Join Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, Mark Steyn, Charles Krauthammer, Larry Kudlow, Artur Davis, Hugh Hewitt, and many more at the National Review Institute Conservative Summit, January 25-27, 2013, in Washington, D.C. Click here.
I feel like Rudolph to Rich Lowry’s Santa this Christmas. Of all the other reindeer in the NR herd – Dasher Ponnuru, Dancer Goldberg, Prancer Davis Hanson, etc – Rich chose me to quote in his Yuletide column, which is all about “White Christmas”.
If you’re interested, the podcast with me and Irving Berlin’s daughter (and his piano) to which Rich refers can be found here. And I see my old friends at The Spectator in London have dusted off an ancient essay of mine on “White Christmas” from a bazillion years ago.
I agree with Rich’s point about the declining quality of Christmas songs. Most recent ones seem to boil down to: Christmas is like a really great day to be with the one you love, just like all the other days you’re with her, only even more so – which doesn’t seem quite sufficient to keep the genre in business. And don’t get me started on that “Christmas In The Sand” thing.
There’s no better way to celebrate Christmas than with a Between the Covers podcast: This week, we talk to Joseph Bottum, author of The Christmas Plains. We discuss why people make a bigger deal of Christmas than Easter, whether Christmas has become too commercial, and why Bottum gave up an editorial life in DC and New York for South Dakota.
A new version of ’Twas the Night Before Christmas removes these two lines: “The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth/and the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath,” in order that children not be encouraged to smoke. But in my USA Todaycolumn, I look at how this kind of editing could prevent children from learning important lessons about morality:
However, what McColl’s revisions will cause is a dumbing down of children’s moral intelligence. The point of stories — even children’s stories, which appropriately tend to be simpler and less complex than young adult and adult fiction — isn’t to present completely sanitized scenarios, where everyone is either completely good or entirely evil.
If that was the case, beloved childhood characters as diverse as Harry Potter (who sometimes uses an invisibility cloak when breaking rules) to Madeline (the little French heroine who recklessly walks — and falls off — a high bridge ledge) should also face censorship.
My colleague Charlie also wrote about this earlier this year.
In regard to Mark Steyn’s note that NR writers were honored by an Atlantic blog, I too feel blessed that someone named David Wagner selected one of my columns as one of his supposedly 50 worst of the year on the basis on the following single paragraph:
Victor Davis Hanson in the National Review on Susan Rice It’s a great time to be a black woman, argues a white man named Victor Davis Hanson. “In the nexus of elite universities and Democratic politics,” Hanson writes about the Susan Rice confirmation holdup, “being black, female, and elite is far more advantageous that being white, male, and poor.” Right. Because we have so few white guys in politics, while the number of black female Senators can be counted on no hands.
One of the signs of a bad writer like this fellow Wagner is the inability to read. Wagner tries to refute my premise that being black, female, and elite is an advantage in Democratic politics and university life by lazily invoking “white guys in politics” and “black female Senators.” But is his “politics” synonymous at all with the nexus of “elite universities and Democratic politics” and are “white guys” the same as “white, male, and poor“?
Wagner has an uncanny ability to appear very stupid in a very brief space: Does this “white man named” David Wagner grasp that racially gerrymandered districts do not often result in black congressional representatives who appeal across racial lines and thus become competitive in statewide races? The reason why serious major national figures are emerging who are not so-called white, like a Tim Scott, Ted Cruz, or Bobby Jindal, is precisely because they did not run by focusing on their racial fides, and unlike the racially fixated Wagner (a “white man named Victor Hanson”) or a Sheila Jackson Lee, or a Maxine Waters, they see race as incidental rather than essential to our characters.
And note how Wagner nonsensically invokes the Senate in a matter of supposed racialism in the discussion over the presumed nomination of Rice as secretary of state — no wonder: Secretary of state is a position that has not seen a white male in the last 15 years, since the inept Warren Christopher, and thus is not a good example of Wagner’s racial obsessions.
Ben Affleck appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation today to raise awareness about the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which, at more than 4 million dead, is the most deadly conflict since World War II and a human tragedy of immense proportions. When asked by the host what course of action the United States might take, Affleck answered, “The main thing that I’d ask the Congress to do is to appoint a high-level, presidential-level envoy, temporary envoy, to the region. That would involve somebody who really has the ear of the president of the United States and the authority that comes with that . . .”
Since he might like someone else who, in addition to the above, will soon be out of a job and has an established cordial relationship with key regional actors, such as Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, the DRC’s Laurent Kabila, and Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, might we suggest Susan Rice?
South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham poured more cold water on the prospective nomination of Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense, telling NBC’s David Gregory, “I don’t think he’s going to get many Republican votes.” For his part, however, Graham said he plans to wait and see what transpires in the hearings if Hagel is in fact nominated before deciding how he will vote on the nomination.
NRA president David Keene appeared on Face the Nation this morning, and spent some of the time rebutting many of the misleading impressions Americans hold about gun control and firearms, including the assumption that “military style” “assault weapons” fire at an exceptionally high rate.
Schieffer began the discussion by asking Keene, “will you oppose, as the National Rifle Association, any attempt to tighten the gun laws, to do what even the International Association of Police Chiefs say is a good idea, and that is to ban these military-style assault weapons? . . . Will you continue to oppose that?”
Keene explained, “we will continue to oppose a ban on semi-automatic weapons . . . These aren’t military weapons. If we equipped our army with the AR-15 [the weapon used in the Newtown tragedy], we’d be beaten by every Third World dictatorship. Military weapons are fully automatic weapons and that’s illegal, you don’t get those. That’s not what we’re talking about. The impression often is, Bob, that that’s what we’re talking about, but it isn’t.”
Right on cue, the host tried to pretend, in fact, that is what they were talking about, asking, “how many rounds can these weapons discharge, say, in five seconds?” “They fire when you pull the trigger,” Keene explained, also known as the definition of semi-automatic.
Schieffer then retorted, “And they keep firing.” “No, they don’t keep firing,” Keene explained, “that’s a fully automatic weapon.”
Stymied, Schieffer pivoted, “but these guns are dangerous. Even Justice Scalia . . .” The host argued that even conservative justices on the Supreme Court have not argued that regulating some types of weapons would constitute a violation of the individual right to bear arms — a straw man Keene was not advancing.
Keene, earlier in the program, had actually explained that the NRA does support at least one specific tightening of America’s gun laws — guess Schieffer wasn’t listening — when he explained that they have pushed for more states to include mental-health status as a disqualifier in the registries they use for background checks.
Pressed on whether he would support former Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel’s nomination as secretary of defense, Chuck Schumer declined to comment, saying only, “I’d have to study his record.” Asked whether the president should nominate Hagel in the first place, Schumer said, “that’s his choice,” but that Hagel’s record will be “studied carefully.”
On NBC’s Meet the Press, David Gregory drew NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre’s attention to the slew of headlines calling him a nut in the wake of his remarks Friday and asked him to respond. “If it’s crazy to call for putting police and armed security in our schools to protect our children, then call me crazy,” La Pierre said. “I think the American people think it’s crazy not to do it. It’s the one thing that would keep people safe and the NRA is going to try to do that.”
Republican congressmen Mick Mulvaney and Steve LaTourette this morning defended house speaker John Boehner against charges that he’s lost control of the Republican caucus and, by extension, against speculation that his speakership may be vulnerable.
Mulvaney, who opposed Boehner’s ‘Plan B,’ said,”I think that the vote on Thursday is being portrayed as a vote on leadership, and it wasn’t, it was a vote on a specific piece of legislation.” LaTourette added, “The reason that John Boehner has trouble managing the House Republican Conference isn’t a lack of leadership, it’s because we have a lot of divergent opinions and he lets people participate, which wasn’t the case in the past.”
The conservatives who were ousted from their committee posts by House leadership just weeks ago might have a different view of Boehner’s willingness to tolerate dissent in his caucus, but the views of Mulvaney and LaTourette are interesting nonetheless.
Last week, we noted the sadly hilarious attempt of the Western media to portray the emerging landslide victory of Egypt’s new sharia constitution as a “slim vote win.” As observed here at the time:
Cases of spring fever abound in the West, but this one is clearly terminal. The sharia constitution is not winning by a slim margin. It is winning in a landslide. At the moment, the vote stands at about 56.5% to 43.5% against the “opposition” — which is called the “opposition” rather than the “supporters of democracy” in order to avoid the embarrassing reminder of what is being so soundly thrashed.
The referendum is already a rout for Islamic supremacists, but there is more. As noted here last week, Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader Egyptians freely elected to be their president, bifurcated the referendum. Only about half the country voted, the rest will vote next Saturday — after being fired up by pro-constitution imams in the mosques on Friday. Understand that of the two halves, the one that already voted this past weekend was expected to have the larger number of “opposition” votes. When all is said and done, the final tally will be closer to a 2-to-1 romp for the Islamists.
Well, the Round II tally is coming in and, as predicted, it was even more of a rout for the Brotherhood — looks like about 71 to 29 percent. Cumulatively, that means sharia wins by about 64 to 36 percent — i.e., close to a 2-to-1 romp for the Islamists.
If you’ve been following along for the last few years, you heard it here first.
On Fox News Sunday this morning, Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota outlined a compromise between the president’s and the House speaker’s previous “grand bargain” deals to avoid the fiscal cliff. Downplaying the alternative the president proposed yesterday as a basic measure to avert the worst of the cliff’s effects, Conrad insisted that the current situation is “an opportunity to do something great for our country.”
The numbers he proposed: $1.45 trillion in spending cuts, to split the difference between Speaker Boehner’s and President Obama’s proposals, and a similar median number on revenue, $1.15 trillion, for a “combination of $2.6 trillion. You couple that with the $1.1 trillion that’s already been done [in the Budget Control Act] and you’re at $3.7 trillion.”
He admitted, “Is it perfect? No. Is it everything we’d hoped for? No. Does it match what Bowles-Simpson did? No. On an even comparison, Bowles-Simpson would be $5.3 trillion.”
Wallace then prompted him, “are you saying you don’t like the president’s plan?” Conrad, indeed, didn’t sound too fond of the president’s final proposal, saying, “It may come to that, but I would hope that we would have one last attempt here to do what everyone knows needs to be done, which is a larger plan that really does stabilize the debt and get us moving in the right direction.”
It’s important to note, however, that it’s unclear if Conrad’s proposal would meet the administration’s mercurial definition of “balance”; White House press secretary Jay Carney, following Boehner’s proposal last week of $1 trillion in spending cuts and $940 billion in revenue, declared that he still had not seen a balanced proposal from Republicans. Conrad’s plan has more spending cuts relative to tax increases than Boehner’s did — crucially, however, it does include higher revenue estimates in absolute terms, which may be of some appeal to the president.
In response, his counterpart on the panel Senator Barrasso noted that he believes the president sees a “political victory at the bottom of the cliff,” and would therefore be uninterested in a grand bargain that averts it.
As a final note, Conrad also made the intriguing deficit-neutral proposal of permanently patching the Alternative Minimum Tax (indexing it for inflation, essentially) and “paying for it” with the drawdown of “overseas contingency operations.” He admitted that the latter is indeed a “spending fiction,” but labeled the former a “revenue fiction” as well — as in revenue forgone which no one expected would be collected anyway, nor should it be (since the AMT is not intended to encompass more and more taxpayers every year merely because current law does not index it for inflation).
On this morning’s edition of State of the Union, Joe Lieberman told CNN’s Candy Crowley that former Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel’s stance on Iran, not his positions on Israel, would the greatest concern for him were he voting on Hagel’s confirmation as secretary of defense. (Hagel is the reported frontrunner to replace Leon Panetta at the Department of Defense.) “President Obama obviously has earned the right to nominate whoever he wants, but I think this will be a very tough confirmation process,” Lieberman said. “I don’t know how it would end, but there are reasonable questions to ask, and that Chuck Hagel would have to answer.”
This morning on Fox News Sunday, Republican senator John Barrasso of Wyoming told Chris Wallace, when asked “are we going over the cliff?,” “I believe we are. I believe the president is eager” to do so.
Barrasso, chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, explained that he thought this was the case because the votes are not apparently available for either the most recent Republican proposals or the president’s most recent proposal, outlined on Saturday. The senator emphasized, when Wallace asked whether he could guarantee that Senate Republicans would not filibuster the president’s new plan, that “I can’t even guarantee the Democrats will vote for it.”
The president’s stripped-down plan, for reference, includes continuing the Bush tax rates for all income under $250,000, extending unemployment benefits, and delaying the sequester cuts for another year (which would require their being made up for with somewhat greater deficit-reduction alternatives in the out years).
The Hemingway house in Key West, Fla., would like federal regulators to leave its six-toed cats alone. What? You didn’t realize that your bureaucratic overlords keep an eye on well-fed museum cats, for the safety and wellbeing of the American people and their pets? NYT:
The dispute began in 2003 after a museum volunteer and cat lover filed a complaint with the department after an aggressive cat wandered from the property. The agency concluded that the museum needed to follow federal regulations on exhibiting animals. But the museum argued that the cats are born and bred at the house, that they seldom wander beyond the grounds and that it is Mr. Hemingway’s legacy — not the cats — that serve as the main attraction.
“If we had a six-toed cat zoo, we wouldn’t get those numbers,” Ms. Higgins said.
But the agency disagreed. It sent in an animal behavioral specialist to index the cats and analyze the situation. Undercover agents were then sent in 2005 and 2006 to observe the cats and surreptitiously photograph their movements. One photo shows a gray cat sitting on the pavement. It carries the caption: “Picture of six-toed cat taken in restaurant/bar at end of Whalton Lane and Duval. May or may not be a Hemingway Home and Museum cat.”
No one has explained what the regulators were seeking at that latitude. (Hemingway allusion!)
Christmas came early for me this year. I’m thrilled to find I’m one of four National Review writers to be honored by The Atlantic in The 50 Worst Columns of 2012. Let’s go for a clean sweep next year!
My elation is only slightly muted by the vague feeling, as an old Fleet Street hand, that the usually reliable year-end fake-awards routine requires a defter touch than Mr Wagner’s. Indeed, his almost paralyzed conformism is a minor example of the point I was making in that column. But what do I know?
Robert Bork has been justly lauded in these pages as one of America’s greatest legal thinkers in the fields of antitrust and constitutional law. His major work and books have been in this area. And after the disgraceful nomination fight, he examined America’s culture war with powerful insight. My favorite book of the judge’s, however, is one only slightly eluded to in the past days Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide Rule of Judges (John Yoo mentioned it in NRO’s Symposium for Judge Bork).
In the 2003 book, Judge Bork wrote: ”Judicial imperialism is manifest everywhere, from the United States to Germany to Israel, from Scandinavia to Canada to Australia, and it is now the practice of international tribunals. The problem is not created simply by a few unfortunate judicial appointments, but by a deeper cause and one more difficult to combat—the transnational culture war.” He points out this transnational “New Class” class is waging political war against consensual government throughout the West, with the aid of American lawyers and judges.
A short, very clearly written, concise book of 139 pages, Coercing Virtue discusses New Class–promoted judicial activism in Israel, Canada, Europe, the U.S. and international bodies. It is in this book that I first learned that the president of Israeli Supreme Court (the most activist in the world) once declared, “The judge must sometimes depart the confines of his legal system and channel into it fundamental values not yet found in it.” This same Israeli Supreme Court essentially chooses it own members and has, in Robert Bork’s words, “wrested control of the attorney-general from the executive branch.”
Most significantly, Coercing Virtue is an evergreen book that will continue to provide powerful arguments for Americans and all our friends across the world who are locked in a political struggle with a New Class that seeks to diminish democratic self-government in the name of a “global rule of law,” which would basically mean, as Judge Bork put it, “the worldwide rule of judges.”
Ramesh, the second point your reader makes below — that broad-based tax increases will help Americans realize the true cost of enlarged government — is one I echoed on Friday in a piece arguing that no deal is better than a bad deal:
Remember that continuing to spend money we don’t have isn’t free. Deficit spending is a tax increase on our children and our grandchildren, and on people who have done the responsible thing and built up their savings. Going over the cliff means that the accounting gimmicks are over. No more “temporary” this and “temporary” that, so that Congress can pretend to be more fiscally responsible than it’s actually being. Going over the cliff means that a broad swath of Americans will be required to pay for the enlarged government that they voted for in November. I don’t think that’s such a bad thing.
Much of the Republican behavior on Capitol Hill has been driven by fear of how the electorate will view Republicans if they don’t continue to pass temporary tax cuts. But reducing the deficit will have to happen sometime, and whenever it happens, it is likely to have some negative impact on the economy. If Republicans don’t want to reduce the deficit two years away from the next election, under a Democratic President and a Democratic Senate, they’ll never reduce the deficit. The time to reduce the deficit is now, before a real fiscal crisis emerges, one that makes Greece look like a picnic.
We achieve historically significant deficit reduction by going over the fiscal cliff, on the scale of $6 trillion or more over ten years. In 2013, with a much more manageable budget deficit, Republicans can pair real, growth-oriented tax reform with commensurate spending reductions. Because middle-class taxes will go up under the fiscal-cliff scenario, people who currently have less incentive to support spending reductions would have more reason to next year.
But so long as the U.S. has the most progressive tax code in the OECD, something Speaker Boehner’s “Plan B” would exacerbate, achieving a consensus for entitlement reform will get harder and harder.
I have three thoughts on your post. First, the politics motivating the recalcitrant House Republicans is not a desire to sharpen distinctions between the parties, but rather the more parochial fear of getting primaried by Tea Party. In politics, as a rule, the more often a legislator has to run for office and the smaller his constituency, the easier it is to scare him away from taking a controversial position.
My second thought is that the phenomenon you describe — House Republicans voting against a tax increase even though as a consequence the country will be saddled with still higher taxes — is precisely what occurred on the eve of the first Gulf War. Needing a budget deal before the start of hostilities against Iraq, President George H.W. Bush negotiated a deal with Democrat and Republican leaders, in which he broke his “no new taxes” pledge. The tax increases were modest, and the president could justly claim to have held the line, especially given the alternative. But House minority whip Newt Gingrich nevertheless rebelled against the plan, As a result, the president was predictably forced to cave in to the Democratic alternative, which involved much higher taxes.
The Tea Party (and I consider myself a member in good standing) is being silly on tax rates, which are near historic lows in the modern era (about 15 percent of GDP). They should be focused on entitlements, the deficit, and a tax code that punishes business activity, which is where the real problems lie. Focusing on taxes guarantees that the president will get his way across the board, because he is perfectly happy to go off the fiscal cliff while blaming Republicans for an increase in middle class taxes. In fact, Republicans should be willing to raise tax rates to a level commensurate with spending, so the American people can see just how much Obama’s middle-class entitlement state truly costs. Obama’s ultimate goal is to lock spending in at the levels his original stimulus increased it to four years ago, around 25 percent of GDP, where it has remained since. Force Americans to start paying for what this level of spending truly costs, and Republicans will soon find themselves back in power, with a mandate to reduce both spending and taxes.
Regarding point 1, it’s pretty tough to beat an incumbent in a primary. Would Republicans really be vulnerable to a challenge because they voted for a bill to restraint tax increases as much as they thought possible–a bill that Grover Norquist affirmed did not count as a tax increase?
Regarding point 2, that’s a point in favor of the argument I’m opposing. In the long run in that case it was probably better for anti-taxers to launch a revolt that caused taxes to go higher in the short run.
In a radio interview on Thursday with Albany’s WGDJ-AM, New York governor Andrew Cuomo said that he plans to work with state legislators next month to submit a proposal for new gun-control laws; in particular, Cuomo said, “our focus is assault weapons,” because current state laws regulating the weapons “have more holes that Swiss cheese.”
“I don’t think legitimate sportsmen are going to say, ‘I need an assault weapon to go hunting,’” he said.
Cuomo continued, “Confiscation could be an option. Mandatory sale to the state could be an option. Permitting could be an option — keep your gun but permit it.”
The governor will propose the new gun-control legislation in his State of the State address on January 9.
It’s an oxymoronic world. An atheist has been hired by a nonprofit to serve as a Stanford “chaplain” to atheist students. From the San Francisco Chronicle story:
The chaplain is an atheist. “People are shocked when I tell them,” Figdor said. “But atheist, agnostic and humanist students suffer the same problems as religious students – deaths or illnesses in the family, questions about the meaning of life, etc. – and would like a sympathetic nontheist to talk to.” Figdor, 28, is one of a growing number of faith-free chaplains at universities, in the military and in the community who believe that nonbelievers can benefit from just about everything religion offers except God.
Don’t we already have those? They are called counselors and mental-health professionals, mentors and life coaches.
The “atheist chaplain” is latest example of the ongoing postmodern assault on the meaning of language. When words and terms mean whatever people want, we lose common frames of reference.
Chaplains have always been associated with explicitly religious services or supporting the faith of those whom chaplains serve through prayer, scripture reading, etc. I mean, that function is inherent in the word’s definition. That doesn’t make it “better,” but it means that the counseling, listening, etc. comes from an explicitly religious core.
It is amusing how the irreligious so often seek to coopt religious terminology. But it can also be subversive because words and their accurate meaning are crucial to our ability to communicate.
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