Stromata Blog

Slick Barry: A New Clinton Moment

It’s only fair to point out that Barack Obama’s surprising statement –

Had the reverend [Jeremiah Wright] not retired, and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and was inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country, for all its flaws, then I wouldn’t have felt comfortable staying at the church.

– is ambiguous. The dexterosphere takes it to mean that two conditions were necessary for the candidate to remain affiliated with (or at least to feel comfortable at) Trinity United Church of Christ: Pastor Wright had to both retire and acknowledge that his anti-American sermons were wrong. He hasn’t done the second, so the Right accuses him of fibbing.

There is, however, an alternative interpretation, which is now the official stance of the Obama campaign: If the pastor had not retired, then, but only then, he would have had to apologize in order to remain in his famous parishioner’s good graces.

What a delightfully Clintonesque statement Slick Barry made to Barbara Walters. He has a first rate command of English rhetoric, so he must have been aware that virtually every viewer would take away the impression that the Rev. Mr. Wright had in fact “acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and was inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country”. Very few of that audience read right-of-center blogs, so the impression would have been left uncorrected. The hoped-for “take-away” was, “Obama’s preacher made some dubious statements, but he said he was sorry, so why are the Republicans making such a big deal out of it?” At the same time, the campaign had a cover story in case the media reported that Pastor Wright had not recanted: No, that bit was hypothetical, what I would have demanded of him if he were still preaching.

Of course, the cover story contradicts the tenor of the Senator’s speech last week. Its implication is that, after twenty years, he was just about to confront a man who had repeatedly maligned America, Jews and white people. But, as luck would have it, the opportunity to “turn his back” disappeared, because the demagogic clergyman slipped away into retirement. What a pity.

If that had been the overt line, nobody would have bought it. As a cover, though, it will likely work just fine. Watch how the elite media scold the “right wing” for its inability to grasp the finer nuances of Senator Obama’s language.

The PBGC and the Stock Market: Moral Hazard or Socialism or Both?

In an attempt to ameliorate its financial strains, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation recently announced a major change in its investment strategy. In place of the fixed income securities that have dominated its portfolio since its inception, it will now invest up to 55% of the assets received from terminated plans in stocks. Total stockholdings could reach $30 billion under this policy.

The motive is obvious: The single-employer insurance fund needs much higher returns if it is to have any hope of overcoming a $14 billion deficit. The PBGC is also confident that adding equities to its investment mix reduces its long-run risk “in the 99th percentile worst-case scenario”.

Investment professionals can argue about whether this benign risk-reward tradeoff is reality or illusion. Today’s Wall Street Journal takes exception on more fundamental grounds:

Risk-taking is the mother’s milk of capitalism. But private sector risk-taking with public sector backing can be a recipe for trouble. Which is why news that the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation will diversify its portfolio to include more equities ought to concern taxpayers. . . .

The editorial highlights two issues. First, the PBGC has “an implicit claim on tax dollars” despite the absence of any explicit federal guarantee. The government thus has an incentive to prop up corporations in which the PBGC has significant holdings, lest investment losses prompt an overt bail-out of the insurance fund. If, for instance, the fund had held a couple of hundred million dollars of Bear Stearns stock last week, might not the Fed have taken a tenderer view of the interests of Bear shareholders? At the very least, it would have had a nagging worry in addition to the overall health of the credit markets.

Second,

There’s also the problem of the government owning significant portions of the private sector. At one point a few years back, PBGC had 25% of United, 15% of Delta and 15% of Kaiser Aluminum. The last thing Americans should want is government owning huge chunks of corporate America, because with ownership eventually comes control.

President Clinton once proposed that the U.S. Treasury begin investing its then surpluses in stocks in order to provide hard assets to back up Social Security. Fear of the de facto nationalization of major companies was one of the factors that short circuited that idea. (It had other flaws, too.) The PBGC is admittedly a pigmy compared to the budget surpluses of the late 1990’s, but $30 billion isn’t insubstantial, and there would inevitably be pressure to deploy it for politically defined “good” ends.

The Journal’s conclusion is that putting the PBGC on a sound footing requires looking in a different direction entirely.

We realize Mr. Millard is in a tight spot and his options are limited. The most prudent way to fix what’s wrong with PBGC, aside from getting rid of it, would be for the agency to promise less or collect more – that is, reduce the amount of the pension guarantee or charge higher premiums that bear some relation to actual risk.

But enacting those changes requires Congressional action, and lawmakers – no surprise – have typically refused to properly fund the agency or to demand higher premiums from the companies that are insured.

It wouldn’t have been unfair to have added that the PBGC bears some responsibility for its unsatisfactory premium income. In the mid-1980’s, acting on a Grace Commission recommendation, it accelerated premium collections by establishing a system of estimated payments. That was an unpopular step with employers and has over the years mostly fallen into abeyance. Under the latest regulations, plans don’t have to pay most premiums until 9½ months after the beginning of each coverage period. The due date for plans with fewer than 100 participants is later yet: 16 months after the start of the year. The upshot is, of course, a great deal of forgone investment income. No private insurance company – certainly not one with a huge actuarial deficit – would operate that way.

Barack and Taxes

In my Utopia, candidates for office would not be pressured, or allowed, to make their income tax returns public. In fact, the returns would self-destruct the day the statute of limitations ran out. I’m surprised that noisy advocates of privacy, who have cultivated the jungles of HIPAA and its ilk, never get excited about the publication of individuals’ intimate financial information (not to mention that the knowledge that one’s Form 1040 may someday wind up on the Internet cannot promote honesty in tax preparation).

Therefore, I deplore the fact that Barack Obama felt compelled to release his and his wife’s returns for the years 2000 through 2006. His demand that Hillary Clinton do the same reduces the level at which I deplore, but only slightly. Be that as it may, the documents can now be read by anybody with a Web browser, so I won’t be so highminded as to ignore them.

Almost all the commentary that I’ve seen so far has picked out the Obamas’ charitable contributions as the main point of interest, which is just silly. Generosity to section 501(c)(3) organizations may be pertinent to a candidate for sainthood, but the Presidency is a merely secular magistracy. If it were otherwise, Mitt Romney would be the odds-on favorite.

What I find fascinating is a comparison of the couple’s taxes in 2000 and 2003, that is, before and after the Bush tax cuts that Senator Obama reviles and vows to repeal.

In both years, the Obamas fell into the “rich” tier of taxpayers for whom liberals routinely evince no sympathy. Their adjusted gross income in 2000 was $240,505, in 2003 $238,327. Their itemized deductions totaled $20,281 in the earlier year, $24,030 in the later. They had one more child in 2003, adding $2,318 (after the phase-out for being high-income taxpayers) to their personal exemptions. The combined effect of lower AGI and higher deductions was that their net taxable income was almost exactly $10,000 less in 2003 than in 2000. Their income tax liability was also less – by $11,756. To put it another way, the 2001 tax reductions saved them about as much as the dance, music and sports lessons for their daughters that Mrs. Obama has bemoaned as such a costly burden. If Malia and Natasha grow up to be Broadway stars, they can thank George W. Bush, their cousin Dick Cheney and the Republican 107th Congress.

Lots of conservatives have scoffed at Michelle Obama’s tales of financial anxiety, and it’s true that her family’s income was, even before the book royalties began rolling in, far above the national average. She and Barack were the sort of people whose wealth tax hikers want to take, but I believe she speaks truthfully when she says she worried about how to get by from paycheck to paycheck. In 2000, the Obamas might be taking in gross income of $20,000 a month, but $5,000 of that went out immediately in income taxes, nearly $1,000 more to FICA/HI tax and at least the same sum in state income and sales taxes. After that, they could pay their mortgage, buy food and clothing, keep up two automobiles, pay medical expenses, repay student loans, take an occasional trip, put $20 a week on the collection tray at church, and try to save a bit toward retirement. That’s not a life of penury, but it ain’t luxury either.

When Senator Obama cheerily promises to raise taxes on “the rich”, he means on people like the Obamas of five years ago. It’s a pity he has forgotten them.

Quote of the Day

The Wall Street Journal:

In the wake of the felony admissions of Weiss and Lerach and last week’s bribery plea by Dickie Scruggs, where are the cries in Congress to crack down on these wealthy wrongdoers who abused their positions of legal trust? Weiss’s corner of the tort bar has enriched itself for decades on the backs of shareholders who took home a pittance while the lawyers became megamillionaires.

This might be the biggest pay disparity in the country – that between class members and the lawyers who purportedly represent them. But you won't hear that from Democrats who bray about executive pay and the “little guy.” The tort lawyers have seen to that by sharing a percentage of their riches, almost like a service fee, with the politicians who prevent any meaningful legal reform.

This rash of indictments and guilty pleas ought to be the Enron of the legal profession. Where are its Sarbanes and Oxley?

Another Year of Hugo Nominees

The list of Hugo nominees for 2008 has just appeared. Some of the choices of vox populi surprise, and a couple appall, me, which isn’t any different from years past.

At a recent con, I heard Mike Resnick bemoan the vast falling off of the readership of the print SF mags, which today have about a tenth of the circulation of 20 years ago. Even though he himself edits the on-line Jim Baen’s Universe, he urged the audience to subscribe to Asimov’s, Analog and F&SF. The nominee list shows one good reason why: Of the 15 short fiction candidates, 11 appeared in the print magazines (four only in anthologies, none on-line), and one of the novels (Rollback by Robert Sawyer) was serialized in Analog. They may be short of readers, but the old mags still print the best stuff.

I’ll reserve comments for later but do want to express my delight that Diana Glyer’s The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community got a Best Related Book nomination. I can pretend that my review was responsible.

Time for Comic Relief

Enough about Barack Obama! It’s time for comedy, albeit the laughs are furnished by an Obama zealot eager to demonstrate that Hillary Clinton has “unsavory religious affiliations”, too.

According to Barbara Ehrenreich, who is, I understand, regarded by the Left as an intellectual, Bill Clinton’s life partner belongs to a “fascist-leaning” Christian group that she (Ehrenreich) portentously calls “the Family”. On the surface, it does nothing more ominous than sponsor the “blandly innocuous National Prayer Breakfast, held every February in Washington”. Behind the scenes, however, it is “the sinister heart of the international right”,

knitting together international networks of right-wing leaders, most of them ostensibly Christian. In the 1940s, The Family reached out to former and not-so-former Nazis, and its fascination with that exemplary leader, Adolf Hitler, has continued, along with ties to a whole bestiary of murderous thugs.

The plotters are exposed in a forthcoming book that sounds like a cross between None Dare Call It Conspiracy and The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk. It should be hilarious reading. Meanwhile, Miz Ehrenreich’s hyperventilations remind us of what a funhouse the Looney Left truly is.

Senator Obama’s Grandmother

The “Grandmother issue”, while perhaps intrinsically minor, may prove to be the gravest embarrassment of Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign, maybe even a decisive embarrassment. In his Philadelphia speech, he said:

I can no more disown [the Rev. Mr. Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

That was bad enough. Disclosing the embarrassing secret of an 85-year old woman, who has told the media that she is too infirm to give interviews, and suggesting that she is a bigot – we no longer have the vocabulary. The word “cad” was invented for such conduct. (For more extended outrage, vide Melanie Phillips, “Trashing Grandma, Yet”, and hundreds of others.)

Then we see that Senator Obama’s autobiography told a different story. The book doesn’t say that Grandmother Dunham “once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street”. Rather, on one occasion her husband, just after a heated marital argument, accused her of wanting to avoid the risk of encountering an aggressive panhandler because “the fella was black”. Conceivably, though the book doesn’t say so, that incident generated an emotional fear of young black males, but her grandson is either uncandid or psychologically obtuse if he sees any comparison between that reaction and Pastor Wright’s anti-white invective.

But the worst comes today, when the candidate, perhaps thinking that he could soften the insult to “a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world”, said that her alleged wariness was just like “a typical white person”. What’s wrong with that statement?

1. On a factual level, it is untrue. Here I have a bit of personal experience. After being mugged for the third time during my residence in New York City (well before the Giuliani Renaissance), I did for a time shy away from any black man under about age 40. The impulse was subconscious and uncontrollable. It lasted for a couple of months, then faded away, never to return. Of course, I exercise prudence and don’t wander into the vicinity of people who look like hoodlums, whatever their race, but blackness in and of itself doesn’t arouse any discomfort or apprehension. I think it highly unlikely that I am, in this regard, anything other than “a typical white person”.

2. Assuming arguendo that Mrs. Dunham really did suffer the mild phobia that Senator Obama describes and that those feelings are “typical” of white Americans, can anyone regard them as worse than a venial offense? Shouldn’t a frank discussion of race relations in America have pointed out that the phobia is fully explained the high black male crime rate? The presumption of bigotry is itself bigoted.

3. The Senator’s rhetorical trope – I can no more disown Pastor Wright, who has “expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country” than I can disown my grandmother who – depends upon the grandmother’s fault being morally comparable to the preacher’s. Otherwise, the comparison falls flat. “My grandmother who gossiped about the neighbors” won’t fill the bill. Therefore, unless this skilled and highly educated orator didn’t think about what he was saying, he believes that using one’s pulpit to damn America is more or less on a level with fearing strange black males. Moreover, the “a typical white person” is guilty of the latter. The only logical conclusion is that the average, ordinary white man or woman is on a moral plane with a race-baiting demagogue.

4. We see now a couple of strange contradictions. Senator Obama professes an “unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people”, yet implies that whites are mostly imbued with a racism similar to Pastor Wright’s. He also stated yesterday that it is wrong for whites to be “told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced”, while today he rebukes them for those same fears. Is this a clear, analytical thinker?

If Barack Obama does not win the Democratic Presidential nomination, I’m pretty sure that historians will single out his words about Madelyn Dunham as the turning point. “Gaffe” is too pale a word.

Judging Oratory by Its Fruits

Because I believe in being fair and balanced, let me now focus on (or, one might say, cherry pick) the agreeable parts of what Senator Obama said yesterday. One paragraph stands out and has been responsible, I think, for much of the positive reaction from commentators who don’t ordinarily have much patience with left-wing sloganeering (e. g., John McWhorter, Charles Murray and, to a lesser extent, Ross Douthat [more Douthat]):

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

Had the text consisted of an elaboration of that paragraph, Senator Obama would not only have been intellectually correct, but he would have done a great deal of good. He would have been saying to the black community, “Stop equating America today with Mississippi half a century ago. Stop being angry about past wrongs, and start remembering how much your white brothers and sisters have done to change racial attitudes and promote equal opportunity. Stop paralyzing yourselves by imagining that you are the victims of vast conspiracies. Stop sympathizing with tyrants who denounce your country, and start showing appreciation for our foreign allies.”

Coming from the first black candidate with a real shot at winning the Presidency, those sentiments might well have undone much of the harm that years of hatemongering by the Rev. Mr. Wright (and others) have wrought. At least, it would have become more difficult to stigmatize pro-Americanism as “middleclassedness” and “thinking white”.

One paragraph, alas, does not make a speech. Surrounding its sharp observations was a mass of soft, cushioning “context”. Tout comprehendre c’est tout pardonner, and many paragraphs were devoted to “understanding” why blacks in general, and Jeremiah Wright in particular, are justified in being angry at America, and why their anger ought to be seen in a forgiving light.

Judging by the audience reactions that Byron York sampled, the speech reinforced, instead of undermining, the attitude that blacks face a malevolent, white-dominated world. If the candidate had the intentions that the optimists attribute to him, he failed as an orator, at least with his immediate hearers. We’ll see whether he has better luck among those who read his remarks or learn about them through second hand reports. Will blacks who were inclined to agree with Pastor Wright begin criticizing the “profoundly distorted” opinions uttered from the Trinity Church pulpit? Or will they declare that white critics have traduced a prophetic truth teller?

To borrow a quotation that Senator Obama must have heard during his two decades of church attendance, “By their fruits ye shall know them.” If his Philadelphia speech bears no good fruit except praise from people who already agree with an anti-racist message, its seed will have been sown in vain.

Change, Hope, Unity and – Grievances

Barack Obama didn’t follow any of my suggestions for his “major address on racism and religion”; not that I expected him to. What he did say has drawn enthusiastic applause from people who wanted him to wash away whatever doubts may have been raised by his 20 years of close association with a racist crank. My own reaction is, I fear, rather less positive. Maybe it is churlish to say so, but the speech revealed to me, beneath a fine flow of words, an ideology that is fundamentally inconsistent with our country’s founding ideals. While Senator Obama invokes “self reliance”, he calls on us to nurture our grievances and seek redress from a government powerful enough to give us all we want.

His picture of a land of misery, oppression and squalor has never before been laid out so starkly. He describes not a nation that leads the world in prosperity and freedom, the most popular destination for emigrants, but a wasteland of “crumbling schools”, emergency rooms filled with people “who do not have health care” (one wonders what they are receiving in the ER), “shuttered mills” and “stagnant wages”. The America Senator Obama sees is wracked by cynicism, bigotry and “a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many”.

Senator Obama’s America is also burdened by a history so heavy and malignant that slavery, abolished 140 years ago, and Jim Crow laws, never prevalent outside one region and gone for over 40 years, still determine the fate of a majority of black Americans and instill in them a legacy of unappeased anger. He believes, or at least says, that his “mentor”, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, “came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted”. That is an outright falsehood. Neither in Philadelphia, where Jeremiah Wright grew up, nor in most of the rest of the United States, was segregation then “the law of the land”, and, while opportunities for blacks were less abundant than they are today, no one was constricting them “systematically”. This was, after all, the period when an all-white Supreme Court held that segregated schools were unconstitutional, and an overwhelmingly white Congress passed the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1964 and 1965 with huge bipartisan majorities. Uninterested in any kind of balanced view, Senator Obama sounds exactly like a classic European nationalist, decrying the historic ills inflicted upon his own volk, blaming all of their problems on the crimes of others, denying that anyone has ever done them a good turn, and implicitly justifying a mood of revanchism.

So far, the Senator follows Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. His novel, and politically clever, move is to invite people of every race and ethnicity to join the grievance parade. White conservatives, he informs us, support welfare reform, anti-crime initiatives and racial neutrality in hiring and education not because they believe those policies to be good for all Americans, but out of “resentment” of efforts that have been made to help blacks.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

The opening paragraphs of the speech praised “a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time”. Yet the ensuing summary of America’s unsatisfactory past and dismal present suggests that fidelity to the Constitution’s ideals has been the possession of only a small minority, which has extracted homeopathic doses of liberty and justice from the majority “through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk”. It’s no surprise that he finds little decency in the majority of his countrymen throughout the majority of our history. If practically everyone is motivated by anger or resentment, what is to be expected?

Now that it has been established that subrational emotions stand in the way of perfecting the Union envisioned by the Constitution, one might expect to hear a plea for putting anger and resentment aside. But Senator Obama calls for the opposite: channeling them toward different enemies, toward the shadowy powers that oppress us all (apparently without being part of “us”) and, once the “special interests” are overthrown, enacting governmental programs that will provide quality education, abundant health care, high paying jobs and all the other desirable things. Missing is an iota of confidence in the creative powers of free individuals or any recognition that the areas where complaints about the status quo are most justified, such as education and health care, are where the government’s hand is already most heavily felt.

Ultimately, according to Senator Obama, the key difference between Jeremiah Wright and himself is simply that the pastor sees a “static” world, rather than one where a sense of grievance can unite Americans to effect change. The clergyman’s diagnosis is correct: This is a racist society governed by a malevolent power elite. But he doesn’t realize that a doctor and a cure have been found. The doctor is Barack Obama. The cure is bigger and better government.

Other reactions: Investor’s Business Daily, “Obama Merely Changes the Subject”
Mickey Kaus, “Can’t We Ignore Race? Please?”
Victor Davis Hanson, “An Elegant Farce”
Stanley Kurtz, “MoveOn MoveIn”
NRO Symposium, “Philadelphia Story: Obama on Race
Byron York, “Obama and His Audience”
The Wall Street Journal, “Discovering Obama
Rand Simberg, “Will Obama Be a Genius?”
James Taranto, “Obama and His ‘White Grandmother’”

And more: Thomas Sowell, “Wright Bound”
Dean Barnett, “Obama the Ditherer”
Jonah Goldberg, “Yesterday’s Baggage”
Michael Meyers, “Obama Blew It”
Peter Wehner, “The Wright Stand”
Charles Krauthammer, “Justifying a Scandalous Dereliction”

What Senator Obama Could Say

I understand that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s best known parishioner will deliver “a major address on race and religion” tomorrow. I’m probably not his target audience, but here are some statements he could make to demonstrate that his mentalité is not at all like that of his “mentor”:

• “Over the past several years, and particularly since the tragic events of 9/11, many members of Trinity, including myself, have been gravely concerned about Pastor Wright’s anti-white and anti-American rhetoric. That is why we worked behind to compel his early retirement and his replacement by Pastor Otis Mills, who firmly repudiates any and all claims that America is to this day an unjust and racist society.”
• “When I was a confused young man, unsure of my identity, Pastor Wright’s hyperbole attracted me. I came to realize, however, that the attraction was a dangerous fraud. Therefore, I have repeated urged the pastor to embrace the loving spirit of Martin Luther King, who followed Jesus’s admonition to love our neighbors, even those neighbors with whom we have sharp disagreements, as ourselves. Jesus loved Samaritans and tax collectors. There is no scope for us to hate any of our fellow Americans. I am sorry that my words had so little visible effect on Pastor Wright, but I pray that in time they will.”
• “At one time it was possible for me to nod when others charged my country with racism and oppression. I was, I am afraid, a brain-dead radical. Then came the horror of September 11, 2001, and I realized that the faults of America shrink to insignificance next to the crimes of the terrorists who have attacked us. Since then, I have devoted my every effort to calling every American, whatever his color, whatever his religion or ethnic background, to unite around our common values and overcome the forces of cynicism and hatred that would tear us apart. While doing that, I confess that I have paid too little attention to my own backyard. Pastor Wright, I am saddened to say, has made unwarranted attacks that contradict everything my message is intended to convey. For that reason, I have today withdrawn from membership in Trinity United Church of Christ. Until and unless the church’s leadership completely changes course and, in particular, renounces the racist theology that Pastor Wright has endorsed, I shall not return.”
• “For twenty years I have been a blind fool and have been a passive but willing accomplice to sin. It is presumptuous of me to seek the most powerful office in the world before purging myself of these profound failures of good judgment. Today I announce that I am abandoning my campaign and resigning my Senate seat. I have volunteered for the United Church of Christ’s mission to Africa, where I hope, through service to God in Jesus’ s name to atone for having fostered hatred and division. Whether I will return to public service at some future time is in God’s hands.”

We shall see.

Further reading: Shelby Steele, “The Obama Bargain”
Thomas Sowell, “Double Life of Barack Obama”

Looking Beyond Tomorrow Afternoon

The two most sensible statements I’ve seen about the present state of the economy are –

• Larry Kudow: “Senator Schumer is calling Bush ‘Herbert Hoover’. But Hoover signed protectionist Smoot-Hawley, just as Hillary and Obama are today trying to break up NAFTA. Hoover signed a huge tax increase, just as Hill-Bama are preaching. The Dems are emulating Hoover.”
• WSJ.com’s Political Diary (formerly OpinionJournal Political Diary and still just $3.95 a month): “How about pulling together the incipient bipartisan consensus for a cut in our exceptionally high corporate income taxes? As Chicago fund manager Seymour Lotsoff points out in his invaluable newsletter, currency markets tend to reflect a judgment about ‘where a rational and unbiased long term investor would choose to place his money. Right now the U.S. is not such a place.’

There you have it. The party likely to control the Presidency and both houses of Congress come next January wants to wallop investment and commerce. Why is anyone surprised that investment and commerce are beginning to stagnate?

The turmoil in the housing market is a small illustration. Lower prices should be attracting buyers, making it possible for overstretched mortgagors to sell off their properties and emerge bowed but not too bloody. The snag is that the potential purchasers look ahead to a near doubling of the long-term capital gains tax rate (from 15 percent to 28 percent, and it could go higher) if Hill-Bama and the Dems have their way. That expectation doesn’t attract their cash.

Similarly, one of the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world doesn’t entice companies to produce goods and services on our shores. A few years ago, the U.S. had one of the world’s better business tax environments, but we’ve rested on our laurels and seen that advantage slip away.

The economy’s problem is the long run climate for entrepreneurial activity. Technical fixes that focus intensively on tomorrow afternoon won’t warm anybody’s animal spirits. That is, however, all that the Fed has in its black bag.

Failure, Success and George W. Bush

The opinion that the Bush fils Administration is a “failed Presidency” has become the conventional wisdom of both the Left, which yearned for failure, and the Right, which has a distressing tendency to fall into line with leftist historical verdicts. If by “failure” we simply mean unpopularity, I can’t dissent, although I can observe that, by that standard, America’s first failed President was another George, George Washington.

On the merits, “failure” is as absurd a label for George W. Bush as “mature” for Britney Spears. Here is a President who entered office during a just aborning recession, promoted exactly the right remedy, oversaw a seven-year economic expansion (now apparently ending, but repealing the business cycle would go beyond successful to miraculous), responded instantly to an unprecedented terrorist attack by launching a successful military campaign half a world away (and making it look easy), ousted one of the world’s most dangerous anti-American tyrants in another short, sharp invasion, and has since kept up relentless pressure on terrorist groups, reducing their attacks against the West to a trickle rather than the flood that most observers anticipated after 9/11. Six and a half years without a major follow-up atrocity on American soil would have been regarded as an insanely optimistic forecast on September 12, 2001.

Not all has gone well, of course. When has it ever? But the demerits are comparatively minor. Some, like the supposedly inept handling of Hurricane Katrina, are outright lies. Virtually all of the horror stories from New Orleans proved to be wildly exaggerated or fraudulent, and it is now clear that the federal relief efforts would have been more than adequate, had it not been for incompetent local officials. The worst than one can say about the White House is that it lacked the imagination to conceive that the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana would fail so comprehensively. Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.

Iraq is the center of the case against President Bush. It is a case that can be sustained only by applying a standard of hindsight and perfectionism (and, as a final resort, ignoring the story when it doesn’t fit the “narrative”). The invasion was a fast, almost bloodless victory, in the face of “expert” opinion that predicted high casualties, a long slog to Baghdad and a Stalingrad-like siege. The subsequent recuperation of the country has gone remarkably well – if one compares it to historical counterparts instead of Utopia. Again, “experts” (mostly the same ones who had forecast a Soviet-style disaster in Afghanistan and a stiff resistance by Saddam Hussein’s “battle tested army”) “knew” that free elections, self-government and economic recovery were distant prospects for post-Ba’athist Iraq.

What didn’t go well in Iraq was a continued high level of terrorism. That stemmed from a strategic decision by the enemy. Although their militarily rational course of action would have been to shift to another theater, where they would not have to confront the world’s strongest army on highly unequal terms, al-Qa’eda and its allies chose Iraq as the “main front” in their war against the West. The upshot was that they lost thousands of foot soldiers and a number of top leaders, lacked the resources to move against promising targets among the weak regimes of the Moslem world, and were distracted from undertaking 9/11-style attacks in Western nations. Eventually, too, their brutality and lack of victories cost them support in Iraq and prestige among their co-religionists. Moslems who don’t like America know now that al-Qa’eda is a broken reed that will pierce the hand that leans on it.

The defeat of the mufsidun in Iraq would doubtless have come more quickly if the Administration had not stuck to a “light footprint” strategy for over three years. The concept was, ironically, the one that the Left incessantly demands: forcing the Iraqis to take responsibility for their own security. Unhappily, the Ba’athists had broken too much. Their armed forces had to be disbanded. (I’m flabbergasted that some otherwise rational pundits regret that decision. Would they have used the Wehrmacht to keep order in Germany after World War II?) The police were unreliable. Civilian bureaucrats were corrupt. The national infrastructure was dilapidated. The new government thus needed more help to get onto its feet than optimistic Americans had expected.

What’s remarkable is not that misestimation but that, once the old strategy was abandoned, the new one, the “surge”, worked so well in so little time. I doubt that any anti-insurgency campaign in history has made more rapid progress. At this point, the enemy’s only hope of victory in Iraq lies in an unforced, premature American withdrawal, which would demoralize supporters of the government, spark an armed struggle for sectarian advantage, allow al-Qa’eda to rebuild its forces, give pro-terrorist neighbors freedom to intervene, and compel other Arab governments to react militarily. The civil war that didn’t happen would turn into a major regional conflict and a moral defeat for the United States on a scale never before seen. If any of that occurs, however, it will be despite, rather than because of, President Bush.

Yet, whatever I or anyone else may say about the President’s objective record of success, the subjective impression of failure is overwhelming. That perception is partly the fault of the Right. Either because he was never a hard-line conservative or because he hoped to forge a broad coalition against terrorism after 9/11, Mr. Bush never attended much to slowing the growth of government spending, implementing socially conservative policies or cracking down on illegal immigration. Those departures from “movement” conservatism much dampened the enthusiasm of his natural allies. On immigration especially, he has had to endure poisonous restrictionist abuse, of the “Bush hates America” variety.

Meanwhile, the surreal shrillness of the Left is echoed by the newspapers and television networks that still provide most Americans with most of their picture of the world. I’ve been paying attention to politics since the waning years of the Eisenhower Administration and can say with certainty that never before, including the worst days of Vietnam and Watergate, has our public discourse been so filled with irrational venom. I’m not surprised that many Administration officials have given up trying to answer the flow of fact-free insults and fun-house distortions. When detailed documentation of Saddam Hussein’s encouragement of terrorism, willingness to aid any enemy of America and close ties to Osama bin-Laden’s highest ranking lieutenant’s is reported as proof that he had no connection with al-Qa’eda, the media have abandoned not just fairness and balance but reason itself. One might as well have looked for factual reporting in Pravda or the radio broadcasts of Lord Haw-Haw.

In this atmosphere, it is hard to look the facts in the eye and ignore the invective. When emotions die down and historians consider the early 21st Century without rancor, it will, I think, be clear that George W. Bush faced severer challenges than all but a couple of his predecessors and met them capably. If the West prevails in the present conflict, he will be honored as the pioneer in the defense of civilization. If we do not, he will be abused as a dangerous foe of Islamic hegemony. In either case, his present day detractors will go down as among the most vacuous and near-sighted of history’s fools.

The Two Obamas

When the Rev. Jeremiah Wright came to the reluctant attention of the elite media (Mrs. Clinton’s flacks are still earning their keep, even if they have to work harder these days), my first thought was that there are probably a hundred conservative Congressmen whose ministers preach Loony Left sermons on a regular basis. What David Mamet terms “brain-dead liberalism” is the default political stance for contemporary Christian leaders. From what clerical acquaintances tell me, it’s no easier to be a Republican at a church conference than in Hollywood.

Upon closer examination, the Rev. Mr. Wright’s looniness appears to be more conscious and ingrained than the average Protestant clergyman’s. “God damn America”, sympathy for Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi, declarations that America deserved 9/11 and dark hints that its government created the AIDS virus go a bit beyond what one ordinarily hears from the pulpits of the Religious Left. A sympathetic profile published last year in the Chicago Tribune emphasized how far Pastor Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ is to the left of both a generally very leftish denomination and other black Protestant churches. The Wright ministry began with a political stance and shaped a theology around it. It metastasized into a lesson in why that is the wrong order of priorities. The political starting point, a call for full civil rights for black Americans, was admirable, but putting politics first led to a spurious distinction between “African” and “white” Christianity and eventually to the demonization of white America, “the U.S. of KKK A”.

That a leading Presidential candidate finds such a figure attractive ought to be a cause for worry. It would be a different matter if Pastor Wright were primarily a spiritual counselor. Many men who are wise, even saintly, in the affairs of God have talked foolishly about mundane politics. In the Orthodox Church, we have examples like St. John of Kronstadt, an inspiring preacher, organizer of charitable enterprises and member of the Black Hundred. But Fr. John was a secular naïf, to whom the Cross, the Holy Sacraments and a life of prayer were vastly more important than the City of Man. Jeremiah Wright is the opposite, so far as we can judge by appearances. (I make no judgement about what is in his heart and wish him nothing but the peace and mercy of Our Lord.)

If Barack Obama were a private citizen, or merely one percent of the United States Senate, his close association with Trinity UCC – praise for his “mentor” Pastor Wright, 20 years of active membership, sizeable donations – would be more a personal than a political matter. If he concurred in his church’s radically racist and anti-American ideology, his sentiments could do only minimal harm and would (rightly) be shielded from close scrutiny by our reluctance to pry into other people’s religious beliefs.

The President is on a different plane. One holding Pastor Wright’s views could do immense damage to the country. Am I convinced that Senator Obama sings “God damn America” in the shower? Certainly not. I wouldn’t rate the likelihood as high as 50 percent. On the other hand, it can’t help being significantly above zero, especially after we factor Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Michelle Obama and Tony Rezko into the equation. That friends and ideological soul mates describe the Senator as “most comfortable in the domain of policy and detail” is reassuring only to those who forget that policy wonks can be extremists, too.

Which is the real Obama? The transcender of racial divisions or the faithful acolyte of a radical hatemonger? How much of a chance can we take on getting the answer right?

Democrats and liberals decried George W. Bush’s “risky schemes” (tax cuts, Social Security reform, etc.), urge the “precautionary principle” as the only guide to environmental policy, and express fear that civil liberties will collapse if telecommunications companies can cooperate with government surveillance without a risk of liability. Men of such timid mien really ought to hesitate before gambling their nation on the hope that Barack Obama’s affinity with Pastor Wright is only accidental rather than elective.

The same question would arise if a Christian Reconstructionist were to become a leading Presidential candidate. Could someone who called R. J. Rushdoony or Gary North his mentor, worshiped with Reconstructionists, and gave money to the Chalcedon Foundation reassure us of his non-radicalism by the simple tactic of likening Reconstructionist opinions to those of an eccentric uncle and claiming not to be aware of the most outrageous ones? The fellow might indeed be an utter innocent, attracted solely by postmillennialism and theological explorations of the relation between the Old and New Testaments, with no desire to outlaw heresy or stone adulterers. Nonetheless, it would be elementary prudence, not “guilt by association”, not to make him the most powerful person on Earth.

Random Reading (2): A Distaff Shakespeare?

A perk of blogging is that one receives – frequently if one is Glenn Reynolds, every blue moon or two if one is me – unsolicited copies of newly published books. Thus Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a Woman Write Shakespeare? appeared in my mailbox some months ago. I had the good intention of repaying the author by reviewing it, but time slipped by and, though the book was read, the review remained unwritten. Then, a few days ago, I ran across a Usenet post commending the author’s thesis. That stirred my sense of responsibility, so here are my thoughts.

And What Would Be a Link?

The Institute for Defense Analyses has just released a new report entitled “Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents”. Through either a master stroke of psychological warfare or bureaucratic inertia, the Pentagon made copies somewhat difficult to obtain and decided not to hold a press briefing. Reporters ill-disposed toward our ouster of Saddam Hussein naturally intuited that the study’s conclusion must have been, in the New York Times’ words, “Oh, By the Way, There Was No Al Qaeda Link” and therefore immediately began publicizing it, without taking the precaution of reading the text first. The Times’s blog based its summary on the left-wing McClatchey Newspapers:

Remember those weapons of mass destruction that could not be found in Iraq? Well, the supposed tight links between Saddam Hussein and the Al Qaeda terrorist network have evaporated as well. . . .

The study, entitled “Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents,” concludes that while Saddam’s regime provided some support for groups in the Middle East that have been labeled as terrorist, his main efforts were directed against Israel and against groups he considered enemies of his government, including Shiite Muslims, Kurds and Iraqi exiles.

Stephen F. Hayes, who has written about the connection that the Left is at such pains to deny, has done his reading. He’ll have a major article up soon [Update: now on-line]. Meanwhile, readers in search of amusement may want to try to figure out how the report’s executive summary, reproduced below, got transmogrified by a leftist mindset into the soothing snark purveyed by McClatchey and the Times.

Executive Summary

The Iraqi Perspectives Project (IPP) review of captured Iraqi documents uncovered strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism. Despite their incompatible long-term goals, many terrorist movements and Saddam found a common enemy in the United States. At times these organizations worked together, trading access for capability. In the period after the 1991 Gulf War, the regime of Saddam Hussein supported a complex and increasingly disparate mix of pan-Arab revolutionary causes and emerging pan-Islamic radical movements. The relationship between Iraq and forces of pan-Arab socialism was well known and was in fact one of the defining qualities of the Ba’ath movement.

But the relationships between Iraq and the groups advocating radical pan-Islamic doctrines are much more complex. This study found no “smoking gun” (i.e., direct connection) between Saddam’s Iraq and al Qaeda. Saddam’s interest in, and support for, non-state actors was spread across a variety of revolutionary, liberation, nationalist, and Islamic terrorist organizations. Some in the regime recognized the potential high internal and external costs of maintaining relationships with radical Islamic groups, yet they concluded that in some cases, the benefits of association outweighed the risks. A review of available Iraqi documents indicated the following:

• The Iraqi regime was involved in regional and international terrorist operations prior to OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM. The predominant targets of Iraqi state terror operations were Iraqi citizens, both inside and outside of Iraq.
• On occasion, the Iraqi intelligence servIces directly targeted the regime’s perceived enemies, including non-Iraqis. Non-Iraqi casualties often resulted from Iraqi sponsorship of non-governmental terrorist groups.
• Saddam’s regime often cooperated directly, albeit cautiously, with terrorist groups when they believed such groups could help advance Iraq’s long-term goals. The regime carefully recorded its connections to Palestinian terror organizations in numerous government memos. One such example documents Iraqi financial support to families of suicide bombers in Gaza and the West Bank.
• State sponsorship of terrorism became such a routine tool of state power that Iraq developed elaborate bureaucratic processes to monitor progress and accountability in the recruiting, training, and resourcing of terrorists. Examples include the regime’s development, construction, certification, and training for car bombs and suicide vests in 1999 and 2000.

From the beginning of his rise to power, one of Saddam’s major objectives was to shift the regional balance of power favorably towards Iraq. After the 1991 Gulf War, pursuing this objective motivated Saddam and his regime to increase their cooperation with – and attempts to manipulate – Islamic fundamentalists and related terrorist organizations. Documents indicate that the regime’s use of terrorism was standard practice, although not always successful. From 1991 through 2003, the Saddam regime regarded inspiring, sponsoring, directing, and executing acts of terrorism as an element of state power.

To some minds, I realize, those links just won’t be enough. For those who are determined to believe that a wicked neo-Zionist cabal launched an unjustified war against a peaceable tyrant, no link will ever be enough. No terrorists count except al-Qa’eda, and no association with al-Qa’eda counts unless it includes Saddam’s personal fingerprints on 9/11.

From any rational point of view, the Ba’athist regime’s willingness to aid and abet “a variety of revolutionary, liberation, nationalist, and Islamic terrorist organizations” was a more serious threat to America and the West than a single-minded relationship with al-Qa’eda would have been. The ultimate lesson of “Saddam and Terrorism” is that Iraq was at war with us for over a decade after the Gulf War. The invasion in 2003 was merely our belated recognition of that fact.

Further reading: Eli Lake, “Report Details Saddam's Terrorist Ties”
Stephen F. Hayes, “Saddam’s Dangerous Friends”
Abe Greenwald, “No Smoking Gun – Thankfully”:

Perhaps it’s me, but there seems to be something sloppy about the metaphorical turn of phrase the MSM has been repeating in describing the supposed lack of connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. There is indeed “no smoking gun” in the report recently released by the Institute for Defense Analyses.

And thank God for that. There is, however, a purchased gun, some bullets, a trained shooter, and a plan to kill. “No smoking gun” is what happens when the crime is prevented. “No smoking gun” is exactly the stated outcome the Bush administration was hoping for back in 2003 when making the case for going into Iraq.

Thomas Joscelyn, “Only Connected”:

I think it is worth pointing out that the report ties Saddam’s regime to at least five different al Qaeda associated groups, including two groups that formed the core of al Qaeda.

The Iraqi Intelligence documents discussed in the report link Saddam’s regime to: the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (the “EIJ” is al Qaeda number-two Ayman al Zawahiri's group), the Islamic Group or “IG” (once headed by a key al Qaeda ideologue, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman), the Army of Mohammed (al Qaeda's affiliate in Bahrain), the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan (a forerunner to Ansar al-Islam, al Qaeda's affiliate in Iraq), and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (a long-time ally of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan), among other terrorist groups. Documents cited by the report, but not discussed at length in the publicly available version (they may be in a redacted portion of the report), also detail Saddam’s ties to a sixth al Qaeda affiliate: the Abu Sayyaf group, an al Qaeda affiliate in the Philippines.

Both the EIJ and the IG were early and important core allies for Osama bin Laden as he forged the al Qaeda terror network, which comprises a number of affiliates around the world.

Democrats Discover Vote Fraud

For years, Democratic politicians have insisted that worries over fraudulent ballots are a right-wing myth and that the only purpose of security measures is to “suppress voter turnout”. Now it looks increasingly likely that Florida or Michigan will restage their Democratic primaries. The only affordable way to do that, since the states are unlikely to pay for the process, is an all-mail election. Suddenly, the Wall Street Journal’s Political Diary (free this week, normally a mere $3.95/month) notes, some Dems sound a lot like worrywart, vote-suppressing Republicans:

Senator Carl Levin of Michigan told ABC News that there is a “security issue” with a mail-in ballot. “How do you make sure that hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million or more ballots can be properly counted and that duplicate ballots can be avoided?” Mr. Levin has vivid memories of how absentee ballots have routinely been abused in Detroit and other cities by unscrupulous candidates.

In Florida, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Miami has her own issues with a mail-in ballot. “It’s fraught with problems and now is not the time to be experimenting when we’re talking about stakes this high,” she says. “We still have very raw nerves from the 2000 recount.”

Senator Levin and Rep. Schultz might also wish to ponder how easy it will be, in a race that has been marked by feverish emotions and a soupçon of violence, for over-the-top backers of either candidate to threaten or bribe. The insoluble “security issue” is the absence of any way to guarantee that ballots will be secret.

Let me confess that I’ll come near to bursting with glee if the Florida Supreme Court has to resolve Clinton v. Obama. Even if that never happens, it is enlightening to hear about Senator Levin’s “vivid memories of how absentee ballots have routinely been abused in Detroit and other cities by unscrupulous candidates”. Perhaps those memories will stick with him the next time a bill to crack down on vote fraud appears on the Congressional agenda?

What the Economy Needs Now

After a delightful day of Spitzenfreude, abetted by a Fed attempt to cushion the landing for overstretched lenders, the stock market has wandered back to its downward track. It ought by now to be obvious to the meanest intellect that pushing on the money supply string will not alleviate what may be a recession and is unquestionably a slowdown. Nor is there much hope that the $600 stimulus handout will have more than a slight ripple of impact. What, then, is to be done?

First let’s ask, what’s wrong? Why have animal spirits so conspicuously deserted our country’s entrepreneurial class? The economy doesn’t run on subprime mortgages, and the rising prices of oil and other commodities are less a cause of economic ills than an effect of Dr. Bernanke’s remedies. Maybe the reason for the developing malaise is the one in plain sight: that next year threatens to bring huge increases in taxes and government spending. That’s what both Democratic Presidential candidates advocate and the House Democratic budget proposal would lock into place. The Heritage Foundation has put together a chart of the costs. Liberals won’t mind the tax hikes and will doubt Heritage’s projections of job and income losses, but the folks who invest and create jobs have good reason to be worried, and very, very cautious.

The great macroeconomic lesson of the past three decades is that lowering taxes, as under Presidents Reagan and Bush fils, or keeping government spending under control, as resulted from the Clinton-GOP standoff, promotes prosperity. Doing neither (Carter, Bush père and the first two Clinton years) has the opposite effect. The Democratic Party is now committed to neither-squared.

The present moment, before recession takes hold, is the ideal time for tax cuts. It is a just a bit earlier in the cycle than the 2001 cuts that lifted the economy out of the late-term Clinton recession; there’s no reason to think that waiting a few months will be beneficial. Unhappily, as the Wall Street Journal gloomily opined last week,

Those jobs numbers suggest that first quarter economic growth will be meager, if not negative. We’d like to offer some policy remedy, but the politicians already think they’ve done their part with their “stimulus” rebates set to land in voter pockets this summer. But at best this will provide a temporary fillip to consumer spending. A tax cut aimed at lifting incentives to invest has no major backers -- which is another reason to worry.

That means everyone is putting all of their hopes on the Fed and easier money. This is a dangerous way to live. This expectation is weakening the dollar and thus lifting dollar-denominated prices, especially in commodities. Rising food and energy prices, in turn, are stealing much of the discretionary income from the very consumers the rebate checks are supposed to motivate to spend more.

But I have a hopeful thought. If the impediment to economic activity is the prospect of a tax and spending avalanche, whatever makes that prospect more remote will have the effect of a dose of real economic stimulus. Therefore, an unambiguous Republican commitment to making the 2001 tax cuts permanent and reducing nondefense spending growth to no more than the rate of increase of the GDP (preferably a little less) can, all by itself, reduce the chances of a long or painful contraction. Naturally, this strategy will work only if businessmen think that the commitment is sincere, a matter than Senator McCain and other Republican candidates must attend to. Nonetheless, as an instance of combining personal and public interest, it has few peers and offers a hope of limiting the damage that the Reid-Pelosi duo can inflict on the rest of us.

DST: More Than Ever and No Better for It

This year, we get an additional month of Daylight Saving Time, so tomorrow will see a national case of jet lag, with the accompanying rise in fatal accidents. The tradeoff is supposedly a minute decrease in energy consumption. Where are the chants of “No Blood for Oil!” when we need them?

This year, inspired by Jonah Goldberg’s fine book on Liberal Fascism, I have a new thought on the evils of this semiannual resetting of the clock.

The case for DST has always rested on more than its alleged economic benefits. I remember when, in my childhood, Washington State voted on adopting the gimmick. The “yes” campaign ads didn’t say a word about energy; their slogan was, “Enjoy an extra hour of daylight”. As a preteen, I could see that the “extra” hour was merely shifted from another part of the day. Older citizens were evidently more gullible, as the measure passed handily.

At what hour people wake up and go to bed ought to be outside the scope of the government’s interest, if anything is. Yet DST proponents presume to decide the preferred shape of everybody’s day and pass laws to promote that preference. This is nannyism on stilts. The health nazis at least have the excuse that most of what they wish to ban really is bad for your health. Trying to force people to change their sleep schedules twice a year lacks that justification (in fact, is unhealthy) and, once the diaphanous economic arguments are taken off the table, serves only a gauzy aesthetic purpose. The images of kids playing in the park and couples strolling in the sunset as twilight gently falls are poetic but ridiculously far outside the legitimate concerns of government. Here is another instance, to add to the many that Jonah cites, of petty fascism creeping in.

Another Restrictionist Loses

Yesterday, the Republicans lost the Congressional seat in Illinois’ 14th District, an area that probably hasn’t gone Democratic since Abe Lincoln was a babe in arms. This is, of course, a difficult year for the GOP, but one factor leaps out in this particular race. The Republican candidate, a rich and so far unsuccessful political dilettante named Jim Oberweis, built much of his campaign around the allegedly urgent need to restrict immigration. In the minds of the restrictionists, that’s the issue that will fire up the demoralized Republican “base” and offset the Democrats’ fervor for defeat in Iraq. It didn’t work that way. Like its cousin protectionism, immigration restrictionism polls well, but for some reason its supporters are like the famous “Obama girl”; they talk loudly but never get around to casting votes.

Further reading: The Wall Street Journal, “Lose and Learn”:

Republicans such as Mr. Oberweis remain convinced that illegal immigration is a winning issue. And if the electorate were comprised mostly of Internet screechers and cable news anchors, they might be right. But the fact that Mr. McCain, the Presidential candidate most closely associated with immigration tolerance, has outlasted Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee and other immigration hardliners, should be an indication that other issues are foremost in the minds of even GOP voters.

An Exam Question for Lawyers, in Real Life

Eugene Volokh started a heated discussion a couple of days ago by calling attention to a legal dilemma that sounds like it was contrived for a final in a legal ethics course. To summarize the essential facts: A client tells his attorney that he committed a murder. Another man is arrested for the crime, tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The attorney believes his client’s confession. What obligation, if any, does he have to disclose it to the authorities?

Two lawyers faced this question in real life and reached the correct exam answer: Unless the client voluntarily waives attorney-client privilege, it is a breach of legal ethics to inform anyone of his admission. But should that be the answer? In this case, an innocent man (innocent of this murder, at any rate) spent 26 years in prison, until the death of the client released the lawyers from their enforced silence. Many commenters on Professor Volokh’s blog think that’s so atrocious an outcome that it raises severe doubts about the ethical principle.

The argument against silence is that, whatever the benefits of attorney-client privilege, a lawyer has a higher duty to prevent the infliction of what he knows to be an unjust punishment. Several commenters declared that the lawyers in this case should have risked disbarment, that is, the loss of their professional livelihood, in order to see that justice was done. (Professor Volokh disagrees on that point.)

It isn’t unusual for more than one moral or ethical principle to be pertinent to a particular situation. (In fact, it’s very unusual for there to be only one.) To think clearly about the competing principles here, we need to start with why the attorney-client privilege exists.

Its justification is not primarily that it makes it easier for clients to be candid with their legal representatives. There are hundreds of other contexts in which candor is desirable but not underwritten by law. The only clear and unequivocal communications privileges that our legal system has traditionally recognized are attorney-client, husband-wife and priest-penitent. The last two rest on reluctance to intrude on marriage and religion. The rationale for the first is rooted in the Constitutional protection against self-incrimination.

An individual cannot be compelled to testify to his own guilt in a criminal matter. He obviously would not lose that immunity if he acted as his own counsel. The attorney-client privilege does no more than preserve it when he employs someone else to represent him. The attorney is simply an extension of the client. The law makes what one tells the other as secret as an unspoken monologue.

As a thought experiment, suppose that lawyers could be replaced by computer programs. Would even the most hard-nosed law’n’order advocate suggest that prosecutors be allowed to browse defendants’ data entries? Why, then, take away confidentiality when the data are conveyed to a man rather than a machine?

On the other side of this dilemma we have the “duty to rescue”. Anglo-American law gives it short shrift; it would not be part of the exam answer. But we are free, considering the question from a moral point of view, to accord it greater weight.

To many of Professor Volokh’s commenters, sparing an innocent man a quarter century of imprisonment was an easy choice. But what about the lawyers’ duty to their client? If we strip away that duty in this instance, doesn’t that imply that protection against self-incrimination should yield to the right of the innocent not to be falsely convicted? If so, what is the justification for the Fifth Amendment? Limitations on self-incrimination unquestionably lead to miscarriages of justice. In the case at hand, the murderer might not have said anything to his attorneys. (He almost certainly wouldn’t have if attorney-client privilege did not exist.) Suppose that the police had pried out a confession through methods not sanctioned by Miranda, but well short of physical coercion. Wouldn’t that also be better than those undeserved years in prison?

Many principles strongly embedded in our legal tradition can lead to unhappy, even tragic consequences. Miscarriages of justice arise abundantly from the Fourth through Seventh Amendments. That is a reason not to turn principles into unyielding dogmas. At the same time, we must face the sad reality that, in the absence of angelic government, hard cases will frustrate all efforts to apply easy laws.

Random Reading: Saxons, Vikings, Celts – And Ice Cream Parlors

[First of an occasional series]

The wanderings of primitive peoples are one of the great romances of history, made more romantic and mysterious by the shortage of direct evidence. Somehow, somewhen the Indo-European languages reached points as far separated as the Ganges River valley and the British Isles, and the cultivation of plants spread from a handful of locations to the entire world. Other languages and technologies, too, wandered far from their birth places. No one recorded the ways and means. We do not know what to attribute to mass migrations, what to the travels of a few artisans, what to the adoption of techniques from neighbors, what to independent invention. Did agriculturalists and metal workers colonize new territories, driving out or exterminating the aboriginal inhabitants, or did such advances spread through peaceable interchange? Can we trace mass migrations in the prehistory of language, or only the success of an elite dialect or commercial lingua franca? Parallels in recorded history show that many causes can produce identical effects. English prevailed in North America and Australia, because the indigenes were overwhelmed by migrants, Latin in Western Europe because it was the language of the Roman conquerors, Swahili in sub-Saharan Africa because it was useful for trade.

Lately the ambiguous evidence of archeology and linguistics has been supplemented by DNA analysis, which offers insights into the direct ancestry of living humans. Geneticists can establish, for instance, that everyone alive today is descended from a woman who probably lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago. (Those facts don’t, incidentally, prove that the human race originated at that time and place. Logically, we all must have a common ancestress. She might lived before homo sapiens existed as a distinguishable species or long after. There are, however, other reasons, notably the lack of diversity in the human genome when compared to other species, that lead to the conclusion that we are a very recent arrival in the biosphere.) Similarly, seven maternal and five paternal ancestors have been identified for the vast majority of Europeans. They are dated and placed variously, from 45,000 years ago in Greece to 8,000 B.C. in Syria, using methods that rely on an heroic assumptions, e. g., that the rate of mutation of mitochondrial DNA was constant over the pertinent time periods. Still, despite all uncertainties, it is suggestive that one ancestress apparently dwelled in an early center of agriculture and that her descendants seem to have arrived in the various regions of Europe pari passu with neolithic farming.

Bryan Sykes, an Oxford professor and the founder of Oxford Ancestors, which ingeniously combines fund raising and research by selling individuals the results obtained by examining samples of their DNA, is one of the pioneers in this field. He has also written three books to explain it to the layman, the most recent of which is titled Saxons, Vikings, and Celts in America or, much more colorfully, Blood of the Isles in Britain.

Unhappily for such a promising topic, either Professor Sykes or his publisher has evidently decided that people who buy books about the scientific exploration of human ancestry know no history and want to know no science. Or it could be that the author has taken the human genome as a model: Most of the material in our chromosomes is “junk DNA”, serving no purpose but padding. Saxons, Vikings, and Celts is padded like an insecure debutante: sales pitches for Oxford Ancestors, descriptions of the scenery of the Scottish isles, praise for the fine organization of British blood drives, reminiscences of professional colleagues, accounts of local folklore, even a recommendation for a particularly fine ice cream parlor in Lampeter, Wales.

The on-topic padding consists of potted history, mostly very elementary with little focus on population movements. In places, it is absurd. Do you think there is a direct intellectual line from Polydore Vergil’s denial of the historicity of King Arthur to the Nazi death camps? Professor Sykes does. He is also under the impression that the Arthurian romances were ecclesiastical propaganda that became outmoded after the Reformation, leading to Arthur’s eclipse as a British hero in favor of King Alfred. As a quick check on that thesis, compare the number of poems, novels, plays, paintings and motion pictures featuring each of those figures over the past few centuries. For everyone who can recount the legend of Alfred’s cakes circumstantially, a hundred can tell you about the Table Round, Merlin, Lancelot, Guinevere, Gaiwan, Mordred, the Sword in the Stone, and other tales of Camelot.

The second rate fustian squeezes out what is interesting in Saxons, Vikings, and Celts, namely, the evidence concerning the ancestry of the English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish people. That is covered in a few bland pages, so devoid of details that it’s hard to figure out what the author has concluded or why. The scantiness of the presentation also makes it hard to judge whether he has taken all of the known historical facts into account. For instance, has he made allowances for the huge Irish immigration into England in the 19th Century? If not, his reconstruction is tainted by a very recent Celtic incursion and isn’t of much use in answering the vexed question of whether the Anglo-Saxons literally drove the Celts out of England or were, like their Roman predecessors, a relatively small ruling clique.

Historical genetics looks like a highly promising tool, but how are we to know if its practitioners are more interested in rating ice cream parlors than revealing the secrets of their art?

Tree-Murdering Warmenists

Leftists still mock Ronald Reagan for having once said, “If you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all”. The Gipper did not, however, engage in arboricide – unlike grandstanders who want to prove their devotion to the Great War Against Warming:

SUNNYVALE, California (AP) – In an environmental dispute seemingly scripted for eco-friendly California, a man asked prosecutors to file charges against his neighbors because their towering redwoods blocked sunlight to his backyard solar panels.

But the couple next door insisted they should not have to chop down the trees to accommodate Mark Vargas’ energy demands because they planted the redwoods before he installed the solar panels in 2001. . . .

After more than six years of legal wrangling, a judge recently ordered Richard Treanor and his wife, Carolyn Bissett, to cut down two of their eight redwoods, citing an obscure state law that protects a homeowner's right to sunlight. . . .

The case marks the first time a homeowner has been convicted of violating the law, which was enacted three decades ago, when few homeowners had solar systems.

The law requires homeowners to keep their trees or shrubs from shading more than 10 percent of a neighbor’s solar panels between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., when the sun is strongest. Existing trees that cast shadows when the panels are installed are exempt, but new growth is subject to the law.

Residents can be fined up to $1,000 a day for violations, though the judge did not impose any fines against the Treanors.

Vargas says the law protects his $70,000 investment in solar power, and he believes it should be strengthened. . . .

Treanor, a retired engineer, said he and his wife are not against solar power, “but we think there’s a rational way to implement it.”

The news account also includes some amusing environmentalist one-upsmanship:

Treanor and Bissett, who drive a hybrid Toyota Prius, argue that trees absorb carbon dioxide, cool the surrounding air and provide a habitat for wildlife.

Vargas, who recently bought a plug-in electric car, counters it would take two or three acres of trees to reduce carbon dioxide emissions as much as the solar panels that cover his roof and backyard trellis.

Without trying to resolve that theological dispute, let’s note that the decapitated redwoods would have absorbed CO2 for centuries into the future. The solar panels will be good only for scrap within a human lifetime.

The Best Reason Not to Elect Slick Barry

Michelle Obama is 44 years old. If Barack Obama is elected President, serves for two terms and doesn’t depart the office with a reputation of Jimmy Carter-like proportions, Mrs. Obama, only 52 at that point, will have little trouble stepping into the Senate seat her husband once held and thereafter following in the footsteps of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Judging by what was intended as a puff piece in the New Yorker (summarized and dissected by Jim Geraghty), her whining dyspepsia and self-righteous victimhood will make us look back on the Tin Lady with fond nostalgia.

The four times I heard her give the speech—in a ballroom at the University of South Carolina, from the pulpit of Pee Dee Union, at an art gallery in Charleston, and in the auditorium of St. Norbert College, in De Pere, Wisconsin—its content was admirably consistent, with few of the politician’s customary tweaks and nods to the demographic predilections, or prejudices, of a particular audience.

Obama begins with a broad assessment of life in America in 2008, and life is not good: we’re a divided country, we’re a country that is “just downright mean,” we are “guided by fear,” we’re a nation of cynics, sloths, and complacents. “We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day,” she said, as heads bobbed in the pews. “Folks are just jammed up, and it’s gotten worse over my lifetime. And, doggone it, I’m young. Forty-four!”

From these bleak generalities, Obama moves into specific complaints. Used to be, she will say, that you could count on a decent education in the neighborhood. But now there are all these charter schools and magnet schools that you have to “finagle” to get into. (Obama herself attended a magnet school, but never mind.) Health care is out of reach (“Let me tell you, don’t get sick in America”), pensions are disappearing, college is too expensive, and even if you can figure out a way to go to college you won’t be able to recoup the cost of the degree in many of the professions for which you needed it in the first place. “You’re looking at a young couple that’s just a few years out of debt,” Obama said. “See, because, we went to those good schools, and we didn’t have trust funds. I’m still waiting for Barack’s trust fund. Especially after I heard that Dick Cheney was s’posed to be a relative or something. Give us something here!”

BTW, Dick Cheney’s father was a soil conservation agent for the Department of Agriculture, not exactly a “trust fund” background.

First Ladies have traditionally gravitated toward happy topics like roadside flower beds, so it comes as a surprise that Obama’s speech is such an unrelenting downer. Obama acknowledged to me that some advisers have lobbied her to take a sunnier tone, with little success. “For me,” she said, “you can talk about policies and plans and experience and all that. We usually get bogged down in that in a Presidential campaign, over the stuff that I think doesn’t matter. . . . I mean, I guess I could go into Barack’s policies and rattle them off. But that’s what he’s for.” In Cheraw, Obama belittled the idea that the Clinton years were ones of opportunity and prosperity: “The life that I’m talking about that most people are living has gotten progressively worse since I was a little girl. . . . So if you want to pretend like there was some point over the last couple of decades when your lives were easy, I want to meet you!”

How long do we want to have to listen to that? There are other reasons not to vote for Barack Obama, but this one, to my mind, will suffice.

Another Obamanian Inexactitude

Maybe it was inevitable that, once the Obama campaign had been caught in one verbal inexactitude (“NAFTAquiddick”), other instances would sprout like weeds. Jeffrey Lord presents another. His article is over-long and overwrought, so let me boil it down to the interesting facts.

On June 23, 2007, Senator Obama delivered an address to the annual meeting of the General Synod of the United Church of Christ. The church’s Web site announced the event thus:

Obama’s Synod speech will be his “first major address on faith and politics as presidential candidate.”

Joshua DuBois, the Obama campaign’s director of religious affairs, said the senator’s Synod speech on Saturday will be his first major address on faith and politics as a presidential candidate. The address, DuBois said, will combine personal details about Obama’s religious experiences with prescriptions for how religious Americans might put their faith into action.

The speech itself included passages like this one:

It’s been several months now since I announced I was running for president. In that time, I’ve had the chance to talk with Americans all across this country. And I’ve found that no matter where I am, or who I’m talking to, there’s a common theme that emerges. It’s that folks are hungry for change – they’re hungry for something new. They’re ready to turn the page on the old politics and the old policies – whether it’s the war in Iraq or the health care crisis we’re in, or a school system that’s leaving too many kids behind despite the slogans.

And this:

I have made a solemn pledge that I will sign a universal health care bill into law by the end of my first term as president that will cover every American and cut the cost of a typical family’s premiums by up to $2,500 a year.

Nothing remarkable there. He’s doubtless uttered the same words from hundreds of stumps. Nor was it remarkable that Obama campaign workers manned tables at the entrance to the convention center where he was speaking. Unfortunately, the IRS became interested in whether the UCC, by hosting a campaign event by a Presidential candidate, had violated the conditions for its tax-exempt status.

It will be a surprise if the UCC suffers any adverse consequences beyond a stern admonition, though its legal fees have apparently been painfully large. What is not, alas, a surprise is how the Obama campaign responded – by denying the obvious:

Amy Brundage, an Obama spokeswoman, insisted that the speech was not a campaign event. In the address, Obama spoke about his personal spiritual journey and had said that faith had been misused in the past to divide Americans, partly because of the Christian right.

A nationalized health care bill is part of a “personal spiritual journey”?

The moment was, of course, embarrassing for the campaign, since it and the UCC had been trapped by absurd rules that try to purify churches from all political activity (and are most often used against “conservative” denominations). But the best reaction to embarrassment is honesty, or at least silence, not Clintonian discourse.

The Audacity of Evasion

Glancing at the Internet during my lunch break, I see that Byron York is listening to an Obama campaign conference call, in which the Senator’s campaign manager first declares, regarding the now-famous Goolsbee-Rioux tête à tête, “This conversation has been discredited by the Canadian government, it has been discredited by our campaign, it is a conversation that simply did not happen.”

Then, perhaps realizing that the nonexistent conversation was memorialized contemporaneously by the Canadian participant, he explains what “not” means:

He concedes that Goolsbee did talk to someone in the Canadian government, but insists the two were “essentially having some casual conversation, and the reports of the conversation are simply not accurate.” Plouffe says Goolsbee was not speaking as a representative of the Obama campaign and that allegations that “somehow this was an official meeting” are not true.

“This is just a conversation that did not happen in terms of any suggestion of softening of [Sen. Obama’s] position,” Plouffe said. “This was not a formal conversation. It was not a request that came through the campaign…It was not a discussion with the Canadian government about Sen. Obama’s position on NAFTA.”

So it doesn’t matter whether Senator Obama’s top economic advisor thinks his candidate is disingenuous on trade issues? So long as that sentiment is not officially conveyed to the “president” of Canada, reports about it are “discredited”?

Professor Goolsbee, incidentally, has his own Clintonesque take (in the article linked above) on what he really told the Canadians. “He said he responded [when asked about protectionism] that Obama is not a protectionist, but that the Illinois senator tries to strike a balance between the economic struggles of working Americans and recognizing that free trade is good for the economy.” That is, of course, a standard bit of protectionist evasion. If Prof. Goolsbee had really uttered it, his interlocutor’s account would have sounded loud notes of alarm, not purred reassuringly “that this messaging should not be taken out of context and should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans”.

Further reading: Lee Cary, “Obama’s Language Games”

Also fascinating is this insight into what Mr. Obama said he believed before he became a Senator.