Category Archives: Media Criticism

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Ideology That Dare Not Speak Its Name

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Who owns socialism?

As Confucius said, “If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.”

One of the insidious tactics of the left over the decades has been to debase the currency of the language, calling themselves “liberals” and “progressives,” and accusing those who disagree with them as “racists,” and “haters.” I refuse to bow to their politically corrosive sophistry. What we are seeing in Washington today is socialism, and fascism, and the two are not opposites, but are in fact closely related.

[Update a few minutes later]

Jonah Goldberg has similar thoughts today at USA Today:

The whole spectacle was just too funny for liberal observers. Robert Schlesinger, U.S. News & World Report’s opinion editor, was a typical giggler. He chortled, “What’s really both funny and scary about all of this is how seriously the fringe-nuts in the GOP take it.”

Putting aside the funny and scary notion that it’s “funny and scary” for political professionals to take weighty political issues seriously, there are some fundamental problems with all of this disdain. For starters, why do liberals routinely suggest, even hope, that Obama and the Democrats are leading us into an age of socialism, or social democracy or democratic socialism? (One source of confusion is that these terms are routinely used interchangeably.)

For instance, in (another) fawning interview with President Obama, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham mocks Obama’s critics for considering Obama to be a “crypto-socialist.” This, of course, would be the same Jon Meacham who last February co-authored a cover story with Newsweek’s editor at large (and grandson of the six-time presidential candidate for the American Socialist Part) Evan Thomas titled — wait for it — “We Are All Socialists Now,” in which they argued that the growth of government was making us like a “European,” i.e. socialist, country.

Washington Post columnists Jim Hoagland (a centrist), E.J. Dionne (a liberal) and Harold Meyerson (very, very liberal) have all suggested that Obama intentionally or otherwise is putting us on the path to “social democracy.” Left-wing blogger and Democratic activist Matthew Yglesias last fall hoped that the financial crisis offered a “real opportunity” for “massive socialism.” Polling done by Rasmussen — and touted by Meyerson — shows that while Republicans favor “capitalism” over “socialism” by 11 to 1, Democrats favor capitalism by a mere 39% to 30%. So, again: Is it really crazy to think that there is a constituency for some flavor of socialism in the Democratic Party?

No, it’s not crazy talk. Except when “right wingers” talk about it, of course.

But as he notes, “corporatism” (the economic philosophy of fascism) is the best term for it.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Advice To The Tea Partiers

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They should ask, “What would Reagan do“?

Conservatives are dismayed and baffled at the sight of Obama’s Latin American-style personality cult and at poll results showing astonishing erosion in public support for free markets and limited government. “This is a center-right nation,” conservatives continue to insist. To be sure, Reagan and the conservative movement stoked the populist flames from the 1970s through the 1990s, with considerable success. But conservatives became too comfortable with the thought that populism would remain a reliable conservative force in American politics, and largely lost or disdained the art of constitutional argument.

Madison and Tocqueville knew better (as Mansfield has warned us repeatedly over the last two decades), and would not have been surprised by the present crisis. The other person who would not have been surprised is Ronald Reagan. This sunny optimist also warned repeatedly that “freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.” Reagan’s greatest frustration as president was his inability to control spending. In contrast to Pres. George W. Bush, Reagan vetoed several “budget-busting” bills in the course of his presidency, only to see many Republican members of Congress join Democrats in overriding his vetoes. This led Reagan, late in his second term, to recognize the wisdom of Mansfield’s Razor and to embrace a bold constitutional strategy that no one much remembers today.

We need to get people to talk about the Constitution much more.

Business, Economics, General, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Other Michigan

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Amid all the talk of bankruptcy of the auto companies, it’s easy to forget that there is another, very desirable part of the Great Lake State. The family of a friend of mine in high school had a cabin on the Au Sable River, and I remember how peaceful it was myself, in both summer and winter.

[Update a few minutes later]

Speaking of bankrupt auto companies, Kaus has some good questions:

How many of the UAW’s members are skilled workers? I thought one of the big virtues [of] assembly line work is that it can be done by unskilled workers. Even with all the fancy computer-assisted quality control systems, does most auto assembly work really require skills that can’t be learned fairly quickly?

The unnamed “task force official” implies that Chrysler’s work force (and GM’s) is so precious that it must be protected from sharing in the sacrifice of bankruptcy. Is it? If UAW workers are so distinctly productive then why do virtually all auto manufacturers starting production in the U.S. try to get as far away from the union as possible? Is there any doubt that if all Chrysler’s workers quit tomorrow they could fairly quickly be replaced by workers–from local communities–who were a) cheaper and b) just as good or better?…

Gee, you’d almost think that they were just favoring a Democrat political constituency that gives them lots of campaign donations. Here’s another one:

Why should the government tax unskilled workers making $18 an hour, who haven’t bankrupted their employers, in order to protect unskilled workers making $28 an hour, and who have bankrupted their employers, from having to take a pay cut?

Why indeed? Someone should ask that question of Bob Gibbs. It would be amusing to watch the logical somersaults, to the limited degree that he’s capable of logic at all.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

History Revealed

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The “fascist cop” who martyred a left-wing German student in the sixties, and created the German left-wing terrorist movement, including Baader-Meinhoff, and helped turn the German nation to the left, has turned out to be a Stasi agent:

Ohnesorg galvanized a generation of left-wing students and activists who rose up in the iconic year of 1968. What was a fringe soon turned to terrorism.

To them his killer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, was the “fascist cop” at the service of a capitalist, pro-American “latent fascist state.” “The post-fascist system has become a pre-fascist one,” the German Socialist Student Union declared in their indictment hours after the killing. The ensuing movement drew its legitimacy and fervor from the Ohnesorg killing. Further enraging righteous passions, Mr. Kurras was acquitted by a court and returned to the police force.

Now all that’s being turned on its head. Last week, a pair of German historians unearthed the truth about Mr. Kurras. Since 1955, he had worked for the Stasi, East Germany’s dreaded secret police. According to voluminous Stasi archives, his code name was Otto Bohl. The files don’t say whether the Stasi ordered him to do what he did in 1967. But that only fuels speculation about a Stasi hand behind one of postwar Germany’s transformative events.

Mr. Kurras, who is 81 and lives in Berlin, told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that he belonged to the East German Communist Party. “Should I be ashamed of that or something?” He denied he was paid to spy for the Stasi, but asked, “What if I did work for them? What does it matter? It doesn’t change anything.” Mr. Kurras may be the monster of the leftist imagination — albeit now it turns out he is one of their own.

Hey, fascist, communist, it’s all good.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

How The “Stimulus” Is Working

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It isn’t:

As we know, most of the stimulus spending does not take place until next year and beyond, so the short-run gains are puny. On the other hand, the big increase in the projected deficit creates the expectation of higher interest rates, which raises interest rates now. These higher interest rates serve to weaken the economy.

According to this standard analysis, the stimulus is going to hurt GDP now, when we could use the most help. Much of the spending will kick in a year or more from now, with multiplier effects following afterward, when the economy will need little, if any, stimulus.

This is the flaw with using spending rather than tax cuts as a stimulus. The lags are longer when you use spending.

Of course, if the real goal is to promote government at the expense of civil society and to create a one-party state in which business success is based on political favoritism, then the stimulus is working exactly as intended.

Yup. But it’s a misnomer to call it “stimulus.”

[Update mid afternoon]

The “reality-based community” has a collision with reality:

Cohn reports how former CBO director and current OMB chief Peter Orszag pressured careerists to assume sizable savings due to proposed reforms. The problem is the bean counters did not believe the alleged savings were justified according to the available evidence…it is interesting that the reality-based Obama crowd, which promised to roll back the “Republican War on Science” is now arguing against what Cohn calls “a super-strict reading of the evidence.”

Well, there’s science, and then there’s, you know, “scientific socialism.” Or maybe they’re just waging a war on math.

[Update late afternoon]

Wishful thinking, not a plan:

Congress is working on a health-care bill to expand coverage mainly by subsidizing insurance for tens of millions of households. This new entitlement is likely to cost $150 billion per year initially and grow, on a per capita basis, at a rate that is about 2 percentage points above GDP growth each year going forward. In other words, the cost of this new program will rise just as rapidly as Medicare and Medicaid spending has for decades now.

Orszag and others are saying, don’t worry, health-information technology, comparative-effectiveness research, more attention to prevention and wellness, and some very modest provider payment reforms in Medicare will make all of this governmental spending — on Medicare, Medicaid, and the new subsidy program — grow much more slowly in the future than it has in the past.

But this is an assertion — not a fact. Where’s the evidence to back it up?

“Wishful thinking” is a pretty good summary of Democrat policies in general, both domestic and foreign.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

“Liberals,” Then And Now

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When did they become Archie Bunker?

Like Sotomayor, Archie is not propounding a theory of racial or ethnic supremacy but describing the world in terms of culturally contingent stereotypes. He is engaging in identity politics.
Podcast

James Taranto on Sotomayor and Archie Bunker.

What’s fascinating about this is that the Meathead (played by Rob Reiner) is a peer of La Jueza Empática: She was born in 1954; Reiner, in 1947. But the liberalism of “All in the Family” is not the liberalism of the baby boomers. It is that of an earlier generation–Archie Bunker’s generation. Series creator Norman Lear and Carroll O’Connor, who played Archie, were born in 1922 and 1924, respectively.

Today, you can easily imagine a conservative uttering the Meathead’s earnest query: “Why do you always have to label people by nationality?” But somewhere along the line, liberalism lost its ideals and adopted Archie Bunker’s theory of representative government.

Actually, I think they’ve just reverted to type from the early twentieth century, when “progressives” were all in favor of eugenics. In both cases, Lear and a “conservative” would be acting as the true liberals. The classical ones, before the word was hijacked by the left.

[Update in the early afternoon]

If I were a Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, I’d have the All In The Family clip played in lieu of some of my time. It’s a lot more effective than most of Senatorial bloviating.

[Update a while later]

Would Sotomayor qualify as a juror?