Mark Steyn on President Obama's "War of Choice"

Who but Mark Steyn can pen a piece that's insightful, clever, dark and dismal yet with a sharp sense of humor shining throughout? I think his Obamacare narrative is right on target and, unfortunately, I agree with his prediction that the abominable thing will be passed, public option and all. Here's the center paragraph of the piece:

And that, ultimately, gets closer than anything else he says to giving the game away. For most of the previous presidency, the Left accused George W. Bush of using 9/11 as a pretext to attack Iraq. Since January, his successor has used the economic slump as a pretext to "reform" health care. Most voters don't buy it: They see it as Obama's "war of choice," and the more frantically he talks about it as a matter of urgency the weirder it seems. If he's having difficulty selling it, that's because it's not about "health." As I've written before, the appeal of this issue to him and to Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank et al is that governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture—one in which elections are always fought on the Left's issues and on the Left's terms, and in which "conservative" parties no longer talk about small government and individual liberty but find themselves retreating to one last pitiful rationale: that they can run the left-wing state more effectively than the Left can. Listen to your average British Tory or French Gaullist on the campaign trail, pledging to "deliver" government services more "efficiently."

Then Steyn goes on to talk about the "lunatic mainstream" of liberalism, picking up his theme of which I had mentioned hearing him speak earlier. It totally makes sense that President Obama would be willing to lose 25 points off his approval rating and the House of Representatives in 2010 to pass this health care legislation. The thing is so huge and so overwhelming that passing it will cause a leftward seismic shift in the entire nation. That's all we need—another third rail.

Krauthammer on the Van Jones Resignation

To describe 9/11 Truthers, I said "bizzaro world", Charles Krauthammer says "hallucinatory alternative reality". Same difference, OK? Great piece.

In the White House no more. Why? He's gone for one reason and one reason only. You can't sign a petition demanding not one but four investigations of the charge that the Bush administration deliberately allowed 9/11 — i.e., collaborated in the worst massacre ever perpetrated on American soil — and be permitted in polite society, let alone have a high-level job in the White House.

Unlike the other stuff (see above), this is no trivial matter. It's beyond radicalism, beyond partisanship. It takes us into the realm of political psychosis, a malignant paranoia that, unlike the Marxist posturing, is not amusing. It's dangerous. In America, movements and parties are required to police their extremes. Bill Buckley did that with Birchers. Liberals need to do that with "truthers."

You can no more have a truther in the White House than you can have a Holocaust denier — a person who creates a hallucinatory alternative reality in the service of a fathomless malice.

But reality doesn't daunt Jones' defenders.

One Obama administration source told ABC that Jones hadn't read the 2004 petition carefully enough, an excuse echoed by Howard Dean.

Carefully enough? It demanded the investigation of charges "that people within the current (Bush) administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war."

Where is the confusing fine print? Where is the syntactical complexity? Where is the perplexing ambiguity? An eighth-grader could tell you exactly what it means. A Yale Law School graduate could not?

Fine print, right.

Barone: Obama's Convenient Fantasies

Lots of good points in Barone's piece yesterday.

Liberal columnists have been attacking Republicans because some of their voters are "birthers," believers in the absurd charge that Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii and thus is not a natural-born U.S. citizen. But they have failed to identify any "birther" that occupied a position in the Republican firmament comparable to that of "truther" [Van] Jones in the Obama administration.

Reminds me of Mark Steyn's comment on Hugh Hewitt's show yesterday about those ACORN employees caught in a sting where they are giving out advice on how to file taxes for a prostitution ring and other money-laundering secrets. Steyn said something like "They talk about the right wing having a lunatic fringe, but here is the American left's lunatic mainstream." I'm paraphrasing, but that was the gist.

If there were money to be made in green jobs, private investors would be creating them already. In fact, big corporations like General Electric are scrambling to position themselves as green companies, gaming legislation and regulations so they can make profits by doing so. Big business is ready to create green jobs -- if government subsidizes them. But the idea that green jobs will replace all the lost carbon-emitting jobs is magical thinking.

I have a good friend who truly believes that wind, hydroelectric and ethanol could be making everyone millions of dollars, providing jobs, getting us off foreign oil (sorry, Canada) and saving the Earth. But "these corporations" are too stupid to take advantage of these huge money-making opportunities. I've tried to reason with him, explaining that there are some smart people who actually work for some of "there corporations" who are exceptionally good at finding ways to make more money... but... well... (sigh).

There is an element of convenient fantasy as well in Obama's health care statements to date. We are going to save money by spending money. We are going to solve our fiscal problems with a program that will increase the national debt by $1 trillion over a decade. We are going to guarantee you can keep your current insurance with a bill that encourages your employer to stop offering it.

Another sigh is in order, I suppose. Anyway, I love how he ends: "No-enemies-to-the-left and convenient fantasies may work in Chicago. They don't work so well when your constituency is the whole United States." I surely hope not. But Obama sure is giving it the good ol' college professor try.

H/T Rerum Novarum.

Harry Jackson Jr. on Van Jones

I don't agree with everything written by Harry R. Jackson, Jr., a Protestant minister in Washington, DC, but here's an example of his writing with which I can heartily concur. He discusses what Van Jones was hired to do, i.e., construct a narrative to recast environmentalism as a civil rights issue. Excerpt:

Once one discovers that the book has a major Marxist agenda, it becomes fascinating to discover who is the target of the book. The Green Collar Economy paints the “new green movement” as full of virtue, while actually attacking large, Bible-believing churches. Specifically he stated, “Mega-church pastors with mega-white teeth assured their far-flung flocks that, with the right amount of prayer and right mental attitude, great abundance, tons of wealth, and high profits were sure to be enjoyed by all ... So we ordinary people...ran after every solo solution we could find. We worked longer hours. We worked extra jobs. We hocked our homes. We bought lottery tickets. We sought shelter under a house of credit cards.”

I have no idea what churches Jones observed or how he decided that mega-churches contributed to the economic problems of the nation. One thing is sure - Van Jones’ work is socialistic in its leanings and seeks to rewrite history. The book ends with an interesting call to action. Jones asks the reader to lobby his/her mayor to sign a local government green job pledge.

As I started this article, I asked the question, “Who helped this community organizer move from community activism to a New York Times Best Seller?” Although I cannot specifically name Van Jones’ mentors and sponsors at this time, it’s obvious that Jones was groomed to be a new green spokesperson. His job was to change his movement’s elitist image, while promoting its new manifesto.

The truth is that radical environmental groups believe the country should produce less energy, driving prices up in order to force energy conservation. The movement will wind up constructing financial hurdles that will raise the cost of goods made in America. The Cap and Trade bill passed this summer creates such a hurdle. Cap and Trade is, at root, a “massive” tax. In a manner of speaking it is a regressive tax, because the poor spend more proportionally on energy than others. Therefore the disposable income of the poor will decrease because of energy costs.

That emphasis at the end is mine. Jackson understands what many people don't about energy costs and the working poor. This practical knowledge might be a result of actually knowing and working with acutal poor people instead of dealing with the poor as an abstract concept and/or a lever to implement radical agendae. Even so, I'm not sure any of the members of Harry Jackson's church go by the name of Pookie.