Tea Partiers, Progressives and Political Ideologies

Scott at Powerline discusses a piece on the Tea Party movement by Michael Barone:

In "Tea partiers embrace liberty, not big government," Barone situates the Tea Party movement at one end of "an argument between the heirs of two fundamental schools of political thought, the Founders and the Progressives." Barone describes it as an old argument that has "been raised again by the expand-government policies of the Obama administration and Democratic congressional leaders." Barone optimistically observes that "[m]ost Americans... are rejecting the path of dependence and are intent on declaring their independence once again." Here's hoping.

Of course, the Progressives have good intentions. Scott also recommends some books and articles on the ideologica origins of the Progressive Movement in America. With special attention to Woodrow Wilson.

Given the tense political times in which are are living, it might be a good idea to understand a little better where Progressive are coming from.

Controlling the Narrative: Belmont Club vanishes

A student on the island of Montreal who describes himself as "liberal" has deleted the Wikipedia entry concerning the Belmont Club. Update: The entry has now been restored. That was quick.  Wretchard comments.  Read the whole thing.

Wikipedia doesn't yet have complete control over content on the internet. Here's the site of the earliest entries at The Belmont Club.

A few years ago, Belmont Club had to move to a new site when the first one got too big. That's where I found Wretchard's entries and the often-fascinating comment threads which followed. Many of the contributors also had fanciful "noms de blog". I had no idea who Wretchard was at the time. It didn't matter much to me. I still don't know anything personal about the people who regularly commented on his posts.

I learned Wretchard's real name when he moved to Pajamas Media. It added a little depth to certain stories to know that he was active in the resistance to the corrupt Marcos regime in the Philippines, that he had attended college in the U.S. and that he has Australian citizenship. But it was also kind of nice in the old days, when the focus was on ideas, rather than personalities. He has a larger audience now, though.

What's in the bill? Rep. Waxman declares war on accounting requirements for which he voted

Even members of Congress who voted for the bill appear to be  caught off-guard by the provisions of ObamaCare. Like Henry Waxman, who seems to want to portray as Enemies of the State the CEOs of any companies which report changes in their financial forecasts based upon future expenses expected to be imposed by the bill. Meg McArdle (who voted for Obama):

Accounting basics: when a company experiences what accountants call “a material adverse impact” on its expected future earnings, and those changes affect an item that is already on the balance sheet, the company is required to record the negative impact–”to take the charge against earnings”–as soon as it knows that the change is reasonably likely to occur.

This makes good accounting sense. The asset on the balance sheet is now less valuable, so you should record a charge. Otherwise, you’d be misleading investors.

The Democrats, however, seem to believe that Generally Accepted Accounting Principles are some sort of conspiracy against Obamacare, and all that is good and right in America.

Glenn Reynolds:

I think when they planned for ObamaCare’s costs to come online post-election, they didn’t know enough to realize that accounting rules (and SEC regulations) would require companies to act now. Just another example of the “knowledge problem” confronting economic planners and regulators . . . . 

UPDATE: Reader Bill Hesson emails: “Would somebody please explain to the gentleman from California that the incessant prosecution of business executives for nothing more than excessive optimism is likely to have consequences that include pessimistic accounting?" . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Brad Garton writes: “What’s really funny is that among other things Sarbanes-Oxley requires them to make the impacts public, and Waxman voted for that. Apparently he didn’t read that bill either.”

The country's in the very best of hands . . . .

Exciting Discoveries in the Health Care Bill

Nancy Pelosi promised us that we would be excited when they passed the bill and we started to discover what is in it. We're starting to find out now.

One big surprise for many people is mandatory massive charges against earnings for major employers in anticipation of new taxes, which will undoubtedly increase unemployment. Followed by threats which place those employers in a legal double-bind situation:

Black-letter financial accounting rules require that corporations immediately restate their earnings to reflect the present value of their long-term health liabilities, including a higher tax burden. Should these companies have played chicken with the Securities and Exchange Commission to avoid this politically inconvenient reality? Democrats don't like what their bill is doing in the real world, so they now want to intimidate CEOs into keeping quiet.

Who, besides companies with tight political connections, would want to do business in this threatening climate?

Andy McCarthy:

. . .  I worked for many years in the U.S. Attorney's Office in whose backyard was Wall Street. If a company like AT&T failed to make a legally mandated restatement of its financial position while continuing to participate in the capital markets, it would be investigated and the responsible management officials would likely find themselves prosecuted while the SEC, concurrently, went after the company and its officiallys in civil enforcement suits. There are prosecutors and investigators who would salivate at the prospect of doing such a career-making case.


If we are now under a system where disclosure gets you a public whipping and other threats by the Powers That Be while nondisclosure promises the ruinous expenses of defending against criminal investigations and civil enforcement, this is no longer anything but a thugocracy.

Furthermore, the section of the bill which led to these massive charges against earnings will lead employers to drop prescription coverage for retirees, which will place more people in the federal program, making the Democrats' claim of "deficit neutrality" even more laughable.  Captain Ed:

Over the past year, I’ve repeatedly warned about the dangers of static tax analysis. That process considers changes in tax policy without considering its impact on behavior. The closure of this “loophole,” as Robert Gibbs called it yesterday, is a perfect example of this stunted thinking.

The Democrats in Congress argued that they would gain $5.4 billion in revenue by eliminating the tax break enacted in the 2003 Medicare Part D program as an incentive for businesses to keep their retirees out of the Medicare system. Instead, they have given businesses a reason to dump their retirees out of the private networks and into the Part D system now. Not only will the expected tax revenues never appear, but now we will have to spend a lot more money covering those prescriptions out of public funds. The seniors in these programs will suffer most of all, as the Part D coverage is vastly inferior to the private plans offered by businesses in the private sector.

Who could have foreseen this? Well, businesses have been trying to get attention to this problem for months, as the AP somewhat belatedly reports . . .

Update: Congress mandated the disclosures which the Democrats now wish to hide, in response to the Enron scandal.

Help Draft a Federalism Restoration Amendment

You can help refine the language of a proposed federalism restoration amendment. This would be a step back toward the American ideals of "Separation of Powers" and more direct involvement of citizens with their government bodies.

The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen

The Ruling Class Flies First Class

Instapundit links John Stossel:

Will you and your family put off a vacation this year because you can’t afford it? Too bad, because you have paid for some terrific trips — for government bureaucrats. The Washington Times reports that last year $13 billion in tax dollars was spent to pamper ‘public servants’ on trips that double as vacation junkets.

Nancy Pelosi, jet-aircraft connoisseur. Don't complain. It cost us under $2.2 million to jet her around. And she IS our first female Speaker of the House. Shouldn't that warrant her choice of military aircraft? "Like I say, I don’t want to hear one word about my carbon footprint."

Tigerhawk:

I am an executive in a public company, so according to many Democrats my compensation ought to be regulated because I cannot be trusted to deal fairly with my supposedly powerless stockholders. But here's the thing: Neither I nor any other executive in my company flies first class, even to Asia. Coach all the way, even for the CEO, because we know that first class is essentially impossible to justify as anything other than a hidden perk.

Apparently, however, the federal government believes that first class is justified for its bureaucrats. . . .

So, who is more accountable to their constituents: Me to my stockholders, or the jet-setting regulators to the voters?

Greed for power and perks masquerades as virtue among the self-important people who make the laws and regulations by which we must live.

Thomas Sowell:

I have never understood why it is “greed” to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.

Thomas Sowell: The Vision of the Anointed

I just found economist and prolific author Thomas Sowell on Twitter. A good source for pithy, challenging quotes like:

Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.

Plus links to articles which back up the pithy quotes, and videos, like this one, concerning his book, The Vision of the Anointed. From the Preface:

The rise of the mass media, mass politics, and massive government mean that the beliefs which drive a relatively small group of articulate people have great leverage in determining the course taken by a whole society. 

The analysis that follows is not only an examination of the vision of this elite intelligentsia . . . but also an empirical comparison between the promised benefits of policies based on that vision and the grim and often bitter consequences of these political and judicial decisions. . .

Check out what Sowell says at about the one minute mark in the video about how deeply many academics believe that they have the right and responsibility to manipulate the lives of poor people "for their own good". These academics may be intellectually incapable of considering the possibility that the poor people whose lives they intend to improve might have a greater right to self-determination.

One thing that is usually missing from the grand plans of "The Anointed" is personal involvement with the people whose lives they intend to change from afar.

American Liberty: Strong Women and Local Government

A five-part interview with the author of this book. The title of this post comes from Chapter 3 of the interview linked below, describing Tocqueville's observations about some of the differences between early America and, say, France. I knew about his admiration for voluntary American civic organizations, but I was surprised to learn that he thought that this civic involvement was only possible because of the involvement of Americans in local governments. I had also not made the connection between his observations about the differences in the roles of American and European women of his time and the American population's attachment to civic liberty.

The quality of the short videos linked below is enhanced by clicking on the "full screen" icon at the lower right after the video has started.

Progressives might want to watch the first "chapter" of the interview last.  The language may seem extreme and inflammatory to you. The universities have had half a century to train you to eliminate some "old" ideas from consideration.  The subsequent "chapters" below present some background ideas which help illuminate "Chapter 1".

The following notes represent only summaries of one or two of the ideas in each linked segment:

Chapter 1: Is the administrative state REALLY now assuming power over our lives which could be considered to be tyrannical?

Chapter 2: The nanny state reflects the "inner nanny" in all of us, so we naturally have some level of comfort with the "nanny" role of government. But there are also reasons why people are often comfortable with life UNDER THE CONTROL of a nanny state.

Chapter 3: French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville made remarkable observations about the American culture of his day. He also predicted comfortable, solicitous "soft despotism" in liberal democracies long ago. Since he was so accurate in his predictions, maybe we should pay attention to what he wrote.

Chapter 4: The major roots of modern soft despotism in America, from the German research universities of the 1870s, through Woodrow Wilson and FDR, and beyond. They never taught me in school, in any depth, where these philosophies came from.

Chapter 5: Is an all-encompassiing welfare state inevitable? Does such a state ALWAYS nurture the seeds of its own decline and destruction? Why is Mark Steyn so pessimistic?

RELATED: EASY-TO-REMEMBER reminder of the differences between America an other democratic countries. At least, until recently.

"Transforming America"

President Obama got his Health Care Reform vote in the House.

Liberty dies, with thunderous applause.

Well, perhaps the Star Wars comparison is a bit dramatic. However, as C.S. Lewis said,

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

The President is going directly from a reality-bending (she's right: he turns the meaning of words on end from the beginning to the end of the speech) victory speech about "Health Care Reform" (read the whole speech if you have doubts about its Orwellian nature) to "Immigration Reform".

The Democrats have to enroll as many dependent voters as possible before November to continue their plan to "Transform America", I guess, since the Democrat's "Health Care Reform" bills are so unpopular.

Remind anyone of the Stamp Act, 245 years ago today.?

The final big points in the President's speech about giving people "control over their own health care":

The work of promoting private sector job creation goes on. The work of putting American families’ dreams back within reach goes on. And we march on, with renewed confidence, energized by this victory on their behalf.

In the end, what this day represents is another stone firmly laid in the foundation of the American Dream. Tonight, we answered the call of history as so many generations of Americans have before us. When faced with crisis, we did not shrink from our challenge -- we overcame it. We did not avoid our responsibility -- we embraced it. We did not fear our future -- we shaped it.

Compare with the observations here, like "My health insurance just became illegal". Well, I guess that's one way to give people control over their own health care. Force them to buy the kind of insurance YOU want them to buy. Unless they're senior Democratic staffers who helped write the bill or something.  OF COURSE you would want to exempt THEM from the restrictions of this bill.

And here's Canadian-born Mark Steyn, writing when the Democrats were still planning on the "Deem and Pass" evasion of responsibility for their votes:

This will be the biggest expansion of the IRS since World War II – and that's change you can believe in. This is what "health" "care" "reform" boils down to: Fewer doctors, longer wait times, but more bureaucrats. . .

Investor's Business Daily argues that the "health" debate is really a proxy fight on the size and role of government. According to their poll, 64 percent of people think the federal government has "too much power."

Correct. But a big chunk of that 64 percent voted less than 18 months ago for a man and a party explicitly committed to more government with more power, and they're now living with the consequences. Obama is government, and government is Obama. That's all he knows and all he's ever known. You elected to the highest office in the land a man who's never run a business or created wealth or made a payroll, and for his entire adult life has hung out with guys who've demonized (demonized?) such grubby activities. Many of which associates he appointed to high office: Obama's Cabinet has less experience of private business than any in the past century. What it knows is government, and government's default mode is to grow, and grow.

California is bankrupt: The dependent class and the government class that issues the checks to the dependent class have squeezed out the poor boobs in the middle who have to pay for it all. Everybody knows this. But a state that already has a Bureau of Home Furnishings cannot restrain itself from setting up a Bureau of Motion Picture Condom Regulation – or, anyway, an impact study to study whether the Bureau of Impact Studies should study the impact of a Bureau of Motion Picture Condom Regulation.

Look around you, and take it all in. From now on, it gets worse. If you have kids, they'll live in smaller homes, drive smaller cars, live smaller lives. If you don't have kids, you better hope your neighbors do, because someone needs to spawn a working population large enough to pay for the unsustainable entitlements the Obama party has suckered you into thinking you're entitled to. The unfunded liabilities of current entitlements are $100 trillion.  . . . To these existing entitlements, Obama and his enforcers in Congress propose to add the grandest of all: health care, on a scale no advanced democracy has ever attempted.

Steyn's observations are set to music by a Dutch Immigrant. With a few additional comments.

. . . he mentioned in passing one of my persistent observations about the strange new world being engineered in Washington; a world in which all, except for the elite, lead smaller, much smaller lives than ourselves or our parents.

Partly because the Bigger the Government, the Smaller the Citizen.

Milton Friedman, April 17, 1996, on the depersonalization of medicine with government control.

Winning Dirty: Louise Slaughter and Friends

Think I'll do a series, for historical purposes.  The Democrats really made a spectacle of themselves with this health care bill.

Until recently, I was only dimly aware of Congresswoman Louise Slaughter. She's the one who came up with the Slaughter Solution which, it turned out, was too duplicitous for House Democrats in the end.

Listen to her here. I know that most politicians bend the truth from time to time, but it's amazing to watch her lie in a most obvious manner about what Rep. Ryan is saying AS HE IS SAYING IT. Just amazing. Maybe she is so used to bearing false witness against Republicans that she forgot she was on TV. Or maybe she is willing to put her reputation for honesty at risk in order to interrupt him, so that citizens would not understand the bill he was describing. The Democrats have gotten a lot of mileage out of the lie that Republicans had no ideas or plan for health care reform.   The press has pretty much backed them up in maintaining this fiction.   I believe that she and her Democratic colleagues were desperate to prevent a cogent message from the Republicans from being heard.

 Either way, politics can sure lead people to act in despicable ways.

Her attempt to obfuscate Rep. Ryan's explanation seems to me to be one more example of the Social Democrats' will to power, rather than concern for healthcare.  But maybe she just has a different, "progressive" moral system now, where noble intentions concerning the "collective good" outweigh the culturally accepted markers of individual morality.

Michael Medved:

After the House of Representatives voted on Obamacare, Representative Louise Slaughter, the New York Democrat who chairs the Rules Committee, told the Wall Street Journal: “It makes me so happy that, after 100 years, we can finally catch up with the rest of the world!”. Does Ms. Slaughter really believe the U.S. has lagged behind the rest of the world since 1910? During that period, we saved the planet in four major international conflicts while our surging economy brought higher living standards to most of the world. The key distinction between Democrats and Republicans involves attitudes toward America. . .

Another Social Democrat who looks at the world through "two left eyes", apparently.   She will probably feel good about helping people in my generation, and thay may actually happen. But the benefits are not sustainable over time. One charitable explanation for the inability of Social Democrats to plan intelligently for the future is that they believe that the rich will find a way to save themselves, and everyone else, after the Social Democrats' terms of office are finished.  That sort of "hope" is not working out too well in Europe right now.   But I bet it won't take us too many decades to "catch up" if serious changes are not made to the bill she supported. In the U.K.:

Under government medicine, all health care is necessarily political. Why anyone would want to live in that world is beyond me. Here is the latest from Great Britain, where the Labour government is trying to keep budget cuts secret until after the election:

Tens of thousands of NHS workers would be sacked, hospital units closed and patients denied treatments under secret plans for £20 billion of health cuts.

The sick would be urged to stay at home and email doctors rather than visit surgeries, while procedures such as hip replacements could be scrapped. ...

Documents show that health chiefs are considering plans to begin sacking workers, cutting treatments and shutting wards across the country.

This one is especially scary:

In the East region, covering Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, up to £2 billion is to be cut. The SHA proposes shifting services out of hospitals and making social workers take over some treatments.

Hey, that makes sense: they have a shortage of doctors and a surplus of social workers, so let's have the social workers start diagnosing diseases and performing surgery. That's what I call a death panel!

A few questions for Representative Slaughter:

Who in the world is going to lead the world in medical innovation now? Canadians with their egalitarian health care system? They have been sponging off the Americans and have avoided the expense of new development. And Obamacare discourages medical innovation by our pharmaceutical, medical device and biotech industries.

Government scientists are good at glamorous basic research, but terrible at the drudge work it takes to bring a "safe and effective" drug to market. Maybe India will take over medical innovation. If we're lucky.

How will Europe be able to sustain its social programs when President Obama drops U.S. defense of Europe? Can't pay for defense and health care, too. Trouble is, the Europeans have factored American military support into their budgets (at least unconsciously).

In what way do you think that placing massive debt on young Americans and future generations constitutes "catching up with the rest of the world"?

One definition of "Social Justice"

Social Justice: Abandoning "equality before the law" in favor of legal decisions intended to produce equal outcomes for members of "protected classes".

Producing results like these.

Because we would not want to suggest that there might be reasons that black students in some neighborhoods actually exhibit behavior different from their white or Asian counterparts. That might make some people feel bad.  Far better to increase racial tensions to the point of violence in an effort to enforce equal treatment of groups, rather than equal treatment of individuals.

Then we can introduce a big, ineffective, court-mandated federal program to fix each problem created by the quest for "social justice".  Leading to more government jobs.  So it's all good.  Civil society retreats as government expands, but who needs civil society?

Greece, California and the Statist Transformation of America

Nothing makes an individual more selfish

than the socially equitable communitarianism

of big government

Mark Steyn:

While President Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand new, even more unsustainable entitlement at the health care "summit," thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split screen - because they're part of the same story. It's just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They're at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is further upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided instead that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter 20 (total societal collapse): The Greeks are at Chapter 17 or 18.

What's happening in the developed world today isn't so very hard to understand: The 20th century Bismarckian welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. In America, the feckless insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they've reached the next stage in social democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over. . .

So you can't borrow against the future because, in the most basic sense, you don't have one. Greeks in the public sector retire at 58, which sounds great. But, when 10 grandparents have four grandchildren, who pays for you to spend the last third of your adult life loafing around?

By the way, you don't have to go to Greece to experience Greek-style retirement: The Athenian "public service" of California has been metaphorically face-down in the ouzo for a generation. Still, America as a whole is not yet Greece. A couple of years ago, when I wrote my book "America Alone," I put the Social Security debate in a bit of perspective: On 2005 figures, projected public pensions liabilities were expected to rise by 2040 to about 6.8 percent of GDP. In Greece, the figure was 25 percent. In other words, head for the hills, Armageddon, outta here, The End. Since then, the situation has worsened in both countries. And really the comparison is academic: Whereas America still has a choice, Greece isn't going to have a 2040 - not without a massive shot of Reality Juice.

Is that likely to happen? At such moments, I like to modify Gerald Ford. When seeking to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences, President Ford liked to say: "A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have." Which is true enough. But there's an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn't big enough to get you to give any of it back. That's the point Greece is at. Its socialist government has been forced into supporting a package of austerity measures. The Greek people's response is: Nuts to that. Public sector workers have succeeded in redefining time itself: Every year, they receive 14 monthly payments. You do the math. And for about seven months' work - for many of them the workday ends at 2:30 p.m. When they retire, they get 14 monthly pension payments. In other words: Economic reality is not my problem. I want my benefits. And, if it bankrupts the entire state a generation from now, who cares as long as they keep the checks coming until I croak?

We hard-hearted, small-government guys are often damned as selfish types who care nothing for the general welfare. But, as the Greek protests make plain, nothing makes an individual more selfish than the socially equitable communitarianism of big government. Once a chap's enjoying the fruits of government health care, government-paid vacation, government-funded early retirement, and all the rest, he couldn't give a hoot about the general societal interest. He's got his, and to hell with everyone else. People's sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense. . .

Think of Greece as California: Every year an irresponsible and corrupt bureaucracy awards itself higher pay and better benefits paid for by an ever-shrinking wealth-generating class. And think of Germany as one of the less profligate, still just about functioning corners of America such as my own state of New Hampshire: Responsibility doesn't pay. You'll wind up bailing out anyway. The problem is there are never enough of "the rich" to fund the entitlement state, because in the end, it disincentivizes everything from wealth creation to self-reliance to the basic survival instinct, as represented by the fertility rate. In Greece, they've run out Greeks, so they'll stick it to the Germans, like French farmers do. In Germany, the Germans have only been able to afford to subsidize French farming because they stick their defense tab to the Americans. And in America President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are saying we need to paddle faster to catch up with the Greeks and Germans. What could go wrong?

Read the whole thing. As Steyn note elsewhere, it's hard to get people in a European-style welfare state to take the need for reform seriously before brutal tyranny rears its ugly head, because a country like this can be a very pleasant place for a majority of people, while it is in the beginning stages of collapse.

J.P. Morgan Chief: California is at greater risk of default than Greece.

More: Follow the links concerning Europe and California here.

What VDH has learned from studying Ancient Greece while living in Modern Greece and California, concerning the dangers of big government.

The ever-cheerful Spengler concerning the choices faced by America.

The difference between the good guys and the bad guys

The difference between the good guys and the bad guys is whether they use human shields or they make themselves human shields.

Pelosi: Giving Artists the Luxury of Unemployment. Meanwhile, is Obama writing Europe off?

Did I miss a great renaissance in European Art with the advent of socialized medicine there?  Nancy Pelosi imagines how the Democrats will give freedom to artists to "quit their day jobs" to concentrate on their art, by passing the Democrat's Health Care Bill.  Which we will only understand once it's passed, she says.

Pelosi has a point about the distortions produced by providing tax breaks to employers, but not to private citizens, for the purchase of health care.  (This unfair situation arose out of the desperate attempts of employers to get around wage and price controls during World War II by offering health benefits in addition to wages.  When the IRS tried to impose taxes on these benefits, the people revolted).

But Ms. Pelosi also seems to be imagining a utopian dream world where the same amount of money just magically appears and makes its way into the government's coffers even if people make much less money.   If everybody becomes an unemployed  artist, living romantically on love, beauty and a few dollars scratched together from selling his work (don't forget to pay the sales tax and self-employment tax, Mr. Artist), who will do the hard, unartistic jobs that pay the bills?  She also seems to want to punish people who become entrepreneurial to the point of hiring significant numbers of employees. And people who make "more than their fair share" of money.   If you subsidize unemployed artists, you get more of them.  If you punish job creation, you get fewer jobs.

A tax base containing more struggling artists and fewer employers and high-wage employees moves the  the "fiscal neutrality" fiction concerning the health care bill even further from reality.  It's that type of unintended consequence that helped turn Lenin's dream of a utopian society (where everyone would be freed from drudge labor to pursue meaningful work like art)  into a society featuring a privileged nomenklatura contrasted with forced labor ("we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us") along with gulags and starvation for those who did not fall into line.

Even though the vast majority of American progressives reject Stalinism, much of the utopianism of early Marxist-Leninist theory remains in their good-hearted, benevolent plans for the rest of us.  And you can tell from listening to Ms. Pelosi that she really does believe that she is helping people.  But childhood stories which she has related in interviews have also revealed that she has a profound admiration for political power.  This is consistent with her behavior in pushing through health care reform.  Benevolence is often accompanied by thuggish or dictatorial behavior.  Totalitarianism is very tempting, even (or perhaps especially) to the benevolent.

Has Ms. Pelosi not noticed the financial condition of her own state?  That's what happens when progressives control the legislature for a few decades.   Pelosi is not doing so well herself at leading the nation into a "pay as you go" direction.  And she looks forward to creating vast new federal bureaucracies where government employees will be paid better than the shrinking private sector, and where they will probably be largely exempt from the health care rationing which her romantic starving artist will experience.  Because re-arranging wealth is far more noble than creating wealth, so bureaucrats deserve better treatment.

And then it will all fall apart, as in Greece and, barring a federal bailout from better-run states, California. But maybe art can console us.  If we do better than the Europeans in that department.

 Another point by Kenneth Anderson from the link above, concerning the EU's current problems with the financial crisis in Greece:

. . . These European leaders know better than anyone on the planet how the shift to their domestic social model implies geopolitical decline. So they have no doubt as to where Obama is taking the US in foreign affairs. . .

The post linked above makes reference to a second post on the reasons developed for forming the European Union in the first place:

. . . the Obama administration’s pooh-bahs seem to have written off Europe as the past, Asia is the future. The irony is that it is precisely on account of striving so desperately, so mightily, to become a Western European democratic socialist state that the Obama administration feels no need any longer to look to Europe. It has already priced-in internally anything of ideological value Europe might have to offer, on account of the transformations under way in the US. We’ve now got — thanks to the decension of Bush and the inclension of Obama –anything of value Europe might offer in the way of values, so why pay attention to those losers? . . .

Of course, the one missing piece of that puzzle is how it is that Europe went into decline, and whether that lesson for the US has been priced-in ....

I wonder how the European art scene will change when Europeans start to internalize the possibility that America will not longer be paying for Europe's military defense? The Russian Bear is stirring. And the Islamists are on the rise.

 Any chance of a return to "hard" totalitarianism in Europe in response? It's been less than a century.  Anti-semitism is on the rise again . . .

Do you know any Bolsheviks?

Back in January, President Obama surprised the Republicans by insisting that their meeting be on C-Span (unlike the healthcare debate, which he had promised would be on C-Span), He tried, quite successfully, to make Republicans seem unreasonable and ultra-partisan by saying that they reacted to the Health Care Bill like it was a "Bolshevik Plot". He characterized the plan as "pretty centrist". Hmmmm.

There aren't any Bolsheviks anymore. But I think you could characterize the Democrats' plan as a "Statist Plot", given the way the Democrats tried to rush it through with no debate or scrutiny, given the special deals for Democratic constituents, given that they seem to be willing to sacrifice their majority in 2010, given that they at one point inserted language to make certain parts of the bill irreversible by future congresses, and given that President Obama and other Democrats have stated that they intend for this plan to lead to a single-payer system. (Follow the links here).

Lenin said,

Socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state.

Mark Steyn said,

Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever-expanding number of government jobs will be statists – sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily "compassionate" statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war welfare state is that you don't need a president-for-life if you've got a bureaucracy-for-life: The people can elect "conservatives," as the Germans have done and the British are about to do, and the Left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who, for tuppence-ha'penny or some such, would agree to go and warm the seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects strolled in and took their rightful place.

I saw the video clip of the President dressing down the Republicans, which had been put on YouTube by the big Lefty blog "Talking Points Memo", at a link which presented additional evidence that the "Coffee Party Organizers" were more than just beginners at political action (as they had been represented by themselves and by the press). Some of them had clear Marxist leanings. This crowd was probably not as happy with some of the videos from the "health care summit".

There is no "Bolshevik plot". President Obama had many Marxist influences during his formative years, and he has appointed a few people with strong Marxist leanings. But they are not "Bolshviks". And most of the Democrats pushing this bill are not Marxists, even though many admire some of the principles which Marx advanced. The sleazy, devious, desperate and sometimes whacky tactics used to pass the various versions of this bill are a testament to the fact that it is not "centrist". The Democrats could not pass it with a filibuster-proof Congress. The Republicans were totally beside the point until Scott Brown was elected. They were not, at certain points, even expected to know what was in the bill before voting on it (the same was true for some Democrats).

Are you getting a better feeling for how the President manipulates language to divert attention from reality? No wonder his approval ratings have fallen so fast.

Despite the collusion of the mainstream Media. Ed Morrissey:

Yesterday I spoke at the Kill the Bill Rally staged by Minnesota Majority at the state capital. The event drew thousands of people, which makes them about 100 times more newsworthy than the “coffee party” gatherings that drew tens of people … three tens of people in St. Louis, for instance, which garnered CNN’s attention. I didn’t see CNN at our little get-together, but perhaps the cold weather and bitter wind deterred them from covering our grassroots event. It didn’t deter thousands of Minnesotans from joining our call to kill the ObamaCare bill and start over from scratch on reforming the cost structure of American health care. . . .

I’m amazed at the hubris of these politicians and their elite group of allies in Washington DC. Perhaps in early 2009, after that big election win the previous November, they had an excuse to assume that they had a mandate for a radically statist agenda, one that sought to make the most private of decisions subject to government oversight – the choices we make for our own health. Since last summer, though, they have no excuses. . .

However, even in the November elections, Obama and the vast majority of Democrats who won DID NOT run on the radical statist agenda which they are now attempting to impose on us. So they had no excuses even in January, 2009 for their statist push to pre-cripple future generations (Mark Steyn's colorful characterization).

A "non-believer's" objections to same-sex marriage

Heather MacDonald, who describes herself as a non-believer, says:

The facile libertarian argument that gay marriage is a trivial matter that affects only the parties involved is astoundingly blind to the complexity of human institutions and to the web of sometimes imperceptible meanings and practices that compose them. Equally specious is the central theme in attorney Theodore Olson’s legal challenge to California’s Proposition 8: that only religious belief or animus towards gays could explain someone’s hesitation regarding gay marriage. Anyone with the slightest appreciation for the Burkean understanding of tradition will feel the disquieting burden of his ignorance in this massive act of social reengineering, even if he ultimately decides that the benefits to gays from gay marriage outweigh the risks of the unknown.

At the link:

. . . When a heterosexual couple or single woman (and occasional single man) makes use of someone else’s sex organs, biology is severed from parental responsibility no less than when a homosexual couple engages in that process.

This division of genetic and parental responsibility has been present throughout human history, of course. Orphans and abandoned children are raised by non-biological adoptive parents; divorce alienates one biological parent from the child’s household and sometimes replaces that parent with another adult. But these arrangements were considered outliers to the normal practice of conceiving and raising children, forced on the parties by sad necessity. However felicitous and loving a new family arrangement turned out to be, it did not challenge the understanding that the ideal route to a family was the shared conception of a child by a married man and woman. Likewise, the use of fertility techniques by heterosexual couples is still regarded as an exception to ordinary conception and child-rearing, and may not even be perceptible to outsiders. By contrast, every gay (and single-parent) conception by definition entails an absent parent; it is a visible affirmation of the social acceptability of severing genetic contribution from parenting. Every gay couple and never-married single parent raising a child trigger the same potential question as the couple in the “Family Values” ad: “Where’s the mother (or father)?”

A large number of people will respond: “Why does it matter?” . . .

The main answer to the “Why does it matter?” question is this: The institutionalized severing of biology from parenthood affirms a growing trend in our society, that of men abandoning their biological children. Too many men now act like sperm donors: they conceive a children then largely disappear, becoming at best intermittent presences in their children’s lives. This phenomenon is increasingly common among the less educated, and dominates in the black community. Too many children — including the great majority of black children and large numbers of children of struggling working-class mothers — are now raised in single-parent homes; many do not even know who their fathers are. The negative consequences of this family breakdown for children include higher rates of school failure and lack of socialization. Moreover, in a culture where men are not expected to raise their children, boys fail to learn the most basic lesson of personal responsibility and self-discipline.

If parental status is a matter of intent, however, not of genes, absent fathers can say: “I never intended to take on the role of that child’s parent; therefore I’m not morally bound to act as a parent.”

. . . gay parenting creates a single-sex home as a matter of deliberate engineering, not accident or unforeseen chance.) The sole argument potentially remaining for persuading fathers that they should raise their chidren — that children need two parents in the home — is easily disposed of: My baby momma is living with her mother.

There's more. Read the whole thing.

Family breakdown in the inner city and the phenomena of almost fatherless communities, leading to fatherless children killing each other are not "gay issues". And the increased risk of child abuse where children are not living with both biological parents has not (to this point) been closely linked to family issues in the gay community (data on gay parenting are limited in this regard).

But the devastating social problems found in neighborhoods without many fathers are indications of the fragility of civil society. Marriage is the primary social institution through which the larger society reinforces the idea that "manliness" encompasses developing the skills and values necessary for men to become full-time, committed "family men" and fathers. The young men in the inner city who are abandoning their children typically have a much different idea of what "manliness" entails. One which does not place much value on "women as people".  Bitch.

Compare to "The Magnificent Seven" (1960, when fatherhood was just starting to be devalued):

Don´t ever say that again about your fathers. They are not cowards!

You think l am brave because l carry a gun. Your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility for you, your brothers, your sisters and your mothers.

This responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. lt bends and it twists them until finally it buries them under the ground.

Nobody says they have to do it. They do it because they love you and they want to.

l have never had this kind of courage. Running a farm, working like a mule, with no guarantee what will become of it – this is bravery. That´s why l never even started anything like that. That’s why l never will.

The young people in Chicago's South Side are choosing markers of manliness other than family responsibilities. Re-defining marriage in a way which will reinforce the idea that "sperm donor" is a standard, desirable family role for men does not help the situation in the inner cities of America. I am sad for all the little kids in our low-income community who live in chaotic, ever-shifting family situations. While a minority of the parents of young school-age kids here are married to each other, most of the kids in our little town differ from the totally fatherless kids more prevalent in the inner city because they usually know the identity of their fathers. And many of those in fatherless homes (at least by my observation) sometimes see their fathers -- often when Dad wants to show off his kids to his "homies".

But Dad does not really act like a Dad.   I cringe when I hear one of these visiting "baby daddies" and his "homies" listening to the most vile, nihilistic, misogynistic kinds of music from the warped inner city culture in the presence of their young children. It appears to me that these children are not the highest priority of many idealistic social engineers.

I have also heard of one child in town who is being raised by a lesbian couple. Perhaps re-defining marriage so that they could have their relationship legally recognized as marriage would satisfy their understandable desire to feel like they are not significantly different, as parents, from a Mom and a Dad.

And perhaps this would, someday, somehow, make up for the damage to the lives of the children "fathered" by the far larger number of current and future "sperm donor" dads whose "baby mommas" are, or will be, living with their child's Grandma or Auntie, or with a succession of friends and relatives or with a new boyfriend. These dads would have the perfect justification for steering clear of the difficult, "two-person" job of raising a child. Preferably, a "two-woman" job. Because, you know, women are better with kids. Some American and British feminists, along with a prominent strain of socialist thought, support the concepts of "sperm donor dads" and families led by women as ideal, as long as the sperm donors participate in paying the bills.

Maybe "mainstreaming" the idea of sperm-donor dads will be good for kids in general. But I don't think so. History is on my side. And historically, there has never been a successful culture which featured gay marriage. Even in cultures where homosexuality and bisexuality were thought of highly. The idea that same-sex marriage would inspire straight couples to marry has not worked out in European countries which have legalized same-sex marriage (except for, in a couple of cases, a short-term uptick in marriage among older couples). And same-sex marriage has not even been particularly popular among same-sex couples where it is legal.

Do you favor legal recognition of same-sex marriage? Are you willing to accept the probable consequence of promoting more of this kind of thing in order to be fair to same-sex couples who want marriage re-defined in a way which will reinforce the idea that there is nothing particularly desirable about kids having a mother and a father? Are you willing to take a little responsibility for inadvertently helping to perpetuate inner city violence in almost-fatherless communities? What about the increased incidence of child abuse faced by children without both biological parents in the home (with the possible exception of same-sex households, about which we have no significant, controlled data)?

Do you think that "social programs" can make up for redefining marriage to support the idea that fathers are optional? Do you believe that eliminating differences in the behavior of men and women is the ideal? How would this intellectual position translate to real life in the inner city?

Many liberal educators (and the people they had educated) were shocked a few years ago when science destroyed the concept that gender is simply a "social construct", by demonstrating significant differences in the brains of men and women.  This led to the shocking headline on TIME magazine cover that Men and Women are Different.  Academics in the social sciences still haven't quite adjusted their  political theories in light of this information.  But the idea of gender as a "social construct" never really caught on in the inner city.  Do you think that legalization of same-sex marriage will lead men and women to act more like each other in these neighborhoods, or to more sexually polarized behavior?

Do you think that young gang-bangers (who probably turned to gangs for social networking because they didn't have an involved father) can be made to understand that the "sperm-donor" role is only a good thing for gay parents -- not for them? Will they understand that Candidate Obama's message that an absent father leaves a "hole in the heart" of his child only applies to guys like them?

Do you have any solid data to back up your dreams that re-defining marriage to include same-sex couples would benefit society more than it would hurt society over a period of decades? Or do you think that laws should always be made primarily on the basis of promoting "equality" without regard to necessity, utility, efficacy or collateral damage to innocent parties, like children? How, exactly, would you explain your intellectual views on the interchangeability of mothers and fathers to these kids? Or to their absent fathers?

Finding out what is in the Health Care Bill will be exciting

Nancy Pelosi realizes that you may be against the Health Care Bill now,

But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it

She's also jazzed about the prospect of all those compassionate Democrats in Congress and the federal bureaucracy controlling what you are allowed to eat:

Prevention, prevention, prevention—it’s about diet, not diabetes. It’s going to be very, very exciting.

Personally, I prefer to leave control of the citizenry's diet to State and Local Governments. Because, like an over-diversified mega-corporation, the more things the Federal Government tries to do, the fewer things it does well. The difference is that an over-diversified, ineffective corporation must generally restructure or fail in the marketplace. But an over-diversified, ineffective government can limp along for decades because it can use police force to extract money from the citizenry. And then, suddenly, you get a disaster like Greece.

Incidentally, the claims that preventative medicine in the form of increased diagnostic testing, etc., will lower health care costs have been soundly refuted. So if Pelosi really believes she can lower health care costs through prevention, it will have to be through federal controls on the lifestyles of the citizenry, as she suggests above. Because we wouldn't want citizens learning how to take on adult responsibilities themselves. The more people become dependent on the government, the better it is for the Party of Big Government.

Close Enough for Government Work

Matt Welch gives us a few too many facts about the differences between President Obama's words and reality.  Read the whole thing.  How can we POSSIBLY believe now that all Mr. Obama and Ms. Pelosi would have to do to convince us that the Democrats' health care plan is great would be to explain the bill better.  The Democratic leadership in Congress helped set the President up for the big fall in his approval ratings:

Take the issue he has explained more than any other: health care. In the State of the Union address, Obama claimed that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had estimated that “our approach” to health care reform “would bring down the deficit by as much as $1 trillion over the next two decades.” This is, strictly speaking, not true. The Democrats’ “approach” to health care reform includes a permanent change to the Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors, colloquially known as the “doc fix.” The CBO estimated that the doc fix, when combined with the health care reform legislative package, actually “would increase the budget deficit in 2019 by $23 billion relative to current law, an increment that would grow in subsequent years.” This is why House Democrats stripped out the doc fix from the health care bill, and passed it separately; it made the CBO scores look bad, making it harder for the president to present bogus claims about deficit neutrality.

That bit of mendacity only scratches the surface of how Congress and the administration gamed the system to produce nice-looking numbers. The CBO, by its own rules, has to take Congress at its word when a piece of legislation promises unspecified future “cuts” in spending, even though an overwhelming majority of promised future cuts never come to pass (a fact that the CBO itself has repeatedly warned in supplementary comments). The Senate promised more than $300 billion in such cuts. Furthermore, the CBO scores bills in 10-year windows. So the Senate delayed more than 99 percent of the reform package’s spending until 2014, thus allowing the decade of 2010–2019 to clock in under the magic $1 trillion number. Add to all that chicanery the fact that every major health care entitlement expansion in U.S. history has vastly exceeded initial cost projections, and you have ample reasons for why Americans believed, by a margin of more than 3 to 1, that health care reform would exacerbate rather than improve the deficit.

Glenn Reynolds:

It’s funny — all he had to do to be a success was to live up to the kind of Presidency he promised. But he didn’t, and it appears that he couldn’t. 

Reader comment:

The best example of this is health insurance mandates. The President defeated Hillary Clinton for the nomination of his party by telling Americans that it was wrong to require people to purchase insurance. Now, as President, he is trying to force people to purchase health insurance. And threatening IRS audits and fines. And he claims to not understand the opposition to this proposal.

Welch again:

(Bill) Clinton’s reptilian relationship with the truth, suffused as it always has been with a catch-me-if-you-can sense of personal preservation, actually turned out to have some uses for the nation when he changed course after the 1994 Republican revolution and began co-opting some of the limited-government policies proposed by his opponents. It’s easier for a chameleon to change his spots.

Obama’s dishonesty, by contrast, seems to spring from a different place. As a man who has spent most of his career wowing people with his words and very little of it converting those words into deeds, he has an activist’s gap between rhetoric and reality and a radio broadcaster’s promiscuous carelessness with cutting rhetorical corners. . . .

But there’s a less charitable explanation too. . .

I wonder how close the experience of being President is to Mr. Obama's expectations? He's started talking about how he'd rather be a great one-term President than a mediocre two-term President. Like Stephen Green says, Being President is hard.

How to Reform Health Care without Killing Innovation

Glenn Reynolds links kidney donor and breast cancer survivor Virginia Postrel.

. . . most of the things that drive people crazy, like dealing with insurance companies, are also true of Medicare. . .

FUN FACT: Medicare denies a higher percentage of claims than ANY major American insurance company.

Professor Reynolds also links his own piece on hiddent costs of nationalized health care.

Bill Whittle: "Imperishable"

An elegant, brilliantly thought-out essay.   I'm partial to essays, and this is one of the most effective I've read recently.

Maybe you can get through it without feeling your eyes tear up.  I couldn't. Whittle takes us with him as he visits some famous sites in Washington D.C. He describes some of his emotions and thoughts at each site before bringing everything together in his conclusion. The video is here if you don't wait too long (or if you subscribe to the archives). You might want to watch the video before reading the text.  It is one of Whittle's best. I saw it before I read the essay. But I like the print version, even though there are a couple of typos - repeated words mostly - probably reflecting the difficulty inherent in transcribing from a video.

This essay would be a wonderful subject for study by high school and college students, and even for some younger students. Especially the ones who don't really understand the difference between the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, or the importance of the latter:

Many of us talk a lot about the Constitution these days, but I don’t want to talk about the Constitution – I want to talk about the Declaration. The Constitution is the “how” of America, but the declaration is the “why.” . .

When Abraham Lincoln . . . wrote that We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth he was talking about the Declaration. . .

Well worth your time, and the time of family members and friends. You might even want to follow his advice for helping to make the Declaration "live" again.

Obamacare: Worth the Price of the 2010 Election

Mark Steyn, with more on the President's unseemly push for the Democratic health care bill, even at the likely cost of the 2010 election:

So there was President Obama, giving his bazillionth speech on health care, droning yet again that "now is the hour when we must seize the moment," the same moment he's been seizing every day of the week for the past year . . .

Why is he doing this? Why let "health" "care" "reform" stagger on like the rotting husk in a low-grade creature feature who refuses to stay dead no matter how many stakes you pound through his chest?

Because it's worth it. Big time. I've been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible.  . . 

The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.

 Republicans seem to have difficulty grasping this basic dynamic. . .  .  The Democrats understand that politics is not just about Tuesday evenings every other November, but about everything else, too. . . 

 Nobody has ever attempted this level of centralized planning for an advanced society of 300 million people. Even the control-freaks of the European Union have never tried to impose a unitary "comprehensive" health care system from Galway to Greece. The Soviet Union did, of course, and we know how that worked out. . . 

. . . Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., justifies her support for Obamacare this way:

"I even had one constituent – you will not believe this, and I know you won't, but it's true – her sister died. This poor woman had no dentures. She wore her dead sister's teeth."

Is the problem of second-hand teeth a particular problem in this corner of New York? I haven't noticed an epidemic of ill-fitting dentures on recent visits to the Empire State. . . Yet, even granting Congresswoman Slaughter the benefit of the doubt, is annexing the equivalent of a G7 economy the solution to what would seem to be the statistically unrepresentative problem of her constituent's ill-fitting choppers? Is it worth reducing the next generation of Americans to indentured servitude to pay for this poor New Yorker's dentured servitude?

Yes. Because government health care is not about health care, it's about government. Once you look at it that way, what the Dems are doing makes perfect sense. For them.

Read the whole thing. It's full of great examples.  Think about it. Then, you might want to consider this piece on the Consent of the Governed (and what to do when it is ignored) again. And this video. The best points are at the end.

By the way: Ezra Klein pretty much admits that Steyn is right. though he wishes the shift to the left went further.

The great mystery of the health care debate is why liberals, who don't trust doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies or insurers, trust Congress and federal bureaucrats.

 Darleen suggests that a new ObamaPress bill might be in order to regulate Mr. Klein's business.  Of course, Campaign Finance laws have been passed to impose stringent regulations of this type for non-journalists (though a recent Supreme Court ruling has recently negated some of these regulations).  And the Democrats are considering something along these lines for journalists, too.   Sean Penn has something even more dramatic in mind for regulating journalists.  Totalitarianism IS tempting.

 I'm waiting for price controls on attorney's fees. At least there would be SOME constitutional basis for this. What with all the bright young college kids who will be going into law instead of medicine, SOMETHING will have to be done.

Black Swans and the Power of Narrative: World War I

Today's second "deep thought" post:

Seizing the Opportunity to Destroy Western Civilization

Fascinating, detailed piece on how World War I started. History sometimes moves on small hinges. Sometimes earth-shaking events even start in the thoughts in one person's mind.

The Five Varieties of Bad Political Thinking

Today's first "deep thought" post. Are YOU prone to falling into any of these thought modes?  Most of us are probably attracted to one or another of these currently-popular approaches to politics.  The trick is to recognize this fact and to open our minds to other ways of thinking.

One of the "varieties of bad political thought"  is Moral Equivalence.

Especially fashionable on the left, this mode of political thought assumes that it is the height of dialectical brilliance to subvert a democratic government’s logic by “comparing” it to that of its totalitarian enemy.

Another is Triumphal Manicheanism, typified (in the author' view) by some fans of Glenn Beck.   Beck's self-described "rodeo clown" schtick is sometimes disconcerting to me, but at least he recognizes that he is being dramatic.   Not being much of a TV watcher, I usually only see him in video clips presented by those who agree with some point he is making, or by someone making fun of him.  Sometimes Beck makes very well-documented, stunningly sensible observations which no one else seems to make.  But these come as a package with  (to me), some embarrassingly weird dramatic efforts.

I hope that most people see much of his presentation style as "acting".   I am never sure whether to expect something brilliant or something jarringly silly, like Beck staring strangely into the camera.  Maybe this unpredictability is one reason people watch or listen to him.  Or maybe some of the more clownish  aspects of his presentation are intended to drive the sophisticated Left wild with contempt, leading Beck's admirers to defend him in turn.   Mark Levin (who himself probably seems more reasonable in print than on the radio) and other conservatives are worried about Beck's influence. And there's this, too:

(the triumphal Manichean) traffics in either/or dichotomies of political thought, believing that everything his own government or society does is right and all those who criticize it—even from within—are radical communists. This may be because the triumphal Manichean once was one himself. Indeed, the trajectory from left to right is typically charted by those with every intention of changing the substance but not the style of their ideology. . .

However, some in the left-leaning mainstream media are in full-blown, seemingly delusional paranoia about Beck, particularly given their lack of similar concern over the ACTUAL VIOLENCE coming from the political left RIGHT NOW. This seems to fall into another of the author's categories of current "bad political thinking":   Hysterical Conspiracism.

Andrew Sullivan is analyzed by the author as having moved from "Triumphal Manicheanism" to "Hysterical Conspiracism".   His creepy, "not-reality-based" obsession with Sarah Palin's children, the recent disclosure that he had been using "ghost bloggers" and the decline in the rationality  of his work makes me wonder why he is kept on board at The Atlantic. He's pretty whacky concerning THE JEWS, too.

The other two current trends in "bad political thinking" identified by the author are Tragic Manicheanism (very popular with the academic crowd) and Charismatic Authoritarianism (currently popular in many countries). The author's examples are good ones.

Obama's Health Care Speech - with translator. UPDATED

Cartoon by the great Michael Ramirez. Click on image to enlarge.

UPDATE:  People are really upset by the "profound dishonesty" of this speech. Language alert on the secondary Ace link.

Still More: Saturday Night Live - Obama's take on Harry Reid's sacrifice: Health Care Bill is "ANGRY-MOB UNPOPULAR" in Reid's district. Oh, well.

“health care” is the fast-track to a permanent left-of-center political culture.

So it's worth it to the Democrats to lose a few elections.

Glenn Reynolds on "The consent of the governed - and the lack thereof.

. . . . Even among the rulers, only 63 percent -- triple the fraction of the general populace but still less than two-thirds of the political class -- regard the federal government as legitimate by the standards of America's founding document. The remainder, presumably, are comfortable being tyrants.

These numbers should raise deep worries about the future of our republic. A nation whose government does not rest on the consent of the governed is a nation whose government holds sway only by inertia, or by force. . .

But we've had enough political drama in recent years, so I'll go for a more prosaic comparison: The once-heady brew of American freedom has become watery and unsatisfying.

In fact, when I think of the federal government's brand now, I think of Schlitz beer. Schlitz was once a top national brew. But, in search of short-term gains, it began gradually reducing its quality in tiny increments to save money, substituting cheaper malt, fewer hops and "accelerated" brewing for its traditional approach.

Each incremental decline was imperceptible to consumers, but after a few years, people suddenly noticed that the beer was no good anymore. . . .

The federal government, alas, finds itself in much the same position. The political class sold its legitimacy off in drips and drabs. As "smart politics" has come over the past decades to mean not persuasion but the practice of legerdemain, the use of political deals, cover from a friendly press apparat and taking advantage of voters' rational ignorance, the governing classes have managed to achieve things that would surely have failed had the people known what was going on.

But though each little trick may have slipped by the voters, the voters have nonetheless noticed that the ultimate product isn't what it used to be. The end result, as with Schlitz, is a tarnished brand. And rescuing tarnished brands is hard.

It gets worse. . . .

In the past, America has managed to reinvent itself without transformations as wrenching as the Civil War or the Revolution. As the legitimacy of our current arrangements becomes increasingly threadbare, it is perhaps worth thinking about how this might be accomplished again. Because when a great beer dies, it's sad. But when a great nation dies, it's tragic.

Read the whole thing.

Tea Parties, Coffee Parties, Cocoa Parties, New York Times

First came the grassroots political movement known as the Tea Party movement.

Then came another grassroots organization, the Coffee Party movement, characterized by its founder as "reality-based" rather than "fear-based". Jim Treacher:

Look out, all you crazy, racist, teabaggin’ Tea Partiers. There’s a new brew in town, and it’s full of beans! Or something. . .  

Much like the Tea Party movement, this is of course an entirely spontaneous response to massive expansion of government power. Except this time, according to coffeepartyusa.org:

The Coffee Party Movement gives voice to Americans who want to see cooperation in government. We recognize that the federal government is not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will, and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address the challenges that we face as Americans.

Got it? The federal government is the expression of our collective will. Just like it was throughout the Bush administration. Right? Hello? . .

Read the whole thing. Heh.

NOW comes the Cocoa Party movement:

Tired of the Coffee Party and the Tea Party? We’re the newest game in town!

I woke up this morning and realized I didn’t want tea or coffee. I wanted hot cocoa!

So I turned on my computer and in a few minutes founded a new political movement — The Cocoa Party!

Yes, it was that simple.

Then I got one of my friends at the newspaper where I used to work to violate all professional journalistic ethics by writing a puff-piece about me without revealing that I used to work there. Thanks!

Also, thanks for not mentioning that I used to really really really like Kool-Aid.

Now, in between fielding 100 emails an hour from new members wanting to start chapters from Wasilla to Waco, Twittering 17 witty tweets per minute, fielding calls from TV producers and journalists, and weeping with joy and sincerity about our wonderful country, I barely have time to consider that I’ve just revolutionized politics — all before lunch!

But enough about me. This is about The Cocoa Party! . . . 

Astroturfing:  It's what the Left accuses the Right of doing to divert attention from its own astroturfing.  The Left constantly accuses the Right of using the tactics it intends to use itself.

Fun Facts:

The Coffee Party Movement was started by Annabel Park, an average citizen whose first listed work experience was as a "Strategy Analyst" at the New York Times, 12 years after she started her BA at Boston University and two years before she finished it. Before finishing her BA in Boston, she was a D. Phil Candidate for three years at Oxford. More recently, she produced videos for the Obama Campaign.

The NYT reporter who wrote the puff piece on the Coffee Party movement, and who has declined to amend her piece to reveal Ms. Park's connection to the Obama campaign or her former employment at the NYT, is Kate Zernike, recently in the news for her bizarre, bigoted characterization of a CPAC speaker as playing to racial stereotypes because he has a Brooklyn accent. Challenge unaccepted: “Identify with time stamps where Mattera uses the ‘Chris Rock voice.’”

Being a New York Times reporter means never having to say you're sorry.

UPDATE: All the favorable, if questionable PR from the New York Times doesn't seem to be making the Coffee Party into a movement.

Oops: Another hidden resume for a Coffee Party organizer: John Edwards MO campaign organizer.