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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Bruce Thornton</title>
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		<title>Sloppy Thinking About &#8216;Torture&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/sloppy-thinking-about-torture/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=sloppy-thinking-about-torture</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Dec 2014 05:46:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247507</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Does the Senate report make America no longer the “city on the hill”?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/mccainfein.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247511" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/mccainfein-450x282.jpg" alt="John McCain, Dianne Feinstein" width="298" height="187" /></a>Torture is one of those topics that often overwhelm sober reason with lurid emotion. Even people who usually are clear-eyed and rational sink into sloppy thinking and incoherent argument when it comes to torture. Peggy Noonan’s recent <em>Wall Street Journal</em> column about the Senate report on the CIA’s interrogation techniques illustrates this phenomenon perfectly.</p>
<p>Noonan is usually an astute analyst, but her column on the report is riddled with received wisdom and unexamined assumptions. For Noonan, the “important lesson” of the report is <em>not</em> that progressives, as usual, are shameful hypocrites and partisan hacks who will damage their country’s interests for ideological or political advantage. It is not that when fighting a brutal enemy who obeys no laws of war, things are done we’d rather not do in order to save lives. No, her “lesson” is that the enhanced interrogation techniques, “torture” in her view, are “not like us” or “part of the American DNA,” and that, quoting John McCain, such techniques damage “our reputation as a force for good in the world.” These assertions, however, are based on simplistic psychology and flawed reasoning.</p>
<p>First, with very few isolated exceptions, none of the interrogation techniques meets the U.S. Code’s legal definition of torture, which requires the intent to cause severe suffering “other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions,” in the words of the statute. Noonan may think the EITs are “what I believe must honestly be called torture.” But what Noonan, or I, or anyone else “believes” does not trump what the law actually says, and it is the law (<a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18">Title 18</a>, <a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I">Part I</a>, <a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-113C">Chapter 113C</a>, § 2340) that our officials must follow, not subjective perception or even international laws that conflict with our own. As I said before, if people disagree with the law, then there is a political process for changing it.</p>
<p>The begged question that the EITs are torture undermines by itself the rest of Noonan’s argument. But it suffers from other problems as well. She also makes the fuzzy but simplistic statement that it “won’t help us fight it [war against jihadism] to become less like ourselves and more like those we oppose.” This is a version of the progressives’ mantra since 9/11 that the “terrorists win” if we do certain things that the critics believe are immoral or contrary to our “values”––as if our crisis of national identity is more important than destroying the enemy, the only way we “win.”</p>
<p>Noonan’s argument, however, falls to pieces on analysis. First, it ignores critical distinctions, such as intent: the reason why we do what we do, and the moral superiority of our reasons compared to those of the enemy. Again, with a few exceptions, the intent of the interrogators was not to inflict pain just to indulge their sadism, but to extract information to save American lives, which they did. Second, there are critical differences between the techniques used by the CIA––which were vetted by the Department of Justice, usually overseen by physicians, and subject to precise rules governing their application––and the horrific torture going on in countries like Iran. It is childish to fail to recognize that being slammed against a wall or deprived of sleep or confined in a coffin is nothing even close to the genuine torture going on all over the world. I haven’t heard any of the journalists who volunteered to be waterboarded asking to have their fingernails wrenched out with pliers, or electrodes attached to their genitals.</p>
<p>Third, ignoring the different purposes of what a country does in war leads to the facile moral equivalence of the naïve pacifist or the anti-American critic. During World War II the Allies’ strategic bombing campaigns destroyed almost all of Germany’s major cities and killed up to half a million people. Some historians today call the strategic bombing campaigns war crimes. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which probably saved a million American and Japanese lives that would have been lost with an invasion of Japan, remain popular bywords for American brutality.</p>
<p>But the noble purpose of all that destruction was to hasten the defeat of two of history’s most brutal regimes, whose triumph would have created a world deprived of freedom and human rights, a world of oppression and misery. Achieving that purpose required the “awful arithmetic,” as Lincoln called it, the tragic but necessary calculus that some must die now so that more don’t die later. Noonan needs to explain why incinerating and blowing up hundreds of thousands of people––including women, children, and the old––during the “good war” is “like ourselves,” while the CIA’s interrogation program––in which a grand total of two terrorists died––isn’t.</p>
<p>Finally, there is the obsession with our country’s “reputation,” and the implication that we should concern ourselves with “the world’s regard.” Just which country in the world has the moral authority and clean enough hands to sit in judgment on what our country does? Russia? Iran? China? The British, who in India strapped rebellious sepoys to cannon and blew them to pieces? The French, who killed a million and a half people during the Algerian War, and used torture to dismantle the National Liberation Front’s terrorist cells? And does Noonan really care what the thug regimes sitting on the U.N. Human Rights Council think? Or even our so-called allies in Europe, who carp and criticize our behavior even as they enjoy the free security ride we provide because we are willing to spend the money and do the dirty work they get to avoid?</p>
<p>As for the brutal men who run most of the world, our concern for their opinion is a sign not of strength, but of weakness. It is a marker of our cultural failure of nerve, and our doubt about the rightness of our motives and purposes, the reasons why we have to do what we’d rather not do. But the fact is, our rivals and enemies don’t hate us or oppose us because of what we do. That canard is psychologically reductive, as if other nations and peoples don’t have their own interests and beliefs and aims that they actively pursue, but just passively sit around until we provoke them to react to our bad behavior.</p>
<p>Of course, our enemies will use our actions as the camouflaging pretext for their own behavior, since they understand that too many Americans are predisposed to believe the worst of their own country and thus will counsel retreat and appeasement, or even damage their own country’s interests and security, as the release of the Senate report has done. Bin Laden was the master of such propaganda, employing a whole specious catalogue of American offenses against Islam as the pretext for terrorist attacks based on his religious beliefs about the divine right of Muslims to dominate the world. But in reality, as the world’s greatest military, economic, and cultural power, we will be envied, resented, and hated no matter what we do or how much we anxiously seek the rest of the world’s high “regard.” Rescuing millions of Muslims from violent oppression in Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan has not cut any ice with the scores of jihadist gangs actively trying to kill us.</p>
<p>Contrary to Noonan and McCain, and despite the dishonest rhetoric from our resentful allies, rivals, and enemies, the Senate report does not diminish America as a “force for good in the world,” a beacon of freedom, tolerance, and opportunity. That is why the U.S. is the emigrant’s favorite destination, why the U.S. is the go-to power for those countries in need when stricken by natural disasters or violent aggressors, and why the basic attitude of most of the world’s peoples is “Yankee go home, and take me with you.” The United States is in fact the “city on the hill,” the only world power in history that has used its power more for good than for ill. To think that reports of interrogation techniques used to save lives challenge the reality of American exceptionalism bespeaks a lack of confidence and faith not in our perfection, but in the fundamental goodness of America and its aims despite our occasional imperfections.</p>
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		<title>Back in Saigon: The Senate Intelligence Committee Report</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/back-in-saigon-the-senate-intelligence-committee-report-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=back-in-saigon-the-senate-intelligence-committee-report-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Dec 2014 05:40:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[CIA]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nixon]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247269</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Left revives an old tradition of besmirching the CIA in a time of crisis abroad. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/o-CIA-SYRIAN-REBELS-facebook.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247270" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/o-CIA-SYRIAN-REBELS-facebook-450x322.jpg" alt="A man crosses the Central Intelligence A" width="362" height="259" /></a>The Senate’s misleadingly dubbed “torture report,” an executive summary of which was released by the Senate Intelligence Committee, is a shameless and dangerous act of political grandstanding and moral preening. The investigative report of the CIA’s long-suspended interrogation program reflects nothing more than just how firmly the progressive mind is stuck in the old Vietnam War paradigm, their master narrative of American crime and left-wing righteousness. Once more, we see how reactionary is the ideology of the left, their minds unable to accommodate historical change, new ideas, or even coherent thinking.</p>
<p style="color: #313131;"><span style="color: #000000;">Jose Rodriguez, a 31-year veteran of the CIA who ran the interrogation program, has <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/todays-cia-critics-once-urged-the-agency-to-do-anything-to-fight-al-qaeda/2014/12/05/ac418da2-7bda-11e4-84d4-7c896b90abdc_story.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">detailed</span></a> the hypocrisy and untruths of the report. He reminds us that in the aftermath of 9/11, lawmakers demanded that the intelligence agencies do everything possible to stop another attack. Indeed, Feinstein in May 2002 told the <i>New York Times </i>that “</span><span style="color: #272727;">we have to do some things that historically we have not wanted to do to protect ourselves.” In her comments on the Report’s release, however, Feinstein referred to the Geneva Convention and said, </span>“No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, (including what I just read) whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” Twelve years later, the political advantages of moral preening have trumped the recognition that hard choices have to be made sometimes to fulfill the federal government’s highest duty, which is to keep the citizens safe.</p>
<p>Rodriguez also explodes the report’s canard that the enhanced interrogation techniques were not legally sanctioned. They were in fact reviewed in 2002 and 2005 by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and in 2009 were investigated by Eric Holder’s DOJ, which did not file charges. Rodriguez also debunks the claim that the CIA withheld information concerning their use from government officials. Rodriguez should know, since he was there when the CIA briefed Senator Feinstein and House Representative Nancy Pelosi on the techniques. And he exposes the lie that EITs did not yield vital information, an assessment also contradicted by ex-CIA chief Michael Hayden, who said of the charge that it “is so untrue” that it “actually defies human comprehension. We detained about 100 people, we had a Home Depot-like warehouse of information from those people.” Former CIA chiefs James Woolsey, Porter Goss, George Tenet, and, with shrewd equivocation, Leon Panetta, along with ex-Attorney General Mike Mukasey and current CIA chief John Brennan, have confirmed that EITs did provide valuable intelligence.</p>
<p>Yet the central fallacy of the report is that the EITs  “amount[ed] to torture,” as Feinstein announced on the report’s release. But government policy follows the law as written and established by Congress, not what “amounts” to the law in someone’s subjective estimation. Such sophistic language compromises the report’s description of EITs. The techniques cited––threats, sleep deprivation, “physical assault,” stripping detainees naked, putting them in “stress positions”––are all obviously frightening and painful. But they are not “torture” under U.S. law. Nor is waterboarding, Exhibit A in the left’s indictment of U.S. heinous behavior. That’s why Feinstein slyly says that EITs “amount” to torture rather than explicitly calling them torture, and why she cites international conventions on torture rather than the U.S. law.</p>
<p>Just consult the <a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/usc_sec_18_00002340----000-.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">statute</span></a> covering torture in the U.S. Code, which defines it as “an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control,” and further clarifies “severe mental pain or suffering” as “the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from . . . the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering.” The key words are “intended” and “severe.” As Marc Thiessen concluded in his <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Courting-Disaster-America-Barack-Inviting/dp/1596986034/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1418248906&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=marc+thiessen"><span style="color: #0433ff;">analysis</span></a> of the EITs and their legality, “The fact is, <i>none</i> of the techniques used by the CIA meet the standard of torture in U.S. law. This is for two reasons: because the CIA interrogators did not <i>specifically intend</i> to inflict severe pain and suffering; second, because they did not <i>in fact</i> inflict severe pain and suffering.” And in 2009 Attorney General Eric Holder agreed, when he testified before Congress that waterboarding U.S. military personnel as part of their training was not torture: “It’s not torture in the legal sense because you’re not doing it with the intention of harming these people physically or mentally.”</p>
<p>This simple legal reality is why Feinstein in her statement depends on imprecise adjectives like “visceral,” “ugly,” “brutal,” and “harsh”––to create a cloud of emotion that hides the fact that EITs were not illegal and were not torture. Furthermore, if Feinstein and other critics think this point is a sophistic evasion and that these techniques <i>are</i> torture, then they should call on Congress to change the law rather than rewriting history to suggest that the CIA did something illegal.</p>
<p style="color: #313131;"><span style="color: #000000;">But fact and reality are not as important as politics and the leftist melodrama of America’s historical crimes. Thus Feinstein said her report reveals behavior that is “</span>a stain on our values and on our history,” and Senator John McCain said they are violations of our “ideals.” So just how is attempting to keep America safe by interrogating terrorists according to the law, with doctors and psychologists present to monitor the terrorist’s well being, a “stain”? In the real world beyond our borders, genuine torture is used daily without the sort of legal limits or oversight imposed on our interrogators. And most of the time, the torture is not used to gain life-saving information, but to punish political enemies, terrorize political opponents, or just indulge sadistic cruelty. That is a real “stain.”</p>
<p style="color: #313131;">As for our “ideals,” such a low bar for indictment as waterboarding––which killed no one, and which several journalists volunteered to undergo––means, <span style="color: #000000;">as Max Boot has suggested, </span>that the Allied strategic bombing of Germany and Japan, which killed 650,000 to a million civilians with high explosives, nuclear bombs, and incendiaries, was an even grosser and more heinous “stain” on our “ideals” than sleep deprivation and scary threats. Where was the investigation of strategic bombing after World War II, or the pontifications on the Senate floor of how we Americans were “better” than such practices? Are we now just morally superior to those Americans who accepted the “awful arithmetic” and defeated 2 racist, brutal, totalitarian regimes? Or how about Obama’s droning to death over 3600 terrorists, including nearly 500 civilians, actions not subject to the legal review the EITs were? Dead terrorists are bad sources of intelligence of the sort gleaned by using EITs. Will we see a future investigation that condemns these drone executions as a “stain on our values and history” and “ideals”? It seems that “values” and “history” are defined by which party is in control of the government and stands to benefit politically by pointing out how they’ve been defiled.</p>
<p><span style="color: #313131;">But apart from politics, this report and its rollout </span>are just another act in the progressive melodrama of America’s sin and guilt for crimes committed when morally superior liberals aren’t running the show. And exhibit number 1 for progressives of a certain age is the Vietnam War. That’s why the conflict in Iraq was shoehorned into the Vietnam paradigm as soon as ambitious Democrats like Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and John Kerry, who had all voted for the war, began noticing the traction Howard Dean was gaining from opposing the war.</p>
<p>Thus the 1964 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_Resolution"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Gulf of Tonkin</span></a> resolution authorizing the escalation of the war in Vietnam found its parallel in Bush’s alleged “lies” and “false intelligence” about Hussein’s WMDs (“Bush lied, millions died!”). The charge that Vietnam was benefitting the “military-industrial complex” and its lust for profits and resources was duplicated in allegations that the Halliburton Corporation and Dick Cheney were really after Iraq’s oil (“No blood for oil!”). Anti-war critics like I.F. Stone and the Berrigan brothers were reincarnated as the buffoonish Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky. The anti-war movement of the Vietnam era reappeared as International ANSWER, Code Pink, and various other outfits protesting the war in Iraq. Clichés like “escalation” and “quagmire” resurfaced in media commentary, and atrocities like My Lai were searched for in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.</p>
<p>And don’t forget the investigative assault on the CIA by Senator Frank Church’s committee following the 1975 North Vietnamese victory in Vietnam, a report that weakened the CIA and compromised its effectiveness in ways that helped pave the way for the 9/11 attacks. Now it finds a new iteration in the Senate Intelligence Committee report and the dishonest media coverage besmirching the CIA. The immediate result has been to endanger our agents and intelligence assets abroad.  It still waits to be seen how much damage will ensue to the morale and future practice of the brave men and women who try to keep us safe.</p>
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		<title>Hillary’s Bad Politics and Worse Ideas</title>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Dec 2014 05:45:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Three key statements that should automatically disqualify Clinton from being president.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/141124111023-hillary-clinton-new-hampshire-story-top.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247039" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/141124111023-hillary-clinton-new-hampshire-story-top-450x344.jpg" alt="141124111023-hillary-clinton-new-hampshire-story-top" width="341" height="261" /></a>Once again Hillary Clinton has given the Republicans some suicidal soundbites they should stash away for 2016 in the likely event she is the Democratic candidate for president. A review of some of her recent statements reveals that Clinton is not just entitled, money-grubbing, unlikeable, unpleasant, and unaccomplished. Nor do they just show that she is a political dunce who has obviously learned nothing from her politically brilliant husband. More seriously, they expose her commitment to failed ideas and dangerous delusions.</p>
<p>First there was the “What difference at this point does it make!” she practically shrieked to Senator Ron Johnson during a January 2013 hearing on the Benghazi debacle that unfolded on September 11, 2012. Clinton had told the grieving parents of the victims during the transfer of remains ceremony at Andrews Air Force base that they died because of “an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.” Four Americans, including an ambassador, had been murdered on her watch, but she refused to explain to the Senate why she blamed the hapless maker of a YouTube video, who spent a year in jail.</p>
<p>This evasion is significant, for within hours of the attack it was clear that it had been a carefully coordinated, well-planned assault, not the spontaneous reaction to a video. Soon it also became known that ambassador Stevens had repeatedly requested increased security, but had been denied by officials in the State and Defense Departments. As Secretary of State, Clinton was ultimately responsible for those decisions made by State, as well as for the astonishing failure to notice the escalating violence in the months before the attacks, or the significance of the anniversary of 9/11, or the immediate evidence that the attack was not a spontaneous reaction to a video that had been on YouTube for weeks.</p>
<p>But in her response to all this evidence of negligence and post facto political spin, all she could do was indignantly declare that all these failures were irrelevant. In 2016, this footage of the arm-waving, shrill Clinton transparently trying to misdirect the Senators and the citizens from her patent incompetence should be played and replayed in political ads.</p>
<p style="color: #0b0b0b;"><span style="color: #000000;">Next came the more recent revelation of her embarrassing economic ignorance, shameless pandering to her left-wing base. At a campaign event in October, attended also by lefty heartthrob Elizabeth Warren, Clinton lectured, “</span>Don’t let anybody, don’t let anybody tell you that, ah, you know, it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs. You know that old theory, trickle-down economics. That has been tried, that has failed. It has failed rather spectacularly.”</p>
<p style="color: #0b0b0b;">Somehow Clinton missed the 1980s, when economic and tax policies that encouraged business investment led to spectacular growth. As the Laffer Center <a href="http://www.laffercenter.com/supply-side-economics/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">explains</span></a>,</p>
<p style="color: #383838;">“According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, 1982-1999 was one continuous mega-economic expansion.  In fact, as it stretched into 2007, this 25 Year Boom saw a tripling in the net wealth of U.S. households and businesses from $20 trillion in 1981 to $60 trillion by 2007.  When adjusted for inflation, more wealth was created in this 25-year boom than in the previous 200 years. This sustained economic growth is not only impressive on its own, but even more astonishing as it compares to the period immediately preceding it.  In the 10 years from 1972-1982, recessions were deep and recoveries were short.  In fact, throughout American history, the nation’s economy has been in recession or depression roughly one-third of the time.  But from 1981-2005, the annual growth rate of real gross domestic product (GDP) in the U.S. was 3.4 percent per year, and 3.8 percent per year during the 1983-1989 Reagan expansion alone.”</p>
<p style="color: #383838;">Compare that to the performance of Obama’s economic policies over the last 6 years, when intrusive regulatory regimes like Dodd-Frank and a runaway EPA, Obamacare’s highjacking of the health-care industry, the trillion-dollar stimulus squandered on crony socialist projects like “green energy,” and the anti-business rhetoric of Obama’s “you didn’t build that,” have all led to sluggish <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/08/11/the-obama-economic-record-the-worst-five-years-since-world-war-ii/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">economic growth</span></a>, metastasizing debt, declining income for the middle class, an explosion in entitlement spending, and nearly 20 million unemployed and under-employed.</p>
<p style="color: #383838;">Contrary to Clinton’s Keynesian superstitions and dirigiste magical thinking, what has “failed spectacularly” has been progressive economic policies that think parasitic politicians and unaccountable government bureaucrats can manage a complex, dynamic <a href="http://townhall.com/columnists/peterferrara/2012/11/16/its_economic_growth_not_redistribution_that_lifts_everyone_including_the_poor"><span style="color: #0433ff;">economic system</span></a> better than a free market that incentivizes people to actually build businesses that create jobs and increase wealth. And just as spectacularly incompetent is Hillary’s political tin ear that lets her make such a statement just to curry favor with a narrow base of anti-capitalist fundamentalists, when she surely must know that come the 2016 presidential election, those words will be pinned to the Obama albatross sure to be hanging around her neck.</p>
<p><span style="color: #383838;">Finally, there is the bizarre statement at Georgetown last week about improving our foreign policy with what she called “smart power”:  </span>“Using every possible tool and partner to advance peace and security. Leaving no one on the sidelines. Showing respect even for one’s enemies. Trying to understand, in so far as psychologically possible, empathize with their perspective and point of view. Helping to define the problems, determine the solutions.” She then added a banal cliché of modern feminism, suggesting that the lack of women negotiators and signatories was responsible for the failure of many peace treaties. After all, women are naturally more empathetic and sensitive to others’ “point of view,” one of those Victorian stereotypes that feminists used to tell us were sexist insults.</p>
<p>These comments embody everything that is wrong with a modern foreign policy based on Kantian delusions about a global “harmony of interests,” the notion that all peoples are just like us and want all the same goods such as peace, prosperity, political freedom, and respect for human rights. If they behave differently, it’s because they just don’t know these goods are in their best interests, or they have been traumatized by history, particularly the depredations of Western colonialism, imperialism, and capitalist exploitation, which are the causes of their violent aggression and brutality. Thus if we “understand” and “empathize” with the roots of our enemies’ behavior, they will see the light and abandon aggression and tyranny.</p>
<p>This is the same delusion that Obama based his foreign policy on, as evidenced by his infamous “apology tour,” on which he donned the hair shirt of Western sin and groveled before foreign audiences. It’s the application to foreign affairs of the two-bit psychologizing that dominates the public schools, where boosting self-esteem and “empathizing” with punks and bullies are the favored mechanisms for teaching and civilizing young people. It utterly lacks any understanding of the tragic constants of human nature and the wisdom accumulated by the human race since the ancient Greeks and Hebrews––that, as Machiavelli said, “all men are bad and that they will use their malignity of mind every time they have the opportunity.”</p>
<p>For all her alleged foreign policy toughness, Clinton’s philosophy embodies the bad utopian ideals that have enabled much of the disorder afflicting the world since their spectacular failure in preventing World War I. We hear the same delusions in the words of Neville Chamberlain after Hitler’s <i>Anschluss</i> of Austria in March 1938, when he told the House of Commons, “We should take any and every opportunity to try to remove any genuine and legitimate grievance that may exist,” and then imagined telling Hitler, “The best thing you can do is to tell us exactly what you want for your Sudeten Deutsch.” Such blind “empathy” and “understanding” and “respect” for Germany’s “grievances,” of course, in 6 months culminated in the debacle of Munich and the devastating sequel of World War II.</p>
<p>Contrary to Clinton and Obama, enemies like Vladimir Putin, ISIS, Bashar al Assad, Hamas, Hezbollah, Boko Haram, the Ayatollah Khamenei, and Xi Jinping are not the global village’s wayward teenagers “acting out” because they don’t know their own best interests and suffer from insufficient self-esteem and “respect.” They are hard, brutal men, vicious and ruthless, who know exactly what they want, and who possess beliefs alien to Western ideals like liberal democracy, human rights, tolerance, and a preference for diplomatic words and “mutual understanding and respect.” In their “perspective” and “point of view,” violence is a tool of international relations, and a legitimate instrument for achieving their aims and interests. And they have nothing but contempt for our schoolmarmish empathy and respect, which they correctly interpret as civilizational weakness and a failure of morale. All they respect is force. That’s the most important truth we need to “understand.”</p>
<p>These 3 statements reveal political beliefs and character flaws that should automatically disqualify Hillary Clinton from being president. And even if we attribute them to rank ambition and venal opportunism rather than sincere belief, their sheer political stupidity and lack of prudence bespeak a mind and character unfit for leading the most powerful country on the planet.</p>
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		<title>The End of Feminism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-end-of-feminism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-end-of-feminism</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Dec 2014 05:20:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Utopian criminalization of young adults’ sexual experiences has arrived.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #000000;"><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/tbtn.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246730" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/tbtn.jpg" alt="tbtn" width="327" height="258" /></a>Originally published by <a href="http://www.hoover.org/research/end-feminism">Defining Ideas</a>. </em></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">California recently passed a law requiring that sexual encounters between students in universities and colleges can proceed only on the basis of “affirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement.” Failure to resist or to ask the partner to stop the encounter can no longer be taken as consent. Institutions that wish to receive state funds or financial aid must adhere to this standard when investigating charges of “sexual assault,” a phrase redefined to include behaviors once considered boorish or insensitive, but not legally actionable. The California law follows on the 2011 Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights’s “dear colleague” <a style="color: #007c93;" href="http://www.ncherm.org/documents/ocrdearcolleagueletter4.4.11.pdf">letter</a> that instructed schools investigating sexual assault complaints to use the “more likely than not” or “preponderance of the evidence” standard of evidence rather than the “clear and convincing” one.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The dangers to individual privacy and accountability that follow such regulatory intrusions into sexual intimacy between legal adults have been well documented, not the least being the violation of the rights of the accused, who now enter a hearing with a presumption of guilt rather than of innocence. Also problematic is the double standard inherent in such rules, particularly when both accuser and accused are drunk or otherwise incapacitated.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">But the main problem with the California law is the corruption of feminism that it represents. When it comes to sex, the old feminist claim to equal treatment based on a woman’s equal capacity to control her sexual choices has been transformed into an old-fashioned Victorian notion of women as weak creatures who need to be protected from sexually feral males, and who lack agency and thus should not be held accountable for their choices.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The feminists’ championing of sexual autonomy for women reached a head in the 1960s. Before the modern age, sex was seen as a necessary but dangerous force that, if left uncontrolled, not just impaired the mind, but also destroyed whole civilizations. It was the illicit sexual passion of Paris and Helen that “burnt the topless towers” of Troy, as Christopher Marlow wrote. As such, sex had to be contained and channeled by social practices and cultural institutions. Virtues, taboos, and especially marriage all attempted to direct sexual energy to its most socially important goal, procreation and the family. Christianity inherited these assumptions and put them in the context of the theology of man’s fallen nature and the need for the soul to be redeemed from the passions of the transient body.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">By the late nineteenth century, many social and cultural developments had undermined this traditional sexual realism. Over the following decades, in the work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Sigmund Freud, Margaret Mead, Alfred Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, and numerous others, sex was removed from the context of religion, custom, and taboo, and made a natural phenomenon that science could understand and hence make more enjoyable and less damaging. The destructive effects of sex, in this view, were not inherent, but the consequence of repressive social institutions and religious superstition perpetuated by the ignorant and narrow-minded. In the sixties, Cultural Marxism interpreted traditional limits on sexual behavior as the instruments of oppression and conformity, reinforcing the “false consciousness” that perpetuated the ruling class and its power. Breaking sexual taboos and experiencing sexual pleasure thus became acts of liberation, leading to self-fulfillment and personal freedom.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Feminism embraced this notion of sexual liberation. The autonomy of women depended on their casting off the shackles of patriarchal misogyny most evident in male control of women’s sexuality––“our bodies, ourselves” became the battle cry. Women should have the equal power to choose sexual experiences and pleasure, and the unjust double standards that gave men but not women sexual autonomy should be discarded. The biological differences between men and women, especially nature’s subjection of women’s bodies to the relentless imperatives of procreation, were now discarded as arbitrary, unjust impediments to women’s freedom and autonomy. This process was moved along by the new technologies of reliable birth control and accessible and safe abortion.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">In the ensuing decades, however, the malign consequences of sexual liberation became increasingly manifest––the proliferation of sexually transmitted diseases, the wider access to demeaning pornography, and the explosion of out-of-wedlock childbirth and the attendant social dysfunctions that follow from children being raised without fathers. Even for more privileged women, there were psychological costs to be paid for contending with male sexual predators and absolving them of responsibility for their behavior, given that now men and women were equally in control of their sexual choices, and that the traditional mores once enshrining male responsibility, such as chivalry, had been dismissed as patronizing and sexist.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">But as the years passed, many women began to discover that there are indeed differences between men and women and their experiences of sex. Liberation did not lead to the sexual utopia of carefree and cost-free pleasure, but to the guilt, regret, and humiliation that follow being used as an object for somebody else’s transient enjoyment.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The response to these ill effects was to create rules and codes designed to eliminate the negative consequences of sexual freedom. But contrary to the assumptions of lawmakers who want to regulate sexual behavior, sex is not a game like tennis that can be pleasurable for the players provided the rules are followed. As Camille Paglia has pointed out, when it comes to sex, the more appropriate metaphor is to the old Roman arena, where there was no law. An act that is so physically and psychologically complicated, and that exposes our most intimate longings and hidden selves, cannot be rationalized and made cost-free, or its unpleasant effects neutralized, by reducing it to a “voluntary agreement” in which the terms and conditions are spelled out and followed as in a contract. Shakespeare’s Prospero is wiser: “The strongest oaths are but straw to the fire in the blood.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Faced with the costs of sexual liberation, contemporary feminism has betrayed its devotion to personal freedom and equality, choosing instead to demand that the state use its coercive power to protect women not just from insensitive men, but from the consequences of their own choices. Sexual harassment law is the most widespread expression of this impulse to use the tutelary state to defend women from a “hostile and intimidating” environment. The vulgar joke or boorish innuendo is now not just a violation of social decorum, but a crime subject to law and punishment.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">But nothing infantilizes women more than the sexual codes promulgated by numerous universities. Obviously, sexual assault properly defined is a crime that should be investigated and the guilty punished. But getting drunk and then sleeping with an equally intoxicated partner is not a crime. It’s a learning experience about taking responsibility for one’s actions, and practicing the virtues of prudence and self-control.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">By criminalizing young adults’ complicated sexual experiences, feminism is betraying its original call for sexual equality and autonomy by making women perpetual victims too weak to be held responsible for their choices, and too incapable of painfully learning from their mistakes and thus developing their characters. At the same time that feminists still call for unlimited sexual freedom, they treat women as Victorian maidens who lack agency and resources of character, and thus must be defended against sexual cads and bounders. As the Manhattan Institute’s Heather MacDonald puts it, this “new order is a bizarre hybrid of liberationist and traditionalist values. It carefully preserves the prerogative of no-strings-attached sex while cabining it with legalistic caveats that allow females to revert at will to a stance of offended virtue.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">This strange demand for absolute freedom without responsibility for one’s choices is not just a symptom of feminism. It reaches into our broader culture. It has become the enabler of the entitlement state, which justifies its growing size and regulatory power over people’s lives by promising to protect them not just from the vicissitudes of life, but from the consequences of their own choices, even as they enjoy more freedom to make even more choices. Thus the feminist demand for government-subsidized birth control and abortion is of a piece with government bailouts for homeowners who over-borrowed on the equity of their homes or lied on their mortgage applications.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The demand for personal freedom without accountability contradicts the foundational philosophy of our republic. The right to liberty is not the right be absolved from the consequences of one’s actions. Taking that responsibility is what makes one worthy of freedom and equal to others who likewise must be accountable for their actions.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Democratic freedom and equality are both compromised without responsibility and accountability. As Alexis de Tocqueville said about the necessity of self-reliance for democratic freedom, “It profits me but little, after all, that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquility of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life.” Many Americans, including the feminists, have accepted the loss of freedom as the trade-off for shedding the burden of responsibility for their own lives.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>America in Retreat</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/america-in-retreat/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=america-in-retreat</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Dec 2014 05:51:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[air force]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Bret Stephens]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246406</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Pulitzer-prize winning writer Bret Stephens unveils the new isolationism and the coming global disorder. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/jk.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-246407" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/jk-231x350.jpg" alt="jk" width="231" height="350" /></a>The 6 years of Barack Obama’s foreign policy have seen American influence and power decline across the globe. Traditional rivals like China and Russia are emboldened and on the march in the South China Sea and Ukraine. Iran, branded as the world’s deadliest state sponsor of terrorism, is arrogantly negotiating its way to a nuclear bomb. Bloody autocrats and jihadist gangs in the Middle East scorn our president’s threats and behead our citizens. Countries in which Americans have shed their blood in service to our interests and ideals are in the process of being abandoned to our enemies. And allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia are bullied or ignored. All over the world, a vacuum of power has been created by a foreign policy sacrificed to domestic partisan advantage, and characterized by criminal incompetence.</p>
<p>How we have arrived at this point, the dangers to our security and interests if we don’t change course, and what must be done to recover our international prestige and effectiveness are the themes of Bret Stephens’ <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/America-Retreat-Isolationism-Coming-Disorder/dp/1591846625">America in Retreat. The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder.</a></em> Stephens is the Pulitzer-prize winning foreign affairs columnist for the <em>Wall Street Journal</em>, and in his new book he analyzes our current retreat from global responsibility with the same stylistic clarity and analytic rigor that make his weekly columns indispensible reading.</p>
<p>A clear sign of American retreat is the precipitous decline in military spending. “In the name of budgetary savings,” Stephens writes, “the Army is returning to its June 1940 size,” and “the Navy put fewer ships at sea at any time since 1916.” The Air Force is scheduled to retire 25,000 airmen and mothball 550 planes. Our nuclear forces are being cut to meet the terms of the 2010 New Start Treaty with Russia, even as its nuclear arsenal has been increasing. Meanwhile Obama––whom Stephens likens to Canute, the Danish king who in legend attempts to stop the tide––issues empty threats, blustering diktats, and sheer lies that convince world leaders he is a “self-infatuated weakling.”</p>
<p>Unfortunately, 52% of the American people agree that the U.S. “should mind its own business internationally,” and 65% want to “reduce overseas military commitments,” including a majority of Republicans. This broad consensus that America should retreat from global affairs reflects our age’s bipartisan isolationism, the centerpiece of Stephens’ analysis. This national mood is not a sign of decline, according to Stephens, who documents the enormous advantages America still enjoys globally, from its superiority in research and entrepreneurial vigor, to its healthy demographics and spirit of innovation. But it does bespeak a dangerous withdrawal from the policies that created the postwar Pax Americana––even though this global order policed by the U.S. defeated the murderous, nuclear-armed ideology of Soviet communism, and made possible the astonishing economic expansion that has lifted millions from poverty all over the world.</p>
<p>Stephens first traces the history and causes of America’s distrust of military engagement abroad. The left, of course, committed to a universalist ideology challenged by national sovereignty and self-interest, promoted isolationism once the threat of Nazism had been destroyed. Henry Wallace, FDR’s third-term vice president who was “willfully blind to the reality of Stalinist Russia,” vigorously opposed the Truman Doctrine, which saved Greece from a communist takeover in 1947, as a “disaster” and “reckless adventure.” Like progressives today, Wallace believed that America was a global “sinner,” as Stephens puts it. As such, the U.S. should meet aggression with appeasement, and consider those who protect our security to be a greater danger than foreign aggressors.</p>
<p>On the other end of the political spectrum, isolationists like Republican Senator Robert Taft feared the “enemy within,” the “’infiltration of totalitarian ideas from the New Deal circle in Washington,’” more than foreign aggressors. He believed that American foreign policy should be limited strictly to fending off obvious threats to the security of and interests of the American people, which Taft narrowly defined as a military attack on our soil. America’s success in waging and winning the Cold War proved both critics wrong.</p>
<p>For Stephens, isolationism has not been the only danger to American foreign policy success. What he calls “the overdose of ideals,” specifically the “freedom agenda” of the sort George W. Bush tried in Iraq and Afghanistan, has misdirected our efforts and squandered our resources in the pursuit of impossible goals. The success of the Cold War and the subsequent spread of democracy and free-market economies suggested that the world could be not just protected from an evil ideology, but “redeemed” by actively fostering liberal democracy even in countries and regions lacking the necessary network of social mores and political virtues upon which genuine liberal democracy rests. But in attempting to redeem the world, Stephens notes, policy makers “neglected a more prosaic responsibility: to police it.”</p>
<p>The failures to create stability, let alone true democracy, in Iraq and Afghanistan have enabled what Stephens calls the “retreat doctrine,” one to be found in both political parties. Barack Obama is the master of this species of foreign policy, incoherently combining idealistic democracy-promoting rhetoric with actions that further withdraw the U.S. from its responsibility to ensure global order. Under the guise of “nation-building at home,” and in service to traditional leftist doubt about America’s goodness, Obama has retreated in the face of aggression, and encouraged cuts in military spending in order to fund an ever-expanding entitlement state. Meanwhile, “Republicans are busy writing their own retreat doctrine in the name of small government, civil liberties, fiscal restraint, ‘realism,’ a creeping sense of Obama-induced national decline, and a deep pessimism about America’s ability to make itself, much less the rest of the world, better.”</p>
<p>The “retreat doctrine” is dangerous because global disorder is a constant contingency. The remainder of Stephens’ book approaches this topic first from the perspective of theory and history, and then from today’s practice. History teaches us that all the substitutes for a liberal dominant global power have failed to prevent the descent into conflict and mass violence. The ideas of a balance of power, collective security, or the presumed peaceful dividend and “harmony of interests” created by global trade did not prevent World War I or its even more devastating sequel. Nor are they any more useful in our own times.</p>
<p>As for today, Stephens identifies several challenges to a global order fragilely held together by the commitment to liberal democracy, open economies, and the free circulation of ideas and trade. The “revisionists” attack this model from various perspectives. Iran sees it as a fomenter of godlessness and hedonism, Russia is moved to oppose it by “revanchism and resentment,” and China believes that it “is a recipe for bankruptcy and laziness,” lacking a “sense of purpose, organization, and direction.” All three see evidence for their various critiques in the failure of the U.S. to exercise its massive power in the face of challenges, and in the willingness of American elites to revel in guilt and self-doubt. These perceptions of national decline invite rivals and enemies to behave as if the U.S. is in fact declining.</p>
<p>The other international players that could worsen disorder are “freelancers” and “free radicals.” The former include those countries like Israel or Japan who, convinced that America will not act in its own or its allies’ interests, will understandably take action that necessarily entails unforeseen disastrous consequences. Much more dangerous are the “free radicals,” the jihadist gangs rampaging across 3 continents, and the nuclear proliferators like Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan, whose collaboration with each other and rogue regimes like Venezuela endangers the world through provoking even further proliferation on the part of rivals, or by handing off nuclear weapons to terrorist organizations. And then there are “free radicals” like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, who have undermined global order by publicizing the necessarily covert tools, practices, and institutions that undergird and protect it.</p>
<p>Finally, there are the structural weaknesses of the globalized economy and its continuing decline in growth, which may create “breaks” in national economic systems that “will be profoundly disruptive, potentially violent, and inherently unpredictable.” Add America’s retreat from world affairs and reductions in military spending, and in the “nearer term,” Stephens warns, “terrorists, insurgents, pirates, hackers, ‘whistleblowers,’ arms smugglers, and second-rate powers armed with weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles will be able to hold the United States inexpensively at risk,” provoking further American retreat from world affairs and the inevitable increased aggression by our enemies and rivals.</p>
<p>Stephens ends with an imagined “scenario” of how a serious global disruption could occur, one grounded in current trends and thus frighteningly believable. So what can be done? In his conclusion Stephens applies to foreign affairs the “broken windows” tactics of urban policing that caused rates of violent crimes to plummet over the last few decades. Thus “the immediate goal of U.S. foreign policy should be to arrest the continued slide into a broken-windows world of international disorder.”</p>
<p>This foreign policy would require increasing U.S. military spending to 5% of GDP, with a focus on increasing numbers of troops, planes, and ships rather than on overly sophisticated and expensive new weapons. It would mean stationing U.S. forces near global hotspots to serve as a deterrent and rapid-reaction force to snuff out incipient crises. It would require reciprocity from allies in military spending, who for too long have taken for granted the American defense umbrella. It would focus attention on regions and threats that really matter, particularly the borderlands of free states, in order to protect global good citizens from predators. It means acting quickly and decisively when conflict does arise, rather than wasting time in useless debates and diplomatic gabfests. Finally, it would require that Americans accept that their unprecedented global economic, cultural, and military power confers on us both vulnerability to those who envy and hate us, and responsibility for the global order on which our own security and interests depend.</p>
<p><em>America in Retreat</em> is a must-read for any citizen and politician worried by our current foreign policy failures and what they portend for our security and interests. No matter how understandable our traditional aversion to military and political entanglements abroad, history has made us the global policeman, one committed to human rights, accountability, and political freedom. If we abdicate that position, there is no country powerful, or worthy enough, to take our place.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Obama the Tyrant</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/obama-the-tyrant/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-the-tyrant</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 24 Nov 2014 05:46:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[executive order]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[A presidential overreach that undermines the most important foundation of the Western political tradition. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/sa.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245837" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/sa-450x281.jpg" alt="sa" width="317" height="198" /></a>Obama’s executive order granting amnesty to 4 million illegal aliens exposes yet again the hypocrisy and cynicism of the most partisan administration in recent history. Typical of a president who seemingly can’t remember or doesn’t care what he has publicly told the people, Obama went ahead and took action that more than 20 times he had publicly said he couldn’t legally take­­. And he did so not because of some pressing “crisis” of illegals living “in the shadows,” a rationale that ignores the <em>real</em> crisis–– illegal deadbeats and thugs serially passing though a porous border in order to create mayhem and disorder in our communities. Rather, this action was a rank partisan gift to vocal activists and clients of the Democratic Party.</p>
<p>More important, however, this latest instance of presidential overreach undermines the most important foundation of the Western political tradition going back to the ancient Greeks––the suspicion of any necessarily flawed man’s excessive power that inevitably flouts the limits imposed by the supreme law of the land.</p>
<p>In ancient Athens, for example, the <em>turannos</em> or “tyrant” was the exemplar of the dangers that flow from excessive power vested in one person. It wasn’t that the tyrant was completely evil and oppressive. Many Greek tyrants, like the Athenian Peisistratus, benefitted their communities. Yet given human nature, even a well-meaning leader given excessive power often will abuse it to gratify his own selfish desires, ambitions, and interests at the expense of the law and the freedom of his fellow citizens. In ancient Greek political thought, the tyrant became the monitory example of power’s ability to corrupt, and thus often was depicted as violent, paranoid, and excessive in his actions.</p>
<p>The American founders were intimately familiar with this tradition. For them a generalissimo like Julius Caesar, who violated the Roman Republican constitution and ruled as an autocrat until his assassination, was the warning against creating a too powerful executive. One of the most popular Romans of the pre-Revolutionary period was Cato the Younger, who committed suicide rather than submit to Caesar. Joseph Addison’s play <em>Cato</em> was the most popular theatrical production of this period. George Washington had it produced for his troops during the grim winter at Valley Forge, and Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty, or give me death” was a paraphrase of a line from the play.</p>
<p>Thus when the Declaration of Independence says of George III, “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States,” the word “Tyranny” is not used lightly or metaphorically. George III is being placed into the long tradition of the tyrant whose oppressive rule, as Aristotle wrote, is “arbitrary power . . . which is responsible to no one, and governs all alike, whether equals or betters, with a view to its own advantage, not to that of its subjects, and therefore against their will. No freeman willingly endures such a government.” That’s why our political ancestors fought the Revolution, and then wrote the Constitution as a safeguard against a future tyrant.</p>
<p>Indeed, in the debates of the delegates to the Constitutional convention, the fear that “power is of an encroaching nature,” as George Washington and others said, guided their crafting of the office of chief executive. In the debate over whether the President should be compensated for his service, Benjamin Franklin feared adding money to the attractions of power the chief executive would possess, “for the love of power and the love of money” when united in one office have “the most violent effects.” Presidential power will attract “the bold and the violent, the men of strong passions and indefatigable activity in their selfish pursuits.” Hence the Constitutional order checks the power of the executive by the legislature and the judiciary, with Congress given the power to make laws and impeach the executive, and the most democratic assembly, the House of Representatives, given the power of the purse in order to deny an overweening president the funds necessary to advance his ambitions. Finally, the states choose the presidential electors who elect the president, giving the states yet another check on presidential power through term limits and the ballot.</p>
<p>The 22<sup>nd</sup> amendment limiting the president to 2 terms is testimony to this traditional distrust of power, particularly because it was passed by Congress in 1947, a few years after the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, who was a popular president elected 4 times. As Thomas Jefferson said in 1807, when the 2-term limit was a custom initiated by George Washington rather than established by law, “if some termination to the services of the chief Magistrate be not fixed by the Constitution, or supplied by practice, his office, nominally four years, will in fact become for life.” This healthy fear of power continuing in one man’s hands for too long reflected the long tradition of the distrust of power based in turn on a tragic view of a flawed human nature. It explains the great care Alexander Hamilton takes in <em>Federalist</em> 69 to set out the differences between the president and a king, mainly because the former is subjected to numerous limitations on his power, making “difficult to determine whether that magistrate would, in the aggregate, possess more or less power than the Governor of New York.” Most important, this fear of power is the central assumption behind the mixed government and balance of governmental powers characterizing our Constitution.</p>
<p>Obama, of course, has rejected this venerable tradition and embraced that of the Progressive movement. Social and technological change, the Progressives argued, have rendered the Constitutional order an anachronism, making necessary a more powerful executive and federal government. Woodrow Wilson’s 1908 <em>Constitutional Government in the United States</em> set out the arguments for this idea. He complained that the chief executive was “only the legal executive, the presiding and guiding authority in the application of law and the execution of policy . . . He was empowered [by the veto] to prevent laws, but he was not to be given an opportunity to make good ones.” That complaint leads directly to Obama’s eagerness to make “good laws” as defined not by the people through their representatives, but by himself and his political faction.</p>
<p>And just as Obama, by legislating via executive order fiat, has proven he is impatient with the mixed government that puts limits on his policy ambitions, Wilson rejected the balancing of power and conflicting factions codified in the Constitution. Government, Wilson wrote, “is a living, organic thing, and must like every other government, work out the close synthesis of active parts, which exist only when leadership is lodged in some one man or group of men.” Here we see the imperial president’s preference for unaccountable technocrats and “experts” like the mendacious Jonathan Gruber, instead of working with the legislators elected by the people and subject to electoral accountability.</p>
<p>Finally, Obama has governed based on the Wilsonian preference for concentrating executive power rather than submitting it to Constitutional checks and balances. “You cannot compound a successful government out of antagonisms,” Wilson wrote. Of course, in Wilson’s view “successful” is defined as solving technical problems or achieving an ideologically biased “social justice,” unlike the Founders, who thought a successful federal government is the one that keeps separate the executive, legislative, and judicial powers and thus protects the freedom of the citizens. And instead of the Constitution’s realist acknowledgement that a vast country of various interests cannot be unified in one leader without risking the people’s freedom, Wilson wrote that we must “look to the President as the unifying force in our complex system, the leader both of his party and of the nation.” The question begged, of course, is unified around what? Which interests or ideals? In reality, they will be reduced to those of one faction that will come to dominate the others, backed by the coercive power of the federal government and its cadres of unelected administrators and bureaucrats.</p>
<p>Obama has governed explicitly as such a “leader.” On every issue from the environment and health care to immigration––87 pages worth of executive diktats–– he has reduced the various and conflicting interests and ideals of the citizens and states to those of his own party and its progressive ideology. But this usurpation of power has come at the expense of state and individual political rights and freedom, not to mention the undermining of the Constitutional order designed explicitly to protect those rights and freedoms.</p>
<p>Obama has set a precedent that, if left unchecked, will be tempting for other presidents to follow, taking us even further down the road of tyranny. From ancient Athens to the Founders to those traditionalists today who understand the primacy of freedom in the architecture of our political order, such a leader has been characterized by one word––tyrant.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Obamacare Architect Exposes Progressive Totalitarianism</title>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 13 Nov 2014 05:55:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Jonathan Gruber]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[A glimpse into the true heart of the Left.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Jonathan-Gruber-MSNBC-interview.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245193" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Jonathan-Gruber-MSNBC-interview.jpg" alt="Jonathan-Gruber-MSNBC-interview" width="329" height="269" /></a>Professor Jonathan Gruber of MIT, who designed the Affordable Care Act, used to be the symbol of the Democrats’ technocratic bona fides, and an example of how big government with its “scientific” experts can solve social and economic problems from health care to a warming planet. Yet a recently publicized video of remarks he made at a panel in 2013, along with 2 other videos in the same vein, has now made him the poster child of the elitist progressives’ contempt for the American people, and their sacrifice of prudence and reason to raw political power.</p>
<p>In the video Gruber explains the spin and lies the Dems used to give cover to their Congressmen so they could vote for Obamacare. Especially important was avoiding the “t-word.” So, Gruber crows on the video, “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure [the Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.” He also explained how the bills’ writers covered up the obvious redistributionist core of the legislation, which to work has to take money from the healthy young to pay for health care for the sick and old. “If you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in — you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed.”</p>
<p style="color: #272727;"><span style="color: #000000;">Then this handsomely paid consultant to the “most transparent administration in history” revealed the foundational contempt progressives have for the “people” whose champions they claim to be: </span>“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.” As David Horowitz tweeted, “<span style="color: #202327;">Progressive totalitarianism: We know what&#8217;s good for you and will lie, cheat and then compel you to agree with us.”</span></p>
<p style="color: #202327;">This modern version of the Platonic “guardians,” who possess superior knowledge but who must camouflage their tyrannical rule with lies, is now over 100 years old, and has become deeply embedded in our politics. It was the fundamental assumption of American Progressivism, which argued that modern technology and social change had rendered the old constitutional order a dangerous relic. The native common sense and wisdom of ordinary people to know their own interests and pursue them primarily at the local and state levels were now replaced by the allegedly scientific knowledge of “experts,” who alone could solve the problems created by the modern world. As Progressive Theodore Roosevelt said in 1901, the “very serious social problems” confronting the nation could no longer be solved by “the old laws, and the old customs,” especially the power given to state governments and laws, which “are no longer sufficient.” Woodrow Wilson agreed, complaining in 1913 that “the laws of this country have not kept up with the change” of economic and political circumstances. To achieve “social justice” and eliminate income inequality, the “laws,” particularly the Constitution, had to change.</p>
<p style="color: #202327;">But to effect such change, the old order of conflicting and balancing “passions and interests,” as James Madison described the political order, had to be transformed in order to create a more collectivist people united in their “collective purpose” to achieve a “vigorous social program,” particularly the redistribution of property. As Progressive Frank Johnson Goodnow wrote ominously in 1916, “Changed conditions . . . must bring in their train different conceptions of private rights if society is to be advantageously carried on.” Individual rights, especially property rights, “may become a menace when social rather than individual efficiency is the necessary prerequisite of progress. For social efficiency probably owes more to the common realization of social duties than to the general insistence on privileges based on individual private rights.”</p>
<p>In practical terms, these goals of “social efficiency” and “social duties” required more power centralized in the federal government and executive at the expense of the states and the people. The most important Progressive theorist, Herbert Croly, wrote in 1909, “Under existing conditions and simply as a matter of expediency, the national advance of the American democracy does demand an increasing amount of centralized action and responsibility.” Woodrow Wilson agreed, and envisioned a cadre of elites to address the national “cares and responsibilities which will require not a little wisdom, knowledge, and experience,” as he wrote in his 1887 essay “The Study of Administration.” As such, administrative power lies beyond politics, and should be insulated from the machinery of participatory government. And much like today’s progressives, Wilson’s ideas were based on contempt for the people who lack this specialized knowledge and so cannot be trusted with the power to run their own lives. Thus Wilson envisioned federal administrative bureaucracies “of skilled, economical administration” comprising the “hundred who are wise” empowered to guide the thousands who are “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish.”</p>
<p style="color: #202327;">Sound familiar? From these early Progressive theorists to MIT Professor Gruber and the Democrats the line is direct, based on the same flawed and illiberal assumptions. The masses cannot be allowed, as envisioned by the Constitution, the autonomy to pursue their interests through local and state governments closest to them, their conflicts regulated by the balance of power, mixed government, and federalism, which prevent any one faction from amassing enough power to tyrannize the rest. Rather, administrative elites must be empowered to override those many interests in order to “solve problems” and achieve “social justice.” This in turn means growing the size and scope of the federal government into the bloated Leviathan it is today.</p>
<p style="color: #202327;">But as Wilson complained, <span style="color: #272727;">“The bulk of mankind is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes.”</span>  Since the citizens still have the vote and can exercise it every 2 years, they must be tricked into doing the “right thing,” as defined by the technocratic elite. One of the most chilling statements by an American president was made by Woodrow Wilson in his essay on administration: “Whoever would effect a change in modern constitutional government must first educate his fellow-citizens to <i>want</i> some change. That done, he must persuade them to want the particular change he wants. He must first make public opinion willing to listen and then see to it that it listen to the right things. He must stir it up to search for an opinion, and then manage to put the right opinion in its way.” What else has “income inequality,” “war on women,” “you didn’t build that,” and all the other slogans of this administration been other than the attempt to get the voters to “listen to the right things” and form a “right opinion”? Listen again to Wilson, from his essay “Leaders of Men”: “<span style="color: #040404;">Only a very gross substance of concrete conception can make any impression on the minds of the masses; they must get their ideas very absolutely put, and are much readier to receive a half-truth which they can promptly understand than a whole truth which has too many sides to be seen all at once.” Is this not the spirit of Professor Gruber’s remarks </span><span style="color: #000000;">on his “very clever basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter” in designing the Obamacare legislation?</span></p>
<p style="color: #202327;">The politics of today’s progressives all have their roots in the old Progressive assumptions––that enlightened elites know better than the people what is good for them, and that the people, being such unenlightened clods, need to be manipulated and lied to for their own good. Most important, the freedom and autonomy of the people must be limited by intrusive federal agencies and regulations in order for these utopian goals to be achieved.</p>
<p style="color: #202327;">Or to put it in other terms, this set of progressive beliefs––which we have seen acted on for the last six years by the president and practically every government agency––is totalitarian at its core. Not the brutal despotism of Italian fascism or Soviet communism or German Nazism, but Tocqueville’s “soft despotism,” the kinder, gentler Leviathan which undermines self-reliance and self-government by taking responsibility for the people’s comfort and happiness, and financing its largess by the redistribution of property. But no matter how comfortable in the short-term, such a condition is nothing other than servitude. And as Tocqueville warns, “No one will ever believe that a liberal, wise, and energetic government can spring from the suffrages of a subservient people.”</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Obama Midwifes a Nuclear Iran</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Nov 2014 05:45:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The president's Munich moment draws near. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/obama.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244883" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/obama-419x350.png" alt="obama" width="340" height="284" /></a>The news that President Obama has sent a secret letter to Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei––apparently promising concessions on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for help in defeating ISIS–– is a depressing reminder of how after nearly 40 years our leaders have not understood the Iranian Revolution. During the hostage crisis of 1979, Jimmy Carter sent left-wing former Attorney General Ramsay Clark to Tehran with a letter anxiously assuring the Ayatollah Khomeini that America desired good relations “based upon equality, mutual respect and friendship.” Khomeini refused even to meet with the envoys.</p>
<p>Such obvious contempt for our “outreach” should have been illuminating, but the same mistakes have recurred over the past 4 decades. But Obama has been the most energetic suitor of the mullahs, sending 4 letters to Khamenei, none directly answered. In May of 2009 he sent a personal letter to Khamenei calling for “cooperation in regional and bilateral relations.” Khamenei’s answer in June was to initiate a brutal crackdown on Iranians protesting the rigged presidential election. Obama’s response was to remain silent about this oppression lest he irritate the thuggish mullahs, who blamed the protests on American “agents” anyway. Even Carter’s phrase “mutual respect” has been chanted like some diplomatic spell that will transform religious fanatics into good global citizens. In his notorious June 2009 Cairo “apology” speech, Obama assured Iran, “We are willing to move forward without preconditions on the basis of mutual respect.” This latest letter repeats the same empty phrase.</p>
<p>But our president is nothing if not persistent. In October of 2009, it was revealed that Iran had failed to disclose a uranium enrichment facility in Qom. Obama commented on this obvious proof of Iran’s true intentions, “We remain committed to serious, meaningful engagement with Iran,” and promised that the “offer stands” of “greater international integration if [Iran] lives up to its obligations.” Iran answered by increasing the pace of enrichment, helping the insurgents in Iraq kill our troops, and facilitating the movement and communications of al Qaeda with other jihadists.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;"><span style="color: #000000;">Indeed, every concession and failure to respond forcefully to Iranian intransigence and aggression confirm its belief that Iran is strong and America weak. As Khamenei has said, </span>“The reason why we are stronger is that [America] retreats step by step in all the arenas [in] which we and the Americans have confronted each other. But we do not retreat. Rather, we move forward. This is a sign of our superiority over the Americans.”</p>
<p>Given this long sorry history, how long will it take for our foreign policy geniuses to figure out that Iran’s theocrats don’t want better relations, or “mutual respect,” or “international integration,” or anything else from the infidel Great Satan and its Western minions, other than capitulation? The mullahs and their Republican Guard henchmen may lust for wealth and power as much as anyone, but the foundation of their behavior is a religious faith that promises Muslims power and dominance over those who refuse the call to convert to Islam and thus by definition are enemies of the faithful to be resisted and destroyed.</p>
<p>Given these spiritual imperatives, the material punishment of the regime through economic sanctions, particularly limited ones, is unlikely to have much effect. During the hostage crisis, mild sanctions and the threats of more serious ones were brushed away by Khomeini. The <i>Economist</i> at the time pointed out the obvious reason why: “The denial of material things is unlikely to have much effect on minds suffused with immaterial things.” Khomeini made this same point after the humiliating disaster of Carter’s half-hearted attempt to rescue the hostages in April 1980, when mullahs were televised worldwide poking their canes in the charred remains of 8 dead Americans. Speaking of the sandstorm that compromised the mission, Khomeini preached, “Those sand particles were divinely commissioned . . . Carter still has not comprehended what kind of people he is facing and what school of thought he is playing with. Our people is the people of blood and our school is the school of Jihad.”</p>
<p>With their eyes on Allah’s intentions for the faithful, the leaders of Iran see the acquisition of nuclear weapons as the most important means of achieving the global power and dominance their faith tells them they deserve as “the best of nations produced for mankind,” as the Koran says. Thus duplicitous diplomatic engagement and negotiation are tactics for buying time until the mullahs reach “nuclear latency,” the ability quickly to build a bomb. Every concession or offer of bribes from the West are seen not as an inducement to reciprocate in order to meet a mutually beneficial arrangement, but rather as signs of weakness and failure of nerve, evidence that the mullahs can win despite the power and wealth of the West. That’s because the Iranian leadership views international relations as resting not on cooperation or negotiation, but on raw power. As Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institute <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/iran-at-saban/posts/2014/11/06-letter-khamenei-ayatollah-iran-obama-nuclear-isis"><span style="color: #0433ff;">quotes</span></a> from a hardline Iranian newspaper, “Our world is not a fair one and everyone gets as much power as he can, not for his power of reason or the adaptation of his request to the international laws, but by his bullying.” And the Iranians believe that their power politics serves the will of Allah.</p>
<p>Obama is not the first president who has completely failed to understand the true nature and motives of his adversary. FDR misunderstood “Uncle Joe” Stalin, and George Bush misread the eyes of Vladimir Putin. This mistake of diplomacy reflects the peculiar Western arrogant belief that the whole world is just like us and wants the same things we want––political freedom, leisure, material affluence, and peaceful relations with neighbors. Some Iranians may want those things too, but a critical mass wants obedience to Allah and his commands more. Obama’s endemic narcissism has made this flaw worse in his relations with the rest of the world, for he can’t believe that the leaders of other nations, many of them brutal realists indifferent to the opinions of the “international community,” aren’t as impressed as he is with his alleged brilliance and persuasive eloquence.</p>
<p>As a result we are on the brink of a dangerous realignment of the balance of power in the Middle East. Despite Iran’s continuing defiance of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, and its long record of lies and evasion, Obama allegedly has offered to raise the number of centrifuges enriching uranium from 4000 to 6000, bringing the mullahs closer to “nuclear latency”––in a regime that has officially been designated the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism; that has threatened genocide against Israel, our most important strategic asset in the region; and that for the last 40 years has stained its hands with American blood.</p>
<p>Rather than the ornament of his foreign policy legacy, as Obama hopes, his pursuit of a deal that will make Iran a nuclear power will be remembered as his Munich.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Republican Senate and the Temptation of Immigration Reform</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-republican-senate-and-the-temptation-of-immigration-reform/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-republican-senate-and-the-temptation-of-immigration-reform</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 07 Nov 2014 05:51:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244760</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The mistake victorious Republicans must not repeat.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/ll.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-244765" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/ll.jpg" alt="ll" width="251" height="201" /></a>Anyone who believes in the Constitution and the primacy of individual rights and freedom should be relieved after the electoral beat-down administered to Harry Reid’s do-nothing Senate. Over the last 6 years the federal Leviathan has grown fatter and fatter, every pound coming at the cost of our freedom and autonomy, not to mention the trillions of borrowed dollars burned in various Keynesian stimulus fires. At the same time, the imperial presidency of Obama, abetted by his courtiers in the Senate, has trampled the Constitution’s limits on government power, and extended intrusive, inefficient, wasteful federal bureaucracies into the business of the states and the rights of the people.</p>
<p>Anything that slows down or challenges this expansion in the next two years will be welcome. The President should be made either to sign or to veto legislation on reforming taxes, securing the border, and correcting the flaws of Obamacare, to name a few issues voters are concerned about. And every piece of legislation should make clear that its ultimate goal is to restore to our politics the ideals of freedom, and the virtues of self-reliance, self-responsibility, and prudence.</p>
<p>Yet there is a danger that many Republicans in the Senate will heed the siren song of “getting things done” and “bi-partisan cooperation” already being sung by the usual progressive mouthpieces. Here’s Tom Brokaw, mouthpiece emeritus of NBC news, on the implications of the Republican victory:</p>
<blockquote><p>“They [the voters] are thinking that they would like to have Washington get something done. And the question is not just which party can get it done, but how can they change the tone in Washington so they can work together . . . The question then is what are they [Republicans] prepared to give to the Democrats to meet them at middle ground? What they are going to do about immigration? What are they are going to do about the minimum wage?”</p></blockquote>
<p>Brokaw’s examples of immigration and the minimum wage tip his hand. The subtext is that “cooperation” and “working together” on these issues really mean that Republicans give ground to pass legislation the other side wants for ideological and political advantage. No matter how much evidence piles up, for example, that raising the minimum wage does little to help those who need it most, like working families––half of minimum-wage earners are 16-24 years old, and a quarter are teenagers–– the progressive mantra of “income inequality” continually exploits this issue for political gain. In Brokaw’s view, then, if Republicans ignore the fact that raising the minimum wage could cost half a million jobs, according to the CBO, and they go ahead and “compromise” with the Democrats and vote to raise it, then they will be doing the right thing. As usual, progressive harping on “gridlock” and “obstructionism” is usually code for the other side’s sticking to its principles.</p>
<p>Yet “immigration reform” is a greater danger, for several Republican Senators last year joined with Democrats in writing the “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” bill, an overstuffed farrago of changes to immigration law, the most dangerous of which is a virtual amnesty for illegal aliens. Of course, improved “border enforcement” is part of the bill, but we’ve been down that road before. In 1986 Ronald Reagan signed the bi-partisan Immigration Reform and Control Act, which granted amnesty to nearly 3 million illegal aliens, along with stricter rules against hiring illegal aliens, a presumably thorough vetting process for those getting citizenship, and informal pledges that there would be stricter enforcement of the border. We all know how that worked out: the border remained porous, the employment sanctions were ineffective, and now we have nearly 12 million illegal aliens living and working in this country.</p>
<p>There are two reasons why some Republicans are willing to repeat this mistake. First, certain industries obviously depend on cheap labor to do work Americans don’t want to do. They have a point, since there is a lot of hard, dirty, physically taxing work American citizens are unlikely to do without labor costs pricing products or services out of the market. And many don’t have to take those jobs, since food stamps, Social Security Disability, extended unemployment payments, and other social-welfare transfers make it easier not to work. There is a fierce theoretical debate about whether these unemployed Americans would work if wages were increased enough, and the supply of cheap labor reduced. But as long as welfare for those who don’t work and cheap labor for employers remain available, we’ll never know the answer to that question.</p>
<p>The more delusional argument is that growing numbers of Latino Democratic voters will eventually swamp the Republican Party if it does not reach out to this demographic and do something to show that Republicans aren’t the xenophobic, nativist, or racist troglodytes of mainstream media caricatures. Usually accompanying this argument are encomia to those 12 million God-fearing, hardworking, family-values illegal aliens whose natural political homes would be the Republican Party if not for the extremist nativists on the fringe who keep blocking immigration reform. Little evidence, however, suggests that caving in on illegal aliens will win over millions of Latino voters, 75% percent of whom favor a “bigger government providing more services,” according to a <a href="http://www.pewhispanic.org/2012/04/04/v-politics-values-and-religion/">Pew</a> poll, a view consistent with the policies of the Democratic Party. It’s patronizing and reductive to think that Latino voters––a complex demographic with multiple, often-conflicting interests–– determine their vote simply on the issue of illegal aliens at the expense of all those other interests or concerns.</p>
<p>More important, the pro-amnesty Republicans have done little to convince us skeptics that they have a reliable and effective means of sorting out those illegal aliens who possess all those laudable qualities and values and so deserve to become citizens. The 1986 bill had a lot of tough talk that in the event was ineffective in separating the good from the bad. Over the past year talk has circulated that in any eventual reform even a few DUIs or convictions for welfare fraud won’t prevent an illegal alien from getting citizenship. But right now we can’t even track and keep out of the country thousands of illegal alien felons. The illegal alien who recently murdered 2 sheriff deputies in Sacramento had racked up 10 misdemeanor violations and been deported twice. Indeed, in 2013, 60% of deportations were of foreigners who had already been deported. What makes us think that the CRI will put in place reliable mechanisms to improve on this sorry record and keep thugs and felons from becoming citizens or continually crossing our semi-open border?</p>
<p>Of course, something must be done about the problem of 12 million illegal aliens residing in our country. The costs of the criminal activities of a substantial portion of this group, as well as of social services, are high both in dollars and in social disorder. As for the former, according to the <a href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/05/the-fiscal-cost-of-unlawful-immigrants-and-amnesty-to-the-us-taxpayer">Heritage Foundation</a>, the difference between taxes paid and “direct and means-tested benefits, education, and population-based services” received by illegal aliens is $54.5 billion a year. Grant them amnesty and make them eligible for other benefits reserved for citizens, and the tab will increase to $106 billion. These figures don’t include the ancillary costs of crime and disorder of which legal citizens, unlike the affluent Senators and pro-amnesty plutocrats, must bear the brunt.</p>
<p>So far the victorious Republicans are studiously ignoring immigration reform. House Speaker John Boehner and soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell didn’t mention it at all in their <em>Wall Street Journal</em> <a href="#http://online.wsj.com/articles/john-boehner-and-mitch-mcconnell-now-we-can-get-congress-going-1415232759">op-ed</a> outlining the Republican Congress’s “priorities” for next year. But Obama’s recent threat to use Executive Orders to do something about immigration if the Republicans don’t act might tempt some Republicans to resurrect the CIR bill in order to head off the president. Mitt Romney has predicted action on immigration in a Republican-controlled Senate, and Ari Fleischer wrote last week, “It is high time for the GOP to move forward on immigration reform.” With the 2016 presidential election in mind, such Republicans, hoping to peel off Hispanic voters, may want to prove that the party isn’t filled with xenophobes and racists. And others may want to demonstrate they can “govern” and “solve problems” through “bipartisan consensus,” and so avoid the usual mainstream media charges of “obstructionism” and “gridlock” that they believe turn voters against them.</p>
<p>They should resist this temptation and pass only immigration legislation that strengthens border security by whatever means necessary. And they should remember that what many decry as “gridlock” is in fact James Madison’s “balance of power,” the protection of individual freedom from concentrations of federal power.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Election Day: What&#8217;s at Stake</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/election-day-whats-at-stake/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=election-day-whats-at-stake</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 04 Nov 2014 05:58:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244348</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Will Americans choose freedom or the continuing dominance of statism? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/votejpeg-42b1d7963e761260.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244349" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/votejpeg-42b1d7963e761260-450x288.jpg" alt="votejpeg-42b1d7963e761260" width="355" height="227" /></a>The election and reelection of Barack Obama have seemingly realized the progressive dream of transforming America from its traditional Constitutional order to one more similar to Europe’s––an activist rather than a limited federal government, one whose power and reach extend into the market economy, trump state sovereignty, and subject individuals to the ideological preferences and aims of the federal Leviathan and its managers. What is at stake today is the continuing dominance of these statist ideas.</p>
<p>Over the past six years Obama and progressives partially achieved some of these progressive goals. Through legislation, executive orders, like-minded judges, and the interpretations of law by anonymous, unelected federal functionaries, Obama’s government has intervened in the automobile, finance, health care, and housing industries; hampered the explosive growth of the energy industry by reducing development on federal lands and waging a war on carbon; encroached on the states’ sovereignty through the regulatory powers of the Environmental Protection Agency and the renegade Department Of Justice; and intruded into civil society and individual rights on issues such as contraception, traditional marriage, freedom of speech, and religious freedom.</p>
<p>Worse yet, the old progressive goal of redistributing property has accelerated over the last 6 years. Entitlement spending has exploded, increasing along the way the wider regulatory scope and intrusiveness of the federal agencies created to manage this transfer of wealth. Social welfare spending now approaches a trillion dollars a year, people claiming Social Security Disability insurance have increased from 3 million in 1980 to 11 million today, and the number of people getting food stamps has doubled to 46 million just over the last decade. These trillions in transfer payments represent a massive redistribution of property. According to the Tax Foundation, America’s highly progressive tax system in 2012 resulted in about $2 trillion being redistributed from the top 40% of taxpayers to the bottom 60%.</p>
<p>The increase in entitlement spending, however, has also required much higher budget deficits and an unprecedented peacetime increase in the national debt, which now stands at $17 trillion dollars, up from $10 trillion in 2008. From 2009-2012, Obama’s budgets averaged deficits of $1.25 trillion. This year’s deficit is projected to be around half a trillion dollars, but according to the CBO, deficits will return to the trillion-dollar mark from 2022-2024. And don’t forget, the costs of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the debt are projected to devour all tax revenues by 2030. This means that either taxes will have to be raised to ruinous levels, or even more money borrowed to finance the unfunded liabilities of those programs, which have been estimated at anywhere between $123 and $200 trillion. Ancient tyrants redistributed the property of just the living; the modern welfare state has managed to redistribute the property of the unborn citizens who will inherit this debt.</p>
<p>Both parties bear some responsibility for this mess, testimony to just how engrained the entitlement mentality and the acceptance of redistributing property are in today’s America. Yet the last 6 years have seen unprecedented expansions of this process, and demonization of those like Paul Ryan who propose even modest steps towards defusing this ticking fiscal bomb.</p>
<p>In foreign policy as well, Obama and the Democrats have shaped their actions according to the quasi-pacifist, “postmodern” ideology that distrusts using American power to protect Americans’ security and promote their interests. Instead, an America guilty of historical crimes, oppression, and exploitation must subordinate its power to transnational institutions like the U.N., and rely on diplomacy and multilateral coalitions that advance international interests, including those of our enemies and rivals, at the expense of America’s.</p>
<p>Thus Obama started his presidency with an apology tour, led from behind in Libya, and oversaw dangerous reductions in the military budget. He has abandoned Iraq, and left its fragile political order, purchased with the blood and money of Americans, stranded between the Iranian rock and the ISIS hard place. His feckless overthrow of Libya’s Gaddafi has left that country a petri dish of jihadist bacilli, leading to the murder of an American diplomat and 3 brave warriors, and flooding the Middle East with weapons plundered from Gaddafi’s arsenals. He has compromised and betrayed America’s allies like Egypt and Israel, and groveled before her enemies like Iran. His empty bluster on Syria and Ukraine has emboldened bloody tyrants like Assad and geopolitical rivals like Russia. All the while he and his foreign policy team have talked and talked and talked, a spectacle of gutless, futile diplomacy redolent of England’s in the 20’s and 30’s.</p>
<p>Yet all these actions and policies both domestic and foreign reflect a worn-out philosophy repeatedly repudiated by history. The progressive worldview of the Democrats is founded on the idea that increasing knowledge of the natural world, human nature and behavior, and social and political reality can drive human progress and improvement. Nature, people, and society thus can be directed towards the creation of an idealized world in which the tragic constants of human life––physical want, suffering, oppression, violence, brutality, inequality, and injustice––are eliminated. Just give power to the “technicians of the soul,” as Stalin called them, the “technocrats” who possess this knowledge, and they will rearrange society in a way that achieves utopia––once, of course, religion, custom, and traditional wisdom are swept away lest their irrational prejudices and superstitions like “sin” and “good and evil” block humanity’s march to the brave new world. All that is needed is to increase the coercive power of the state in order to institute reforms and remove any obstacles to the efforts of technical elites to achieve these utopian boons.</p>
<p>The progressives’ hostility to free-market capitalism and fondness for dirigiste economic polices, for example, illustrate these philosophical assumptions. To progressives, “income inequality” and economic winners and losers are intolerable injustices reflecting not the variations of talent, virtue, hard work, and luck among individuals, but capitalism’s rigged rules and privileging of profit over people. Use the power of the state to amend those rules and to intervene in the market through regulations, tax policy, and the redistribution of property, and you can eliminate those injustices. Thus Obama’s “You didn’t build that” and  “When you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody” rhetoric, recently endorsed by Hillary Clinton’s similar claim, <span style="color: #272727;">“Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.” </span>Thus the relentless public demonization of the wealthy and corporations, and the attempt to use regulatory and taxing power to siphon off their capital and put it to achieving the progressive vision of “social justice.”</p>
<p>What is at stake this election day is whether or not Americans will reject this ideology and the policies it creates. It is about starting to restore to our politics prudence, humility, respect for traditional wisdom, and common sense. It is about recognizing that an irreducibly complex and quirky human nature and behavior are not infinitely plastic and so cannot be shaped according to the abstract visions of technical elites armed with an intrusive power that compromises our freedom. It is about accepting the tragic truth that the freedom to choose how to shape one’s life means that bad choices will create bad consequences, and so individual freedom cannot exist without individual responsibility for those bad choices. It is about accepting that suffering and failure are not unjust anomalies to be engineered from human existence, but non-negotiable givens of human life, and thus will never be eliminated, but only mitigated. And it is about remembering that every attempt to create heaven on earth has had to diminish the people’s freedom, and sometimes has demanded their lives.</p>
<p>In short, what is at stake is the return to the ideas about human nature and existence upon which the Founders built the American order and its guarantee of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Politics of Victimhood</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-politics-of-victimhood/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-politics-of-victimhood</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 27 Oct 2014 04:09:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The dishonest tactics of the Left that stifle debate. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #000000;"><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/943-dsNVL.AuSt_.55.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243788" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/943-dsNVL.AuSt_.55-450x276.jpg" alt="943-dsNVL.AuSt.55" width="360" height="221" /></a>Originally published by<a href="http://www.hoover.org/research/politics-victimhood"> Defining Ideas</a>. </em></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Gabby Giffords, the former Democratic Congressman from Arizona who was shot in the head at a campaign rally in 2010, has come under fire recently for exploiting her horrific experience for political gain. Using her celebrity as a famous victim of gun violence, Giffords has created a Super PAC, Americans for Responsible Solutions, focused on gun control legislation. Her group has produced political ads for Democratic candidates that feature other victims of gun violence, and that suggest the candidate’s opponent supports policies that contribute to such violence.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Even supporters of Giffords’ own party are uncomfortable with this electoral tactic. At Politico, Alex Isenstadt wrote recently that Giffords “has unleashed some of the nastiest ads of the campaign season, going after GOP candidates in Arizona and New Hampshire with attacks even some longtime supporters say go too far. And Republicans on the receiving end are largely helpless to hit back, knowing a fight with the much-admired survivor is not one they’re likely to win.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Exploiting one’s personal experiences is, of course, nothing new in politics. Ancient Roman candidates were expected to show off their scars earned in fighting for Rome. Marc Antony fired up the Roman people after the assassination of Julius Caesar by brandishing his bloodstained and torn toga. During Reconstruction in the United States,  “waving the bloody shirt” became common among radical Republicans who used the casualties and suffering of the Civil War as a weapon against Southern Democrats.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">In those cases, however, it was service and sacrifice in war that were used for political advantage. Today, any sort of suffering from any cause, especially on the part of those considered victims of historical oppression, is used to obscure rational discussion and debate with clouds of pathos and emotion.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The questionable assumption we often accept about suffering is that enduring terrible experiences automatically make one an expert on the broader issues related to the causes of suffering. That’s why like other public victims of gun violence, Giffords has spoken out as if her experience has made her an authority on gun policy. Thus she has attacked politicians for disagreeing with her on the issue of guns not by making a coherent argument, but by conjuring up her own experiences and sentimentalizing other victims of gun violence. Having created a fog of emotion, she then argues for policies, such as more restrictive background checks for those buying guns, even though there is no evidence that such procedures keep guns out of the hands of those determined to get them. After all, the man who shot Giffords had undergone a thorough background check. Worse yet, such emotionalism sets aside the critical Constitutional issue––the Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Focusing on any one citizen’s unfortunate experience obscures the fact that public policy affects millions of people with differing views on what aims we collectively pursue and put into law. Moreover, policy must adhere to the constitutional limits on government action and conform to existing law. The complex clash of conflicting beliefs and respect for the law requires clear, coherent thinking of the sort difficult to achieve when issues are clouded with emotion and sentiment. It also requires open deliberation and debate, which are short-circuited by indulgence of the <em>ad misericordiam</em> fallacy, the use of pity, compassion, or sympathy to entice, or browbeat, people into accepting a conclusion not earned by argument. Giffords indulged this fallacy last year when the Senate did not pass gun-control legislation she favored. Speaking of Senators who had voted against the bill, she later wrote, some “looked into my eyes as I talked about being shot in the head at point-blank range.” It may sound harsh, but as <em>National Review</em>’s Kevin Williamson writes, “Being shot in the head by a lunatic does not give one any special grace to pronounce upon public-policy questions.” Nor does it give one the expertise, knowledge, and sober arguments necessary for public political debate on contentious issues.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Another example of the deleterious effects of using personal experience to trump sober reasoning was Republican Senator John McCain’s campaign against waterboarding, in which he freely exploited his own harrowing experience of being brutally tortured as a prisoner of war for six years during the Vietnam conflict. The pathos and horror of that experience made it difficult for critics to appeal to the simple fact that waterboarding was not torture under the U.S. law defining torture.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Yet calling on his own experience at the hands of the North Vietnamese, McCain clouded this critical discussion with lurid emotional appeals to most people’s lack of knowledge about what defines torture in U.S. law, and to their understandable sympathy for McCain’s six years of suffering. As a result, McCain’s efforts gave bipartisan cover to President Obama, who on entering office issued Executive Order 13491, which forbade waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques that had successfully yielded actionable intelligence from enemies of the United States. As a result, our interrogation tools have been severely limited, which has lessened the value of capturing terrorists for interrogation. McCain’s remarkable fortitude and courage in surviving such an experience are worthy of our admiration, but they did not make him an expert on the legal complexities of interrogation, and the grim imperative to extract from terrorists information that could save lives.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Both Giffords and McCain personally suffered horribly so it’s understandable that their experiences would shape their responses to relevant political issues. Yet others use suffering by proxy as a political trump card. In particular, those endorsing identity politics depend on the historical suffering of their group in order to gain political leverage and foreclose deliberation and debate.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Proponents of identity politics define individuals by their race, ethnicity, or sex, which in turn are defined by a history of oppression and exclusion. This history casts members of those groups as victims, no matter how far removed they actually are from oppression today. As victims, then, these groups have grievances that they claim the larger society has a moral obligation to address, mainly in the form of various kinds of reparations, such as affirmative action, government transfers, or other government set-asides based on race or sex. In the political arena of deliberation and debate over policy, the emotions aroused by that historical suffering bestow a specious authority on the self-proclaimed victim, who now is beyond criticism or accountability for the coherence or validity of his arguments. Critics are instantly branded as “insensitive” or “uncaring” at best and “racist” or “sexist” at worst.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Attorney General Eric Holder has been a prominent example of this mentality. During his tenure, he aggressively has attacked states that have legislated voter identification requirements. In his retirement speech he said that protecting “voting rights” was his “top priority” as Attorney General, and he pursued this priority even after the Supreme Court upheld voter identification laws in their 2013 decision of <em>Shelby vs. Holder</em>. His efforts on this issue were predicated on the past history of Jim Crow era restrictions on black voters, a backbone of the segregation outlawed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Holder has consistently referred to that history of discrimination last practiced more than half a century ago. In a 2012 speech before the Council of Black Churches, he subtly linked the Jim Crow voting restrictions to the photo identification laws when he said that these “discriminatory” laws threaten “some of the achievements that defined the civil rights movement”—achievements that “now hang in the balance.” Later on he added, “We have to honor the generations that took extraordinary risks” to gain equal access to the polls, and warned, “this fight must go on.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">In July of this year, Holder repeated his commitment to this crusade: “I will not allow people to take away that which people gave their lives to give, and that is the ability for the American people to vote.” These references to the Civil Rights movement suggest that asking for a photo ID before voting is similar to the exclusionary legal restrictions such as literacy tests common in segregated states.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Supporters of Holder’s position have taken the same tact. Commenting on Florida’s pending voter ID legislation in 2012, the Advancement Project warned, “We are particularly concerned about the impact of this election year’s voter removal practice on eligible voters of color protected under the Voting Rights Act, given Florida’s documented history of erroneous discriminatory purges in the past.” The suffering of blacks during the Jim Crow period, which included lynching, legal exclusion, and everyday incidents of brutality and humiliation, has become a proxy for what in fact is, under state law, the mild inconvenience of acquiring a photo ID necessary for scores of other public transactions.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Like Giffords and McCain, Holder also appeals to personal experience. His sister-in-law was one of the students who in 1963 desegregated the University of Alabama, as Governor George Wallace famously blocked the “schoolhouse door.” Linking his own political efforts to this family history and iconic moment in the Civil Rights movement enhances Holder’s authority and provides cover for his constitutionally dubious and politically partisan efforts against red-state governments. Similarly, like many affluent and powerful blacks, Holder is fond of referencing personal experiences, such as being pulled over by the police for no reason, to gain some credibility as a victim of ongoing racism.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">By using suffering as a political trump card, people like Holder not only cloud sober debate with sentiment and emotion, but also shut the debate down by accusing critics of being racists attempting to undo the achievements of the Civil Rights movement. In July of this year, Holder leveled this charge against those protesting his arguably radical politicization of the Department of Justice: “There’s a certain level of vehemence, it seems to me, that’s directed at me [and] directed at the president,” Holder told ABC. “You know, people talking about taking their country back. . . . There’s a certain racial component to this for some people. I don’t think this is the thing that is a main driver, but for some there’s a racial animus.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Some of Holder’s supporters are less restrained. Michael Eric Dyson, a professor at Georgetown University, recently claimed that Holder has “weathered the storm of an enormous racial backlash against black people in power at the top,” and has had to endure “vicious and acrimonious, if you will, articulations by people in the Senate” disturbed by “American power in a black man.” Such <em>ad hominem</em>smears short-circuit a public discussion of the issues and policies Holder and others pursue.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The trump card of suffering might be politically useful, but using it is a dishonest tactic that inhibits informed deliberation and debate. Relying on emotion and sentiment, no matter how understandable they are as a response to suffering, have since ancient Athens been the agents of bad policies and dangerous political decisions, and tactics for pursuing political advantage at the expense of the public good. They have no place in our already conflicted and divisive public political discourse.</p>
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		<title>Janet Yellen Shills for the Democrats</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Oct 2014 04:42:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The Chairman of the Federal Reserve indulges a destructive leftist lie. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/janet-yellen.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243314" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/janet-yellen-450x337.jpg" alt="janet-yellen" width="278" height="208" /></a>At a conference last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen recycled a shopworn Democrat talking point about the supposed crisis of income inequality and stalled economic mobility. “The extent and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concerns me,” Yellen said, going on to wonder “whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation’s history,” especially “equality of opportunity.”</p>
<p>Like the mythic “war on women,” this progressive sound bite is misleading and duplicitous, based on statistical sleight of hand. Worse yet, it is a pretext for more and more government expansion and intrusion into the economy, and for more and more redistribution of income through entitlement programs. It makes one wonder what one of the most powerful government officials impacting the economy, supposedly a politically neutral technocrat, is doing recycling Democratic campaign slogans.</p>
<p>The “income inequality” claim depends on ignoring numerous data that contradict it. For one thing, it glosses over the mobility among the 5 income cohorts over time, assuming that the same people are rich or poor year after year. But as Stephen Moore and James Pierson <a href="http://spectator.org/articles/58135/dont-eat-rich">point out</a>, “In America they [the rich] don’t generally stay rich for long. A few years ago the Department of Treasury examined what happens to the wealth of families across several generations. Guess what: the poor got richer and the rich got poorer. The incomes of poor households rose 80 percent from 1987 to 1996 and then more than doubled from 1996 to 2005. The richer people were at the start of this period, the more income losses they suffered in subsequent years.”</p>
<p>The Treasury study indeed confirms this mobility, finding that between 1996 and 2005 over half of taxpayers moved to a different income quintile. Half of taxpayers in the bottom quintile in 1996 moved to a higher income group in 2005. Meanwhile, only 25% of the richest 1/100 of 1% in 1996 were still that rich in 2005. This mobility has indeed stalled, but not for “several decades,” as Yellen claimed, and not because of the sinister machinations of the wealthy. Its cause rather is the sluggish economic growth after the recession ended 5 years ago, and the blame for that in large part falls on Obama and the Democrats’ regulatory overreach, trillion-dollar deficits, “you didn’t build that” anti-business rhetoric, and redistributionist economic policies. Get the feds out of the way of the economy so it can grow, and we will see income growth and mobility again.</p>
<p>The “income inequality” meme ignores other facts as well. It focuses only on “money income,” neglecting the value of government transfers like Medicaid, Electronic Benefit Transfer cards (formerly known as food stamps and welfare checks), emergency-room health care, Section 8 housing subsidies, and the Earned Income Tax Credit, all of which boost the buying power of the statistical poor and lower middle class. For the middle class, “money income” ignores the value of employer-provided fringe benefits such as health care. As for the rich, “money income” ignores the highly progressive taxes they pay to fund those government programs. As Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-front/posts/2014/05/20-rising-inequality-1920s-measuring-income-burtless">writes</a>, “To disregard the impact of transfers and progressive taxation on the distribution of income and family well-being is to ignore America’s most expensive efforts to lessen the gap between the nation’s rich, middle class, and poor.”</p>
<p>Finally, consumption––how much people spend–– is more revealing than “money income” as a measurement of economic wellbeing. In fact, consumption rates of the lowest income quintile have increased over the years, reaching nearly twice of income in 2005. As a result, Kip Hagopian and Lee Ohanian <a href="http://www.hoover.org/research/mismeasure-inequality">write</a>, “A family claiming $22,300 in income in 2005 would have reported about $44,000 in expenditures in that year. As noted earlier, the gap between reported income and consumption is filled by various categories of government transfer payments (including Medicaid, food stamps, subsidized housing, the Earned Income Tax Credit, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, etc.), family savings, imputed income from owner-occupied housing, barter, support from family and friends, and income from the underground economy.” Indeed, if one takes into account consumption, the statistical <a href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/07/what-is-poverty">poor enjoy living standards higher</a> than the average European. The obsession on “money income” ignores how well all Americans live.</p>
<p>Yellen’s second claim, that income inequality contradicts “values rooted in our nation’s history” like “equality of opportunity,” is equally muddled. If we look at the political order of the Constitution––our most important “national values”–– income inequality was taken for granted, a reflection of an unchanging and flawed human nature. In his famous comments on “factions” in <em>Federalist</em> 10, James Madison wrote, “As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves. <em>The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests.</em> <em>The protection of these faculties is the first object of government</em> [emphasis added]. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.” Hence “the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.” Income inequality is a fact of life, not a failure of government or the economy.</p>
<p>Indeed, the clashing interests of those with property and those without, and the political discord they create, were continually on the minds of the delegates to the Constitutional convention. New Yorker Gouverneur Morris, arguing for an appointed rather than a popularly elected Senate, frankly said, “The Rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest. They always did. They always will. The proper security against them is to form them into a separate interest. The two forces will then control each other . . . By thus combining and setting apart, the aristocratic interest, the popular interest will be combined against it. There will be a mutual check and mutual security.”</p>
<p>Thus the “mixed government” of the Constitution was designed <em>not</em> to eliminate property inequality, which is rooted in the differences of talent, hard work, virtue, and luck among people. Rather, it was created to prevent <em>any </em>faction, whether the rich or the poor, from taking control of the government in order to aggrandize its own power and serve its own interests at the expense of others’. Only that way can the freedom, property, and opportunity of all be kept safe.</p>
<p>Our “national values,” then, are for equality of opportunity, not equality of result. Yellen pays lip service to the former, yet that sentiment contradicts the whole complaint about income inequality, which is about result, not opportunity. Like most progressives, Yellen is really concerned with equality of result, something the Founders abhorred, for a tyrannical government always promises the masses equality of result, in the form of a redistribution of property, in order to secure the support of the people for centralizing and increasing government power and limiting personal freedom. But equality of result, as the sorry and bloody history of communism shows, is contrary to the reality of human nature and the unequal distribution of talent and character. As Plato wrote, it is “numerical” equality rather than “proportionate equality,” which takes into account the differences of character and virtue that exist among people, and “assigns in proportion what is fitting to each. Indeed, it is precisely this which constitutes for us political justice.”</p>
<p>America’s “national values” have traditionally included equality of opportunity, not equality of result. People should be free to rise to whatever levels their differing talents and virtues can take them. Differences of wealth over time and over large populations reflect those differences more than any unjust manipulation of the economy by the rich. Moreover, in a dynamic, free-market economy, the success of the well off improves the well being of the rest, whether by creating jobs or paying the trillions of dollars in taxes that fund the redistributive programs that have allowed millions of American to enjoy a material existence only dreamed of by most of the human race.</p>
<p>We still have equality of opportunity, whether measured by the millions of ordinary people who create and run businesses big and small, or the 11 million illegal aliens who didn’t risk their lives coming to America because it lacks economic opportunity. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve has no business indulging a progressive canard that exploits envy and resentment for electoral gain.</p>
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		<title>Still Getting Jihadism Wrong</title>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 14 Oct 2014 04:58:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The false theory that poverty fuels radical Islam. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/hg.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242892" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/hg.jpg" alt="hg" width="320" height="230" /></a>President Obama’s recent claim that Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam was nothing new. Since 9/11, we have heard from both ends of the political spectrum that jihadist terror has material causes and psychological conditions created by social, political, or economic dysfunctions. This argument is an old one, and was common in the aftermath of 9/11. Typical of such thinking was Bill Clinton’s claim that “these forces of reaction [al Qaeda] feed on disillusionment, poverty, and despair.” Left unexplained is the fact that billions of other people around the world even more impoverished and hopeless have not created a multi-continental network of groups dedicated to inflicting brutal violence and mayhem on those who do not share their faith or who block their visions of global domination.</p>
<p>Such materialist analyses ignore or rationalize the historical and theological context of modern Islamic violence. As a result, well into the second decade of our war against jihad we are still misdiagnosing the problem and hamstringing ourselves by resorting to democracy-promotion or economic development, solutions that have nothing to do with the root of the problem––the theologically sanctioned violence, intolerance, and totalitarian universalism that define traditional Islam.</p>
<p>A recent example of this failure of imagination appeared in <i>The Wall Street Journal</i> in an essay by Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto. De Soto is one of Latin America’s most eloquent champions of free-market economies and the prosperity, freedom, and opportunity they create. Referencing the success of some Latin American countries in throwing off dirigiste or socialist economies, de Soto claims that in the Muslim world as well, “Economic hope is the only way to win the battle of the constituencies on which terrorist groups feed.”</p>
<p>To buttress this claim, de Soto uses an analogy between Islamic jihadists and the radical Marxist-Leninist terrorist group “Shining Path” that troubled Peru in the 90s. Just as economic and legal reforms created opportunity and wider prosperity, and thus drained support for Shining Path, de Soto argues, so too in the Middle East similar attention to encouraging entrepreneurship and laws favorable to business could neutralize the numerous jihadist outfits. This analogy, however, ignores crucial differences between a faith-based movement and one like communism predicated on a secular, materialist ideology.</p>
<p>Islam and communism do share similarities, as numerous writers have noted for nearly a century. Bertrand Russell wrote in 1920, “Bolshevism combines the characteristics of the French Revolution with those of the rise of Islam . . . Marx has taught that Communism is fatally predestined to come about; this produces a state of mind not unlike that of the early successors of Mahommet [Mohammad].” Later, French sociologist Jules Monnerot wrote in 1949, “Soviet Russia is merely the geographical center from which communist influence radiates; it is an ‘Islam’ on the march, and it regards its frontiers at any given moment as purely provisional and temporary. Communism, like victorious Islam, makes no distinction between politics and religion, but this time the claim to be both universal State and universal truth applies not only within a civilization or world which co-exists with other different civilizations, other worlds, but to the entire terrestrial globe.”</p>
<p>These comparisons, as Ibn Warraq shows in his <a href="http://www.newenglishreview.org/Ibn_Warraq/Apologists_of_Totalitarianism%3A_From_Communism_to_Islam,_Part_I/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">survey</span></a> of them, are apt insofar as they highlight the universalist ambitions and totalitarian nature of communism and Islam as ideologies. But the important differences between the two belief systems as they actually appear in practice make the analogy less useful when the issue is how to reform Islam and neutralize jihadism. We can see this problem in a more recent, and influential, example of comparing the Soviet Union to Islam, Natan Sharansky’s 2004 <i>The Case for Democracy</i>, which inspired George W. Bush’s failed ambition to create democratic freedom in Iraq. Sharansky argued that just as the Soviet Union collapsed because of the innate desire for freedom, so too in the Muslim world creating democratic governments that respected political freedom and human rights would deprive jihadist leaders of recruits.</p>
<p>This analogy, however, ignores a profound difference between communism and Islam. Soviet communism was a materialist, atheist ideology imposed by force on a deeply religious people. It tried to suppress the religious needs of Russians, and to deliver material prosperity in compensation. It failed on both counts. Notice that today an autocratic Vladimir Putin enjoys widespread support among Russians, partly because he acknowledges the religious sensibilities and pride of the Russian people, and champions their belief that religious piety lies at the core of their national identity and separates them from the godless secularist West. And this support remains strong despite the manifest dysfunctions and corruption in the Russian economy.</p>
<p>Putin’s autocracy is similar to the even more autocratic governments in the Muslim Middle East. There such regimes are careful to respect and gratify the religious sensibilities of their peoples, most obviously in Saudi Arabia, where the support and tolerance of Wahhabism and jihadism abroad have helped to keep the House of Saud in power. So too in Iran, where the Mullahcracy enjoys significant support among the mass of pious Shiites in the villages and towns beyond the reach of Western cameras in Tehran; or in Turkey, where Tayyip Erdogan has rolled back a century of Kemalist secularization and democratization by reviving traditional Islam’s pride of place as the sole paradigm for social and political order.</p>
<p>In all these examples, autocratic leaders, for all their tyranny and illiberalism, still maintain solidarity with their people founded on their religious piety, a harmony between rulers and ruled that did not exist in Soviet communism. And they share resentment and often hatred of the West and especially the United States, which to the pious Muslim is a godless Sodom of materialism and depravity fostered by rootless individualism and irresponsible license camouflaged as prosperity and democratic freedom. So even though the desire for political freedom and material prosperity isn’t being met by autocratic Middle Eastern regimes, religious needs are.</p>
<p>It is this profound Islamic spirituality that de Soto and other secularists ignore. If the economic development championed by de Soto and others has wrought the impiety, sexual license, and godlessness that Muslims can see everyday on satellite television and the internet, why would they want to gain such a world at the cost of their immortal souls? That this picture of the U.S., one now nearly a century old, is a one-sided caricature to some degree doesn’t matter. It is what Muslims see, what they hear in Friday sermons at their mosques, and what sharpens the centuries old, cosmic conflict between the faithful and the infidels, the House of Islam and the House of War.</p>
<p>Economic development is not the answer to Islamic terrorism. Iran and Turkey are not impoverished nations, yet they actively support and fund jihadist terror. So too does Qatar, which is fabulously wealthy. Like the autocrats, jihadists share fundamental beliefs with millions of Muslims worldwide. The latter may not blow themselves up or wage jihad personally, or they may believe that such violence is tactically wrong, but that doesn’t eliminate the spiritual solidarity, desire to live under shari’a law, and dreams of Islamic global dominance founded on traditional Islamic belief and practice, a solidarity that an atheist, secularist ideology like communism never enjoyed with the masses of people, whether in Russia or Peru. Until we see jihadism as a spiritual rather than a material phenomenon, we will continue to pursue tactics and policies doomed to fail.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss Frontpage Editor <strong>Jamie Glazov</strong> discuss <strong>The Roots of Jihad-Denial</strong>: </em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/QsDu8Os3PlA" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The President We Deserve?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-president-we-deserve/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-president-we-deserve</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 07 Oct 2014 04:50:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Will Americans choose a difference course for the country this election season? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/8C9521234-131028-obama-healthcare-331p.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242420" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/8C9521234-131028-obama-healthcare-331p-443x350.jpg" alt="Image: U.S. President Obama walks to speak about the Affordable Care Act at the White House in Washington" width="339" height="268" /></a>In 1920 H.L Mencken wrote prophetically, “As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissistic moron.”</p>
<p>Like the long tradition of antidemocrats from Plato to Founding Father Fisher Ames, Mencken believed that a democratic leader would reflect the self-interested aims and passions of the necessarily mediocre mass of voters. The disaster of Barack Obama’s administration invites reflection on the truth of this proposition.</p>
<p>Obama’s narcissistic self-regard by now is obvious to all but the most besotted of tingle-down-my-leg, smartest-president-ever, trousers-crease-bedazzled Obamaboppies, as Mark Steyn calls them. Obama’s favorite words are “I,” “me,” and “my,” except of course when he’s dodging responsibility for his failures, as he did recently when he blamed his intelligence agencies for his own neglect of the growing threat from Islamic State in northern Iraq. He’s still blaming George W. Bush for many other failures, most recently when he blamed him for the lack of a status of forces agreement with Iraq––something he really didn’t want so he could brag, as he did in 2011, “<span style="color: #272727;">The tide of war is receding. Now, even as we remove our last troops from Iraq, we’re beginning to bring our troops home from Afghanistan . . . Our troops are finally coming home.” A year later he made this political calculation explicit when he said of the SOF agreement during the foreign policy presidential debate, “</span><span style="color: #343434;">What I would not have done is left 10,000 troops in Iraq that would tie us down.”</span></p>
<p>Dodging accountability and refusing to confess one’s mistakes are classic signs of the egomaniac. So too is seeking out audiences that uncritically accept one’s own estimation of personal greatness. That’s why the president prefers fund-raisers to governing. It’s not just about garnering money for his party; it’s also about bathing in the waves of adulation from the carefully selected audience of fans. That’s certainly more gratifying than sitting through the Presidential Daily Briefings, 56% of which he missed in his first term, and 62% in his second. George W. Bush, in comparison, almost never missed the PDB.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;"><span style="color: #000000;">And when someone does get by the gatekeepers and asks an even slightly challenging question, Obama gets a bit snappish, as those convinced of their own brilliance are wont to do. For example, when asked at a recent town-hall gathering about double-digit rate-increases for health care, he sniffed, </span>“The question is whether you guys are shopping effectively enough.” It’s your fault, not mine. So too when his handlers can’t control the questions, as in presidential debates. There he relies on juvenile snarkiness to defend his amour propre. Remember when he responded to Mitt Romney’s warning about Russia, which recent events have proven prescient? “The 80s called, they want their foreign policy back,” he jeered with the air of a junior-high witling.</p>
<p style="color: #121212;"><span style="color: #272727;">Overestimating one’s abilities, however, is the most obvious indication of crippling self-regard. Way back in 2008 Obama sent us a very clear signal of what would make him a dangerous president: </span>“I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.” Such a preposterous statement, proven false by the events of the last 6 years, points us to the reasons for those failures––his unwillingness to listen to advice from anyone other than his servile courtiers. As former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta writes in his new book, Obama and his spaniel advisors refused to listen to Panetta and military commanders about the importance of leaving a residual force in Iraq. Instead, the administration gave up on securing an agreement it didn’t want in the first place, choosing the self-flattering political narrative about “ending the war” over the long-term strategic dangers of walking away from the still fragile political order in Baghdad.</p>
<p style="color: #121212;">But why should Obama question himself, when his closest and most trusted advisor, Valerie Jarrett, has gone on record with astonishing claims about the president’s brilliance? The following statement from 2010 is one of the most embarrassing displays of toadying I know of outside a Versailles fop or a Hollywood press agent:</p>
<blockquote><p>I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is . . . He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually . . . So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy . . . He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.</p></blockquote>
<p>We know now that this whole encomium is false in every detail––except for the claim that Obama “knows” that all Jarrett’s claims are true. In a position as powerful as the presidency of the world’s greatest economic and military power, such self-delusion is lethal.</p>
<p style="color: #121212;">Obama’s claim to his own brilliance, reinforced by enablers like Jarrett, brings us to the issue of intelligence. With his typical hyperbolic sarcasm, Mencken uses the word “moron.” But the problem with Obama is not his level of intelligence, which I suspect is above average. Rather, Obama’s mind has never been properly trained. Like physical strength, intellectual development needs resistance. The novice needs to be regularly scolded that his callow opinions and interpretations are badly argued or uninformed, and then sent off to improve them. Does anyone think that an affirmative action admit like Obama was ever subjected to such ego-wounding criticism? I’ve been in the university for 40 years, and I’ve seen repeatedly the anxious cossetting, inflation of ability, tender solicitude for feelings, and unwillingness to apply rigorous standards when it comes to minority students, what George Bush has called the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” All Obama has had to do is show up, and white people have done the rest.</p>
<p>Back in 2008 we had an example of this dynamic when esteemed presidential historian Michael Beschloss––a Harvard-trained holder of numerous prestigious fellowships and visiting scholar positions––claimed Obama had the highest I.Q. of any president ever, without having a clue about what his I.Q. actually is. For the rest of us, there is scant evidence of this brilliance. No college transcripts, no LSAT scores, no peer-reviewed articles, nothing other than a couple of books of uncertain authorship.</p>
<p>We do have, however, Obama’s astonishing blunders like “there are 57 states; Canada has a president; ‘Austrian’ is a language; America is ‘20 centuries’ old; Arabic is spoken in Afghanistan. He’s called the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) the Maldives, and declared it would be ‘unprecedented’ for the Supreme Court to invalidate a law passed by Congress,” as Jack Kelly has <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/05/25/obama_is_not_that_bright_114271.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">written.</span></a> And let’s not forget the “intercontinental railroad” and the reference in the 2009 Cairo speech to Muslims in 15<sup>th</sup> century Córdoba decades after they had been driven away. Such mistakes bespeak not a stupid mind, but a lazy and untrained one completely lacking in Socratic self-awareness of how much it doesn’t know but only thinks it knows.</p>
<p>Obama will be history in 2 years, so the real question is whether Mencken was right when he said that such a president reflects the “inner soul” of a democratic people. Has narcissistic self-regard become a defining characteristic of the American people, as Christopher Lasch argued in his 1979 book <i>The Culture of Narcissism</i>? Is the electorate dominated by what Rush Limbaugh calls the “low-information voter,” as Ilya Somin documents in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Political-Ignorance-Smaller-Government/dp/0804786615/ref=sr_1_1_title_1_pap?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1412525981&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=democracy+and+political+ignorance"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i>Democracy and Political Ignorance</i>,</span></a> published last year? In short, is the antidemocratic charge that “Among the common people [is] the greatest ignorance,” as the Athenian called the Old Oligarch wrote around 450 B.C., really true?</p>
<p>The next 2 elections may give us an answer to that question. Perhaps the residual common sense of Americans, once awakened by increasing crises at home and abroad, will reassert itself, and prove Abe Lincoln correct: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.” Let’s hope the future proves Lincoln a better prophet than Mencken.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Reasons for Political Hope</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/reasons-for-political-hope-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=reasons-for-political-hope-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 03 Oct 2014 04:52:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[constitution]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Four key factors working against the Left this election season. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/vote-here.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242263" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/vote-here-450x337.jpg" alt="Americans Go To The Polls To Elect The Next U.S. President" width="308" height="231" /></a>Many Republicans are excited about the midterm elections. They see a good chance of taking over the Senate, which means they can neutralize Obama’s last few years in office. Many also are hopeful about the presidential election in 2016, though Hillary Clinton will enter that race with decided advantages. Regaining the presidency, some believe, will lead to a reprise of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, in which the country was turned from its leftward drift under Jimmy Carter.</p>
<p>Yet even if this scenario unfolds as the Republicans hope, it is doubtful the deeper structural problems of the country will be solved. The entitlement Leviathan, nourished under governments dominated by both parties, is unlikely to be reformed as significantly as it must in order to ward off looming fiscal catastrophe. Too many Republican politicians are enablers of government spending, voting to keep funding handouts like the $20 billion a year in agricultural subsidies. Others are plotting “comprehensive immigration reform,” aka amnesty, to ensure a steady supply of cheap labor.  Too many have seemingly accepted the disastrous cuts in military spending that put at risk our ability to defend our interests and security.</p>
<p>Then there are the nearly 66 million American people who reelected as president an inexperienced narcissist, serial liar, racial divider, and manifest failure. Whether they did so out of juvenile idealism, hope for racial reconciliation, or the lure of more government handouts doesn’t really matter. This lack of judgment and basic information, or sacrifice of principle to self-interest, bespeaks an electorate significant numbers of whom are unlikely to support any politician or party that seriously attempts to halt runaway entitlement spending, debt, and deficits, or to rebuild our military deterrence and reassert our will globally.</p>
<p>Yet despite these obstacles, the political order created in 1787, assaulted as it has been over the last 100 years, still possesses resources for putting us back on the right track. If we fail to take advantage of those resources and modern information technologies, we will have no one blame but our fellow citizens or ourselves for our country’s decline.</p>
<p>First and foremost, we still hold elections every 2 years, and elections have consequences. We can remain mystified that 66 million voters chose Barack Obama over Mitt Romney in 2012, but think how much worse it could have been without the 2010 midterm “shellacking,” as Obama called, that gave the House of Representatives to the Republicans. We can disagree over what the Republican House should or shouldn’t have done with their power, but they at least slowed down the slow-motion train-wreck of the Democrats’ progressive policies.</p>
<p>Regular fair and transparent elections mean that changing course is always possible. It may be that things will have to get much worse than they are now to wake up those 4 million Republicans who stayed home in 2012, or those 5 million voters who gave Obama the victory. And there’s a chance that the pain of correction will be much more severe, much more socially disruptive than anything we’ve seen in many years. But we still will have the legal right to change course when that moment comes.</p>
<p>Second, despite decades of assault on federalism, sovereign state governments still exist. They still remain what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in 1932 called a “laboratory” in which citizens can “try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” In recent years states have gone their own way on issues like gun control, voter identification laws, same-sex marriage, right-to-work laws, reduction of public employee unions’ political power, limits on abortion, or legalization of marijuana. Particularly important are the states’ right to set tax laws and business-friendly regulations that lure investment and people.</p>
<p>A comparison of California with Texas illustrates this phenomenon. As <i>Forbes</i> <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2013/07/03/texas-v-california-the-real-facts-behind-the-lone-star-states-miracle/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">reported</span></a> last year on the country’s two most populous states, “California’s state and local tax burden ranks as America’s 4th-highest compared to Texas at 45th.  California taxes a 42 percent larger share of state income than does Texas, California’s restrictive energy policies discourage oil extraction, even though it has the largest proven shale oil reserves in the nation; while its industrial electrical rates are 88 percent higher than in Texas.” As a result, in 2011 Texas’ per capita GDP surpassed California’s. No surprise, then, that between 2000 and 2012, Texas’ population growth rate doubled California’s, and that 183 Californians moved to Texas for every 100 Texans moving to California.</p>
<p>Increasing red-state success in growing their economies and liberating people from the intrusive Leviathan state will attract more and more people, even as the bankrupt blue-state policies of ruinous tax rates and over-regulation will drive more and more people away. We could then see a return to the Founders’ idea of federalism as “islands of intolerance in a sea of tolerance,” with people free to feet-vote for the political and social order they find congenial.</p>
<p>Third, American civil society––those 1.5 million associations and organizations separate from government––is still vigorous, though not as much as it was at its peak in 1970. People still belong to groups like the PTA and the Rotary Club, and still attend more than 350,000 churches. The pushback by churches and religious organizations against Obamacare’s requirement that they offer abortifacients and birth control in their health plans illustrates the impact civil society can have on public policy. More significant is the rise of the Tea Party, a truly grassroots movement that quickly organized in 2009, and by the summer its members were confronting politicians at “town-hall” events, a display of direct political accountability to the people more typical of early America or ancient Athens. There is no question that the Republicans’ victory in the 2010 midterm was made possible by Tea Party activists.</p>
<p>Finally, new communication technologies have broken the monopoly liberals once held over information and commentary. Before the rise of talk-radio in the 80s, political opinion was controlled by a few score network news anchors, magazine editors, and syndicated columnists. Today there are hundred of thousands of voices and opinions on cable news networks like Fox News, blogs, on-line magazines like <i>FrontPage</i>, websites, social networks like Facebook, and video sites like YouTube. It’s clear that the persistence of Fox News in reporting the Benghazi debacle and the IRS scandal have kept these administration failures alive in the public square.</p>
<p>Of course some of these sites are frequently venues for misinformation, propaganda, and transient trivia. But they also provide ordinary citizens with a democratic virtual town square in which lies are exposed, truths hidden by the establishment media revealed, and opinions aired to raucous challenge and debate. Don’t forget, the Tea Party could become a national organization nearly overnight because of a YouTube video and the Drudge Report. Still protected by the First Amendment, this virtual town square gives everyone the opportunity to exercise their right to free speech, and to mobilize resistance to the political status quo.</p>
<p>The resources, then, are there, and they more than any one election give us hope. We just have to make use of them. It is still in doubt whether the 2 terms of Barack Obama have represented a permanent change in the American political character, a shift much farther to the left than this country has ever experienced; or whether the unique circumstances of electing the first black president will be a one-off, and the nation will return to its traditional center-right character, and restore our fiscal sanity and our global leadership. Whatever the outcome, it will be the responsibility of the people to use resources of the Constitution to get our country back on track.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Incredible Lightness of Being Barack Obama</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-incredible-lightness-of-being-barack-obama/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-incredible-lightness-of-being-barack-obama</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Sep 2014 04:56:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A speech of clichés, platitudes and moral idiocy. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/85.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-241763" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/85-433x350.jpg" alt="85" width="318" height="257" /></a>Barack Obama’s address to the U.N. General Assembly was so insubstantial, so full of airy platitudes, and so adulterated with the gaseous clichés of bankrupt internationalism and progressive bromides that I thought at any minute he might just float away.</p>
<p>First was the obligatory call “to renew the purpose of the U.N.’s founding,” which apparently is “to observe and enforce international norms,” the most important being “to ensure that no nation can subjugate its neighbors and claim their territory” and to promote “the path of diplomacy and peace and the ideals this institution is designed to uphold.” Such phrases are so common and uncritically received that we forget “international norms” do not exist. Different peoples have different “norms” about, for example, the use of violence to achieve their aims. Nations will sign treaties that seemingly express our norms, but that doesn’t mean they believe in them. More often, such treaties are mere mechanisms for one nation to get what it wants from another. The sorry history of U.S. arms-control treaties with the Soviet Union and then Russia, treaties the Russians violated for decades to improve their nuclear arsenal at our expense, is just one example.</p>
<p>As for seizing territory by force, the U.N. did nothing to prevent Turkey from seizing northern Cyprus, or China from seizing Tibet, and more recently Russia from seizing Crimea. The Serbs’ attempts in the &#8217;90s to “claim territory” were stopped not by the U.N., but by American bombs. So too was Saddam Hussein’s aggression against Kuwait. Nor should we be surprised at the serial failure of the U.N. to enforce its lofty founding principles. Nations belong to the U.N. because they think they can use it to advance their interests, not “to enforce international norms,” especially when their own “norms” see nothing wrong with using duplicity and force to achieve their aims. Indeed, the continuing violence justified by other “norms” since the U.N.’s founding has claimed some 41 million lives. The U.N. serves the conflicting, zero-sum interests of the member states, not the “path of diplomacy and peace.”</p>
<p>From that preposterous beginning, the speech went downhill. “Islam teaches peace,” the President intoned. No, Islam teaches <i>submission</i>. There is no peace for those who refuse to submit, even for Muslims considered heretics by other Muslims, but especially for “polytheists” or “infidels.” In their case, Islam teaches jihad against them if they refuse to accept the “call” to convert. Far from being extremists “who have perverted one of the world’s great religions,” as Obama scolded, the proliferating jihadist outfits that are kidnapping, torturing, raping, beheading, and enslaving people around the globe are acting on the doctrines and past practices of Islam’s founding fathers.</p>
<p>So Obama might think that their “nightmarish vision . . . would divide the world into adherents and infidels,” but it is traditional, orthodox Islam that divides the world into the <i>dar al harb</i>, the “house of war” against which the faithful must wage jihad, and the <i>dar al islam</i>, the “house of Islam,” the ummah of faithful Muslims. Obama may really believe that “No God condones such terror” like the beheadings perpetrated by Islamic State, but it is the Koran, the literal words of Allah, that says <span style="color: #272727;">at 8.12: “</span>I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.”</p>
<p>Such “willful blindness,” as Andrew McCarthy has called it, to the traditional motivations of today’s jihadists depends on clichéd lies like those Obama trades in. Perhaps that blindness explains his astonishing praise in his U.N. speech for Sheikh Abdallah Bin Bayyah, whose group has endorsed Hamas, who supported a 2004 fatwa calling on the faithful to murder U.S. soldiers in Iraq and another forbidding any “normalization” of Israel, and was associated with an organization whose founder called for “<span style="color: #2f2d2f;">the death of Jews and Americans.”</span></p>
<p>Then there is the last refuge of the morally addled, moral equivalency. In his remarks on the Arab war against Israel, Obama can’t resist this cowardly cop out. Speaking of the endless and fruitless “peace process,” Obama intones, “We cannot afford to turn away from this effort––not when rockets are fired at innocent Israelis, or the lives of so many Palestinian children are taken from us in Gaza.” Of course, it is not Israelis “taking” these children, it is the Hamas jihadists who use them as human shields, sacrificing their own children in order to gin up international condemnations in order to isolate Israel. Worse yet, such a sentence completely ignores the most important dimension of this violence: the decades of wars and terrorist attacks instigated by Arabs whose doctrinal hatred of Jews has compelled them since 1947 &#8212; when they violated a U.N. resolution with impunity–– to serially refuse a state for the Palestinian Arabs or agree to “two states living side by side, in peace and security,” yet another stale cliché useful for pretending to say something when one has nothing important to say. In reality, the Palestinian Arabs have made it clear that what they want is to destroy Israel.</p>
<p>Yet nothing matches the surreal moral idiocy of Obama’s next indulgence of moral equivalency:</p>
<blockquote><p>I realize that America’s critics will be quick to point out that at times we too have failed to live up to our ideals; that America has plenty of problems within our own borders. This is true. In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri––where a young man was killed, and a community was divided.</p></blockquote>
<p>Here is one of the staple dogmas of the Progressive mind: the sins and crimes of America that require apologies and reparations, even as the millions of dead, tortured, and imprisoned in other nations are shrugged off. Obama began his presidency with the “apology tour” in which he donned the hair shirt of American guilt for its imperialist depredations, its racist sins, and its global exploitation of others. Then as now, Obama ignores important distinctions. To equate the atrocities of Islamic State or Hamas, or the shooting down of a passenger jet in Ukraine that cost nearly 300 lives, with what probably will turn out to be the justified shooting of a lawbreaker assaulting a police officer, bespeaks either delusion or the sophistic pandering to an audience comprising the representatives of nations most of which are some of the planet’s most brutal and murderous regimes.</p>
<p>This speech proves once again that Obama is not a serious man. His badly trained mind is a warehouse of the sort of leftist and progressive received wisdom and dull clichés that pollute our universities, media, and popular culture. He represents the moral idiocy and fashionable self-loathing that signals to our enemies and rivals that the United States can be had.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>When Activism Kills</title>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 18 Sep 2014 04:50:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The irrational battle against GMO and the human misery left in its wake. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/GMO-Protest.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-241248" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/GMO-Protest-448x350.png" alt="GMO-Protest" width="305" height="238" /></a>Originally published by <a href="http://www.hoover.org/research/when-activism-kills">Defining Ideas</a>. </em></p>
<p>For four decades genetically modified organisms (GMO) have been vilified and caricatured as “Frankenfoods,” the abominations of mad scientists meddling with nature and putting the human race at risk. Currently, over sixty bills have been introduced in over twenty states that will require food labels indicating if the product contains GMO. Globally, over sixty countries restrict or ban GMO outright, including eight E.U. nations and countries in Africa suffering from famine and malnutrition that could be alleviated by genetically modified crops.</p>
<p>Critics accuse GMO of being unhealthy, increasing chemical pollution, threatening other species, causing dangerous side effects, and harming the environment. But as plant molecular biologist Robert Goldberg of UCLA points out, “In spite of hundreds of millions of genetic experiments involving every type of organism on earth, and people eating billions of meals without a problem, we&#8217;ve gone back to being ignorant.”</p>
<p>In fact, no one has yet documented a single case of illness from GM foods, even as about 3,000 people a year in the U.S. die of food-borne illnesses, many of them contracted from “organic” foods. All the dangers of GMO that worry critics are speculations of what might happen in the distant future. Mixing genes from different species, critics contend, will create alterations in the organism that will in the long term produce destructive effects, or genetic material from an engineered crop someday may transfer into the human genome.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, in contrast to these theoretical risks, GM foods are improving people’s lives, especially in the developing world. Food is cheaper, meaning more people are adequately fed. Crops are 20 to 30 percent more productive, so less land is needed to feed more people. Pesticide use is diminishing, lessening damage to the environment. And if the bans on GM crops were not deterring some countries from planting it, Golden Rice, genetically engineered to contain vitamin A, could be reducing the one million deaths, and half a million cases of blindness, occurring in the developing world every year because of vitamin A deficiency.</p>
<p>If GM foods have an “astonishing range of potential applications,” according to James D. Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, that could radically improve daily life for billions in the developing world, why this war against their use? The origins of this animus lie more in culture than in science––in an ancient myth about nature and humanity’s relationship to the environment, and in the angst about technology embedded in those myths.</p>
<p>The Golden Age myth historically arose when more complex urban civilizations developed that increased the distance between people and nature. The Golden Age is that earlier existence before cities, agriculture, and technology, a time idealized as simpler and more fulfilling, closer to a maternal nature that is “untouched by the hoe and unwounded by the plow,” as the Roman poet Ovid put it—a time when nature “herself gave all things,” wrote Ovid. In the Golden Age, there was no crime or sickness, no war or competition for wealth, no oppressive social or political institutions.</p>
<p>But this paradise is lost, and the human race degenerates into the Iron Age, a time of wickedness, crime, hard work, war, disease, private property, and greed, the “cursed love of possessing,” as Ovid called it. Key to this degeneration is the rise of technology, particularly sea-faring, metallurgy, agriculture, and mining. Already in antiquity the contrast is set: the idealized, lost peaceful world of life in harmony with nature, and the miserable present world of crime, sickness, and war.</p>
<p>This myth has been a powerful constant in Western literature and thought. In the early nineteenth century, the impact of industrialization and urbanization on the environment and social life seemingly confirmed this ancient wisdom. In contrast to what English poet William Blake called the “satanic mills,” pristine nature beckoned as the restorative of a more authentic existence. William Wordsworth’s memories of the rural landscape, for example, give solace to a life that “mid the din/ of towns and cities” is stunted by the “fretful stir/ Unprofitable, and the fever of the world.” In reality, of course, fantasies of a benign nature ignore the chronic malnutrition, early death, daily violence, famine, disease, and constant pain of life before the advances of technology.</p>
<p>The idealizations of nature remain powerful today. Much of the leftist critique of globalized capitalism recycles with a veneer of Marxist theory the demonization of technology and industrialism that first appears in the myth of the Iron Age. “All natural,” “organic,” and “no GMO” are labels that savvy marketers use to sell food. And of course, the stock-in-trade of dystopian science fiction is the mad scientist whose unnatural creations threaten to destroy the earth and the human race.</p>
<p>The inherent dangers and wickedness of technology and industrialism will lead, environmentalists argue, to apocalyptic destruction caused by man’s unnatural alterations of the natural world, whether these result from GM crops or pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The contemporary twist on these traditional motifs is the patina of scientific research layered over mythic longings and anxieties. Yet despite those pretensions to scientific precision and rigor, the obsession with potential risks has obscured the proven advances new technologies have made, particularly in food production.</p>
<p>Inorganic fertilizers, for example, are often decried as dangerous and “unnatural.” Part of the appeal of “organic” foods comes from their claim that no such fertilizers are used, implying that there is some danger to them. In fact, a 2012 Stanford University meta-analysis of existing studies found that organic foods carried no significant health or nutritional benefits. Moreover, the animus against inorganic fertilizers ignores the role they have played in increasing food production and reducing famine in the developing world.</p>
<p>The father of the “green revolution,” Norman Borlaug, saved perhaps a billion lives across the globe with his high-yield agricultural techniques using artificially engineered plant varieties and inorganic fertilizers. In India, the yield of wheat per acre went from 800 pounds in 1963 to 6,000 pounds today. As a result, 100 million acres of virgin land did not have to be cleared and farmed to feed a growing population. Yet the international environmentalism movement constantly opposed Borlaug, just as it is today blocking the development of GM crops in Africa.</p>
<p>GMO technology promises to be the next agricultural revolution, one that can increase yields even further, reduce the use of pesticides, roll back deforestation, and provide not just calories but needed nutrition to billions across the planet. Are there possible risks and unforeseen consequences? Of course there are, for nothing humans do is risk-free. Our network of roads and highways confers numerous social and economic benefits, yet it costs 33,000 deaths and many more injuries every year. Hospitals save millions of lives, yet medical mistakes and misdiagnoses kill over 100,000 people a year. Those are costs we accept and risks we run every day, most of us without noticing, let alone obsessing over them. The rational approach is to weigh benefits against risks, always with the fundamental aim of improving life for the greatest number of people both now and in the future.</p>
<p>The irrational battle against GMO is just one front in a larger environmentalist war against the modern world. Climate change is another, one equally reflective of the dislike of industrialism and capitalism, which have created and distributed more wealth to more people than was even imaginable a century ago. The attack on hydraulic fracturing, part of the war against carbon, irrationally harms its own goal to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide, for the switch from coal to natural gas, which emits half the carbon of coal, to generate electricity can “green” the environment more than anything the environmental lobby does. Particularly in the developing world, economic development, which for now is dependent on carbon-based energy, is the best way to protect the environment in the long run. Spending money on improving the environment is the luxury of those who aren’t worried about their children eating for one more day.</p>
<p>Armed more with an ancient myth about a lost natural paradise, the critics of GMO are keeping billions in the developing world from enjoying the nutrition and adequate food that Western elites take for granted. As Borlaug said before his death, such critics have “never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they&#8217;d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”</p>
<p>Those who have the luxury of abundant and reliable food can afford to decry the economic expansion that is the developing world’s best hope of mitigating the myriad problems afflicting their people. It is criminal for rich Westerners to agitate for policies that keep the benefits of biotechnology from those desperate for its boons, and to pass the costs of their idealism onto those least able to suffer the consequences.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Buckley Program Stands Up for Free Speech</title>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 17 Sep 2014 04:43:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Ayaan Hirsi Ali triumphs over campus hate groups. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/6a00d83451c36069e20168eb9dbef6970c.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240943" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/6a00d83451c36069e20168eb9dbef6970c.jpg" alt="6a00d83451c36069e20168eb9dbef6970c" width="314" height="259" /></a>The William F. Buckley Program at Yale University lately showed bravery unusual for an academic institution. It has refused to be bullied by the Muslim Students Association and its demand that the Buckley Program rescind an invitation to Ayaan Hirsi Ali to speak on campus September 15. Hirsi Ali is the vocal Somalian critic of Islamic doctrine whose life has been endangered for condemning the theologically sanctioned oppression of women in Islamic culture. Unlike Brandeis University, which recently rescinded an honorary degree to be given to Hirsi Ali after complaints from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Buckley Program rejected both the MSA’s initial demand, and a follow up one that Hirsi Ali share the stage with one of her critics.</p>
<p>The Buckley Program is a rare instance of an academic organization staying true to the ideals of free speech, academic freedom, and the “free play of the mind on all subjects,” as Matthew Arnold defined liberal education. Most of our best universities have sacrificed these ideals on the altar of political correctness and identity politics. Anything that displeases or discomforts campus special interest groups––mainly those predicated on being the alleged victims of American oppression–– must be proscribed as “slurs” or “hateful,” even if what’s said is factually true. No matter that these groups are ideologically driven and use their power to silence critics and limit speech to their own self-serving and duplicitous views, the modus operandi of every illiberal totalitarian regime in history. The spineless university caves in to their demands, incoherently camouflaging their craven betrayal of the First Amendment and academic freedom as “tolerance” and “respect for diversity.”</p>
<p>In the case of Islam, however, this betrayal is particularly dangerous. For we are confronting across the world a jihadist movement that grounds its violence in traditional Islamic theology, jurisprudence, and history. Ignoring those motives and their sanction by Islamic doctrine compromises our strategy and tactics in defeating the jihadists, for we cripple ourselves in the war of ideas. Worse yet, Islamic triumphalism and chauvinism–– embodied in the Koranic verse that calls Muslims “the best of nations raised up for the benefit of men” because they “enjoin the right and forbid the wrong and believe in Allah”–– is confirmed and strengthened by the way our elite institutions like universities and the federal government quickly capitulate to special interest groups who demand that we endorse only their sanitized and often false picture of Islam. Such surrender confirms the jihadist estimation of the West as the “weak horse,” as bin Laden said, a civilization with “foundations of straw” whose wealth and military power are undermined by a collective failure of nerve and loss of morale.</p>
<p>This process of exploiting the moral degeneration of the West has been going on now for 25 years. It begins, as does the rise of modern jihadism, with the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian Islamic revolution. The key event took place in February 1989, when Khomeini issued a fatwa, based on Koran 9.61, against Indian novelist Salman Rushdie for his novel <i>The Satanic Verses</i>, which was deemed “against Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran,” as Khomeini said. Across the world enraged Muslims rioted and bombed bookstores, leaving over 20 people dead. More significant in the long run was the despicable reaction of many in the West to this outrage against freedom of speech and the rule of law, perpetrated by the most important and revered political and religious leader of a major Islamic nation.</p>
<p>Abandoning their principles, bookstores refused to stock the novel, and publishers delayed or canceled editions. Muslims in Western countries publicly burned copies of Rushdie’s novel and encouraged his murder with impunity. Eminent British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper suggested Rushdie deserved such treatment. Thirteen British Muslim barristers filed a formal complaint against the author. In their initial reactions, Western government officials were hesitant and timorous. The U.S. embassy in Pakistan eagerly assured Muslims that “the U.S. government in no way supports or associates itself with any activity that is in any sense offensive or insulting to Islam.&#8221;</p>
<p>Khomeini’s fatwa and the subsequent violent reaction created what Daniel Pipes calls the “Rushdie rules,” a speech code that privileges Islam over revered Western traditions of free speech that still are operative in the case of all other religions. Muslims now will determine what counts as an “insult” or a “slur,” and their displeasure, threats, and violence will police those definitions and punish offenders. Even reporting simple facts of history or Islamic doctrine can be deemed an offense and bring down retribution on violators. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for example, earned the wrath of Muslims in part for her contribution to Theo van Gogh’s film <i>Submission</i>, which projected Koranic verses regarding women on the bodies of abused women. Van Gogh, of course, was brutally murdered in the streets of Amsterdam. And this is the most important dimension of the “Rushdie rules”: violence will follow any violation of whatever some Muslims deem to be “insulting” to Islam, even facts. In effect, Western law has been trumped by the shari’a ban on blaspheming Islam, a crime punishable by death.</p>
<p>The result is the sorry spectacle of groveling and apology we see almost daily from our government, the entertainment industry, and worse yet, universities. Trivial slights and offenses that civilized nations leave to the market place of ideas to sort out are elevated into “slurs” and “hate speech” if some Muslim organization deems them so. A reflexive self-censorship has arisen in American society, one based on fear of violent retribution or bad publicity harmful to profits and careers.</p>
<p>Thus the government officially proscribes words like “jihad” or “Muslim terrorist” from its documents and training materials in order to avoid offending Muslims. Similarly the Muslim terrorist, a fixture in recent history since the PLO started highjacking airliners in the 60s, has nearly disappeared from television and movies, replaced by Russians, white supremacists, and brainwashed Americans. And when a Muslim terrorist does appear, his motivations and violence are rationalized as the understandable response to the grievous offenses against his faith and people committed by the U.S. and Israel. Islam is airbrushed from the plot, as in the recent series <i>Tyrant</i>, a dramatization of a fictional Arab Muslim state that somehow manages to ignore Islam as a political force. More seriously, universities disinvite speakers at the faintest hint of protest from Muslim organizations, even as they accept Gulf-state petrodollars to create “Middle East Studies” programs that frequently function as apologists and enablers of terrorist violence.</p>
<p>“Free men have free tongues,” as the Athenian tragedian Sophocles said. One of the pillars of political freedom is free speech. When the ability to speak freely in the public square is extended beyond an elite to a large variety of people with clashing views and ideals, speech necessarily becomes rough and uncivil. Feelings get hurt, passions are aroused, and language becomes coarse and abusive. That’s the price we pay for letting a lot of people speak their minds, and for creating a process in which truth and good ideas can emerge from all this rambunctious, divisive conversation. But when we carve out a special niche for one group, provide it with its own rules, and protect it even from statements of uncomfortable facts, then we compromise that foundational right to have our say without any retribution other than a counterargument. So three cheers for the Buckley Program. It has stood up against intimidation and defended one of our most important and precious freedoms.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Foreign Policy of Empty Words</title>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Sep 2014 04:30:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[For America's enemies, actions speak louder than rhetoric. ]]></description>
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<p><em>“When force threatens, talk is no good.”</em></p>
<p>That line from John Ford’s classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance contains wisdom everyone from peasant to king knew before our modern age and its smug illusions. Go back 2,400 years, and you can hear it from the Athenian orator Demosthenes as he chastises his fellow citizens for responding to Macedonian aggression by “forever debating the question and never making any progress” and issuing “empty decrees.” “All words, apart from action,” Demosthenes warned, “seem vain and idle, especially from Athenian lips: for the greater our reputation for a ready tongue, the greater the distrust it inspires in all men.” We’ve had several years now of watching Obama and his foreign policy team prove this eternal truth as they have feebly and fecklessly responded to crisis after crisis in Ukraine, Syria, and a dozen other venues.</p>
<p>Just in the last few weeks we have heard a lot of bluster about Islamic State, the rampaging jihadists in northern Iraq who have left in their wake a trail of traditional Muslim mayhem–- sectarian cleansing, forced conversion, slaving, rape, torture, slaughter, and Koran-inspired beheadings, including two American journalists. In response to these decisive deeds, Obama has thundered that he will “degrade and destroy” the “cancer.” In an op-ed co-written with British Prime Minister David Cameron, he has vowed that the allies “will not be cowed by barbaric killers.” His vice president Joe Biden, with his usual trite hyperbole, has threatened, “We will follow them to the gate of hell until they are brought to justice.” And Secretary of State John Kerry, after the beheading of journalist James Foley, has warned, “The world must know that the United States of America will never back down in the face of such evil. ISIL and the wickedness it represents must be destroyed, and those responsible for this heinous, vicious atrocity will be held accountable.” “By whom” is the question the passive voice artfully leaves unanswered.</p>
<p>To paraphrase Demosthenes, the greater this administration’s ready tongue, the greater distrust it inspires in our allies, and the greater boldness it creates in our enemies. Or to put it in my old man’s more earthy terms when I smarted off, “Don’t let your mouth write checks your ass can’t cash.” Obama has been bouncing foreign policy checks from Ukraine to the South China Sea, and most points in between.</p>
<p>Indeed, the deeds necessary to back these loud boasts have been few. That should not surprise us, since Obama has said and done much to tell the world that we will not act decisively, relying instead on verbal processes and gestures of force like bombing some trucks to create a telegenic illusion of action. He started his presidency with the “apology tour,” on which he called the U.S. “arrogant, dismissive, derisive,” confessed that we are “still working through some of our own darker periods in our history,” proclaimed that we “will be willing to acknowledge past errors where those errors have been made,” confessed that “too often we set [our] principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford” and so “we went off course,” and promised that we “are working to improve our democracy.” How could such a tainted and flawed state have the moral authority to act with the confidence and decisiveness that his recent rhetoric implies?</p>
<p>Likewise his domestic deeds have undercut the capacity to enforce his tough foreign policy words. Because of cuts to the military budget––inspired in part by his desire to reduce the U.S. to merely one unexceptional member of an international coalition that supposedly can maintain global order and create collective security––our military capacity is destined “to be an increasingly hollow force,” as Bret Stephens writes, “with the Army as small as it was in 1940, before conscription; a Navy the size it was in 1917, before our entry into World War I; an Air Force flying the oldest—and smallest—fleet of planes in its history; and a nuclear arsenal no larger than it was during the Truman administration.”</p>
<p>Commensurate with this undercutting of America’s armed forces have been Obama’s empty bluster and careless language, something dangerous coming from the Commander-in-Chief of the greatest military power in history. “Leading from behind” in Libya, the vanishing “red line” in Syria, the juvenile scolding of Putin “that in the 21st century, the borders of Europe cannot be redrawn with force, that international law matters,” the “no strategy” gaffe about the “jayvee” jihadists of the Islamic State–– all were instantly refuted and discredited by facts on the ground created by hard men of brutal action. Libya is not a democracy, but the jihadist version of Road Warrior. Syria’s Bashar al Assad is winning in Syria by slaughtering close to 200,000 men, women, and children. The Islamic State still controls northern Iraq and Syria, and still sits at the gates of Baghdad. And Putin has snatched Crimea and is closing in on eastern Ukraine. Throw in Obama’s penchant for berating allies like Israel, ignoring the interests of others like Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, undercutting vulnerable states like Poland and the Czech Republic, and appeasing genocidal mullahs in Iran, and is it any surprise that his words “inspire greater distrust” in everyone except our enemies?</p>
<p>Of course, Obama’s habit of using words to substitute for politically risky deeds is universal in the West. We just saw a NATO confab in which a lot of big talk for the reporters end up so much smoke when the details are parsed. NATO leaders have agreed “to establish a so-called spearhead force of several thousand troops designed to move into trouble spots at short notice,” as The Wall Street Journal reported. Talk about closing the barn door after the Russian bear has got loose. I’m sure Putin is trembling over the thought of “several thousand” NATO troops that someday might materialize to stop his adventurism. If NATO isn’t acting now, what makes anyone think this special “spearhead force” will act in the future, even if NATO members do create it? As Charles Krauthammer writes, the force “is a feeble half-measure. Not only will troops have to be assembled, dispatched, transported and armed as the fire bell is ringing, but the very sending will require some affirmative and immediate decision by NATO. Try getting that done. The alliance is famous for its reluctant, slow and fractured decision-making.”</p>
<p>And haven’t we heard this sort of braggadocio before from Europe? Remember the 60,000-man “rapid reaction force” the EU was going to create so that they could avoid any further embarrassment of having “cowboy” Americans pull their foreign policy irons out of the fire, as happened in Bosnia and Kosovo? Given that only three European NATO members honor the 2% of GDP minimum for military spending, it’s unlikely that the money for creating this alleged “deterrent” will ever be budgeted, not with EU economies in the doldrums, and widespread grumbling over “austerity” budgets. No wonder that, as the Journal reports, “most details of the force . . . remained to be settled.” But don’t worry, NATO leaders have “committed” to spending the 2% on defense they “committed” to in 2002 and subsequently ignored. Better read the fine print: the commitment is non-binding and will be implemented over a 10-year period. Who knows how much more of the old Soviet Empire Vladimir will have taken back by then.</p>
<p>“Word, words, words,” as Hamlet says. But words useful for politicians who want to avoid the risk and uncertainty of action, and don’t want to face disgruntled voters at the polls. And when this perennial calculus is joined to the progressive belief that an exploitative, racist, neo-imperialist America is disqualified by its sins from being the guarantor of global order and stability, you get the world we are rapidly becoming––a Darwinian jungle of feral violence, illiberal hegemons, thug-nations, and nuclear-armed terrorist states.</p>
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		<title>&#8216;To Hell With the Constitution!&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/to-hell-with-the-constitution/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=to-hell-with-the-constitution</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Sep 2014 04:50:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=239942</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The long road of soft tyranny that led to Obama. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/600x393.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239944" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/600x393-450x347.jpg" alt="600x393" width="289" height="223" /></a>In 1902 Theodore Roosevelt intervened in a strike by Pennsylvania coal miners, exceeding his Constitutional authority as president. When this was pointed out to him by Republican House whip James E. Watson, Roosevelt allegedly yelled, “To hell with the Constitution when the people want coal!”</p>
<p>This outburst reflected the novel Progressive view of the Chief Executive. Instead of the Constitution’s limited powers focused on specific needs, such as national defense, beyond the capacity of the individual states or local governments to address, the President needed more expansive authority in order to serve the “people.” Over 100 years later, Barack Obama has governed on the same assumption, one that undermines the Constitution’s structure of balanced powers and limited government, and puts at risk our political freedom and autonomy.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;"><span style="color: #000000;">In January of this year Obama famously asserted, much less honestly than did T.R., his willingness to shed Constitutional limits: </span>“We’re not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help they need. I’ve got a pen and I’ve got phone.” And he’s been true to his belief during his nearly six years in office. He has changed his own signature legislation, Obamacare, 42 times. He has also used his “pen and phone” to change immigration laws, gun laws, labor laws, environmental policy, and many other statutes that should be the purview of the legislative branch, to which the Constitution gives the law-making power.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">Other presidents, of course, have used signing statements and executive orders. But Obama has pushed this traditional prerogative far beyond the bounds that presidents in the past were usually careful to respect. But the ideas behind this expansion of power are not peculiar to Obama, and transcend any one man. They come from the Progressive worldview that rejects the Constitution’s philosophical vision of humans as driven by conflicting “passions and interests,” and eager to amass power in order to gratify both. The Progressives, on the contrary, believe that human nature can be improved, and that technocrats armed with new knowledge of human behavior and motivations can be entrusted with the concentrated power necessary for managing that improvement and solving the new problems created by industrialism, technology, and the other novelties of modernity.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">In terms of the federal government, the key to this new vision is the executive branch, led by an activist president. Woodrow Wilson was quite explicit about these ideas. In 1890 he wrote of the need for a “leader of men” who has “such sympathetic and penetrative insight as shall enable him to discern quite unerringly the motives which move other men <i>in the mass</i>.” He knows “what it is that lies waiting to be stirred in the minds and purposes of groups and masses of men.” This sympathy is one “whose power is to command, to command by knowing its instrument,” and the leader possessing this “sympathy” cares only “for the external uses to which they [people] may be put.”</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">More frightening still are Wilson’s comments further expanding on this “sympathy.” “Whoever would effect a change in a modern constitutional government must first educate his fellow-citizens to <i>want</i> some change. That done, he must persuade them to want the particular change he wants. He must first make public opinion willing to listen and then see to it that it listens to the right things. He must stir it up to search for an opinion, and then manage to put the right opinion in its way.” Gone are the notions that free people decide their own political fate and choose representatives to serve their interests and principles, their autonomy protected by the Constitutional structure of checks and balances. Now an empowered elite presumably wiser about human nature will, like Plato’s Guardians, manipulate the people’s opinions so that they make the “right” choice. These ideas are on a continuum that at the extreme end lie Mussolini’s fascism and Lenin’s communism.</p>
<p><span style="color: #272727;">The president, then, must transcend the Constitution’s outmoded limits on government power. In 1908, for example, Wilson complained that the president was merely a “legal executive” and “guiding authority in the application of the law and the execution of policy,” which is the Constitution’s charge that the president “</span>shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” For Wilson, this was too limited an authority, for the president could only veto bad laws, and was not “given an opportunity to make good ones.” And explicitly rejecting the Constitution’s vision of clashing “factions” driven by conflicting “passions and interests,” Wilson writes, “You cannot compound a successful government out of antagonisms.” So much for Madison’s governing principle in <i>Federalist </i>51 that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” The Progressive collectivist “people” possessing uniform interests must have a “President as the unifying force in our complex system.”</p>
<p>We see in Wilson’s writings another Progressive assumption still with us today: defining Americans as an abstract, collectivist “people.” This unitary “people” rejects the Founders’ recognition of America’s great variety of economic interests, passions such as religion, and regional folkways that characterize the citizens of the United States. Indeed, it is just this variety that threatened political freedom, for a flawed human nature is intoxicated by power, and always seeks more power in order to gratify its peculiar needs and interests by forming “factions” of the like-minded. As John Adams wrote in 1787, the “selfish passions in the generality of men” are the “strongest.” Knowing that this selfish inclination is rooted in a human nature unchanged since the days of Athens, and so cannot be improved or eliminated, the Founders sought merely to balance faction against faction so that no one faction can amass enough power to threaten the freedom of all.</p>
<p>The proponents of centralized power, however, require a more homogeneous “people” to justify expanding government power. Such a “people” will have similar interests that only the central government can effectively identify and serve. Interests like “social justice,” “social duties,” and “social efficiency,” cannot be fulfilled by local or state governments, or by the parochial aims of civil society or the market, or by churches divided by sectarian beliefs. The federal technocrats of government agencies, more knowledgeable than the people about what they really want and need, must be given the power to trump those clashing local interests and manage polices that serve the larger “social” good––as defined not by the people in all their variety and complexity, but by federal bureaucrats and technocrats.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;"><span style="color: #000000;">Go back to Obama’s “pen and phone” statement and read what follows to see this same collectivist vision at work: </span>“And I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward in helping to make sure our kids are getting the best education possible, making sure that our businesses are getting the kind of support and help they need to grow and advance, to make sure that people are getting the skills that they need to get those jobs that our businesses are creating.” The president assumes that in a country of some 330 million people, “the help they need” and their views on improving job creation, education, or job training are all the same, and thus one man can formulate policies that advance them, cutting out the several hundred representative of Congress, and state and local governments.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">The obvious danger is one evident from the 20<sup>th</sup> century’s history of totalitarianism from the Bolsheviks to the Khmer Rouge. Elites convinced of their superior knowledge and insight into human behavior and the proper aims people should pursue, demand the coercive power to achieve these goods. But true to the Founders’ vision of a flawed human nature, power is “of an encroaching nature,” as Madison and Washington both warned. It intoxicates and corrupts those who possess it. Moreover, it requires weakening the autonomy and freedom of the people, whose various interests will contradict the “vision of the anointed,” as Thomas Sowell dubs them, who claim to know what’s best for everybody, and use their power to neutralize or eliminate those who resist this superior wisdom.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">We need to recognize that for over a century this Progressive vision has revolutionized the federal government, which now has a size, scope, cost, and coercive power that would have horrified the Founders. The ideas underlying this vision––for example, the notion that the federal government and its agencies are better able to “solve problems” than are local and state governments, or civil society––are taken for granted as self-evident even by many Republicans. Thus focusing on the spectacular incompetence of Barack Obama can blind us to the dangers that will continue after he has left office. Obama vowed to “fundamentally transform America,” but that transformation had started long before he became president.</p>
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