In my utter frustration with this current passing of this preposterous health-care bill, I came across some interesting articles that I thought I would share here. This guys has a TON of knowledge of political history, and the fact that all the “current” political ideas & arguments are not at all new, and have played out over & over & over … There’s that old saying by someone famous and intelligent — “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

March 22, 2010
We’ve Crossed the Rubicon
by Victor Davis Hanson
Pajamas Media

President Obama has crossed the Rubicon with the healthcare vote. The bill was not really about medicine; after all, a moderately priced, relatively small federal program could offer the poorer not now insured, presently not on Medicare or state programs like Medicaid or Medical, a basic medical plan.

We have no interest in stopping trial lawyers from milking the system for billions. And we don’t want to address in any meaningful way the individual’s responsibility in some cases (drink, drugs, violence, dangerous sex, bad diet, sloth, etc.) for costly and chronic health procedures.

No, instead, the bill was about assuming a massive portion of the private sector, hiring tens of thousands of loyal, compliant new employees, staffing new departments with new technocrats, and feeling wonderful that we “are leveling the playing field” and have achieved another Civil Rights landmark law. (NB: do the math: add higher state income taxes in most states; the new Clinton-era federal income tax rates to come; the proposed lifting of limits on income exposed to FICA taxes; and now new healthcare charges — and I think you can reach in some cases a bite of 65%to 70% of one’s income.)

So we are in revolutionary times in which the government will grow to assume everything from energy use to student loans, while abroad we are a revolutionary sort of power, eager to mend fences with Syria and Iran, more eager still to distance ourselves from old Western allies like Israel and Britain.

There won’t be any more soaring rhetoric from Obama about purple-state America, “reaching across the aisle,” or healing our wounds. That was so 2008. Instead, we are in the most partisan age since Vietnam, ushered into it by the self-acclaimed “non-partisan.” But how could it be anything else?

Partisanship All the Time, Everywhere

No, Obama has thrown down the gauntlet, and is trying to reify the sloganeering of the 1960s. He apparently reasons along the following lines: that centrist talk was campaign fluff; the voters fell for it, and now it’s his turn to remake America with 51% of the House and 44% of the people. Think Sweden, or, better, Greece as our model at home, and something like America as Brazil in matters of foreign policy. Apparently, Obama figures that people now may not like the present partisanship, but they didn’t like FDR at the time either. Yet whom do they associate their Social Security checks with? Hoover? Coolidge? Harding?

I don’t see why the ram-it-through, healthcare formula won’t be followed by similar strategies for blanket amnesty, cap and trade, and expansions of the state takeover of cars, banks, student loans, and energy.

Remember, all these will be packaged as “comprehensive” reform — comprehensive healthcare, comprehensive immigration, comprehensive energy, comprehensive monitoring of even the banal decisions we make. So what does comprehensive really mean, other than all of us are going to get even more official looking letters in the mail, advising us to fill out a form, pay a fine, and be warned that a new regulation or tax is on the way — followed by the usual state/federal representative’s newsletter bragging about some new entitlement that he “won” for us with our borrowed money?

The Logic of Statism

I expect a lot of the following in the next three years.

1) Them!: More Obama soaring speeches about some “historic” crisis that needs “comprehensive” solutions (e.g., more of “this is our moment” banalities). Those introductions will be followed by alternate praise of some heroic individual who lost her healthcare, struggled to unionize, breathed some sooty air, was deported while cooking the evening meal, etc. These gripping narratives will be mixed in with ‘Them!’ demagoguery (e.g., the healthcare industry, the big corporations, the polluters, the nativists and racists — all of “Them” are standing in the way of hope and change, and, together, yes, we can! defeat them. Oh yes, there is going to being even more sermonizing, and shriller human interest portraits about “Them” smashing poor five-year-old Billy Jones from Topeka who flew up to DC to find Harry Reid for “help”; or “Them” denying Herlinda Lopez from Fresno her college dreams, who then wrote a letter pleading to Michelle for assistance; or “Them” absolutely crushing the mother of Bobby Smith for no other reason than sheer greed, who then took the Greyhound to Nancy Pelosi’s office!

2) The Fedopus has far more than eight tentacles: More letters in the mail from more state and federal bureaucracies (both broke, and searching for billions of dollars for millions of workers who need to be paid). The official looking stationary letters will be advising us that there is a new fee, surcharge, rule, regulation, etc. — mostly in the context that we have already in some way violated something. (Expect in such writs to see your name misspelled, your address garbled, one letter canceling out the one of the prior month, and semi-threatening language demanding compliance. [Don’t dare call the government number since the U.S. can’t hire more competent answerers from India]). This last month, to name a few, I got IRS friendly reminders, State Board of Equalization new rules, federal agricultural surveys, county assessment questionnaires, and the Census. All in all, about 12 official letters came, and I expect more this month. (My favorites are all the county, state, and federal agricultural questionnaires that usually have a warning like, “Do not write ‘no change from last year!’”—meaning that, even though your vineyard hasn’t gone anywhere in the last twelve months, you must go through a zillion questions, marking “No” to things like “Do you have a billboard on your property?” or “Do you raise gaming horses?”

3) More Cynicism: The more Obama talks about the greedy and selfish in society who “take” from others, the more the public will understand that they are in fact the greedy in these crosshairs. Costly health problems that originate with obesity, smoking, alcoholism, unsafe sex, violence, law-breaking, etc. are really due to lack of scheduled office visits. One missed colonoscopy — not 50 extra pounds or 1000 Big Macs over the years — causes cancer. People always ache due to a dearth of medical advisors and outreach counselors — or the diet and prescription drugs pushed on the victim by the profit-mongering corporation. In other words, the old days of a kindly, but tiny government politely advising us about what not to do have now transmogrified into a brave new world in which there is no individual. Instead, there exists only collective responsibility — a creed that assumes those in rehab or on parole or fighting weight-induced diabetes were victims of a system in which those who did not engage in that sort of behavior were culpable in some way and should pony up. Best of all, the system assumes we are greedy, cruel, and selfish for writing things like the above.

4) Pelosism: In our brave new world, expect more of the lurid stories about the secretary of the Treasury not paying his FICA taxes. The multimillionaire Madame Speaker will spend more of the state’s millions on private jet travel as she lectures on carbon footprints and a culture of corruption. We will hear more about the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee hiding his income, or a member of the House Rules Committee bragging that, given the historic importance of healthcare, they are just making up the rules as they go along — and proud of it. Our guardian class has become the new French aristocracy at Versailles. They will rail about Citation jets for the CEO, and then fly federally-owned Gulfstreams; they will put us in Smart cars but limo in Yukons and Tahoes on “official business.” Our lifestyles will be as monitored as much as those who do the monitoring will not be at all.
5) Greedy and Not-So-Greedy Capitalists: And there are “bad” and “not so bad” capitalists too. The CEOs for GM are trying to help America out with green designs and fair wages — so unlike those at Ford and Toyota. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are the model execs, quite unlike the yokels who run Caterpillar and whine about healthcare. George Soros is not really a money speculator that ruins banks, but a transferer of capital to progressive causes. In every statist society, large corporations either resist or join. For the latter, the machinery of government reinvents them as part of the solution rather than the problem — in the way that Al Gore really doesn’t really guzzle electricity, or John Edwards never really lived in a mansion. The transition to a Ministry of Industry requires a Ministry of Truth. With the Obama media we are already half there.

6) The Race/Class/Gender Cult: This federal caring creed trumps all religion. We will hear thousands of homophobic, racist, sexist anecdotes (but not those from a Ruth Ginsberg, or Harry Reid, or Joe Biden) that remind us why the government must enforce diversity set-asides and affirmative actions, and fund new sociological studies proving why group X hates group Y, and why government bureau Z is fighting X on behalf of Y for all our benefit. We are in perpetual war with perpetual ologies and –isms and we need far more Van Joneses to win them!

I understand the reasoning behind Obamism and am familiar with the feel-good, this-is-our-moment rhetoric of egalitarianism. But please at least spare us the fictions and simply be honest: Obama wants a state-run America, somewhere to the left of France or Denmark, a United States unexceptional and merely one of many nations at the UN. This vision follows an existing, decades-long encroachment of government. And it requires all sorts of highly credentialed overseers monitoring and at times justifiably attacking the upper middle class for its deplorable treatment of those below it.

This new America is ultimately predicated on the notion that we were born equal and must die absolutely equal as well. And this is entirely within our grasp, if we just understand that individual responsibility, talent, natural endowment, chance, merit, luck, tragedy, and a dozen other variables far too complex for government to imagine, much less solve, in fact, are not the real obstacles to ensuring equality.

Instead, it is simpler than that: greed, selfishness, racism, sexism, classism, and not niceness on the part of a few really are the culprits. Thank God that a few rare souls like Obama fathom that. And thank God, again, that it will take a singular humanitarian and genius like Obama to make us denser folks see it and do something about it.

That’s about where we are.

Subscript: Do Democrats realize that we really have crossed the Rubicon? In the future when the Republicans gain majorities (and they will), the liberal modus operandi will be the model — bare 51% majorities, reconciliation, the nuclear option, talk of deem and pass, not a single Democrat vote — all ends justifying the means in order to radically restructure vast swaths of American economic and social life. Is someone unhinged at the DNC? They just blew up any shred of bipartisan consensus when their President polls below 50%, the Democratically-controlled Congress below 20%, and healthcare reform less than 50%. Usually unpopular leaders and their unpopular ideas seek the shelter of minority rights and prerogatives. What will they do when they are in the minority — since they’ve entered the arena, boasted “let the games begin” and shouted “by any means necessary”?

©2010 Victor Davis Hanson

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February 28, 2010
Obama Fatigue
by Victor Davis Hanson
Pajamas Media

Every President starts to wear on the public. But the omnipresent Obama has become wearisome in record time. Why?

1) Money. There is none. Every time the President talks of another billion for this, and trillion for that, the people sigh: “We don’t have it; he’s going to borrow it.” Unemployment is near 10%, so borrowing nearly $2 trillion each year makes more sense to Keynesian economists than to voters who don’t find hope by maxing out their credit cards when they lose their jobs.

Obama is weirdly oblivious to number crunching — as is true of many who have never been self-employed or had to scramble without a public salary. Yet even Hillary is now whining that her foreign policy is frozen by the fact of mounting American debt. Obama is the stereotypical great-aunt that sweeps into the Christmas dinner casually boasting about what she is going to do for this niece and that nephew, while most roll their eyes with the understanding that her credit cards are long ago maxed out — and more likely she will be hitting up relatives for loans. Americans don’t like magnanimity with other people’s money.

2) Style. Great orators get better in their rhetoric, not worse. It turns out that the people risked a blank slate in Obama in part because in his teleprompted hope-and-change orations, he sounded fresh and mellifluous. Voters assumed he would wear well. But in nonstop interviews, press conferences, and conversations, the impromptu President seems no more comfortable than was an ad hoc George Bush. And just as liberals were turned off by Bush’s cowboyisms, so too conservatives are tired of Obama’s professorial, condescending sermons.

After a year, the people are tired of all the “let me be perfectly clear” psycho-drama; the “make no mistake about” pseudo-tough man pose; the straw man “I reject the false choice that some would…”, and the narcissistic “I have ordered…..my team…to”. The boilerplate is now recognizable even to the Washington Press corps. But as important, it dovetails with more disturbing propensities: there are the periodic signs of inanity like “Cinco de Quatro” and “Corpse Men”; the constant fudging on the truth of multibillion dollar new programs really “saving” money; and the surreal bowing to dictators and emperors, with the relish of turning our misdemeanors into felonies and our enemies’ felonies into benefactions.

3) Laureate Warmaking. Utopians cannot get away with quadrupling the number of targeted killings in Pakistan and Waziristan against suspected terrorists and their wives. Twangy Texans who believe that we are at “war” against non-uniformed enemy combatants logically order Predator assassinations against what they see as a ruthless, bloodthirsty radical Islamic “enemy” in a “them or us” fight to the finish. But, again, not so Noble Peace Laureates, who want terrorists to be Mirandized, the architects of 9/11 to be tried in civilian courts in New York, and CIA interrogators to be investigated for waterboarding known mass murderers.

So once you go down the path of our struggle against terrorists and jihadists as a criminal enterprise, with writs, trials, and prison sentences, then targeted killing and assassinating suspects, even from high in the sky, simply do not make sense. (Comparative morality argues that it is nicer to waterboard confessed mass murderers than to vaporize suspected terrorists.)

4) Saintly partisanship. Crass politicians can get away with the nuclear option or reconciliation. Hard-nosed Republicans Senators once threatened to go nuclear with 51 votes in the Senate to get judges confirmed in the manner that once outraged liberal politicos now are more than happy to ram through healthcare without 60 votes. But messiahs?

Obama once gave a sermon on the dangers of mere majority rule, when he was a backbencher in the Senate and a favorite of the hard left. “Majorities” in his refined mind were then a sign of rowdy tyrannical populism. So such a parliamentarian really cannot now threaten to use a bare majority to smash through health care, not when he has assured us that he is no Harry Reid or Barbara Boxer, but rather a “no more blue/red state” “healer.” The wages of hypocrisy are usually more costly than mindless partisanship. And the more Obama talks of bipartisanship and reaching out, the more the law professor seems to go out of his way to be petulant and trenchantly ‘my way or the highway.’

5). The “Bush Did It” whine is over. Why? Two reasons: 1) Obama has copied Bush on almost all the anti-terrorism protocols that worked, such as tribunals, renditions, Patriot Act, Iraq, Afghanistan, Predators, wiretaps and intercepts. And to the extent he has not — a trial for KSM in New York, a witch hunt against the former CIA interrogators, Miranda rights for the would-be Christmas Day bomber, proposed closing of Guantanamo — the people wonder what in the hell is this guy doing? 2) Obama turned Bush’s misdemeanors, like deficits, borrowing, and new government programs, into felonies. So in comparison, Bush doesn’t look quite so bad now: next time Obama plays the “Bush Did it” card, the public will think either “Thank God,” or “Yeah, but not as badly as you did”.

6). Race is a no-no. We have variously heard that opposition to Obama is based on: 1) right-wing, Tea-party know-nothing angst; 2) greedy Wall Street profit-making to ensure riches for the elite; 3) narrowly-minded partisanship of Republicans that only want power for themselves rather than what is good for America; 4) the clueless American people and their “broken” system that hasn’t yet fathomed what a rare chance they have with a prophet like Obama who can lift them out of their NASCAR ignorance. All of those tropes either did not resonate or backfired. Obama laughing about “tea-baggers”, his “fat cats” quip, his “partisans and Washington insiders,” and the notion that Americans will come to appreciate healthcare once he forces it upon them — all failed.

What is left? The race card. Some of his own supporters have played it; other losing politicians like Gov. Paterson tried it. Yet it is a prescription for turning failure into catastrophe. Every time Obama got near racial grievance-mongering — the Rev. Wright mess, the “typical white person” slur, the clingers speech, the Holder “cowards” outburst, the Skip Gates ‘stereotyping” whine — he sunk in the polls or had to backtrack big time. The population is so tired of racial chauvinism, so multiracial itself, so convinced that constant affirmation action bromides, entitlements and guilt will not ipsis factis remedy problems in the black community, that a charge of racism against the society that elected its first black president will simply boomerang.

Bottom Line?

Can Obama recover in the midterm elections? Compare the following ifs: if the economy grows by 5% (it could, given the massive government borrowing) in the third quarter and unemployment goes below 8% (not likely) in a natural cycle of rebound; if Obama kills or catches Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden (kills is the operative word); if the Democrats clean house of Dodd, Rangel, Pelosi, Reid, etc. and start using old time (are any left?) centrists as their public spokespeople; if Obama himself shows more humility, drops the “I”s and “me”s, weans himself off the teleprompter, quits all the bowing and apologizing, and Clinton-like starts talking about balanced budgets, well, then there is a chance of recovery. But note if he were to do that, he would not be Obama as he has been for nearly the last half-century. More likely, he’s going to Carterize it to the end, and end up at 85 writing op-ed responses why he really, really was a great president nearly forty years prior.

Personal Notes

1) Chilean Earthquake. I was much relieved to hear from my daughter Susannah, who has been teaching in Santiago for over the last year; she called and is safe and now wondering how to fly home (scheduled over three months ago to leave on (now cancelled) March 3 on an American flight to Fresno, to be reset I think a few days later). Let us hope the news of damage is not as grievous as first reported.

2) Makers of Ancient Strategy (the Princeton press edited volume on ancient precursors to our modern war on terror concerns) comes out March 31. The Father of Us All (rewritten, expanded, and completely new essays on warring between a postmodern West versus and premodern other), appears from Bloomsbury on May 3rd. The final version of The End of Sparta (the novel about the freedom of the helots and the end of Sparta power) goes to the Bloomsbury editors on March 1 for publication in Spring 2011. I am half done with the Savior Generals, and currently deep into Procopius’s contradictory accounts of Belisarius, and eager to start on Scipio Africanus.

3) The cruise down the Danube this May, as the annual military history tour, had both additions and cancellations and is just about right now at about 55-60 participants. We might have opened a very few new slots, but am not quite sure. Contact the website ad for details. We will have lots of guest lectures from historians and journalists, like Bruce Thornton, Joe Joffe, David Price-Jones, and Anton Pelinka. The military historian Tom Connor will do the on the bus lectures; I’ll talk mostly about WWII and the Ottoman invasions. This trip has everything from talks at Nuremberg and a visit to Hitler’s Eagle Nest, to stops along the Danube at battle sites during the Ottoman invasion and visits to museums like the Vienna’s famed War Museum.

4) Very relieved to see all the rain out here in central California. Just checked the water table in an old well outside my front door on the farm, and it’s come up quite a bit. The snow at Huntington Lake in the Sierra is quite unbelievable and I’ve gone up there a lot to do nothing other than dig — dig the roof, dig out the walls, dig the patio, dig everything. I need to remember that all this snow is due to global warming, just as the last few scant years were too — just as the current wet year in the Valley, just as the past drought years, were as well.

5) We are thinking of having a climb to Kaiser Peak in early June, a rigorous ascent over 10,300 feet. I think I’ll post the date and say something like “a political discussion on the top of Kaiser Peak” — and then give the day and time, and hope someone makes it up to converse with who knows how many who will show up. The Hoover National Security Fellows (colonels in the various military branches) promise to make it.

6) Looking forward to the annual Blossom Trail blossom ride next Saturday, and a speaking trip to Alabama this week.

7) Remember — endless globally-warmed drought was not our preordained future here in California; Iraq was not “doomed” and “lost”, the E.U. was not the “ideal,” and “ a new permanent liberal majority” was never likely. Never give up hope…

©2010 Victor Davis Hanson