But is there a head tilt of compassion, along with the regret? When will we see the pictures of Chris Buckley and David Brooks? Brooks must be really shocked. That’s not the Barack Obama he knew. Why, that Barack Obama read Reinhold Niebuhr!
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Racial Cowards
I guess, as Jim Geraghty points out, that Dick Durbin was one of the people who Eric Holder was talking about, because he let Bobby Rush mau mau him into seating Roland Burris.
Is It Ayn’s Tea Party?
Paul Hsieh thinks that it should be. I have to agree with the commenter, though, who thinks that Hayek is a better bet.
At Last, An Honest Leftist
Lee Stranahan admits that he wanted the Iraq war to fail.
Actually, it went beyond a desire, into fantasy and wishful thinking, as when Harry Reid moronically declared it a failure, and a war that was already lost.
[Update a few minutes later]
John Hawkins, on what Rush Limbaugh got wrong.
Back On His Own
Will Collier, formerly of Vodka Pundit, has set up his own blog.
The Alternate Reality
…in which the administration lives, that results in their selling out of Israel:
I would sum it up as a growing administration belief that solid U.S. support for Israel is probably the reason for radical Islamic anti-American terrorism; and, secondly, the Palestinian issue can be best resolved with the return of Israel to the 1967 borders. Apparently, this thought stems from the assumption that there has been a radical reappraisal about Israel on the part of the Arab nations, and Islamic world at large, who in toto have now accepted Israel’s right to exist. Therefore, with the casus belli removed, in the future we should expect no more wars — like 1948, 1956, and 1967, when Israel did not hold the Golan Heights or the West Bank. Accordingly, the withdrawals from Lebanon and Gaza were positive first-steps and left stability in their wake.
I suspect that Netanyahu knows that he’s on his own now.
What Does The Tea Party Mean?
Some sobering thoughts. I was discussing this with a very pessimistic friend at dinner last night.
[Late morning update]
Some reports from protests around the country, and thoughts about the implications.
Barack Obama’s Straw Men
What Is “The Bush Moon Plan”?
Whatever it is, AvWeek says that the Obama administration is going to “stick with it.”
The fiscal 2010 NASA budget outline to be released by the Obama Administration Feb. 26 adds almost $700 million to the out-year figure proposed in the fiscal 2009 budget request submitted by former President Bush, and sticks with the goal of returning humans to the moon by 2020.
Well, the story doesn’t support the headline. What they’re sticking with is the goal, not the plan (which is a description of how the goal is to be achieved). It’s hard to know whether this is good news or bad. It depends on whether or not the “plan” (i.e., Constellation/ESAS) is going to be stuck with. We still have no information about the plan.
That’s Not The John Maynard Keynes That I Knew
Apparently, President Obama and the Congressional Democrats have thrown Keynes under the bus, too, even though they don’t realize it:
…it is true that government direction of capital is something Keynes advocated. But the current direction of capital by government is being conducted in a manner that flies in the face of Keynes’s underlying justifications for such state involvement.
For example, the stimulation of investment has thus far been ad hoc. The Treasury and Federal Reserve have infused capital into some firms but not others. In the case of financial firms, the rationales have been to promote liquidity or prevent insolvency or both. The government has moved on to direct capital into the troubled automobile industry. The Federal Reserve and the Treasury are buying mortgage-backed securities, thereby making more credit available to the housing industry. The construction trades are expecting a huge infusion of capital under the rubric of “infrastructure” spending. And now an enormous list of other industries has been approved for temporary stimulation by the Obama administration.
It is difficult to imagine that Keynes would be enthusiastic about these temporary and discretionary policies given his diagnosis of the fundamental problem.
The historical record is helpful here. Keynes opposed immediate, short-term stimulus in 1937 when the British unemployment rate was 11 percent—much higher than we are experiencing today. Furthermore, he opposed temporary reductions in the short-term rates of interest because he believed that variability of interest rates sent the wrong long-term message. As he argued in “How to Avoid a Slump,” an article in the Times of London newspaper, “A low enough long-term rate of interest cannot be achieved if we allow it to be believed that better terms will be obtainable from time to time by those who keep their resources liquid.”
Of course, most of these people are far too economically illiterate to even understand Keynes. Instead, they simply adulate him as a god and use him as an excuse to do what they want to do anyway, regardless of whether or not it’s truly Keynesian.
[Update early evening]
More historical ignorance: Barack Obama versus Henry David Thoreau. Now, Thoreau was actually sort of a loon, and his “wisdom” is highly overrated, as P. J. O’Rourke has amusingly pointed out in the past, but the notion that the small-government philosopher would have approved of the “stimulus” plan is ludicrous.