The stimulus and the health-care bill are no longer a net plus for the Democrats.

Like many Democrats over the past 40 years, Barack Obama has hoped that his association with unpopular liberal positions on cultural issues would be outweighed by his pushing economic policies intended to benefit the ordinary person.

In his campaign in 2008, and as president in 2009 and 2010, he has hoped that those he characterized to a rich San Francisco Bay–area audience as bitterly clinging to guns and God would be won over by programs to stimulate the economy and provide guaranteed health insurance.

#ad#At least so far, it hasn’t worked, as witnessed by recent statements by some of the Democrats’ smartest thinkers.

The 2009 stimulus package is so unpopular that Democrats have banned the word from their campaign vocabulary. “I’m not supposed to call it stimulus,” Rep. Barney Frank told The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart. “The message experts in Washington have told us that we’re supposed to call it the recovery plan.”

“I’m puzzled by that,” Frank went on. “Most people would rather be stimulated than recover.” The problem is, the economy has neither been stimulated nor recovered.

As for the health-care bill, Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, who has been pondering Democrats’ standing with working-class voters since his perceptive 1980s studies of Reagan Democrats in Macomb County, Mich., has pretty much thrown in the towel.

In a report for Democratic insiders that was leaked, Greenberg and fellow pollster Celinda Lake concede that “straightforward ‘policy’ defenses fail to be moving voters’ opinions about the law” and “many don’t believe health reform will help the economy.”

“Women in particular,” they add, “are concerned that [the] health law will mean less provider availability -- scarcity [is] an issue.” In other words, people have figured out that government rationing may mean less supply for a product for which there is great demand.

Greenberg and Lake recommend using personal stories to highlight the law’s benefits. But “don’t overpromise or ‘spin’ what the law delivers” and don’t “say the law will reduce costs and [the] deficit.”

Do say: “The law is not perfect, but it does good things and helps many people. Now we’ll work to improve it.”

This amounts to an abandonment of the claims that the Obama Democrats have been making about the health-care bill they jammed through five months ago. It’s an admission that they messed up when they had supermajorities, and a claim that they will do better when they have fewer votes. It’s a reframing of the issue from support-versus-oppose to revise-versus-repeal.

So much for the economic issues that were going to provide the underpinnings of what Greenberg’s associate James Carville predicted would be 40 years of Democratic-party dominance.

#page#As for cultural clashes, Democrats can claim to have quieted down debates over abortion and other issues that, as Obama said in his 2004 convention speech, unduly divided Blue America from Red America. But others have taken their place, to the Democrats’ discomfort this legislative season. The Obama Justice Department stepped in and got an injunction against an Arizona law that authorized law enforcement to ask people stopped for other reasons about their immigration status.

Never mind that other states do this routinely without getting sued. The real problem is that about two-thirds of Americans support the Arizona law. Why couldn’t the administration let it go into effect and see if it assisted the efforts they assure us they are making on border and employer enforcement?

#ad#Then there was Obama’s iftar-celebration comments on the mosque proposed for a site two blocks from the World Trade Center ruins -- comments that were taken as an endorsement, until the president proclaimed himself a day later as unwilling to comment on whether it should be built there.

A large majority of Americans, according to a Fox News poll, believe the advocates have a right to place a mosque there, but an even larger majority believe they should not do so. Now we have been watching as Democrats from Harry Reid and Howard Dean on down scamper to say they agree with both these views, while Obama endorses only the first.

The Arizona law and the Ground Zero mosque are not likely to be dispositive issues in most congressional races this year. But they are additional baggage for the Obama Democrats, who find themselves, as the economy languishes, on the defensive on the issues they thought would win over the bitter clingers.

-- Michael Barone is senior political analyst for theWashington Examiner. © 2010 The Washington Examiner.

Michael Barone

A literary legend commences his tenth decade.

Roughly a decade before he created the Christmastime television movie The Homecoming and the long-running series it inspired, The Waltons, Earl Hamner was a successful novelist and writer of scripts for live television in New York. In 1961, as a recent transplant to Southern California, he wanted to break into the world of writing for taped television programs but couldn’t seem to get his foot in the door anywhere.

He consulted a short list of contacts who might help him in his job search and came across the name of Ray Bradbury: scriptwriter for John Huston’s Moby Dick, and author of such minor classics as The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, and Dandelion Wine as well as numerous well-respected short stories. Would this giant be willing to offer a helpful tip or two to the new arrival?

#ad#Taking a chance, he telephoned Bradbury, who said he would be glad to help.

The two met at the MGM commissary, just down the street from Bradbury’s house. During a friendly chat over lunch, Bradbury encouraged Hamner to submit script ideas to the producers of a quirky, fairly new television show called The Twilight Zone. Hamner took this advice, and the eight scripts he crafted for Rod Serling’s program launched his new career. He has been warmly grateful to Bradbury ever since.

Over the many years of his career, Bradbury has inspired loyalty and affection from many who have known him and are familiar with his works. Even those who have never met Bradbury -- who turns 90 on August 22 -- have been touched to the depths of their being by his stories and novels, sometimes to their dismay.

I remember a dorm-room bull session during my long-ago college years, when a know-it-all from down the hall sneered, “Ray Bradbury? Come on! Who reads him any more?”

“After all,” the lofty young sophisticate explained, “his stories are all filled with#...#ethics and things.”

What “things”? Well, the average reader might find that Bradbury’s fiction exhibits such characteristics as lively writing, intelligent plotting, a sense of wonder, evidence of a cartwheeling imagination, and other such “things” deemed hopelessly unfashionable by his self-anointed betters.

As for ethics, they are elemental in Bradbury’s fiction and screenplays, and even in his horror stories (every devotee of ghostly fiction should read his collection of early stories titled The October Country). Moral truths appear not in obvious nuggets, like raisins in a raisin cake, but blended among the basic ingredients. They bespeak Bradbury’s beliefs that human beings are more than the flies of summer -- they are in fact made for knowing beauty, truth, and eternity -- and that each movement toward political centralization, materialism, sham intellectualism, and needless destruction of the natural environment endangers all that makes life fulfilling and worthwhile, rendering man little more than a trousered ape.

Bradbury long ago made it known that he is no champion of utilitarianism, applied science as a panacea, gadgetry, literature that strikes a mighty blow for progressive causes, or death to the unwanted and unproductive. Long identified as a prophet who foresaw the coming of flat-screen televisions, ATMs, and televised police chases, avidly watched, Bradbury is -- to the surprise of many -- a despiser of the Internet and e-reader devices, a believer that technology can easily be as much a destroyer as a benefit, and a man who didn’t take an airplane flight until his late ’60s. As he has told many people, he doesn’t even consider himself a science-fiction writer, but a writer of myths, metaphors, and fantasies.

#page#While he is a great advocate for NASA and space travel, his greatest fictional works address the recurrent theme of much of the modern age’s more significant literature: the separation of spirit and imagination from technological achievement and the dangers that attend this divorce. He asks, How much that is homely, lovable, beautiful, and irreplaceably precious will you cast aside for the sake of ease and self-fulfillment? How much wonder will people willfully drain from their lives in the cause of expediency? Such literature can be filled with much gloom in other hands, but Bradbury remains a poet of affirmation.

“The thing that drives me most often is an immense gratitude that I was given this one chance to live, to be alive the one time round in a miraculous experience that never ceases to be glorious and dismaying,” he wrote to his friend Russell Kirk many years ago. He added: “I accept the whole damn thing. It is neither all beautiful nor all terrible, but a wash of multitudinous despairs and exhilarations about which we know nothing. Our history is so small, our experience so limited, our science so inadequate, our theologies so crammed in mere matchboxes, that we know we stand on the outer edge of a beginning and our greatest history lies before us, frightening and lovely, much darkness and much light.”

#ad#Where William Faulkner famously wrote that the past is never dead, as it isn’t even past yet, Bradbury would perhaps add that only in the past lies the matrix of mores that make life worthwhile, whether in a spaceship headed to the farthest reaches of the universe, or in quiet Green Town, Ill., modeled after the small Midwestern city where he was born.

To Bradbury, the world of his boyhood in Waukegan must seem sometimes like a pleasant memory of a half-forgotten dream. Despite its flaws (common to any small town or city), it was a world of quiet talks with friends and family members on the front porch in summertime, with dandelion wine for refreshment. And on the Fourth of July, fire balloons: those small baskets of burning light that mount aloft through miles of quietness into the night sky and blend with the stars before disappearing, while grandparents, parents, and cousins stand and watch.

How far we have come since then, as we make our way through the early 21st century with the disquieting sense that something valuable has been lost over the years since the fire balloons disappeared.

It was in Waukegan that young Ray Bradbury took in a circus sideshow featuring “Mr. Electrico,” a mysterious worker of wonders with an electric wand. At one point near the conclusion of his performance, he called for the children in the audience to come forward. Glowing with electricity, the magician then faced the assembled children and gently touched them one at a time with his magic wand, shouting a hair-raising blessing upon each of them in turn. As he touched the young future author with the wand he commanded, “Live forever!” Somehow, the boy knew he might do just that.

The years passed, and now, at age 90, Bradbury has done a lot of living; the details are described in Sam Weller’s superb biography, The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury (2005). Bradbury learned long ago that amidst the joy, there is also evil in the world and in the hearts of men. In a letter, he once wrote that each one of us has “a private keep somewhere in the upper part of the head where, from time to time, of midnights, the beast can be heard raving. To control that, to the end of life, to stay contemplative, sane, good-humored, is our entire work, in the midst of cities that tempt us to inhumanity, and passions that threaten to drive through the skin with invisible spikes.”

#page#Despite his reputation in some quarters as an apple-cheeked optimist, Bradbury knows, in Solzhenitsyn’s often-quoted phrase, that “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but through every human heart -- and through all human hearts.”

Selfishness, greed, senseless environmental destruction, violent fear of the unfamiliar, and the shadow of death are as part of Bradbury’s stories as are their wonder, adventure, and love of life. In an article originally published in National Review and reprinted in his book Enemies of the Permanent Things, Russell Kirk recounts the true story of a librarian’s reaction to Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury’s depiction of a future in which books are feared and burned.

#ad#The librarian received a copy by mistake, read it, and was duly offended by it. The book was#...#disturbing. According to Kirk, she fired off a letter of furious protest to the wholesaler: How dare they send such a disturbing book! “I took it right out in back and burned it,” she crowed proudly. From which Kirk concludes, “The future is already here.”

That was in 1969. Today, when America’s best and brightest increasingly assume that their fellow citizens have somehow evolved to a point beyond freedom and dignity (in B. F. Skinner’s hateful phrase) and as a result need to have everyday decisions made for them by an enlightened elite, it may be that Bradbury’s little book is needed now more than ever. “Ethics and things” are at the unseen core of this work, to which an informative companion piece might be C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man.

In late 2005, Earl Hamner and I visited Bradbury at his dandelion-colored house in Los Angeles. Sitting in his toy- and book-strewn den in a wheelchair, wearing tennis shorts but a neat shirt, tie, and cardigan, Bradbury greeted us like old friends, though it was my first face-to-face meeting with him. For a full hour he spoke of his love of writing -- “You’ve got to embrace the thing you love, and never let it go! Follow the love of your life!” he said -- as well as his passion for monster movies and comics, his thoughts on the long-delayed cinematic remake of Fahrenheit 451 (which he pronounces “Fahrenheit Four-Five-One”), how he came to create the novel’s chief character (the fireman Montag), his excited plans to see Peter Jackson’s then-unreleased remake of King Kong, and many other matters.

All too soon it was time to take our leave. Hamner, ever the gracious Virginia gentleman, shook hands with Bradbury and quietly expressed his thanks again for that long-ago piece of advice. As Bradbury turned to me, I shook his hand and said quietly, “Ray Bradbury, live forever!” Tears sprang into his eyes -- he is a man who cries for joy at every kindness -- and his mouth moved soundlessly for a moment, searching for words. Quickly he raised my hand to his lips and gave it a quick kiss. “God bless you, Jim,” he said. “God bless you -- and I wish the same for you!”

As we walked away from the Bradbury house, I thought about what the man’s works have meant to me and many other readers since we first encountered them. What remains for those who haven’t read Bradbury for some time are memorable books worth rereading and a collage of unforgettable images: the canals of Mars filled with fragrant wine, a gun that fires deadly bees, a man covered with animated tattoos, a cocky gun-slinging bully sitting down in a barber chair for his final shave at the hands of a barber he’s threatened once too often, a spaceship harvesting a small fragment of the sun, a frightened old woman racing home through the midnight streets of Green Town and groping for the light switch in a darkened room in which a stranger awaits, and an adolescent boy fearing for the life of his humble, decent father amid the autumn twilight in a small Midwestern town.

#page#And Bradbury continues working, churning out one short story per week, as he has since the mid-1930s: a 90-year-old man beavering away with the enthusiasm and imagination of a teenager. It’s what he loves: life and literature. Follow the love of your life.

“Literature of escape,” Bradbury’s work is sometimes called with a sneer. But then, as Tolkien once observed, who other than jailers are fearfully preoccupied with escape? Kirk wrote that the ideologue, in particular, denounces “escape” because he is a prisoner of his own political obsessions, and misery loves company.

#ad#“Bradbury’s stories,” Kirk wrote, “are not an escape from reality; they are windows looking upon enduring reality” -- the reality of normative truth glimpsed through wonder. On the occasion of his 90th birthday, Bradbury deserves the nation’s appreciation as one of its most accomplished and imaginative writers, a national treasure.

-- James E. Person Jr. is a longtime book reviewer and the author of Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mind (Madison Books) and Earl Hamner: From Walton’s Mountain to Tomorrow(Cumberland House Books).

James E. Person Jr.

That is the real question at hand in the Ground Zero mosque debate.

The real battle for religious freedom lurks beneath the Ground Zero mosque controversy. It is sadly ironic that our public debate presents the mosque proponents as the partisans of liberty: That includes everyone from imam Feisal Rauf, the project’s sharia-touting sponsor, to President Obama, Mayor Bloomberg, and the rest of the Islamist-smitten Left, to the GOP’s own anti-anti-terrorist wing. Yet, wittingly or not, when they champion this mosque and its sponsors, it is the agenda of an alien and authoritarian Islam that they champion -- an Islam against which many American Muslims chafe.

When it comes to liberty, no one in this society has been given a wider berth than the Islamists, the purveyors of this authoritarian Islam, which is the mainstream Islam of the Middle East. Their vise grip on the American Muslim community has been cinched for two decades by the government, the media, and the academy. For our post-American ruling class, “Islamic outreach” means prostituting themselves for Saudi largesse; it means putting the “moderate” label on the Muslim Brotherhood -- the Saudi-backed saboteurs whose American operatives boldly promise to “eliminate and destroy Western Civilization from within.”

The victims of this lethal charade include American Muslims. They, too, crave religious liberty and Western enlightenment. Our elites abandon them to the sharia-mongers. That freedom destroyers have been allowed to pose as freedom defenders ought to tell mosque opponents something: We have done a poor job of explaining the stakes.

In 1993, I headed up a prosecution team that was preparing to try the “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven other jihadists for conducting a terrorist war against the United States. The case revealed this country’s Muslim divide.

On one side were patriotic American Muslims, without whom successful prosecution would have been impossible. Not only did they infiltrate the terror cells, they helped us shape the resulting evidence into a compelling narrative. On the other side were the Muslim Brotherhood’s satellites. These included outfits like CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations), which was formed in 1994 by the Brotherhood’s Hamas-support wing, with seed money from an Islamic “charity” -- the Holy Land Foundation -- later shut down for financing foreign terrorist organizations. These Brotherhood satellites purport to speak for American Muslims. In fact, they speak for anti-American Muslims, most of whom are outside the United States. They demagogued the case as a phobic criminalization of Islam itself, just as they have libeled America since 9/11 as being “at war with Islam.”

Translating evidence into English turned out to be a Herculean challenge during our trial preparation. Most of our evidence was in Arabic, because almost all of our defendants had immigrated here from Egypt and Sudan, hotbeds of anti-American Islam. The resulting mounds of documents, wiretap recordings, and inflammatory sermons overstretched the Justice Department’s thin Arabic-language capacity. To ease the strain, we tried to retain some civilians as private contractors. A number of local Muslims expressed interest, but in the end they turned us down.

BROTHERHOOD ISLAM vs. AMERICAN ISLAM
Mind you, they wanted to help. They were as offended as anyone by what the terrorists had done. These folks were Americans. They were the kind of Muslims you’re never exposed to, given the media’s preference for jihad apologists who, when not applauding him, claim Osama bin Laden was “made in the U.S.A.” But the would-be translators wanted ironclad assurance that their assistance to the prosecution would be kept confidential. It was an assurance I was not in a position to give, so they politely declined.

Here’s the most depressing part: It wasn’t really a matter of safety. There was surely some element of that -- it goes with the territory in terrorism cases. But these people were mostly worried that they and their families would be ostracized in their communities as traitors to Islam.

In Muslim communities, I learned, many people -- especially American Muslims -- were supportive of our investigations. Of course they didn’t like the light of suspicion being shined on Muslims, not any more than Italian Americans liked the attention our mafia cases thrust on their communities. Yet they tuned out the CAIR chorus, just as most sensible people tune out the grievance industry. They reserved most of their resentment for the malevolent, anti-American actors in their midst. They understood that public safety is the government’s highest obligation. As long as they could do it quietly, they were willing to help.

But doing it quietly was imperative. Most American Muslims are not instinctively different from other Americans. But American Muslim communities are peculiar. In many of them, the leadership of the mosques and Islamic centers is foreign (or at least foreign-influenced). This leadership tends to be anti-Western and arrogant, claiming an Islamic authenticity Americans are said to lack. Many American Muslims are intimidated into silence. They are cowed by the specter of being condemned as too American. In Islam, there is no more grievous offense than causing disunity through infidelity. It is no small thing when community leaders frame a Muslim as insufficiently loyal to the ummah, the notional Islamic nation.

American Muslims are also taken aback by the ease with which their community leaders straddle the line between preaching Islam and cheerleading for terrorists. Why, they wonder, does their government, the U.S. government, consistently elevate America-bashing Islamists who can’t give a straight answer when asked about Hamas and Hezbollah? Why not highlight Muslims who are pro-American and unambiguously anti-terrorist -- Muslims who desperately need the support?

Most of the mosques and Islamic centers in our country are controlled, to a greater or lesser degree, by the Muslim Brotherhood and its satellites. The North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) was established in the early Seventies to buy up property for the establishment of American mosques and “Islamic centers,” the latter being what the Brotherhood calls “the axis” of the Islamist movement in America. The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) supplies literature and vets imams. Both NAIT and ISNA, along with CAIR and other Brotherhood groups, were identified by the Justice Department as unindicted coconspirators in the recent Hamas-financing prosecution against the Holy Land Foundation. These Islamists owe their vision to the Brotherhood. Just as important, they owe their livelihood, influence, and power to moneyed Middle East patrons, particularly the Saudis.

The Kingdom and the Brotherhood have combined for a half-century to put American Muslim communities in a stranglehold. They proselytize a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam -- an amalgam of Saudi Wahhabism and Brotherhood Salafism -- that is virulently anti-Western. Its instruction to Muslims in the United States, Canada, and Europe is voluntary apartheid: Immigrate but don’t integrate, infiltrate but don’t assimilate.

SHARIA OR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM?
This brand of Islam is designed to create parallel Muslim enclaves, resistant to America’s freedom culture and to Western civilization, just as it created the liberty-killing “no-go zones” now sprouting up throughout Europe. It is designed to snuff out religious freedom, pressuring American Muslims to adopt the Islamists’ social mores, financial practices, and anti-Western outlook. And the authoritarian device it uses to establish and control these enclaves is sharia, Islam’s legal and political framework, which aspires to control of all aspects of life -- not just spiritual life, but all of life.

It is the Brotherhood’s objective to thread sharia through American law and culture. This mission drives imam Feisal Rauf’s work, as documented by the Center for Security Policy’s Christine Brim in an eye-popping report at Andrew Breitbart’s Big Peace website.

Since 2006, Rauf has been developing the “Sharia Index Project.” His partners in this venture include longtime Muslim Brotherhood honcho Jamal Barzinji, a top official at the International Institute of Islamic Thought. The IIIT, a major backer of the convicted terrorist Sami al-Arian, is one of the Brotherhood satellites that republished Rauf’s book, What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America, the book that was released in Malaysia under the more telling title, A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa in the Heart of America Post-9/11. (The other Brotherhood organization behind the republication of Rauf’s book was the aforementioned ISNA.) As Ms. Brim explains, the purpose of Rauf’s Sharia Index Project is “to benchmark” every country’s compliance with sharia, with an eye toward pressuring them to adopt and enforce more.

The United States is not going to become a sharia state anytime soon. That obvious fact has commentators pooh-poohing the encroaching peril, even as we watch Europe succumb before our eyes, as if no-go zones, honor killings, the Balkanizing of society, and the strangulation of freedom could never happen here. On Tuesday, for example, in an otherwise insightful column on the Left’s incoherence in the mosque controversy, the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto took an offhanded swipe at the “fringe right’s ravings about ‘Shariah.’” But are the concerns really “ravings,” and are they truly confined to a right-wing “fringe”?

It so happened that in the same day’s Journal, Bret Stephens penned a sharp essay about Muslim “moderates” who turn out not to be so moderate. As his counterpoint, he offered a courageous, progressive Muslim reformer, Irshad Manji. Rather than pretending that Islamic doctrine has nothing to do with terrorism, Ms. Manji is forthrightly confronting the doctrine and working to change it. What is it that needs change? As illustrated in her spellbinding book, The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith, much of what ails Islam is sharia sclerosis. Sharia, she elaborates, represents the legal opinions of classical Muslim jurists, frozen a millennium ago and, ever since, impervious to critical inquiry.

Frozen it remains thanks to atavistic zealots, prominent among them the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization founded by fundamentalists in the 1920s and lavishly funded by the Saudis since the 1950s, an outfit Manji correctly describes as “the al-Qaeda of its generation.” These Islamists are the true enemies of religious liberty. It is they who foreclose modern Muslims from the right to reason independently, to evolve.

Whether Ground Zero mosque proponents realize it or not, the cause they are advancing -- against the will of the American people, and, perversely, under the guise of “religious freedom” -- is the Islamist cause. It is the Brotherhood, not American Muslims, insisting that this monument must be imposed on this sacred spot.

It is a “considerable comfort,” Mr. Stephens writes, “to know that there are Muslims in the U.S. like Irshad who are working, tirelessly but mainly out of view, toward the cause of reform. They could use more support and recognition.” But, of course, their tireless work must happen “out of view,” because the Islamists have made it too dangerous for them to work openly. And they are denied support and recognition because the post-American ruling class has made its bed with sharia salesmen like Rauf, who blame America for 9/11 and can’t bring themselves to say Hamas is a terrorist organization.

By contrast, American Muslims grasp that 9/11 was an attack on their country, too. Their emerging leaders, such as Zuhdi Jasser and Steven Schwartz, have started organizations -- respectively, the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and the Center for Islamic Pluralism -- that promote freedom and offer Muslims an escape from the Brotherhood’s clutches. As Messrs. Jasser and Schwartz relate, American Muslims understand the significance of Ground Zero to our nation, to the families of those who were slaughtered, and to the enemy against whom we are still fighting. They know that, in contrast to the innate intolerance of sharia states, the United States opens its arms to people of all faiths, including Muslims. Like Ms. Manji, they are struggling, against daunting opposition, to forge an Islam that embraces Western values, that reveres religious faith but denies it temporal authority.

The Ground Zero mosque controversy is not about religious liberty for Muslims. It is about which Islam will thrive in the United States: the one that is fighting Americans, or the one American Muslims are fighting for.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Andrew C. McCarthy

The congressman acknowledges that market processes work. Can <I>Obama</I>?

Can you teach an old dog new tricks? In politics, the answer is usually no. Most elected officials cling to their ideological biases, despite the real-world facts that disprove their theories time and again. Most have no common sense, and most never acknowledge that they were wrong.

But one huge exception to this rule is Democrat Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

#ad#For years, Frank was a staunch supporter of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant government housing agencies that played such an enormous role in the financial meltdown that thrust the economy into the Great Recession. But in a recent CNBC interview, Frank told me that he was ready to say goodbye to Fannie and Freddie.

“I hope by next year we’ll have abolished Fannie and Freddie,” he said. Remarkable. And he went on to say that “it was a great mistake to push lower-income people into housing they couldn’t afford and couldn’t really handle once they had it.” He then added, “I had been too sanguine about Fannie and Freddie.”

When I asked Frank about a long-term phase-out plan that would shrink Fannie and Freddie portfolios and mortgage-purchase limits, and merge the agencies into the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) for a separate low-income program that would get government out of middle-income housing subsidies, he replied: “Larry, that, I think, is exactly what we should be doing.”

Frank also said that any federal housing guarantees should be transparently priced and put on budget. But he added that the private sector must be encouraged to re-enter housing finance just as the government gradually withdraws from it.

Some would say Frank’s mea culpa is politically motivated in advance of an election where bailout nation and big government are public enemies number one and two. Of course, poll after poll shows that the $150 billion Fan-Fred bailout, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates could rise to $400 billion, is detested by voters and taxpayers everywhere.

In fact, these failed government agencies are in such bad shape that they can’t even pay Uncle Sam the dividends owed under the conservatorship deal reached two years ago. That’s right. In order to pay a $1.8 billion dividend on Treasury department stock, Fan and Fred had to borrow $1.5 billion from -- you guessed it -- the Treasury.

#page#Then there’s this head-scratching detail: In an absolutely outrageous move last Christmas Eve, President Obama signed off on $42 million in bonuses for the top twelve Fannie and Freddie executives, including $6 million apiece for the two CEOs. (Hat tip to attorney Stephen B. Meister.)

Voters are on to all this. So politics may indeed be motivating Barney Frank’s turnaround. But I’m going to credit him with more than that.

#ad#I think Chairman Frank watched these government behemoths descend into hell and then witnessed the financial catastrophe that ensued. And I think he has come to realize that the whole system of federal affordable-housing mandates that was central to the real-estate collapse -- including the mandates on Fannie and Freddie and the myriad bad decisions made by private banks and other lenders in response to the government’s overreach -- simply needs to be abolished.

Noteworthy is the fact that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has come to a similar conclusion. Geithner told a recent Washington conference on the future of housing finance that the system needs fundamental change. He said, “We will not support a return to the system where private gains are subsidized by taxpayer losses.”

Of course, the withdrawal of housing markets from government programs, and the onset of a reinvigorated private sector for providing mortgages, must be done gradually over a period of years. But it is possible that the federal mortgage madness is coming to an end.

We will have to see if Congress really does say good-bye to Fan and Fred, as Republicans like Jeb Hensarling are advocating. Equally important, we will have to see if the federal affordable-housing mandates created by Congress and implemented by HUD and banking regulators are similarly repealed.

And then we will have to see if reformed federally guaranteed housing insurance includes larger down-payments, stricter underwriting standards, and greater reliance on private capital markets, lenders, and insurers. In other words, we need to see if housing will be restored to a market-based system and removed from the government-backed system that has proved so disastrous.

The broader lesson here is that government planning doesn’t work. And if left to their own devices, market processes will work. I don’t know if President Obama gets this. But my hat goes off to a man who does, Chairman Barney Frank.

-- Larry Kudlow, NRO’s Economics Editor, is host of CNBC’s The Kudlow Report and author of the daily web blog, Kudlow’s Money Politic$.

Larry Kudlow

It doesn’t look like he knows what he’s doing.

I have tried diligently to detect some subtle rationale for this administration’s policy toward the Muslim world. There have been some good moves, particularly the emphasis on Afghanistan and the serious effort, after eight years of grapefruit-league tokenism, to apply all means -- aid, diplomacy, and force -- to produce the desired outcome there. The delay before acting was distressing, but better to take a good look before leaping. And yet: Taking the plunge while promising to be out next year was insane. Wars cannot be conducted that way. President Roosevelt did not ask Congress to declare a war that would last only until the day before the next presidential election, and President Truman did not secure the agreement of the United Nations for a “police action” in Korea (in which 33,000 American servicemen died) that would last only until a certain date. It is now clear that the greatest problem in Afghanistan is the corruption of the Karzai government, which was well known before the president committed to the tripling of the American military effort there.

#ad#It seemed, after the 2008 election, that Mr. Obama thought that, having convinced the great white moderate political center of America that it should put him in the White House to slake its concerns about 400 years of mistreatment of blacks (and, as a bonus, to be spared having to take seriously the posturings of charlatans like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson ever again), he might be perhaps able also to turn the page in international relations with many countries that were convinced the United States was governed by a self-serving white capitalist apparat. It was worth a try, but it didn’t work. Those countries and political currents in the world that do not wish America well don’t care who is in the White House. They want to pick America’s pocket, overrun its interests, and kill its children. Unfortunately, although President Obama may have made brief inroads on public opinion with his speeches in Egypt and Ghana, public opinion in undemocratic countries doesn’t have much force unless the regime is insufferably oppressive and terribly enfeebled. His words were eloquent in Ghana, rather cloying in Cairo; in both cases, they evaporated like the tropical dew.

Mr. Obama appears to believe some of the guilt-stained profferings he has made to the world: The United States should be more socialistic, like economically stagnant Europe, carried for decades by America’s addiction to Italian and French luxury goods and German engineered products. President Truman should not have dropped the atomic bomb. President Eisenhower should not have been complicit in turfing out Mossadegh (a deranged fellow-traveling demagogue who rarely got out of his pajamas, perhaps the sartorial inspiration for the late don of the Genovese crime family, Vincent “The Chin” Gigante), as prime minister of Iran.

America may just now be coming to grips with the implications of the fact that its president is going forth into the world actually believing the bunk that America pursued its national interest with unjustifiable callousness and behaved reprehensibly by the standards of those who reproach it now, and that there may actually be some merit to the Americaphobic strictures of the Ahmadinejads, Mugabes, and Chávezes.

Equally disturbing, he may also think that enemies like appeasers. Stalin told Churchill after they reminisced about Churchill’s having advocated “strangling Bolshevism in its cradle” in 1919, that “I prefer a candid opponent to a pretended friend.” Mao told Nixon: “I like conservatives, I can deal with them”; he said he admired and respected de Gaulle, Eisenhower, Nixon, and even Edward Heath, but not “these so-called social democrats claiming we really have a lot in common.” It must be clear to everyone by now that the disrespect that engulfed George W. Bush has now settled like an Angeleno smog on Obama. Even relatively well-disposed foreigners disparage, out of envy and habit, all U.S. presidents since Roosevelt, except JFK, as fools (Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan, the Bushes), or knaves (Nixon and Clinton). But they think the Great Republic has scraped the barrel with George W. Bush and the incumbent. And unfortunately, for once, America’s critics may be correct.

#page#

Afghanistan is a cauldron of appalling and unremitting complexity. It has never justified the effort that would be required to subdue it, whether by Persia, the Mongols, Russia, or Great Britain, because it is a poor, land-locked country of no geopolitical value, and thus a perfect failed state to give shelter to terrorists. Iran, Russia, India, and Pakistan all have factional interests in the country, and before setting out on a course of nation-building in such infertile soil, the U.S. might have had a better idea of what it was undertaking. (In contrast, Iraq is, at least, an important Arab country with immense oil resources and some of the features of a functioning state.) The Pakistanis, Indians, Iranians, and Russians all have their own factions in Afghanistan, and it is hard to avoid the temptation to think that the U.S. and NATO are the innocents slouching toward Babylon. The inevitable Richard Holbrooke was in New York on July 6 to try, contrary to the wishes of the Russians, to remove certain Taliban names from the list of designated terrorists in U.N. Resolution 1267. The Iranians are encouraging some of the northern Taliban resistance to Kabul and the Allies; and the Pakistanis are exploiting Karzai’s fears of an early Western pullout to build up their Haqqani faction in the broader Taliban, and are selling themselves to Karzai as the future of his regime by their ability to broker a deal with the Taliban. The Russians and Indians, having themselves tasted the sting of Taliban terror, are implacably hostile to it, despite Russia’s tacit assistance to one of the northern factions (just to irritate the Americans). Thus America’s great ally, Pakistan, is building up part of America’s Afghan opposition among the Taliban, to strengthen its hand in maintaining a post-U.S. and -NATO Karzai in a coalition with the Taliban. And the enemy the U.S. has instituted a surge to fight, the Taliban, is supported by its chief ally, Pakistan, and opposed by its other chief ally in the region, India, as well as by Russia, whose assistance the U.S. seeks in opposing an Iranian nuclear capability, even as Iran and Russia both assist certain Taliban factions against the U.S.

#ad#If this were a Republican administration, the New York Times and Washington Post and the traditional television networks would lift the stone on this mess of snakes and spook public opinion. As it is, it is hard to believe that the administration really knows what it is doing; though, if it has a secret deal to give Afghanistan to Pakistan, India, and Russia to supervise and ensure the absence of an international terror-generating enterprise there, that would make sense. But this doesn’t square with what anyone in the administration is saying, except possibly General Petraeus, in whom my confidence, in this role, is based on Karzai’s description of him as “a politician.” In the U.S., meanwhile, the insipid and mindless appeasement of the Muslims continues. In his “official statement on the occasion of Ramadan,” Mr. Obama praised “Islam’s role in advancing justice, progress, tolerance, and the dignity of all human beings . . . (its) great diversity and racial equality” and “American Muslims’ . . . extraordinary contributions to our country.” In fact, Islam has done nothing to advance justice or any version of progress or tolerance, and Obama, like Condoleezza Rice, is regularly denounced by the official outlets of leading Muslim countries in ethnic slurs that would embarrass Bull Connor and Lester Maddox. The ambitious Islamic genocidal initiative in the Sudan has earned that country’s president a historical apprenticeship to Hitler, as well as an International Court of Justice indictment as a mass murderer.

It is inexcusable that there is any serious thought of building a mosque near the World Trade Center site. It has nothing to do with freedom of religion, tolerance, and so forth. It is a matter of decent respect for sensibilities. The authors of the unspeakable atrocity on that site, and other terrorist acts against civilians, espoused the faith the proposed mosque celebrates. Of course most Muslims are inoffensive. So are most Germans and Japanese and Russians; but there is no move to build cultural or recreational centers by those countries at Auschwitz, Pearl Harbor, or the Katyn Forest. This is an argument that only a degenerating society can have, and when Maureen Dowd is trying to enlist George W. Bush to this cause, we know that this is not necessarily a sick society -- as the Left loved to claim in Johnson’s, and Nixon’s, and Reagan’s days -- but that the New York Times is a sicker pigeon than we thought. As for my friendly acquaintance Mayor Bloomberg, he should have saved himself $80 million, devoted 10 percent of that to electing his talented and delightful companion Diana Taylor to the Senate over the cipher who festers there now, and hastened to his philanthropies. If this mosque is built in this location, everyone in the world will see it as a sign that the U.S. has become, in the words of Richard Nixon’s prescient warning, “a pitiful, helpless giant.”

-- Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full. He can be reached at cbletters@gmail.com.

Conrad Black

Obamacare kicks Nebraskans in the wallet.

Remember the Cornhusker Kickback? It was a giveaway to Nebraska brokered in order to secure the vote of one of its senators for Obamacare. After word of the scam broke, pressure mounted on Congress to drop the provision, which it eventually did.

This week, Nebraska governor Dave Heineman released an analysis of the final bill -- and Cornhuskers are hurting. The report from Milliman, a leading independent actuarial firm, estimates that Obamacare will increase Nebraska’s annual Medicaid expenses by somewhere between $75 million and $110 million. Heineman called the price tag “potentially devastating to our state budget.”

#ad#Some context: Medicaid is a program that provides health insurance to certain categories of the poor. States design their own programs, but the federal government picks up a portion of the total cost. Typically, the feds pick up about 60 percent of total state Medicaid spending. Nationwide, spending on Medicaid has more than quadrupled over the past two decades.

Many health-policy experts believe Medicaid is a broken program. Its cost for taxpayers is rising dramatically, and mounting evidence suggests that Medicaid recipients receive a lower quality of care than privately insured patients. (A recent study from the University of Virginia even found that Medicaid patients have worse surgical outcomes than individuals without insurance.) Despite these problems, Obamacare was designed to achieve half of its insurance-coverage gains by dumping more people into Medicaid. Obamacare mandates that states expand Medicaid eligibility to include all persons below 138 percent of the federal poverty level.

The expansion begins in 2014, and for the first three years, the federal government will pay 100 percent of the cost of insuring the newly eligible enrollees. After 2016, the federal share will gradually decline, until it reaches 90 percent in 2020. Since states were being asked to pick up such a small share of expansion costs, many states felt they were getting a bargain.

But these states forgot to factor in two very important side effects. First, thanks to the publicity around the individual mandate and Obamacare in general, many individuals will sign up for Medicaid who would have been eligible even under the old criteria. States will receive merely their standard federal reimbursement for these individuals, not the elevated one. Milliman estimates that between 21,700 and 27,700 such Nebraskans will enroll in Medicaid. The estimated annual cost: $26 million to $34 million.

The Cornhusker Kickback wouldn’t have spared Nebraska taxpayers this expense. It applied solely to the expansion population -- the individuals who gained eligibility due to the more generous criteria. Had the kickback been retained, federal taxpayers would have picked up 100 percent of the cost of Nebraska’s Medicaid expansion population in perpetuity -- the proverbial free lunch for Nebraska. That would have saved Cornhusker taxpayers an estimated $43 million to $60 million per year.

#page#This leads us to the second serious side effect. The federal reimbursement rate encourages careless spending among the states. For every $100 that a state with a 60 percent reimbursement rate spends on Medicaid, $60 seems "free." The federally funded expansion only makes this distortion worse, by increasing the reimbursement rate for the expansion population.

And of course, that money is not really free. It comes from federal taxpayers -- who are, basically, the same people as state taxpayers. From the taxpayers’ perspective instead of the state governments’, there is no reason for states to spend more money on Medicaid than necessary, with or without federal subsidies. In the end, it all comes from pretty much the same pockets.

#ad#Further, when costs are passed to a third party, the result is generally waste and inefficiency. It is estimated that 10 percent of Medicaid spending, or $40 billion annually, is lost to fraud. And as the Milliman study shows, the costs to states for this expansion of the Medicaid population will likely wind up being far higher than the administration advertised.

Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion will cost American taxpayers an estimated $80 billion annually and place people in a system with a shockingly poor track record. This is policy malpractice of the first order.

— Brian Blase is a policy analyst in the Center for Health Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation.

Brian Blase

There is a chart currently making the rounds that shows President Reagan’s approval ratings during his first two years in office overlaid upon President Obama’s. The trend lines nearly overlap. Liberal commentators are using the chart to argue that Obama’s unpopularity is almost entirely attributable to the weak economy and thus comparable to that of Reagan, who also inherited a recession. If the economy improves, the argument goes, then Obama’s approval ratings will bounce back just as Reagan’s did. Liberals add that Obama faces a more difficult task than Reagan did because he inherited a nastier recession. Some conservatives are taking issue with this, arguing that Obama has made his task much more difficult by going on a government spending spree, whereas Reagan cut taxes to stimulate growth.

Both arguments miss the important ways in which the recessions the two men inherited are similar and the important ways in which their approaches differed. Both men faced seemingly intractable economic problems with no easy solution, but Reagan understood that curing the nation’s debilitating inflation was going to involve a good deal of short-term economic pain and political unpopularity, and he was prepared to endure that. By contrast, Obama has done everything in his power to avoid painful corrections -- at great cost to future taxpayers.  It is increasingly evident that his policies have merely put off these corrections or dragged them out, and that we have not avoided them at all. Reagan’s willingness to accept painful and unpopular but necessary economic adjustments -- and Obama’s lack of the same fortitude -- is the essence of what separates the two men. 

It is true that Reagan and Obama faced very different challenges. The biggest impediment to economic growth in the late 1970s and early 1980s was instability in the general price level that made it difficult for businesses to make long-term plans or invest with confidence in the future. As Robert Samuelson explains in The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath, the resulting stagflation confounded U.S. policymakers, who had come to rely on excessively cheap money as an easy way of keeping the unemployment rate low. President Carter nominated Paul Volcker in 1979 to head the Federal Reserve without understanding that Volcker would set out immediately to conquer inflation. “It is doubtful that, aside from Reagan, any other potential president would have let the Fed proceed unchallenged,” Samuelson writes, one of many reasons it is a lucky thing that Carter lost and Reagan won.

The blowback that resulted from Volcker’s decision to put the economy into a coma was swift and severe. The sharp recession that ensued once Volcker started shrinking the money supply prompted Democrats and Republicans alike to introduce legislation to rein in the Fed. But Reagan refused to back any such action or even criticize Volcker in public. In private, Reagan was candid about what needed to be done, according to the late Bob Novak’s reporting on the subject: “I’m afraid this country is just going to have to suffer two, three years of hard times to pay for the [inflationary] binge we’ve been on,” Reagan said. It is impossible to imagine Obama speaking such unpopular truths in public or in private after having so often expressed the opinion that a massive debt-fueled government-spending program would create millions of jobs and reconstruct an economy torn asunder by years of binging on debt.

It is true that economic crises present presidents with difficult challenges, but it is not true that the challenges Reagan faced were so much easier. We can look back now and say that the solution to stagflation was obvious, but that’s only because the Reagan/Volcker approach worked. At the time, the idea that simply raising interest rates would be sufficient to alter inflationary expectations was a contested proposition. Samuelson produces numerous priceless quotes from influential doubters, including from Volcker’s predecessor at the Fed. Ultimately, these doubters were silenced when yearly price increases shriveled from 11 percent in the fall of 1980 to less than 4 percent by the end of 1982, and by the decade of robust growth that followed.

Notably, Obama’s doubters have not grown quieter: Obama’s manifest failure to deliver on his economic promises has amplified their voices, to the point that administration officials have made a rhetorical shift from trumpeting mediocre economic indicators as signs of recovery to blaming Republicans for obstructing the extension of various stimulus programs or for not letting them pass a larger stimulus in the first place. It is probably true that critics on both the left and the right have exaggerated the pros and cons of the stimulus bill, just as both sides have probably exaggerated the importance of Reagan’s early tax cuts. Conservatives tend to underestimate the credit due Reagan and Volcker’s triumph over crippling inflation for the subsequent boom. Liberals, meanwhile, attack Reagan’s tax policy for creating large deficits while underplaying the effects of the Fed-induced recession on revenues.

To the extent that insufficient aggregate demand is not what ails the economy, the stimulus isn’t important. Obama’s strategies with regard to the banking system, the housing market, and the deficit, on the other hand, matter significantly. And in these areas, he has opted for a strategy of maximum pain-avoidance that has contributed to the sluggishness of the recovery. Instead of forcing the bondholders of TARPed banks to share in the sacrifice, Obama opted for a slow-motion bailout that allowed banks to rebuild their balance sheets gradually by borrowing from the Fed at zero and lending to the government at 4 percent. This strategy kept a lot of capital locked up in zombie institutions rather than flowing to productive enterprises.

Instead of letting housing prices find their floor, the administration tried to prop them up with a variety of ill-advised programs. Instead of attempting to restore stability to a shaken economy, Obama decided to shake things up even more by borrowing at record levels to effectuate a bailout of insolvent state governments, passing a raft of new financial regulations, and attempting to pass a total overhaul of the way the nation uses energy. Instead of spending the considerable political capital he brought to his presidency to take these painful but necessary steps, Obama saved it for his year-long battle to pass a health-care plan that the American people didn’t want. In that sense, he was willing to take unpopular steps, but only when they served longstanding liberal policy goals.

In short, while Reagan accepted a great deal of short-term unpopularity, including among members of his party -- “He said he would not do something to help the chances of Republicans in Congress in 1982 only to have to see the need for restrictive policies afterward,” said Reagan adviser Jerry Jordan -- his unpopular moves laid the groundwork for three decades of unprecedented economic expansion. So far, we have seen no evidence that Obama’s unpopular policies will pay those kinds of dividends. Like Reagan, Obama inherited an economy with structural problems requiring painful adjustments. Unlike Reagan, he has tried to put off those adjustments or cover them up with feel-good stimulus programs. Reaganomics worked. Obamanomics? Let’s just say it will be interesting to see how much longer those trend lines overlap.

The Editors

And even if it was, it’s time to realize that an affluent China could economically benefit the US.

It was big news around the world: China has “overtaken” Japan as the world’s second-richest economy.

Except, well, it’s not really news, it’s not really big, and it’s not entirely true.

Let’s take the last part first. Yes, technically, China’s gross domestic product is now slightly ahead of Japan’s. 

But GDP is a gross statistic. It doesn’t tell you nearly as much as you might think. In a very real way, China is still poorer than Japan. It’s also poorer than Tunisia, Ecuador, Gabon, Kazakhstan, and Namibia.

#ad#Last quarter Japan produced about $1.28 trillion of economic output, or about $10,085 for each of the 127 million Japanese people. China’s output was $1.337 trillion for the quarter. But China has 1.3 billion people, so that’s about $1,000 for each Chinese person.

Yes, 1.3 billion poor Chinese people are collectively more productive than 127 million rich Japanese people, but I can guarantee that most sane people would rather be poor by Japanese standards than middle class by Chinese standards.

When I graduated from high school in 1987, historian Paul Kennedy published The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. The original cover depicted the Japanese about to seize center stage, while Uncle Sam was stepping down (and Winston Churchill was already walking off to historical oblivion). That cover looks pretty stupid now.

At the time, the book was a sensation, taken as gospel by a whole class of liberal economists, journalists, and intellectuals. Indeed, Kennedy was simply synthesizing the consensus at the time. Which is why he could confidently predict the inevitability of Japanese world dominance, but completely miss the demise of the Soviet Union, which was right around the corner.

Regardless, the idea that Japan was going to supplant America as the dominant world power was one of those things “everybody knows.”  

James Fallows of The Atlantic insisted that America had to emulate Japan’s policies while pursuing a policy of “containing” Japan, lest we be run over by it. Chalmers Johnson insisted that the Cold War was over and “Japan won.” He also argued that the failure of free-market economics was so complete that, “If America were a well-run country, neoclassical economists would be hanging from the Capitol dome.”

Today we hear similar stuff about China. Indeed, when it comes to China, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman often seems like one of the hypnotized acolytes of the snake god Thulsa Doom from the movie Conan the Barbarian.

In fairness, China’s rulers haven’t hanged their free-market economists from the politburo’s balcony (at least not recently).  In fact, they’ve listened to them. China has, however, murdered tens of millions of its own people, a fact that doesn’t seem to bother Friedman much at all. Indeed, he speaks often of his “envy” for China’s ability to pursue “optimal policies,” whereas because of America’s inefficient democracy, we can only pursue “sub-optimal” ones.

What is remarkable, however, is what unites China and Japan. As the editors of the Wall Street Journal (who’ve been shellacking Japanophiles for 30 years in these debates) recently noted, Japan’s economic rise coincided with a small government sector, and its economic fall has coincided with the growth of government. In 1984, in terms of spending and taxing, Japan had just about the smallest government of the top 23 developed countries. Since the early 1990s, when its “lost decade” began, it has pursued a massive Keynesian spending spree and the government has grown to European levels.

China followed the opposite path. Starting from the abject poverty only doctrinaire communism and feudalism can create, it has imposed market-based reforms, lifting hundreds of millions out of economic squalor. And yet the Friedman and Fallows crowd looks at both examples and bizarrely concludes that the secret to success is more statism, and the source of failure is more freedom. 

China still has enormous problems, many of which aren’t reflected in its GDP growth rates, and since it lacks democracy, a free press, and the rule of law, we can’t know what all of the problems are until they explode (and neither can the Chinese).

But all of this misses the most important point. Economic “competitiveness” is a con. It assumes that when other countries prosper, America loses. That’s nonsense. If the average Chinese worker were as rich as the average Japanese worker, it would be an economic windfall for the United States. Conversely, if China’s economy imploded tomorrow, we would “gain” competitively but suffer economically. The cult of competitiveness is just a ruse used to justify the ambitions of economic planners and the pundits who worship them.

— Jonah Goldberg is an editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Jonah Goldberg

In Iraq, Bush snatched victory from the jaws of defeat with the surge. Obama is in danger of reversing the process.

At the end of the movie Charlie Wilson’s War, the brilliant architects of the ouster of the Soviets from Afghanistan are begging for funds from Congress to consolidate their success on the ground. To no avail.

In less cinematic fashion, the same scenes are playing out on Capitol Hill over Iraq. The last U.S. combat brigade has crossed the border into Kuwait, bringing the U.S. presence down to 50,000, on the way to zero by the end of 2011. It leaves a country no longer embroiled in a hellish civil war and feeling its way toward stability amid continuing terror attacks and a deadlock over the formation of a new government.

#ad#This is possible only because the Bush surge of 2007 snatched an opportunity for victory from the jaws of defeat. Now, the question is whether we’ll lurch back into the maw of failure out of ideological willfulness, inattention, and foolish penny-pinching. The Obama administration wants $2 billion in funding next year for the Iraqi army. The Senate Armed Services Committee cut the request in half on the grounds that, to paraphrase roughly, “them Iraqis can pay fer their own damn army.”

The administration has vacillated between wanting to take credit for the windfall generated by the surge, and wanting to wash its hands of “Bush’s war.” At the same time that Joe Biden has averred that the emergence of a stable, democratic Iraq “could be one of the great achievements of this administration,” the administration’s ambassador to Iraq, Chris Hill, has falsified both elements of “smart power” with his clueless passivity.

For all of Biden’s premature self-congratulation, Iraq could still become Obama’s South Vietnam, an ally we casually toss aside after Herculean efforts to get it to a tentatively sustainable state. Consolidating Iraq’s gains will require a deep strategic relationship and -- inevitably -- a continued U.S troop presence beyond 2011.

The administration has realized the folly of its hands-off approach to the stymied negotiations over a new government, and it is replacing Hill as ambassador with James Jeffrey, who knows something about the country. We’ll want to coax the Iraqis toward a coalition government, but without seeming overbearing.

That’s a natural task for diplomats -- unlike many of their other new duties. At the beginning of the war, the military did everything, even jobs for which civilians were better suited; now, the situation will be reversed.

We currently station troops at checkpoints along disputed areas between Arabs and Kurds in the north of Iraq. The hope is that two embassy branches in Kirkuk and Mosul will fulfill the same friction-reducing function after we draw down, but diplomats mostly confined to their posts can’t replace boots on the ground.

The State Department will take over training of police forces, but it has failed miserably at this before in both Iraq and Afghanistan; it is building its own private security force, when we already have an army capable of protecting it; and there’s no substitute for an everyday relationship between the Iraqi and American militaries, which acts as a brake on any potentially extraconstitutional power grabs by the Iraqi army.

All of this means that the Bush-era status-of-forces agreement setting the departure of U.S. troops for the end of 2011 will eventually have to be revisited. In general, Iraq should be treated as an important regional ally. We have an interest in intertwining ourselves with the Iraqi military, in fostering trade and investment, in seeing top Iraqi students coming to study in the West -- and, above all, in supporting an Iraqi government competent enough that it doesn’t discredit democracy.

Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution notes that countries that experience intercommunal civil wars often slide back into conflict within five years after a ceasefire. The odds of a relapse go down when a great power plays a peacekeeping role. That’s us, unless we want Iraq to become a squandered opportunity alongside Afghanistan of the early 1990s and South Vietnam of the mid-1970s.

— Rich Lowry is editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com.  © 2010 by King Features Syndicate.

Rich Lowry

The political class not only wastes trillions of our money, it adds insult to injury with each condescending statement.

Why are Americans enraged? As this moribund economy limps through its third year of doldrums, Americans are sick of having their hard-earned money swiped by the Democrat-dominated political class in Washington, D.C., which is clueless, condescending, and invariably costly.

Could anything but cluelessness explain what happened when Harv’s Metro Car Wash in Sacramento owed the federal government precisely four pennies because of a mistake in its tax return? Rather than shrug at a four-cent error, the IRS dispatched two agents to deliver a letter by hand informing the owner of his tax debt.

#ad#“They were deadly serious, very aggressive,” Harv’s proprietor, Aaron Zeff, told the Sacramento Bee. That was the first time he had heard that his account was amiss. Indeed, Zeff had received an official letter last October saying that his business had “filed all required returns and addressed any balances due.”

Even more clueless, if that is possible, is the Obama administration’s War on Kindles. As the Washington Examiner’s Byron York reported, several universities collaborated with Amazon to offer Kindles to students in a purely voluntary program to see if the electronic devices were a worthy alternative to traditional, tree-killing textbooks.

“Unfair!” screamed the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. It investigated Arizona State, Case Western, and other universities for possible discrimination against the blind. After all, division chief Tom Perez told a House hearing, “We must remain vigilant to ensure that as new devices are introduced, people with disabilities are not left behind.”

Have Perez and Justice’s other geniuses not noticed that blind people cannot read regular books, either? Perhaps fairness should require universities to close their libraries, lest sighted students enjoy a serious advantage over their blind colleagues.

For that matter, is it equitable that sighted students can see their professors while blind scholars only can hear them? Perhaps DOJ should sue all our universities until they force teachers to lecture behind dark curtains. That way, professors could be heard, but not seen, equally by all students.

Meanwhile, blind people now can activate Kindle’s newest model, which can read books aloud.

Crisis averted.

As for condescension, consider President Obama’s August 5 speech at a Chicago Ford plant. Obama praised federal bailouts for the auto industry, including a new, $250 million loan guarantee for Ford from the Export-Import Bank.

“I refuse to walk away from this industry and American jobs,” Obama thundered. “I have put my money on the American worker.” 

“My money?” Really? Does Obama think we are that stupid?

Obama’s middle initials should be O.P.M., as in “Other People’s Money.” He spends trillions relentlessly. And none of it is his money.

Washington is costly, too. Obama loves federal assistance for alternative energy projects. Supposedly they create jobs. The August 9 Newsweek listed the taxpayer costs against the employment benefits of several such initiatives. U.S. Geothermal received a $102.2 million loan guarantee for a project that employed ten people. Cost per job: $10.2 million. Brightsource Energy’s $1.37 billion guarantee funded a program that yielded 86 positions at $15.9 million apiece. Abengoa Solar’s $1.45 billion guarantee produced 85 jobs at $17 million each.

Well, at least the feds who perpetrate this nonsense work cheap.

Yeah, right.

As the Bureau of Economic Analysis recently concluded, in 2009, average private-sector compensation (salary and benefits) was $61,051. Among federal civilians, however, the equivalent figure was $123,049 — slightly more than double. Since 2000, inflation-adjusted private-sector pay has grown 8.8 percent. Among federal civilians, compensation is up 36.9 percent — more than quadruple the private-sector growth rate.

Democrats championing tax increases amid such staggering federal greed is obscene, bordering on pornographic.

If federal employees were spending the Great Recession tightening their belts, skipping meals, and wearing their old shoes thin while walking to job interviews, most Americans would think, “Well, we and the feds are all in this together.”

Instead, this differential in private versus government compensation looks less like “all for one and one for all” and more like the contrasting scenes inside and outside the gates of Versailles in April 1789.

Not surprisingly, in a Rasmussen survey released Wednesday, 28 percent of likely voters polled believe the U.S. is on the right track, while 67 percent think this republic is on the wrong track. Also, 65 percent are at least “somewhat angry,” while 40 percent are “very angry.”

Come November, Americans should take this justified fury and fire it like catapults at the Washington Democrats who demolish this beautiful country just a little more each day they go to work.

-- Deroy Murdock is a nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

Deroy Murdock

The warnings of Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln have never been more relevant.

How did we get to the point where many people feel that the America they have known is being replaced by a very different kind of country, with not only different kinds of policies but also very different values and ways of governing?

Something of this magnitude does not happen all at once or in just one administration in Washington. What we are seeing is the culmination of many trends in many aspects of American life that go back for years.

Neither the Constitution of the United States nor the institutions set up by the Constitution are enough to ensure the continuance of a free, self-governing nation. When Benjamin Franklin was asked what members of the Constitutional Convention were creating, he replied, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

#ad#In other words, a constitutional government does not depend on the Constitution but on us. To the extent that we allow clever people to circumvent the Constitution while dazzling us with rhetoric, the Constitution becomes just a meaningless piece of paper as our freedoms are stolen from us, much as a pick-pocket might steal our wallet while we were distracted by other things.

It is not just evil people who would dismantle America. Many people who have no desire to destroy our freedoms simply have agendas of their own that are singly or collectively incompatible with the survival of freedom.

Someone once said that a democratic society cannot survive for long after 51 percent of the people decide that they want to live off the other 49 percent. Yet that is the direction in which we are being pushed by those who are promoting envy under its more high-toned alias, “social justice.”

Those who construct moral melodramas -- starring themselves on the side of the angels against the forces of evil -- are ready to disregard the constitutional rights of those they demonize, and to overstep the limits that the Constitution puts on the powers of the federal government.

The outcries of protest in the media, in academia, and in politics when the Supreme Court ruled this year that people in corporations have the same free-speech rights as other Americans were a painful reminder of how vulnerable even the most basic rights are to the attacks of ideological zealots. Pres. Barack Obama said that the Court’s decision would “open the floodgates for special interests” -- as if all you have to do to take away people’s free-speech rights is call them special interests.

It is not just particular segments of the population that are under attack. More fundamentally under attack are the very principles and values of American society as a whole. The history of this country is taught in many schools and colleges as the history of grievances and victimhood, often with the mantra of “race, class, and gender.” Television and the movies often do the same.

When there are not enough current grievances for them, they mine the past for grievances and call it history. Sins and shortcomings common to the human race around the world are spoken of as failures of “our society.” But American achievements get far less attention -- and sometimes none at all.

Our “educators,” who cannot educate our children to the level of math or science achieved in most other comparable countries, have time to poison their minds against America.

Why? Partly, if not mostly, it is because that is the vogue. It shows you are “with it” when you reject your own country and exalt other countries.

Abraham Lincoln warned of people whose ambitions can only be fulfilled by dismantling the institutions of this country because no comparable renown is available to them by supporting those institutions. He said this 25 years before the Gettysburg Address, and he was speaking of political leaders with hubris, whom he regarded as a greater danger than enemy nations. But such hubris is far more widespread today than just among political leaders.

Those with such hubris -- in the media and in education, as well as in politics -- have for years eroded both respect for the country and the social cohesion of its people. This erosion is what has set the stage for today’s dismantling of America, which is now approaching the point of no return.

— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Thomas Sowell

Viva la Summer of Wreckovery.

It’s not enough that the White House is moving to lock up hundreds of millions of acres of land in the name of environmental protection. The Obama administration’s neon-green radicals are also training their sights on the deep-blue seas. The president’s grabby-handed bureaucrats have been empowered through executive order to seize unprecedented control from states and localities over “conservation, economic activity, user conflict and sustainable use of the ocean, our coasts and the Great Lakes.”

Democrats have tried and failed to pass “comprehensive” federal oceans-management legislation five years in a row. The so-called “Oceans 21” bill, sponsored by Democratic representative Sam Farr of California, went nowhere fast. Among the top reasons: bipartisan concerns about the economic impact of closing off widespread access to recreational fishing. The bill also would have handed environmentalists another punitive litigation weapon under the guise of “ecosystem management.” Instead of accepting defeat, the green lobby simply circumvented the legislative process altogether.

#ad#In late July, President Obama established a behemoth 27-member “National Ocean Council” with the stroke of a pen. Farr gloated: “We already have a Clean Air Act and a Clean Water Act. With today’s executive order, President Obama in effect creates a Clean Ocean Act.” And not a single hearing needed to be held. Not a single amendment considered. Not a single vote cast. Who gives a flying fish about transparency and the deliberative process? The oceans are dying!

The panel will have the power to implement “coastal and marine spatial plans” and to ensure that all executive agencies, departments, and offices abide by their determinations. The panel has also been granted authority to establish regional advisory committees that overlap with the existing regional and local authorities that govern marine and coastal planning.

No wonder the anti-growth, anti-development, anti-jobs zealots are cheering. The National Ocean Council is co-chaired by wackadoodle science czar John Holdren (notorious for his cheerful musings about eugenics, mass sterilization, and forced abortions to protect Mother Earth, and for hyping weather catastrophes and demographic disasters in the 1970s with his population-control-freak pals Paul and Anne Ehrlich) and White House Council on Environmental Quality head Nancy Sutley (best known as the immediate boss of disgraced green-jobs czar/avowed Communist Van Jones).

Also on the new ocean panel:

● Socialista and energy/climate-change czar Carol Browner, last seen bullying auto-company execs to “put nothing in writing, ever” and threatening to push massive cap-and-trade tax hikes during the upcoming congressional lame-duck session.

● Dr. Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a former high-ranking official at the left-wing Environmental Defense Fund, which has long championed drastic reductions of commercial fishing fleets and recreational-fishing activity in favor of centralized control.

● Attorney General Eric Holder, who will no doubt use his stonewalling expertise to shield the ocean council’s inner workings from public scrutiny.

● Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who apparently doesn’t have enough to do destroying jobs through his offshore-drilling moratorium, blocking onshore development, and wreaking havoc on the energy industry.

#page#Given Salazar’s fraudulent book-cooking in support of the administration’s offshore-drilling moratorium (remember, Obama’s own appointed scientists blasted the interior secretary for unilaterally contradicting and misrepresenting their conclusions), his comments on the new ocean grab are more threat than promise: “With two billion acres we help oversee on the Outer Continental Shelf, Interior is a proud partner in this initiative, and we look forward to helping coordinate the science, policies and management of how we use, conserve and protect these public treasures.”

“Helping coordinate the science,” as interpreted by Obama’s Chicago-on-the-Potomac heavies, means doctoring, massaging, and ramming through whatever eco-data is necessary “to reduce conflicts among uses, reduce environmental impacts, facilitate compatible uses, and preserve critical ecosystem services to meet economic, environmental, security and social objectives.” Translation: drastically limiting human activity from coastal areas to seabeds to achieve the “social objective” of appeasing the enviros and their deep-pocketed philanthropic funders.

#ad#Even New York senator Charles Schumer slammed the administration’s junk-science-based fishing limits at a meeting this week between NOAA’s Lubchenco and Long Island recreational fishermen. Draconian regulations, he said, according to the New York Post, “put the industry on death’s door.” Now, the same forces behind such job destroyers will have free reign over a national ocean policy established by administrative fiat. Viva la Summer of Wreckovery.

-- Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery, 2010). © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Michelle Malkin

Supporters of the mosque fail to see its true significance.

It’s hard to be an Obama sycophant these days. Your hero delivers a Ramadan speech roundly supporting the building of a mosque and Islamic center at Ground Zero in New York. Your heart swells and you’re moved to declare this President Obama’s finest hour, his act of greatest courage.

Alas, the next day, at a remove of 800 miles, Obama explains that he was only talking about the legality of the thing and not the wisdom -- upon which he does not make, and will not make, any judgment.

You’re left looking like a fool because now Obama has said exactly nothing: No one disputes the right to build; the whole debate is about the propriety, the decency of doing so.

#ad#It takes no courage whatsoever to bask in the applause of a Muslim audience as you promise to stand stoutly for their right to build a mosque, giving the unmistakable impression that you endorse the idea. What does take courage is to then respectfully ask that audience to reflect upon the wisdom of the project and consider whether the imam’s alleged goal of interfaith understanding might not be better achieved by accepting the New York governor’s offer to help find another site.

Where the president flagged, however, the liberal intelligentsia stepped in with gusto, penning dozens of pro-mosque articles characterized by a frenzied unanimity, little resort to argument, and a singular difficulty dealing with analogies.

The Atlantic’s Michael Kinsley was typical in arguing that the only possible grounds for opposing the Ground Zero mosque are bigotry or demagoguery. Well then, what about Pope John Paul II’s ordering the closing of the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz? Surely there can be no one more innocent of the atrocities that took place there than those devout nuns.

How does Kinsley explain this remarkable demonstration of sensitivity -- this order to pray, but not there? He doesn’t even feign analysis. He simply asserts that the decision is something “I confess that I never did understand.”

That’s his Q.E.D.? Is he stumped, or is he inviting us to choose between his moral authority and that of one of the towering moral figures of the 20th century?

At least Richard Cohen of the Washington Post tries to grapple with the issue of sanctity and sensitivity. The results, however, are not pretty. He concedes that putting up a Japanese cultural center at Pearl Harbor would be offensive, but then dismisses the analogy to Ground Zero because 9/11 was merely “a rogue act, committed by 20 or so crazed samurai.”

Obtuseness of this magnitude can only be deliberate. These weren’t crazies; they were methodical, focused, steel-nerved operatives. Nor were they freelance rogues. They were the leading, and most successful, edge of a worldwide movement of radical Islamists with cells in every continent, with worldwide financial and theological support, with a massive media and propaganda arm, and with an archipelago of local sympathizers, as in northwestern Pakistan, who protect and guard them.

#page#Why is America fighting Predator wars in Pakistan and Yemen, surveilling thousands of conversations and financial transactions every day, and engaging in military operations against radical Muslims everywhere from the Philippines to Somalia? Because of 19 crazies, all of whom died nine years ago?

Radical Islam is not, by any means, a majority of Islam. But with its financiers, clerics, propagandists, trainers, leaders, operatives, and sympathizers -- according to a conservative estimate, it commands the allegiance of 7 percent of Muslims, i.e., over 80 million souls -- it is a very powerful strain within Islam. It has changed the course of nations and affected the lives of millions. It is the reason every airport in the West is an armed camp and every land is on constant alert.

#ad#Ground Zero is the site of the most lethal attack of that worldwide movement, which consists entirely of Muslims, acts in the name of Islam, and is deeply embedded within the Islamic world. These are regrettable facts, but facts they are. And that is why putting up a monument to Islam in this place is not just insensitive but provocative.

Just as the people of Japan today would not think of planting their flag at Pearl Harbor, despite the fact that no Japanese under the age of 85 has any possible responsibility for that infamy, representatives of contemporary Islam -- the overwhelming majority of whose adherents are equally innocent of the infamy committed on 9/11 in their name -- should exercise comparable respect for what even Obama calls hallowed ground.

-- Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010 the Washington Post Writers Group

Charles Krauthammer

How to celebrate Cost of Government Day.

Every year, Americans for Tax Reform calculates Cost of Government Day -- exactly how many days of the year Americans work to pay the total cost of government. This includes all government spending by federal, state, and local government. It also includes the costs forced into every product and service we buy in the private sector by state and federal regulations. Some regulations are silly and destructive. Others are important and useful. But none are free.

In 2008, Americans worked 197 days, until July 16 — in other words, more than half the year -- to pay for the total cost of government. As a result of the bailouts, stimulus, and increased discretionary spending in the federal budget and new taxes for health care, Americans this year have worked until August 19, fully 231 days.

#ad#In two years, the American people have lost over a month of wages to the higher cost of government. Of the total, approximately 104 days are for federal spending, 52 days for state and local spending, 48 days for federal regulations, and 26 days for state and local regulations.

We know the problem. How do we do a U-turn on the road to serfdom?

Step one is to stop digging the hole deeper. The TARP bailout should be ended, all unspent funds used to pay down debt. Any money not yet spent on the stimulus should be left unspent. And the trillion-dollar spending hike over the next decade that Congress passed in 2009 should be repealed. Two years of that trillion have been spent. The rest can be saved now by refusing to spend it.

At the federal level, recent studies have shown that federal workers are paid -- in wages, benefits, and salary -- an average of $123,000. Private-sector workers are paid $61,000. That means taxpayers in the real economy are paying $62,000 more than they earn themselves to each of their “civil servants.” Pay fairness would save taxpayers $175 billion each year and $2 trillion over the next decade. State and local government workers earn an average of $80,000 compared with $61,000 for the private sector -- this includes pay, benefits, and pensions. Since there are 19 million state and local employees, we simply multiply the $19,000 per worker overpayment times 19 million and find that state and local taxpayers are overpaying by $361 billion every year, or $4 trillion over a decade. Pay equity for taxpayers would save 33 percent of all state and local taxes.

Three good ideas have bubbled up about changing the way Washington spends money that would result in large, if difficult-to-quantify, savings for taxpayers.

First, every piece of legislation that spends money should be required to be put online so every American can read it for five working days before either the House or the Senate can vote on the bill. And if a single word is changed by amendments, the five-day waiting period begins again so that the final product stands naked to the world for five full days. No more surprises. No more thousand-page bills hiding untold corruptions and payoffs for lobbyists.

Second, Congress should bring back the Joint Committee on Reduction of Nonessential Federal Expenditures, formerly known as the “Byrd Committee.” This committee, created in 1942, actually proposed and won $38 billion in spending cuts measured in today’s dollars. It is the committee that proposed ending the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Work Projects Administration. Imagine the power of an Anti-Appropriations Committee that would send out subpoenas demanding accountability from the federal bureaucracy as it spends our money and the power to write laws that defund failed programs.

Third, the Appropriations Committee itself, the source of bridges to nowhere and tens of thousands of earmarks, needs to be reformed. Membership on the powerful and tempting-to-corruption committee should be limited to six years for any member. Then no member of Congress would spend his or her career in Washington as a professional spender of other people’s money.

And last, transparency of all government spending and contracts should be the law of the land at the federal, state, and local levels. In Texas, Gov. Rick Perry got the ball rolling by putting every check written by the state, and every contract, online so every American can see it. Missouri followed, as did 29 other states. Utah and Florida went further and mandated that all local-government spending and contracts be put online. When Americans can see how their money is spent, they will become more informed and competent defenders of their rights.

Federal, state, and local spending is growing too fast. It has gotten much worse in the past two years. But we can change the future. We can make a U-turn on the road to serfdom.

-- Grover Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform. The Cost of Government Day study can be viewed at CostOfGovernment.com.

Grover Norquist

The West Wing is on notice.

If Republicans win the House this fall, Rep. Darrell Issa will wield the majority’s sharpest investigative tool: the subpoena pen.

“Cabinet officers, assistant secretaries, directors -- I will be able to take on everybody that the president hires and relies upon; the people who tell him that everything is fine,” pledges Issa, the ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, in an interview with National Review Online.

#ad#For months, Issa, a California Republican, has been delving into allegations of bureaucratic abuse and political foul play, prepping for the committee chairmanship should the chance come. A relentless critic of the Obama administration, he frequently takes to cable news to highlight his growing pile of files. Everything from the alleged job offers made to Democratic candidates by White House emissaries, to the private-sector ties of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has caught his eye.

Prodding Democrats for answers, of course, has brought him both notoriety and enemies. The New York Times, for example, calls him President Obama’s “Annoyer-in-Chief.” Issa shrugs off Democrats’ displeasure. In fact, he says that he enjoys tangling with the administration and its flacks. But subpoena power, he notes, will make a “big difference” between annoying the administration and “holding its feet to the fire.”

“You will get oversight where now you don’t,” Issa observes. “[In the minority,] I try to create public awareness about my questions so that I can try to get at least partial answers. Without press coverage, however, it is hard to get heat onto members. The administration often simply does not respond.” With subpoena power, the stakes change. Republicans, he predicts, “may not have to use it, but when [investigative targets] know that you can, it makes them attempt to give you an answer.”

Rep. Dan Burton, the Indiana Republican who chaired the oversight committee during the Clinton years, says if Issa becomes chairman, his investigations will most likely face intense opposition. “From my past experience, I know that [White House chief-of-staff] Rahm Emanuel, in particular, will do whatever is necessary to put pressure on the chairman,” he says. “[Emanuel] was part of a group in the Clinton White House that looked into everything that I had done since I was in high school to try and get me off of Clinton’s back. If [Issa] is aggressive -- as I’m sure he will be -- he should be prepared to get hit.”

Burton, who issued more than 1,000 subpoenas during his chairmanship, has high hopes for Issa. “It is extremely important to make sure that nothing questionable is going on in the executive branch and in government agencies,” he says. “Issa, who I think is very thoughtful and forceful, will likely do whatever is necessary as chairman to make sure that oversight is carried out. In that sense, he is a lot like I was: Unwilling to back down even when people threaten you.”

If he wins the chairmanship, Issa will be able to hire a slew of investigators. He says he hopes to build a team with a “healthy lack of respect, if you will, for bureaucrats.#...#I want them to assume that bureaucrats will always paint a rosy picture and to dig deep.#...#I’d look for the kind of people -- talented attorneys and other investigators -- who have the skills to do the research and find the failures in government.”

#page#How does Issa himself see the role? “What we would do is look for waste, with the scandals becoming evident on their own,” he says. “We would never go looking for a scandal -- they come to us. Typically, it is not the crime but the cover-up. The scandal comes when administration officials try to circumvent, not report, or distort what is happening.”

David Bossie, who worked as chief investigator for Burton, says Republicans should embrace the subpoena as “an incredibly powerful tool” that will enable Congress to keep a “true check and balance on power.” Being able to bring in officials for deposition, he says, “will be a game-changer,” with witnesses being forced to answer questions truthfully or risk the penalty of perjury.

#ad#“It may take time, but the subpoena and deposition authority forces the facts and truth to come out,” Bossie says. “This executive branch will fight you, just like the Clintons did, who became experts in the art of that kind of warfare.” After two years of “zero oversight,” the Obama administration, he predicts, will be faced with “a lot of sunshine.”

Issa takes care to note that should he become chairman, his efforts will be based on evidence, not partisan politics. “I took on the Republican National Committee when they put out a fundraising letter mimicking Census documents,” he says. “Chris Matthews says, ‘Yeah, sure, he does that once in a while, but he’s still over the top.’ So let’s get this straight: I’m not over the top when I take on the RNC chairman but I’m over the top when I ask why the administration is mandating large signs bragging about stimulus money?”

“Ultimately,” Issa says, “I view what we do as holding the president to the standard that he sets.” The West Wing is on notice.

-- Robert Costa is a political reporter for National Review.

Robert Costa

Obama should be building bridges, not aggravating local controversies.

The president of the United States has it hard enough without needlessly wading into, and fanning, local controversies. The economy is battered by sluggish growth, high unemployment, record annual deficits, and near-unsustainable national debt. Over 50 percent of the people now disapprove of Barack Obama’s handling of these problems.

So why weigh in on hot-button issues that can only polarize people without solving anything?

Last summer, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, a scholar of African-American literature and history, got into a silly dispute with a local policeman. For some reason, President Obama, the leader of the free world, rushed to judgment and gratuitously announced that police sergeant James Crowley and the local Cambridge, Mass., police had acted “stupidly.” For relish, he added that police wrongly stereotype in general. Obama supporters wrote off the entire psycho-drama as a “teachable moment.”

#ad#Arizona recently passed a bill designed to enforce existing immigration law and stop the enormous influx of illegal aliens into the state. Various groups, including the federal government, quickly made plans to sue the state. Yet various polls indicated that 70 percent of Americans agreed with the Arizona law, and dozens of states were planning similar legislation.

Nonetheless, the president also jumped into that acrimony -- well before the law went into effect. Obama and his attorney general alleged that Arizonans were promoting stereotyping, even though police were forbidden to question the immigration status of those who had not come into prior contact with law enforcement.

Most recently, Obama pontificated about the proposed mosque next to Ground Zero in lower Manhattan, in what his supporters might call a “teachable moment.” The issue is not a legal one. Both sides recognize the legal right of Muslims to build mosques anywhere that local zoning ordinances permit them. Instead, the controversy pertains to common decency, and the nature of the funding and proponents of the project.

No matter: The president instead lectured his mostly Muslim audience that America respects the rights of all religions -- again, not the issue in question. A day later, in embarrassment, he backtracked a bit.

Where to start with all these teachable moments?

All these controversies involve issues addressed at the state and local level, with presidential action unnecessary. In such contentious matters, why intervene when Obama cannot do much other than polarize millions?

We have learned that President Obama has a bad habit of impugning the motives of those with whom he disagrees. In the Gates case, he rushed to condemn Crowley and the police. Arizonans were not to be seen as desperate citizens trying to enforce federal law, but instead derided as bigots who harass minorities when they go out to get ice cream. And in the mosque case, the president disingenuously implied that opponents of a Ground Zero mosque wanted to deny the legal right of Muslims to build religious centers.

Note that all three issues poll badly for the president, and belie his former image as a conciliator and healer. 

Again, why does Obama go off message to sermonize about these seemingly minor things that so energize his opposition and make life difficult for his fellow Democrats?

First, off-the-cuff pontificating on extraneous issues is a lot easier than dealing with a bad economy, two wars, and heightening tensions abroad. Sermonizing is a lot different than rounding up votes in Congress, fending off reporters at press conferences, or dealing with aggressors abroad -- and it can also turn our attention away from near 10 percent unemployment and a heavily indebted government.

Second, Obama has spent most of his life around academics, lawyers, journalists, and organizers. That insular culture tends to pontificate and lecture others far more than do action-oriented business people, soldiers, doctors and farmers -- the doers who are few and far between in this administration.

Third, as an Ivy League–trained lawyer and former Chicago community organizer, Obama embraces an overarching race/class/gender critique of the United States; the story of America is not so much about an exceptionally independent and prosperous people, a unique Constitution or a vibrant national past in promoting global freedom, but about how the majority oppressed various groups. Clearly, these local instances of purported grievances have excited the president -- and almost automatically prompt his customary but unproven declarations that the majority or establishment in each case is biased or unfair.

Obama should remember that successful presidents build bridges to solve national and international problems. They leave polarizing local controversies to divisive community organizers and partisan activists.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Victor Davis Hanson

State-to-state foreign aid can’t stop terrorism. But a new private-sector program could subvert it by creating enclaves of freedom and prosperity.

“Those attacks showed emphatically that ways of doing business rooted in a different era are just not good enough. Americans should not settle for incremental, ad hoc adjustments to a system designed generations ago for a world that no longer exists.”   -- 9/11 Commission Report

Far from defeating terrorism, today’s government-to-government foreign-aid system can actually incite it by propping up corrupt and repressive one-party states. Fortunately, there is a strategy that could subvert global terror by providing hope and opportunity in the Third World -- at the expense of corruption and despair

#ad#Free Cities is a new private-sector development paradigm that would allow the United States to offer millions of people in developing countries the same freedom and non-corrupt prosperity that Hong Kong enjoys -- without the baggage of colonialism.

Hong Kong was always different from other colonies. It began as a minor trading post, surrounded by empty territory. Over time, more and more people moved there, attracted by opportunity and freedom -- just as they were drawn to the United States. In 1984 Hong Kong became a free city under a 50-year agreement between Britain and China. The Chinese government let Hong Kong retain its self-government, all its existing laws, and its free-market economy. Post-colonial Hong Kong has been a spectacular success, energizing and accelerating the transformation of Communist China itself.

China calls this remarkable arrangement “One Country, Two Systems.” It provides a model the U.S. can use to seed new outposts of freedom and prosperity around the world.

The U.S. should negotiate a series of bilateral treaties with receptive governments, carving out undeveloped sites the size of Hong Kong. Then a joint venture between the host government and the U.S. would launch brand new Free Cities in these places, with a complete set of American-style freedoms and responsibilities, guaranteed by treaty for 50 years.

Treaty-based Free Cities would entice and attract enterprising people and capital from around the world by offering: self-government; the rule of law; low taxes; reliable prosecution of corruption; freedom of faith, speech, and press; public registration of real property; a merit-based civil service; multi-ethnic meritocracy; zero tariffs; and an American university.

Free Cities would exemplify free-market globalization, rather than the economic exploitation of protectionist colonialism. They would generate millions of jobs where there are none today. And rather than opening another bottomless pit of statist foreign aid, these cities would be self-funding. A Free Cities development strategy would pay its own way by attracting funds from the private sector.

#page#A Free Cities program would also offer a transformational solution to illegal immigration. It is economic desperation that drives millions of illegals into the U.S. and Europe today. Free Cities would offer these people hope and opportunity back home. They would empower enterprising people around the world to self-select and congregate in safety to pursue their dreams of freedom and non-corrupt prosperity.

#ad#The Free Cities concept is simple, inexpensive, and revolutionary. It would shift the focus of foreign aid away from the state and toward the private sector. And it would put America on offense in the global war of ideas.

A Free Cities program would appeal directly to the idealism and generosity of the American people. It could stimulate a profound new American engagement with the poor of the world. Rather than just talking about helping poor people, or pouring more aid dollars down the drain, Free Cities would give millions of Americans a long menu of things they could do personally -- either philanthropically or for profit -- to help admirable and motivated entrepreneurial people build new free societies in Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

It is an undeniable truth that way too much state-to-state foreign aid is stolen. Today’s aid system was designed for a different time. It survives primarily because it has been the only game in town. The emergence of a viable alternative development paradigm would enable Congress to institute fundamental reforms.

Free Cities would create a global network of vibrant new free-market economies, allied with the United States and populated by citizens who have concrete stakes in preserving their freedoms and the open global trading system.

And this proposal can generate more than enough political support to be enacted. It will attract:

• People who want to subvert terrorism.

• Companies looking for non-corrupt markets in developing countries.

• Faith communities that need freedom of faith for their overseas missions.

• Expatriate entrepreneurs who would love to make an honest living back home.

• People offended by the waste and corruption of today’s foreign-aid system.

• Friends of freedom everywhere who dream of building free societies.

Free Cities offers a path to purpose for Americans who are looking for inspiring goals they can pursue to make a genuine contribution to a better world.

-- Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is cofounder of Renewing American Leadership. Ken Hagerty is vice president, policy, of that organization. 

Newt Gingrich & Ken Hagerty

In another era, projects like the Pentagon were built swiftly and efficiently.

When I drive from downtown Washington to Reagan National Airport, I often encounter delays on the George Washington Parkway due to the construction of a small bridge over an inlet of the Potomac.

It’s called the Humpback Bridge, and the Federal Highway Administration began reconstruction in January 2008. It was supposed to be finished last February, but the estimated completion date is now June 2011.

That’s 42 months to finish a bridge that doesn’t rise more than 30 feet over the water.

From the top of the Humpback Bridge, if you glance to the south, you can see the Pentagon.

#ad#The Pentagon was built in 18 months.

From the groundbreaking on Sept. 11 (yes!), 1941, it took only 15 months for Gen. George Marshall and Secretary of War Henry Stimson to move in.

Those metrics tell us something about how government worked then and how it works now. It’s taking more than twice as much time to reconstruct a small bridge than it took to build the world’s largest office building more than half a century ago.

Now it must be conceded that the two cases are not precisely comparable. Construction crews leave the Humpback Bridge during rush hours. They built the Pentagon 24/7/365.

Still, the contrast is stunning -- and unsurprising. In human societies, learning is supposed to be cumulative. But government has unlearned how to build big projects fast.

Steve Vogel’s vividly written The Pentagon: A History, published in 2007, tells the story of how the Pentagon was built and makes it clear that it was typical of the times.

Gen. Brehon Somervell was handpicked by Marshall to supervise the project because, as head of the WPA work-relief agency in New York City, he had built LaGuardia Airport from start to finish in 25 months. Try building an airport in 25 months today.

Somervell worked fast. One Thursday evening in July 1941, he ordered the War Department’s chief architect to prepare the building’s general layout, basic design plans, and architectural perspectives, and have them on his desk by 9 A.M. on Monday morning.

Today, government takes longer to do things. The Obama Democrats’ stimulus package was passed by Congress in February 2009. Of the $140 billion authorized for infrastructure spending, less than $20 billion had been disbursed twelve months later.

The $8 billion of stimulus money set aside for high-speed rail won’t be used for years in the Northeast Corridor, the busiest passenger-rail artery in the nation, because the Obama administration ordered a strict environmental review.

Somervell and his WPA boss, Harry Hopkins, would have had things moving a lot faster than that. Of course, they didn’t have to deal with the intricacies and incrustations of federal procurement policy that have been built up over the years.

They didn’t have to get clearance from environmental agencies and then prepare for the lawsuits that in our time are inevitably launched by environmental-advocacy groups (part of the Pentagon was built on mud flats; any endangered species there?).

They didn’t have to engage in endless negotiations with state and local agencies. In New York, Somervell settled his disagreements with Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in brief shouting matches, after which everyone quickly went to work on the airport that would later bear the mayor’s name.

A case can be made that some of these changes are beneficial. Recent reconstruction of the Pentagon showed that some of the cement that was supposed to be poured never was. A nearby semi-shanty town inhabited by blacks was ruthlessly torn down. We do want to protect the environment more than Americans did in the 1940s.

But even those conservatives who don’t want government to do much do want government to do the things it should be doing reasonably rapidly.

Three days after the BP gulf oil spill, the Dutch government offered their oil-skimming ships and oil-cleansing technology. The Environmental Protection Agency rejected them for weeks because the cleaned ocean water would contain more than 15 parts per million of oil. Somervell wouldn’t have taken five minutes to make the opposite decision.

Big government has become a big, waddling, sluggish beast, ever ready to boss you around, but not able to perform useful functions at anything but a plodding pace. It needs to be slimmed down and streamlined, so that it can get useful things done fast.

By the way, do you think they’ll actually finish the Humpback Bridge by next June? Me neither.

— Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner. © 2010 the Washington Examiner. Distributed by Creators.com.

Michael Barone

It’s a “shadow war” and it’s already underway.

Back in 2007, those of us assigned as “expert advisers” to the Baker-Hamilton Commission were given a straightforward assignment: Come up with a plan to salvage the deteriorating situation in Iraq. Few of us thought that was possible. Only a small minority -- I was perhaps the most vocal -- enthusiastically supported the “surge”: the counterinsurgency strategy conceived and implemented by Gen. David A. Petraeus.

It will be years before we know for sure whether the surge permanently transformed Iraq. But it clearly averted what would have been an American defeat in the heart of the Muslim Middle East at the hands of al-Qaeda and Iran’s proxy militias. Such a defeat would have been consequential in ways most people -- including most Baker-Hamilton advisers -- have never taken the trouble to imagine.

#ad#Whether it was wise for Pres. George W. Bush to invade Iraq in the first place is a separate question. Also a separate question: whether it was wise for Pres. Barack Obama to declare Afghanistan the “good war,” the war that must be won.

Actually, I’d argue they are the same war -- just different theaters, much as Europe, Asia, and North Africa were different theaters of World War II. But I guess that, too, is a separate question. The pertinent fact is Obama did commit to Afghanistan, and he doubled down on that commitment by ordering a surge of his own and assigning, once again, General Petraeus to command the mission.

On the left, support for Obama’s Afghanistan policy -- never solid -- now seems to be eroding. Support from the right also has been weakening. Some conservatives aren’t convinced Obama has the determination to see the mission through. Others believe the mission has become too focused on “nation-building” and not enough on disabling America’s enemies. 

That brings us to a rare instance of Left/Right consensus: Hardly anyone believes that the U.S. should replicate the Iraq/Afghanistan model in Somalia or Yemen or other corners of the globe. So whether or not Plan A works in Afghanistan, we will still need a Plan B to fight the long war being waged by what Obama calls “violent extremists” -- sworn enemies of the West who see themselves as jihadis, commanded by the Koran to fight non-Muslims everywhere until all submit to Islamic law and Islamic rule.

News bulletin: There is a Plan B -- and it’s already being implemented. As the New York Times reports, the Obama administration is now fighting a “shadow war against Al Qaeda and its allies.”

The Times continues:

In roughly a dozen countries -- from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics crippled by ethnic and religious strife -- the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists.

However: “Virtually none of the newly aggressive steps undertaken by the United States government have been publicly acknowledged.” Well, that’s what makes it a shadow war, isn’t it?

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This approach is more counterterrorism than counterinsurgency. It actually began during the Bush administration, almost immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but it has expanded since Obama has been in office.

According to the Times, what is taking place is nothing less than a “transformation of the C.I.A. into a paramilitary organization as much as a spying agency,” one that has “broadened its drone campaign beyond selective strikes against Qaeda leaders and now regularly obliterates suspected enemy compounds and logistics convoys, just as the military would grind down an enemy force.”

At the same time, “the Pentagon is becoming more like the C.I.A.,” with Special Operations conducting “spying missions that were once the preserve of civilian intelligence agencies.”

#ad#Most Republicans are not criticizing Obama for these policies because they believe -- as they did during the Bush years -- that it is imperative to take the war to the enemy rather than wait for him to come to us. Most Democrats also are holding their tongues. Partisanship, no doubt, is one reason. But the Times may be correct to surmise that many Democrats have become eager for an alternative to the Iraq/Afghanistan model of ground wars requiring years of American military occupation.

In sum, it appears, we have broad, if tacit, bipartisan agreement for Plan B: a stealth war, fought with drones and assassination teams and contractors with special skills, a conflict in which we enlist the cooperation of local rulers but do not necessarily pressure them to champion freedom and democracy and pursue policies leading to economic development. The goal is more modest: Find the bad guys and kill them.

Among the concerns one might have about this policy: It focuses on non-state actors; and it does not address the long-term threat from state actors, notably Iran, which is seeking nuclear weapons and using its oil wealth to sponsor terrorist organizations from the Middle East to South America. In the final analysis, Iran is a much greater threat to the U.S than its rival -- and occasional collaborator -- al-Qaeda.

Also: It is not clear that the CIA is up to this task. Decades of misdirection and bureaucratization clearly have taken their toll on the agency. To become adept at covert warfare -- not just the use of drones -- will be an enormous challenge.

As for the Pentagon, my impression is that America’s elite military units are the best of the best. But even for them, fighting a shadow war of indefinite duration will be extraordinarily difficult. No matter how carefully they follow the rules they are given, they will be accused of violating international laws and conventions by organizations indifferent -- if not hostile -- to American interests. Will Obama stand up to them?

And can this approach work without recourse to coercive interrogations -- techniques useful for gathering intelligence but prohibited by Obama? Can there be congressional oversight without attempts to derive partisan advantage? Will the intelligence community and the Pentagon feel confident entrusting their secrets to members of Congress? Such questions have yet to be answered.

In the meantime, Plan B is underway. We should hope it succeeds. And we should begin working on Plan C -- just in case it does not.

-- Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism and Islamism.

Clifford D. May

This administration’s commitment to the national security of the United States is open to serious question.

One of the few campaign promises that Barack Obama has kept is this: “We are going to change the United States of America!”

As in many other cases, those who were thrilled by the thought of “change” seldom seemed to consider whether it would be a change for the better or for the worse. True believers in the Obama cult assumed that it had to be a change for the better.

Now it is slowly dawning on more people that it is a change for the worse -- runaway government spending, under the banners of “stimulus” and “jobs,” is not stimulating anything except political pay-offs to special interests. As for jobs, the percentage of the population with jobs keeps on declining, even as the administration points to all the jobs it is creating.

#ad#It is of course not pointing to all the other jobs that it is destroying, whether by taking money out of the private sector or by loading so many mandates on employers that labor is made artificially too expensive for many employers to do much hiring.

But the most dangerous and most lasting damage that this administration has done to this nation has been in the international jungle, where it is alienating our longtime allies, dismantling our credibility by reneging on our commitments to putting up a missile shield in Eastern Europe, and -- above all -- doing nothing meaningful to stop the leading terror-sponsoring nation in the world, Iran, from getting nuclear weapons.

We could deter the Soviet Union with our own nuclear weapons, but no one can deter suicidal fanatics, whether they are international terrorists of the sort that caused 9/11 or the kind in charge of the government of Iran, who have long been supplying international networks of suicidal fanatics.

Threatening to launch nuclear retaliation against the people of Iran will not deter them. They have already shown how little they care about the people of Iran and how much they care about their fanatical beliefs and hate-filled agendas.

How much does our own administration in Washington care about the American people and their national security? This is not a question you would usually have to ask about an administration of either party. But this is not like any other administration, and Barack Obama is unlike any other president of the United States in having come from a background of decades of associations and alliances with people who resent this country and its people.

Against that background, the Obama administration’s undermining of our longstanding alliances with Britain and Israel, among others, while seeking to reach accommodations with nations hostile to this country, raises painful questions and even more painful possibilities for the future.

Gratuitous affronts to both Britain and Israel began early in the Obama administration, including a clear downgrading of state visits from their national leaders. These affronts were pitched at a level unlikely to be noticed by the general public but unmistakable to anyone familiar with international relations, including both our allies and our enemies. But most of the pro-Obama media said little to alert the public.

It is not only in our foreign relations that the administration’s commitment to the national security of the United States is open to serious question. Domestically, as well, the same serious and painful questions arise.

After spending hundreds of billions of dollars on political pork-barrel projects from coast to coast -- some frivolous beyond belief -- its only major cut in federal spending has been its move to cut $100 billion from the Defense Department’s budget.

If there was ever a time when we needed a larger standing army, as distinguished from relying on National Guard troops, who are taken suddenly from civilian life and sent on multiple tours of combat duty, this is that time. We need a bigger and constantly modernizing military, not a bargain-basement military, trimmed down to leave more money for pork-barrel spending.

Sometimes small things can give you a better clue than large things. A recent editorial in Investor’s Business Daily pointed out that hundreds of captured illegal aliens from terrorist-sponsoring nations have been released on their own recognizance within the United States. Are these the actions of an administration that is serious about the national security of the American people?

— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Thomas Sowell