Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary

Thoughts On Tiananmen Square

3 Comments

…on the twentieth anniversary:

George Orwell said, “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” He’s all too right. Last century, an estimated 262 million people were murdered by their own government . That doesn’t include the hundreds of millions more killed by opposing governments during war.

Today ought to be a day to celebrate and promote human liberty, and to remember the abuses governments have heaped upon their subjects over the centuries.

So go find your own metaphor for the government tank pictured above.

Then put yourself in front of it.

You know, I can’t think of a single corporation that could claim even a tiny fraction of such a death toll.

[Update a few minutes later]

Sadly predictable behavior by the left — using the anniversary of Chinese government brutality against those seeking liberty, to smear Walmart.

Political Commentary, War Commentary

You Don’t Say

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Lee Smith says that Obama is playing to Iran’s strength:

It is a given that anything Obama says or does will be an improvement over the Bush administration’s inept efforts at Muslim outreach. And yet it is worth recalling that the Bush administration also sought to appeal directly to Muslims. Bush’s freedom agenda, after all, was intended to give Muslims a democratic voice in their own governance. Nonetheless, Paul Wolfowitz, Bush’s one-time point man for Middle East democracy, is one among many across the political spectrum who are concerned that by choosing an authoritarian police state for his podium, Obama may be signaling that the United States is ditching democracy promotion. But the real problem is that Obama has not learned from Bush’s errors. In seeking to speak to the Muslim masses over the heads of their rulers, Obama, as columnist David Goldman (who usually writes under the name Spengler) explains, is undermining an important U.S. ally on his home turf.

Note that (for the trolls) I don’t claim that he’s a traitor. But he’s frighteningly naive. It’s Jimmy Carter II.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Yes, There’s A Large Population In Each Of The Fifty-Seven States

16 Comments

I’m not sure which is more disturbing — that the president believes that the US is a Muslim nation at all (let alone one of the largest ones, and while denying that we are Judeo-Christian), or that the Times is so uncritical in reporting such a belief. Kuwait probably has more Muslims (over three million) than the US does, and it’s a tiny Muslim country. We know what would be the press response had George Bush made such an egregiously nonsensical and innumerate statement.

[Update a few minutes later]

Respecting the faithful versus respecting the faith. Yes, the two can, and should be separated. And it applies to all religions, not just Islam. We can respect the right to believe something without respecting the belief itself. I for one respect no religion, other than my own, but I will defend the right to believe in any of them, at least until acting on such beliefs violates my own natural rights.

[3 PM update]

More thoughts from the Belmont Club:

By choosing to give his speech in Egypt, an authoritarian Middle Eastern country, instead of a more moderate country like Indonesia, he runs the risk of accidentally conveying the sense that democracy is on the back burner. What message does President Obama wish to project when he says “Les Etats-Unis sont “l’un des plus grands pays musulmans de la planète”? Is it of Islam as the future of America or America as the future of Islam? The President’s speech seems innocent enough, but emphasis is important. Didn’t he say, “don’t tell me that words don’t matter?”

In the interview, President Obama says one of the goals his trip is to foster dialogue between the West and the Muslim world. Maybe some communications strategist or public diplomacy consultant has advised “rebranding America” as the sort of place Muslims can identify with. That way it will be an easy sell. What better way to do it than by saying, ‘America is one of the biggest Muslim countries on the planet’. Ich bin ein Mussulman, or however you say it. That won’t necessarily fly; it doesn’t seem to work too well for India, which has a genuinely huge Muslim population. But there’s a hidden danger. His audience can say right: just look at how advanced and rich America is, and it’s one of the largest Muslim countries on the planet. See nothing is broken in Islam. America is proof. There comes a point when rebranding may become misleading packaging.

But hey, “misleading packaging” is the man’s forte, after all.

Political Commentary

An Absurd Ruling

8 Comments

At least based on this quote: “Federalism is an older and more deeply rooted tradition than is a right to carry any particular kind of weapon.”

That seems nonsensical to me. The right to self defense is fundamental in English common law, and goes back much further than federalism. I’m as big a federalist as the next guy, and more than most, but how can the First Amendment be incorporated, but not the Second? This will be going to SCOTUS.

[Update a few minutes later]

Eugene Volokh, unsurprisingly, has some thoughts, here and here:

…it’s not implausible, I think, to treat the Court’s precedents as stare decisis on the question of incorporation via the Fourteenth Amendment generally, rather than solely of incorporation via the Privileges or Immunities Clause (though I’d probably be inclined to the other position). But it seems to me that the case is not nearly as clear as the Seventh Circuit’s analysis suggests, and that the opinion’s not discussing the difference between the two Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment is a significant weakness.

As I said, the SCOTUS will almost certainly get this. And having Sotomayor won’t make any difference, since Souter would likely rule the same way as she does. It will be interesting to see what the rest of the court does.

[Update]

A thought, based on some good comments in Eugene’s second post. When self defense is outlawed, only outlaws will defend themselves.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

What A Bargain

27 Comments

Your tax dollars at work:

According to today’s Washington Post, the company currently employs 88,000 workers in the United States. (That seems low, but that’s what the paper says.) GM has gotten $19.4 billion in loans from the U.S. government and Obama promised another $30 billion yesterday.

$49.4 billion divided by 88,000 workers comes out to $561,363.63 per worker.

Can that possibly be right? That in an effort to avoid layoffs, Uncle Sam has pursued a course more expensive than handing each worker a check for a half a million dollars?

Well, the math is correct, but it’s not right, in any sense of the word. I see some very interesting campaign ads coming out of this in 2010.