If Obama wins re-election -- and I think the chances of that improve daily without a quick winnowing of the Republican field, followed by a refocusing of Republican fire on the real target, rather than eachother -- this overly-drawn-out and acrimonious primary will be to blame.
The media and the Democrats (but I repeat myself) are loving it, but it is bleeding the right of resources and energy and it's "diminishing the brand," as Krauthammer points out. Paul and Gingrich have had as much impact as they are going to have. If they stay longer, it's just a selfish ego trip that assists Obama. Santorum has peaked; his "conservative" credentials are even more iffy than Romney's; he drags the party into a social issues quagmire that will kill it (which is where the media and the liberals want the battle fought); and he just doesn't have the horsepower to win.
Romney isn't ideal but he has been winning, with respectable levels of support from Tea Party people and true conservatives. Doubts about his conservative bona fides and "electability" are being exaggerated and amplified by the horserace-loving media. If the Right tries to make perfect an enemy of the good, it will lose and we'll have four more years of Obama.
Any questions? Send them to Krauthammer.
Showing posts with label Tea Party. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tea Party. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Dead Sea Scrolls
"Archaeologists excavating the west side of the U.S. Capitol grounds reportedly have stumbled upon a frayed, faded, soiled old parchment, dating to the nation’s earliest days, which they say could have explosive implications for what goes on in the chambers above. Scholars hope the document, which they call “The Constitution,” may hold long-forgotten clues about what motivated the colonists to free themselves from British rule. It may, they say, even be the original blueprint, according to which the former republic was supposed to be organized. The political implications could be explosive, according to those who’ve read it, since it reportedly sets explicit limits on the size and scope of the central government and grants states and individuals a level of autonomy – a level of “freedom” – that is unthinkable today. In a related development, some members of Congress are threatening to open the next session by actually reading this so-called Constitution into the public record, which critics call a subversive, politically-motivated stunt designed to dredge-up old longings for liberty and sow doubts about the now-widely-accepted federalization of everything. It’s an interesting old relic, say most capital city insiders, but irrelevant to how things work in the modern era."
This parody of a (not-so-farfetched?) future news story is prompted by reports that subversives in the U.S. House of Representatives plan to open the 112th Congress by reading the U.S. Constitution, out loud and right in front a everybody, and have instituted new rules requiring that any new bill introduced cite some constitutional authority before the clerk will file it.
The moves, meant to show Tea Partiers that Republicans have gotten their pro-Constitution message, naturally evoke skepticism in certain quarters:
"I think it's entirely cosmetic," said Kevin Gutzman, a history professor at Western Connecticut State University who said he is a conservative libertarian and sympathizes with the tea party. "This is the way the establishment handles grass-roots movements," he added. "They humor people who are not expert or not fully cognizant. And then once they've humored them and those people go away, it's right back to business as usual. It looks like this will be business as usual - except for the half-hour or however long it takes to read the Constitution out loud."
But also enthusiasm:
""It's a big deal," said Brendan Steinhauser, director of federal and state campaigns at FreedomWorks. "That's a very basic starting point for all legislation - not only should we do it, can we afford to pay for it, but can we do it?"
Most, like me, probably will adopt a wait-and-see attitude about this renewed reverence for The Constitution. "You can do the talk, but you have to do the walk," one Connecticut Tea Party leader told the Post. "It may be an olive branch," said another. "People are excited to see that our leaders know there's a relevance to the Constitution in the process. But I don't think it will make people any less vigilant in looking at the laws that are being introduced."
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Election Day Reflections
Republicans today seem poised to benefit, at least temporarily, from the anti-Obama-Pelosi-Reid backlash. I'm one of those who is looking forward to the return of divided government in Washington. But I'm feeling more relieved than triumphant, more cautious than elated, given the speed with which the pendulum could swing back in Obama's favor if Republicans don't make the most of this shot at redemption.
Part of what killed Democrats was their hubris -- that and their fatal misreading of the "mandate" they thought they were handed two years ago. Republicans should not make the same mistake.
These could very well be short-term gains, given the unprecedented volatility of today's political climate, unless the GOP rediscovers its Reaganesque roots and begins building a coherent and compelling alternative to the super-statism of the other party. The Tea Party testifies to a growing public distrust, and disgust, with both political parties, but Republicans will suffer most if they don't heed the message this movement is sending. Being the anti-Obama and anti-Pelosi will be good enough for now, perhaps, given the mess they made of things. But it wasn't that long ago that Republicans were making a mess of things. And this will be a very short, unhappy honeymoon if they misread the message and return to old form.
Is two years of wandering in the political wilderness long enough for Republicans to have truly seen the light? I have my doubts. But unless they soon do, they'll be wandering in the wilderness again -- next time, maybe for good.
Part of what killed Democrats was their hubris -- that and their fatal misreading of the "mandate" they thought they were handed two years ago. Republicans should not make the same mistake.
These could very well be short-term gains, given the unprecedented volatility of today's political climate, unless the GOP rediscovers its Reaganesque roots and begins building a coherent and compelling alternative to the super-statism of the other party. The Tea Party testifies to a growing public distrust, and disgust, with both political parties, but Republicans will suffer most if they don't heed the message this movement is sending. Being the anti-Obama and anti-Pelosi will be good enough for now, perhaps, given the mess they made of things. But it wasn't that long ago that Republicans were making a mess of things. And this will be a very short, unhappy honeymoon if they misread the message and return to old form.
Is two years of wandering in the political wilderness long enough for Republicans to have truly seen the light? I have my doubts. But unless they soon do, they'll be wandering in the wilderness again -- next time, maybe for good.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Take Note, Reaganfeller Republicans
Does the Tea Party movement have political muscle?
The question's been asked many times by reporters and pundits, applying an unusual degree of skepticism, even for the media. Most were dismissive of the movement from the start, giving it snide or scant coverage. And when it refused to just fade away, as per their expectations and desires, they did their best to relegate it to the lunatic fringe by highlighting oddball participants or hinting at racist tendencies. But still the Tea Party rolls on, crushing media naysayers in its path, and demonstrating, without a doubt, that it's one of the most potent (and truly grassroots) political movements of recent times.
I hope the results of yesterday's election -- which had Tea Party picks Dan Maes and Ken Buck surging to wins over establishment Republicans -- will finally put to rest the question of whether the Tea Party has "pull." At least in Colorado, it's officially a force to be reckoned with, which should be as alarming for Reaganfeller Republicans -- those who talk like Ronald Reagan but think and act like Nelson Rockefeller -- as it is for liberal Democrats.
Whether the Party has enough horsepower to carry its candidates to wins in the general election remains to be seen. And it's true that Maes's razor thin win over Scott McInnis undoubtedly was helped by the latter's glaring ethics problems. But these caveats can't detract from this clear moment of promise for the Tea Party movement in Colorado. Reporters and columnists who continue to discount or dismiss it, do so at the peril of ending up with even more egg on their faces.
Party on, patriots.
The question's been asked many times by reporters and pundits, applying an unusual degree of skepticism, even for the media. Most were dismissive of the movement from the start, giving it snide or scant coverage. And when it refused to just fade away, as per their expectations and desires, they did their best to relegate it to the lunatic fringe by highlighting oddball participants or hinting at racist tendencies. But still the Tea Party rolls on, crushing media naysayers in its path, and demonstrating, without a doubt, that it's one of the most potent (and truly grassroots) political movements of recent times.
I hope the results of yesterday's election -- which had Tea Party picks Dan Maes and Ken Buck surging to wins over establishment Republicans -- will finally put to rest the question of whether the Tea Party has "pull." At least in Colorado, it's officially a force to be reckoned with, which should be as alarming for Reaganfeller Republicans -- those who talk like Ronald Reagan but think and act like Nelson Rockefeller -- as it is for liberal Democrats.
Whether the Party has enough horsepower to carry its candidates to wins in the general election remains to be seen. And it's true that Maes's razor thin win over Scott McInnis undoubtedly was helped by the latter's glaring ethics problems. But these caveats can't detract from this clear moment of promise for the Tea Party movement in Colorado. Reporters and columnists who continue to discount or dismiss it, do so at the peril of ending up with even more egg on their faces.
Party on, patriots.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Collateral Damage
Most media coverage of the public land wars follows a familiar but simplistic pattern. You have the malevolent force called "industry" on one side, poised to ruthlessly plunder the planet for private gain. Then you have the good guys, wearing green hats, who are just trying to "save" something "pristine" and "precious." Ignored in this sort of coverage are the Americans caught in the middle -- Westerners who appreciate (but don't necessarily worship) their natural surroundings, but would also like decent paying jobs, in something other than an ice cream scoop economy that caters to tourists.
I'm talking about unemployed timber workers in Oregon and Washington, living on welfare because America cares more about the Spotted owl than it cares about them. I'm talking about out-of-work commercial fishers in New England, California and Florida. I'm talking about ranchers and miners who've thrown in the towel, because government regulators are waging war on them. I'm talking about energy industry workers who aren't working, because anti-drilling zealots have derailed another domestic gas and oil project.
I'm talking about Jeremy and Amber Harrison of Vernal, Utah, who traveled all the way to Washington last week, for an appointment with an Interior Department official whose decisions can mean work or a welfare check for so many Westerners. They went carrying hand-written letters from folks back in Utah, who were left in the lurch when Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, immediately after confirmation, unilaterally canceled 77 drilling leases in the state, which he and a few green groups say pose a threat to national parks.
The Harrison's wanted to deliver a "human impact statement." But the official, Deputy Interior Secretary David Hayes, snubbed them at the last minute -- reinforcing the message that arrogant Washingtonians are indifferent to the collateral damage their decisions inflict out here in fly-over country. Here's the story, as told by the Deseret News.
Stood-up Vernal couple still seek to tell oil-lease story in D.C.
They were there to talk about oil leases, but official canceled
When told they could meet with the Interior Department's No. 2 official, Jeremy and Amber Harrison pulled money out of their tight savings and with friends' help traveled to Washington, D.C., from Vernal, hoping to tell how canceling federal oil leases is hurting Vernal.
But after they arrived, an aide to Deputy Interior Secretary David Hayes called and canceled the meeting that had been scheduled in the office of Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah. They were told no other time was available with Hayes, but an alternate official could maybe meet with them sometime.
"This is not the way people ought to be treated," said an upset Bishop. He said his office had verified the meeting last week, but it was canceled at the last minute. "It is unfortunate. I mean these guys came back on their own dime to try and meet with Hayes."
It comes as the House Natural Resources Committee is beginning two days of hearings Wednesday on how to meet America's energy needs while protecting the environment, as administration officials, environmental groups, sportsmen, landowners and others are scheduled to testify.
Amid that, the Harrisons had sought Bishop's help to meet with Hayes and bring 150 or so letters from Vernal residents about how the administration's cancellation of oil leases there is hurting them. "It's going to be like a human impact statement," Bishop said, noting he will enter all of those letters into the record at the hearing.
"We need Americans at work, not foreigners" selling foreign oil to America, Jeremy Harrison said. He and his wife want to tell how unemployment has gone from about 1 percent around Vernal to 8.5 percent, which they blame largely on administration actions making it harder to drill for oil.
Amber Harrison said she and her husband own a small business to truck crude oil. "Our income has gone down drastically. We were on the verge of losing a few items, but we were able to pull things out," she said.
"But a lot of people around us have lost entire homes and cars and are wondering if they can feed their families," she said. "Many people have had to move away because they cannot find a job." Amber Harrison said she and her husband attended a "tea party" protest in April, and began talking with others about the need for a group to counter what they feel are misleading claims by environmental groups.
She said they formed a citizens group called Grassroots Alliance for Public Lands. "It was our response to the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance," she said, and it started looking for ways to get out the story of the economic impacts of actions that make drilling harder.
When Hayes traveled to Vernal earlier this year for a hearing on canceled oil leases, the Harrisons and other members of their grass-roots alliance were there.
"I did get up and speak with David Hayes and I presented him with an 'I Love Drilling' T-shirt signed by people in Vernal. We were hopeful that because of comments he had made directly to me, that he would be willing to meet with us. Unfortunately, the willingness just isn't there," Amber Harrison said.
The Harrisons are meeting, however, with all members of the Utah delegation and with the Western Caucus of the House to tell stories of people in Vernal. They will also attend the hearings on energy, and Bishop has promised to ask some questions on their behalf while also presenting their letters.
One letter is from 9-year-old Heather Mendoza. It says that before her grandfather was laid off from his oil industry job, they lived in a home where she had a horse and a dog.
"We sold my horse because we could not afford to keep her. Where we moved in Vernal, we had to get rid of my dog as well," Mendoza wrote. "The only thing I ask is please let my grandpa go back to work so we can at least stay in Vernal."
In another letter, Kathleen Fladeland wrote that her husband has been out of work since February, after working in the oil industry for 40 years. "I am working a part-time job, but it does not cover even a quarter of our bills," adding they will "soon be in foreclosure if he can't find a decent job."
In another letter, Julie Curry wrote how even her car wash for large trucks in Vernal has been hurt by canceling oil leases, so truckers have fewer jobs and less need of her service.
"Our business has experienced a 67 percent decrease," she wrote, adding that it went from having nine employees earlier this year to now having just two.
Jeremy Harrison said of such letters, "Stuff like this should not be happening in America."
He added that while environmental groups argue that canceling oil leases could help tourism in Vernal by making areas more pristine, "tourism may help a bit in summer. But the oil fields are what keeps the area going all year long."
e-mail: lee@desnews.com"
Several days later, at a congressional hearing, Secretary Salazar was asked by Rep. Bishop what response he had for people like the Harrisons. "Look at what is happening to real people on the ground as a result of decisions the Department of Interior has made in my home state of Utah," Bishop said. But the insufferably smug Salazar would not take responsibility, shifting that (as all Obama administration officials do) to the previous administration, which he says rushed the leases through.
I'm talking about unemployed timber workers in Oregon and Washington, living on welfare because America cares more about the Spotted owl than it cares about them. I'm talking about out-of-work commercial fishers in New England, California and Florida. I'm talking about ranchers and miners who've thrown in the towel, because government regulators are waging war on them. I'm talking about energy industry workers who aren't working, because anti-drilling zealots have derailed another domestic gas and oil project.
I'm talking about Jeremy and Amber Harrison of Vernal, Utah, who traveled all the way to Washington last week, for an appointment with an Interior Department official whose decisions can mean work or a welfare check for so many Westerners. They went carrying hand-written letters from folks back in Utah, who were left in the lurch when Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, immediately after confirmation, unilaterally canceled 77 drilling leases in the state, which he and a few green groups say pose a threat to national parks.
The Harrison's wanted to deliver a "human impact statement." But the official, Deputy Interior Secretary David Hayes, snubbed them at the last minute -- reinforcing the message that arrogant Washingtonians are indifferent to the collateral damage their decisions inflict out here in fly-over country. Here's the story, as told by the Deseret News.
Stood-up Vernal couple still seek to tell oil-lease story in D.C.
They were there to talk about oil leases, but official canceled
When told they could meet with the Interior Department's No. 2 official, Jeremy and Amber Harrison pulled money out of their tight savings and with friends' help traveled to Washington, D.C., from Vernal, hoping to tell how canceling federal oil leases is hurting Vernal.
But after they arrived, an aide to Deputy Interior Secretary David Hayes called and canceled the meeting that had been scheduled in the office of Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah. They were told no other time was available with Hayes, but an alternate official could maybe meet with them sometime.
"This is not the way people ought to be treated," said an upset Bishop. He said his office had verified the meeting last week, but it was canceled at the last minute. "It is unfortunate. I mean these guys came back on their own dime to try and meet with Hayes."
It comes as the House Natural Resources Committee is beginning two days of hearings Wednesday on how to meet America's energy needs while protecting the environment, as administration officials, environmental groups, sportsmen, landowners and others are scheduled to testify.
Amid that, the Harrisons had sought Bishop's help to meet with Hayes and bring 150 or so letters from Vernal residents about how the administration's cancellation of oil leases there is hurting them. "It's going to be like a human impact statement," Bishop said, noting he will enter all of those letters into the record at the hearing.
"We need Americans at work, not foreigners" selling foreign oil to America, Jeremy Harrison said. He and his wife want to tell how unemployment has gone from about 1 percent around Vernal to 8.5 percent, which they blame largely on administration actions making it harder to drill for oil.
Amber Harrison said she and her husband own a small business to truck crude oil. "Our income has gone down drastically. We were on the verge of losing a few items, but we were able to pull things out," she said.
"But a lot of people around us have lost entire homes and cars and are wondering if they can feed their families," she said. "Many people have had to move away because they cannot find a job." Amber Harrison said she and her husband attended a "tea party" protest in April, and began talking with others about the need for a group to counter what they feel are misleading claims by environmental groups.
She said they formed a citizens group called Grassroots Alliance for Public Lands. "It was our response to the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance," she said, and it started looking for ways to get out the story of the economic impacts of actions that make drilling harder.
When Hayes traveled to Vernal earlier this year for a hearing on canceled oil leases, the Harrisons and other members of their grass-roots alliance were there.
"I did get up and speak with David Hayes and I presented him with an 'I Love Drilling' T-shirt signed by people in Vernal. We were hopeful that because of comments he had made directly to me, that he would be willing to meet with us. Unfortunately, the willingness just isn't there," Amber Harrison said.
The Harrisons are meeting, however, with all members of the Utah delegation and with the Western Caucus of the House to tell stories of people in Vernal. They will also attend the hearings on energy, and Bishop has promised to ask some questions on their behalf while also presenting their letters.
One letter is from 9-year-old Heather Mendoza. It says that before her grandfather was laid off from his oil industry job, they lived in a home where she had a horse and a dog.
"We sold my horse because we could not afford to keep her. Where we moved in Vernal, we had to get rid of my dog as well," Mendoza wrote. "The only thing I ask is please let my grandpa go back to work so we can at least stay in Vernal."
In another letter, Kathleen Fladeland wrote that her husband has been out of work since February, after working in the oil industry for 40 years. "I am working a part-time job, but it does not cover even a quarter of our bills," adding they will "soon be in foreclosure if he can't find a decent job."
In another letter, Julie Curry wrote how even her car wash for large trucks in Vernal has been hurt by canceling oil leases, so truckers have fewer jobs and less need of her service.
"Our business has experienced a 67 percent decrease," she wrote, adding that it went from having nine employees earlier this year to now having just two.
Jeremy Harrison said of such letters, "Stuff like this should not be happening in America."
He added that while environmental groups argue that canceling oil leases could help tourism in Vernal by making areas more pristine, "tourism may help a bit in summer. But the oil fields are what keeps the area going all year long."
e-mail: lee@desnews.com"
Several days later, at a congressional hearing, Secretary Salazar was asked by Rep. Bishop what response he had for people like the Harrisons. "Look at what is happening to real people on the ground as a result of decisions the Department of Interior has made in my home state of Utah," Bishop said. But the insufferably smug Salazar would not take responsibility, shifting that (as all Obama administration officials do) to the previous administration, which he says rushed the leases through.
"Salazar . . .said the Obama administration should not be blamed for economic problems in Utah oil country related to rescinding the auction, but the Bush administration should be for rushing the auction without fully consulting the National Park Service. "What happened with those 77 parcels … is that there was simply not the consultation that should have taken place there between the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service," Salazar told the House Natural Resources Committee. "Because that consultation did not take place, there was a need to review that to ensure that the other legal interests of the United States of America were being protected," he said . . .
. . . . Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, complained that Deputy Interior Secretary David Hayes had canceled a meeting with Jeremy and Amber Harrison of Vernal who brought 150 letters from neighbors to describe economic distress from the canceled auction — after they spent their own money to travel to Washington on the promise of meeting him Tuesday.
"I'd be happy to take whatever documents they have," Salazar said, but said economic problems in the Uintah Basin should be blamed more on rushing a bad auction than on him for trying to fix it. "Sometimes what ends up happening is when the government does things in a rushed and wrong way, you end up having consequences to human beings like the Harrisons that you don't have when you do it the right way," Salazar said."
The oil and gas industry vigorously denies the process was shortcut. The Independent Petroleum Association of the Mountain States has produced a point-by-point rebuttal to these claims. An independent panel reinstated a number of the canceled leases, raising more doubts about the legitimacy of Salazar's actions. But the Interior secretary defending his abuses of power, arguing that he had the authority to unilaterally cancel leases "near" national parks.
"Many of those lease parcels are in fact going forward," Salazar said. "But the fact is I don't believe we should drill everywhere because not everyplace is appropriate for us to drill. We shouldn't be drilling near Arches National Park and Canyonlands and Dinosaur. Those are important treasures that we need to protect."
"Near" and "close" are relative terms in the sprawling West. What's "near" here would be "far" back East. Is a drilling rig 20 or 30 or 40 miles away from a national park boundary line really too close? Salazar and others are trying to make that claim (using what I call the "proximity ploy").
But since when did a single individual's subjective judgments become the basis for making such momentous decisions? And how many millions of acres of public lands are we removing from potentially productive uses when we draw such arbitrary and subjective buffer zones around parks? Given the prevalence of parks across the West -- just look at a map of southern Utah --isn't this a rationale for locking away a huge new swath of public lands?
That's exactly what it is.
Rep. Bishop is asking hard questions about whether Salazar's Interior Department colluded with outside groups on the issue. He pressed Salazar on this at the hearing:
"Bishop also complained that the department has not provided documents he has requested that he says may show it has a too cozy relationship with environmental groups that oppose oil drilling in Utah. "Your department has been foot-dragging, stonewalling and the only thing we have received is the apparently false claim that there are only seven communications," Bishop said. Salazar said, "We have thousands of pages, frankly, that have been sent over (or) are being sent over. … You've gotten a lot of those documents. You're getting a lot more."
Whether or not collusion can be documented, is there any doubt that Salazar and the Obama administration are water-carriers for the radical green groups that helped put them in power? No doubt, in my opinion. It's evident not just in the policies they're adopting, but in their arrogant indifference to the human casualties, and collateral damage to the American economy, these policies leave in their wake.
The Harrisons of Vernal Utah are just the tip of the iceberg.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
The Village Idiot
The Wall Street Journal's editorial page keeps columnist Thomas Frank on board to serve as a sort of court jester: he's the liberal whose arguments are so stupid they make conservative arguments look brilliant. He's there as the village idiot, who makes every one else on the page look good in comparison.
Yesterday he delivered on both counts.
His piece bemoans the fact that the left has meekly surrendered the mantle of the freedom fighter to the right, even though, according to Frank, liberals, statists and collectivists are the true freedom fighters in this society. The founding fathers were wrong, he says; it's just not true that expansive government is a threat to freedom. For support, he cites no less an authority than the painter Norman Rockwell. His other authority is of course Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose "Four Freedoms" established the predicate for the nanny state we live under today.
You'll want to read the whole piece, for the same reason you gawk at car wrecks. But here are the key passages:
"Any increase in the size or duties of government, the right tells us, necessarily subtracts from our freedom. Government is, by its very nature, a destroyer of liberties; the Obama administration, specifically, is promising to interfere with the economy and the health-care system so profoundly that Washington will soon have us all in chains.
"What we're going to end up with is higher taxes, bigger government and less freedom for the American people," House Republican Leader John Boehner said on Fox News in July. "We're going to have a real fight for how much freedom we're going to have left in America." . . .
. . . That our ancestors could ever have understood freedom as something greater than the absence of the state would probably strike protesters as inconceivable. But they did. You can see it in that famous Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving painting from 1943: "Freedom from Want," an illustration of one of Franklin Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms." Strange though it might sound, this is a form of freedom that pretty much requires government to get involved in the economy in order to "secure to every nation," as Roosevelt put it, "a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants." The idea is still enshrined today in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights" . . .
. . . Conservatives of the 1930s, led by an upper-crust outfit called the American Liberty League, certainly felt that way. "That Roosevelt was a dictator there was no doubt; but Liberty Leaguers were not quite sure what kind," wrote the historian George Wolfskill in "The Revolt of the Conservatives," a 1962 study of that organization. "Some thought he was a fascist, others believed him a socialist or Communist, while others, to be absolutely sure, said he was both."
Today, of course, we know that the right's tyranny-fears were nonsense. Most of Roosevelt's innovations have been the law of the land for 70 years now, and yet we are still a free society free enough, that is, to allow tens of thousands of protesters to gather on the National Mall and to broadcast their slogans and speeches to the world via C-SPAN.
Even such pits of statism as Britain and Canada remain free societies, generally speaking, despite having gone skipping blithely down the universal-health-care road to serfdom decades ago. For the sort of people who gathered on the Mall last weekend, however, I doubt that such observations would matter in the least. Their conception of freedom soars on by a force all its own, carried aloft on the wings of pure abstract reasoning: Government intervention equals tyranny. Liberalism is forever a form of despotism-in-waiting."
Most American "ancestors" who predate the 1930s did in fact define freedom, in part, as the "absence of the state," which is why American government was designed to be strictly limited in power. And I could fill this post with quotes, citations and evidence to back that up. But for leftists, like Frank, American history begins not at the founding, but in the Roosevelt era. That's as far back in American history as they dare delve, in search of rationales for the superstate.
Yesterday he delivered on both counts.
His piece bemoans the fact that the left has meekly surrendered the mantle of the freedom fighter to the right, even though, according to Frank, liberals, statists and collectivists are the true freedom fighters in this society. The founding fathers were wrong, he says; it's just not true that expansive government is a threat to freedom. For support, he cites no less an authority than the painter Norman Rockwell. His other authority is of course Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose "Four Freedoms" established the predicate for the nanny state we live under today.
You'll want to read the whole piece, for the same reason you gawk at car wrecks. But here are the key passages:
"Any increase in the size or duties of government, the right tells us, necessarily subtracts from our freedom. Government is, by its very nature, a destroyer of liberties; the Obama administration, specifically, is promising to interfere with the economy and the health-care system so profoundly that Washington will soon have us all in chains.
"What we're going to end up with is higher taxes, bigger government and less freedom for the American people," House Republican Leader John Boehner said on Fox News in July. "We're going to have a real fight for how much freedom we're going to have left in America." . . .
. . . That our ancestors could ever have understood freedom as something greater than the absence of the state would probably strike protesters as inconceivable. But they did. You can see it in that famous Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving painting from 1943: "Freedom from Want," an illustration of one of Franklin Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms." Strange though it might sound, this is a form of freedom that pretty much requires government to get involved in the economy in order to "secure to every nation," as Roosevelt put it, "a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants." The idea is still enshrined today in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights" . . .
. . . Conservatives of the 1930s, led by an upper-crust outfit called the American Liberty League, certainly felt that way. "That Roosevelt was a dictator there was no doubt; but Liberty Leaguers were not quite sure what kind," wrote the historian George Wolfskill in "The Revolt of the Conservatives," a 1962 study of that organization. "Some thought he was a fascist, others believed him a socialist or Communist, while others, to be absolutely sure, said he was both."
Today, of course, we know that the right's tyranny-fears were nonsense. Most of Roosevelt's innovations have been the law of the land for 70 years now, and yet we are still a free society free enough, that is, to allow tens of thousands of protesters to gather on the National Mall and to broadcast their slogans and speeches to the world via C-SPAN.
Even such pits of statism as Britain and Canada remain free societies, generally speaking, despite having gone skipping blithely down the universal-health-care road to serfdom decades ago. For the sort of people who gathered on the Mall last weekend, however, I doubt that such observations would matter in the least. Their conception of freedom soars on by a force all its own, carried aloft on the wings of pure abstract reasoning: Government intervention equals tyranny. Liberalism is forever a form of despotism-in-waiting."
Most American "ancestors" who predate the 1930s did in fact define freedom, in part, as the "absence of the state," which is why American government was designed to be strictly limited in power. And I could fill this post with quotes, citations and evidence to back that up. But for leftists, like Frank, American history begins not at the founding, but in the Roosevelt era. That's as far back in American history as they dare delve, in search of rationales for the superstate.
I happen to believe Americans have become less free since the New Deal, if one defines freedom not just as having the right to march on Washington to protest ObamaCare (Frank's emasculated definition of "freedom"), but the freedom from dependency on government programs and largess, which tends over time to make one an indentured servant (if not a slave) of the state. It's our independence -- meaning independence from state interference and state coercion and co-option -- that's been eroded as the size, power, appetite and mission of the mega-state grows. There's no denying it's grown significantly since the 1930.
Construction of the mega-state has gone on under both Democrat and Republican regimes. What Obama is doing is the logical extension of the trajectory the country had been traveling for decades. But the changes until now were too incremental to stir more than minor rebellion. The accelerated pace of Barack Obama's Great Leap Forward -- his fevered rush to finish the edifice Roosevelt laid the foundations for -- has jarred many American awake to the trap into which they've sleepily wandered. And that, not racism or embittered partisanship, is at the root of the ObamaCare backlash and tea party movement.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
What a Party
The Gazette's minute-by-minute blog coverage of the Taxpayer Tea Party in Acacia Park at one point estimated a crowd of about 200. What a crock. 200 times 10 or 15 is more like it. I had 300 fliers promoting Limited Government Week in my hand when I arrived on the scene, and they were gone, snapped up like hotcakes, before I waded very far into the throng. That's what you get for being a pessimist.
Congratulations to all those who made this event such a success. They did it with scant "mainstream media" coverage or attention. The unmistakably snide coverage -- Gazette - simply confirms that the denizens of most news rooms are far from "mainstream" themselves. The reporter mischaracterized the crowd as angry. While there may have been a little of that -- some of it justified, in my view -- most of the people I saw or encountered were smiling, having fun and simply exalting in their freedom to air their beefs about the way the country is going. That's as "mainstream" American as baseball and apple pie. They seemed no more "angry" than the people who attended Barack Obama campaign rallies, belittling and denouncing the former administration and screaming for "change."
I was honored to participate as a speaker. What I had to say can be boiled down to a few bullet points, though they may have been garbled in transmission given my meandering ways as a speech-giver.
The problem isn't just in Washington or Denver or in City Hall, I pointed out. It's with We the People -- and especially people who have double standard about government spending -- those who think "pork" can only be found in other congressional districts -- and can't recognize that everything Washington "gives" them, it takes from them with the other hand. "The bucks start here," I said, "and the buck needs to stop here, too, if we want to collar runaway government."
I said change won't come to Washington until we in the hinterland begin to rediscover the old American virtues of self reliance, self-determination, and self-discipline. The second American revolution will only happen when we rediscover the virtues of limited government. The more we ask of government, the larger it becomes and the more it takes from us.
The second American Revolution doesn’t require violence or upheaval. It begins quietly, when each of us begins asking less of the government and looking more to ourselves for the answers and solutions. The first tea party, in Boston, was about taxation without representation. Today the problem is different. Today we have over-taxation with over-representation -- meaning that Washington now wants to do for us what we should do for ourselves. We’re asking more than we ought to of Washington, which gives it license to tax us and regulate us at will.
Some people laugh off the idea of limited government as an anachronism. But limited government has a flip side, I said. Limited government liberates and empowers people. Unlimited government enslaves them. It's something the founders understood. And it's as true today as it was back then.
I had selected three quotes, from a varied (and bipartisan) list of luminaries, to underscore the point, but I wandered off the script and they never made it in. Here they are, taken from the archive of quotes kept at LocalLibertyOnline.org.
John F. Kennedy: "Every time that we try to lift a problem from our own shoulders, and shift that problem to the hands of the government, to the same extent we are sacrificing the liberties of our people."
Ronald Reagan: ""Man is not free unless government is limited ... As government expands, liberty contracts."
And, finally, I had planned to use this beautiful quote from Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon here was writing about Athens, not Rome. But the lessons have universal relevance: "In the end more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free."
I was particularly moved when the crowd, near the end of the program, sang "My Country Tis of Thee," something I hadn't sang since elementary school, I realized, and rarely if ever hear any more.
Those are the points I tried to make today, even if something got lost in translation once my mouth started motoring. I was honored to speak. I hope Taxpayer Tea Parties becomes an April 15 tradition.
Congratulations to all those who made this event such a success. They did it with scant "mainstream media" coverage or attention. The unmistakably snide coverage -- Gazette - simply confirms that the denizens of most news rooms are far from "mainstream" themselves. The reporter mischaracterized the crowd as angry. While there may have been a little of that -- some of it justified, in my view -- most of the people I saw or encountered were smiling, having fun and simply exalting in their freedom to air their beefs about the way the country is going. That's as "mainstream" American as baseball and apple pie. They seemed no more "angry" than the people who attended Barack Obama campaign rallies, belittling and denouncing the former administration and screaming for "change."
I was honored to participate as a speaker. What I had to say can be boiled down to a few bullet points, though they may have been garbled in transmission given my meandering ways as a speech-giver.
The problem isn't just in Washington or Denver or in City Hall, I pointed out. It's with We the People -- and especially people who have double standard about government spending -- those who think "pork" can only be found in other congressional districts -- and can't recognize that everything Washington "gives" them, it takes from them with the other hand. "The bucks start here," I said, "and the buck needs to stop here, too, if we want to collar runaway government."
I said change won't come to Washington until we in the hinterland begin to rediscover the old American virtues of self reliance, self-determination, and self-discipline. The second American revolution will only happen when we rediscover the virtues of limited government. The more we ask of government, the larger it becomes and the more it takes from us.
The second American Revolution doesn’t require violence or upheaval. It begins quietly, when each of us begins asking less of the government and looking more to ourselves for the answers and solutions. The first tea party, in Boston, was about taxation without representation. Today the problem is different. Today we have over-taxation with over-representation -- meaning that Washington now wants to do for us what we should do for ourselves. We’re asking more than we ought to of Washington, which gives it license to tax us and regulate us at will.
Some people laugh off the idea of limited government as an anachronism. But limited government has a flip side, I said. Limited government liberates and empowers people. Unlimited government enslaves them. It's something the founders understood. And it's as true today as it was back then.
I had selected three quotes, from a varied (and bipartisan) list of luminaries, to underscore the point, but I wandered off the script and they never made it in. Here they are, taken from the archive of quotes kept at LocalLibertyOnline.org.
John F. Kennedy: "Every time that we try to lift a problem from our own shoulders, and shift that problem to the hands of the government, to the same extent we are sacrificing the liberties of our people."
Ronald Reagan: ""Man is not free unless government is limited ... As government expands, liberty contracts."
And, finally, I had planned to use this beautiful quote from Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon here was writing about Athens, not Rome. But the lessons have universal relevance: "In the end more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free."
I was particularly moved when the crowd, near the end of the program, sang "My Country Tis of Thee," something I hadn't sang since elementary school, I realized, and rarely if ever hear any more.
Those are the points I tried to make today, even if something got lost in translation once my mouth started motoring. I was honored to speak. I hope Taxpayer Tea Parties becomes an April 15 tradition.
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