her miscellaneous musings
In an interview with NBC, President Obama sets the record straight with respect to his administration’s much-criticized handling of the oil-spill crisis. Far from flailing in his response to the environmental disaster, Obama has been way ahead of the curve all along. As early as a month ago, he assures us, he was facing the elements down in the Gulf, gaining first-hand intelligence from local fishermen on “whose a** to kick.”
Read the rest at Commentary.
It was not uncommon for a pharaoh to deface the monuments of his predecessors, insert his name in their inscriptions, or impose his likeness on the heads of their statues. The enterprising ruler—whoever he might have been—responsible for introducing this practice debased the respect traditionally accorded to a Pharaoh’s postmortem, opening the door of precedent for successors to usurp his monuments and achievements in turn. Fiddling with the permanence of the past in exchange for artificial boosts to a leader’s legacy tends to be self-defeating.
Today the Obama administration is behaving as if its mandate—conferred by a majority of voters frustrated with the Bush administration—carried sufficient authority not only to break with the past but also to undo it. The new man in the White House is bringing retroactive changes to foreign policy and showing no scruples about reneging on the long-term commitments of his country when they interfere with his own plans. On September 17, President Barack Obama officially announced that he would abandon the Eastern European missile-shield program, thus scrapping the treaties Gorge W. Bush had signed with Poland and the Czech Republic. The decision has drawn expressions of dismay from the governments of both countries.
“Catastrophic for Poland” is how a spokeswoman at the Polish Ministry of Defense described the suspension of the program. Mirek Topolanek, the former Czech prime minister who had gone out on a limb with his own electorate by signing the missile-defense treaty two years ago, interpreted the decision as another sign that “the Americans are not interested in this territory as they were before.” He added ruefully that “this is not good news for the Czech state, for Czech freedom and independence.” Lech Walesa, the former president of Poland and founder of Solidarity, observed with bitterness: “I can see what kind of policy the Obama administration is pursuing toward this part of Europe. The way we are being approached needs to change.”
Read the rest at Commentary magazine.
P.S. This is my first article for Commentary.
Brian Deese hails from the establishment elites: the son of an engineer specializing in “renewable energy” and a political science professor at Boston College, he majored in political science at Middlebury College, went on to Yale Law School, took leave to become deputy economic policy director for the Obama campaign, then moved on to the White House’s National Economic Council. The New York Times recently profiled Mr. Deese, 31 years old, as the face behind the dismantling and restructuring of General Motors:
Mr. Deese’s role is unusual for someone who is neither a formally trained economist nor a business school graduate, and who never spent much time flipping through the endless studies about the future of the American and Japanese auto industries.
The profile quotes Lawrence Summers on Deese:
“And there he was in the Roosevelt Room, speaking up vigorously to make the point that the costs we were going to incur giving Fiat a chance were no greater than some of the hidden costs of liquidation.”
Yet Mr. Deese’s impressive legal and politically scientific education has apparently not instilled in him any basic understanding of opportunity cost. Presiding over General Motors’s operations should teach him a few lessons, which he is likely to ignore, as have scores of career bureaucrats preceding him. The argument Mr. Deese employed in favor of nationalizing General Motors — that costs to the government would be greater under dissolution due to associated unemployment and insurance expenses — betrays inability to see past the numbers in front of him.
It’s only so fun to hold that sign in a South Park alternate universe. Make your own avatar here. You’ll have a good time with it…
Modern leftist activists have usurped and perverted the meaning of words so blatantly that I wonder how they can possibly get away with it! Their coup d’état against language puts Orwell’s Newspeak dictionaries to shame. Through this persistent perversion, true liberalism has been fooled into adopting self-defeating terms for naming its key virtues:
Capitalism has ubiquitously replaced Free Enterprise in our vocabulary, tainting the latter with Marx’s flawed notions of the labor theory of value, and making it unnatural to defend as a system centered around the arbitrary possession of tangible ‘Kapital’ and the benefits accruing to its owners, not around universal individual freedom thanks to which anyone can accumulate capital among other things.
The Left labels the middle class bourgeois with elitist contempt.
It keeps a straight face while calling itself Liberal, which is a slap in the face for Classical Liberalism. The newspeak term for a true Liberal is now Libertarian, which sounds dangerously close to Libertine, especially to the profane who might Google it.
It has proclaimed itself to be Progressive: What’s so progressive about leftism? If anything its entire ideology is dreadfully regressive, pointing back to the greatest failed experiment of the 20th century, which almost every participating country has gotten out of after incurring colossal losses of life, wealth, and liberty.
The Left prides itself for being Secular, a characterization which the moronic Right backs and exacerbates without understanding its implications. Now the Left can conveniently prey on the ever growing generation of youths and intellectuals disillusioned by corrupt Christianity but who are not yet ready to live without God. Clinging to the Left’s unchallenged label of Secularism fulfills their delusion of having succeeded in their impotent pseudo-struggle to break free.
If religion is the opiate of the masses, “secular” leftism is the crack cocaine of the half-assed apostates of organized religion. The Left recruits these useful idiots and exploits almost effortlessly what their religion has primed them for: radical altruism, mass-scale masochism, and irrational dedication to a supremacist dogma. Getting away with this might not be so easy if Leftism was exposed for the religion that it is instead of being labeled as Secular.
Let’s start claiming back the meaning of words, shall we? Start calling the Democrat base the Religious Left. Rename the Libertarian Party the “Liberal Party” to confuse Leftists and bring attention to the classic ideas of Liberalism, and stop conceding perverted definitions of notions which are key to the discussion of our political and ideological realities. How about that?