PRESIDENT MENDACIOUS
Lost in the furor over MSNBC's Mark Halperin's calling President Obama a "dick" last Thursday (6/30) was the substance of his argument. Mr. Obama's harsh attacks on Republicans will make it harder to reach a compromise on raising the ceiling on the national debt, Mr. Halperin said. "If everybody else is willing to take on sacred cows and do tough things in order to achieve the goal of real deficit reduction, then I think it would be hard for the Republicans to stand there and say that the tax break for corporate jets is sufficiently important that we're not willing to come to the table and get a deal done," the president said. Later, Mr. Obama said Republicans were "willing to compromise their kids' safety so that some corporate jet owner continues to get a tax break." This was more than harshly partisan. It was mendacious. That's a fancy word for lying, for being maliciously dishonest on purpose. On examination, Mr. Obama is habitually so. He should be known as President Mendacious.
A REAGAN FOURTH OF JULY
Grosvenor Square, London. 2011 is the centennial year of Ronald Reagan's birth, which is why this Fourth of July brings tears to my eyes like never before. This morning at Grosvenor Square in front of the American Embassy in London, England, I was privileged to be at the unveiling ceremony of the bronze statue of President Ronald Reagan, and heard him praised as one of the most beloved men and finest presidents in US history. Yet it was not simply the praise of past greatness that was so inspiring - it was the optimism for America's future. Condoleezza Rice spoke so clearly of the moral certainty of Ronald Reagan in his goal of ridding the world of Soviet Communism - a goal in which he so triumphantly succeeded. We forget how dark those days were, she said, when at the onset of the Reagan presidency the Soviets were on the verge of victory over us and hope of our winning the Cold War seemed ridiculously Pollyannish. What we need right now, said Condi, is an infusion of Ronald Reagan's unquenchable optimism that America's best days are in her future, not her past, that a moral certainty in America's principles and values will triumph over darkness. Condi is right. This is exactly what we need. We need a Reagan Fourth of July.
HALF-FULL REPORT 07/01/11
We have a lot of ground to cover in this HFR, but there's no resisting starting off with a celebration: Hugo Chavez is dying of cancer. The "pelvic abscess" he had removed in Cuba was a malignant tumor that has metastasized. He's only 56, and everyone thought his curse upon his country would last as long as Castro's. This is a great stroke of luck for the world. Chavez is one of those one-man-band dictators whose death presages the end of the dictatorship. If the leader of a tyrannical system is bumped off or dies - say, Ahmadinejad in Iran or Assad in Syria - the system simply replaces him and carries on. The entire system has to be replaced through wholesale and often violent regime change. But knock off a Mugabe or Gaddafi or Chavez and their regime implodes. What happens next will be nightmarish, as the Chavistas get out the guns in desperation to keep their power - but the power is gone, utter chaos will ensue, and in the end the Chavistas will be swept away. Also swept away will be those commie megalomaniacal regimes Chavez's oil billions pays for: Rafael Correa's in Ecuador, Evo Morales' in Bolivia, Danny Ortega's in Nicaragua, and of course, the Castro brothers' in Cuba. Further...
WHAT PRO-GOVERNMENT ECONOMISTS CANNOT SEE
Former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Blinder wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal this past week (6/21) attacking Republicans who have said that more government spending will kill jobs. In the same vein, my old friend Bruce Bartlett, a Treasury official in the George H.W. Bush administration, wrote an article attacking former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and other Republicans for claiming the Reagan tax cuts paid for themselves. (Note: Mr. Bartlett used to be a supply-side advocate, but in the past few years, he has become an almost full-time Republican basher and, not surprisingly, now writes for the New York Times.) Mr. Blinder, Mr. Bartlett and others of their stripe no longer seem to be able to see beyond the first-order effects of an economic policy. That is why they are always dead wrong.
WE SHOULD ALL HOPE PALIN WILL RUN
Bristol Palin told Fox News her mother has made up her mind about running for president, but Ms. Palin told the New York Times she's still thinking about it. According to the conventional wisdom, it may be too late for her to run. Ms. Palin's done no fundraising, nor has built a campaign team. Republicans who supported her are drifting to active campaigns, chiefly that of Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn. The conventional wisdom is more conventional than wise. Candidates start early to build name recognition, need a campaign organization to get supporters to the polls. Sarah Palin has 3.2 million followers on Facebook -- about 800,000 more than all the declared GOP candidates combined. Palinistas tend to be the sort who would crawl over ground glass to vote for her. She has less need of a GOTV operation than any other political figure in modern times. But the question here is not, will she run but should she? The answer is yes.
GREECE IN AMERICA
Saranda, Albania. What a spectacular place to enjoy a pint of cold Birra Tirana while contemplating the serene beauty of the Ionian Sea and the turmoil of Greek tragedies. Saranda is at the southern end of a breathtaking coastline known as the Albanian Riviera. Just two miles offshore of Saranda's beaches looms the northern tip of the Greek island of Corfu. Where I am is heavenly. But right over there in Greece, hell is unfolding. It's such a teachable moment regarding the world's most dangerous and addictive drug: OPM. Far more than heroin, cocaine, and meth, once people are mainlining Other People's Money via government subsidies and welfare into their veins, any attempt to get them off the drug drives them criminally insane. It's a lesson we are going to learn the hard way, for what you are seeing in Athens and other Greek cities - which is going to get increasingly worse - is going to become horrifically commonplace in American cities. Truth is, we are seeing it already.
OBAMA IS LOST IN THE AFGHAN QUAGMIRE
In a poorly crafted speech tepidly delivered, President Barack Hussein Obama announced last week (6/22) 10,000 of the 33,000 additional troops he sent to Afghanistan will be withdrawn before the end of the year, the remainder of the surge force by September 2012. Because winters in Afghanistan are so brutal, the Taliban fights mostly in summer. Setting a withdrawal deadline in the middle of the fighting season makes no military sense, said retired Lt. Gen. David Barno, a former commander in Afghanistan who is now a fellow at a liberal think tank. Mr. Obama thinks it makes political sense. He wants those troops home before the presidential election campaign heats up after Labor Day. "If there is anyone who can make the excellent idea of reversing the Afghan surge sound like a bad one, it's our president," said Ann Marlowe of the Hudson Institute, who described the speech as "more or less a concession of defeat."
NO RETREAT FROM THE RISE OF FREEDOM
[This is the full text of Tim Pawlenty's address today, 6/28, to the Council on Foreign Relation on American policy towards the Middle East. ] I want to speak plainly this morning about the opportunities and the dangers we face today in the Middle East. The revolutions now roiling that region offer the promise of a more democratic, more open, and a more prosperous Arab world. From Morocco to the Arabian Gulf, the escape from the dead hand of oppression is now a real possibility. Now is not the time to retreat from freedom's rise.... [For example] it is not wrong for Republicans to question the conduct of President Obama's military leadership in Libya. There is much to question. And it is not wrong for Republicans to debate the timing of our military drawdown in Afghanistan- though my belief is that General Petraeus' voice ought to carry the most weight on that question. What is wrong, is for the Republican Party to shrink from the challenges of American leadership in the world. History repeatedly warns us that in the long run, weakness in foreign policy costs us and our children much more than we'll save in a budget line item. America already has one political party devoted to decline, retrenchment, and withdrawal. It does not need a second one.
HALF-FULL REPORT 06/24/11
Sofia, Bulgaria. The irony of writing the HFR here this week is overwhelming. I was first here 21 years ago, June of 1990, as the Soviet Union and its colonial empire was disintegrating. I was leading a group of conservatives to be eyewitnesses to momentous history. Among us were Phyllis Schlafly, Dr. Joel Wade, and John Perrott ("albinobushman" on the TTP Forum). There was also a free-lance journalist among us, a young fellow who thought following a Conservative Victory Tour through the collapsing Communist rule of Eastern Europe would make a great story. His name was Richard Stengel, and he is now Editor of Time Magazine. How ironic that this week Time released it's July 4th issue depicting the US Constitution being shredded on the cover, and the cover story - Does It Still Matter? - written by Richard Stengel. The blatant purpose of his screed is to shred conservatives who oppose liberal shredding of the Constitution. Obviously, Stengel has learned nothing about either conservatives nor the Constitution in the last 21 years.
OBAMA’S FOREIGN POLICY IS ABOUT TO GET MUCH WORSE
Outgoing US Defense Secretary Robert Gates is worried about the shape of things to come in US foreign policy. In an interview with Newsweek over the weekend, Gates warned: "To tell you the truth, that's one of the many reasons it's time for me to retire, because frankly I can't imagine being part of a nation, part of a government... that's being forced to dramatically scale back our engagement with the rest of the world." What Gates is saying is that he doesn't trust his commander in chief to allocate the resources to preserve America's superpower status. He is saying that he believes that Obama is willing to surrender the US's status as a superpower. This would be a stunning statement for any defense secretary to make about the policies of a US President. It is especially stunning coming from Gates. Many conservatives hailed Obama's decision to retain Gates as defense secretary as a belated admission that Bush's aggressive counter-terror policies were correct. These claims ignored the fact that in Bush's last two years in office, with the exception of the surge of troops in Iraq, under the guidance of Gates and then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, US foreign policy veered very far to the Left. As bad as it has been so far under Obama with Gates, it is now going to get much worse without him.