And now Fareed Zakaria…

The New Neo Posted on by

…seems to have lost his ability to reason.

The argument he offers in his Newsweek column about 9/11 and the US reaction to it is the equivalent of saying that, since the pneumonia patient recovered after getting the antibiotics, the treatment wasn’t necessary. Has Zakaria ever heard of the principle of cause and effect?

There is no way to prove what would have happened post-9/11 in the absence of the Bush administration’s reaction. Of course, it’s possible that the response had nothing to do with the result: that we would have been completely safe without it, and that al Qaeda, after its enormous political and psychological success in pulling off the largest terrorist attack ever, in the most flamboyant way possible, and on US soil, would have just slunk off and gone quietly into the night, satisfied with the blood and suffering it had extracted.

If Zakaria believes that, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell him.

[NOTE: Patterico agrees, with an analogy to a similar brain glitch in the NY Times Seems there’s a lot of that going around.]

Young people and unemployment

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday on this comments thread there was a smattering of schadenfreude towards young people who voted for Obama and are now out of work.

A number of readers felt that the high rates of unemployment among the young is a case of just desserts: serves them right. And although I want a great many young people to learn the lesson that voting for a con man, an empty suit with little or no experience who makes beautiful promises that mean little or nothing, is a bad idea—and that they retain the information for decades to come, so it doesn’t happen again—there’s no joy in my heart about the rest of it.

Perhaps this is because I know too many hard-working young people who have been unable to find jobs or have been laid off from the ones they had and relied on. They weren’t living beyond their means, but right now they’re hurting. Yes, in many cases they can return to stay with parents, but the stress this will cause on everyone can be huge, and in some cases they have become parents themselves.

As for blame, I can’t find it in my heart to castigate them. I understand far better why and how a young person could have been fooled by Obama than an older one, who has no excuse. This is especially true for very new voters, aged 18 (I happen to think the voting age should have been kept at 21), or even those in their twenties.

What do they know of economic reversals? What have they ever seen? And is it their fault if schools didn’t do a good job of teaching them history, or if they were taught it but the words didn’t have much reality for them until they experienced something similar themselves? Grown-up life’s not called “the school of hard knocks” for nothing.

As Churchill is reported to have said (although apparently, like so many quotes, it is a suspect attribution), “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.” Young people can be forgiven for having heart, for wanting to do good, and for being fooled by a good-looking grifter who appeals to that heart. But having their hearts broken is how young people can come to grow up.

Paul Krugman…

The New Neo Posted on by

…appears to finally have gone stark raving mad.

He thinks Obama has erred in following:

…a strategy of playing it safe: never put forward proposals that might fail to pass, avoid highlighting the philosophical differences between the parties.

Has Krugman been paying any attention at all? For example, did he notice how many promises and deals had to be made, and how the usual procedures were passed over and avoided, in passing HCR, all because the bill was so radical there was a high probability that it would be defeated even with such strong Democrat majorities in both houses?

Does he understand that other bills such as cap and trade had to ultimately be abandoned because there was no support for such an extreme anti-business agenda?

Does he have any notion that the American people are leaning Republican now in good part because the actions of the Obama administration (and Pelosi and Reid) in advancing legislation with such radical goals has accomplished just what he said they failed to do: highlight the philosophical differences between the parties?

Krugman’s error here is to ignore basic political reality. He seems to have become delusional: what he wants Obama to have done is what Obama should have done, and that’s that.

Those unemployment figures

The New Neo Posted on by

Summary of this month’s job report: the news is not good.

Summary of Obama administration reaction: hey, it could be worse!

Well gee, isn’t that always the case? And isn’t it largely irrelevant?

Just about everybody knows the truth. Even the New Republic called its comments on the matter, “New Jobs Report, Same Old Disappointing Story (Again).”

As for remedies, the administration is considering—is thinking about, is mulling over, is cogitating on—stuff they should have put in place years ago, such as a payroll holiday.

The White House’s Axelrod blames the usual suspects, those nasty mean old Republicans, for the nation’s economic woes, then and now:

…[W]e have to make clear our ideas and theirs, and the fact that the Washington Republicans, having helped create this recession, have attempted to block our every effort to deal with it.

Sure, like that payroll tax holiday you attempted and that the Republicans blocked…oops, guess not, since Republicans have been on board with that for much of Obama’s tenure, and yet somehow Obama doesn’t seem to have seriously considered the proposal till now.

No, that dog won’t hunt. It seems the electorate has gotten Obama’s con-man number:

…[P]anic is setting in among many Democratic candidates who fear it is too late for Obama to convince voters that he understands the depth of the nation’s economic woes and can fix them…

Last November, Obama announced that he would turn his attention to unemployment, calling it “one of the great challenges that remains in our economy.” He declared the same intent two months later, telling House Democrats he would focus relentlessly on job creation “over the next several months.” Senior aides went on television pledging that the mantra would become “jobs, jobs, jobs.”

But other matters – health care, the BP oil spill – continually stole the limelight, creating the impression, some Democrats complain, that the president was barely focused on the economy at all.

Actually, although the BP oil spill did steal a little limelight, Obama’s “solution” of the drilling moratorium shed even more light on his anti-jobs anti-business focus. And HCR didn’t “steal” any limelight at all—it was a choice that Obama made, and it proved once again that helping the economy was not a priority of his, despite his oft-repeated promises, which by now have become something of a joke.

Here’s another guy who gets the joke:

We did the mosque, Katrina, Iraq, and now Middle East peace?” said a Democratic strategist who works closely with multiple candidates and spoke on the condition of anonymity. “And in between you redo the Oval Office? It has become a joke.”

When even wunderkind Obama shill Ezra Klein can’t muster up a good word to say about the jobs report, you know Obama is in big trouble.

Slow news…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is good news.

Have you noticed that for the last couple of weeks there’s been a lull in the news? This often happens in August. Congress is on recess, and can’t do much mischief. People are on vacation—and that has included President Obama for much of the time lately.

The majority of the news involves the upcoming election, now almost exactly two months away. There’s a sense of Republican inevitability, but it may be illusory, especially if there’s an October surprise. We also wonder about an ominous predicted September surprise (is that an oxymoron? a predicted surprise?) involving the stock market, a traditional time for downturns.

But right now all is relatively smooth. Bloggers thrive on fast-breaking, intense news stories, and so far we’ve had quite a lot of that during the Obama administration. But what we like as bloggers we dislike as people. It’s not good to have the sense that this administration is a runaway train, accelerating ever faster to a destination we’re not pleased about. So for the moment, it’s good that there’s at least the illusion of a pause.

Or is it just the calm before the storm?

It’s a free country!

The New Neo Posted on by

Back when I was a child, there were a few choice phrases that were in every kid’s repertoire of snappy repartee.

The first was the all-purpose sarcastic, “Har de har har har” (already discussed in this post and the comments section following).

The second was “Bounces off me and sticks to you,” a nifty way of deflecting all insults.

And the third was “It’s a free country!,” handy for simultaneously declaring patriotism while defending any questionable acts of the speaker.

The following tape, brought to us by Boston WTKK radio personality Michael Graham, features Massachusetts Governor (and Obama buddy) Deval Patrick, with an interesting variant on that third theme:

So, what did Patrick mean? Was he joking? Was he referring to something else, as Graham seems to think? Or was he revealing the anti-libertarian heart of the liberal mind, as in “Ah, if only we could shut people like Glenn Beck up, imprison them, and throw away the key?”

Democrats or Republicans: does the difference make a difference?

The New Neo Posted on by

In the comments section of yesterday’s post, “ghost707” writes

The reasons the Republicans rolled over is that they found out that they could fleece the public and get away with it. Democrats controlled most of the institutions in this country, so all they had to do was wave a little money in Republicans’ direction and say “you wanna’ get rich”?

Become a Washington insider and make yourself rich, be above the law. Insider trading, zoning code manipulation, voter fraud – hell anything you want to fill your pockets with cash – never having to worry about consequences.

Democrats will run the country into a brick wall at 200 mph.
Republicans will run the country into a brick wall at 150 mph.

Slight difference, same result.

Commenter “mike Mc.” replies:

The difference between R and D is between 150 and 200mph collisions. Very clever. Not. That’s cute. Sophomoric truly.

And wildly wrong.

And fundamentally its own disaster from about 5 different directions.

I’ve heard “ghost’s” comment, or something very much like it, many times before, on this and many other blogs. It says that essentially “there’s no difference, they’re all bums, choose your poison.”

It’s a sentiment that often fuels voter apathy. It’s a sentiment that can also fuel third-party enthusiasm. It’s a sentiment that lurks around the edges of the Tea Party movement. And it’s similar to the sentiment that—in another place and time—ended up leading to this dreadful result.

It’s the sentiment that was responsible for Ross Perot’s respectable showing in 1992, and therefore at least indirectly for Bill Clinton’s victory despite his getting less than 50% of the total. And therein lies the problem. If you really think there’s no difference between the two parties, or that it’s merely the difference between two different types of fatalities (as ghost indicates), then go right ahead and stay home, or vote for a fringe candidate. Because the most likely result of your actions will be to favor a candidate you despise.

And yes, if more people did those things, we’d probably have a chance of a third-party nominee actually winning an election (by plurality, not majority). But then we’d have had President Perot; does anyone really think that would have been a good thing? Not I, although it certainly would have been an interesting thing.

I believe that ghost’s real complaint is that power corrupts, and that government is an invitation to it. I agree. But I believe that a better way to attempt to counteract that phenomenon is to pay attention to the checks, balances, and limitations wisely written into our form of government by our founders, who were well aware (perhaps even more so than we) of the problem and its potential dimensions, and to work hard for the election of people who promise to do just that. And most of those people appear to be Republicans, although unfortunately not all Republicans (or even most of them) fit into that camp.

That leaves the question: are Republicans in general really all that different from Democrats in general? I agree with mike Mc. that the answer is, “Of course they are, and it matters.” But I’m with ghost707 in saying “but it hasn’t mattered enough, especially fiscally.”

Republicans have acted like Democrats-lite in recent years. But lite and heavy are two very different things, and right now we’re getting the full bore heavy Democrat treatment. I think the differences are readily apparent, part of which is the speed of the fiscal unraveling during the present administration. Another important difference involves foreign policy and the acceleration of the world’s perception of our weakness.

As I see it, what the Republicans did wrong in the early years of the twenty-first century involved the flaws and frustrations inherent in government itself, a slow bleed of integrity and an accretion of power and of corruption by money. Such imperfections seem to be part and parcel of all government—except for some ideal, Platonic one that exists only in our imaginations or legends. The remedy is not to opt out, it is to work for those who seem to be most resistant to such temptations, and to hope they continue to avoid them as long as possible, and then to toss them out as soon as they succumb.

[NOTE: for a graphic example, take HCR (please!). Does anyone think that were Republicans in charge they would have enacted something as dreadful as the current bill? Not even close. But we did get Bush’s much-criticized prescription drug bill in 2003 when they were (slightly, anyway), although I doubt very much that such a bill would have ever been passed by a Republican Congress in the teeth of an economy like the one we face today. Another problem is that when Republicans were in charge they accomplished little to fix the very real defects of our health insurance system, although they probably could have imposed some conservative solutions such as portability, which might indeed have improved the situation, both for us and for them.]

Fall cleanup

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s the first day of September.

Although not the official beginning of fall—that doesn’t happen for about three weeks—it’s the real beginning of autumn in my book. And this despite the fact that it’s well into the nineties today where I live.

But when this time of year comes, my hands itch to clean up. Not the yard, but my closets and drawers and cupboards. Despite my best efforts, over time the stuff accrues, and I see that the metaphorical weeding must begin. And although I’m no hoarder, it still can be a wrench to make those decisions and toss things forever.

But how deeply satisfying, to roll out that drawer and actually be able to find what I’m looking for! To cart the detritus to Goodwill (I’ve given up on consignment stores; it’s never been worth the effort for the few piddling coins my goods seem to fetch.)

It’s a task which—unlike so many others, whose rewards remain more abstract and amorphous—offers instant and graphic gratification. And if it’s somewhat Sisyphean (not to mention Augean)—well then, it always feels so good to stand momentarily at the peak of that hill, with the illusion of a finished task.

HCR, the turning point

The New Neo Posted on by

This Jay Cost article indicates what we already sensed: that the passage of health care reform turned out to have been a sort of Rubicon on the part of the Democrats in Congress. When they decided to cross it, the almost inevitable result was their decline in the polls.

Apparently, many of them believed their leaders when they said that the American public would learn to love HCR if it were passed—although why anyone would credit such as idea is beyond me. You can’t say the signs of voter anger and discontent weren’t obvious from the start, long before the bill was passed by a perverted legislative process that sickened the American people even more than the bill itself (which is saying something).

In fact, it was a little over a year ago, during the town hall meetings of summer, that the Congressional Democrats learned just how little the public thought of their HCR proposals. The anger of the energized crowds was visible and powerful, and it came from groups not usually given to public displays of rebellion. But most Democrats in Congress reacted by either ignoring or insulting their constituents, a course of action that is not usually considered the path to electoral victory.

So why should they be surprised now at the dismal polls? Maybe they’re just surprised at the extent of the gap that appears to have opened up. At least for now, the Republicans have sprinted to an “unprecedented” double-digit (51% vs. 41%) lead in the Gallup generic poll, for the first time since such polls were first taken in 1942.