Last of the Old Socialists

*Special Contribution*

LAST OF THE OLD SOCIALISTS

By Stephen J. Miller, Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation

Many attempts have been made since the publication of Christopher Hitchens’ memoir Hitch-22 to make sense of his contradictory political views, and this fixation on the search for his unifying motif is turning into an undue obsession.  All of us have to deal with contradictions and address imperfections in our views, and none of us holds the same opinions at all times.  Hitchens is quite candid about his efforts to work out the kinks in his views, without flagellating himself for being wrong in the past.  

Last month I attended one of Christopher Hitchens’ last public appearances before he revealed that he has esophageal cancer.   After buying a signed copy of his memoir, I noticed on the back cover a blurb by Gore Vidal, one of the intellectual leaders of the Left.  The Vidal blurb, in which Hitchens is named as his heir and successor, is crossed out in red, indicating Hitchens’ rejection of the offer.  This single cross-out is perhaps the best summary of the book yet.

David Brooks is correct to point out that Hitchens is not a “sixty-eighter” or a “soixante-huitard,” in any meaningful sense.  The leaders in the Anglo-American Left who came of age or earned their cred in the Sixties (Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Alexander Cockburn, the Clintons) could not be more distant from the old Anglo-American Left which came of age in the late Victorian and Edwardian Eras and is personified by Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, and H.G. Wells. The members of this latter group were socialists when there was still a proletariat and before the free market solved most of the problems that they saw as intractable.  In other words, they had arguments that intelligent people had to take seriously back then.  They also expressed themselves with elegance, erudition and wit, and although their political views were indeed radical, they had the manners and morality of well-bred Victorian gentlemen.  If Hitchens still considers himself a man of the Left, he belongs in this latter group—and he is the last of his kind.

Hitchens was born in 1949, but the voice that emerges from his writings and his many public appearances is that of a man born around 1870.  While fluent in our contemporary idiom, his pristine use of language and syntactical craftsmanship are echoes of a different era.  (And to those who still think Barack Obama’s preachy, monosyllabic speeches are eloquent, I recommend watching any YouTube clip of Hitchens at the podium to hear what eloquence sounds like.)

Hitchens’ memoir makes a strong case that the Left abandoned him when “the personal became political,” in the decade following the romanticized year of 1968.  Since he has seen through the false assumptions and fraudulence of the modern American Left, evident in its behavior since the liberation of Iraq, Hitchens is far closer to David Horowitz, Douglas Murray, and Bill Kristol then he would dare to admit.  Indeed, Hitchens is much closer to the American Right than he is to the Left on many crucial questions.  Though he loathes the label “conservative” and insists on calling himself a radical, there is a marked spot in the conservative movement with his name on it that was reserved for him by other “neo-conservatives” who followed the same intellectual trajectory. 

This is why Hitchens must overcome his illness and pick up right where he left off.  For a man who has devoted his life to fighting totalitarianism in print and speech, the personal may not be political, but the political is personal.  His memoir is not yet complete, and it will not be finished until Iraq and Afghanistan are stable democracies.  We are now closer than ever before to this future that Hitchens has envisioned for the former totalitarian and clerical states of the Middle East.  I for one want to read new columns and books by Hitchens as this transformation unfolds well into the 2030s, after many of the positions that he advocated will have reached fruition.

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Stephen Miller currently serves as assistant to the chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

The Enemy Within: A Conservative Response to a Radical Rebuttal

 

It is not often that I pay much attention to those who tread beyond the margins of respectable political opinion, much less on the fringes of American society. But after reading a member of Young Americans for Liberty’s response to my recent article at The Daily Caller, I’d like to volunteer some thoughts.

In my original piece, I argued that the vast majority of young conservatives who rightly support their country at war must begin standing down the insurgents within our political coalition who refuse to do so. I singled out the anti-war libertarian activists who have coalesced around people like Rep. Ron Paul and their viewpoints. Because these viewpoints tend to include sympathy for America’s enemies and gross historical revisionism (i.e., we provoked 9/11, the Civil War was unnecessary), I argued that proponents of such nonsense ought to be exposed and chastised by those of us who follow in the tradition of William F. Buckley. Just as he chased the radicals of his time out of the conservative mix, so must we.

What did my opponent from Young Americans for Liberty argue? Only a few excerpts from his diatribe need to be highlighted in order to understand precisely where he and his peers stand.

“I am arguing that the American government has engaged in a secretive, imperialistic, war-mongering foreign policy for over 20 years before 9/11 occurred at the cost of the peoples of both the United States and the Middle East.”

Truth be told, Osama bin Laden could not have said it better himself. If this is not a justification for some form of retribution against America, then I do not know what is. Furthermore, the Cold War policies to which he alludes were actually implemented in favor of liberating Afghanistan from communist occupation, at which we succeeded. And those policies, of course, ultimately led to the fall of the Soviet Union, of which he barely makes any mention.

“I mourn every day for the innocent people that died in the World Trade Center on 9/11, but I equally mourn for the men, women, and children of the Middle East who have endured horrible fates due to what Qualtere refers to as ‘the Good War of a new century,’ a war of aggression being cleverly disguised as a war of defense.”

It is not often that one hears a “but” follow an expression of sympathy for dead Americans, at least not when it comes from an actual American. It is even rarer, and vastly more disturbing, to see that “but” preface an equalization of one’s fallen countrymen with those slain by his country’s military during a combat operation. It is worth noting that the author does not bother at all to make any distinction between civilian casualties and dead terrorists. This is telling.

Earlier on in his article, he sarcastically dismisses another obvious distinction:

“Here’s a radical idea: suppose that young Americans consider the fact that the people of the Middle East are human beings just like us, and that the majority of them want nothing more than to live according to their own values. Suppose that a constant American military presence in the Middle East is recruitment fuel for Islamic extremists.”

Here’s a not-so radical idea: suppose that Americans don’t view everyone living in the Middle East as one homogenous people. Suppose that Americans choose to differentiate the liberated Iraqis who now fight shoulder-to-shoulder with our troops from the ones who once beheaded our men on video camera. And suppose that most Americans are able to see a clear difference between the Afghan woman about to be stoned for adultery and the clerical fascist with rocks in hand. But for that “American military presence,” she and countless others would be forced to live or die according to the oppressive “values” of someone else.

Unfortunately, radical libertarians like my opponent lack the courage to make these vital distinctions. Instead, they prop up contrived and utterly false moral equivalencies between an American soldier and a Taliban militant, between a terrorist attack and a legitimate military campaign, between radical Islamism and liberal democracy.

In the world view of such misguided souls, America has no enemies. The rest of the world, however, does. It is us. Alas, it is little wonder that the libertarian movement has attracted so many self-professed “9/11 truthers”—those who believe that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job, planned and executed by the American government—with such public insinuations and arguments as the one with which my opponent closes his article:

“[T]he greatest enemies of our freedom are not hiding in caves overseas, but sitting in decadent halls right here at home.”

Elliot Engstrom, the author of Young Americans for Liberty’s rebuttal to my piece, need not worry about ever bearing any sort of influence on mainstream American politics. His radical assertions, only a few of which I’ve quoted above, have all but guaranteed his irrelevance and permanent place on the margins. But there are many more young activists like him, wise enough to conceal their apparent hatred for the United States but bold enough to continue jostling for political representation and power. All the while, they are obstructing the ideas and efforts of American conservatism and contaminating the party of Reagan with an extremism he would have despised. It is they who must be confronted, discredited, and exiled from the mainstream conservative movement lest they mistake their flimsy CPAC straw poll victory for anything more than a transient fluke. In particular, they are enemies of conservatives of every age, of every brand, of every background. Indeed, in the midst of this war for civilization’s very future, they are enemies of our nation’s indispensable fight for victory. Henceforth, let us treat them as such.

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Tom Qualtere currently serves as research assistant to the president of The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. This column was originally published at TheDailyCaller.com.

Hawks We Are, Hawks We Must Remain

The Moore You Know About Obama…

In politics, knowing what your opposition thinks and says about you and your team is critical. But listening to what they?re saying about their own side can sometimes be even more telling.

In the latest issue of Rolling Stone, Michael Moore insists that Barack Obama?s ambitions are much farther left than he lets on. Thus, the President has been deliberately lying to us about everything from health care reform to the war on terror. But contrary to the Bush years, when perceived presidential deceit evoked liberal rage and a film to go with it, Moore adoringly approves of what he now sees as a necessary ?rope-a-dope strategy? to advance his side?s cause.

The interview, part of a larger round table discussion also including Paul Krugman and David Gergen, asks the ?three leading political observers? to analyze and discuss the first six months of the Obama presidency. The most startling perspective Moore provides is in regard to the current health care debate:

I take all of the things that make me nervous about the decisions that Obama has made, and I look and them through that lens ? that it?s some kind of master plan. It?s like his continued support of a government-run option for health care. If a true public option is enacted ? and Obama knows this ? it will eventually bring about a single-payer system, because the profit-making insurance companies won?t be able to compete with a government plan and make the profits they want to make. At some point most of them will probably have to bow out of the business.

Moore?s frankness even earns praise from the far more temperate David Gergen:

I?m glad to have someone of Michael Moore?s honesty say that the public option on health care is, in fact, designed to be a pathway to a single-payer system. Because the Democrats have essentially said, ?That?s not true.?

Moore?s view of Obama on Iraq is similar. While the Fahrenheit 9/11 director demands ?more than a truth commission ? a serious criminal investigation? into the Bush administration?s supposed ?lying to convince Congress to back an invasion of another country that did nothing to us,? he also tells the magazine:

Look, this guy [Barack Obama] is a very good basketball player ? he fakes right and goes left. He says he?s going to keep 50,000 troops in Iraq. But I would be shocked if, three years from now, there are 50,000 troops in Iraq. He says these things to keep the wolves away from the door, and it works. The other side seems to buy it. That?s why I admire his craftiness here.

?Same with Afghanistan,? he claims. While adding, ?I don?t think there was a reason for the war? because ?the Taliban are not an invading force ? they are citizens of Afghanistan? and therefore ?it is up to the citizens of Afghanistan whether they want to be oppressed,? he makes clear:

When [Obama] said he was going to send in 20,000 new troops, I thought, ?He?s again trying to create this illusion so that the opposition will be kept at bay.?

(Think about it: When the far left thought ?Bush lied??about WMDs, remember??they cried for impeachment. But for Obama, it?s just matter of admirably creating crafty illusions in order to trick his pesky opposition into silence and submission. Consider it liberalism by any means necessary.)

The way Moore sees it, even when it comes to serious national security issues like prosecuting terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, ?I think he gets the opposition to shut up by telling them what they want to hear.? Indefinite detention? ??Indefinitely? for Obama,? he says, ?might mean ?two more months.??

Overall score from Moore?

I would give him an A if my theory about the rope-a-dope strategy he has employed turns out to be right. If I?m wrong about that, then I?ll have to mark it down to a C-minus. Right now, I?m going to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Eventually, Gergen confronts the filmmaker about the openness of his ?fakes right, moves left? rhetoric and asks, ?Isn?t that the same critique the Republicans have been making about the president for some time?? Moore bluntly responds:

Yeah, and nobody will listen to them! I feel sorry for them. They think they know what he?s doing and they try to point it out, but Obama just acts all innocent and says, ?No, I?m not doing that.? I probably shouldn?t be saying this, but I?m counting on the fact that Republicans won?t be reading this in Rolling Stone.

Team America?s ?giant socialist weasel? counted wrong.

Back in 2004, the idea that ?Bush lied? begat plenty of fits, a film, and much more from the far left. But that, of course, was when a Republican was president. Five years later, half-truths and deceit from a liberal Democratic president are not only commendable, it seems, but absolutely vital. Apparently Barack Obama?s real plans are just that unpalatable for the public to swallow.

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Tom Qualtere?currently serves as research assistant to the president of The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. This column among many others can also be found at NewMajority.com.

Who’s “rooting against the country?”

During a phone interview yesterday on MSNBC, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) accused congressional Republicans of “rooting against the country” for daring to vote against cap and trade. I could only ask myself of the painful irony I was hearing, “Can he possibly be saying this with a straight face?”

The statement, deeply cynical and wholly inappropriate, along with the rationale behind it, deserves further examination. Listen to it for yourself here.

Here?s a partial transcription of what Waxman told host Andrea Mitchell:

So far, this Congress — since Obama became President — the Republicans have said no to an economic stimulus bill, they’re saying no to a global warming bill… They want to play politics and see if they can keep any achievements from being accomplished that may be beneficial to the Democrats. They’re rooting against the country and I think in this case, even rooting against the world because the world needs to get its act together to stop global warming. I wish they were playing a more constructive role. Some Republicans doubt the whole science of global warming, even though the consensus is overwhelming. They don’t want to believe it.

Let’s be clear: One of the same guys from the same party that not long ago suffered a near-panic attack at the prospect of American victory in Iraq is actually trying to call out the GOP for putting politics before, well, patriotism. As the saying goes, you just can’t make this stuff up.

Waxman did more than bestow new meaning upon the phrase, “People in glass houses shouldn’t cast stones.” As strange and irreverent as it may seem, Waxman actually confirmed just how much global warming may be to the left what Islamist terrorism is to the right, and probably still most Americans. “As Paul Krugman put it in Sunday’s New York Times:

Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole, but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.

Still skeptical? Let’s reexamine Waxman’s own words. A simple swap of environmental-speak for war on terror talk and an interchange of party names offers a more precise illustration of his inadvertent irony. Here’s what a conservative Republican easily could have said just two short years ago:

So far, this Congress — since they became the majority — the Democrats have said no to the troop surge, they’re saying no to a war funding bill… They want to play politics and see if they can keep any achievements from being accomplished that may be beneficial to the Republicans. They’re rooting against the country and I think in this case, even rooting against the world because the world needs to get its act together to stop global terrorism. I wish they were playing a more constructive role. Some Democrats doubt the whole success of the surge, even though the consensus is overwhelming. They don’t want to believe it.

See the comparison? In Waxman & Krugman’s world, global warming, not Islamofascism, is the “existential threat” that demands urgent, dramatic, status quo-altering action. All who oppose or even question them are, according to Krugman, committing “betrayal” and “a form of treason… treason against the planet.”

(Michael Goldfarb at The Weekly Standard rightly points out that, according to leftwing criteria, more Americans are actually traitors as opposed to… I guess we’ll call them “patriots of the world.”)

Bottom line: Nobody ought to be “rooting against the country,” ever, for any reason at all. The reasons are too obvious to even list. And in a way, Waxman et al are at least right to be on the lookout for snakes in the garden. However, his accusation was both wrongly directed and poorly applied.” By lumping well-meaning Republicans in Congress with certain talking head types, Waxman completely rejects the serious arguments being made against cap and trade, not to mention the merits of various alternatives to the bill. (Such immense criticism will likely, hopefully lead to the bill’s demise in the Senate.) All things considered, who’s really doing the disservice to the country?

In recent years, many on the right have called out their fellow Americans — whether they’ve been Democratic leaders, the far left, Limbaugh, or even the paleocons — for openly craving the present administration’s failure. Such a selfish desire is downright vulgar in our modern, decent democracy and deserves to be condemned. Many on the left, however, have consistently been missing the mark.

In Waxman’s recent episode, legitimate concern was mistaken for callous sedition, quite possibly because he (like Krugman and others) truly believes global warming to be more deadly a threat than radical Islam. In his world, regrettably, basic policy skepticism is “treason” and the largest tax on the middle class in more than a decade, in the words of another Democrat, is “patriotic.”

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Tom Qualtere currently serves as research assistant to the president of The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. This column among many others can also be found at NewMajority.com.

Reagan vs. Buckley? – An Urgent Lesson

The following piece was originally published by and is the sole property of NewMajority.com

 

The specters of both Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley have been summoned over the past week to offer two examples for Republicans facing the distresses of minority status. In actuality, the models contradict, not compliment, one another. But there is a unifying lesson to be learned.

In last week?s Weekly Standard, Naomi Emery presented Reagan the Republican who used his ?unfailingly gracious tone? to bring the right, the middle, and remnants of the old left into what he saw as a must-be big tent Republican Party. In the June 1 Wall Street Journal, Richard Brookhiser reminded us of Buckley the Conservative who employed the same weapon to do just the opposite. Instead of party recruitment, Buckley used his brainpower as a battery to energize the magnetic pull of conservatism so that more Americans were attracted to the movement, regardless of which party they belonged to.

Ronald Reagan, ?unlike William F. Buckley, who urged his followers to shout ?stop!? to the onrushing currents of history,? Emery reminds us, ?thought history would be on his side.?? Buckley, whom Brookhiser says ?helped create the climate of opinion in which Ronald Reagan was elected president,? was unsure of such inevitability. Thus, both men?s immediate priorities were demonstrably different.

Whereas Reagan yearned for a robust and powerful Republican Party, Buckley was interested in nurturing a sacred and safely fortressed conservative movement. Emery?s Reagan wished to use a strongly populated GOP to torpedo his conservative message into the halls of the federal government. Brookhiser?s Buckley focused on keeping an increasingly popular American conservatism alive and pure by staying on the lookout for imposters or moderates, and thereby preventing its host party from fatal infection.

Both Reagan and Buckley were conservatives. Both were Republicans who had at least the general wellbeing of their party in mind. And they each shared the common goal of deterring and defeating what had come to be known as modern liberalism. But, according to Emery and Brookhiser, their ways of going about doing so (and thus the models they?re asking us to emulate) were quite different.

In Emery?s piece, ?Reagan in Opposition,? she details how Reagan refused to campaign for Jeffery Bell, his former aide ?who mounted a conservative primary challenge in the 1978 midterms to Senator Clifford Case of New Jersey.? Reagan?s reasoning was similar to that of President Bush when he supported Sen. Lincoln Chafee over his far more conservative primary opponent in 2006: Party first. (Sen. Case lost to Bell, but Reagan was somewhat vindicated when Bell eventually lost to former Sen. Bill Bradley.)

In his column, ?Bill Buckley and the Future of Conservatism,? Brookhiser recalls how Buckley ?was married to the GOP, but ? never expected it to be faithful to his ideas, and ? fought it when it strayed.? Such was the case when he challenged Republican John Lindsay for Mayor of New York in 1965 as a candidate for the state?s independent Conservative Party. Buckley ?went even further in party disloyalty? when he backed a liberal Democrat named Joe Lieberman in a 1988 Connecticut Senate race over the even more liberal Lowell Weicker, the Republican incumbent, helping cost Lowell the seat.

Clearly, we?re told, Reagan and Buckley viewed the relationship between the GOP and the conservative movement in different lights.? Reagan ?was a conservative and a Republican,? writes Emery, ?who understood the two roles of a movement and party, and how the two roles can converge.? However, she also claims that Reagan ?understood that the Republican Party has no obligation to present the conservative movement with a nominee to its liking.? This starkly contrasts Buckley?s position, which Brookhiser summed in no uncertain terms: ?The party should, as much as possible, support the movement, not the other way around.?

Two conservative icons, two different arguments to contemplate.

Assuming these recent analyses of Reagan and Buckley are faithful to the men?s actual political outlooks, the conflict of which example to follow back to prominence can appear daunting. Nevertheless, middle ground can be found.

Emery?s piece (subtitled, ?The Lessons of 1977?) brings us back to times like today, after the 1976 election when, as Robert Novak put it, the ?long descent of the Republican Party into irrelevance, defeat, and perhaps eventual disappearance? was becoming a (foolishly) accepted reality. In the face of a liberal Democratic majority in Washington and a country swollen with malaise, there stood Reagan?sunny, bright, and ardently right?using his words and wit to tug the American center towards his side of the yard.

Through his lecture circuit, columns, and radio broadcasts, Reagan sought to ?reframe conservatism in his own image? and make the Republican Party its home. In order to do so he needed to shake the dead skin of Nixon and Ford off the GOP and cloak it the antique armor of happier warriors like Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. A former FDR/Truman Democrat himself, Reagan believed a party that reflected his view of America and his ideology could and would become a national party.

Buckley?s belief was equally confident and ambitious. Brookhiser describes his early postwar political vision:

The new president, Dwight Eisenhower, despite his conservative instincts, was unwilling to pick ideological fights. ? Germany, Japan and (it seemed) the Depression had been beaten by great collective efforts. The world had moved into a new era, and conservatives should recognize the fact.

Buckley would have none of it. He wanted a conservatism that stood for capitalism and freedom. The Cold War required another great mobilization, which Buckley supported wholeheartedly, but he would not lose sight of his individualistic goals.

Both Reagan and Buckley eventually got what they wanted: a national conservative Republican Party. Thanks to that entity, the Cold War ended in America?s favor and a new conservative consensus was solidified at home. Ultimately, their different approaches to their party and their movement did not matter as much as their similar tactics in winning over the hearts and minds they needed to turn their dream into a reality. It was the common method with which they fought for their common cause as political minorities that eventually lifted them atop the tidal wave that hurled them into majority rule.

According to Emery, Reagan ?was optimistic, inclusive, positive, disciplined, and focused on large issues.? So was Buckley. According to Brookhiser, ?Buckley thought it was possible to change climates of opinion, he knew it was futile to try to change certain facts about human nature? He was always trying to apply those great principles [first articulated by Burke] to the problems of the day.? So did Reagan.

Thus, it was Reagan?s willingness to allow anyone?ex-Democrats, moderates, single issue voters?into the Republican fold that made the party grow. But these new voters had to be at least comfortable with the GOP?s foundational philosophy if they were going to be pulling its lever in the voting booth. Thus, it was Buckley?s tolerance for an evolving conservatism that enabled the Republican Party to wrap itself around the conservative movement and remain palatable to voters for a generation.

Neither man ever ?opposed for the sake of opposing.? They always maintained a certain ?tone of voice? with which they offered their alternatives, often ?bringing in large blocs of ex-Democrats? in the process. Reagan, like Buckley, ?understood that his role was less to attack than to persuade,? especially as a candidate for higher office.? Thanks to the maturity and civility of both men, the GOP and the conservative movement benefited exponentially.

But Reagan?s unique ?tone of voice? and Buckley?s ?hyperarticulate defense of ideas? were not entirely what gave conservatives their time in the sun. Ultimately, the right came to respect and appreciate the need for the Republican Party as the only real means to advance their goals. Despite Buckley?s ?turbulent relationship? with the GOP, Brookhiser argues, he still ?never believed in trying to replace it with a new national party.? Wisely, Emery says, Reagan ?rebuilt the Republican Party around [the conservative movement], as a large and a national force.? Overall, the movement and the party, with full focus on their common adversary, more or less told one another, ?I?ll have your back if you got mine.? Majority status awaited them.

Those days are now over. Reagan and Buckley are gone and the Republican Party hasn?t had the uncomfortable relationship it now seems to have with the conservative movement since long before 1980. It doesn?t have to be like this.

Now back in minority status, many conservative activists are antsy and distrustful. Yes, much of their anxiety is understandable. But there lays a risk that their angst will only damage the GOP and prolong its time in the political wilderness. Such will be the case if certain conservatives (and you know which ones) keep telling themselves that party purity is more important than a party victory.

The time to be frank is now. A selfish ?take it or leave it? attitude by the base of the conservative movement towards the Republican Party is nothing less than a gift to the Democratic Party. Conservatives should not tell themselves, ?Well, as long as it?s Republicans the voters hate, we?re fine!? Nor should they believe for one minute that ?protest-voting? (which I witnessed far too much of here in DC last fall) is noble or commendable. All those who voted for Bob Barr to ?stick it to the Republicans? because ?John McCain wasn?t a real conservative? didn?t ?teach the party a lesson.? They simply voted for a lunatic and helped Barack Obama.

All successful relationships require commitment and effort from both sides. Emery is right when she says that ?the conservative movement has the obligation to lay out its case in so convincing a manner that it persuades most Republicans, most independents, and even some Democrats to follow its banner.? Living in a happy bubble is unacceptable. Meanwhile, Brookhiser reminds us that Buckley was in fact not a ?complete ideologue? and ultimately understood that ?the political vehicle of a late 20th century conservative movement was bound to be the Republican Party.?

The same goes for the 21st century. The days of disgruntled conservatives treating the GOP as little more than a quaint political organism to be considered for electoral use each November but free to threaten afterwards must end now. The purity tests and RINO hunting should cease and desist; the name of the game should be convincing others, not convicting our own. The common legacy of Reagan and Buckley would be honored, and those Americans wishing for a Washington without Obama would be grateful.

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Tom Qualtere?currently serves as research assistant to the president of The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. This column among many others can also be found at NewMajority.com.

Targeting Dissent, the Liberal Way

Consistency has never been a liberal strong suit.

Though all-too-familiar with filling the streets with their own anti-government bile during the Bush years, much of the left is now awkwardly offended by the recent activism of their political counterparts. The object of their scorn? The anti-tax tea parties.

During Wednesday’s national ?Tax Day Tea Party,? more than 800 of these protests took place all across America, many featuring live concerts and New Years Eve-type treatment from Fox News. Since late February, thanks in part to prompting by CNBC?s Rick Santelli, thousands of citizens have been gathering to evoke the 1773 Boston Tea Party as a way to vent their frustration over the massive spending of tax dollars by the federal government.

As Ross Douthat at The Atlantic put it:

They resemble nothing so much as the anti-war protests during Bush’s first term. ? ?They’re anti-bailout, anti-stimulus, anti-deficit, and anti- the tax increases that will eventually be required to pay for the current spending spree.

Overall, they fear that the Obama administration and Congress are slowly transforming the nation into a European-style socialist state. Most have brought signs or flags; others have worn costumes. The marches have been peaceful and the antics remain harmless, even if a bit silly. Any additional causes that have found their way into the mix (i.e. ?Is Obama really a Muslim??) have been widely seen as uninvited sideshows having nothing to do with the main attraction.

Nevertheless, the tea parties have quite visibly gotten under the skin of many liberals who remain extremely defensive of President Obama and find any conservative challenges to his agenda irritating, to say the least, and in need of swift belittlement.

While most of the jeers and smears have been juvenile and forgettable, the very worst hit job on the tea parties came Wednesday at a protest in Chicago. There, CNN reporter Susan Roesgen forfeited every bit of her composure and professionalism live on camera when she ditched the more passive derisiveness of her liberal contemporaries and got downright aggressive and nasty.

After acidly describing the Chicago protest as just ?a party for Obama-bashers,? Roesgen felt compelled to tell viewers, in an extremely annoyed tone, ?I have to say, this is not entirely representative of everybody in America.? She then pulled a protester in front of the camera and, pointing to his Obama-as-Hitler sign, angrily demanded to know, ?What does this mean?! Why would you say he?s a fascist?! He?s the President of the United States!?? While the man tried his best to respond, she angrily continued, ?Do you know how offensive that is?!? When he told her that ?the real pirates are in the White House,? she asked in dismay, ?Why be so hard on the President of the United States, though, with such an offensive message??

(That it was only a couple years ago when liberal protesters claimed that the real terrorists lived in the White House, etc. seems to have escaped from Roesgen?s memory. Did she take time to emphasize that these people were ?not entirely representative of everybody in America??)

Roesgen eventually moved on to talk down to another man holding his two year old son. While repeatedly interrupting his pointed argument she breathlessly defended Barack Obama?s policies with more passion than Robert Gibbs could ever muster?all while ?reporting? her story for CNN.

Mark Hemmingway at National Review Online agreed that the episode was ?pretty unreal? and rightfully added:

Of all the leftist protests I’ve covered over the years ? and I’ve covered many of them ? I have never seen a reporter enter the fray and act personally offended by the many, many examples of outrageous behavior at a protest. There’s little to be gained by it, and it’s simply not professional. What Roesgen is doing is doing here pure hackery. Even as grandstanding, she fails. She goes about things with all the subtlety of a brick through a window, and in the end it appears she’s just an angry jerk.

She?s not only ?an angry jerk? but an inconsistent hypocrite as well. Hemmingway also referred to a Newsbusters report that features Roesgen at a 2006 anti-Bush protest in New Orleans welcoming a costumed student in a George W. Bush mask with devil horns and a Hitler mustache as a ho-hum, no big deal ?prop? with which ?to illustrate her story.?

Susan Roesgen may be a sham and an embarrassment to journalism, but she?s not the only anti-tea party liberal guilty of the double-standard.

Paul Krugman saw fit to dedicate his entire Sunday column in the New York Times to describing how ?crazy? and ?clueless? the Republicans are because, of all things, the tea parties which he said deserve ?considerable mockery.? But Krugman was notably silent when, for example, Code Pink protested and defaced a Marines recruitment office in Berkley. They surely gave fresh meaning to the terms ?crazy? and ?clueless? and deserved ?considerable mockery? of their own but, of course, got none from Krugman or anyone at the Times.

Marc Cooper of the L.A. Times complained about the ?collective insanity? at the tea parties, the participation in which he compared to sniffing glue. ?The Tea Party movement,? he wrote, ?is a rather garish display of a Republican right that seems to have lost not only the national elections but also any semblance of political bearings.? It?s a shame that Cooper and others like him didn?t sense the ?collective insanity? when, say, antiwar leftists gathered to burn Americans flags or torch effigies of U.S soldiers. He then could?ve easily concluded that such ?garish displays? are of a Democratic left that must have seemed ?to have lost not only [their] national elections but also any semblance of [their] political bearings? at the time as well.

MSNBC?s David Shuster, filling in for fellow lefty Keith Olbermann on Countdown, took to sophomorically renaming the events, ?tea-bagging parties.? In an interview with Shuster, Daniel Gross of Newsweek disparaged the protesters as a ?fringe group of people.? On the same network, Rachel Maddow spent a seven minute segment trashing the tea parties as a ?celebration of inchoate rightwing bad feelings? and factiously asked, ?Is there a radical message here?? Her guest, Anna Marie Cox of Air America radio, responded, ?Well, yes?I think the tea-baggers would like it to be more radical than it is.?

But of course the whole gang at MSNBC never flinched during the antiwar rallies where masked men carried obscene signs like the infamous ?We Support Our Troops When They Shoot Their Officers? banner. A ?fringe group of people? is there ever was one. And they never stopped looking the other way at the crude depictions of the Bush administration as the true Axis of Evil, nor the comparisons of Bush to Hitler or America to the Nazi empire. There was your ?radical message,? Rachel, not at the tea parties.

Mary Katherine Ham reported the following at The Weekly Standard?s blog:

?I actually went to a tea party, in a small town in North Carolina. It was filled with ?retirees trying to protect their grandchildren from debt, mothers of two with “Don’t Tread ?on Me” flags, sweet church-going ladies with American flags flying from their Hover-?Rounds. This was not a raucous, conspiracy-theorizing, anti-government crowd of ?revolutionaries.

One of the factors of every leftwing anti-tea party gripe has been the contrived suspicion of rich rightwing supporters, shadowy activist groups, and sympathetic networks daring to back the protests and the cause behind them. Needless to say, such manufactured triviality did not matter in the least bit when far-left elements like George Soros, ANSWER Coalition, and MSNBC provided the exact same services to their side.

The other thing that every display of tea party disapproval continues to share is that they all come across as part of a strange episode of the Twilight Zone where liberal Democrats have never heard of political protests and stand appalled at the very notion of speaking truth to power. Regrettably, this is not science fiction. This is the Obama Era. And in these new times, suddenly in full power and outright incensed at dissent, the left conveniently has dementia.

-tom 

Hearing Thunder at CPAC

I was there. Leaning against the side wall about seven rows from the stage, I witnessed Rush Limbaugh deliver his “first address to the nation” at CPAC on Saturday afternoon.

The ground was shaking, the walls were vibrating, the hall was rumbling.?Several thousand people entered a room in one mood, and left in another. The speaker perfectly channeled his audience’s anger, unease, confusion, frustration, and defensiveness with a?hot yet handled command beneath a healthy, vibrant superiority complex on full display for the entire?world. And I enjoyed every minute of it.

But I also remained deeply contemplative. During Rush’s entire speech, I couldn’t help but feel like I was given a sort of introduction or prologue to it about a full week beforehand. And then I remembered Matthew Continetti’s latest column in the newest issue of The Weekly Standard, titled “The Age of Irresponsibility.”

He tells, overall, of the degeneracy of our society–?although not?as?having come, as?usually suspected,?from the ground up (just the opposite). In other words, the powers that be have failed us morally, spiritually, and behaviorally, and as a result America has almost run out of heroes.?At that point in a society, very bad things always follow.?I will further analyze Continetti’s words in my next column, but until then, I’ll?leave a quote from the piece’s conclusion:

“Things can get a whole lot worse. A failure of accountability not only erodes the foundations of our culture. It also puts our country on unstable fiscal ground. A storm of moral and financial insolvency has been brewing for some time. The populist reaction is only the beginning. We’re hearing the thunder. Get ready for the deluge.”‘

(Hint: He’s not only talking about economics.)

- TQ

Here, and Back Again

Part One of More than One

I’ll admit two things right now. First– I’ve neglected to contribute to thelobbyist for about three months. There were good reasons,?such as?starting a new job and?relocating to a new home in a?familiar yet still relatively new major city. But now I’m back, and I must add that the site’s?makeover?looks superb.

Second– I will go on the record and state that I am probably one of the most selective (read: “picky”) readers you’ll ever meet. I read a lot, don’t get me wrong, probably more than most people. In many ways, my job depends on it. But I consider most of what I read today,?as well as?most of what I hear on the radio and see on television, to be over-repetitive and inconsequential.

Thus, I?prefer my music and movies, and yes, my literature to be groundbreaking, transformational, epic,?heroic, milestonic, passionate, operatic, melodic, timeless, timely, unforgettable, under the radar and over the top. It’s certainly no wonder then that I enjoy listening to Meat Loaf, watching The Dark Knight, and reading, among other things,?nonfiction.

Good nonfiction in it’s most irresistible form, in my opinion, is political commentary. Good political commentary?(and most is not) can do what history books cannot do:?testify?to the present, judge it, and demand consequences. Good political commentary cuts through contemporary fiction and falsehoods?within our?modus operandi and presents a?surprising, unexpected clarity that?condemns, praises,?exposes, embarrasses, and elicits reaction and initiates response.

When a column or essay can achieve this status, certain doors of opportunity can?swing open and? lead the?columnist to become more than just a writer. He becomes a dictator of the immediate present but for only as long as it takes to read between the first word and last sentence of his text. After that? It’s?difficult to say. Sometimes his words are taken as warning, other times as an order or a call to revolt. Or they’re simply forgotten by most who read them.

Think of the different?outcomes?of the opinings of Marx?and the verses of Mein Kampf. Extreme examples? You bet. How about the Crisis Papers by Thomas Paine? A bit more friendly and familiar. Sometimes old religious texts can somehow say new political things,?as is?the case?with?the Koran. The observations of Tocqueville still generate new ideas on the opposing ends of the political spectrum. The words within some texts are still being deciphered, debated and argued over to this very day.

Henceforth, I will dedicate my column space (which I’m privelaged to call my own) on this site to testifying to the present, judging its actors, and demanding justice in different ways at different times in different forms.

In other words, I’m a political commentator. And I’m back again.

End TARP Now

By correcting the past, we?d spare the future.

?

Once the Senate successfully blocked a bailout package for the major players of the auto industry last week, the Bush administration saw an opportunity to use the Treasury?s special TARP funds to give it to them anyway. Americans, conservatives in particular, now have an opportunity at hand as well. With one bold move we can better the economy, curb government activism, and defend the rule of law. The plan of action? Demand the repeal of TARP.

The Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP, no longer has the timid support it enjoyed just two months ago. Originally designed as an available sidekick to ensure the health and vitality of America?s financial institutions, most Americans, including many conservatives, gave it their blessing. No more. The eagerness on the part of the White House to use it to bail out the ?Big Three? auto makers has thrust the program into a new discerning light, bringing forth questions about its potential to aid and abet fiscal liberalism which few, if any, intended.

That intention was spelled out quite clearly. Under the consensus that if financial institutions ever fall, the nation will slip with them, Democrats and Republicans created TARP to grant them last resort funds in emergency situations (like the one which occurred this fall). What qualifies as a financial institution? The statute declares that ?any institution, including, but not limited to, any bank, savings association, credit union, security broker or dealer, or insurance company? on the brink of economic collapse would be eligible for TARP assistance. Unless the bill also doubles as a Magic Eye game with more than meets the eye hidden within, car making companies aren?t entitled to a dime.

Forget that tapping into TARP to ?rescue? Chrysler, GM and Ford is completely illegal; it also lacks any resemblance of common sense.?

According to The Heritage Foundation?s James L. Gattuso, Detroit has fallen into its current situation because of ?years of bad business decisions, high labor costs, high retirement costs? and having put off ?the need to restructure? from within for far too long. The precise antidote to its current ills remains a separate debate, but it is worth noting that using TARP to help Detroit is like robbing Peter to pay Paul?except that Paul is a failed businessman and Peter is broke.

Conservatives need to be very frank with themselves in regards to the current predicament. If President Bush subverts the law (with or without Congressional approval) to ?save? car manufacturers who require billion dollar bailouts as much as an alcoholic needs that one extra pint, the madness will not stop there. It won?t be a single isolated episode of lame duck sloppiness towards the economy and the law. It certainly won?t be seen as a noble mistake better left in the past. It?d be a precedent.?

If a conservative Republican president can use TARP to improperly fund non-eligible businesses in the private sector, why couldn?t or wouldn?t a decisively liberal Democratic chief executive feel totally free to do the same? He could and would. Even if Bush does refrain, what?s to stop Barack Obama? And why stop at the auto industry? If Chrysler, why not Chevron? If General Motors, why not Guess Jeans? Worst of all, there would be no check or balance on such liberal adventurism since the only figure to veto such a travesty would be the same man ordering unelected bureaucrats in the Treasury department to cut the checks.?

As brilliant minds from Thomas Paine to Thomas Jefferson to Ronald Reagan have long told us, government which governs least, governs best. Even in tipsy financial times, their advice has served us very well. Americans must come to understand that the very existence of programs like TARP now invite a long era of Big Government that will radically alter our economy as we know it. It?s not too late to stop it.

At the time of TARP?s creation, the antique notion of government as a necessary evil offered lukewarm comfort to conservatives who were deeply suspicious of its intentions, potential, and legality. After uncovering its intentions as shaky, potential as frightening, and legality (at least in the current case) as nonexistent, conservatives must now lead the charge to write TARP?s obituary.??

- tom?

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