Remember civility?: Roger Simon, racism, and polemics

The New Neo Posted on by

Roger Simon (not to be confused with PJ’s Roger L. Simon) was long a respected and supposedly objective journalist. And yet take a look at his column:

Question: If Ted Cruz and John Boehner were both on a sinking ship, who would be saved?

Answer: America.

Harsh? Look around you at what is happening to America and you will see harsh. I am not talking about closed parks and monuments. I am talking about the funds cut to nearly 9 million mothers and young children for food, breastfeeding support and infant formula.

That is harsh. Making a war against babies is harsh. And for what? Because Cruz, Republican senator from Texas, has grown so drunk on the sound of his own voice and so besotted with illusions of his own grandeur that he believes halting government today will propel him into the White House tomorrow?

You can read the whole thing if you wish, but that’s a sample of what passes for political discourse from a respected and middle-aged reporter-now-turned-opinion-writer. And from the comments section there (which you are welcome to peruse) the “Tea Party Racists” theme that Simon is flogging has become entrenched truth among Democrats (although if you want to see racism, just read some of the comments about Thomas Sowell in the comments section to Simon’s article).

It’s a feeding frenzy on the left because the sharks think they smell the blood of the dying GOP. It’s not the display of an isolated fringe, either, but a mainstream display by people who don’t think of themselves as polemicists.

Polemicists? Noted journalist Roger Simon neglects to convey a few itty bitty facts when he writes:

Remember Samuel Wurzelbacher? Known as “Joe the Plumber,” he was selected by John McCain as his presidential campaign mascot in 2008 with the same care McCain used to select Sarah Palin.

Over the weekend, Wurzelbacher posted an article on his blog titled: “America Needs a White Republican President.”

“Admit it,” the article said. “You want a white Republican president again. Wanting a white Republican president doesn’t make you racist, it just makes you American.”

America has come to a sorry pass. Not because there are still racists among us, but because the racists among us think they can tell us what makes an American.

Sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it? But here are the facts: (1) Joe the Plumber didn’t write the article, although he did put it on his site; (2) the article was written by a black man, Kevin Jackson, and is actually quite different than what one might think from reading the title (have a read). In it, Jackson is saying that if we had a white president people couldn’t argue that every criticism of him was due to racism.

Ironic, isn’t it, how Simon turns that around, and accuses Jackson (or whoever he thought wrote it) of racism? Either Simon didn’t even do his homework and failed to read the article and/or find out who wrote it, or he knows all of this and prefers to dissemble to his readers. I would bet on the latter.

[NOTE: Note, also, that Simon fails to link to the Jackson piece. Perhaps he doesn’t want his readers to actually read it and see what it really says.]

What’s in a name: healthcare.gov

The New Neo Posted on by

It has not escaped my notice that the Obamacare website is named “healthcare.gov.” That sounds innocuous enough, so why am I calling anyone’s attention to it?

It’s emblematic of the insidious nature of the language around the ACA that we hardly notice. But I very doubt doubt the site’s name was chosen casually. It is a very deliberate attempt (although almost beautiful in its subtlety) to make the populace think that what Obamacare—and government—dispenses is health care itself.

Government as healer, and as beneficent portal to doctors, nurses, hospitals, and medication; to treatment.

But what the government is actually offering here is health insurance. “Healthinsurance.gov” is not too unwieldy a phrase for a website URL. Of course, health insurance facilitates the procuring of health care for the majority of people (although the price of health care has risen so much partly as a result of widespread third-party coverage).

You won’t be seeing the website renamed “healthinsurance.gov” any time soon. Or any time at all. Even if we went to single payer—in which case it really would be healthinsurance.gov—the government would call it something else. In Britain, for example, they skip the “care” and just call it the National Health Service.

Obamacare: Big Dig of government programs?

The New Neo Posted on by

Although, come to think of it, it certainly wouldn’t be the only government program to resemble that illustrious undertaking in Boston:

The Big Dig was the most expensive highway project in the U.S. and was plagued by escalating costs, scheduling overruns, leaks, design flaws, charges of poor execution and use of substandard materials, criminal arrests, and one death. The project was originally scheduled to be completed in 1998 at an estimated cost of $2.8 billion (in 1982 dollars, US$6.0 billion adjusted for inflation as of 2006). However, the project was completed only in December 2007, at a cost of over $14.6 billion ($8.08 billion in 1982 dollars, meaning a cost overrun of about 190%) as of 2006. The Boston Globe estimated that the project will ultimately cost $22 billion, including interest, and that it will not be paid off until 2038.

Get used to it, if you weren’t already. They don’t say “good enough for government work” for no reason:

The biggest problem with Healthcare.gov seems simple enough: It was built by people who are apparently far more familiar with government cronyism than they are with IT.

That’s one of the insights that can be gleaned from the work done by the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that focuses on government transparency. In a report filed this past week, the group examined why the system broke as horribly as it did: The contracts awarded to those who built it were, by and large, existing government contractors with “deep political pockets.”..

Why did they get the work? The report hints at a likely reason: The companies were big lobbyists, with “some 17 contract winners reported spending more than $128 million on lobbying in 2011 and 2012.” Granted, some experience with government work is vital for any contractor, and the federal procurement system is geared to favor those already doing government work, but Sunlight pointed out that the list tips heavily toward those with both existing contracts and political leverage…

One…name in particular on the contractor list probably won’t be familiar to readers, but ought to be from now on: Science Applications International Corp., or SAIC. Nominally a defense contractor, SAIC has been involved with many government projects with ghastly end results, such as New York City’s fraud- and corruption-riddled $600 million CityTime payroll software boondoggle.

But many problems with the website were not the fault of incompetent contractors. One of the main difficulties, the sign-in process and the fact that an account must be created before a person can browse programs and prices, was intentional (although I doubt they meant it to be quite as awful as it has turned out). But there actually was a reason they made people sign in and be verified before they could get price quotes, and the reason was not a trivial one, although the whole thing underscores the problems with Obamacare and the federal government in general: they figured that if they allowed people to shop around and look at prices before their income level and eligibility for subsidies had been verified, too many viewers would see the real (that is, unsubsidized) prices and freak out at the cost. The government wanted lower-income people to only see the prices they’d actually be paying, with the government (in other words, the taxpayers and/or Obamacare subscribers with more money than they) footing the rest of the bill. So the real price of Obamacare would be hidden.

It’s exactly the opposite of discount stores where they proudly display the original price so you can see just how much it’s been marked down and feel that you’re getting a huge bargain. Of course, in that case, the consumer is free to accept or reject the product, taxpayers aren’t subsidizing the shopper, and the original price may even be inflated to make the buyer think the deal is even better.

But the point of the Obamacare site was to be, if not exactly duplicitous (after all, the subsidized price is in fact what a person getting a subsidy would actually pay), then certainly to be secretive about the bigger picture of cost. But one of the hallmarks of Obamacare has been this speed and secretiveness, so why would that change now?

Even Ezra Klein has interviewed a guy who noted it (Robert Laszewski, president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates):

One thing the Obama administration has been really paranoid about is rate shock. When someone like me says there’ll be rate shock they say you have to net out the subsidies. That is a fair point. But I think what happened was when they designed their system they were so paranoid about that that they wanted to make sure people browsing got the lowest price. That required signing in so you could see subsidies. And my theory is that’s why they went to the architecture they did even though the IT systems people wanted to go another way.

So not only are the problems no simple glitch, but they are only partly the fault of the IT people. Some of this is the fault of big government itself, and why so many people hate it. But in this case the Obama administration had political goals above all else, and they sacrificed efficiency and openness to them. This, of course, is not news.

[NOTE: Another bonus of the way the website was designed was to maximize the amount of information the government could glean about even casual browsers. The way the Obamacare website is set up, there are no casual browsers.

And to be fair, the government may also have feared that if people saw the unsubsidized prices first, they run screaming from the site and never return. This, of course, would spell doom for Obamacare, since it depends on a lot of young and healthy people enrolling.]

David Horowitz: what the newer left learned from the older left

The New Neo Posted on by

David Horowitz was a leader of the American left during the tumultuous 60s and 70s. Raised by Communist parents, he was a devoted mover and shaker in the cause, and an early editor of Ramparts magazine.

But Horowitz has been on the right for quite some time now; he chronicled his change experience in his book Radical Son, which I wrote about here and here and is recommended reading.

Having looked at activist political life from both sides now for quite a while, Horowitz is uniquely positioned to comment on left and right, old and new. Here is a small portion of what he said in a searing address he recently gave to the Kohler conference of the Bradley Foundation:

There is a marked difference between the radicals of the Sixties and the radical movement Obama is part of. In the Sixties, as radicals we said what we thought and blurted out what we wanted. We wanted a revolution, and we wanted it now. It was actually very decent of us to warn others as to what we intended. But because we blurted out our goal, we didn’t get very far. Americans were onto us. Those who remained on the left when the Sixties were over, learned from their experience. They learned to lie. The strategy of the lie is progressives’ new gospel. It is what the progressive bible ”” Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals ”” is all about. Alinsky is the acknowledged political mentor to Obama and Hillary, to the service and teacher unions, and to the progressive rank and file. Alinsky understood the mistake Sixties’ radicals had made. His message to this generation is easily summed up: Don’t telegraph your goals; infiltrate their institutions and subvert them; moral principles are disposable fictions; the end justifies the means; and never forget that your political goal is always power.

An SDS radical wrote in the Sixties: “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” The Alinsky version is this: The issue is never the issue; the issue is always power: How to wring power out of the democratic process, how turn the process into an instrument of progressive control. How to use it to fundamentally transform the United States of America ”” which is exactly what Barack Obama warned he would do on the eve of his election.

The chosen legislative instrument to begin this transformation was Obamacare. It was presented as an act of charity, a plan to cover the uninsured. That was the “issue” as they presented it. But the actual goal of Obamacare’s socialist sponsors was a “single payer system” ”“ government healthcare ”” which would put the state in control of the lives of every American, man, woman and child. That is the reason that none of the promises made about Obamacare was true, beginning with his campaign lie that Obamacare government health care was not a program he would support. Obamacare will not cover 30 million uninsured Americans, as Obama and the Democrats said it would; Obamacare will not lower costs, as they promised it would; Obamacare will deprive many Americans of their doctors and healthcare plans, as they assured everyone it would not; Obamacare is a new tax, as they swore it wouldn’t be. All these promises Obama and the Democrats made were false because they were only a camouflage for their real goal actual goal, which was universal control.

This false face of the left was not actually new. Horowitz says that in his parents’ generation, Communists were for the most part working underground and secretly, calling themselves “progressives” and “Jeffersonian democrats” instead of disclosing their true affiliation. But in the 60s, his generation of leftists came in from the cold of being undercover and declared themselves proudly for what they actually were, thinking the time was right for their brand of politics.

It wasn’t.

And it probably wasn’t in 2008, either, despite the fact that in the interim the educational system and the MSM had both come more and more under leftist control and had prepared the way, at least in part (and, by the way, many of those early 60s and 70s leftists have been instrumental in that endeavor). But if Obama had openly declared his leftism during the election of 2008 or even that of 2012 (when it could have been inferred even more easily than in 2008, although it could have and should have been figured out in both years), he most likely would have lost. The left still has to remain somewhat stealthy—although less stealthy than before—until it achieves its over-arching goal of indefinite one party rule.

[NOTE: If you followed the Ramparts link to its Wiki entry, you’d have seen see the following list of writers who contributed articles there: Robert Scheer, Murray Rothbard, Noam Chomsky, Cesar Chavez, Seymour Hersh, Tom Hayden, Angela Davis, Jonathan Kozol, Todd Gitlin, Sol Stern, Tariq Ali, Alexander Cockburn, Christopher Hitchens, Saul Landau, David Welsh, and John Beecher. A sort of who’s who of the radical left at the time. Besides Horowitz and Peter Collier, both editors of the magazine who underwent a left-to-right conversion, Christopher Hitchens had a sort of half-conversion that was equally dramatic. The Wiki entry also mentions that Brit Hume was the Washington correspondent for the magazine for a short time.

It ceased publication in 1975.]

[ADDENDUM: Commenter “kit” asks:

What is in it for them[?]

Why would they want to live in an oppressed nation. Is it because they think they will be the oppressors and they get sadistic joy from that? Do they think they will redistribute the wealth of a nation’s people and take it for themselves. Do they think they will all be the leaders living in luxury?

I dont understand. I see it happening but I cannot understand why any human born free would want to change a free land into something so abominable.

My answer:

Some are in it for the power.

Some really think that they are the ones who can figure out a way to bring justice, peace, and joy to man/womankind, and save the planet as well (see this book by Thomas Sowell). “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”

Tyranny rides in on the back of a union of the amoral/immoral power-hungry and the idealistic dreamers. The second are the tools of the first.

And what makes it easier to happen is when we get lazy and abdicate teaching our young people how to avoid it. Watch:

You know, listening to that again (and I’ve heard it several times in the last few years, and linked to it before) brings tears to my eyes. A brilliant, brilliant expression of a truth we’ve come to know very well in the years since he said it. Let’s hope we never ever have to tell our children what Reagan says at the end there.]

Susan Collins is very surprised

The New Neo Posted on by

Republican moderates in the Senate such as Susan Collins of Maine have gotten used to augmenting their own power by being the great compromisers and go-betweens, part of this or that “gang.” But this time the Democrats don’t seem as interested, and Collins seems surprised:

Sen. Susan Collins, who offered a potential compromise to end the government shutdown and raise the nation’s debt ceiling, said Sunday that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was too quick to dismiss it when lawmakers are still struggling to break a fiscal stalemate on Capitol Hill.

“I was very surprised that Sen. Reid said that,” Collins said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I don’t think it was very constructive.”

Reid pats her on the head and throws her a fish that indicates he may ultimately play ball with her if she’s patient and good enough:

Susan Collins is one of my favorite senators, Democrat or Republican,” Reid told reporters. “I appreciate her efforts ”” as always ”” to find a consensus. But the plan that I’ve seen in writing is not going to go any place at this stage.”

Reid knows the value to him of Republicans such as Collins. And before you start screaming “Primary her!!”, there’s virtually no question that if she leaves the political scene, she will be replaced by a liberal Democrat. Faced with this prospect, you might say, “better a real Democrat than a Republican Democrat,” but I disagree because RINOs like Collins at least give Republicans a shot at changing the leadership of the Senate and getting rid of Reid. A real Democrat would not.

Chuck Schumer knows how to turn a phrase:

“We are not overplaying our hand,” Schumer told reporters. “We are open to discussion in every way, and I think our Republican colleagues are moving in our direction.”

Open to discussion “in every way”—as long as all the important compromise is on the Republican side. And no, he doesn’t think the Democrats have overplayed their hand, because he’s convinced the hand they’re holding is a royal flush.

[NOTE: More here and here.]

Even the NY Times can’t hide…

The New Neo Posted on by

…the debacle that was the Obamacare website launch:

For the past 12 days, a system costing more than $400 million and billed as a one-stop click-and-go hub for citizens seeking health insurance has thwarted the efforts of millions to simply log in. The growing national outcry has deeply embarrassed the White House, which has refused to say how many people have enrolled through the federal exchange.

Even some supporters of the Affordable Care Act worry that the flaws in the system, if not quickly fixed, could threaten the fiscal health of the insurance initiative, which depends on throngs of customers to spread the risk and keep prices low…

By early this year, people inside and outside the federal bureaucracy were raising red flags. “We foresee a train wreck,” an insurance executive working on information technology said in a February interview. “We don’t have the I.T. specifications. The level of angst in health plans is growing by leaps and bounds. The political people in the administration do not understand how far behind they are.”

It’s interesting that the Times is still capable of writing hard-hitting pieces when it wants to. Usually, however, it only wants to against Republicans. In this piece, despite a few pro forma jabs at Republicans and the shutdown, it’s pretty much open season on the web’s designers and those in the administration who oversaw the debacle.

What is it about the Obamacare rollout that caused the Times to stop carrying Obama’s water, if only for a minute? The first thing might be that they don’t have to blame Obama, who most likely did not oversee the design of the website. The second is that it is, indeed, deeply embarrassing—perhaps even to the Times, which has been cheerleading Obama and Obamacare for so long. And the third reason might be that it is more than ordinarily difficult to hide or disguise or spin this particular story, when so many citizens have actually interacted with the website and experienced major troubles, and then told their friends and family. This screw-up is more immediately up-close and personal than most.

But over it all looms the fear that the mess implicates Big Government and its efficiency as a whole, and bolsters the conservative narrative. So the Times may be warning those responsible in the Obama administration that if they are too glaringly incompetent, even their friends in the liberal press might actually call them on it, because that high a level of ineptitude potentially endangers the entire liberal enterprise.

The liberation of the WWII Memorial

The New Neo Posted on by

Go to Legal Insurrection for some good coverage of today’s events in DC, with demonstrations by vets and truckers.

Also via Legal Insurrection, take a look at this from the NY Times, about the Obamacare website:

These are not glitches,” said an insurance executive who has participated in many conference calls on the federal exchange. Like many people interviewed for this article, the executive spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he did not wish to alienate the federal officials with whom he works. “The extent of the problems is pretty enormous. At the end of our calls, people say, ”˜It’s awful, just awful.’ ”

It’s awful, all right, and not just in the way they mean. The level of fear this administration has engendered is—yes, I’ll use the word—unprecedented, in this country, at least. And it’s getting harder to tell what part of the sycophancy of the MSM is ideological mind-melding and what part is fear.

Nixon had an enemies list, but how many people were truly afraid of him? And the people who were afraid of him actually were his enemies. With Obama, it seems that quite a few of the people who are afraid of him are his admirers and supporters, fellow-liberals and Democrats in the press and elsewhere. They’re afraid to tell the truth, afraid they’ll be punished for not sucking up fast enough and furiously enough.

But hey, that’s the way Obama got his start in politics. Remember the Alice Palmer incident? In Obama’s very first political campaign he managed to get all his Democratic primary opponents (mostly black, I might add, and including his mentor Alice Palmer) knocked off the ballot on technicalities, making him the only choice left standing. His reputation preceded him to the Illinois Senate as a man to be feared and thus “respected” by fellow-Democrats. Later, when the party became the majority, new Illinois Senate President Emil Jones cleared the way for Obama to take credit for the legislative work of others, and to ride the crest of those “achievements” all the way to the US Senate, and ultimately the US presidency.

Separated at birth?

The New Neo Posted on by

[See ADDENDUM below.]

They were high school buddies. Both were children of divorce, and both were famous at a young age.

The first two photos are one person, the second two another.

COO3

COO1-001

COO2-001

V2-001

ADDENDUM and CORRECTION: Mea culpa. I was so fooled by the resemblance between these two women that I accidentally posted three from column A and only one from column B. That is, the first three photos in the post above are of person number one, and only the fourth and last photo is of person number two. I still think that the third photo looks more like the person in the fourth photo than it does the person in the first two. Weird.

However, I’m rectifying the error by adding two more photos of the woman who appears in the fourth and last photo above. That way there will be three photos of each woman in the entire post.

V6-001

V1-001

[HINT: If you want the instant gratification of the answer, it’s here. Don’t peek if you don’t want to know.]

“Talks” break down

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s where it stands at the moment:

There is no agreement, Boehner said in a room in the Capitol Saturday, and there are no negotiations between House Republicans and the White House, since Obama rejected the speaker’s effort to lift the debt ceiling for six weeks and reopen government while setting up a budget negotiating process.

Harry Reid starts putting the screws on:

“I was happy to see the Republicans engaged in talks with the president, the House Republicans. That’s over with. It’s done. They’re not talking anymore,” Reid said. “I say to my friends on the Republican side of this Senate, time is running out.”

Methinks the Democrats believe they have a very, very strong hand here. Their buddies in the media have drummed it into the public that this is the Republicans’ fault, and will continue to reliably deliver that message. Polls are a bit unclear, but so far the gist of them seem to indicate that the public blames the Republicans far more than Democrats.

But I really wonder how many are really paying attention, even at this point. I think for most people this is just background noise, buzzing and annoying but in the distance. What will really matter is how their lives play out in the next year, just as Nate Silver says (yes, that Nate Silver—who, by the way, I have long had a lot of respect for, even though I didn’t like the news he was delivering back in 2012):

…[P]residential elections are more the exception than the rule. As I discuss in my book, the more common tendency instead is that people (and especially the “experts” who write about the issues for a living) overestimate the degree of predictability in complex systems. There are some other exceptions besides presidential elections ”” sports, in many respects; and weather prediction, which has become much better in recent years. But for the most part, the experts you see on television are much too sure of themselves.

That’s been my impression of the coverage of the shutdown: The folks you see on TV are much too sure of themselves. They’ve been making too much of thin slices of polling and thinner historical precedents that might not apply this time around.

There’s been plenty of bullshit, in other words. We really don’t know all that much about how the shutdown is going to be resolved, or how the long-term political consequences are going to play out.

Please read the whole thing.

And I wonder if the same isn’t true for the debt ceiling negotiations, a fight which is predicted to potentially have far greater ramifications, although no one is quite certain what they would be.

[ADDENDUM: Some suggestion to the GOP from DrewM at Ace’s.]

Who is John Boehner, and would you like to be in his shoes?

The New Neo Posted on by

Some conservatives are predictably lashing out in frustration at John Boehner, whom they already neither liked nor trusted.

Sellout. RINO. Wuss. You know the drill.

But I don’t see it quite that way.

Before there’s any misunderstanding (although as Popper said, misunderstanding’s gonna happen no matter how you try to head it off), let me say I’m not a Boehner fan. He’s uninspiring, seems naive, and exhibits nothing especially superior in either the brains or the rhetoric or the spine department.

But I don’t think he’s dumb, nor do I think he’s all that naive. It’s been my observation over time that people don’t get to be head of a party (either party) in Congress without having some smarts in at least the strategy and tactics department. Or without being somewhat good at playing political poker.

Now, Boehner may be one of the worst of recent political party leaders at that. Or he may be one of the better ones, given the not-so-great hand he’s been dealt. I don’t know; I can’t really tell because I sense that most of what goes on in Congress right now (or ever) is hidden from view. But I’m willing to at least entertain the idea that Boehner may (as this American Thinker piece by Fisher Adams claims) be playing a smarter game than is immediately apparent.

As commenter “T” (who linked to Adams’ article) wrote:

I am reminded of Henry Kissinger’s comment about foreign affairs: he said that there are always two chess games being played, the one on the table that everyone watches and a second game under the table that no one sees. Could that be the case here?

Could be. Fervently hope so, anyway. Because the alternative is pretty grim.

Boehner has a rather interesting history that at least indicates the possibility of a considerable amount more toughness than is apparent on the surface, as well as more devotion to conservative principles than many people credit him with. For example, he had a hardscrabble childhood and young manhood and managed to work his way up from it:

[Boehner] grew up in modest circumstances, having shared one bathroom with his eleven siblings in a two-bedroom house in Cincinnati. His parents slept on a pull-out couch. He started working at his family’s bar at age 8, a business founded by their grandfather Andy Boehner in 1938…All but two of his siblings still live within a few miles of each other; two are unemployed and most of the others have blue-collar jobs.

Boehner attended Cincinnati’s Moeller High School and was a linebacker on the school’s football team, where he was coached by future Notre Dame coach Gerry Faust…[Boehner was] the first person in his family to attend college, taking seven years as he held several jobs to pay for his education.[

If Boehner’s a RINO now, he certainly wasn’t at the outset. Or, if he was a RINO even back then, he certainly managed to keep it pretty quiet:

Boehner, along with Newt Gingrich and several other Republican lawmakers, was one of the engineers of the Contract with America in 1994 that politically helped Republicans during the 1994 congressional elections during which they won the majority in Congress for the first time in four decades.

By 1997, when Gingrich was perceived by the others as a political liability, Boehner was also one of a group of Republicans that tried to get Gingrich to resign as Speaker. But when Boehner ran for Majority Leader in 2006, he “campaigned as a reform candidate who wanted to reform the so-called ‘earmark’ process and rein in government spending.” Of course, because Republicans lost in the House in 2006, he was demoted to Minority Leader and it wasn’t until 2010 that he got to be Speaker.

For the most part, Boehner’s political positions have been conservative. So if he’s actually a RINO, he’s a very odd one indeed. What he is, however, is a guy who’s been in Congress and in some position of party power for a long, long time, which would officially make him an “establishment Republican.”

As for naivete, there’s very good evidence that Boehner knows at least some of what he’s up against in Obama and Pelosi, et al. He may not know exactly what to do about it, given that the Senate is in Democratic hands. But he knows the intent of today’s Democratic leaders:

House Speaker John Boehner told a group of Republicans the day after President Barack Obama’s [2012] inaugural ceremony that the president’s focus was to “annihilate the Republican Party.”

In remarks to Republicans attending a closed luncheon sponsored by the Ripon Society, Boehner pointed to the president’s speech as evidence Obama recognizes he can’t achieve his agenda because of the GOP-led House of Representatives.

“Given what we heard yesterday about the president’s vision for his second term, it’s pretty clear to me that he knows he can’t do any of that as long as the House is controlled by Republicans. So we’re expecting over the next 22 months to be the focus of this administration as they attempt to annihilate the Republican Party,” the House speaker said.

Boehner underlined his point, adding, “And let me just tell you, I do believe that is their goal ”“ to just shove us into the dustbin of history.”

My only disagreement with what he says would be that it’s not merely “the Republican Party” they want to “annihilate.” It’s the whole idea of small government and conservatism which they wish to discredit and demonize. They are well on their way to doing so, with the help of a compliant MSM, and unfortunately events such as the shutdown and the debt ceiling negotiations have the paradoxical effect of helping them in that endeavor with a large segment of the American public.

Republicans face a dilemma. The Congressional elections of 2014 are of the utmost importance. They have a chance to take the Senate (although even if they manage to do so—and to keep the House, which they must also do—Obama will retain veto power). But the conservative wing of the Republican Party is clamoring (and understandably so) for more action now, and threatening to defect if more isn’t done to stop the Democrats in their tracks. Boehner is in the position of having to weigh approaches that could backfire, knowing he will be reviled if he fails, and knowing it is very late in the day and the stakes are incredibly high.

But that’s the role he asked for.

The public is dissatisfied with Washington

The New Neo Posted on by

The public’s mad at Obama, Democrats, and Republicans–really, at just about everybody in Washington. They hate Republicans the most, but they’re not happy with anybody:

The AP-GfK poll finds few people approve of the way the president is handling most major issues and most people say he’s not decisive, strong, honest, reasonable or inspiring.

In the midst of the government shutdown and Washington gridlock, the president is faring much better than his party, with large majorities of those surveyed finding little positive to say about Democrats. The negatives are even higher for the Republicans across the board, with 4 out of 5 people describing the GOP as unlikeable and dishonest and not compassionate, refreshing, inspiring or innovative.

Negativity historically hurts the party in power ”” particularly when it occurs in the second term of a presidency ”” but this round seems to be hitting everyone. More people now say they see bigger differences between the two parties than before Obama was elected, yet few like what either side is offering.

Well, I’ve generally not liked politicians and I’ve not been keen on many presidents either, so for me this is nothing new. And of course many of those people mad at Republicans for being “unlikeable and dishonest,” as well as not “refreshing, inspiring or innovative” are in fact conservative and/or Republicans.

But if one of the reasons a lot of people are down on both Democrats and Republicans in Congress is that the parties are further apart than ever, I think many of those people might do well to look in the mirror. Because I think it only reflects the fact that Americans themselves are more politically polarized than ever. Sometimes I wonder which comes first, the chicken or the egg?

My best guess is that it’s an escalating feedback loop, where greater polarization of politicians helps feed greater polarization of the public, and vice versa. And of course let’s not discount the MSM’s contribution, as well as talk-radio, the 24-hour cable news networks and news cycle, the growth of opinion journalism masquerading as news journalism, and the decline of politeness and respect in public life (helped by President Obama himself, whose rhetoric has been increasingly inflammatory).

If we really have become a population that’s more and more divided into polarized factions, you might say “so be it.” But one of the strengths of the US used to be that the parties were composed of a greater proportion of moderates, and were much more able to pull together for the common good, especially in wartime or other crises. I fear we’ve lost that ability.

Pathological altruism

The New Neo Posted on by

Interesting article:

The left derives its sense of moral authority from the supposition that its intentions are altruistic and its opponents’ are selfish. That sense of moral superiority makes it easy to justify immoral behavior, like slandering critics of President Obama as racist–or using the power of the Internal Revenue Service to suppress them. It seems entirely plausible that the Internal Revenue Service officials who targeted and harassed conservative groups thought they were doing their patriotic duty. If so, what a perfect example of pathological altruism.

Oakley concludes by noting that “during the twentieth century, tens of millions [of] individuals were killed under despotic regimes that rose to power through appeals to altruism.” An understanding that altruism can produce great evil as well as good is crucial to the defense of human freedom and dignity.