Category Archives: morality

Presidential Ego

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To be the leader of a large business, and especially of a great nation, it’s necessary to possess an outsized ego.

Here’s an example of an outsized ego, courtesy of Haaretz:

…Obama…met about 20 Conservative Jewish community leaders [prior to the White House Medal of Freedom award ceremony that afternoon]….

There were some questions directed at the presidents concerning his thoughts on the role of religious leaders in a more civil political dialogue, which then lead to the inevitable question—how does he feels about Israel?  Obama joked that [White House Chief of Staff Jack] Lew always warns him it will get to “the kishkes question.”

Obama remind[ed] his guests that he had so many Jewish friends in Chicago at the beginning of his political career that he was accused of  being a puppet of the Israel lobby.

Obama…stressed he probably knows about Judaism more than any other president, because he read about it—and wondered how come no one asks Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner or Senate minority leader Mitch McConnel about their support to Israel.

William Kristol, writing in The Weekly Standard after the meeting, had some comments.

1. The reason no one asks John Boehner or Mitch McConnell about their support for Israel is … because they really do support Israel.  The reason people ask Barack Obama about his support for Israel is because his support for Israel has been equivocal.  [Blogger’s note: I think Kristol is being generous here.  I would have said Obama’s support has been indifferent.]

2. It’s truly pathetic that Obama has to reach for the tired (to say the least) trope that some of his best friends were Jewish.  Actually, one wishes more of his best friends were pro-Israel Christians.  They might have had more luck convincing him, a fellow Christian, that he should be pro-Israel.  [Blogger’s note: Well, he did have Bill Ayers, Bernadette Dohrn, and Jeremiah Wright.  But then, they were just folks in the neighborhood and a guy in a church.]

3. And the claim that Obama knows more about Judaism than any president?  His vanity boggles the mind.  One could begin by citing Adams and Madison, who knew Hebrew, or Harry Truman, who knew Jewish history … but it’s silly to dignify this claim with a rebuttal.  In thinking about the presidents since Truman, though, I’d guess the president who knew the most about Judaism was Jimmy Carter, who taught Sunday school and had a deep interest in religion.  [Blogger’s note: But, but—Obama read a book!]

To be successful as that leader, though, it’s also necessary to have an accurate picture of one’s self and of one’s place—both vertically, as one of many in a long history of predecessors creating and building that entity; and horizontally, as a part of the entity and just one of its many members.

Income Inequalities

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“Income inequality is a strange obsession, at least to the extent the obsessives focus their policy responses on trying to adjust the condition of the top 1% rather than improving the opportunities of everyone else.”
–Holman Jenkins, The Wall Street Journal

As Freud put it, “Everyone must be the same and have the same.  Social justice means we deny ourselves many things so that others may have to do without them as well.”

Or we could follow an alternative.  We could worry less about equality of outcomes and more about equality of opportunity, as our Founders suggested.  Since we don’t all have an equal endowment of ability or work ethic, and more importantly, we don’t all have the same goals for our lives, equal outcomes—equal incomes, equal wealth—is necessarily impossible.

But those equal opportunities, and the ability of everyone to satisfy his own potential in the manner and to the extent each sees fit, is the stuff of rapidly increasing wealth for all of us—not only of the pecuniary variety, but of the moral, as well.

Expanding Government Dependency

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Who benefits from government benefits?

This is what we have today:

  • 49.1% of the American population lives in a household where at least one member received some type of government benefit in the first quarter of 2011.  This is an increase of two-thirds since the end of the Reagan era:
  • 45 million people in 2011 received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, a 70% increase from 2007 according to a CBO report.  That report also  said that the number of people receiving the benefits, the food stamps, would continue growing until 2014 and would not, in the foreseeable future, revert to anything like the Clinton/Bush era lows.
  • The median number of weeks before someone unemployed leaves the labor force is 21.4.  That’s about five months—a long time.  But then it seems to be final.  Out of work too long, and employers view that person as damaged goods.  Out of work too long, and skills are eroded, and employers are less interested.  That person needs more government benefit payout.

Again, I ask: who benefits from this?  The answer is: follow the money to the source.

Progressives, Terrorists, and Civility

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Brett Kimberlin, the Speedway Bomber, was convicted in 1981 of a week-long bombing spree in Indianapolis, IN, a serial bombing sequence in which eight separate bombs caused extensive property damage, destroyed a police cruiser, and severely maimed a man, which eventually led to the man’s suicide.  Kimberlin spent 17 years in prison for his crimes, including having his parole revoked when, after losing a $1.6 million judgment in favor of the widow of the suicide victim, he refused to pay—not couldn’t pay, refused to pay.

Of course, there is the possibility of redemption and of correcting old ways, of making amends.  But not all are repentant.  Consider that Kimberlin still hasn’t paid the judgment.  Consider the $200 thousand bounty that Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution put on the Chamber of Commerce’s Tom Donohue.  Consider the attacks on Patterico (also via Memorandum, if that link doesn’t work), and on Stacy McCain, and on Michelle Malkin.  While the attacks on Malkin may not have been perpetrated by Kimberlin and his…colleagues…they are of a type.

But, aside from these cowardly attacks from the Left against people whose only crime is that they are conservative and both act and write like it, I also am interested in the Progressive leadership condoning such bullying and potentially criminal behaviors.  Where is the hue and cry about Brett Kimberlin’s activities and those of his ilk?

To be sure, nor conservatives nor Progressives need decry every little wrong, every smearing speech such as Arizona State Senator Linda Lopez’ (D) attempt to lay the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords off on conservatives, that this or that extremist makes.  But surely these ongoing and dangerous attacks, not only against the conservatives, but their families also, warrant an outcry from an honest left.  But the President, his campaign advisors, the DNC leadership, the Progressive leadership in Congress all are silent.  And by their passive silence about these events of which they surely are aware, they actively condone them.

But it’s of a piece with Progressive civility.  This is the civility that has Congressman John Lewis (D, GA) claiming—without substantiation even today—that conservative Tea Partiers called him a nigger, that has Congressman Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) dismissing those who protested against Obamacare as not American and Astroturfers, that has DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schulz (D, FL), at her protest gathering outside then-candidate Allen West’s campaign headquarters, saying about conservatives and conservative protesters

I don’t see any swastikas or any pictures of the President in black face or burned in effigy here.  The difference between the way we express our First Amendment rights and the way I’ve seen Tea Party extremists—Republican Tea Party extremists—express their right is dramatically different.

And President Obama saying

Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care?

All they haven’t done, yet, is to send out their own SWAT teams.

Some Thoughts on Freedom

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The Archdiocese of New York, headed by Cardinal Timothy Dolan; the Archdiocese of Washington, DC, headed by Cardinal Donald Wuerl; the University of Notre Dame; and 40 other Catholic dioceses and organizations around the country announced on Monday that they are suing the Obama administration for violating their freedom of religion, which is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution.  The problem, as described on the DC Archdiocese’s new Web site PreserveReligiousFreedom.org, is this:

It is not about whether people have access to certain services; it is about whether the government may force religious institutions and individuals to facilitate and fund services which violate their religious beliefs.

President Obama’s Health and Human Service’s mandate, which is intended to facilitate his Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and is the proximate object of the suit, forces religious organizations, against their most fundamental beliefs, to provide access to, or to make access available through their insurance programs, contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilization procedures.

These drugs and services, and many of the behaviors that “need” these drugs and services, are held by a host of religions (Catholicism and Baptist congregations are only the most well-known) to be sinful.  It is, then, not only morally wrong for a religious entity holding these beliefs to provide these things, it is impossible for that entity that is true to its beliefs to do so, or to wink at their insurance programs that do so.

Take careful note: this problem is not about whether such things are, in fact, sinful.  This problem is not about whether Catholic women, by regularly going to Mass and then to their neighborhood pharmacy for contraceptives, seemingly give the lie to Catholicism’s position.  (Indeed, the existence of sin is a raison d’être for churches of all types—to help those sinners.)  This problem is not about “free” access to these services. (In fact, they are not free: by the government’s mandate, if the recipient isn’t paying for them, you and I are—whether it violates our religious teachings or not—through higher prices to us to pay for the subsidy.)

No, this problem is about whether government can define for religious entities what is sin.  It is about whether government can dictate to a religious entity what its religious tenets are.  It is about whether government can dictate to a religious entity what its practices in furtherance of its fundamental tenets are.  It is about whether government can dictate to us individually what our beliefs, what our private decisions, must be, and whether we must sin at government’s behest.

As a practical matter, which patients are being “protected” under the Act of that name?  Plainly only those of whom Obama approves.  Certainly not those with beliefs with which he disagrees.

As a matter of freedom, what is being protected by this government diktat?  Certainly not the fundamental freedom of conscience that Christian religions teach.  Certainly not the fundamental freedom of religion—a part of our Creator’s endowment—that is codified in our Constitution.