series on American presidents, edited by Sean Wilentz, is a two-hundred page celebration of Lincoln for his governmental reconstruction successes, destroying the “Republic,” which was a white, male monopoly, and launching our “strong centralized government.”
In his attitude toward the rest of the world, McGovern was no latter-day Robert Lafollette; nor does he bear any resemblance to those well-meaning patriots who formed the America First Committee. He was a Communist sympathizer, who is proud of having fought fascism in World War Two, on the side of our supposed Soviet friends. During this edifying adventure, McGovern flew thirty-five bombing missions over enemy territory. The effect of his bellicose activity was incinerating unprotected civilians, particularly after the German and Austrian civil defenses had failed during the last year of the War. Unfortunately, Stalin became our enemy once this good war had ended, and so Bill Kaufmann’s small-town Methodist, who sang in church choirs, advocated peaceful coexistence with Stalin’s slave empire.
In 1948, McGovern joined American Communists in founding the Progressive Party, which drafted as its presidential candidate someone who was known to be quite soft on the Soviet government, former Vice President Henry Wallace. It is telling that the socialist Norman Thomas pointedly refused to back Wallace, for having refused to distance himself from his heavily Communist constituency. Not surprisingly, McGovern, when he ran for president, called for massive cuts in the defense budget and for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam. He took this position less because he hated war than because he disliked opposing the Communists. He might well have been the least anti-Communist U.S. Senator in American history.
Equally important, McGovern helped seal the marriage between two Lefts, one consisting of Communists and Communist fellow-travelers and the other the party of cultural radicalism. The charge against him made by the usually unobtrusive, liberal Republican senator Hugh Scott (who pace Dan was from the Philadelphia Mainline and not from Tennessee), that McGovern stood for “appeasement, acid, and abortion,” was entirely on target. McGovern was as far to the left on social issues as he was in his economic views and in his pro-Communist foreign policy. Under him the Democrats moved decisively leftward, and one can not understand the path subsequently taken by that party without looking back to 1972, any more than one can understand where the GOP and conservative movement have drifted without considering their fateful occupation by the anti-McGovern neocons.
Although there are many things that reasonable Americans are justified in holding against the neocons, to the extent that some of them looked askance at McGovern, it is impossible for me to criticize them. McGovern was a thoroughly reprehensible comsymp, as opposed to a thoughtful critic of military overexpansion. His partisans whom I encountered every day for years on American campuses were drawn from two equally repulsive groups, fanatical anti-anti-Communists and lifestyle radicals. I never met a libertarian or consistent opponent of war in all of my encounters with these groups, and so when I find the admirers of Albert J. Nock and Murray Rothbard saluting McGovern and his friends as likeminded libertarians, I can only attribute this to insufficient historical information. With due respect to Bill, who is a truly gifted stylist, I must respectfully dissent from one overly generous judgment that he offers in