"The house we hope to build is not for my generation but for yours. It is your future that matters. And I hope that when you are my age, you will be able to say as I have been able to say: We lived in freedom. We lived lives that were a statement, not an apology."


Tuesday, November 29, 2011

OWS, Still

The public's tolerance for OWS, as measured in opinion polling, is running out.

Surprising, this is not.

Weeks after these occupations began, nothing new has really developed from them.  No cause to action, no demands, no political organization.  They are just there, camped out in their own refuse, angry at an abject percentile.  To the extent that there was a point to be made it has been made.  Now they are are just occupying space.

Also, a populace that has endured sustained economic hardship for years now is entirely likely to show some empathy towards a movement fueled by economic grievance, however Marxist and misdirected it may be.  But once that movement, comprised of people who are generally not in search of gainful employment, begins to interfere with people and the pursuit of their own, empathy, sympathy and any other residue of common-cause quickly evaporate, replaced in their turn by anger, contempt and intolerance.

This is what OWS is becoming: a pointless, obstructive social nuisance.

Soon may it wither under the weight of the coming winter cold and wet.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Taxing or Spending?

As everyone mourns the failure of the Super Committee to achieve a grand bargain that would have saved the republic (not that anyone could have plausibly expected them to succeed; they wail for partisan positioning), we must all ask ourselves a fairly simple yet impactful question: Are we on the road to bankruptcy because we do not tax enough or because we spend too much?

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Newt Ascendant

Observers have been speculating for weeks whether Newt Gingrich would eventually get a second look (and a spike in the polls) from conservatives looking for an alternative to Romney.  That has begun to happen and it is not hard to see why.  As the ever-wise and sagely Charles Krauthammer poninted out, this race has been shaped more by the debates and less by traditional retail-politicking.

That is to Newt's strength, for he has dominated the debates -- or, better said, his comprehensive knowledge on seemingly every public issue has shone through.  (His shots at the mainstream media moderators have not hurt him either.)

This coupled with the fact that each of the would-be alternatives have wilted in turn as soon as they've ascended the polls and Newt's newfound strength is easily explained.

What might be harder to explain is if he holds up under the inevitable scrutiny better than those before him.

Palestinian Statehood

It is hard to imagine a more counterproductive act in the Mid-East peace process than granting the Palestinians statehood.  Since Oslo, the premise of the entire process has been "land for peace" -- in return for Israeli cession of land and autonomy the PA is to crack-down on the terrorist elements within its society.

Land and autonomy have been ceded -- on multiple occasions, as it happens -- without peace being provided in return.  The PA, in other words, has gotten more and more of what it has wanted without being compelled to hold up its end of the bargain.

Now they ask for statehood with much of the international community's endorsement.  It will not happen now or in the imminent future (the United States will veto the initiative in the UN Security Council), but that the idea has so much support speaks to how little those global actors interested in peace in the Holy Land know how to achieve it.

By mistakenly believing that peace is just one more Israeli concession away without holding the PA accountable for itself, Palestinians have come to understand that no change in the way they operate is really needed: international pressure will eventually compel the Israelis to make every concession they desire.  Terrorism thus continues and a lasting peace slips farther away.

The push for Palestinian statehood is just the latest, and how anyone can support the idea given the present state of affairs strains reason.  Having felt no compulsion to pacify its society, the PA hasn't.  The state created would thus be saturated, nay controlled by elements seeking to destroy the state next door.

That this is so little understood only means that peace is as far away as ever.  The ball is in the Palestinians' court and they are the ones whom the international community should hold accountable.  No one else.

Wednesday, November 09, 2011

Romney On a Limb

The hang-up conservatives have with Gov. Romney is the conviction that he will say, support, oppose anything advantageous to him politically.  The upshot is a fear that, however much he may espouse conservative principles at present, he will abandon them if and when they become politically inconvenient.

His cautious, low-risk campaign has done little to assuage these fears.  If anything, it has exacerbated them.  Witness the "anyone but Romney" efforts that are intensifying within the conservative movement, all because he has declined to outline or defend conservative initiatives that address the paramount issues confronting the republic.

To address this the governor must continue to do what he did on Saturday: propose entitlement reforms similar in kind to those that have been proposed by conservative luminaries like Paul Ryan.  This is by its definition risky, something by which President Obama and the Left will bludgeon him in the general.

Accordingly, it will earn him credit with the Republican base.  He will be going out on a limb for something bold and conservative, tying his political fate, in other words, to the fate of conservatism and its prescriptions for improving America.

To be the standard-bearer of conservatives, he must bear the standard.  On Saturday he began to do this.

Tuesday, November 08, 2011

The Consternation

The consternation of the Republican Party this campaign cycle is that all of its best talent is unripe: recently elected and not quite ready to assume the White House.  (We've all seen what happens when you put someone who isn't ready into the White House...)

In 2016 many of them should be seasoned enough, but by then President Obama will have done four more years of damage or a Republican will be seeking re-election.

Tuesday, November 01, 2011

Greece & the EU

David Pryce-Jones stops just short of declaring that Greece will soon be the author of the EU's downfall today:
Everybody with a head on their shoulders has been forecasting for years that the euro was certain to come to a crisis like this. The sovereignty of nations is stronger than the Brussels mob. Union was a historic mistake. The Greeks invented democracy, and it will be poetic justice if they save it now and free us all"
That Eurocrats have reacted so harshly to Prime Minister Papandreou's referendum plan is hardly surprising.  Having sought for decades to consolidate total-authority in Brussels, Greek popular will stands to bring the whole edifice down in a single plebiscite.

That is fine.  Greeks have every right to assert themselves in such a manner.  It is their future and they cannot be blamed if they don't want to leave it languishing in the hands of Angela Merkel, Nicholas Sarkozy and their distant, would-be rulers in the capital of Belgium.

Rejection of the EU bailout is the only way to do this. As a consequence they would of necessity leave the Euro, reinstate and devalue the drachma, and slowly climb out of the huge catastrophe that is otherwise here to stay. Sure, Greeks will personally have to deal with the consequences of their recklessly-constructed and unsustainable social state, but in the long-run that is clearly preferrable to being stuck with a currency and economic model that prevents the country from embarking on a necessary restructuring.

Greeks would once again be their own masters, not the dictated-too subservients of their European neighbors. 

They defeated Xerxes -- they can and must do this.

Iraq Withdrawal

One can be forgiven for assigning political motives to the president's decision to withdraw from Iraq when scarcely anytime elapsed between his announcement and his campaign touting it to his base.

There are certainly no strategic reasons to justify it.

Iraqi democracy is real but fragile.  Next-door neighbor Iran has regional aspirations that hinge on both a nuclear program and influencing affairs in Mesopotamia.

American retreat makes this infinitely easier.  Coupled with the drawdown President Obama hopes to achieve soon in Afghanistan, America is on the verge of surrendering most, if not all ability to shape affairs in the Middle East towards our interests.  Not only are we declining to give support to incipient democratic elements but we are leaving a vacuum that Iran and other Islamist actors will not hesitate to fill.  This decision effectively gives those seeking to attack the United States greater latitude to do so.

As Frederick and Kimberly Kagan point out, America's retreat from Iraq is as shameful an abdication of responsibility and strategic sense as our retreat from Vietnam -- except that Iraq is at the center of the global region most pivotal to America's long-term national security.

For someone who has complained ad nauseum about the predicament his predecessor left him in, the president is inexplicably creating a mess that his successors will have to deal with for a generation or more.  All so he can keep a campaign promise he never should have made in the first place.