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Articles on National Review Online http://article.nationalreview.com NRO Articles en-us © National Review Online 2009. All Rights Reserved webmaster@nationalreview.com (NRO Webmaster) Sat, 07 Nov 2009 23:25:43 -0500 Sat, 07 Nov 2009 23:25:43 -0500 NRO RSS Generator v1.0 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 5 http://www2.nationalreview.com/images/nro_rsslogo.jpg Articles on National Review Online http://article.nationalreview.com 144 80 National Review Online Centuries in the Making -- By: Conrad Black webmaster@nationalreview.com (Conrad Black) http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MzhlMmMxNDY4OGE1ZTkxMWM2OTE5ZTNjYzU2MTljNWI= Twenty years ago, like scores of millions of others, I watched in delight as the Berlin Wall came down. A huge crowd stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate, waving the flag of the Federal Republic and singing the current words of the country’s stirring national anthem, composed by Haydn. This piece is still better known outside Germany as “Deutschland über alles,” but now extols peace, unity, and freedom. It was a rare, seismic event, and it produced a kaleidoscopic variety of perspectives on Germany, Europe, and the whole world. For Germany, it was clear that the imposture of the Democratic Republic (East Germany), an artificial creation of Stalin’s Red Army in 1945, was over. It was like watching a fly after a blast of insecticide, buzzing furiously about, in denial that it was about to drop down dead. I remembered the aftermath of the popular unrest in 1948 and 1953, of East German dictator Walther Ulbricht’s assertion that the “State had lost confidence in the people,” prompting disillusioned Communist writer Bertolt Brecht to ask if the regime intended to choose another population to misrule. Like all who lived through the Cold War, I saw the steady departure of huge numbers of East Germans to the West, through Berlin, and Khrushchev’s construction of the wall in 1962, the first “national” physical enclosure to keep a population in rather than invaders out. And I watched the agony of fugitives being murdered by the East German police as they tried to cross over the wall, and the immense demonstrations on the western side, with swaying masses locking arms and singing the mournful and moving German dirge, “Once I Had a Comrade.” What the Americans had mockingly called “the Pankow regime” had been backed into announcing the opening of the wall. Ulbricht’s successor, the equally leaden Erich Honecker, when sacked by his central committee as the state crumbled, dutifully voted for his own dismissal and censure to preserve unity. His successor, Egon Krenz, bustled purposefully around, explaining how much East Germany had to teach West Germany: “In [East Germany], we don’t have to take our car keys out of the ignition when we park our cars.” All Germans were aware of the ability of totalitarian police to discourage street crime, and also of the limitations of East Germany’s absurd little plywood, 40-mph national car, the Trabant. (When they strayed unsuspectingly out onto the Federal Republic’s unlimited-speed autobahns, the Trabants were regularly run down, and over, by the mighty Porsches and Mercedes and BMWs of the west.) The only becoming face of East Germany was that of the graceful and beautiful figure-skating champion, Katarina Witt, the poster girl of the Communist government, who often concluded her performances by reclining on the ice, on her side, an allegory of female allure. She was much indulged by the regime, but carefully monitored, with officials listening pruriently to bugged recordings of the highlights of her allegedly energetic but quite conventional sex life. In the only place where heavily armed Soviet and American soldiers had faced each other in the Cold War, at the world-famous Berlin checkpoints, there was now an immense flow of traffic, and thousands of people tearing down the wall, as U.S. leaders from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan long had demanded. Now its relics could join the other nearby alluvia of previous German states, like the rings of a tree: Frederick the Great’s Brandenburg Gate; Bismarck’s Reichstag; the pretentious Hohenzollern Lutheran cathedral, with implausibly heroic tombs of deceased infant princes; a few stark, Teutonic, Albert Speer exemplars of Hitler’s pre-nascent Germania (the Fuehrer Bunker remains, sealed, the subject of intense controversy); and Stalin’s grotesquely large socialist-realist Soviet embassy. All these heirlooms of Germany’s unsuccessful search for responsible government are jumbled together in half a square mile, and they would be joined by the magnificent monuments of a reunited Germany: the brilliantly restored (by British architect Norman Foster) Reichstag; the immense but benign, white chancellery; and, soon, the restored Schloss of the Wilhelmine emperors. These chronological layers of Germany’s terribly disturbed history express the truisms that Germany was too late unified (centuries after France, Britain, and Russia), had always been ambiguous about whether it was an eastern- or western-facing country, and could not assure its own security without destabilizing its neighbors. Twenty years ago, Communism itself was crumbling along with these deep-seated German politial neuroses. Part of the Hungarian border was opened. Romania’s Ceausescu was publicly booed, fled his palace in a helicopter, and was hunted down by his former collaborators; he and his wife were finally executed by one of history’s largest firing squads, so eager and numerous were the volunteers for it. In Prague, students conducted large sit-ins and occupations of the universities and public places, and read out some of the most lapidary works of Jefferson and Lincoln. Poland was already under martial law and committed to elections that were sure to send the Communists packing (these being the elections Stalin had promised at Yalta 44 years before). Soon, Poland would join NATO and the European Economic Community, finally fulfilling the decision of Britain, France, and Canada to go to war to defend Poland when it was attacked by Hitler and Stalin in 1939. The eastern border of the Western World would not be a German border. Germany would be encased in the West. The Cold War, and in a sense the Second World War, would end in a mighty and bloodless triumph of democracy, and, more or less, market economics. I lived in Britain then, and though not a Eurofederalist, I did not doubt the sincerity of German chancellor Helmut Kohl’s formulation: “A European Germany and not a German Europe.” After 40 years of professing to seek the reunification of Germany, the British and French governments (led by Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand) fell to lobbying Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev not to allow it to happen. But it was soon clear that Gorbachev was powerless to stop it, and the United States, unlike the U.K. and France, had no fear of a united Germany. President Bush (senior) and his agile secretary of state, James Baker, worked skillfully with Chancellor Kohl, and turned the Open Skies meeting at Ottawa into a German-reunification meeting. All this was easily foreseeable, even inevitable, 20 years ago. What was not so clear was that the Soviet Union would itself disintegrate, and that the emergent era of one overwhelmingly powerful country in the world would be such a fragile vacuum. The spirit of reconciliation and relief that rippled out from the Brandenburg Gate uplifted the world. I assumed that the United States, at the supreme coruscation of its history, would have a long, successful, and benign eminence in the world. In these 20 years, it has come close to fumbling, but has not forfeited, its status, unique in the world since the Roman Empire. It will presumably recover its balance, if not its dominance. America was there when civilization needed it, and when only America could lead. Twenty years ago, almost the whole world was grateful to America. The world turns, but it should not forget. -- Conrad Black is the author of <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=B000C4T424">Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom</a> and <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=1586486748">Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full</a>. He can be reached at <a href="mailto:cbletters@gmail.com">cbletters@gmail.com</a>. This article is reprinted from Canada’s National Post with the author’s permission. <hr width=100% size=2> http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MzhlMmMxNDY4OGE1ZTkxMWM2OTE5ZTNjYzU2MTljNWI= Sat, 07 Nov 2009 07:00:03 -0400 The Hole at the Heart of Our Strategy -- By: Mark Steyn webmaster@nationalreview.com (Mark Steyn) http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjVmN2E4MjQwZTZkMDgyNTZiMTIxNzhjYzcxZTAxNzI= Thirteen dead and 31 wounded would be a bad day for the U.S. military in Afghanistan, and a great victory for the Taliban. When it happens in Texas, in the heart of the biggest military base in the nation, at a processing center for soldiers either returning from or deploying to combat overseas, it is not merely a “tragedy” (as too many people called it) but a glimpse of a potentially fatal flaw at the heart of what we have called, since 9/11, the “War on Terror.” Brave soldiers trained to hunt down and kill America’s enemy abroad were killed in the safety and security of home by, in essence, the same enemy -- a man who believes in and supports everything the enemy does. And he’s a U.S. Army major. And his superior officers and other authorities knew about his beliefs but seemed to think it was just a bit of harmless multicultural diversity -- as if believing that “the Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor” (i.e., his fellow American soldiers) and writing Internet paeans to the “noble” “heroism” of suicide bombers and, indeed, objectively supporting the other side in an active war is to be regarded as just some kind of alternative lifestyle that adds to the general vibrancy of the base. When it emerged early on Thursday afternoon that the shooter was Nidal Malik Hasan, there appeared shortly thereafter on Twitter a flurry of posts with the striking formulation: “Please judge Major Malik Nadal [sic] by his actions and not by his name.” Concerned Tweeters can relax: There was never really any danger of that -- and not just in the sense that the New York Times’s first report on Major Hasan never mentioned the words “Muslim” or “Islam,” or that ABC’s Martha Raddatz’s only observation on his name was that “as for the suspect, Nadal Hasan, as one officer’s wife told me, ‘I wish his name was Smith.’” What a strange reaction. I suppose what she means is that, if his name were Smith, we could all retreat back into the same comforting illusions that allowed the bureaucracy to advance Nidal Malik Hasan to major and into the heart of Fort Hood while ignoring everything that mattered about the essence of this man. Since 9/11, we have, as the Twitterers recommend, judged people by their actions -- flying planes into skyscrapers, blowing themselves up in Bali nightclubs or London Tube trains, planting IEDs by the roadside in Baghdad or Tikrit. And on the whole we’re effective at responding with action of our own -- taking out training camps in Afghanistan, rolling up insurgency networks in Fallujah and Ramadi, intercepting terror plots in London and Toronto and Dearborn. But we’re scrupulously non-judgmental about the ideology that drives a man to fly into a building or self-detonate on the subway, and thus we have a hole at the heart of our strategy. We use rhetorical conveniences like “radical Islam” or, if that seems a wee bit Islamophobic, just plain old “radical extremism.” But we never make any effort to delineate the line which separates “radical Islam” from non-radical Islam. Indeed, we go to great lengths to make it even fuzzier. And somewhere in that woozy blur the pathologies of a Nidal Malik Hasan incubate. An army psychiatrist, Major Hasan was an American, born and raised, who graduated from Viriginia Tech and then received his doctorate from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, which works out to the best part of half a million dollars’ worth of elite education. But he opposed America’s actions in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and made approving remarks about jihadists on American soil. “You need to lock it up, Major,” cautioned his superior officer, Col. Terry Lee. But he didn’t really need to “lock it up” at all. He could pretty much say anything he liked, and if any “red flags” were raised they were quickly mothballed. Lots of people are “anti-war.” Some of them are objectively on the other side -- that’s to say, they encourage and support attacks on American troops and civilians. But not many of those in that latter category are U.S. Army majors. Or so one would hope. Yet why be surprised? Azad Ali, a man who approvingly quotes such observations as “If I saw an American or British man wearing a soldier’s uniform inside Iraq I would kill him because that is my obligation” is an adviser to Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service (the equivalent of the U.S. attorneys). In Toronto this week, the brave ex-Muslim Nonie Darwish mentioned en passant that, on flying from the U.S. to Canada, she was questioned at length about the purpose of her visit by an apparently Muslim border official. When she revealed that she was giving a speech about Islamic law, he rebuked her: “We are not to question sharia.” That’s the guy manning the airport-security desk. In the New York Times, Maria Newman touched on Hasan’s faith only obliquely: “He was single, according to the records, and he listed no religious preference.” Thank goodness for that, eh? A neighbor in Texas says the major had “Allah” and “another word” pinned up in Arabic on his door. “Akbar” maybe? On Thursday morning he is said to have passed out copies of the Koran to his neighbors. He shouted in Arabic as he fired. But don’t worry: As the FBI spokesman assured us in nothing flat, there’s no terrorism angle. That’s true, in a very narrow sense: Major Hasan is not a card-carrying member of the Texas branch of al-Qaeda reporting to a control officer in Yemen or Waziristan. If he were, things would be a lot easier. But the pathologies that drive al-Qaeda beat within Major Hasan too, and in the end his Islamic impulses trumped his expensive Western education, his psychiatric training, his military discipline -- his entire American identity. One might say the same about Faleh Hassan Almaleki of Glendale, Ariz., arrested last week after fatally running over his “too Westernized” daughter Noor in the latest American honor killing. Or the two U.S. residents -- one American, one Canadian -- arrested a few days earlier for plotting to fly to Denmark for the purposes of murdering the editor who commissioned the famous Mohammed cartoons. But Noor Almaleki’s brother shrugs that’s just the way it is. “One thing to one culture doesn’t make sense to another culture,” he says. Indeed. To infidels, Islam is in a certain sense unknowable, and most of us are content to leave it at that. The vast majority of Muslims don’t conspire to kill cartoonists or murder their daughters or shoot dozens of their fellow soldiers. But Islam inspires enough of this behavior to make it a legitimate topic of analysis. Don’t hold your breath. We’d rather talk about anything else -- even in the Army. What happened to those men and women at Fort Hood had a horrible symbolism: Members of the best trained, best equipped fighting force on the planet gunned down by a guy who said a few goofy things no one took seriously. And that’s the problem: America has the best troops and fiercest firepower, but no strategy for throttling the ideology that drives the enemy -- in Afghanistan and in Texas. <hr width=100% size=2> http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjVmN2E4MjQwZTZkMDgyNTZiMTIxNzhjYzcxZTAxNzI= Sat, 07 Nov 2009 06:00:00 -0400 A Few Good Democrats -- By: The Editors webmaster@nationalreview.com (The Editors) http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OGM0ZTFiMmViY2MzNDZmYjUxZmVkM2QyMDYwOTdkYjU= Republicans have made a good case against the Democrats’ health-care bill, and they have offered a decent alternative. But given the majorities enjoyed by Nancy Pelosi in the House and Harry Reid in the Senate, Republicans can do only so much. The minority whip, Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, has promised that not a single Republican will vote for the monster of a bill that Democrats are pushing through the House. But Republican party discipline is not the magic bullet that will stop Obamacare. What’s needed is a few good Democrats -- either moderate “Blue Dogs” who are experiencing some queasiness about the size, scope, and radicalism of the Obama-Pelosi program, or those with specific concerns about the proposed legislation, including its trillion-dollar price tag, its forced subsidy of abortion, and its insistence upon disrupting insurance arrangements with which American families are satisfied. The health-care vote will tell us a lot about what America is and what it is to become: a nation with a limited government, a robust market economy, and a tradition of moderate reform, or a European-style social democracy. Secondarily, it will tell us much about who is really running the Democratic party, and whether that party will continue on its road to radicalism or return to its sensible, centrist roots. With that in mind, it is worth noting that topmost in the minds of many House Democrats is the truly shocking expense of Obamacare. The current best estimates put the price at $1.3 trillion over the next ten years; if Medicare and Medicaid are any example, though, the costs could run many times that figure. Though the inevitable last-minute wrangling will find some minds changing, Democratic Representatives Arcuri, Giffords, Himes, Rodriguez, and Schrader all have expressed reservations about that whopping price tag. Oregon Democrat Schrader, to take one example, is under pressure from the <a href="http://www.statesmanjournal.com/article/20091106/OPINION/911060326/1049">SEIU and allied leftist groups</a> to knuckle under to Pelosi and salute whatever flag she runs up the pole. How he breaks will tell us something about who is really calling the shots in today’s Democratic party. Representative Arcuri has expressed sober concerns that the gigantic new tax burden that will be imposed by Obamacare will hurt manufactures in his constituency of Utica. The SEIU stands to reap a financial windfall from Obamacare, but upstate New York manufacturers will be kneecapped by new taxes. Whose interests will the Democrats embrace, and whose will be cast aside? A particularly ugly aspect of Obamacare is its insistence that Americans be forced to subsidize abortion -- there’s not even an opt-out for those who have conscientious objections to the practice. In the past few elections, Democrats have made a big show of recruiting candidates such as Bobby Casey of Pennsylvania, who is at least nominally pro-life. Besides Representative Stupak, the strongest of the pro-life voices, the Democrats who are said to have some reservations about forcing their constituents to finance abortion include Representatives Boccieri, Boswell, Carney, Costello, Cuellar, Driehaus, Kanjorski, Kildee, Lipinski, Mollohan, Oberstar, Rahall, and Wilson. Representative Cuellar probably does not want to go home to Laredo and explain that his party is forcing his constituents to write checks to Planned Parenthood, and he’s also in a good position to appreciate that tort reform has done great things for his state -- achievements that would be endangered by all the gifts to trial lawyers packed into this bill. Representative Kanjorski has been an important voice on the abortion aspects of the bill, and you can be sure that no effort is being spared to bully him or buy him off. Another group of Democrats prominent in this debate includes those who believe that the “public option” -- the government-run insurance program -- is too big and too intrusive. It will also force private insurers to compete against the government, putting them at an incredibly unfair disadvantage. This fact is not lost on those Democrats with insurance companies headquartered in their districts. Equally important, the public option will probably cost many American families their current health insurance as employers bend to financial incentives to dump their health-care expenses into the laps of taxpayers. Representatives Baird, Bean, Cardoza, Chandler, Kagen, Markey, Michaud, Snyder, Space, and Teague are among those who have expressed these reservations. Rep. Scott Murphy has been treated to the presence of a rent-a-mob at his district office because of his hesitance to fall in line behind Nancy Pelosi. The vote will tell whether he will hold the line or toe it. There are other ways to reform health care. There are more sensible, market-based, moderate approaches -- and, more important, there is no need to pack every reform into one sweeping bill, larded up with special favors and irresponsible spending, that will radically remake the American economy and health-care system. Radicalism may be in fashion in Nancy Pelosi’s district and in the salons in which Barack Obama was educated, but it may be less so in south Texas, rural Ohio, northeastern Pennsylvania, western Colorado, and other places where Democrats will have to face the voters again soon enough. Let us hope that enough of them are willing to show some restraint -- and to put the national interest over President Obama’s ambitions -- that they are able to put the brakes on this mess before we go any farther down this road. <hr width=100% size=2> http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OGM0ZTFiMmViY2MzNDZmYjUxZmVkM2QyMDYwOTdkYjU= Sat, 07 Nov 2009 04:00:24 -0400 The Party at the Wall -- By: Flashback webmaster@nationalreview.com (Flashback) http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZjZiOGJjOGI5ZjFmZWQwNTFiZDg3ODlhNWVmY2RmYzY= EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece by Bennett Owen appeared in the December 22, 1989, issue of <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/subscribe/nr.p">National Review</a>. (You can dig into NR’s archives anytime <a href="http://search.nationalreview.com/?s=NQ==">here</a>.) West Berlin -- It began as a trickle. On East German TV, a government spokesman had ended an evening press conference by saying that citizens of the GDR could travel freely, and by 9:30 p.m. on November 9, the first East Berliners strolled across a bridge at Bornholmer Strasse. They’d heard the news in a bar and walked down to the nearest crossing to see if it was really true. It was. A small crowd greeted them as they reached the Western side. “May I come in?” asked one politely. “To walk across this bridge into West Berlin is the most normal thing in the world,” one man said -- and then added, “Things haven’t been normal here for 28 years.” A youngster coming across pointed to the Wall he’d just passed through and commented, “This used to be the end of the world for us.” At first, most said they just wanted to come over and walk on the Kurfurstendamm, Berlin’s answer to Fifth Avenue. But as the news spread, the border crossings quickly became jammed with people. The soldiers who once had orders to shoot to kill were reduced to stamping passports and directing traffic. They laughed when asked if they’d been handed their pink slips yet. By midnight, the celebration had begun in earnest. Thousands of Germans from East and West gathered at the Brandenburg Gate, drinking cheap champagne just steps away from crosses commemorating those whose dreams of freedom couldn’t wait this long. “I have seen the future and it runs through the heart of Berlin.” Through that kind of graffiti the Berlin Wall spoke with cynical eloquence, and last January, in the icy half-light of winter in Berlin, it appeared to say that the Cold War was as cold as ever. George Shultz, on a final tour of Europe as secretary of state, declared the Wall should come down. East Germany’s Erich Honecker defiantly replied that it would be standing 100 hundred years from now, and at the same time a series of incidents dramatically underscored his words. Two young men who tried to flee across the Wall in the southern part of town were shot (one of them fatally), and in the days following, more shots were heard at border crossings in other parts of the city. In late January a man tried to swim to the West across the River Spree in the center of town. He made it to the western shore but was exhausted, and as he tried to pull himself from the water East German soldiers pulled him into their patrol boat by the hair. The border guards were taking their orders from the East German chief of security, a dedicated Marxist by the name of Egon Krenz. Despite the show of force, escape attempts were a daily occurrence. Of the dozens who tried through the winter and spring of this year, two spectacular attempts come to mind. In one, a would-be escapee was killed when he fell from a makeshift hot-air balloon. In another, two brothers living in West Germany flew two ultra-light planes into East Germany, where they picked up a third brother and flew him back to freedom. By the end of summer, though, that kind of desperation had evaporated as East Germans by the hundreds of thousands made an end-run through Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Egon Krenz became the new leader of East Germany, but, as a West German magazine put it, he is a shepherd without a flock. Desperately (and futilely, as later events have shown) seeking to regain control of his people, he threw open the Berlin Wall. And so, on a crisp autumn night, a newspaper headline screams, “Berlin is Berlin again.” Just after midnight on November 10, a very stout and very drunk reveler climbed onto the wall and, with the Brandenburg Gate as a backdrop, withstood the East German water cannon that tried to force him off. In freezing weather, he turned his back to the jets of water, and when the guards finally gave up, he turned toward them, unzipped his fly and#...#well, you know. As dramatic symbolism it doesn’t quite equal staring down a tank in Tiananmen Square, but the Germans applauded wildly. By Friday evening, Berlin was pure and simple chaos, its population swollen by a half-million East Germans with more pouring in every minute. At Checkpoint Charlie, a seemingly unending river of champagne poured over the cars as they came through, and the mood was euphoric. On the dark and muddy pathway that follows the Wall from Checkpoint Charlie to the Brandenburg Gate, there was a constant clinking of claw-hammers against cement as Berliners chipped away souvenirs. In the morning, jackhammers would take their place, opening up new crossings and making old roads and rail lines whole again. The surest sign that history was being made was at the Brandenburg Gate, where, 30 feet above the throngs of people in a cherry-picker, stood Dan Rather speaking into a video camera. Back on earth were ABC and NBC, and CNN seemed to be everywhere at once. By Saturday, more than a million guests had invaded Berlin-a newspaper cartoon showed an East German family running through a checkpoint, with a caption that read, “Quick, before the West Germans build a wall.” The most emotional event took place Sunday, when the Wall fell a Potsdamer Platz. The rest of the world sees the Brandenburg Gate as the symbol of Berlin, but those who live here remember Potsdamer Platz as the heart of the old city. It was there where, in 1945, Soviet tanks crushed the last life out of the Third Reich, and where, in 1953, the uprising of June 17 was quelled. Now, the army that built the Wall is busy tearing holes in it. As Mayor Walter Momper declared, “The heart of Berlin will soon beat again.” <hr width=100% size=2> http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZjZiOGJjOGI5ZjFmZWQwNTFiZDg3ODlhNWVmY2RmYzY= Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:00:53 -0400 Painting the Gulag -- By: Hans A. von Spakovsky webmaster@nationalreview.com (Hans A. von Spakovsky) http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YTM0NDZhNTdmNTcxOWMyMTNlN2I2MGU1ZWNmYjJiYTc= My Russian father and German mother, who survived some of the worst wars and atrocities of the last century, came close to death many times. But I recently experienced a visual reminder of just how lucky they were, despite the many hardships they endured. The Heritage Foundation is exhibiting a “new” collection of 50 paintings of the Soviet Gulag, the infamous penal system for political prisoners and slave laborers. They were painted over a 40-year period by Nikolai Getman, a Ukrainian who spent eight years in Soviet concentration camps in Siberia and Kolyma. His only crime was being present at a meeting of artists where one drew a caricature of Stalin on a cigarette box. After Getman was released in 1953, he began secretly to paint a series of pictures about life in the Gulag. He told no one about his paintings -- not even his wife -- knowing that if they were discovered, he would be imprisoned again or perhaps even killed. The paintings were rescued in 1997 and brought out of Russia. Getman was desperate to get them safely into the West because he feared they would be destroyed upon his death by a post-Soviet Russia that wants to pretend this past never existed. The paintings are haunting. They are the only visual counterpart to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s writings, which exposed this terrible system of mass imprisonment that Robert Conquest has rightly called “unexampled coldblooded inhumanity.” We will never know how many innocent people disappeared into the Gulag, but the estimates of those who died in the Gulag and under Soviet Communism range from 15 million to 30 million. The only difference between the Holocaust and the Gulag is that the Soviet Communists never got around to using gas to kill their prisoners -- just old-fashioned bullets, beatings, starvation, and literally working them to death. Getman’s stark paintings cover everything from the transportation of prisoners to the camps in unheated trucks and ships, to the horrible and almost unspeakable living conditions in the Gulag. We see the routine brutality with which prisoners were treated. The fragile existence they led is captured in Getman’s paintings, which represent an enormous accomplishment considering that all of the scenes were painted from memory. They represent events that Getman either witnessed himself or heard about firsthand. One painting shows the despairing faces of a group of men taken from their barracks in the middle of the night and executed by the NKVD (the forerunner of the KGB), the secret-police organization that ran the entire Gulag system. These kinds of executions occurred constantly for no apparent reasons. All of the prisoners knew that if you were taken out of your barracks in the middle of the night, you never came back. Looking at Getman’s paintings, I realized that if my father, who fought the Communists, had not fled Russia when they took control, he undoubtedly would have ended up in the Gulag -- assuming he wasn’t immediately executed by the secret police. As for my mother, at the end of World War II, she lived in the part of eastern Germany that the Allies handed over to Poland. When German civilians were ordered out in 1946, my mother was loaded into a cattle car with hundreds of other men, women, and children. The Russians divided the train in half -- one half went east toward the Soviet Union, where those civilians disappeared into Stalin’s labor camps, and the other half was sent west into occupied Germany. My mother was in the very last car sent west. Had she gone east, her chances of surviving would have been almost nonexistent. She might have ended up in one of the camps depicted by Getman, a women’s forest camp where the inmates were forced to do hard labor with primitive hand tools to get their daily rations of soup and bread. Those who did not fill their quotas received only bread and no water. Countless women inmates were sexually assaulted and permanently maimed. Many were killed doing the work or died of malnutrition and disease. Nikolai Getman was convinced that it was his duty to leave behind a testimony to the fate of the millions of prisoners who died and should not be forgotten. He survived under such unimaginable circumstances because of his absolute conviction that good would triumph over evil. He concluded that one of the great human virtues is strength of will, which even the terrible Gulag machine couldn’t extinguish. The tragic repression and lawlessness he saw in the camps persuaded him of the value of man and of the dignity of his mind and spirit. Getman realized that “each of us is responsible for the future” -- and because of that responsibility, he could not be silent. Lee Edwards, chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VCMF) and a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, recently launched a virtual museum on the Internet dedicated to telling the story of Communism. It’s a story that stretches from Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto to the ongoing suppression of Tibet by Communist China -- a country that, led and inspired by White House communication director Anita Dunn’s favorite political philosopher, Mao Zedong, has killed 65 million of its own citizens since 1949 through the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square massacre, and its own Gulag system, known as Laogai. Edwards is hopeful that at some point in the future, the VCMF will be able to raise the funds needed to build a bricks-and-mortar museum where Getman’s paintings -- and all of the other information the foundation is collecting -- can be displayed. The least we can do is to remember those who, unlike my parents, did not escape the terror and death of the Soviet and Chinese camps, which were part of the second and third Holocausts of the 20th century. These stark paintings help us do that. -- Hans A. von Spakovsky is a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation. The Getman paintings will be on display at Heritage through December 10. <hr width=100% size=2> http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YTM0NDZhNTdmNTcxOWMyMTNlN2I2MGU1ZWNmYjJiYTc= Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:00:45 -0400 Health-Care U -- By: Father Thomas D. Williams webmaster@nationalreview.com (Father Thomas D. Williams) http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OTQwZDBjZDhmMTkxMzY4ZDE5ODlhNDEyOTBiMzYxOTg= If you were to ask the proverbial person on the street what the Catholic Church thinks about health-care reform, the answer would sound pretty much like this: Catholics have serious problems with the surreptitious inclusion of abortion in the current health-care proposal, as well as with the absence of genuine protection for conscientious objection among health-care workers. Apart from those deep reservations, Catholics are 100 percent behind the proposed health-care reform. Thus, Bill Claydon could <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/catholic_church_and_health_car.html">write</a>: “The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops supports the proposed current health-care reform provided it includes conscience protection clauses and specifically prohibits abortion funding” (American Thinker, Aug. 16, 2009). Yet something is wrong with that picture. As straightforward as this summary seems, it doesn’t do justice to the Catholic Church’s far more nuanced position. It’s true that vocal objection to proposed health-care reform has focused almost exclusively on these two closely related issues. Last week, the USCCB sent inserts to nearly 20,000 Catholic parishes across the country to be included in the Sunday bulletins distributed to the faithful. The inserts urged readers to contact Senate leaders and encourage them to support efforts to “incorporate longstanding policies against abortion funding and in favor of conscience rights” in health-reform legislation. The text adds, “If these serious concerns are not addressed, the final bill should be opposed.” The fact that the bishops openly oppose the reform bills in their current form, however, does not mean that they would fully support the bills even if they were to be freed of their more egregious flaws. Surely many bishops do feel this way. In their efforts to eschew partisan politics, many take pains to show that they are neither Left nor Right, neither conservative nor liberal, neither Democrat nor Republican. This is commendable, as far as it goes, since it allows bishops to elude unfair pigeonholing and to remind the faithful that the Church espouses principles that transcend partisanship. But some bishops, in an effort to counterbalance their steadfast stand against abortion, have shown a willingness to embrace virtually any initiative purporting to advance “social justice,” as long as the program doesn’t directly attack innocent life. This uncritical approach certainly doesn’t describe all the bishops, and probably not even the majority. If the bills are eventually tweaked to eliminate the possibility of abortion funding and to guarantee the rights of conscience, we shouldn’t expect the USCCB to send another bulletin insert to parishes urging Catholics to support the legislation. Though the bishops support “health-care reform” in the broadest sense, many problems remain with proposed legislation. Above and beyond specific concerns, the key question revolves around the fundamental issue of the government’s role in health care. What many fail to realize is that the Catholic Church has a long history of support for a core principle of social ethics called subsidiarity, which seeks to limit government control while protecting the rights of individuals, families, and associations against harmful intervention. The Catechism of the Catholic Church elaborates on this principle in theological, and almost poetic terms: <blockquote> God has not willed to reserve to himself all exercise of power. He entrusts to every creature the functions it is capable of performing, according to the capacities of its own nature. This mode of governance ought to be followed in social life. The way God acts in governing the world, which bears witness to such great regard for human freedom, should inspire the wisdom of those who govern human communities. </blockquote> In his widely acclaimed 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus, Pope John Paul II issued an unusually stern warning regarding the tendency of governments to expand, creeping toward what had come to be known as a “social assistance state.” He noted several problems with this tendency, including increased costs, a loss of personal initiative and responsibility, and ultimately ineffective service. <blockquote> By intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility, the Social Assistance State leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies, which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients, and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending. In fact, it would appear that needs are best understood and satisfied by people who are closest to them and who act as neighbours to those in need. </blockquote> Yet the Catholic Church’s resistance to government expansion doesn’t seek to place blame for bureaucracy solely on the shoulders of overly aggressive state officials. It also recognizes and opposes the natural human tendency to abdicate personal responsibility and to assign overarching duties to the state -- duties that could perfectly well be carried out by the private sector. In its important text on the Church in the modern world, after noting the duty of rulers to respect the legitimate autonomy of families and private organizations, the Second Vatican Council sought to temper the demands of the general population on state services: <blockquote> Citizens, for their part, either individually or collectively, must be careful not to attribute excessive power to public authority, not to make exaggerated and untimely demands upon it in their own interests, lessening in this way the responsible role of persons, families and social groups. (Gaudium et spes, No. 75) </blockquote> This last note seems particularly important at the present juncture, while private citizens still have the opportunity to let their voices be heard. In the end, few would disagree that universal healthcare is a good thing, and that health care reform is imperative. The question remains as to how comprehensive a role the federal government should have in administering and controlling health care in the United States. On this question the Catholic Church may offer some unexpected resistance to current proposals. -- The Rev. <a class="bioline" href="http://www.thomasdwilliams.com/">Thomas D. Williams</a> teaches Catholic social doctrine at the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical Athenaeum in Rome and is Vatican analyst for CBS News. He is also author of <a class="bioline" href="http://www.amazon.com/Who-My-Neighbor-Personalism-Foundations/dp/0813213916/ref=sr_1_50?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1224259659&sr=1-50">Who Is My Neighbor? Personalism and the Foundations of Human Rights</a> (CUA Press). <hr width=100% size=2> http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OTQwZDBjZDhmMTkxMzY4ZDE5ODlhNDEyOTBiMzYxOTg= Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:00:39 -0400 Inverse Reaction -- By: Jim Geraghty webmaster@nationalreview.com (Jim Geraghty) http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YzYxNmNmOTA4NWFhODJlMDI3ZTk4NjJlNjNlYWIyOTI= The Tea Party movement in all its myriad forms -- free-market groups, little old ladies, crusty in flag hats, fans of Beck’s 9/12 Project -- have done everything one could possibly ask to derail a government takeover of the health-care system. It will be a perverse irony if their high-visibility protests end up persuading Democrats to damn the torpedoes in the face of near-certain electoral doom. This Thursday -- two days after Republicans won the governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey, and two days before the House of Representatives is slated to vote on its version of Obamacare -- some 10,000 Tea Party activists turned out on Capitol Hill, on relatively short notice, to attend a rally and to make “house calls” on their members. The midday rally featured all the trademarks of the movement: teabags, yellow-and-black “Kill the Bill” signs, chants of “Reform yourself, not us,” the opening music of The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” A new wrinkle was signs using the logo from V, ABC’s new alien-invasion television series that some have argued feels like an allegory of the Obamamania that swept the country last year. Tea Party organizers also held rallies at members’ district offices around the country. While Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R., Minn.) was the headliner of the Capitol Hill rally, Minority Leader John Boehner and Minority Whip Eric Cantor also appeared, making clear that the rally and its message represented a wider swath of the House GOP than only conservative diehards like Bachmann and Steve King of Iowa. Cantor got one of the biggest roars when he pledged that the Pelosi-backed version of the bill would, like the stimulus legislation, receive no Republican votes in the House. Washington is used to Capitol Hill protests, and not just from groups on the left, as the annual March for Life demonstrates. But by most standards, this event was eyebrow raising -- thousands of people turning out at noon on a weekday, with only a few days’ warning. Just about everything the Tea Partiers have been asked to do, they’ve done with relish -- the Tax Day protest, the angry crowds at congressional town-hall meetings this summer, the 9/12 rally on the Mall in Washington. Obama’s overall approval rating has steadily slid for most of the year, and his approval rating on health care has been under water (more disapproval than approval) for months now. His influence with voters appears to be waning: He pulled out all the stops for Jon Corzine in New Jersey, with rallies in Newark and Camden on the Sunday before Election Day; two days later, Corzine got <a href="http://www.politickernj.com/max/34813/corzine-wins-newark-nearly-4000-fewer-votes-2005">considerably fewer votes</a> in those cities <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/04/AR2009110404821.html" target="_blank">than four years ago</a>. So all of this ought to have Democrats quaking in their boots and terrified of casting a vote for the heath-care bill, right? Perhaps not. In August, <a href="http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YTE0ZmQ2NGZkZGVhY2Q2Mzg3OWNiMzhmMTg4MzU5NWY=&w=MQ==" target="_blank">I wrote</a>, “Many congressional Democrats, told that passage of the sweeping health-care legislation will cost them their seats, may find the choice a harder decision than many observers think. Yes, no one should doubt a politician’s instinct for self-preservation. But it’s quite possible that long-serving Democrats might want to enact a sweeping social change instead of taking the safe route.” Since then, the brutal choice facing Democrats has only become clearer: Voting for the Pelosi bill may cause dozens of them to lose their seats. But the other option may be even worse. <a href="http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/09/generic-house-polling-suggests.html" target="_blank">Prognosticators and campaign analysts</a> are now saying that Republicans have a serious chance of retaking the House in 2010. But Democratic incumbents may be facing the choice of passing a health-care bill and trying to get re-elected in an atmosphere where the conservative grassroots are furiously energized, or failing to pass it and trying to get re-elected in races where the liberal grassroots are either completely dispirited or furious with them. And in the latter scenario, it’s hard to see the conservative grassroots taking their side. Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Democrat who represents the northern Virginia suburbs where Bob McDonnell won narrowly and the even more explicitly conservative Ken Cuccinelli got nearly half the vote, told the Washington Post the day after the election, “I concluded from last night, we’ve got to pass health care,” adding that Democratic members have to make sure they give Democratic voters something to be excited about. Failure to pass a health-care bill would represent a nearly unparalleled political catastrophe for Democrats. For years, when explaining why their agenda has not yet passed, Democratic leaders said to their grassroots, “We don’t have the votes.” When they retook Congress in 2006, they said they needed the White House and 60 senators to overcome filibusters. The Democratic grassroots have now delivered just about every winnable seat, giving President Obama the same number of Democrats in the House that Bill Clinton began with (257, including the two elected this week, Bill Owens of New York and John Garamendi of California) and, in the Senate, 60 Democrats or independents aligned with the Democrats (three more than Clinton ever had). Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the rest of the congressional Democrats have no excuses left. Many conservatives feel that Republican congressional leadership has jerked them around for years, over-promising and under-delivering, but today that sentiment may be even stronger on the left. If serious government expansion into the delivery of health care and provisions like the public option are not passed in this session, it seems likely that they will never pass. Back in August, Rep. David Wu (D., Ore.) was open about his disregard for opposition in his district, <a href="http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2009/08/wu_defends_health_care_reform.html" target="_blank">telling constituents</a> that he would vote with his heart on reform even if they continued to urge him to vote against it. Those closely watching the House races shaping up for next year believe that the health-care vote will be huge -- perhaps make-or-break -- in the re-election prospects of Democrats Bart Gordon of Tennessee, Baron Hill of Indiana, Bobby Bright of Alabama, Bruce Braley and Leonard Boswell of Iowa, John Spratt of South Carolina, Ike Skelton of Missouri, Ed Perlmutter of Colorado, Alan Grayson and Suzanne Kosmas of Florida, Vic Snyder of Arkansas, and Gerry Connolly, Glenn Nye, and Tom Perriello of Virginia. Thursday brought block-long lines of anti-Obamacare protesters to all entrances of the House office buildings, an intimidating sight. But it may not be intimidating enough. Given the choice of passing a bill and between losing their seats, or not passing a bill and losing their seats, most House Democrats would pick the former. Many of them will approach the coming vote as men and women with not much left to lose. -- Jim Geraghty writes the Campaign Spot on NRO. <hr width=100% size=2> http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YzYxNmNmOTA4NWFhODJlMDI3ZTk4NjJlNjNlYWIyOTI= Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:00:51 -0400 Three Strikes against Obamacare -- By: The Editors webmaster@nationalreview.com (The Editors) http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NTQ2ZTI4MzcwMzNmZDY0MzRjNzgwNGY0NjQ2NGI1YTY= Barack Obama promises that if the Democrats’ health-care plan is passed, Americans will enjoy wider and better insurance coverage without: 1. being forced out of their current insurance; 2. being subject to government rationing, including the outright denial of life-saving care; 3. spending themselves and future generations into deeper debt. The Democrats’ program deserves to be rejected because conditions 1, 2, and 3 are not going to be met -- and because the Democrats know it and are doing their best to hide that fundamental and important fact from the American people. This isn’t a question of conjecture or of competing interpretations of complex CBO calculations. Just as Democrats have misled Americans about whether their health-care plans will force taxpayers to <a href="http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZDg4ZTYwMmI4YzNjNWE2NmUzZTBlNGYyNmI5YzE3M2Y=">subsidize abortion</a> or shunt money into the pockets of <a href="http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MzU5MjU2NDNlZmNkOTUyNDdmM2ZkYTI2YmE5ZjAxMzY=">illegal aliens</a>, they deny these three facts -- Americans will lose their current insurance, will be subject to rationing, and be will encumbered with debt -- but that denial does not overrule reality. The most noisome fact for most Americans is that the legislation coming out of the Democratic caucus will force many families out of their current insurance plans. Estimates suggest that nearly 90 million Americans will lose their current insurance under the Democrats’ vision and very likely will be forced into a government-run program. True, current insurance plans are “grandfathered” into the new system -- but only for five years. (Doubt it? Consult Section 202(b)(1) of the House bill, page 91.) After that, the Democrats’ mandates will force families and employers to select only those plans that conform to Washington’s demands -- which is to say, to the demands of the insurance-industry lobbyists who will end up determining the criteria. In states that have similar mandates, we already have seen how that shakes out: Inexpensive catastrophic-care plans are forced out in favor of expensive, bloated packages that legislate coverage of everything from infertility treatment to personal counseling. There’s nothing wrong with those things, but not everybody in the country needs to be forced to buy coverage for them -- and they certainly shouldn’t be forced out of their current insurance plans on that account. And will your new Washington-approved plan include your current doctor, or reflect your current needs? Who knows? But that’s not the only way Americans will lose their current insurance coverage. Those who receive relatively expensive high-benefit coverage through their employer will very likely find themselves dumped into the government-run and government-subsidized “public option,” which will give businesses an incentive to offload health-care costs onto the taxpayer. The Democrat-controlled CBO estimates that 15 million will be sucked directly into Medicaid -- not Medicare, mind you, but Medicaid, the perennially dysfunctional program for the poor, entirely operated by the government. And older Americans who receive private coverage through <a href="http://www.iowapolitics.com/index.iml?Article=175855">Medicare Advantage</a> will certainly lose that option, since the Democrats’ plan will gut the program. That’s a lot of angst and upset for a bill that, according to its own supporters, will only raise insurance coverage from <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2009/11/some-vaguely-heretical-thoughts-on-health-care-reform.html">83 percent of the population to 96 percent</a>. Which brings us to the second count on this indictment: Moving the insurance-coverage rate from the mid-80s to the mid-90s is a worthy goal, if not a dramatic one. But even modest as it is, when combined with the Democrats’ extensive menu of mandates and subsidies it surely will bring an influx of patients into the health-care system, increasing demand without doing anything to increase supply. (Indeed, the Democrats’ new regulations and price controls will restrict the supply of both private insurance and health-care services.) Unless Speaker Pelosi is empowered to repeal the laws of mathematics, that means higher prices for health-care services. But Democrats promise to “bend the cost curve.” What they mean, of course, is that they will ration care, both through the outright denial of care to patients in government-run programs and by using price controls to deny payments to physicians and hospitals, and thereby to deny care indirectly. This is precisely the arrangement that sends thousands of Canadians and Europeans flocking into the United States every year seeking care that is denied to them in their home countries, where political necessities trump medical necessities, as they inevitably do in a government-run system. Finally, President Obama promised that health-care reform would not add “one thin dime” to the federal deficit or impose new taxes on the middle class, but the most honest estimates of the program’s cost is <a href="http://dmarron.com/2009/10/30/the-house-health-bill-costs-almost-1-3-trillion/">$1.3 trillion</a>. There may be modest cuts, true -- but, given that our government operates in habitual deficit, that still means either $1.3 trillion in taxes on somebody or $1.3 trillion added to the national debt. Neither option looks very attractive. Democrats habitually promise to confine tax hikes to “the rich,” but economist <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/business/economy/01view.html?_r=1">Greg Mankiw</a> calculates that Obamacare will represent something on the order of a 23 percent implicit tax rate on families of modest means. Pelosi’s bill includes an 8 percent payroll tax, which in reality will come right out of the pockets of working Americans. We call that three strikes: taking away Americans’ current insurance plans, replacing them with a system of government rationing, and burning through more than a trillion steadily depreciating U.S. dollars to get it done. <hr width=100% size=2> http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NTQ2ZTI4MzcwMzNmZDY0MzRjNzgwNGY0NjQ2NGI1YTY= Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:00:51 -0400 The $1.5 Trillion Fraud -- By: Michael F. Cannon webmaster@nationalreview.com (Michael F. Cannon) http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ODU0NGRhY2FhNDAyZDA4MzAzMDBlZTJiZjM3ZjA4NDM= If House Democrats hold a vote on their health-care overhaul this weekend, they might as well vote on abolishing the Congressional Budget Office too. It would be no more audacious -- and much more honest -- than their current strategy for hiding the true cost of their legislation. Never mind the everyday budget gimmicks House Democrats have used, such as removing $250 billion of deficit spending to be voted on separately. Or claiming their bill would cost just <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/30/health/policy/30health.html">$894 billion</a> -- around <a href="http://dmarron.com/2009/10/30/the-house-health-bill-costs-almost-1-3-trillion/">$400 billion less</a> than the CBO actually projected. We’ve seen this kind of trickery plenty in recent years; to suppress an inconvenient cost estimate of its proposed Medicare drug entitlement, the Bush administration threatened to fire Medicare’s chief actuary. Deceptions on this scale are child’s play, at least when compared to what has to be the biggest fiscal obfuscation in the history of American politics: The current leadership has rigged the legislation so that 60 percent of its total cost will not be made public by the CBO in advance of the House vote. Here’s how they did it. The centerpiece of the bills currently under consideration is not the “<a href="http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10382">public option</a>,” but the “individual mandate” -- a legal requirement that all U.S. residents purchase health insurance, on penalty of <a href="http://www.politico.com/livepulse/0909/Ensign_receives_handwritten_confirmation_.html">fines and/or imprisonment</a>. The CBO describes an individual mandate as “<a href="http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/48xx/doc4816/doc38.pdf">an unprecedented form of federal action</a>” whose closest analogue in federal law is the draft. But as President Obama told a <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-to-a-Joint-Session-of-Congress-on-Health-Care/">joint session of Congress</a>, the rest of the legislation won’t work unless the federal government forces Americans to purchase health insurance. President Clinton’s ill-fated health plan had an individual mandate, too. Back in 1994, the CBO <a href="http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/48xx/doc4882/doc07.pdf">decided</a> that since “the mandatory premiums#...#would constitute an exercise of sovereign power,” the agency would treat all premiums as federal revenues, including them in the federal budget. That revealed to the public the full cost of Clinton’s health plan. Clinton’s secretary of health and human services, Donna Shalala, called the CBO’s decision “devastating.” Journalist Ezra Klein <a href="http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=numbercruncherinchief">writes</a> that it “helped kill the bill.” Rather than admit the individual mandate’s unpopularity and move on, congressional Democrats simply ensured that its costs would not appear in the federal budget this time around by gaming the CBO’s rule for what constitutes “federal revenues.” The CBO <a title="blocked::http://cbo.gov/ftpdocs/102xx/doc10243/05-27-HealthInsuranceProposals.pdf" href="http://cbo.gov/ftpdocs/102xx/doc10243/05-27-HealthInsuranceProposals.pdf">explains</a> it will not count mandatory premiums as federal revenues if the individual mandate leaves consumers with what the CBO considers a “sufficient” or “meaningful” or “substantial” degree of choice among health plans. That rule is both amorphous and arbitrary. (For example, it presumes that the freedom not to purchase health insurance -- which an individual mandate would eliminate -- is not “meaningful.” Millions of Americans would disagree.) More important, evading that rule doesn’t make an individual mandate any less compulsory, or any less costly. It just hides those costs by pushing them off-budget. Obama budget director Peter Orszag laid the groundwork for this feat. While director of the CBO in 2007 and 2008, he fostered a more collaborative relationship between the CBO and members of Congress, which enabled the agency to provide behind-the-scenes guidance to Democrats crafting their mandate. That’s why the cost of the Democrats’ individual mandates appears nowhere in the half-dozen or more “preliminary cost estimates” the CBO has completed on various Democratic health-care bills. In Massachusetts, which has enacted what is essentially the Democrats’ health plan, mandatory premiums account for about 60 percent of overall costs, according to the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. On-budget government spending is just 40 percent. By my count, mandatory premiums accounted for a similar share of the Clinton health plan’s <a href="http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/48xx/doc4882/doc07.pdf">projected cost</a>. So while the CBO estimates that the coverage expansions in the House Democrats’ legislation would trigger about $1 trillion of new federal spending over ten years, the actual cost of those coverage expansions is more like $2.5 trillion. The CBO exists to bring honest accounting to the federal government. House Democrats are gaming the CBO, subverting this purpose. Anyone who cares about honest accounting or transparency in government should put the brakes on this vote until the American people have all the facts. -- Michael F. Cannon is director of health-policy studies at the Cato Institute and co-author of <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=1930865813">Healthy Competition: What’s Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It</a> . UPDATE: In an <a href="http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/107xx/doc10706/hr3962Dingell_with_mgr_amendment.pdf">updated preliminary score</a> of the House bill that the CBO released this morning, the agency writes that the bill would impose mandates on the private sector whose cost would “greatly exceed” $139 million per year. But that’s it -- we still have no official estimate of that cost. <hr width=100% size=2> http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ODU0NGRhY2FhNDAyZDA4MzAzMDBlZTJiZjM3ZjA4NDM= Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:00:44 -0400 Forgetting the Fall -- By: An NRO Symposium webmaster@nationalreview.com (An NRO Symposium) http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YTUwN2I3OWQxNTIwZGE0OGZkZTdiYWFkOGIzY2RiODI= <div class="article"> President Barack Obama has RSVPed “nein” to Chancellor Merkel’s invitation to Germany to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. National Review Online asked a few experts what this snub reveals about our current president. DINESH D’SOUZA I’m glad Obama is not going. Of course it’s a stupid move for him politically, but I’m all for stupid moves by this guy. If Obama were wily like Bill Clinton, he would go to the Berlin Wall and make a lot of pompous statements about how “we” won the Cold War. Clinton knew very well that “we” didn’t win the Cold War; Reagan did. The Republicans did. Reagan had some crucial allies: Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa. Gorbachev too played an important role, although it was largely a role that he didn’t intend to play, one that was scripted for him by Reagan. But the West’s victory in the Cold War was not one that would have occurred if the policies of liberal Democrats had been in place. For this reason, the fall of the Berlin Wall is a reminder that liberalism was proven wrong in perhaps the greatest foreign-policy challenge since World War II. Obama probably thinks he has more important things to do than to go to Berlin. What he doesn’t realize is that his mask is coming off: The serene, above-the-fray Obama of the presidential campaign is now giving way to the partisan ideologue that appears to be the real Obama. If Obama went to Berlin, he would have a chance to put his mask back on. Perhaps it’s best that he stay home. — Dinesh D’Souza is the author of <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=%0684848236">Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader</a> and, most recently, <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=%201596980990">Life After Death: The Evidence</a>. FRANK GAFFNEY Nine words say it all: Undermine our allies. Embolden our enemies. Diminish our country. That’s the Obama Doctrine in a nutshell, and the slighting of Germany with regard to one of the most symbolic and consequential expressions of the quest for freedom undertaken in the teeth of Soviet oppression does all three. — Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington. LARRY GREENFIELD GDR citizen Helke Dittrich, 25, managed to escape East Berlin by lying down between two hollowed-out surfboards. The Stuttgart shop mechanic Ulrich Werner, 27, whom she married afterward, smuggled her out. The surfboards were brought out on the rooftop of a Renault Fuego, which made its way across the Berlin Wall checkpoint. The year was 1987, the year that Pres. Ronald Reagan, at the Brandenburg Gate, told Mr. Gorbachev to Tear Down This Wall. Reagan early and often promoted liberty, American exceptionalism, and human rights. All those who escaped Communism by hidden secret compartments in cars, or by tunnel, or by hot-air balloon, or in fantastic motorized water packs, and all those who died trying, had a friend in Ronald Reagan and the American people, including, previously, Pres. John F. Kennedy. From the Berlin airlift to spiritual uplift, great American leaders have always resolutely stood up for freedom. Until now. Mr. Obama came to Berlin in 2008, while campaigning, and has continued to preen for foreign approval by apologizing around the globe for the United States. But this year, the celebrations will take place without him. Berlin, 2009. Celebration of liberty and America’s heroic leaders. Mr. Obama, apparently this is not your place. President Reagan, meanwhile, will now have an exhibit dedicated to his leadership at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. — Larry Greenfield is fellow in American studies at the <a href="http://claremont.org/">Claremont Institute</a> and executive director of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. ALLEN C. GUELZO Presidents of the United States cannot be expected to show up for every anniversary, especially if the anniversary requires major intercontinental travel, and is really someone else’s party (in this case, Germany’s). And yet there is something odd in Mr. Obama’s decision to take a pass on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The wall was, after all, the greatest symbolic gesture of contempt for freedom ever constructed. And even if it was, strictly speaking, a German problem, the wall was really the “dare mark” that separated the United States and the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War. At worst, Mr. Obama invites the shrillest voices to conclude that, in his view of the world, the Cold War was nothing more than right-wing paranoia. The United States was much less the champion of freedom, the Soviet Union much less the ogre of oppression, and militant Communism much more harmless, than the Goldwaters and Strangeloves made them out to be. So, not enough was at stake in building and then destroying the wall to justify a presidential presence at the anniversary. But in a more modulated tone, Mr. Obama’s absence will suggest that foreign affairs are really not matters of urgency for him (unless they offer celebrity moments), and that the community-organizing of American life trumps this paranoia about terrorism, war, and international power. If al-Qaeda and the Taliban are really only “distractions,” and not the threats to life and limb George W. Bush believed they were, then we should not be surprised that celebrating the end of Communism is so low a priority. Perhaps we should not be surprised, either, that Mr. Obama would prefer not to draw attention to the anniversary of an event that a conservative Republican did so much to cause. — Allen C. Guelzo is Henry R. Luce professor of the Civil War era and director of the Civil War Era Studies Program at Gettysburg College. PAUL KENGOR Obviously, this is an outrage. There’s no good excuse for it, even as Obama’s disciples grasp for one. First, this is what we ought to expect from a president whose mentor was Frank Marshall Davis and who, in the 1980s, when President Reagan was seeking to breach the Berlin Wall, was being educated by — and chose to “hang with” — what he himself acknowledged were “Marxist professors.” Obama was raised, nurtured, and educated by what Whittaker Chambers — and Ronald Reagan quoting Chambers — dubbed the wrong side of history. By not going to Berlin, Obama is once again choosing the wrong side of history. Second, with all that said, I’m personally not disappointed by Obama. Barack Obama is who he is. I’m disappointed by the American public, which elected a leader who thinks this way. Ronald Reagan went to the Berlin Wall. He went there and demanded it be torn down. It was. And now, today, Ronald Reagan rolls over in his grave. — Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College. His recent books include <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Crusader-Ronald-Reagan-Fall-Communism/dp/0061189243/ref=ed_oe_p" target="_blank">The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism</a>. DANIEL PIPES How big a deal is it that the president won’t be going to Germany to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall? Let us meditate briefly on Obama and the year 1989. In one of the first interviews of his fledgling presidency, on Jan. 27, 2009, Obama informed the audience of an <a href="http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2009/01/27/65087.html#004">Arabic-language television channel</a> that he hoped to restore “the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago.” How interesting that Obama praised 1989 as a time of exemplary U.S.-Muslim relations, and not the year of the Berlin Wall’s collapse. It was an undistinguished year for U.S.-Muslim relations, but it was before the U.S. government sought to democratize the region. It was when Washington still focused on getting along with kings, presidents, emirs, and other autocrats. Obama’s phrasing, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123310499999722371.html">Fouad Ajami</a> points out, signals “a return to Realpolitik and business-as-usual” in relations with Muslims. The president’s decision to skip the celebrations in Berlin, thus, fits a larger <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/6163/obama-the-middle-east-and-islam-an-initial">pattern of nostalgia</a> for the good old days before George W. Bush’s “freedom agenda” and its inconvenient tensions with dictators. — <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/">Daniel Pipes</a> is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. PETER ROBINSON The Cold War was the defining struggle of the second half of the 20th century — a clash of beliefs about God, man, government, and economics so utterly basic, so primal, that it stands in comparison with the Persian Wars or the long conflict between Rome and Carthage. “My view of the Cold War is simple,” Ronald Reagan once famously explained. “We win, and they lose.” And with the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago on Monday, that is just how it turned out. Liberty vanquished tyranny. Barack Obama? He has no idea. No idea at all. — Peter Robinson is a fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=0060524006">How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life</a>. MICHAEL RUBIN Symbolism is incredibly important. When Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “Evil Empire,” the reverberations within the East Bloc went far beyond what Reagan’s own supporters realized. Likewise, the moral clarity evident in Reagan standing before the Berlin Wall and declaring, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” did as much as tens of millions of dollars poured into influence operations aimed at the Soviet bloc. Nor can anyone forget the symbolism of East Germans, with hand and hammer, tearing down that symbol of oppression. Alas, Pres. Barack Obama’s decision not to celebrate one of the seminal events of the 20th century — an episode that illustrates the victory of freedom over totalitarianism and peace through strength — is also replete with symbolism. Just as Reagan’s advisers had no idea just how much his rhetoric would reverberate, I’m afraid that Obama does not understand how important his refusal to attend commemoration events will be, not only to those still suffering under the yoke of oppression, but also to adversaries who see American isolation and weakness as a phenomenon to be exploited. — Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is a senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School. DAVID SATTER President Obama’s decision to skip the ceremonies marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall has worrying implications for the war in Afghanistan. Although Obama may not be aware of it, Communism and political Islam are basically the same. One pretends to be a perfect science, the other religious. But each divided the world into the holy and the profane. Each believed itself in possession of absolute truth and, deifying itself, attempted to impose its deranged interpretation of reality on the world by force. The fall of Communism showed that fanatics are defeated by the collapse of their ideology. This lesson is critical to our success in Afghanistan. If we discredit fanatical Islam, we win. If it discredits us, we lose. It was therefore critically important for Obama to use the opportunity of the Berlin Wall commemoration to explain to the world and, in particular, the Muslim world, why we are fighting. The fact that he did not seize this opportunity indicates that he may not know. Clausewitz wrote that in war the first priority of a statesman or commander is to understand what kind of war he is fighting. Obama is involved in an ideological war. If he does not understand that, it will be his tragedy — and ours. — David Satter is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. His latest book is <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=0300098928">Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State</a>. PAUL J. SAUNDERS Is it a big deal that Barack Obama has not gone to Germany for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall? Not really. German chancellor Angela Merkel was received quite well by the president and the Congress this week, and the vice president visited some of 1989’s other top beneficiaries — Poland, Romania, and the Czech Republic — just a few weeks ago. Though that trip was clearly intended to repair strained ties with Warsaw and Prague after the administration’s poor handling of missile defense, the White House explicitly linked it to the 1989 anniversary. Nevertheless, the president is largely himself to blame for the über-angst about his non-visit to Germany. The anxiety is a clear consequence of concern that notwithstanding his campaign rhetoric about rebuilding relations with America’s allies, when faced with his first significant European security decision, Mr. Obama unilaterally revised a NATO agreement on missile defense without consulting the host countries, other key nations, or NATO as an institution. President Obama doesn’t seem to have much emotional attachment to 1989 or to Central Europe, which isn’t a crime. But if he doesn’t change his approach to working with America’s treaty partners, we might all share the punishment. — Paul J. Saunders is the executive director of the Nixon Center and the associate publisher of The National Interest. ANDREW STUTTAFORD Am I that worried that Obama has chosen not to go to Berlin for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall? Not that much, and I’m sure the Germans will quickly get over any disappointment they may feel. After all, messiahs have a habit of not showing up when expected. That said, I couldn’t help but be amused by the fact that (as Rich Lowry has <a href="http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YzIzYWM4MWRmNTE1NzQ4MGY5ODE0MGRjMmIwYjdmMmQ=">observed</a>) Obama was prepared to go to Berlin when it was all about Obama. The most symbolically charged moment in the collapse of Communism, by contrast, doesn’t appear to count for quite so much. Oh well. I worry more over the thought that (even if accidentally) Obama’s decision is a reflection of a wider trend in which the story of Soviet Communism — its rise, its crimes, its failures, and its eventual fall — is being allowed to slide into a memory hole that is (thankfully) unimaginable in the case of the rise, crimes, failures, and eventual fall of the Third Reich. To the extent, therefore, that Obama’s absence wastes a potential (dread phrase) “teachable moment,” it’s a pity. — Andrew Stuttaford is a contributing editor of National Review Online. GEORGE WEIGEL It’s a very big deal, because the president’s absence bespeaks a woodenheadeness about the history of our times: a woodenheadness likely influenced by the classic left-liberal notion that the Cold War was just an action-reaction cycle between two “great powers” (“two scorpions in a bottle,” as a Jimmy Carter appointee notoriously put it), not a moral contest for the human future between imperfect democracies and pluperfect dictatorships. There have been few moments in modern history when the good guys won, cleanly, and without mass violence; Americans had a large role in creating the conditions for the possibility of that. The fall of the Wall was the symbolic centerpiece of the Revolution of 1989 — it’s shameful and, frankly, embarrassing that an American president is not in Berlin to celebrate the implosion of the worst tyranny in human history. But it’s hardly surprising, given the president’s performance before Russian students earlier this year. The politics of national self-deprecation — moral blindness wrapped in moral sanctimony — continues. — George Weigel is distinguished senior fellow of Washington’s <a href="http://www.eppc.org/">Ethics and Public Policy Center</a>.</div> <hr width=100% size=2> http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YTUwN2I3OWQxNTIwZGE0OGZkZTdiYWFkOGIzY2RiODI= Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:00:31 -0400 The End of an Era That Never Began -- By: Jonah Goldberg webmaster@nationalreview.com (Jonah Goldberg) http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NGQxYTM5ZWU0MmQwNWMyOWYxYThjZjI0MTdkODIxZTA= It’s all so terribly sad. To listen to liberals and the White House spin election results, you’d think all was well with the world. Barack Obama is still personally popular! The evil right-wing extremists lost in New York’s 23rd congressional district and a Democrat (who was arguably more conservative than the Republican nominee) won. Virginia was always a red state (no matter what we all said about it turning blue with Obama’s victory), and the election hinged on local issues. Defeated New Jersey governor Jon Corzine was personally unpopular (let’s all forget that the White House tried to turn the race into a referendum on Obama’s agenda). In short, the White House spin is: “There’s nothing to see here, folks. All is well.” By now, those interested in such things have already heard the rebuttal to these desperate talking points. And there’s no need to rehearse them again. In fact, what is sad is not the spin war. This happens after every election. The partisans and pundits race for the election results like kids charging the disgorged contents of a piñata, claiming convenient facts like candy and shouting, “Mine!” It’s always an unseemly process. No, what’s sad is how far Obama’s defenders have had to move the goalposts just to keep up their morale. They might be right that the elections don’t mean all that much for Obama and the Democrats. I very much doubt it, but even having the argument represents an enormous defeat for self-styled progressives. Almost exactly a year ago, liberals insisted that Obama was going to be FDR 2.0 and that this was the dawn of a new progressive era. Countless magazine articles and newspaper columns were dedicated to the idea we were poised for a “new New Deal.” Filmmaker Spike Lee declared that we will henceforth measure time B.O. (“before Obama”) and A.O. (“after Obama”). Newsweek became so obsessed with Obama as a redeemer-saint-Jedi reincarnation of both FDR and Lincoln -- and also the sexiest man alive -- it’s a wonder the Secret Service didn’t issue a restraining order. Nearly a year later, Newsweek’s November 2 cover story is a “survival guide” for liberals who seem on the verge of self-immolation given their disappointment with Obama. If Obama is the new FDR, it might be instructive to go back and look at the elections in 1933, one year after Roosevelt was elected. Obviously, the comparison isn’t perfect, but many of the imperfections illuminate why the “Obama revolution” was always phony. The driving political issue that year was the repeal of Prohibition. Indeed, historians often overplay the popularity of FDR’s economic program in 1932 and underplay the importance of his promise to let Americans have a beer. Regardless, the people agreed with the White House on both fronts, and supporters of repeal and the New Deal rallied to the polls. In Virginia, Democrats won a massive across-the-board landslide, outpolling the GOP 3-1. Meanwhile, the most watched race in the country was for New York City mayor. It was a complicated three-way contest. Republican Fiorello LaGuardia beat the White House’s preferred candidate, Joseph V. McKee, a veteran of machine politics in New York, and the Tammany Hall Democrat John O’Brien. The key thing to remember is that while the White House’s man lost, the progressives’ man won. LaGuardia was in every way a New Dealer who shared FDR’s agenda. This week, Democrats insist Obama is still popular. Maybe so. But Obamaism is on the ropes. Congress is racing to pass health-care reform because Nancy Pelosi and Co. know it is losing popularity, and they fear -- rightly -- that moderate Democrats will jump ship after reading the tea leaves of the Virginia and New Jersey blowouts. They also now know, thanks to Corzine’s defeat, that Obama’s personal popularity is not transferable. A true ideological realignment of the sort that people associate with the New Deal requires a massive move in the political center of gravity, with both the middle and the right moving leftward. There is absolutely zero evidence of anything like that at play in Tuesday’s election results. The middle moved rightward and the right continues to hold its ground. Obama still seems to believe that the equivalent issues to Prohibition and the New Deal are health-care reform and cap-and-trade. Every day that looks more and more absurd. The truth is that Obama’s signature issue in 2008 was also repeal -- repeal of George W. Bush. He achieved that on Election Day. And now he is left looking for a mandate he never really had. He may still be a successful president. He will surely have some victories. But the “new era” is now over, before it even began. -- Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and the author of <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=0385511841">Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning</a>. © 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc. <hr width=100% size=2> http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NGQxYTM5ZWU0MmQwNWMyOWYxYThjZjI0MTdkODIxZTA= Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:59 -0400 Barack Obama's Mandate Gap -- By: Rich Lowry webmaster@nationalreview.com (Rich Lowry) http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NmIxMzU3MTVlNjg3OWE1NDk3ZDljMDRhMTUwZTE1NGI= EDITOR’S NOTE: This column is available exclusively through King Features Syndicate. For permission to reprint or excerpt this copyrighted material, please contact: <a href="mailto:kfsreprint@hearstsc.com" target="_blank">kfsreprint@hearstsc.com</a>, or phone 800-708-7311, ext. 246. On November 3, the fairy tale died. The election results in Virginia and New Jersey dismantled the self-satisfied, just-so story that Democrats have been telling themselves about last year’s election. The story goes like this: In 2008, Americans voted for change not just in the nation’s leadership, but in its fundamental political orientation. They wanted a shift to the left not seen since 1932. The nation’s political map had been utterly transformed. Barack Obama owned the suburbs and independents, and laid claim to formerly secure Republican states. An outdated GOP had been reduced to a rejectionist husk clinging to rural areas and the South. A more modest rival interpretation explained it differently: A charming young man running against a Republican party debilitated by its association with an unpopular war and a politically toxic incumbent won a solid 7-point victory nationally. He sounded reasonable and moderate, and won for his party something important, if not necessarily epoch-making: a chance to govern after the other side had blown it. The Republican sweep of the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey is flatly incompatible with the first, heroic interpretation of 2008. If things changed so fundamentally, they wouldn’t have snapped back so quickly. Obama beat John McCain among independents in Virginia by 1 point, and in New Jersey by 4 points, while winning the suburbs. Both Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie took back the burbs and wiped out their Democratic opponents among independents by 2-1 margins. If Obama wants to freshen up on appealing to independents, he could do worse than send David Axelrod to get a tutorial from McDonnell (66 percent) or Christie (60 percent). Candidates from a fringy party doomed to oblivion don’t perform this well in a Democratic state and a swing state, respectively. In New Jersey, Democrats have a 700,000-voter edge in party registration over Republicans. After 2008, Virginia was touted as the next blue state. The Washington Post wrote a piece headlined “Democrats Make Most of Shifts in Va.; Demographic Changes Put Party in Optimal Position.” They went from optimal position to wrong side of a historic landslide in all of twelve months. Liberals are comforting themselves that McDonnell and Christie had to play to the center, as if that in itself were a stinging rebuke to the Right. They seem to forget that they have long been arguing that conservative candidates can’t appeal to the middle. That the pro-life, anti-gay-marriage, limited-government conservatives McDonnell and Christie had more cachet with the center than their opponents should be a Democratic warning sign. Of course, Obama wasn’t on the ballot, although that’s cold comfort for 2010. In New Jersey, the African-American turnout held up from 2008 to 2009, but the youth vote dropped off from 17 percent to 9 percent of the electorate. The infatuation of starry-eyed Obama kids apparently isn’t transferable. In Virginia, the youth vote fell off by half, and the African-American vote went from 20 percent of the electorate to 14 percent. Obama’s mistake is governing as if he has a heroic mandate when he really has a modest one. This is his mandate gap. It accounts for the paradox of his current political standing. His job approval is holding up around 50 percent, and people still like him, even as his rating on key issues -- health care, the economy, and the deficit -- falters. The mandate gap is a potential killer for Democrats not named Barack. Consider poor Creigh Deeds, the losing Democrat in Virginia. He got saddled with Obama’s unpopular policy positions, while Obama’s likability naturally didn’t make him any more charismatic or inspiring. At the end of his campaign, Deeds ran an ad consisting entirely of vintage Obama waxing poetic about him at a campaign rally, in the forlorn hope the magic would rub off. It didn’t, and it won’t for other Democrats. The mandate gap threatens their congressional majority. They’ll persist anyway, sprinkling more pixie dust on their tattered fairy tale and wishing, wishing it were so. — Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. © 2009 by King Features Syndicate EDITOR’S NOTE: This article has been amended since its inital posting. <hr width=100% size=2> http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NmIxMzU3MTVlNjg3OWE1NDk3ZDljMDRhMTUwZTE1NGI= Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:44 -0400 The Myth of '08, Demolished -- By: Charles Krauthammer webmaster@nationalreview.com (Charles Krauthammer) http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZjYxYWY1ZTI0YzNiY2IzMzhmMDQ5ODU2NDM0YTUwYmY= Sure, Election Day 2009 will scare moderate Democrats and make passage of Obamacare more difficult. Sure, it makes it easier for resurgent Republicans to raise money and recruit candidates for 2010. But the most important effect of Tuesday’s elections is historical. It demolishes the great realignment myth of 2008. In the aftermath of last year’s Obama sweep, we heard endlessly about its fundamental, revolutionary, transformational nature. How it was ushering in an FDR-like realignment for the 21st century in which new demographics -- most prominently, rising minorities and the young -- would bury the GOP far into the future. One book proclaimed “The Death of Conservativism,” while the more modest merely predicted the terminal decline of the Republican party into a regional party of the Deep South or a rump party of marginalized angry white men. This was all ridiculous from the beginning. 2008 was a historical anomaly. A uniquely charismatic candidate was running at a time of deep war-weariness, with an intensely unpopular Republican president, against a politically incompetent opponent, amid the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. And still he won by only 7 points. Exactly a year later comes the empirical validation of that skepticism. Virginia -- presumed harbinger of the new realignment, having gone Democratic in ’08 for the first time in 44 years -- went red again. With a vengeance. Barack Obama had carried it by six points. The Republican gubernatorial candidate won by 17 -- a 23-point swing. New Jersey went from plus 15 Democratic in 2008 to minus 4 in 2009. A 19-point swing. What happened? The vaunted Obama realignment vanished. In 2009 in Virginia, the black vote was down by 20 percent, the under-30 vote by 50 percent. And as for independents, the ultimate prize of any realignment, they bolted. In both Virginia and New Jersey they’d gone narrowly for Obama in ’08. This year they went Republican by a staggering 33 points in Virginia and by an equally shocking 30 points in New Jersey. White House apologists will say the Virginia Democrat was weak. If the difference between Bob McDonnell and Creigh Deeds was so great, how come when the same two men ran against each other statewide for attorney general four years ago the race was a virtual dead heat? Which made the ’09 McDonnell-Deeds rematch the closest you get in politics to a laboratory experiment for measuring the change in external conditions. Run them against each other again when it’s Obamaism in action and see what happens. What happened was a Republican landslide. The Obama coattails of 2008 are gone. The expansion of the electorate, the excitement of the young, came in uniquely propitious Democratic circumstances and amid unparalleled enthusiasm for electing the first African-American president. November ’08 was one-shot, one-time, never to be replicated. Nor was November ’09 a realignment. It was a return to the norm -- and definitive confirmation that 2008 was one of the great flukes in American political history. The irony of 2009 is that the anti-Democratic tide overshot the norm -- deeply blue New Jersey, for example, elected a Republican governor for the first time in twelve years -- because Democrats so thoroughly misread 2008 and the mandate they assumed it bestowed. Obama saw himself as anointed by a watershed victory to remake American life. Not letting the cup pass from his lips, he declared to Congress only five weeks after his swearing-in his “New Foundation” for America -- from remaking the one-sixth of the American economy that is health care to massive government regulation of the economic lifeblood that is energy. Moreover, the same conventional wisdom that proclaimed the dawning of a new age last November dismissed the inevitable popular reaction to Obama’s hubristic expansion of government, taxation, spending, and debt -- the tea party demonstrators, the town hall protesters -- as a raging rabble of resentful reactionaries, astroturf-phony and Fox News-deranged. Some rump. Just last month Gallup found that conservatives outnumber liberals by 2 to 1 (40 percent to 20 percent) and even outnumber moderates (at 36 percent). So on Tuesday, the “rump” rebelled. It’s the natural reaction of a center-right country to a governing party’s seeking to rush through a left-wing agenda using temporary majorities created by the one-shot election of 2008. The misreading of that election -- and of the mandate it allegedly bestowed -- is the fundamental cause of the Democratic debacle of 2009. <hr width=100% size=2> http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZjYxYWY1ZTI0YzNiY2IzMzhmMDQ5ODU2NDM0YTUwYmY= Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:38 -0400 Are You with Us or with Them? -- By: Mona Charen webmaster@nationalreview.com (Mona Charen) http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YzljZWNiMzdmNTlhMDBiNmE4ZDQxODU4MjA2OWUyZjg= President Obama likes to preen himself on his supposed moral superiority to his predecessor. He announced the closing of Guantanamo in his first week on the job (though, ten months on, it remains open) to advertise the new administration’s disdain for George Bush’s war-fighting tactics. And at every opportunity since, he has stressed that his policies -- on taxes, on the Middle East, on health care, on “man-caused disasters,” and on “climate change” -- reflect a more refined and elevated morality than has ever before held sway in Washington, D.C. So you have to wonder how the president slept last Wednesday night. He has known that critics in the United States regarded his posture toward the Iranian regime as weak. But on Wednesday, he heard this critique from a different quarter -- one that will be more difficult to dismiss. Every year, on November 4, the anniversary of the day in 1979 when Iranian thugs took American diplomats hostage in Tehran, the government has organized a street demonstration outside the former American embassy. In the early days, the rallies may have engaged a certain number of spontaneous participants, but they have long since become utterly stage-managed government shows. The only people the regime could muster this year to chant “Death to America! Death to Israel!” were non-Iranian members of Hezbollah and students bused in from the provinces for that purpose. But that wasn’t the only demonstration in Tehran that day. Displaying awe-inspiring courage in light of the brutal tactics (including murder) the regime has used to quell opposition, tens of thousands of Iranians took to the streets again. Instead of “Death to America,” they shouted “Death to the Dictator,” referring to Ahmadinejad. And they trampled on photos of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Michael Ledeen, of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, reports that demonstrations also erupted in Shiraz, Isfahan, Kermanshah, Zahedan, Arak, Mazandaran, Tabriz, and Rasht. As before, the regime used paramilitary goons on motorcycles to beat, tear-gas, and bludgeon protestors. And again the regime disrupted cell-phone service, text messaging, and the Internet to prevent demonstrators from coordinating their activities. But this is what should awaken Obama’s conscience: The protestors chanted something new this time. As they dodged the blows of the militia they chorused: “Obama! Obama! Either you’re with them or you’re with us.” This exquisitely moral White House was unmoved. Incredibly, President Obama released a statement that very day commemorating (!) the 30-year anniversary of the kidnapping of America’s diplomats, taking the opportunity once again to abase himself and us. “Thirty years ago today,” the president recalled, “the American embassy was seized” -- he did not say by whom. But because some anonymous agent seized the embassy, it “set the United States and Iran on a path of sustained suspicion, mistrust, and confrontation” that Obama is determined to reverse. He wants to move beyond the past and seek “a relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran based upon mutual interests and mutual respect.” By ostentatiously using the term “Islamic Republic,” Obama tips his hand. He could have expressed his hopes for good relations with the people of Iran. That would have left the door open to a new Iranian regime that might not be politically Islamic. Instead he has signaled his eagerness to placate and, yes, appease the current malevolent Iranian leaders. “We do not interfere in Iran’s internal affairs,” he assured them. Asked about the demonstrations flaring around Iran, the president’s spokesman Robert Gibbs hoped that “the violence will not spread,” which sounds like something you’d say about rioters. In Iran, the violence is coming exclusively from the government, which is firing upon unarmed demonstrators. Though the Obama administration has tripled the deficit in just ten months in office, it has found one program to cut -- the $3 million to support the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. The tiny research organization, which kept records of the disappearances, murders, and other human-rights abuses in Iran, was abruptly defunded last month, sending a clear message of contempt to the Iranians who are putting their lives on the line to resist this vicious regime. A successful overthrow of the nearly nuclear mullahs in Iran would be the greatest boon to world peace and stability since the fall of the Berlin Wall. After this week’s events, it can no longer be said that the Obama administration isn’t doing enough to support the opposition. The people on Tehran’s streets know the truth -- he’s effectively supporting the regime. <hr width=100% size=2> http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YzljZWNiMzdmNTlhMDBiNmE4ZDQxODU4MjA2OWUyZjg= Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:32 -0400 Two More Reasons to Oppose Pelosicare -- By: Deroy Murdock webmaster@nationalreview.com (Deroy Murdock) http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmVmNWQ0YTZjMjlkZTQ3MTI2ZWU0ZjJiYjk2YmY5Yjg= H.R. 3692, the monstrous health-care-reform bill that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) unleashed on October 30, comprises 1,990 pages of dense, nearly impenetrable prose. This legislation is precisely ten sheets shy of four reams of paper. Just ten pages after completing its third full ream, this bill reveals on page 1,510 yet another reason to reject Obamacare: an unfunded federal mandate for nutrition labeling at chain restaurants and even on vending machines. In language that would stir only a House committee chairman’s heart, this bill’s Section 2572 begins: “TECHNICAL AMENDMENTS. -- Section 403(q)(5)(A) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (21 U.S.C. 343(q)(5)(A)) is amended -- (1) in subclause (i), by inserting ‘Except as provided in clause (H)(ii)(III),’ after ‘(i)’ ; and (2) in subclause (ii), by inserting ‘except as provided in clause (H)(ii)(III),’ after ‘(ii).’” Any American still conscious after that passage would discover that H.R. 3692 requires food chains with 20 or more outlets to display “in a clear and conspicuous manner#...#a nutrient content disclosure statement.” It must include caloric information on each standard food item beside its spot on the menu. Diners also are entitled to “a succinct statement concerning suggested daily caloric intake, as specified by the [Health] Secretary by regulation and posted prominently.” This information must appear on “a drive-through menu board” and even “in the case of food sold at a salad bar, buffet line, cafeteria line, or similar self-service facility.” This federal legislation covers “standard menu items that come in different flavors, varieties, or combinations, but which are listed as a single menu item, such as soft drinks, ice cream, pizza, doughnuts, or children’s combination meals through means determined by the Secretary, including ranges, averages, or other methods.” These rules also would cover operators of 20 or more vending machines. Their nutritional data must appear “in close proximity to each article of food or the selection button.” This molecular micromanagement is costly and irksome. Stupider still, it likely will fail. To great fanfare last year, Michael Bloomberg -- New York City’s just-reelected mayor -- inflicted similar food labels on local restaurant chains. So far, Bloomberg’s initiative quietly has backfired. Writing in October 6’s Health Affairs, New York University and Yale researchers describe their interviews with patrons at Burger King, KFC, McDonald’s, and Wendy’s locations in Gotham -- both before and after Bloomberg’s labeling law, and in Newark, N.J., which lacks such strictures. Only 27.7 percent of New Yorkers who saw nutrition information said it affected their eating decisions. Average New York patrons ingested 825 calories per meal before the law and 846 afterward. Newark’s typical consumption rose from 823 to 826 calories. Dietary labels evidently leave fast-food lovers cold. As columnist Steve Chapman recently <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-oped1011chapmanoct11,0,687867.column">observed</a>: “Giving them nutritional information is a bit like recruiting for Greenpeace at a rifle range -- a doomed enterprise.” Alas, these proposed regulations are not this bill’s ugliest feature. Compared to its other failures, fretting about food labels is like complaining that the shrimp forks should have been sharper on the Titanic. More like an iceberg is H.R. 3692’s brand-new, 5.4 percent surcharge on those with Adjusted Gross Incomes above $1 million. Americans for Tax Reform <a href="http://www.atr.org/new-surtax-small-employers-inbr-house-a4144">notes</a> that this population includes some 626,000 small-to-medium-sized employers who would face $130 billion in new taxes over the next ten years. Absent $13 billion vacuumed from their pockets annually, these productive citizens nonetheless are expected to create or save jobs. So it goes in the fantasy world that is the Democrat party. These proposed food notices, this new small-employer tax, and H.R. 3692’s other statist ingredients demonstrate that Obamacare in general and this bill in particular are virtual Thanksgiving feasts for liberal big-government activists. This measure overflows with fresh regulations; <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/11/02/raw-data-gop-list-new-bureaucracies-house-health-care/?loomia_ow=t0:s0:a16:g2:r1:c0.140064:b28668333:z10">111 brand-new boards, agencies, and programs</a>; and <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703399204574505423751140690.html">$572 billion in new taxes</a> to finance all of the above. And more. Nancy Pelosi’s contribution to Obamacare is an all-you-can-eat banquet for federal busybodies. — Deroy Murdock is a New York-based columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution. <hr width=100% size=2> http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmVmNWQ0YTZjMjlkZTQ3MTI2ZWU0ZjJiYjk2YmY5Yjg= Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:30 -0400 Better or Worse? -- By: Thomas Sowell webmaster@nationalreview.com (Thomas Sowell) http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MzM0ODU5OGY2M2UxNzEyNzJmNGRmNjQwNzU1NWU1OWY= What is so wrong with the current medical system in the United States that we are being urged to rush headlong into a new government system that we are not even supposed to understand, because this legislation is to be rushed through Congress before even the senators and representatives have a chance to read it? Among the things that people complain about under the present medical-care system are the costs, insurance-company bureaucrats’ denials of reimbursements for some treatments, and the freeloaders at hospital emergency rooms whose costs have to be paid by others. Will a government-run medical system make these things better or worse? This very basic question seldom seems to get asked, much less answered. If the government has some magic way of reducing costs -- rather than shifting them around, including shifting them to the next generation -- they have certainly not revealed that secret. The actual track record of government when it comes to costs -- of anything -- is more alarming than reassuring. What about insurance companies’ denying reimbursements for treatments? Does anyone imagine that a government bureaucracy will not do that? Moreover, the worst that an insurance company can do is refuse to pay for medication or treatment. In some countries with government-run medical systems, the government can prevent you from spending your own money to get the medication or treatment that their bureaucracy has denied you. Your choice is to leave the country or smuggle in what you need. However appalling such a situation may be, it is perfectly consistent with elites’ wanting to control your life. As far as those elites are concerned, it would not be “social justice” to allow some people to get medical care that others are denied, just because some people “happen to have money.” But very few people just “happen to have money.” Most people have earned money by producing something that other people wanted. But getting what you want by what you have earned, rather than by what elites will deign to allow you to have, is completely incompatible with the vision of an elite-controlled world, which they call “social justice” or other politically attractive phrases. The “uninsured” are another big talking point for government medical insurance. But the incomes of many of the uninsured indicate that many -- if not most -- of them choose to be uninsured. Poor people can get insurance through Medicaid. Freeloading at emergency rooms -- mandated by government -- makes being uninsured a viable option. Within living memory, most Americans had no medical insurance. Even large medical bills were paid off over a period of months or years, just as we buy big-ticket items like cars or houses. This is not ideal for everybody or every situation. But if we are ready to rush headlong into government control of our lives every time something is not ideal, then we are not going to remain a free people very long. Ironically, it is politicians who have already made medical insurance so expensive that many people refuse to buy it. Insurance is designed to cover risk. But politicians have mandated that insurance cover things that are not risks and that neither the buyers nor the sellers of insurance want covered. In various states, medical insurance must cover the costs of fertility treatments, annual checkups, and other things that have nothing to do with risks. What many people most want is to be insured against the risk of having their life’s savings wiped out by a catastrophic illness. But you cannot get insurance just for catastrophic illnesses when politicians keep piling on mandates that drive up the cost of the insurance. These are usually state mandates, but the federal government is already promising more mandates on insurance companies -- which means still higher costs and higher premiums. All this makes a farce of the notion of a “public option” that will simply provide competition to keep private insurance companies honest. What politicians can and will do is continue to drive up the cost of private insurance until it is no longer viable. A “public option” is simply a path toward a “single payer” system, a euphemism for a government monopoly. <hr width=100% size=2> http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MzM0ODU5OGY2M2UxNzEyNzJmNGRmNjQwNzU1NWU1OWY= Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:18 -0400 A Healthy Reaction -- By: Michael G. Franc webmaster@nationalreview.com (Michael G. Franc) http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MWY5NzMzYTFhODEyOWMyNzVmMTQ3OTAyNjdiMzI0NGU= ‘Contain the scope of the debate”: This has been a key element of the Democratic strategy to enact Big Government health reform. As long as voters perceive the issue as a nice, neat, four-cornered proposal to expand health coverage, the liberals who control Congress will win. Polls confirm that Americans want Congress to expand, even guarantee, access to health care for all. But when the parameters of this debate expand beyond health care, conservatives have a fighting chance. Once voters pick up the scent of other issues -- a whiff of higher taxes and deficits, more debt passed on to our kids and grandkids, a loss of personal freedom, stagnant wages and job insecurity, profound moral concerns relating to life, not to mention an unprecedented intrusion of government into our lives -- liberals finds themselves on their heels. Tuesday’s election results suggest that America’s normally quiescent and politically independent middle class may have reached its limit. Burghers quietly lit torches and lifted pitchforks in precisely the sort of jurisdictions that provided the political oomph behind the Democrats’ successes in 2006 and 2008. Democratic candidates either lost or underperformed in Northern Virginia, Westchester County (N.Y.), suburban Philadelphia, and throughout that most suburban of all states, New Jersey. Crucial to this turnaround was the appeal to independents of the two Republican gubernatorial candidates. In both Virginia and New Jersey, the GOP carried these voters by two-to-one margins. Why? My guess is that it’s all about taxes, debt, and too much government. These areas, after all, rank among the most heavily taxed and regulated jurisdictions in America. According to data compiled by <a href="http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/25431.html">the Tax Foundation</a>, 15 of the 25 counties with the heaviest property-tax burdens in America are in New Jersey. And Virginia’s Arlington, Loudoun, and Fairfax counties are not far behind. New Jersey governor-elect Chris Christie won overwhelming majorities or held his own in all 15 of those counties. Meanwhile, Virginia governor-elect Bob McDonnell did well in Arlington and Loudoun, and actually carried true-blue Fairfax county by 51 percent to 49 percent. Excessive taxation isn’t a problem just at the county level. In New Jersey, upper-middle-class voters also shoulder one of the heaviest state-income-tax burdens. The Garden State’s top marginal tax rate now exceeds 10 percent. Despite the onerous tax burden, New Jersey’s total state debt has quadrupled over the past 15 years. It stands at $35 billion. The state’s budget deficit for this year stands at $8 billion and counting. Little wonder that 32 percent of New Jersey’s voters told the exit pollsters the economy was their greatest concern. Another 26 percent fingered property taxes. So what does this all portend for the health-reform debate in Washington? If overhauling our health system exudes the odor of bigger, more expensive government, the odds of passage plummet in the face of these growing middle-class concerns. When it comes to their own political survival, politicians possess impeccable radar. Last night’s election returns should set off those radars for dozens of Democrats who represent these overextended and financially insecure suburban families. One can almost hear those backroom conversations. “I still want to see a health-reform bill enacted,” they will assure their leaders on Capitol Hill, “but can’t we at least dial it back a bit?” This will complicate things for Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid. How will they find a politically acceptable mix of new taxes to finance such an ambitious plan? The short answer is that they can’t. Whether they finance their plan with a tax on “Cadillac” health plans, drugs, and wheelchairs or impose massive new taxes on the “rich,” it will hit the family budgets in these middle-class communities. Memo to lawmakers who represent these districts: You will need to identify other ways to pay for the trillions in new health “benefits” you want to bestow on us, or find a more fiscally manageable way to skin the health-care cat. Senior citizens are the other politically significant voter group whose behavior last night should set off those radars. The two Democratic gubernatorial candidates won only 40 percent of the senior vote. Memo to lawmakers: This may not be the most opportune time to further enfeeble the fiscally stressed Medicare program by shifting hundreds of billions of dollars out of it to finance yet another unmanageable federal entitlement program. The common thread here is that our friends and neighbors in purple and blue suburban communities are giving the big thumbs down to “robust” health reform, “robust” budgets, “robust” tax rates, “robust” anything. Big is bad. They’re telling lawmakers at all levels of government to get their fiscal houses in order first. -- Michael G. Franc is vice president of government relations for the <a href="http://www.heritage.org"></a>Heritage Foundation. <hr width=100% size=2> http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MWY5NzMzYTFhODEyOWMyNzVmMTQ3OTAyNjdiMzI0NGU= Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:00:21 -0400 No Public Money for Abortion -- By: The Editors webmaster@nationalreview.com (The Editors) http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZDg4ZTYwMmI4YzNjNWE2NmUzZTBlNGYyNmI5YzE3M2Y= It is easy to forget that there are pro-life Democrats, and even pro-life Democrats committed enough on the issue to stand athwart health-care legislation coveted by President Obama. But Rep. Bart Stupak (D., Mich.) threatens to do exactly that, while Nancy Pelosi and her circle are retreating behind closed doors to frustrate his efforts. What pro-lifers, Democratic and Republican, seek is simple and should be noncontroversial: that public money not be used to fund abortions. Abortion is the most controversial subject in American politics, and anything that modifies its status quo needs careful consideration -- consideration that is independent of other complex issues, such as health-care reform. Under current law, the federal government is prohibited both from funding most abortions and from spending money to subsidize premiums for private plans that cover elective abortions. Stupak seeks only to preserve that arrangement. He proposes no new restrictions on abortion. The Pelosi health-care bill, on the other hand, authorizes the public plan to cover all elective abortions -- and it will certainly do so. Can anyone imagine the Obama administration’s HHS deciding otherwise? And people receiving federal subsidies would be able to use them to purchase private insurance plans covering abortion. Which is to say that federal funds will, in a break with longstanding policy, be entangled with abortion. With the public option, there will not even be a chance to opt out of abortion coverage. As Time magazine has <a href="http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1918261,00.html">reported</a>, all enrollees in the public option will be required, by law, to put at least $1 a month into a fund that will pay for abortions, and the legislation explicitly proclaims that “nothing in this Act shall be construed as preventing the public health insurance option from providing for” abortions. As for the premium subsidies, Democrats are attempting to use a bit of misdirection to obscure the reality. The insurance companies involved may be private, but the fact that taxpayers’ dollars may first move through private hands before they reach the abortionist does not make the subsidy any less a subsidy. Stupak’s challenge reveals something important: Democrats’ repeated assurances that the health-care bill would not fund abortions were dishonest. Factcheck.org, hardly a pro-life mouthpiece, has found President Obama misleading the American public on the subject: “Despite what Obama said,” Factcheck writes, “the House bill would allow abortions to be covered by a federal plan and by federally subsidized private plans.” If the Democrats had been telling the truth about funding abortions through the health-care bill, then Stupak’s proposed amendment would be superfluous, and its inclusion in the legislation unremarkable. Instead, Speaker Pelosi and other Democratic leaders worry it will pass. They have engaged in backroom maneuvers to block a vote on the amendment and substitute a fig-leaf “fix” of their own. The fake compromise is the Ellsworth amendment, which, relying upon the fiction that funds paid into a federal program are private “insurance premiums,” establishes an abortion money-laundering procedure that would do nothing to stop public funds from being used to procure abortions. Studies of the impact of public funding of abortion strongly suggest that the effect of this amendment would be to increase the abortion rate a great deal -- and make a mockery of the president’s professed commitment to finding common ground with pro-lifers in an effort to reduce that rate. If President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and other Democratic leaders want to have a national debate about abortion at this moment, we welcome that. But cowering in the legislative murk surrounding health-care reform is underhanded, and ought to be denounced as such by people of good faith, Republican or Democratic, pro-life or pro-choice. <hr width=100% size=2> http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZDg4ZTYwMmI4YzNjNWE2NmUzZTBlNGYyNmI5YzE3M2Y= Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:00:05 -0400 Cosmic Justice -- By: Dinesh D'Souza webmaster@nationalreview.com (Dinesh D'Souza) http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NzcwOWM0ZWQ1ZDc2YzgxNzg3MWU4MjRkYjM2MzRiZGE= All evolutionary attempts to explain morality ultimately miss the point. They seek to explain morality, but even at their best what they explain is not morality at all. Imagine a shopkeeper who routinely increases his profits by cheating his customers. So smoothly does he do this that he is never exposed and his reputation remains unimpeached. Even though the man is successful in the game of survival, if he has a conscience it will be nagging at him from the inside. It may not be strong enough to make him change his ways, but it will at least make him feel bad and perhaps ultimately despise himself. Now where have our evolutionary explanations accounted for morality in this sense? In fact, they haven’t accounted for it at all. These explanations all seek to reduce morality to self-interest, but if you think about it, genuine morality cannot be brought down to this level. Morality is not the voice that says, “Be truthful when it benefits you,” or “Be kind to those who are in a position to help you later.” Rather, it operates without regard to such calculations. Far from being an extension of self-interest, the voice of the impartial spectator is typically a restriction of self-interest. Think about it: If morality were simply an extension of selfishness, we wouldn’t need it. We don’t need moral prescriptions to tell people to act for their own benefit; they do that anyway. The whole point of moral prescriptions and injunctions is to get people to subordinate and curb their selfish interests. There is a second, deeper sense in which evolutionary theories cannot account for human morality. We can see this by considering the various attempts to explain altruism in the animal kingdom. I recently came across an article in the London Telegraph titled “Animals Can Tell Right from Wrong.” I read with interest, wondering if animals had finally taken up the question of whether it is right to eat smaller animals. After all, the greatest problem with animal rights is getting animals to respect them. Alas, the article was unilluminating on this point. Even so, it provided examples of how wolves, coyotes, elephants, whales, and even rodents occasionally engage in cooperative and altruistic behavior. Perhaps the most dramatic examples come from the work of the anthropologist Frans de Waal, who has studied gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees. According to de Waal, our “closest relatives,” the chimpanzees, display many of the recognized characteristics of morality, including kin selection and reciprocal altruism. Yet de Waal recognizes that while chimps may cooperate or help, they have no sense that they ought to help. In other words, chimps have no understanding of the normative basis of morality. And this of course is the essence of morality for humans. Morality isn’t merely about what you do; mostly it is about what you should do and what it is right to do. Evolutionary theories like kin selection and reciprocal altruism utterly fail to capture this uniquely human sense of morality as duty or obligation. Such theories can help to explain why we act cooperatively or help others, but they cannot explain why we believe it is good or right or obligatory for us to do these things. They commit what the philosopher G. E. Moore called the “naturalistic fallacy” of confusing the “is” and the “ought.” In particular, they give an explanation for the way things are and think that they have accounted for the way things ought to be. But if evolution cannot explain how humans became moral primates, what can? Now it is time to test our presuppositional argument. The premise of the argument is that virtually all conceptions of life after death, especially the religious conceptions, are rooted in the idea of cosmic justice. Consider Hinduism: “You are a greedy and grasping person in this life; very well, we’ll be seeing you as a cockroach in the next one.” Buddhism has a very similar understanding of reincarnation. Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, by contrast, uphold the notion of a Last Judgment in which the virtuous will be rewarded and the wicked will get their just deserts. The Letter to the Galatians contains the famous quotation, “Whatever a man sows, that he will also reap” (6:7). And here is a similar passage from the third sura of the Koran: “You shall surely be paid in full your wages on the Day of Resurrection.” In all these doctrines, life after death is not a mere continuation of earthly existence but rather a different kind of existence based on a settling of earthly accounts. These doctrines hold that even though we don’t always find terrestrial justice, there is ultimate justice. In this future accounting, what goes around does come around. Now let’s make the supposition that there is cosmic justice after death and ask, Does this help to explain the great mystery of human morality? It seems clear that it does. Humans recognize that there is no ultimate goodness and justice in this world, but they continue to uphold those ideals. In their interior conscience, humans judge themselves not by the standard of the shrewd self-aggrandizer but by that of the impartial spectator. We admire the good man, even when he comes to a bad end, and revile the successful scoundrel who got away with it. Evolutionary theories predict the reverse: If morality were merely a product of crafty and successful calculation, we should cherish and aspire to be crafty calculators. But we don’t. Rather, we act as if there is a moral law to which we are accountable. We are judged by our consciences as if there is an ultimate tribunal in which our actions will be pronounced “guilty” or “not guilty.” There seems to be no reason for us to hold these standards and measure our life against them if the standards aren’t legislative in some sense. But if they are legislative, then their jurisdiction must be in another world since it is clearly not in this world. So the presupposition of cosmic justice, in an existence beyond this one, makes sense of human moral standards and moral obligation in a way that evolutionary theories cannot. Ironically it is the claims of atheists that best illustrate the point I am trying to make. In the last pages of The Selfish Gene, a book devoted to showing how we are the mechanical products of our selfish genes, Richard Dawkins writes that “we have the power to turn against our creators.#...#Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs.” A century ago Thomas Huxley made the same point in regard to the cosmic process of evolutionary survival. “Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.” Now these are very strange demands. If we are, as Dawkins began by telling us, robot vehicles of our selfish genes, then how is it possible for us to rebel against them or upset their designs? Can the mechanical car turn against the man with the remote control? Can software revolt against its programmer? Clearly this is absurd. Why, then, would Dawkins and Huxley propose a course of action that undermines their own argument and seeks to runs athwart the whole course of evolution? If we stay within the evolutionary framework, there is no answer to this question. There cannot be, because we are trying to understand why dedicated champions of evolution seek to transcend evolution and, in a sense, subvert their own nature. We don’t see anything like this in the animal kingdom: Lions don’t resolve to stop harassing the deer; foxes don’t call upon one another to stop being so sneaky; parasites show no signs of distress about taking advantage of their hosts. Even apes and chimpanzees, despite their genetic proximity to humans, don’t try to rebel against their genes or become something other than what nature programmed them to be. What then is up with us humans? What makes even the atheist uphold morality in preference to his cherished evolutionary paradigm? Introduce the presupposition of cosmic justice, and the answer becomes obvious. We humans -- atheists no less than religious believers -- inhabit two worlds. The first is the evolutionary world; let’s call this Realm A. Then there is the next world; let’s call this Realm B. The remarkable fact is that we, who live in Realm A, nevertheless have the standards of Realm B built into our natures. This is the voice of morality, which makes us dissatisfied with our selfish natures and continually hopeful that we can rise above them. Our hypothesis also accounts for the peculiar nature of morality. It cannot coerce us because it is the legislative standard of another world; at the same time, it is inescapable and authoritative for us because our actions in this world will be finally and unavoidably adjudicated in the other world. Finally, the hypothesis also helps us understand why people so often violate morality. The reason is that our interests in this world are right in front of us, while the consequences of our actions in the next world seem so remote, so distant, and thus so forgettable. When Einstein discovered that his theory of relativity could explain something that Newton couldn’t -- the orbital precession of the planet Mercury -- he was thrilled. He knew about the “gap,” and he was able to close it not within the old framework but by supplying a revolutionary new one. Now, within the new paradigm, there was no gap at all. In this essay we have identified not a mere gap but a huge chasm in the evolutionary paradigm. This is the conundrum of human morality, the universal voice within us that urges us to act in ways contrary to our nature as evolutionary primates. There have been supreme efforts, within the evolutionary framework, to plug the gap, but, as we have seen, these have proven to be dismal failures. Our rival hypothesis of cosmic justice in a world beyond the world fares vastly better. It provides a way to test our hypothesis of life after death by applying it to human nature and asking whether it helps to illuminate why we are the way we are. In fact, it does. Taken in conjunction with other arguments, this argument provides stunning confirmation that the moral primate is destined for another life whose shape will depend on the character of the life that is now being lived. --<a href="http://www.dineshdsouza.com/"></a> <a href="http://dineshdsouza.com/">Dinesh D'Souza</a> is the Rishwain fellow at the <a href="http://www.hoover.org/">Hoover Institution</a>. This the third of a three-part adaptation from his just-published <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=%201596980990">Life after Death: The Evidence</a>. <hr width=100% size=2> http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NzcwOWM0ZWQ1ZDc2YzgxNzg3MWU4MjRkYjM2MzRiZGE= Thu, 05 Nov 2009 04:00:55 -0400 Republican Civil War? -- By: An NRO Symposium webmaster@nationalreview.com (An NRO Symposium) http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2RiNGRhYTYwZGZlNzZjMWFkZjNlZGE2MTM5Nzk4ZTU= The NY-23 race has political commentators abuzz: Is there a Republican civil war going on? If so, who started it, and can there be a truce? If not, why is everyone saying there is one? National Review Online asked a few close observers of the Right to report in on these rumors of war. KEN BLACKWELL Dede Scozzafava’s record in the New York State legislature was pro-tax, pro-abortion, and anti-marriage. She even accepted the endorsement of ACORN. But she got the local party elders’ support, based on nothing other than their calculated desire to maintain partisan supremacy, regardless of conviction. Doug Hoffman’s defeat was not about forcing the Republican party to take an “extreme” position. Hoffman was and is clearly in line with the GOP national platforms that gave Ronald Reagan national leadership victories. Reagan, it should be remembered, was the last Republican to carry New York State for president -- and he did so twice. President Lincoln once said, “moral principle is all that unites us.” The Republican party is not a private club with an admissions test but rather a coalition built on principle. GOP leaders can’t stiff-arm their conservative grassroots and expect not to have a fight for the soul of the party. Dede’s effort was not about party-building or coalition politics. It was about political suicide or death. Sometimes a little bloodletting can save an ill party’s life. Conservatives have contributed to a GOP mid-course correction. We will take the seat back next year a stronger party. -- Ken Blackwell, a former Ohio secretary of state, is a senior fellow at the American Civil Rights Union. RORY COOPER While pundits may say the NY-23 race pitted one conservative faction against another, it simply is not the case. Conservatism has never been stronger, or more unified. The war isn’t among the Right but against the disastrous habits of the Left, and one dysfunctional race won’t change that. Poll after poll shows that the conservative philosophy is more popular than ever, crossing party lines. Even President Obama did his best to run as a center-right candidate in 2008. He promised to address jobs, a necessary war in Afghanistan, even a tax cut. These are conservative principles, and voters are now seeing the difference between rhetoric and reality. The Left yearns for conflict on the Right, so their moderate members aren’t tempted to vote their conscience. We cannot fall into that trap. The lesson to be learned here for anyone involved in the limited selection process in New York or elsewhere across the nation is that conservatism can come in many forms, but it requires some core elements. It requires job creation through private incentives, not government growth. It requires a robust national-security policy that includes a strategy of success in Afghanistan and American global leadership. It requires health-care solutions that empower individuals, not reckless expansions of entitlements. It requires empowering small businesses, not using arbitration or union ballots to end enterprise entirely. Conservatives can have regional priorities. They can differ on solutions. That isn’t a civil war, that’s a debate. And conservatives have never wanted to be a part of the debate more. Families are divvying up 2,000-page bills from Capitol Hill to hold elected officials accountable. And, yes, they are asking to see reality versus rhetoric out of their candidates. Conservatives have a destiny. And it isn’t rooted in just one congressional district. --Rory Cooper is director of strategic communications at the Heritage Foundation. ALVIN S. FELZENBERG There is no civil war, but there is much confusion, caused by outside bud-inskies on all sides. Those who consider rural districts of this kind as mere “fly-over” country should let the locals fight it out. They used to call it devolution. The true winner in New York yesterday was Mike Huckabee, who stayed out. A conservative will defeat Owen in McHugh’s old district if Washington keeps its paws inside the Beltway. (The overall winner last night was Haley Barbour, whose Republican Governors Association now has two more members.) Words to the wise at the congressional campaign committees: Don’t treat non-incumbents as incumbents. Let the primary voters decide. Place to start: Florida. I miss those hanging chads already. -- Alvin S. Felzenberg is author of <a href="http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Njk4N2IxOWFkYzE5OTQ1MWVhZTg5MDFiYWNjODRmYTM=">The Leaders We Deserved and a Few We Didn’t: Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game</a>. TERRY JEFFREY We are not seeing a Republican civil war. We are seeing a rebellion of the middle class against the incipient socialism of Democrats in Washington, D.C. What happened in New York’s 23rd is that a small group of party leaders made the mistake of thinking it is easier to expand the GOP by abandoning conservative principles than by doing what Ronald Reagan did: Persuade people in the middle that conservative principles are right. Had the bosses nominated Doug Hoffman in the first place, he would be on his way to D.C. today to be sworn in and vote against Obamacare. It was the New York Times that in a June 3 front-page story -- the day after New Jersey Republicans nominated Chris Christie -- defined what this election was about: “The fall campaign, one of only two for governor this year (the other is in Virginia), promises to be treated to varying degrees as a referendum on President Obama’s momentous first year or on Republicans’ continued viability -- in New Jersey, if not nationally.” Christie, said the Times, “did take plainly conservative positions on school vouchers, restrictions on abortion rights, and rolling back regulation, particularly on the environment. At his rally, Mr. Corzine made clear he would go after Mr. Christie on social issues as well as pocketbook ones, saying Republicans indeed wanted smaller government -- ‘small enough to slip under your bedroom door’ or to ‘dictate their own religious beliefs to the rest of us.’” As the Times framed it five months ago, this election was a referendum on Obama and on the viability of socially conservative Republicans. Pro-life Republicans won governorships in New York and New Jersey and a pro-life Conservative party candidate drove a pro-abortion Republican right out of the race in New York’s 23rd. That’s the story. -- Terry Jeffrey is editor-at-large of Human Events. SCOTT W. JOHNSON Speaking of a civil war, it is helpful to recall that the Republican party was founded in opposition to “those twin relics of barbarism -- Polygamy, and Slavery.” True to its heritage, the Republican party now stands as the bulwark against the Democratic party’s totalizing impulse to assert control over American life from birth to death and the residual zones where life and property remain private. With a twinkle in his eye, Bill Buckley used to characterize a liberal as someone who wanted to reach into your shower and adjust the temperature of the water. He was, as usual, onto something, as we see in this liberal hour. There aren’t many conservatives or Republicans who don’t understand the imperative of resisting the project in which Obama and the Democrats are engaged. Republican party leaders in New York’s 23rd unfortunately found one, but congressional Republicans have maintained a remarkably united front in opposition to Obama. Rumors of a civil war among Republicans have been sown mostly by the media adjunct of the Democratic party with the intent of dampening opposition to the liberal project by stigmatizing it as extreme. Buckley’s rule of prudence dictated the support of the rightward-most viable candidate in any given race. Once Republicans learned that Scozzafava was a liberal, and that they had a viable conservative alternative in Doug Hoffman, they left Scozzafava in droves. In my view, the wish is father to the thought that the story of New York’s 23rd congressional district special election represents a civil war among Republicans. -- Scott W. Johnson is a Minneapolis attorney and contributor to the <a href="http://www.powerlineblog.com/">Power Line</a> blog. MARY MATALIN The most insistent claimants of a GOP civil war are those who have the most to gain by (mis)defining the party as extremist-excluders. Though Democrats outnumber Republicans, independents outnumber Democrats. Neither party can win without independents. The problem for Democrats is that indies consistently self-identify as conservative, intensely oppose Obama’s general big-government worldview, and also oppose his individual priority policies (stimulus, health care). Because Democrats repel indies on policy, they must attract them on politics, that is, the politics of destruction of the opposition. Republicans should resist taking the bait. Don’t get distracted defending our honor against the myriad Democratic definitions of extremism: homophobia, misogyny, racism, sophism, philistinism, greed, warmongering, mean-spirited hyper-partisanship, etc. Promote our commonsense, time-honored principles, which are irrefutably inclusive and mainstream. Independents side with conservatives on principle and policy, and do not see themselves or their beliefs through the Democratic/liberal prism. Extremism to these critical voters is a record like Dede Scozzafava’s -- stimulus, card check, and high taxes -- which is why they flocked to Hoffman. So when liberals call candidates like Hoffman or the policies he advocated extreme, indies get offended and, yes, angry. Hoffman may have lost the battle, but he won the war. There is now one more conservative Democrat to stop Obama statism, while Republicans keep working their way back home. Indies will naturally gravitate to the GOP if we just stay on point calling the liberals out for who they are and what they stand for. We must reassert the principles of constitutionalism and the practical policies that flow from them, and we must do so in confident -- not strident -- voices, with smiles on our faces. We need not embark on a cross-country primary-ing crusade, but we also don’t need to support Dede-Republicans. -- Mary Matalin is a Republican strategist and consultant. PETER WEHNER There is no civil war going on in the GOP. Even the brush fires we see are pretty tame. In fact, during the last year in the political wilderness, Republican recriminations have been, for the most part, fairly minor and certainly manageable. There is no broad-based effort to tear down the pillars of the modern GOP. The GOP remains a center-right party -- and any effort to make it otherwise would be silly and suicidal. The reasons a lot of people are saying NY-23 was evidence of a coming crack-up within the party are that (a) they don’t know what actually happened on the ground and (b) they have an interest in pushing such a narrative. What happened in NY-23 was sui generis. A very bad nominee was replaced by a novice who did not have the benefit of the imprimatur of the party at a time when it would have helped. If he’d had that, he probably would have won. The only important lesson, I think, is that Republicans should select as their nominees people who reflect the basic principles of the party. When they don’t, they’re asking for trouble. I understand that what voters in Vermont are looking for is different than what voters in Mississippi are looking for. The same model doesn’t sell well in every state. But Dede Scozzafava held views that made it difficult to take her Republican bone fides seriously, and the fact that she dropped out and endorsed a Democrat simply highlighted that fact. What happened yesterday in Virginia and New Jersey dwarfs what happened in NY-23. It was a very good night for Republicans -- and a very bad night for Democrats, Obama, and his entire statist agenda. -- Peter Wehner, formerly deputy assistant to President Bush, is a senior fellow at the <a href="http://eppc.org/">Ethics and Public Policy Center</a>. <hr width=100% size=2> http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2RiNGRhYTYwZGZlNzZjMWFkZjNlZGE2MTM5Nzk4ZTU= Thu, 05 Nov 2009 04:00:52 -0400 More 'Work' for the President -- By: Patrick J. Michaels webmaster@nationalreview.com (Patrick J. Michaels) http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YmVjNDEyYWRlN2ZlMmY5Mzc2NjBlMGE5MzBlM2JlNDI= In the blame game, the Obama administration isn’t about to stop with Fox News. Instead, it’s moving on to lowly scientists. Last month, President Obama gave a somewhat chilling, if somewhat ignored, speech on climate change at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He stated that any scientific debate about the magnitude of global warming is unscrupulous, decrying “those who#...#make cynical claims that contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence when it comes to climate change, whose only purpose is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary.” Then, the president talked tough, saying, “We’ll just have to deal with those people,” language familiar to anyone who knows the vagaries of Chicago politics. This surely isn’t the first time in world history that some president, premier, or pope has attempted to define science and threaten those who disagree. But the truth of the matter is that disagreement, one way or another, is a given. One can selectively cite recent climate data in support of pretty much any point of view, from the rejection of any influence by humankind at all to the wild notion that the world is about to come to an end. The ease with which anyone can construct just about any climate argument he wants has to do with the inconstant nature of climate itself. The sun warms the earth, but the amount of energy it radiates changes (right now it’s pretty cold). The earth’s surface is dominated by two very different substances -- uneven rocks and large, smooth oceans -- so internal climate oscillations and accidents happen as well. Temperatures seesaw up and down depending upon ever-changing currents of air in the tropical atmosphere and oceans, including El Niño in the Pacific and other weather features elsewhere. They can be either cold or warm. When the warm ones are absent or weak for a decade or so -- a common occurrence -- temperatures may stay the same or even fall. When there’s a huge warm phase in El Niño, global temperatures rise, as they did in 1998, setting records that have yet to be broken. Finally, there’s carbon dioxide itself. We put it in the air whenever we burn pretty much anything, be it in a power plant or in an automobile. Everything else being equal, that will warm temperatures at the surface and in the lower atmosphere. Just how much is the subject of a great scientific debate that has yet to be resolved. And everything else is never equal. Cold portions of El Niño and a cold sun can completely halt carbon-dioxide-induced warming (and clearly have for more than ten years now). And this behavior creates a fertile environment for criticism of the projections of computer models for this century. What you can say is happening to the climate depends on the period you choose to study. Using the surface-temperature record that scientists cite the most, you will find a significant cooling trend after 2000. You’ll find no significant trend whatsoever if you start in any year between 1996 and 2000. Beginning your trend before 1996 will yield you significant warming. And so forth. It’s therefore not surprising that anyone can see anything on the climate Ouija board. In fact, though, there’s only one thing that is clear: For the last decade and a half, our climate has not behaved in accordance with the predictions of most climate models. They just don’t predict such a long hiatus in warming even as carbon-dioxide emissions from human activity continue to climb. Note to the president: I do not say that to “defeat or delay” your policies on climate change. The fact is that the U.S. Senate is likely to do that anyway, with or without this information. Early on Election Day, the GOP <a href="http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OWNhYmQzMTkzNGNjODFkN2JmYWQ3NjA2NjExODYzMmM=">boycotted</a> a session of the Environment and Public Works Committee in protest of a climate-change bill’s costs, and Democrats were split on the legislation as well. Tuesday’s election results are likely to give Blue Dog Democrats further pause. If the Senate does not pass a climate bill that is acceptable to the president, Obama is almost certain to ask the Environmental Protection Agency to issue regulations on carbon-dioxide emissions that he can take to the Copenhagen climate conference next month as evidence of America’s efforts. These will then be used to extract some vague concessions on the part of the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, China, and the Copenhagen Protocol will be hailed as a major victory over global warming. Of course, it will be no such thing. If the EPA does issue global-warming regulations, it will have to defend the science that it uses to raise the price of virtually everything. And it is true, Mr. President, that people will use the inconvenient facts of recent climate behavior to defeat or delay the “change” the EPA commands. The administration may respond by “working on” the global-warming people it doesn’t like, but it can’t “work on” the obvious and growing disconnect between what was forecast and what is happening. The administration did a great job of increasing the ratings of Fox News. Maybe it can do the same for dissident scientists. -- Patrick J. Michaels is a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and distinguished senior fellow in public policy at George Mason University. <hr width=100% size=2> http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YmVjNDEyYWRlN2ZlMmY5Mzc2NjBlMGE5MzBlM2JlNDI= Thu, 05 Nov 2009 04:00:21 -0400 Same Old, Same Old -- By: Michael Knox Beran webmaster@nationalreview.com (Michael Knox Beran) http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MzU0ODJhODVlYmI5YjU2ZDRlN2VjYThiNjhkZTI0ODU= Barack Obama won the White House promising a politics of change, yet he presides over an administration that has become a mortuary for dead ideas. In the year since his election, he has given the country not novelty, but the same old, same old, serving up policies that might have been arresting in the time of McKinley but have long since lost their luster. From his administration’s profusion of “czars” and “special masters” to his party’s push to compel Americans to eat certain kinds of food and do certain kinds of exercise (that they might conform to whatever behavioral models are at present deemed good for them), from the drive to regulate the Internet to the proposal to require doctors to offer patients the latest refinements in “end-of-life counseling,” the president and his acolytes peddle the hoarier clichés of a now archaic politics of social regeneration. It’s a “we know what’s good for you” philosophy that has come to grate on the nerves. Surely it is the inalienable right of every citizen to go to hell in his own way. President Obama has spoken of the moment in politics when “the perfection begins.” Sometimes one would just as soon the perfection ended. We are human beings, and deeply imperfect by nature. The last thing we need is a nosey, cajoling, and meddlesome state forcing a spurious gospel of betterment down our throats. Once upon a time, social reform, with its ideal of government by enlightened administrators versed in the latest social technic, sounded like a good thing. It was hot stuff -- in the 19th century, when Bismarck and Disraeli pioneered it. But what was exciting in the 1870s now seems not merely wrongheaded but old. Creaking. By the 1950s, Hannah Arendt was warning that social reformers were drawing from a poisoned well. The social sciences to which they looked for inspiration were, she said, “behavioral sciences.” They aimed to “reduce man as a whole, in all his activities, to the level of a conditioned and behaving animal.” Why has President Obama, a man who if anything has been a little too free with the word “change,” chosen a way of governing that was old hat half a century ago? It might be that he truly believes in the millennial promise of social-justice theology. Some go so far as to <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article5987457.ece">claim</a> that the president has swallowed a secular version of the new-heaven-and-new-earth eschatology of the twelfth-century mystic Joachim of Floris. I rather doubt it. The president almost certainly regards his prophetic conceits and shamanistic mannerisms as little more than a useful form of political theater. He is less a mystic than a man of power, and the administrative philosophy of social control, whatever else it might be, is a formula of power. Its first champions were the defensive patricians of the 19th century, who were threatened by a new class of industrial magnates. The feudalists could no longer lord it over the little people with whips and chains in the way seigneurs like the Marquis de Sade had in the good old days. They needed a more up-to-date method of coercion. Disraeli and Bismarck found it in social legislation; across the ocean, the two Roosevelts aped them. The castle paternalism of the Ancien Régime was transformed into the bureaucratic maternalism of the administrative state. The chastising office once filled by the feudal seigneur was taken up by the modern social technician, part babysitter, part prison warden. This new <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobles_of_the_Robe">noblesse de robe</a> was initially a high-bred patrician affair, but today the administrative clerisy is less an aristocratic elite than an Ivy League one; it is a caste founded not in blood but in expertise. One enters it by going to certain schools, sitting in certain lecture halls, and obtaining certain degrees. President Obama, who bears all too evidently the stigmata of Columbia and Harvard, has been deeply influenced by the ideals and assumptions of the technocratic elite; his presidency, which was supposed to bring reform, promises instead to enlarge a tired and cynical mandarinate. The creation by the president and his followers of more machineries of compulsion will only exacerbate the elements of banality and despair in modern life, and further undermine town-square institutions that once provided pastoral guidance and charitable care of a higher caliber than today’s social-scientific regimes. The historian Johan Huizinga, in his book <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=B000GWDYOG">Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture</a>, observed that the 19th-century progressive philosophies on which the Obama administration has so largely drawn were “inimical to the play-factor” in life. Their bureaucracies crushed the spirit of flexibility and improvisation, of imagination and poetry, that are essential to the health of a civilization. Yet Barack Obama, a year after his elevation, appears resolved to add one more chapter to this dismal history. -- Michael Knox Beran is a contributing editor of City Journal. His most recent book is <a class="bioline" href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=%20074327069X">Forge of Empires 1861-1871: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made</a>. <hr width=100% size=2> http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MzU0ODJhODVlYmI5YjU2ZDRlN2VjYThiNjhkZTI0ODU= Thu, 05 Nov 2009 04:00:15 -0400 No Free Lunches in Medical Care -- By: Thomas Sowell webmaster@nationalreview.com (Thomas Sowell) http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Y2Y2MjM4MGVlN2JiNmM4ZWFkZDdmM2VmZTYzM2ZhNDk= One of the strongest talking points of those who want a government-run medical-care system is that we simply cannot afford the high and rising costs of medical care under the current system. First of all, what we can afford has absolutely nothing to do with the cost of producing anything. We will either pay those costs or not get the benefits. Moreover, if we cannot afford the quantity and quality of medical care that we want now, the government has no miraculous way of enabling us to afford it in the future. If you think the government can lower medical costs by eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse,” as some Washington politicians claim, the logical question is: Why haven’t they done that already? Over the years, scandal after scandal has shown waste, fraud, and abuse to be rampant in Medicare and Medicaid. Why would anyone imagine that a new government medical program will do what existing government medical programs have clearly failed to do? If we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical drugs now, how can we afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical drugs, in addition to a new federal bureaucracy to administer a government-run medical system? Nothing is easier for politicians than to rail against the profits of pharmaceutical companies, the pay of doctors, and other things that have very little to do with the total cost of medical care, but which can arouse emotions to the point where facts don’t matter. As former congressman Dick Armey put it, “Demagoguery beats data” in politics. Economics and politics confront the same fundamental problem: What everyone wants adds up to more than there is. Market economies deal with this problem by confronting individuals with the costs of producing what they want, and letting those individuals make their own trade-offs when presented with prices that convey those costs. That leads to self-rationing, in the light of each individual’s own circumstances and preferences. Politics deals with the same problem by making promises that cannot be kept, or which can be kept only by creating other problems that cannot be acknowledged when the promises are made. Price controls are a classic example. At various times and places, in countries around the world, price controls have been put on any number of goods and services -- going all the way back to the days of the Roman Empire and ancient Babylon. Price controls create lower prices for open and legal transactions -- but also black markets where the prices are higher than they were before, because the risks of punishment for illegal activity has to be compensated. Price controls also lead to shortages and quality deterioration. But politicians who take credit for lower prices blame all these bad consequences on others. Diocletian did this in the days of the Roman Empire, leaders of the French Revolution did this when their price controls on food led to hungry and angry people, and American politicians denounced the oil companies when price controls on gasoline led to long lines at filling stations in the 1970s. It is the same story, whatever the country, the times, or the product or service. The self-rationing that people do when prices are free to convey the inherent impossibility of any economy to supply as much as everybody wants is replaced, under price controls, with rationing imposed by government, which cannot possibly have the same knowledge of each individual’s circumstances and preferences -- least of all when it comes to medical care, where patients differ in innumerable ways. Here, as elsewhere, there is no free lunch -- even though politicians get elected by promising free lunches. A free lunch in medical care is one of the most dangerous illusions of all. Waiting in long gasoline lines at filling stations was exasperating back in the 1970s, but waiting weeks to get an MRI to find out why you are sick, and then waiting months for an operation, as happens in countries with government-run medical systems, can be not only painful but dangerous. You can be dead by the time they find out what is wrong with you and do something about it. But that will “bring down the cost of medical care” because you won’t be around to require any. <hr width=100% size=2> http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Y2Y2MjM4MGVlN2JiNmM4ZWFkZDdmM2VmZTYzM2ZhNDk= Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:13 -0400 Afghan Mythologies -- By: Victor Davis Hanson webmaster@nationalreview.com (Victor Davis Hanson) http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Zjg0MTllODYwNWM3ZDAwMWU2OTBkNGJjYTFlN2FlYTI= As President Obama decides whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, we should remember that most of the conventional pessimism about Afghanistan is only half-truth. Remember the mantra that the region is the “graveyard of empires,” where Alexander the Great, the British in the 19th century, and the Soviets only three decades ago inevitably met their doom? In fact, Alexander conquered most of Bactria and its environs (which included present-day Afghanistan). After his death, the area that is now Afghanistan became part of the Seleucid Empire. Centuries later, outnumbered British-led troops and civilians were initially ambushed, and suffered many casualties, in the first Afghan war. But the British were not defeated in their subsequent two Afghan wars between 1878 and 1919. The Soviets did give up in 1989 their nine-year effort to create out of Afghanistan a Communist buffer state -- but only because the Arab world, the United States, Pakistan, and China combined to provide the Afghan mujahideen resistance with billions of dollars in aid, not to mention state-of-the-art anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons. While Afghans have been traditionally fierce resistance fighters and made occupations difficult, they have rarely for long defeated invaders -- and never without outside assistance. Other myths about Afghanistan abound. Is the country ungovernable? No more so than any of the region’s other rough countries. After the founding of the modern state in 1919, Afghanistan enjoyed a relatively stable succession of constitutional monarchs until 1973. The country was once considered generally secure, tolerant, and hospitable to foreigners. Did we really take our eye off the “good” war in Afghanistan to fight the optional bad one in Iraq? Not quite. After our brilliant campaign to remove the Taliban in 2001, the relatively stable Karzai government saw little violence until 2007. Between 2001 and 2006, no more than 100 American soldiers were killed in any given year. In fact, American casualties increased after Iraq became quiet -- as Islamists, defeated in Iraq’s Anbar province, refocused their efforts on the dominant Afghan theater. Is Afghanistan the new Vietnam? Hardly. In the three bloodiest years, 2007 through 2009 so far, the United States has suffered a total of 553 fatalities -- tragic, but less than 1 percent of the 58,159 Americans killed in Vietnam. What is astounding is the ability of the U.S. military to inflict damage on the enemy, protect the constitutional government, and keep our losses to a minimum. Our military is the most experienced in both counterterrorism and counterinsurgency warfare in the world. The maverick savior of Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, now oversees operations in the Mideast and Central Asia. His experienced lieutenant, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, is a successful veteran of the worst fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unlike past foreign interventions, our U.N.-approved aim is not to create a puppet state, but a consensual government able to defend itself against the Taliban and al-Qaeda -- while preventing more strikes against the United States. With Iraq relatively stabilized, jihadists have no choice but to commit their resources to prevent a second defeat. Meanwhile, Pakistan at last is cracking down on terrorist enclaves. Unlike the case of the unpopular Bush decision to surge troops in Iraq, President Obama does not face a hostile political opposition at home. Many Americans are undecided rather than against continuing the war. Republicans in Congress will support the administration’s efforts to secure the country. There are no conservative counterparts to Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehan. Even most anti-war Democrats became quiet once Barack Obama was elected. European NATO commanders want the U.S. to lead them to victory. What, then, prevents President Obama from sending more troops to secure the country? Mostly problems of presidential indecision and confusion. Candidate Obama ran on the theme of Afghanistan as the necessary war, Iraq the optional one. But he assumed the then-quiet front in Afghanistan would stay that way, while Americans would withdraw from what he deemed a hopeless effort in Iraq. Just the opposite ensued. The surge worked. But Afghanistan heated up. So now the president finds himself increasingly trapped by his campaign rhetoric. He is on record as committed to defeating the Taliban and winning the “necessary” war. But the president is now also a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who apparently does not want what has become a messy conflict with Islamists on his watch. We have experienced soldiers and military leadership, a just cause, and Western unity. In other words, we have everything we need to defeat the Taliban -- except a commander-in-chief as confident about fighting and winning as he once was as a candidate. <hr width=100% size=2> http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Zjg0MTllODYwNWM3ZDAwMWU2OTBkNGJjYTFlN2FlYTI= Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:09 -0400 Small Miracle -- By: Clifford D. May webmaster@nationalreview.com (Clifford D. May) http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MmY3NTM3NDk4ZTI4NWEwOWRkYTdkZGZhM2Y1OWNhM2Q= People forget how small Israel is. Its entire population is a little more than 7 million -- smaller than Lima, Peru. Its land area is about 8,000 square miles, smaller than New Jersey or Belize. By comparison, Jordan, its neighbor to the east, occupies 35,000 square miles; Egypt, its neighbor to the West, covers 386,000 square miles. There are more than 20 Arab states, which have a combined population of 325 million, and more than 50 majority-Muslim states, which have a combined population of well over a billion. By contrast, Israel is the world’s only Jewish-majority state -- and 20 percent of its population is Arab, most of them Muslim. So why is so much attention -- and firepower -- focused on this tiny nation? Israel’s many enemies and critics say it is because the Jewish state has deprived Palestinian Arabs of a homeland. But Jordan, situated on the three-quarters of historic Palestine lying east of the River Jordan -- from which the country took its name when it was created in the 1920s -- is populated, not surprisingly, mostly by Palestinians. As for the royal family that rules there, it was exiled from its ancestral home in Mecca, after the Saudis -- a warrior clan subscribing to Wahhabism, a radically fundamentalist version of Islam -- conquered the lion’s share of the Arabian Peninsula and named it after themselves. Palestinians also inhabit Gaza, from which Israel withdrew every settler and soldier four years ago. And, under various peace proposals, Israel has offered to remove its citizens from more than 90 percent of the West Bank, a territory occupied in 1967 at the end of a war with Egypt (from which it took Gaza), Jordan (from which it took the West Bank), and other Arab neighbors whose explicitly stated goal was Israel’s eradication. Defenders of Israel argue that it is despised for different reasons, not least because it is an outpost of Western values in a region, the broader Middle East, engaged in a long-term project of religious and ethnic cleansing. One country after another has become inhospitable toward its minorities. As a result, Jews, Christians, Baha’i’s, and Zoroastrians are among the minority groups that have been eliminated, decimated, or compelled to flee to more tolerant corners of the world. There also is the fact that, economically, Israel punches way above its weight. As Dan Senor and Saul Singer describe and document in a fascinating new book, <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=044654146X">Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle</a>, the “greatest concentration of innovation and entrepreneurship in the world today” is found in the Jewish state: a higher percentage of GDP devoted to research and development than anywhere else in the world; more high-tech start-ups per capita than any other country; 80 times as much venture capital investment per capita as in China; more companies on NASDAQ than all of Europe combined. What’s more, Senor and Singer believe the conventional and sometimes stereotypical explanations for this success -- e.g. Jews work hard, Jews are smart -- are either wrong or insufficient. An overlooked and key contributing factor, they theorize, is that virtually all Israelis serve in the military where a specific set of skills and values are pounded into them. They learn for example, “that you must complete your mission, but that the only way to do that is as a team. The battle cry is ‘After me’: there is no leadership without personal example and without inspiring your team to charge together and with you. There is no leaving anyone behind. You have minimal guidance from the top and are expected to improvise.” The Israeli military encourages a kind of entrepreneurship: the assumption of both responsibility and risk at a young age, coupled with on-the-job experience making life-and-death decisions. European troops, by contrast, rarely venture onto battlefields and, when they do, as in Afghanistan, too often are instructed to serve as peacekeepers -- where there is no peace to keep. What does that teach? In recent years, American military men and women have been facing -- and overcoming -- daunting challenges. Senor and Singer suggest that upon return to civilian life they should not “deemphasize their military experience when applying for jobs,” and that employers should recognize the skills and habits that young Americans are now acquiring while fighting for their country and to ensure that freedom has a future. That is not an argument in favor of war. But war has been both declared against us and thrust upon us. Those who believe otherwise indulge a dangerous delusion. What’s more, the inconvenient truth is that war, not peace, has been the norm throughout history. And reports of history’s death have been exaggerated. The “greatest generation” was forged in the crucible of a global conflict. If the global War Against the West produces a second “greatest generation,” that will be a bitter defeat for Osama bin Laden, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and all those sympathetic to their medievalist and supremacist ideologies. America is an exceptional nation. But each generation of Americans must decide whether to assume the burden required to continue that tradition. Israel, too, is unique: Unlike the vast majority of states born in the second half of the 20th century, Senor and Singer observe, “Only Israel’s founders had the temerity to try to start up a modern first-world country in the region from which their ancestors had been exiled two thousand years earlier.” The problem is that in the eyes of much of the world Israel is both a “start-up nation,” and an upstart nation. It defies the “international community” by daring to defend itself, and it prospers even while under attack. To many people, such behavior is unforgiveable. <hr width=100% size=2> http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MmY3NTM3NDk4ZTI4NWEwOWRkYTdkZGZhM2Y1OWNhM2Q= Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:03 -0400