The View from Right Field

Another Republican Bites the Dust

Yet another shoe has dropped for the Republican Party in Congress. While Senator Ted Stevens (R., Alaska) is entitled to a presumption of innocence on the charges against him, voters will not give the Republican Party any such presumption of innocence. And there is probably no reason they should.

Regardless of whether Senator Stevens failed to report gifts that he received as charged, voters will see this as yet another failure by the Republican Party to live up to what it used to claim were its principles. Federalism; not with No Child Left Behind. Limited government; not with Medicare Part D (the prescription drug benefit for senior citizens). Controlling government spending; not with earmarks gone wild and no vetoes of spending programs for first six years of George W. Bush’s presidency. Free markets; not with subsidies and restrictions favoring interest group after interest group.

Back in the '50s and '60s there was a complaint about "me too" Republicans, Republicans in Congress who seemed to say "me too" to Democratic ideas just to get a crumb or two from the table of the majority party. (There was a reason Phyllis Schlafly called her book A Choice Not an Echo.) But in the last ten years, with all the spending and earmarks and subsidies to special interests, Republicans have acted like Democrats, even though they were in the majority.

Republicans got control of Congress because of their principles. Too many of them tried to keep control by abandoning those principles. What they have wound up with is neither.

For the Next Time Senator Obama Goes to Berlin

I am glad that Barack Obama got to Berlin. It is a great city. I have been there four times, and I am looking forward to my next trip back. But while I am glad Senator Obama was able to go to Berlin, it’s too bad that he spent most of his time making a campaign speech. If he had had a little more time, maybe he could have visited some of my favorite sights in Berlin.

First, there is the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie museum. If he had gone there, he might have learned a little something about the Wall that he kept talking about coming down. He might have seen not how the world came together, but how families were split apart. He might have seen how people tried to go through, under and over the Wall to get out of the prison that was East Berlin and East Germany and how many of them were killed trying.

He might have had the chance to go to Bernauer Strasse to see a section of the Wall that still stands. He could have visited the chapel there that was built on the site of the Church of Reconciliation, a church that was literally trapped between the two walls that constituted the Wall. The church remained trapped and unused until finally the East Germans tore it down in 1985. He might have seen that it was not a world coming together that tore down the Wall. Rather, it was a part of the world, the freedom-loving part of the world, that triumphed over that part of the world that preferred tyranny.

He might have gone to Glienicker Brücke (Glienicke Bridge) and seen where the East and West did come together – to exchange spies.

Most importantly, maybe he could have gone to Tempelhof Airport to see the memorial to the Berlin Airlift. Senator Obama talked about the Berlin Airlift as the world coming together. No, the Berlin Airlift was about the United States and its British allies coming together. They were the ones who flew the planes that supplied Berlin.

The Berlin Airlift was not a triumph of the world. It was a triumph of the Free World. It was a triumph of that part of the Free World that was willing to stand up to do what was right even while others urged withdrawal or worried more about the strain on our troops than the job that needed to be done. And that is all the difference in the world.

Corruption in Afghanistan? We've Got Plenty Right Here in Illinois.

Today’s Chicago Tribune has a big article on Afghanistan: "Where heroin rules, kingpins walk free. Corruption and poor policing handicap nation." It is an interesting article, but as I read it, I wondered, so what?

After all, I live in Illinois. Our last governor is in jail. It will no be surprise if and when the current one gets indicted. He said things would change when he got elected. It seems like the only thing that has changed is the bank account the money goes to.

The Cook County Board President effectively lied his way into office. During the 2006 election, he did not tell the truth about the medical condition of his father, who was County Board President at the time. When the truth came out, he said he did it to protect his father’s mother (or something like that). I understand not telling the truth about somebody’s medical condition to protect your grandmother. But if you want to do that, don’t run for public office. Now he is raising taxes and giving jobs to his friends and relatives.

Chicago continues to have corruption trial after corruption trial, as the U.S. Attorney slowly works his way through City Hall. I really don’t think Richard Daley condones it or is personally involved in it (I may be naïve on that point), but he certainly doesn’t seem to be trying very hard to stop it – because if he really wanted to, I think he could.

Let’s not worry too much about corruption in Afghanistan until we get rid of it here in Illinois – or at least until we stop electing and re-electing public officials who are involved in it or don’t try hard enough to stop it.

"He ventured forth to bring light to the world"

"And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness.

The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow. …"

[To read the rest of this article, by Gerard Baker of The [London] Times (and I recommend you do, it’s hilarious), see here.]

"Obama Sides With the Lefties" – I Got It Wrong / Lefties, Congress and the Courts

This is a belated apology re my post "Obama Sides With the Lefties" (see here). I need to apologize because I got it wrong. I thought Obama’s vote to oppose immunity for the telecommunication companies, even though he voted to support the final bill updating the 1978 Foreign Security Surveillance Act, showed he was siding with the lefties. The lefties did not agree. They felt betrayed by Obama because of his vote for the bill – and because he did not try to filibuster the provision giving immunity to the telecoms, even though he had previously said he would do that. I flat out got it wrong.

I did want to make a comment on one of the arguments that the lefties, including some in Congress, raised against the provision granting immunity to the telecommunications companies. The argument went like this (this from an article by Nat Hentoff):

"[B]y dismissing the scores of lawsuits against these companies from Americans wanting to know whether they've been ensnared in this giant government-spun Web, the president and such supporters as Obama will have made it close to impossible to conduct meaningful investigations of the intricate nexus of the ways these telecommunications giants can collect leads to Americans with no connections to terrorism — and could continue to so long as they're assured by a future lawless administration that national security demands breaking another law."

Now wait a second. If Democrats really want to investigate what the telecommunication companies did and what the President did, they can do it. They control Congress. They appoint all the chairs of the committees. Investigating the executive branch, especially alleged wrongdoing of the executive branch, is one of the powers of Congress. In fact, if the Democrats really think something improper was done, then it’s their job to investigate it.

Except, however, they don’t want to do that. And the reason they don’t is because the voters don’t want it. The voters, except for Bush-hating Democratic lefties (assuming that is not a double redundancy), want the telecoms to help our country when the President asks in times like right after 9/11.

And so, like in so many other areas, when the lefties can’t get the Congress (or some other government) to do what they want (because a majority of the voters disagree with them), they go to court. They claim some constitutional right has been violated or come up with some interpretation of a statute or regulation that they couldn’t get Congress to approve. They hope to find a judge who will do what the elected representatives of the people wouldn’t do. Or maybe they can wear out the other side or scare them (the telecoms in this case) with litigation expenses and wasted time, until they can get through a lawsuit what the lefty Democrats in Congress either couldn’t get enough votes to do or didn’t have the political courage to do. After all, who needs to convince Congress or the voters, when you have the courts?

The worst part is that while you may think I am kidding, I’m not.

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Update (7/26/08 5:00 p.m.):  I cleaned up some formatting issues and fixed a typogrpahical error.

President in 2008: What Should Conservatives Do?

A lot of conservatives are unenthusiastic about the choices for President this year. Obama is obviously a big government kind of guy. He is a Democrat, and in 2007 he had the most liberal voting record in the Senate.

Many conservatives don’t like McCain any better. They point to the McCain-Feingold law limiting free speech in political campaigns (as they see the issue). McCain rails against "obscene" profits in the oil industry, which conservatives see as economic nonsense. McCain originally opposed the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, and even though he supports their continuation now, some conservatives wonder where his heart is. There is global warming – and lots more. The choice makes so little difference, they say, that it is not worth worrying about.

But as conservatives complain about McCain, I wonder how many times in the last 40 years conservatives had a candidate they didn’t complain about. Sure, they liked Goldwater, but he didn’t win, and I don’t think they liked the Great Society that came after that election.

Reagan was a conservative, but Nixon and Ford weren’t. George H.W. Bush wasn’t a real conservative. Bob Dole may have been conservative, but he came across like a root canal conservative, not an optimistic one. And then there is George W. Bush. He claims to be conservative, but it is not a conservatism most conservatives would recognize, let alone agree with.

However, even though we have seldom had a real conservative as President, conservatism has had a fair amount of success over the last 30 years. I can think of at least three reasons for this. First, of course, is the obvious failure of communism, socialism, and big government liberalism. But it was also because of the intellectual and philosophic resurgence of conservatism over the last 50 years. William F. Buckley, Jr., and National Review were part of this, as were Milton Friedman, the rediscovery of people like Friedrich von Hayek, and more. In Great Britain there was the Institute of Economic Affairs, Keith Joseph, etc. People talked about conservatism and wrote about conservatism, even when it seemed hopeless.

Another reason for conservatism’s success has been the election of real conservatives to Congress and state offices. These people pushed conservative ideas. They were able to get conservative policies implemented even without a conservative president. Think about welfare reform, passed over Bill Clinton’s objection.

So what has happened to conservatism recently? To some extent, as the failures of communism and socialism have faded in memory, the promises of big government philosophies (as opposed to the reality of what they actually do) have begun to sound good again. But mostly conservatism’s downfall has been conservatives’ and Republicans’ own fault. As Republicans and conservatives started to try to spend and earmark their way to re-election, they abandoned the principles on which they were elected in the first place. "Big government conservatism" is more about big government than conservatism. In the end, you can’t achieve conservative ideas through big government policies because limited government is one of the basic conservative ideas.

So what should conservatives do in 2008? First, the fact conservatives may not like John McCain is no reason to sit out this election. We still need to get conservatives elected to Congress and in the states. We have some good conservatives in Congress, but we need more of them, and we need to keep the ones we already have. Some of them need help if they are going to stay, like Senator John Sununu of New Hampshire. If conservatives sit out the presidential race, it will hurt conservatives like John Sununu.

Second, we need to keep talking and writing and promoting real conservative principles. Limited government. The freedom to live your life as you want to, not the way some know-it-all wants you to live it. The right to keep your own money unless the government has a good purpose for it. We need to continue to fight for these principles.

But we also need to address of failings of conservatism (and Republicans) over the last 15 years. We need to be able to convince people, and reassure ourselves, that when conservatives go to Washington, they will stay conservative. No more earmarking of useless projects. No more trying to win elections through spending (i.e., trying to bribe the voters with their own money).

We need to stop thinking Washington has to solve every problem with new laws and more spending. Many problems are best solved by state or even local governments. Schools aren’t a problem for Washington to solve. They are for local school districts, with direction from the states. Other problems don’t need government solutions at all. Many times people can deal with their own problems better than government can.

We also need to tell people how conservatism can deal with things like the housing crisis, market bubbles, etc. There is a perception among many people that the free market has failed and that we need more government rules and control. In some cases, like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, it is actually the opposite. The problems with Fannie and Freddie were not a result of free market economics; they were the result of people buying government support and favorable government regulation (or lack of appropriate government regulation) through influence, lobbying and contributions. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are more a failure of government than of the free market.

In other cases, though, the free market has not worked well. There is no sense trying to claim the free market is always right. It isn’t. But then no system gets it right all the time. We need to be able to suggest tweaks to the free market system while defending the system in the main. Even Adam Smith understood the need for government regulations in some cases. We also need to be able to explain how the failures of the free market are fewer and less harmful than the failures of any other system and how government solutions often wind up being worse than the problems they were supposed to solve.

So, finally, what are conservatives to do in the race for president in 2008? We need to work for the candidate who, even if he is not a real conservative, is most likely to accommodate and be agreeable to conservative policies and principles. We need to support the candidate who supports continuation of the Bush tax cuts and who has promised to appoint judges like John Roberts and Samuel Alito. We need to support John McCain.

Leaving After Succeeding

According to today’s Washington Post,

"President Bush and Iraq's prime minister have agreed to set a ‘time horizon’ for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq as part of a long-term security accord they are trying to negotiate by the end of the month, White House officials said yesterday.

The decision, reached during a videoconference Thursday between Bush and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, marks the culmination of a gradual but significant shift for the president …."

Not surprisingly, Democrats are reacting like Senator Joseph Biden, who said the President "has reversed course and dropped his adamant opposition to a timeline for redeployment of American troops from Iraq. … [The administration] is finally facing reality."

Of course, what Biden, and all the other Democrats who will say the same thing, are missing is that they wanted to set timetables when we were losing.

It is not a reversal of course to set a timetable once you are succeeding. That is just the next step in the policy President Bush has followed all along: We would leave once the job was done. Now that we are getting there, we can start to leave. And as long as we have a President who is committed to succeeding, as opposed to just getting out, I think you will find the timetable is not going to be so rigid that it endangers the success we and the Iraqis have achieved so far.

A Surge Succeeds. An Army Learns.

Sometimes significant news is barely mentioned in the media’s rush to report, or re-report, the latest gibberish. An example of this happened recently.

On a regular basis the Army convenes what is sometimes called a brigadier generals board. The purpose of the board, as you can tell by its name, is to review a pool of more than 1,000 colonels to decide who will be promoted to brigadier general. Obviously, this is very important to the men and women involved. But it is even more important to the Army and to the country, too.

There have been complaints in the past that the Army has rewarded traditional, conventional military thinking. Before General Petraeus took over in Iraq there was considerable criticism of Army leadership for not understanding the kinds of new thinking and new strategies needed for conflicts in places like Iraq.

Therefore, it was very significant when I saw an article in The Washington Post last November that General Petraeus had been called back to the United States to preside over the current brigadier generals board. The article in the Post said this was "an unusual decision that officials say represents a vote of confidence in Gen. David H. Petraeus’s conduct of the war [in Iraq], as well as the Army counterinsurgency doctrine he helped rewrite." (The Washington Post, November 17, 2007.)

I have been wondering about the board for a long time. Finally, I found a couple of paragraphs in an article on a related subject in last Wednesday’s Washington Post:

"[T]he Pentagon yesterday released the list of Army officers nominated by President Bush for promotion to the rank of one-star general …. The list, resulting from a selection board led by Gen. David H. Petraeus … includes several officers skilled in the counterinsurgency doctrine that Petraeus helped write -- a doctrine that embraces a broader approach to winning conflicts centered on protecting and providing for local populations.

Army officers on the list, many of whom have served repeatedly in Iraq or Afghanistan, include Col. Sean B. MacFarland, Col. H.R. McMaster, Col. Stephen J. Townsend and Col. Jeffrey J. Snow. The list also includes several commanders of Special Operations forces with multiple combat tours …."

A couple of examples from the list. Sean MacFarland led the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Armored Division in 2006 when it was deployed in Ramadi and in al Anbar province, where he played an important role in getting Sunni chiefs there to switches sides, the al Anbar Awakening. (Chicago Tribune, May 9, 2007 and here.)

In 2005 H.R. McMaster commanded the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment when it secured the Iraqi town of Tal Afar, an operation that President Bush praised and that was featured in The New Yorker. In 2007 he was back in Iraq as part of a team of advising General Petraeus on counterinsurgency. Previously, he wrote Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam on the failure and weakness of the Joint Chiefs when it came to Vietnam and properly advising President Johnson on that war. But McMaster was twice passed over for promotion to Brigadier General, and it was not until General Petraeus headed the promotion board that he was selected. (See here, here and here.)

After Vietnam, the Army forgot what it had learned under Creighton Abrams about how to fight insurgencies. What this list of appointments is hopefully telling us is that this time the Army it is not going to forget what it learned with the surge and General Petraeus’s change in strategy and tactics.

If this does turn out to be true, it will be a boon for our next President, even if it is someone who said the surge could never work and would only makes things worse.

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Update (7/21/08 11:55 p.m.): Deleted some unnecessary underlining in the lengthy quotation from The Washington Post.

What Does Barack Obama Believe?

Back when Barack Obama was running for the Democratic nomination, I thought my problem with him was that he was too liberal. A National Journal survey listed him as the most liberal Democratic senator in 2007. (National Journal, January 31, 2008) His speeches talked about unity and bridging differences and bringing us together*, but his positions and his votes were from the left wing of the Democratic Party. Even Senator Obama’s once-famous speech on race (given when he was still refusing to abandon the Rev. Wright) concluded with an appeal based on a standard set of liberal Democratic policies. He was talking unity, but his positions and his votes were left-liberal.

But now that he is the "presumptive" Democratic nominee (is that like when the news media calls somebody an "alleged" criminal?), things are changing.

In 2006 Senator Obama voted against both the Alito and Roberts nominations to the Supreme Court. In fact, when he voted against Roberts, only half of the Democrats in the Senate voted with him. The other half supported the Roberts nomination.

But a couple of weeks ago, Senator Obama agreed with Roberts and Alito when they voted, in a 5-4 decision, to invalidate the District of Columbia’s handgun ban and read an individual right to bear arms into the Second Amendment. He also agreed with Roberts and Alito when they dissented from the Supreme Court’s decision that it was unconstitutional to impose the death penalty in cases of the rape of a child.

In Ohio, before he had clinched the nomination, he said NAFTA cost us a million jobs. Since becoming "presumptive," he has said his rhetoric on trade was "overheated."

My initial reaction to all this was to think Senator Obama was a flip-flopper. But I’m not sure that is it. It may be that he does not know what he thinks on a lot of issues. After all, he hasn’t been a Senator that long. Robert Samuelson described Obama this way:

"[Obama] strikes me as a super-successful graduate student; the brightest, quickest, most articulate guy in the seminar. In his career, he has advanced mainly by talking and writing – not doing – and may harbor a delusion common to the well-educated that he can argue and explain his way around any problem."**

Which means this: We know that Senator Obama is good at giving speeches and that he sounds good when he talks. But will he be the unifier of his speeches, the left-wing liberal of his 2007 Senate votes, or the middle-of-the-road politician who agrees with Roberts and Alito on the Second Amendment? I don’t know. And nobody voting for him in November will know, either.

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* Another politician who said his goal was "to bring the American people together" was –- Richard Nixon. (See here.)

** This may be why Obama said last summer that he would meet with the leaders of North Korea, Iran, and Cuba in his first year as President without preconditions. Maybe he thinks it is just a matter of people sitting down and talking it out –– or maybe that was just what he was saying before he clinched the nomination.

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Update (7/13/08 8:20 p.m.):  The parenthetical in the second paragrpah was changed.

Is Anybody There?

In honor of our nation’s 232nd birthday, let me quote the lyrics from "Is Anybody There," a song sung by John Adams at the end of the musical "1776". The Declaration has been approved, and John is waiting for it to be signed the next day:

"Is anybody there?
Does anybody care?
Does anybody see what I see?

They want to me to quit; they say
John, give up the fight
Still to England I say
Good night, forever, good night!
For I have crossed the Rubicon
Let the bridge be burned behind me
Come what may, come what may

Commitment!

The croakers all say we'll rue the day
There'll be hell to pay in fiery purgatory
Through all the gloom, through all the gloom
I see the rays of ravishing light and glory!

Is anybody there? Does anybody care?
Does anybody see what I see?
I see fireworks! I see the pageant and
Pomp and parade
I hear the bells ringing out
I hear the cannons roar
I see Americans - all Americans
Free forever more

How quiet, how quiet the chamber is
How silent, how silent the chamber is

Is anybody there? Does anybody care?
Does anybody see what I see?"