Progressive Comedy on the Brink

Dennis Kucinich reaches into American History to describe America on the brink of the fiscal cliff:

The Anasazi were Native Americans whose culture dated back 2,000 years. They were the cliff dwellers who built into the sheer walls of canyons extraordinary places to live. Yet, in 1300 A.D., these cliff dwellers, these great architects of culture and civilization,
mysteriously disappeared. 

 The people of this great Nation, the United States of America, are dwelling on real cliffs of fiscal insecurity: the cliffs of joblessness and low wages; the cliffs of mortgage foreclosure, homelessness; the cliffs of retirement insecurity; the cliffs of small business failure and investor uncertainty; the cliffs of violence at home and war abroad. 

 At a time when the government should be demonstrating its capacity to meet the practical aspirations of the American people for jobs, education, health care, and retirement security, the government instead would have America dwell at the edge of a fiscal cliff in a manufactured crisis to manufacture consent for a deal that would otherwise be unacceptable. 

 Leaders of both parties would do well to remember that the original cliff dwellers, as great as they were, disappeared.

 Meanwhile, Sheila Jackson Lee finds her wisdom on a coffee cup, in a bag of potato chips, and on an AARP card:

I think it is enormously important that, as Starbucks said, we ``come together.'' And we can do so. We can do it in a rationality that takes a simple analysis. A simple analysis says that if I like a bag of potato chips, that's a luxury item, I can run in and get it. I don't have to think about it. Its cost is manageable. If I want to go in and get a high-end Cadillac, I'll think about it for a couple of days. 

 That should be the thought process for this fiscal cliff. Pass the $250,000 that will give 99 percent of Americans a tax break. Protect hose who are unemployed who have worked and provide for their unemployment insurance. Protect those with the AMT--30 million taxpayers will fall over the cliff if we don't fix that, 222,000  Texans. And then if we have to deal with looking at how we address the question of reforming those benefits of Americans who work like Medicare and Social Security, we can do so. But I join the AARP, I join senior citizens: Leave Social Security alone. The changed CPI will not
work, and that is not a time to deal with it in these waning hours. 

 We, Republicans, created this quagmire with the sequestration. We need to go and be able to address the immediacy. Get your bag of potato chips, cut the taxes for 99 percent of the American people and protect the unemployed. 

 One takes the humor where one can. Because the cliff is here, we are going over, and men and women of good will seem unable to win their points in Washington. Because the GOP recognizes spending is an issue -- but can't seem to accept that if there is to be sacrifice, a Democracy is going to require that it be shared. And the Democrats, in their Progressive bleeding hearts, think that they can always find revenue to fund their spending, so why stop spending?

There's not good cheer for this moderate today. Think I'll spike the egg nog and down a few...

The Newspaper of Record Ignores The News

The New York Times runs another episode in its carefully constructed sitcom, "That Darn Congress".  It begins it with a tried and sometimes true witticism:

Senators bid hasty goodbyes to families, donned ties and pantsuits in lieu of sweat pants and Christmas sweaters and one by one returned to the Capitol on Thursday to begin the business of doing nothing in particular.

 Har, har har. That kind of joke could have been uttered by Will Rogers while doing rope tricks at the Ziegfeld Follies back in Wilson's day. (If you don't get the reference, google it.) Problem is, the Senate was actually doing business yesterday that most people would consider important. Not that the NYT snark-meister noticed:

Amid the absurdity of an urgent, nonurgent holiday session, there was the odd hum of normalcy. Senators fulminated about espionage for hours on the Senate floor as they debated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Congressional aides wore their workday best as they sped through hallways, clutching their phones. Taco Thursday continued as it does each week in the small carryout restaurant where staff members collect lunches to be eaten at desks. Mr. Paul, as per usual, tussled with the leadership over one of his amendments.

What the NYT person missed was the "fulmination" over FISA was actually a fairly significant debate, as the rules that govern how foreign intelligence is gathered would have expired on December 31, had the Senate not acted. (Yes, there was a looming FISA cliff, as well as a Fiscal Cliff.) The debate dealt with some basic issues in our Democracy -- the reach of the 4th Amendment, the craptacular way Congress handles significant legislation (there was only one day to debate this bill, and no practical way to amend it, if the FISA cliff were to be avoided), Obama broken promises, and failures by the NSA and the FBI to provide reports required by the currently expiring version of FISA. You'd  think the New York Times would pay attention to the words of the like-minded Pat Leahy:

When Congress has authorized the use of expansive and powerful surveillance tools that have the potential to impact so significantly the constitutional rights of law-abiding
Americans, isn't this exactly the type of situation that calls for that sort of vigorous and independent oversight?

 But, I guess the NYT narrative of the moment demands snark, mockery, and, when it comes to the sort of civil rights issue that used to engage them, silence.

Christmas Iconography from the Democrats

My Congressman chooses to feature both the First and the Second black presidents in his Christmas card. Interesting that Lewis, who, with total historical accuracy could easily feature Martin Luther King in anything he does, instead chooses Clinton.

The Forgotten Oppressed

When the world thinks of oppressed peoples, it has a few favorite groups to be obsessed about. Palestinians. Women in the Muslim world. Followers of the Dali Lama. Maybe a tear or two gets shed for Egyptians who are also Liberals.

One group gets forgotten. Probably that group's members are like too much like many of us. They are Christians -- and Christians don't suffer too much here in the USA. But these Christians misfortune is that they live in the Middle East. Rep. Frank Wolf explains.

A phrase not often heard outside the majority Muslim world is ``First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.'' The `Saturday people'' are of course the Jews. Their once vibrant communities in countries throughout the region are now decimated. In 1948 there were roughly 150,000 Jews in many as 80,000 Jews and now less than 100 remain. It appears a similar fate could befall the ancient Christian community in these same lands. Iraq's Christian population has fallen from as many as 1.4 million in 2003 to between 500,000 and 700,000. Churches have been targeted, believers kidnapped for ransom, families threatened with violence if they stay. 

It's easy to denigrate the evangelical Christian community's concerns, because many of their prescriptions for America are ones that people of other faiths do not necessarily want to follow. But is is this the sort of thing we in America want to ignore?

 Shabbaz Bhatti, Pakistan's Federal Minister for Minority Affairs, and the only Christian Member of the cabinet and an outspoken critic of his country's blasphemy laws, was one such man. On March 2, 2011 he was murdered, his car riddled with bullets, leaving his mother's house for work. In a video filmed shortly before his assassination, Bhatti appears to sense that the path he has chosen will come with a price. When asked about the threats against his life, he said, without malice or fear, ``I believe in Jesus Christ who has given his own life for us. I know what is the meaning of [the] cross. And I am following the cross. And I am ready to die for a cause.'' And so he did. 

 Apparently, with respect to this Administration, the answer is yes:

Bipartisan legislation to create a Special Envoy position at the State Department charged with advocating on behalf of religious minorities in the Middle East and South Central Asia overwhelmingly passed the House a year and a half ago. But it has remained stalled in the Senate as a result of State Department opposition and the refusal of Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry, rumored to be in the running for Secretary of State or Defense, to even hold a hearing on the legislation. 

Will the Church community speak out on this? Will the government hear?

The book of Proverbs tells us to ``Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves. . . .'' Bhatti can no longer speak. The Chinese bishop under house arrest cannot speak. The North Korean enslaved in the gulag cannot speak. The Iraqi nun fearing for her life cannot speak. Will we be their voice? Martin Luther King famously said, ``In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.'' Are we not their friends?
 

After a very bitter election, I fear much of the evangelical community is inclined to turn inward, lick their wounds, and not fight for anyone's liberty but their own. But if the Evangelicals are looking for the kind of fight where they might attract allies, rather than scare off those of different faiths, this might be a good place to start.

 

 

Chucky Schumer Hearts the Second Amendment

Chuck Schumer, in the course of a long dialog about various and diverse things (most requiring appropriations to be spent in New York), offered thoughts about the Second Amendment that sounded different than the usual leftish thoughts on the least leftist beloved portion of the Bill of Rights:

So we have to acknowledge that guns are a way of life and that the second amendment has a rightful place in the Constitution. We cannot interpret the first, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth amendments as broadly as possible and then say the second
amendment should be seen through a pinhole of militias, that it only affects militias. That is only fair. 

Now, since Schumer is a gun control advocate -- one wonders. How does he reconcile what he wants with the Constitution?

This is how:

Our colleagues on the pro gun side should admit another thing, and that is that no amendment is absolute. As important as the [Second Amendment] is, as constitutional, as enshrined as it is, no amendment is absolute. 

Take the first amendment. We can't falsely scream fire in a crowded theater. That creates such danger. That is an impingement on someone's first amendment rights. We have anti-child pornography laws. We should have them, but that too is a limitation on the first amendment. Even libel laws, in a pure first amendment world, you could say and defame
anything about anybody you wanted. We say no. That is a limitation on the first amendment. Well, just as there can be limitations on the first amendment, and yet the essence of the first amendment is preserved, the same should be true of the second amendment.  

To be a bit more specific, Schumer suggests:

I would argue that other changes--making it harder for mentally ill people to get guns or saying assault weapons are weapons of war and don't belong on our streets but belong on the battlefield--do not interfere with the enjoyment I experienced when I went hunting with Ben Nelson, nor with the right of a small shopowner in a bad neighborhood who feels he needs a gun or she needs a gun to protect themselves.

Schumer depicts himself as a man in search of the middle ground on this issue:

 There can be a way of moving forward in the middle, with the left admitting the second amendment is important and as much a part of the Constitution as the others, and with the right admitting that limitations on that amendment--as there are limitations on the first, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth--do not interfere with the fundamental right and, in fact, that no amendment can be absolute.

The fact is, the judicial system has gone through some painful contortions to get those "limitations", and some of those limitations have later embarrassed the nation.  Most of those limitations have arisen during some great national upset, much as the one we experienced on Friday.

Liberties are a dangerous thing to give up, even though there may be more argument pro on the issue of gun rights. It's nice that Schumer is actually addressing the issue, when typically Congress likes to forget about the Constitution while enacting whatever is on its mind. But my guess is that the right side of things will have a hard time believing that those on his side actually think:

It is only right the second amendment to the Constitution is there just as the others are and deserves respect and not an endless effort to chip away at it.

 

 

 

Obama Revealed

President Obama, in a fairly eloquent fashion, revealed his worldview last night:

This is our first task -- caring for our children. It’s our first job. If we don’t get that right, we don’t get anything right. That’s how, as a society, we will be judged.

 

And by that measure, can we truly say, as a nation, that we are meeting our obligations? Can we honestly say that we’re doing enough to keep our children -- all of them -- safe from harm? Can we claim, as a nation, that we’re all together there, letting them know that they are loved, and teaching them to love in return? Can we say that we’re truly doing enough to give all the children of this country the chance they deserve to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose?

 

I’ve been reflecting on this the last few days, and if we’re honest with ourselves, the answer is no. We’re not doing enough. And we will have to change.

 

There's a lot to unpack here. But here is Obama's second term in a nutshell:

• Government must care for, and be responsible for the children.
• The President has thought things over, and will now make society change.

When Obama talks about things related to family, he often becomes quite eloquent, and it is in these moments those of us who voted for him the first time round see glimpses of what we hoped we were getting. After four years of it, though, all I can see are the warning signs, and the implicit egotism of his statement that he has been a thinkin', and now this here country has gotta change to align itself to his way of thinkin'. Because, remember:

We can’t tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change. We will be told that the causes of such violence are complex, and that is true. No single law -- no set of laws can eliminate evil from the world, or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society.

 

But that can’t be an excuse for inaction. Surely, we can do better than this. If there is even one step we can take to save another child, or another parent, or another town, from the grief that has visited Tucson, and Aurora, and Oak Creek, and Newtown, and communities from Columbine to Blacksburg before that -- then surely we have an obligation to try.

 

And here, we have a very American version of Progressivism at work. Obama has been imbued with the spirit of Woodrow Wilson, who always knew best, and was driven to instruct the nation on its duties. Obama knows that laws must be passed, because when there is a problem in Society, there must be more Laws.  And in this, Obama falls prey to the illusion that the proper role of government is to remake society. Society remakes government, not the other way around.

It is probably best for the Country, if not for Obama, that the President will probably be surprised and disappointed on how Society responds to his ministrations.

 

 

A Rant on a Rant

Michael Walsh has a hissy fit in NRO's Corner about Mitt, Rockefeller Republicans (they still exist?), and the otherwise insufficiently Conservative who appear to be running the GOP House caucus these days. It serves as a handy compendium of how NOT to react to electoral defeat, and should be read in its totality as an example of a pundit allowing his id to run amok. But, like many a temper tantrum, it gives us a window into an unpleasant worldview. And that worldview is mostly about somebody else's unpleasant worldview:

The Romney fiasco should be the death knell of the Washington Generals approach to competing against the Democrats, and the whole lot of the Old Guard — starting with weepy John Boehner — should be tossed out and replaced with those who can distinguish between strategy and tactics and who understand that the only acceptable strategic outcome should be total victory over the modern Left and its alien, imported ideology. After all — that’s certainly the other side’s goal.
 

 Lest we think that Mr. Walsh is merely extrapolating some blogging lefty's twitter account into the Carefully Articulated Viewpoint of the Other, Walsh drags in some big names in European philosophy to demonstrate that the other side is motivated by Satan (or, at least, a bunch of Commies):

Of course, that depends on whether you see the current conflict as simply politics-as-usual, in which both sides share the same basic values and aspirations, and differ only in methods (the Boehner approach); or as a struggle between individualism and collectivism, which has been going on in Europe since Rousseau and his evil love child, Karl Marx, but is still relatively new to these shores. But extending the olive branch toward an opponent who’s not prepared to extend to you the slightest shred of moral or political legitimacy is suicidal.

 What Mr. Walsh does not mention, blinded as he is by the fact the modern Left finally won an election, is that both moral and political legitimacy has to be continuously earned, or it withers away. The Congressional Republicans, by their conduct since the first governmental shutdown, have done a good job of trashing it through a stupid impeachment, periodic government shutdowns, and a debt limit fight poorly understood by the public, until the credit downgrade, and reams of unsettling rhetoric in the style of Robspierre. Presidential Republicans gave us an oopsy-daisy war. The Republican Primaries gave us a cattle call of the comically unready, and Mitt Romney, who gives Mr. Walsh dyspepsia. Given this record, Mr. Walsh should worry less about the Left, and be concerned a to whether the American people are willing to concede to the GOP "the slightest shred of moral or political legitimacy"

Mr. Walsh is upset (as I am) by the end state of GOP fecklessness, though he blames those confounded Rockefeller Republicans (all one or two of them), rather than the people who need the blame. In his dismay, he cries:

The reason no one speaks for the GOP is that there’s nothing to speak for — no principles other than accommodation, and thus no message. 

 And that cry is nonsense. To many, the main principle of the the GOP for the last several years has been confrontation, and no underlying message behind it. Boehner is in his fix now because the GOP has allowed itself to appear pointlessly pugnacious time and time again.

That said, I do agree with Walsh's conclusion:

And until [the GOP gets a message], something at once fundamentally American and electrifyingly appealing, it’s not going to find its voice.

I have a feeling, however, that Walsh and I are not going to want the same message.