Monthly Archives: January 2013

More on the Racism of the Left

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Eliana Johnson, in National Review Online, had some remarks about former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s shameful “defense” of current Secretary of Defense nominee, Chuck Hagel.  She starts off by quoting Powell on Hagel’s on “insensitive” remarks about Hagel’s hated “Jewish” lobby:

“That term [“Jewish lobby”] slips out from time to time,” he told NBC‘s David Gregory [Johnson posted the entire interview at the head of her article; however, it’s now labeled “This video is private”]. “So Chuck should have said ‘Israeli lobby,’ not ‘Jewish lobby,’ and perhaps he needs to write on a blackboard a hundred times ‘It is the Israeli lobby.’

Then she notes

Powell’s bizarre defense of Hagel took an even more troubling turn as he decried the “dark vein of intolerance” in some parts of the Republican Party.  In particular, he singled out former Alaska governor Sarah Palin and former New Hampshire governor John Sununu for their racial insensitivity, charging that they “look down on minorities.”  Palin attacked the Obama administration for withholding information on the Benghazi scandal, accusing the president of doing a “shuck and jive”; “That’s a racial-era, slave term,” Powell said.  Sununu slammed the president’s first debate performance against Mitt Romney, calling Obama “lazy and detached”; “Now, it may not mean anything to most Americans, but to those of us who are African-Americans, the second word is ‘shiftless’ and then there’s another word that goes along with it.”

And

One might think that a modicum of self-awareness would prevent Powell from making such charges after flippantly dismissing the concerns raised by many in the Jewish and pro-Israel communities.  Don’t such remarks just—woopsy daisy!—“slip out from time to time?”  And if Powell finds the use of slave-era terminology offensive, one wonders why he has difficulty understanding that, among Jews, the imputation of dual loyalties rankles, even if “it may not mean anything to most Americans.”

Let’s leave aside Powell’s blatant hypocrisy concerning the “slipping out” of terms being minor accidents of phrasing when applied to some groups but are seriously racist when applied to his favored group.

As Powell notes, the terms he’s chosen to find offensive are ancient in their original usage (“racial era, slave”).  Languages, as a man of Powell’s evident intelligence surely knows, evolve, and American English is no different.  Today as Powell also notes, the terms don’t mean much of anything “to most Americans” beyond their actual, dictionary meaning (“lazy,” for instance, simply meaning “unwilling to work” and implying nothing at all to anyone beyond the individual being referenced).  With regard to slang phrases, Powell, as the father of a son and two daughters who were teenagers once, also surely knows slang evolves even faster than its base language (“shuck and jive,” for instance, today means nothing more than being cynically evasive “to most Americans”).

The only reason these terms have any racial overtones at all (and the same applies to the “Jewish” lobby—except I don’t see very many Hebrew-Americans being as strident about “dual loyalty” as Powell is being about his imagined slurs) is because guys like Powell actively seek to keep those overtones alive, for their personal use.  See, for example, the evolution of the colonial slur “Yankee” applied to us by those nasty 18th century Brits.

This is just another example of the Left manufacturing a race problem to mask their inability to form a substantive position in a discussion.

Note: the Gregory-Powell interview’s transcript can be read here (so far), and the video of the interview is at the same location.  Apparently, MSNBC just doesn’t want the material in the hands of those they can’t control.

Education and American Culture

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Dr Keith Ablow, writing for Fox News, has some thoughts on the impact of our educational system on American culture.

A new analysis of the American Freshman Survey, which has accumulated data for the past 47 years from 9 million young adults, reveals that college students are more likely than ever to call themselves gifted and driven to succeed, even though their test scores and time spent studying are decreasing.

Psychologist Jean Twenge, the lead author of the analysis, is also the author of a study showing that the tendency toward narcissism in students is up 30 percent in the last thirty-odd years.

And

On Facebook, young people can fool themselves into thinking they have hundreds or thousands of “friends.”  They can delete unflattering comments.  They can block anyone who disagrees with them or pokes holes in their inflated self-esteem.  They can choose to show the world only flattering, sexy or funny photographs of themselves….

Using Twitter, young people can pretend they are worth “following,” as though they have real-life fans, when all that is really happening is the mutual fanning of false love and false fame.

Using computer games, our sons and daughters can pretend they are Olympians, Formula 1 drivers, rock stars or sharpshooters.

On MTV and other networks, young people can see lives just like theirs portrayed on reality TV shows fueled by such incredible self-involvement and self-love that any of the “real-life” characters should really be in psychotherapy to have any chance at anything like a normal life.

And

…in a dizzying paroxysm of self-aggrandizing hype, town sports leagues across the country hand out ribbons and trophies to losing teams, schools inflate grades,…psychiatrists hand out Adderall like candy.

In short,

These are the psychological drugs of the 21st Century….

Sitting apposite these remarks are some thoughts from Thomas Sowell, writing for National Review.

Many years ago, as a young man, I read a very interesting book about the rise of the Communists to power in China. In the last chapter, the author tried to explain why and how this had happened.

Among the factors he cited were the country’s educators.

In the US,

Schools were once thought of as places where a society’s knowledge and experience were passed on to the younger generation.  But, about a hundred years ago, Professor John Dewey of Columbia University came up with a very different conception of education—one that has spread through American schools and even influenced education in countries overseas.

John Dewey saw the role of the teacher not as a transmitter of a society’s culture to the young, but as an agent of change—someone strategically placed with an opportunity to condition students to want a different kind of society.

A century later, we are seeing schools across America indoctrinating students to believe in all sorts of politically correct notions.  The history that is taught in too many of our schools is a history that emphasizes everything that has gone bad, or can be made to look bad, in America—and that gives little, if any, attention to the great achievements of this country.

And

This misuse of schools to undermine one’s own society is not something confined to the United States or even to our own time.  It is common in Western countries for educators, the media, and the intelligentsia in general to single out Western civilization for special condemnation for sins that have been common to the human race, in all parts of the world, for thousands of years.

Thus,

Even in the face of mortal dangers, political correctness forbids us to use words like “terrorist” when the approved euphemism is “militant.”  Milder terms such as “illegal alien” likewise cannot pass the political-correctness test, so it must be replaced by another euphemism, “undocumented worker.”

Some think that we must tiptoe around in our own country, lest some foreigners living here or visiting here be offended by the sight of an American flag or a Christmas tree in some institutions.

With this potential outcome:

American schools today are similarly undermining American society as one unworthy of defending, either domestically or internationally.  If there were nuclear attacks on American cities, how long would it take for us to surrender, even if we had nuclear superiority—but were not as willing to die as our enemies were?

Think that last is apocalyptic?  Recall Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV), Senators Barack Obama (D, IL) and Dennis Kucinich (D, OH), then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), et al., all begging for surrender at the point of victory as the 2007 surge in the Iraq war was announced.

These problems, and their outcomes, are not unrelated.

Increasingly, we parents aren’t doing our jobs of participating in, and ensuring the quality of, our children’s education.  But at this late remove, we parents need to do more.  We need to take outright control of our education systems—K-12 and college/university—back from the administrators and “educators” who have so strong a disdain for American greatness, who elide the things our nation—the people of our nation—have accomplished.

Indeed, our accomplishments, our greatness, are easily measured, by those who actually attend to our history, not only domestically in terms of individual liberty, responsibility, and prosperity achieved, but also globally in the treasure—both in terms of our fisc and our blood—we’ve spent so that other peoples also can have an opportunity to achieve their own individual liberty, responsibility, and prosperity.  And in the individual liberty, responsibility, and prosperity actually achieved by those we’ve helped.

These, and a justifiable pride—measured in those actual accomplishments in the real world—in ourselves and our nation must be restored to our education.  Our national security—our national survival—requires it.

But there’s another factor that underlies all of this, and our national security—our national survival—depends on this, too.  We parents must retake control over the environment in which our children exist as children—our homes.  They spend a third of their lives exclusively in our homes and their (our) friends’ homes and yards and playgrounds even before they start school, and they spend the remaining two-thirds there outside school hours.

When was the last time we read with (not to) our kids, talked with (not at) our kids, goofed around with them—all without the TV, the game boxes, the laptops and smartphones with their overused and overhyped “social” media?  When was the last time all of you—kids and parents—sat at the table and ate dinner (or breakfast) at the same time?  And talked about the day’s events (yours and your kids’, as well as the news), or about anything at all?

Middle Class, Luck, and American Power

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George Friedman, writing for Stratfor (he’s also their Founder and CEO), has an article out concerning the American middle class and American global power.  The whole article is well worth reading, but for now, the relevant remark comes near the end:

It would seem to me that unless the United States gets lucky again, its global dominance is in jeopardy.  Considering its history, the United States can expect to get lucky again….

The luck to which Friedman refers concerns some fortuitous unintended consequences, and he offers three examples:

The GI Bill was designed to limit unemployment among returning serviceman; it inadvertently created a professional class of college graduates. The VA loan was designed to stimulate the construction industry; it created the basis for suburban home ownership. The Interstate Highway System was meant to move troops rapidly in the event of war; it created a new pattern of land use that was suburbia.

The threat to our status as a global power—and by extension to our freedom of action as a nation—stems from a generation of the failure of a long-standing belief in American culture—the faith in the availability of economic upward mobility.  For instance, median household income in 2011 was $49,000, just below the level in 1989 in real terms; it seems that upward mobility has stagnated.

Luck matters, but to a very large extent, we make our own luck.

Underlying this making is individual responsibility, individual initiative, and individual risk-taking.  In all of our past booms, including those in which fortune played a role through those unintended consequences, the freedom to exercise those individual characteristics was both broadly present and not very much circumscribed by government intervention.

Here’s a present example of the role played by fortune, this time negatively: those individual characteristics, and parallel ones in business, are severely circumscribed by government regulation in all aspects of our lives.  We’re restricted in what we’re permitted or required to buy or to throw away (see Obamacare and CFL bulbs), in the decisions businesses are permitted to make in their own interests rather than government’s (see Obamacare and Dodd-Frank with its CFPB abomination), in what businesses are permitted to release as by-products of production or sales.

Our ability to make our own luck, today, is severely limited by government.  Fortuitous unintended consequences are a lot less likely in an environment of rapidly increasing government control over the economic environment which underlies the making of that luck.

There’s another factor at play, too: those government restrictions also have the unintended consequence of restricting upward mobility.  The poor become trapped in their stratum and cannot move up into the middle class due to those restrictions’ effect on job creation and hiring.  This not only works to the detriment of those poor, it shrivels the remaining middle class.

National Default on the National Debt

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President Barack Obama and his Senators keep saying that House RepublicansCongress must raise the debt ceiling or the US will go into default.  The latest example of this claim came when Obama, through his White House Press Secretary, Jay Carney, said in response to the idea that the administration could simply mint a $1 trillion coin and then spend that,

There are only two options to deal with the debt limit: Congress can pay its bills or it can fail to act and put the nation into default[.]

Here’s what the Constitution says on the matter (you might recall that bit of paper—a document that Progressives insist ought to be scrapped or that already is useless and non-binding; maybe its inconvenient limits on government are why).  From Article I, Section 8, in relevant part:

The Congress shall have Power…to pay the Debts…;

To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;

Thus only the Congress can borrow—or create the conditions for paying what it has borrowed.  The President, as with all laws (nearly all of which, by the way, have his signature on them—he’s actively agreed with them, except in those very rare cases where his veto has been overridden), has only to execute them—here, to spend the money authorized, to collect the taxes authorized, to borrow according to the Congress’ budget and borrowing limit.  He’s Constitutionally, and by his oath of office, required to faithfully execute those laws.

(Incidentally, a later clause in that Section 8 says this:

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof….

Thus, only Congress can mint a $1 trillion coin, not Treasury.)

The 14th Amendment, which some Progressives like to cite as a means for Obama to bypass Congress on the national debt, says in relevant part:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.

Notice that confusing part—it being more than 100 years old—”authorized by law.”  The clause not only says that the US’ debt must be paid—no getting around that—but the only debt that must be paid is that authorized by law—that budget thing (from an even older and apparently even more confusing part of the Constitution), which must be passed by Congress and signed by the President or his veto overridden.  The president cannot (not may not—cannot) create debt on his own recognizance.

On the first part above, then, Obama has it right—Congress can agree to continue spending and borrowing, or it can decide not to act (or anywhere between the two extremes: cut spending enough to fit it into current revenues, thereby eliminating the deficit and stopping the growth in borrowing altogether, or cut spending to fit within projected revenues and raise the debt ceiling somewhat, with a view to gradually reducing spending, eliminating the deficit over time, and ultimately stopping the growth in borrowing altogether, for example).

What are the practicalities of the matter?  Say the debt ceiling is not raised; what results?

The interest on our current national debt (some $16+ trillion at the end of 2012, an explosion of 60% in Obama’s first four years) ran to $220 billion.  Total revenue collected from various tax sources (including payroll taxes for Social Security, et al.,) by the Federal government was $2.5 trillion—a shade over 10x those interest payments.

In short, there is no risk of default from Congressional inaction.  There is plenty of money with which to pay the interest, thereby keeping our debt current and not in default.  There’s plenty of money with which to roll existing debt that’s coming due—essentially to refinance by paying off that old debt with new borrowing—within the current debt ceiling.  This is the same as us refinancing our homes, which we must do within our own debt ceilings, values our lenders determine based on our credit rating.  There’s even plenty of money with which to begin in aggregate paying down that debt, reducing it below those $16 trillion, and to reduce it further in subsequent years.

Thus, if Congress declines to raise the debt ceiling at all, there would be spending cuts, but no default.  Federal spending in 2012 ran to $3.7 trillion, rather more than those $2.5 trillion in collections.  Progressive (and Conservative) favored programs would be drastically curtailed.  Welfare programs like food stamps, subsidies for “green” energy companies, farm price supports, and the like would be severely curtailed.  Entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid transfers to the States would be greatly circumscribed.  Withal, no default, and not even very many existing programs eliminated.

However, if Obama and his Senators truly are concerned about “not paying for our spending on the backs of our seniors and the middle class” (and the poor—that group these Progressives have been ignoring right along), they’ll get serious about spending cuts, the deficit, and the debt.  The cuts then could occur in a deliberate, controlled manner, across programs about which Conservatives and Progressives compromise on curtailing.

Obama and his Senators know what the Constitutionally mandated priorities are.  They simply are lying when they make their claim of debt default, and the NLMSM are complicit in the claim’s spread.  What these Progressives really mean is that, absent a debt ceiling increase, they will default on their vote buying promises.  And that terrifies them, since among those to whom they “owe” their vig are unions.

Gun Control and the Purpose of Guns

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Governor Mario Cuomo (D, NY) has demanded we “end the madness now” and surrender control of our firearms to government.

No one hunts with an assault rifle.  No one needs 10 bullets to kill a deer.

The tragic events of just the last few weeks in Newtown, CT, and West Webster, NY, have indelibly taught us guns can cut down small children, firefighters, and policemen in a moment[.]

A couple of things about this.

First, government doesn’t get to dictate to us our purpose in owning firearms or our purpose in owning magazines with capacities of our choosing.  Leaving aside the reason for the 2nd Amendment in the first place, which was to allow a population to protect itself from an overreaching government more than to put victuals on the table, this goes beyond the 2nd Amendment.  If we let government determine our reasons for owning or not owning a thing, it becomes a very short step to letting government determine what me must own or not own, what we must buy or not buy.  Like health insurance.

Second, Cuomo is right that guns can “cut down small children, firefighters, and policemen in a moment.”  When the murdering begins, and help is summoned, the responding police will be only minutes away.  In those intervening moments, though, the killing of the unarmed, including unarmed adults also on the scene, continues apace.  It’s the folks present at the start who are in the best position promptly to interfere with the killer, but when they’ve been carefully disarmed by a Know Better government, they’re as helpless as those children.