The Armchair Historian

The Writ Against Newt & Its Riposte

2011-12-17T11:49:00.000-08:00

The writ against Newt is that he overstates. Sure there are other issues packed in his infamous baggage, but in a skyrocketing campaign powered by debate performances, the man's penchant for hyperbole is central to the diatribe that he's untrustworthy. Even his Freddie Mac apostasy centers on his exuberant public statements as much as on the fees he accepted.

What's less acknowledged is the extent to which he's overachieved. Seriously, who is the most successful Republican of the past half century? Ronald Reagan. Obviously.

Who's second? Newt Gingrich. Without him, Clinton has an economically failed Presidency. An accomplishment like that is an indictment to a grasping backbencher like Michele Bachman, and made him the bete noire of smart Left Wing America. (Or is that Left Wing Amerika? Kidding. Just kidding.)

2012 voters in their twenties barely remember 1990s politics anyway, so they'll learn fresh how Newt's leadership was essential to building the best economy in American history and even more importantly to increasing American happiness. Happiness successfully pursued? Yep, jobs, jobs and more jobs, millions of welfare recipients moving to payrolls, crime plunging. Morning in America? Hell, Newt's Contract with America led to a decade of gloriously sunny days in America.

Newt did this while leading the Clinton Presidency from behind. Clinton? That's Bill Clinton. You know, Hillary's husband. So along with Slick Willy, Newt was the last Washington leader to partner with the opposition to achieve undisputed great progress for America. IOW, he's done more than talk a good and occasionally bad game. He's delivered. BIG TIME.

Overachiever. Overstater. I'm willing to accept the latter to gain the former.

Besides, when has it ever been a crime to be a big talker in America? This is the country that gave the world tail-fins and a thousand songs in your pocket. Some hyperbolic optimism, backed up by some 1990s-style overachievement, would do America a world of good right about now.

Be An Apostle For Liberty

2011-05-21T00:42:00.000-07:00

An Open Letter to Mitch Daniels

Be an apostle for liberty. Why is it good, necessary, desired, hard, true, fair, strong, valuable? Explain these, singly then together. Pitch liberty to America, pitch American liberty to the world at large, to the Muslims, to the Socialists, to the oligarchical subjects yearning to be free. Pitch liberty and save the world.

Avoid libertarianism. The extra four syllables confuse things. Stick to liberty. Everybody wants it. Everybody should have it. America should have more of it.

Foreign policy should be based on it. Not blindly. Savvy remains required. Good. Savvy is one quality that no one doubts you possess. In spades.

What does liberty require of us? As individual citizens, as parents, as economic actors, as a Party? Liberty sure isn't free. What are its costs?

What does 21st Century liberty look like? How should it manifest itself online, on phones, in a connected world?

How should liberty be taught? By who, to whom, when and where?

What is government's role in creating the conditions for liberty, in defending it, in promoting it?

Together with your impeccable domestic executive experience, liberty will fully define you by providing a lodestar for a foreign and military policy deeply rooted in the American Dream.

After all, what is the Leader of the Free World but an Apostle for Liberty.

Geithner's Gotta Go

2010-02-21T17:12:00.000-08:00

"Geithner's Gotta Go" has more than just a ring to it. It's necessary. Guy was a bad hire from the gittgo. Never mind that he mangled his own taxes, he's been an ineffective advocate his entire career. Hell, the McCain campaign let Sarah Palin go on CBS about as much as the Fed put Geithner in front of cameras. Why do you think that was?

The only thing the guy can sell is free money to Goldman Sachs.

Fatally, he was the Fed's Man on Wall Street while the Mortgages for Everyone bubble inflated. He fiddled while Rome gorged itself on highly flammable instruments. Money-center institutions - colloquially known as Too-Big-To-Fail - borrowed forty (40!) times their assets to wager on tiny market changes on his watch. Not enough markets? They invented more, some called SIVs, from which the money has since sieved out.

Perhaps Geithner was doing Washington's bidding by not at least flagging such lunacy. Congress wanted lots and lots of mortgages to go out, codifying them in the '92 Legislative Changes to the Community Reinvestment Act. This in turn inflated the government sponsored gut of all bad mortgage policy, those rocking and rolling Government Sponsored Entities themselves - Fannie and Freddie!!!!! Wheewwwwweeee!

Fan and Fred wanted anyone who could fog a mirror into a mortgage. "Into": a preposition normally, a verb when used by mortgage brokers and certain salesmen.

So what'd Wall Street do when the GSEs needed to unload trillions in mortgage credit? Securitize, a fancy word for aggregate, slice and sell. Notice the absence of moral conscience. Aggregate, Slice, Sell.

Coin operated dicks: that's how to think of bond salesmen.

Ignoring the stinking pile of flammable leverage trillions deep behind him (reading a balance sheet being among his deficits), Geithner was positioned as a White Knight to our shiny new President, whose previous executive experience consisted of editing the Harvard Law Review. (As if smarts are all it takes to lead. Track record - a.k.a. successful experience - turns out to be the only solid predictor. Ethnicity turns out to be largely irrelevant. Imagine that.)

So Rahm whispered in the President's ear that Geithner's not simply the best man, he's The Only Man to run Treasury. The. Only. Man. To Run. Our Treasury.

Geithner couldn't adequately explain the situation then, can't adequately explain it now, so ipso facto he doesn't know what he's doing.

"Geithner's Gotta Go" Go, go, go.

Our Treasury holds Our Future, for goodness sakes.

Brown America

2010-01-20T22:33:00.000-08:00

Politicians who lose sight of jobs and defense deserve to lose. Plain and simple.

Though I made a couple dozen Scott Brown for Senate calls Monday and yesterday, I'd not heard him speak till his acceptance party last night. What a party. Mass done itself proud. Ayla put on a hot singing performance before her Dad came out. Doug F-ing Flutie on stage. Man. Hot.

The Brown family certainly upholds the great looks tradition of the Kennedy family.

Gotta love the truck too.

Brown even out-manned the President on the truck after our first hoops playing Prez came in with some weak s**t. Downtown Scotty Brown challenged the Prez and a teammate of his choosing to a game of 2 on 2 vs. the new Republican Senator from Tax-a-chusetts and his BC forward daughter Ayla.

T he scouting report on Ayla: 'Brown was scouted by the staff at Boston College beginning at the age of 15. She made a commitment to the school, and went on to attend BC on a full athletic scholarship. Currently in her senior year, she plays the forward position for the Boston College Eagles, wearing jersey #1. Brown's nickname given to her by her teammates is "Downtown Ayla Brown" because of her ability to sink 3-pointers and lengthy shots and in reference to her father's college basketball nickname "Downtown Scotty Brown".'

Good luck Mr. President. You're going Downtown.

You kidding me? This is the biggest political debut since William Jennings Palin herself introduced the country to lipstick conservatism, topping even young Senator Obama's One America speech at the Kerrey convention. Or was it the Gore convention? There's been so many failed Presidential Democrats.

Unions are the problem that I and so many other independents have with the Democrats. The unions, of course, are the biggest of all losers from Scott Brown's Goliath slaying. That $80 billion payoff on health insurance they just got promised, the one that we non-union members were expected to fund. That would appear to now be out the window.

The other loser is, of course, the Obama Administration, which badly needs to clean house.

Rahm and Axelrod gotta go for political health. Geithner and Summers gotta go for fiscal health. The latter's what they were sent there to fix.

So now we got us a whole new Bay State Senator.

I like him. A lot. Like his truck, like his ladies, like his "no tax money so terrorists can lawyer up" trope. Like the Lt. Col. JAG Corp thing. Like it all. A lot.

So as a Californian let me just say to my Bay State friends and family: thank you, thank you very much.

Doc Dean speaks the truth

2009-08-30T19:08:00.000-07:00

The ever passionate Howard Dean, chairman of the DNC, spoke the truth this week in most welcome fashion. He admitted that the reason jackpot justice reform isn't in the Dem's healthcare overhaul is because the trial lawyers won't stand for it and they are too strong to challenge.

Doc Dean also said that the bill is "enormous." Ya think? 1,300 pages. Yep, that's a hella big and complex set of rules, regs, loopholes, committees, commissions, taxing authorities, inspectors general, special assistants, and other people from the government here to help.

So John Edwards and his fellow trial lawyers get to exercise their veto rights and we get 1,300 pages worth of enormous government. Who's the winner here?

Why People Are Mad: Near Death Experiences and Sacred Cows

2009-08-09T12:45:00.000-07:00

Obama supporters - convinced of the intellectual superiority of their left-side position - are aghast that the tools first used by Democratic operatives - MeetUp and community organizing - are being used against their man's initiatives, especially his epic attempt to reengineer 1/6th of the world's largest economy while simultaneously effecting a dramatic tax increase on energy - another fundamental swath of the economy - in the midst of the worst downturn in a century and trillion dollar deficits (TRILLION!!!). Why would anyone be concerned?, the President's supporters wonder. Must be a devious right wing plot. Or even a racial thing. Yeah, that's it, it's a racial thing (says a Nobel laureate).

Here's why people are downright livid over the healthcare coup: The President and his minions spent most of the summer declaring they needed the healthcare law - complete with Medicare for All - out of Congress by the August break that began last week. After this political near death experience, it should be no surprise that doubting Thomases amongst the citizenry are thanking their lucky stars they get a chance to weigh in AT ALL. (The aforementioned Nobel laureate seems to have missed this particular writing on the wall.)

The problem began well before Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid failed to deliver the corpse of our current healthcare system to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue prior to Nantucket time. The problem began when the President went all Nixonian by declaring two top priorities that in fact are not his top two priorities. Coverage for All and Cost Containment über alles he said. Witness nothing in those laudable goals about public options. Witness the fiscal rectitude. So far so good.

What then are the top priorities of the President and his minions? A public option and retention of two of the top fundamental economic distortions in the system. Woah Dude, someone just tried to pull a fast one on us! Ya think we might be a little skeptical going forward.

Skip the competition issue for the moment, public or private. Focus instead on the most important economic flaw of our entire healthcare system: People with jobs get government subsidized healthcare and people who work for themselves or are unemployed don't. This is arguably the most regressive tax treatment in the entire blasted system. And that's saying something.

There's no dodging - unless you're President of the United States - the need to remedy this fundamental distortion. Our alternatives are to eliminate the payroll deductibility of health insurance or provide a tax credit to everyone, or some combination of the two. Avoiding this choice avoids reality.

Another fundamentally huge economic distortion is the jackpot justice and defensive medicine that are the bitter fruits of malpractice shysters run wild.

Avoiding these issues brings us to the Democratic Party's sacred cows: unions and trial lawyers. Unions - especially government employee unions - don't want their benefits taxed, and won't even enter the debate to see if they can get the deduction returned to them in the form of a credit. They've gone to the mattresses on the issue, as have their ideological soulmates in the West Wing.

Trial lawyers are moneybags when it comes to Democratic party coffers. How do you think silver tongued John Edwards paid for his 102-acre estate, his run for President and hush money for his mistress? Trial lawyer extraordinaire, he sweet talked juries into megahuge pain and suffering awards. He's got other problems now but his fellow sharks will eat the head off anyone who tries to mess with their ability to sell a jury on a $50 million sob story.

And so we suffer on with malpractice premiums that cripple women's medicine, that cause massively expensive defensive medicine, and that generally suck the lifeblood out of the system.

The Left has at least finally come clean about their reverence for government funded healthcare. After all, don't seniors love Medicare? No doubt many do, but that doesn't make it any less a fiscal disaster. Remember The Day After Tomorrow, that ridiculous climate change scare fest from a couple of years ago. Massive snow drifts buried New York in that movie. Picture those drifts as the debt that Medicare and its ilk are piling on our country and you'll see the situation more clearly. If you're not shivering, you're delusional.

Now to competition: As it currently stands, you can buy California peaches from New York and Florida oranges from Chicago, but you can't buy health insurance from outside your state. What's more, each state gets to make its own rules about what kind of insurance gets offered and what must be covered. I assume the Public Option wouldn't have to play that states rights shit. After all, the Geniuses in the Obama Administration know best (so says Hollywood schmuck Bill Maher). So presumably the Public Option would have yet another fundamental competitive advantage over the money grubbing private sector, to go along with its statutory money grubbing (i.e., cheaply funding its operations on the public dime), the same model that failed so spectacularly at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. What could go wrong here?

The solution - of course - is to remove artificial barriers to competition. Not between public and private. That boundary makes perfect sense and needs to be respected. Rather remove the barriers that keep the nation's hundreds of insurance companies from competing with one another. It'll be "Low Prices Everyday" in no time. But NOOOOOOOOOO says the President and his minions. Can't have companies taking the credit for saving peoples lives. That's what savior presidents from the Left Wing are supposed to do.

So that's why people are mad.

I ain't no Nobel laureate, but the situation don't seem to call for one either.

The End of the Beginning Sets Up 2008 Presidential Election

2006-10-14T22:50:00.000-07:00

It is not about George Bush. That’s the real inconvenient truth of the poorly named ‘War on Terror.’ Rather, it is about a fifty year conflict in which we are at most one decade along, a war against what we can pray is the last totalitarian movement the natural world will see. This started before George W. and he might be just a footnote by the time it is done.

And yet The Left, in a patented bit of self-defeatism, has met the enemy and found it to be us. Brilliant. Let’s let Fascist Islam win, in all its stultifying, life-defying, women subjugating, no rest until all non-Islamic infidels are dead or praying five times a day, living-in-the-false-past brutality. Looking for a state of denial? This qualifies.

Clash of civilizations? You bet. Not with the (vast, we hope) majority of Muslims, but with the alarmingly large (and growing) Fascist Islamic cohorts that refuse to accept modernity, in all its limiting and limitless messiness.

Nor is this simply a West or a Jew or a Christian v. Muslim issue. Sadly, in the grandest possible way, it is a Muslim v. Non-Muslim issue. After all, the Taliban came to global notice in March 2001 when they saw fit to dynamite two ancient, huge Afghani statues of Buddha. (The Buddha, who in the world hates the Buddha?) And it was Islamic radicals who blew up the Indian parliament some years ago, bringing India and Pakistan to the brink of nuclear war. (BTW, if India didn’t nuke Pakistan then, why fuss now about dropping the pretense of their possession of nuclear weapons? Remember, mature democracies don’t threaten offensive nuclear war. Only totalitarian or pseudo-democratic states like Iran, North Korea and Saddam’s Iraq are prone to such toxic bombast.)

Yes, nothing is simple. Saudi petrodollars – fed by American SUVs – fund Wahhabi schools that teach a benighted vision of Islamic superiority and vengeance to millions of youngsters the world over. But complexity doesn’t change the most fundamental of universal standards of decency, the first corollary of the Golden Rule: thou shall not target civilians. (Here is a simple rule of thumb for telling the good guys from the bad: the good guys try to avoid collateral damage, while the bad guys consider collateral damage the goal.)

On 9/11 we stared into the valley of death, to all appearances the beginning of the end. Turns out it wasn’t the end, just the mass launch of a new beginning. Five years later, after ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, and serious rear-guard skirmishes in London, Madrid, Amsterdam, Ankara, Paris and Bali, we are finally, painfully, bloodily at the end of that beginning.

Now the Middle Game begins. To get your bearings, compare the current IslamoFascist War (IFW) to the Cold War, its closest recent analog. Five years into that East-v-West conflict, our last Middle American rube of a President had awkwardly if in the end magnificently laid down the strategic markers of success: containment and Mutual Assured Destruction. Dismissed during his presidency, other than for one all-time-great photo opp, Truman has since risen to near Rushmorian proportions.

A strongly martial Democrat, of the kind now extinct, Give ‘em Hell Harry was broadly considered a dufus and an embarrassment by the Ned Lamont crowd of his day. Of course in those days the comfortable crowd at country clubs in Connecticut and elsewhere were solid Republicans.

Today’s comfortable Democrats are so dismissive of George W. many can’t bring themselves to even look at him, diverting themselves from the wolf at the door by fixating on a transitional character, the first of what will likely be five US Presidents during the full run of the IFW.

Consider Truman’s Cold War successors: Eisenhower did okay, JFK a bit of this a bit of that during two and a half years, LBJ disaster, Nixon self-inflicted disaster, Ford mostly stayed on his feet, Carter wimped out both economically and martially, literally leaving the Iranian hostage situation on Reagan’s doorstep. Then, finally, a hero. Ronald Reagan, to the everlasting chagrin of the Left, immediately faced down a young Ahmadinejad, then ably and mostly elegantly won the End Game of the Cold War, bringing a fifty year conflict to a very successful conclusion with nary a nuke fired. A generation of Democratic sophisticates still can’t bring themselves to accept it.

Enough history: back to the future. How many Republicans and how many Democrats are going to follow George W. Bush before Beirut becomes a vacation hotspot again, before Amman is a thriving regional hub and before Cairo becomes a leading light of academia and engineering? In short, until the IFW is over?

The next couple of Presidents, assuming each serves two terms, will have the Middle Game to play. Their job will be to not mess up things any worse than they are, setting up the End Game for IFW President Number Four, if we’re lucky.

Unlike the last time someone tried to unseat the sitting wartime President, we can hope that 2008 candidates will realize that the key to winning the larger contest will be not just out debating the other party’s candidate. Rather, it will be to truly lead the Free World by speaking directly to the Muslims and every other ‘interest group’ on this spaceship Earth. Because the war won’t stop, can’t stop, until Islam grows up and accepts that it ain’t all about them, or their Prophet (Peace be upon him.), or what their Mullahs say. The IFW will end when Fascist Islam becomes relegated to the dustbin of history, there to sit in infamy with the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, and the Cultural Revolution Maoists.

Give us an upcoming President that speaks that truth to that audience and we’ll get busy scouting out another spot up on Rushmore. (A woman’s face would look good, don’t you think?)

Political Cartoon of the Century

2006-09-16T14:38:00.000-07:00

So Much for Papal Infallibility

2006-09-16T14:15:00.000-07:00

Well, that wasn’t very helpful was it? I am referring, of course, to Pope Benedict’s ham-fisted challenge to Islam to prove itself a non-violent religion. ‘Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached,’ quoth the Pope this week, citing 14th Century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos.

Now the Armchair Historian appreciates historical references more than most, but this one strikes me as specious and spectacularly unenlightened. Consciously reaching back to a pre-Enlightenment source, especially to a Christian emperor of what is now Islamic Turkey, bespeaks intellectual juvenility unbecoming a modern global statesman.

Certainly Islam deserves to be challenged from within and from without. This youngest of the world’s great religions has much trouble in its tent, having failed to negotiate a harmonious entry into our now very small modern world, thus allowing itself to be defined by the death worshipping extremists of its lunatic fringe.

Indeed the entire world waits with baited breath for Islam to slough off its adolescent cloak of petulance so it can reclaim its heritage as a source of light among the family of men. Will this take ten more years, or fifty, or another century, or the better part of this fledgling millennium? No one knows, not the Pope, or the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Grand Ayatollahs or the Grand Muftis, not a roomful of Rabbis or even the Dali Lama. Though many of these learned leaders might dispute the form and even the premise of the question, the fate of the world rests on the answer.

More important than the environmental health of the Earth, than increased prosperity, than the eradication of disease, the maturation of Islam is the overriding issue of the current age. Which is why the Pope’s public entrée into the debate is so terribly disappointing.

He might have extended a hand of empathy to the vast majority of Muslims who are dismayed at the highjacking of their faith by a dogmatically corrupt minority. He might have pointed out that when the 14^th Century Christian Emperor made his challenge to Islam, Christianity was roughly the same age as Islam is now, yet sadly was more than a century away from halting the religiously inspired slaughter of infidels by Christians and even of Christians by other Christians.

In short, he might have said ‘Christianity had a difficult adolescence when we were 1400 years old too, so we know of whence we speak.’ He could have gone on to observe how Christianity made terrible mistakes, Protestants beheading Catholics, and Catholics torturing Jews, to name just a couple of depredations. He could have pointed out that as unspeakably horrible as these atrocities were, they occurred before technology brought us all into a small world studded with weapons of mass destruction, observing that the stakes are therefore profoundly higher today than in those relatively simple times.

He could have proposed a summit of the leaders of the world’s great religions, a Global Ecumenical Council, charged with identifying the truths that unite us, in order to repudiate the forces that benight us.

But he didn’t. He failed, proving yet again that we’re all just human.