George Will Gives But One Cheer For George W. Bush, Fiscal Cliff Winner

Here:

"Third, one December winner was George W. Bush because a large majority of Democrats favored making permanent a large majority of his tax cuts. December’s rancor disguised bipartisan agreement: Both parties flinch from cliff-related tax increases and spending decreases. But neither the increases nor decreases would have tamed the current $1 trillion-plus budget deficit nor made a discernible dent in the 87-times-larger unfunded liabilities of the entitlement state."

Liberalism Can't Distinguish Radicalism Because They're Related

liberalism leads to death

Liberalism can't recognize radicalism because they're related. Instead liberalism tries to squirm out of the uncomfortable fact by calling it anything else. Extremism will do.

So Peggy Noonan, who appears to feel like she needs a shower after witnessing the extremism of the Democrat Convention but doesn't quite know why. 

For The Wall Street Journal, here:

Beneath the funny hats, the sweet-faced delegates, the handsome speakers and the babies waving flags there was something disquieting. All three days were marked by a kind of soft, distracted extremism. It was unshowy and unobnoxious but also unsettling. There was the relentless emphasis on Government as Community, as the thing that gives us spirit and makes us whole. But government isn't what you love if you're American, America is what you love. Government is what you have, need and hire. Its most essential duties—especially when it is bankrupt—involve defending rights and safety, not imposing views and values. We already have values. ... The huge "No!" vote on restoring the mention of God, and including the administration's own stand on Jerusalem—that wasn't liberal, it was extreme. 

Who else but a liberal could say all that and still be comfortable having a nitwit like Joe Biden a heartbeat away from the presidency?

As for Joe Biden, I love him and will hear nothing against him. He's like Democrats the way they used to be, and by that I do not mean idiotic, I mean normal . . ..

Peggy is a liberal, and knows one when she sees one. Hence her short love affair with Barack Obama, whom she threw over for Republican liberal Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts in early 2010. The Democrats under Obama aren't liberals any longer, except in the sense that babies grow up and become adults who only faintly resemble the parents. The hapless Baby Boom can't hold a candle to the so-called Greatest Generation, yet Peggy would speak in their defense. If only their failures didn't suggest their parents weren't so great after all. The 20th Century may have been the American century, but our troubles now suggest a deeper truth, that war is by definition demoralization writ large.  

That's the problem with liberalism. It can't properly name the enemy because to do so would indict the whole family. To liberals, Rep. Todd Akin is just as much of an extremist as the Democrat secularists, but that's all. Every family has its crazy uncle, shunned if not disowned. To people like Obama, however, Rep. Akin represents a mortal danger, an existential threat which must be eradicated, as in pulled out by the roots. He has to be disappeared by his minions because he blurts out the sordid reality which the radicals are in revolt against and ever seek to deny.

That's who Obama is, a radical, one who goes to the root of things and pulls them out by the roots. You know, like babies from their mothers' wombs. And if they happen to survive that, well, he has supported laws which would require a second doctor to come in and finish the job. But when human life begins is "above his paygrade." It sure is. We should be running this man out of the country, not running him for president.

People who get caught up in Obama's notion of transforming America forget Francis Fukuyama's timely phrase, "monstrous projects of social transformation". Death on a mass scale is its ultimate form, individual murders its particular. WWI, WWII, the Ukrainian "famine", the Gulag, Auschwitz, abortion. The vice president has seen and believed. He spoke of having learned of "the enormity" of the president's heart over the last four years. "The extreme scale of something morally wrong." You know that heart. It is the monstrous heart which orders drones to kill enemies who are on a list of his own making. American citizens have been victims of these crimes, in which he has acted as judge, jury and executioner. He shook hands with Qaddafi, and then had him killed. There was no intention of capturing Osama and making a spectacle of him, only of killing him. Who will be next?   

Liberalism has failed in explicating these things, whether it is a Democrat explanation or a Republican one. Rather it takes a conservative to understand them, someone who is trying to preserve the plant we call the constitution, not rip it out, like George Will for The Washington Post, here:

[Obama] is a conviction politician determined to complete the progressive project of emancipating government from the Founders’ constraining premises, a project Woodrow Wilson embarked on 100 Novembers ago. ... Progress, as progressives understand it, means advancing away from, up from, something. But from what? From the Constitution’s constricting anachronisms. In 1912, Wilson said, “The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of governmental power.” ... Wilson never said the future of liberty consisted of such limitation. Instead, he said, “every means . . . by which society may be perfected through the instrumentality of government” should be used so that “individual rights can be fitly adjusted and harmonized with public duties.” Rights “adjusted and harmonized” by government necessarily are defined and apportioned by it. Wilson, the first transformative progressive, called this the “New Freedom.” The old kind was the Founders’ kind — government existing to “secure” natural rights (see the Declaration) that preexist government. Wilson thought this had become an impediment to progress. The pedigree of Obama’s thought runs straight to Wilson.

George Will Only Imagines Congress' Power Has Been Limited, But It Hasn't

Here:

If the mandate had been upheld under the Commerce Clause, the Supreme Court would have decisively construed this clause so permissively as to give Congress an essentially unlimited police power — the power to mandate, proscribe and regulate behavior for whatever Congress deems a public benefit. Instead, the court rejected the Obama administration’s Commerce Clause doctrine. The court remains clearly committed to this previous holding: “Under our written Constitution . . . the limitation of congressional authority is not solely a matter of legislative grace.”

The fact remains, however, that with the stroke of a pen the Court has changed the locus of unlimited power-seeking from the venue of commerce to the venue of taxation. Congress' power "to mandate, proscribe and regulate behavior" hasn't been diminished one bit, just shifted.

I can now be penalized (!) with a tax (!) for not buying whatever Congress' decides. This used to be a power reserved to the States, which can force you, say, to purchase a gun. Now the Court has given that power over you to the Congress, by-passing the States.

The issue was well-framed for us already, in the dead of winter, during the Republican primary debate about RomneyCare, here:

One difference between the health care bills is that Romneycare is constitutional and Obamacare is not. True, Obamacare's unconstitutional provisions are the least of its horrors, but the Constitution still matters to some Americans. ... As Rick Santorum has pointed out, states can enact all sorts of laws -- including laws banning contraception -- without violating the Constitution. That document places strict limits on what Congress can do, not what the states can do. Romney, incidentally, has always said his plan would be a bad idea nationally. The only reason the "individual mandate" has become a malediction is because the legal argument against Obamacare is that Congress has no constitutional authority to force citizens to buy a particular product. ... States have been forcing people to do things from the beginning of the republic: drilling for the militia, taking blood tests before marriage, paying for public schools, registering property titles and waiting in line for six hours at the Department of Motor Vehicles in order to drive. There's no obvious constitutional difference between a state forcing militia-age males to equip themselves with guns and a state forcing adults in today's world to equip themselves with health insurance.


But now the Congress has this power, under the taxing authority, at least until some enterprising citizens challenge healthcare premiums they actually pay as a form of unapportioned direct taxation, and win.

Until then, we have no place left to hide. The whole country has become Massachusetts.

George Will Notices Amicus Brief That ObamaCare Violates Centuries Of Contract Law

In his Washington Post column, here:

The individual mandate is incompatible with centuries of contract law. This is so because a compulsory contract is an oxymoron.

The brief, the primary authors of which are ... Elizabeth Price Foley and Steve Simpson, says that Obamacare is the first time Congress has used its power to regulate commerce to produce a law “from which there is no escape.” And “coercing commercial transactions” — compelling individuals to sign contracts with insurance companies — “is antithetical to the foundational principle of mutual assent that permeated the common law of contracts at the time of the founding and continues to do so today.” ...

Throughout the life of this nation it has been understood that for a contract to be valid, the parties to it must mutually assent to its terms — without duress. ... Under Obamacare, the government will compel individuals to enter into contractual relations with insurance companies under threat of penalty.


Like governments, contracts derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed." And when the consent is missing, "it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it."

And we will, one way or another.

George Will, Free Trader, Labels Herman Cain Entrepreneurial Charlatan, Disrespectful

Yeah, after Cain has withdrawn from the race.

Coward.

Here.

Prohibition: An Alliance Between Evangelical Christians and Criminals

So said George Will last year in his review of Daniel Okrent's book which details how the women's war on men's drinking inspired a chain of constitutional and social changes ills:

Women's Prohibition sentiments fueled the movement for women's rights -- rights to hold property independent of drunken husbands; to divorce those husbands; to vote for politicians who would close saloons. ...

Women campaigning for sobriety did not intend to give rise to the income tax, plea bargaining, a nationwide crime syndicate, Las Vegas, NASCAR (country boys outrunning government agents), a redefined role for the federal government and a privacy right -- the "right to be let alone" -- that eventually was extended to abortion rights. But they did.

Now the "darkly hilarious" story has been immortalized by none other than Ken Burns on none other than PBS.

Don't miss it.

You can watch it online, here.

George Will Defends the Font of Serial Marriage and Other Destructive Behaviors

Here:

[T]he libertarians' argument. ... The essence of which is the commonsensical principle that before government interferes with the freedom of the individual, and of individuals making consensual transactions in markets, it ought to have a defensible reason for doing so. It usually does not.

The Tea Party Has Already Made The Democrats Blink on Tax Increases

"They’ve moved in other words, the Senate Majority Leader, far in their direction."

-- George Will, here

An excellent point, the premise of which is that politics is the art of the possible.

In point of fact not just once, either. The extension of the Bush tax rates from this crowd of left wing fanatics was no mean achievement.

The Tea Party speaks for many in wanting the deficit spending to stop. In view of the fact that deficit spending and enthusiasm for taxation are the cornerstones of the opposition, getting Democrats to relent on taxes late last year and again now is pretty good for just 20 or 30 fiscal extremists in the US House.

It should remind us all that imagination is important to political success. Michael Steele didn't have any in early 2010 when he opined that Republicans probably couldn't take back the House. Boy was he mistaken.

It would be a mistake to stop imagining that we can reduce spending. The only caveat is whether Obama  possesses enough character to refrain from defaulting on the debt. If he doesn't and does default, it could be blamed on overreaching by the Tea Party.

At a minimum, Obama's persistent extreme rhetoric threatening such a default should trouble more people. Even left of center types here and there are upset by his behavior, which is a good sign. It is nothing short of disgraceful that a president should talk this way, and it gives everyone over the age of forty pause.

I say that's a tactic, not a promise. Obama is going outside the experience of the enemy, one of Alinsky's rules.

The Tea Party should keep pressing the issue. And Republicans need to buck up and go on the rhetorical offensive. The farthest they should go is a clean debt ceiling increase of $1 trillion, which buys more time but doesn't give the president the space he wants, and needs.

The next crisis date is October 1, by which time we must have a budget agreed to by the Democrats to fund the next fiscal year. 

No Newts in 2012

Everybody's piling on today. ThinkProgress.org on the left is one, with links to some of the righties joining on the pile, here. George Will notably on Sunday called his an unserious candidacy. Indeed.

Does Newt really expect us to believe that his different version of a healthcare mandate is any less radical than Obama's, or than Rep. Paul Ryan's proposed entitlement reforms for that matter?

Newt evidently also thinks that his long history of flip-flops, detailed by The Weekly Standard, doesn't matter in the new world of Obama's promises with expiration dates.

NY Times Paints Loughner and Hard Money Libertarianism as Right Wing Extreme

The leftist ridicule offensive continues, designed to preoccupy the opposition and get the right fighting amongst themselves over who belongs and who doesn't, while the left presses on for new gun control measures and suppression of free speech.

Notice the elision going on in the first passage here:

He became an echo chamber for stray ideas, amplifying, for example, certain grandiose tenets of a number of extremist right-wing groups — including the need for a new money system and the government’s mind-manipulation of the masses through language.

Libertarians generally hold to hard money ideas, but that hardly makes them right wing, witness the long war of traditionalists like Russell Kirk against what he called "the chirping sectaries." The hard money idea is subtly paired with mind-manipulation conspiracy theory by the Times, whatever that means, without support and simply by assertion. Having been a fairly well-informed conservative since the late 70s, one is hard-pressed to know what the Times is even talking about. There you go again, one of our own might say now. We've had our Truthers and our Birthers. Now we've got our Minders, I guess.

One suspects the Times knows full well its only plausible case is in the Libertarian hard money ideology, as here:

A few days later, during a meeting with a school administrator, Mr. Loughner said that he had paid for his courses illegally because, “I did not pay with gold and silver” — a standard position among right-wing extremist groups. With Mr. Loughner’s consent, that same administrator then arranged to meet with the student and his mother to discuss the creation of a “behavioral contract” for him, after which the official noted: “Throughout the meeting, Jared held himself very rigidly and smiled overtly at inappropriate times.”

Notice the effort to paint gold and silver backed money as "a standard position" on the right. It isn't, and it hasn't been as long as conservatism has been resurgent since the 60s and Milton Friedman style monetarism and devotion to a strong dollar captured people's imaginations.

Clear-headed thinkers on the right, like George Will, have well noted the Federal Reserve's failure to maintain a sound currency partly because its mandate was divided in 1978 to include maintaining full employment. Instead, hard money ideology has been an enthusiasm prevalent on the fringe, among Libertarians, in the post-war era in view of the fact that the monetarist consensus has been breaking down due to its failures, and because the gold standard used to be, well, the law of the land, all the way up until . . . FDR.

The dishonesty of the presentation coheres with the view of the Times that, for most of its history, America has been a veritable right-wing nuthouse. They ought to know.

"The Tax Code is 10 Times Longer Than the Bible, Without the Good News"

So says Republican Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, and George Will approves, here, especially with the additional observation that it is not right that the bottom two income quintiles pay no taxes whatsoever, and receive direct cash payments in the form of refundable tax credits.

Real conservatives agree: everyone needs to have skin in the game.

George Will Notices That Sarah Palin Will Never Be A Ronald Reagan

What took you so long, George? This was all pretty clear already in January, here and here.

“After the 2008 campaign she had two things she had to do: she had to go home to Alaska and study, and she had to govern Alaska well,” Will told “This Week” anchor Christiane Amanpour. “Instead she quit halfway through her first term and shows up in the audience of ‘Dancing with the Stars’ and other distinctly non-presidential venues.”

More at this link.

George Will, National Treasure, Font of American Wisdom

Some excerpts from his address to The CATO Institute in May:

We are not Europeans. We are not, in Orwell's phrase, a "state-broken people."

It is a principle of liberal social legislation that a program for the poor is a poor program.

[D]ependency is the agenda of the other side.

I believe that today, as has been the case for 100 years, and as will be the case for the foreseeable future, the American political argument is an argument between two Princetonians: James Madison of the class of 1771, and Thomas Woodrow Wilson of the class of 1879.

The very virtue of a constitution is that it's not changeable. It exists to prevent change, to embed certain rights so that they cannot easily be taken away.

Madison said rights pre-exist government. Wilson said government exists to dispense whatever agenda of rights suits its fancy, and to annihilate, regulate, attenuate, or dilute others.

We are going to come to a time when America is going to have to revisit Madison's Federalist Paper no. 45, and his statement, "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined."

Gridlock is not an American problem, it is an American achievement!

[W]e always have more to fear from government speed than government tardiness.

We are told that one must not be a "Party of No." To "No," I say an emphatic "Yes!"

[T]he most beautiful five words in the English language are the first five words of the First Amendment, "Congress shall make no law."

The Bill of Rights is a litany of "No's."

The American people are, I think, healthier than they are given credit for. They have only one defect. They have nothing to fear, right now, but an insufficiency of their fear itself. It is time for a wholesome fear of what people with a dependency agenda are trying to do. We have few allies. We don't have Hollywood, we don't have academia, and we don't have the mainstream media. But we have two things. First, we have arithmetic. The numbers do not add up, and cannot be made to do so. Second, we have the Cato Institute. The people in this room are what the Keynesians call "a multiplier." And, for once, they are right!

Don't miss the rest at the link!

Of Politicians and Potato Chips

George Will spanks some babies while discussing the recent Supreme Court activism in defense of The Bill of Rights:

Even if it were Congress' business to decide that there is "too much" money in politics, that decision would be odd: In the 2007-08 election cycle, spending in all campaigns, for city council members up to the presidency, was $8.6 billion, about what Americans spend annually on potato chips.

Read more here.

George Will Answers That Chirping Sectarian, Ron Paul

At Bernanke's recent confirmation hearing on his nomination for a second four-year term, Jim DeMint, a South Carolina Republican who is co-sponsoring a Senate version of Paul's bill, asked Bernanke: "Do you believe that employment should be a mission, a goal of the Federal Reserve?" Bernanke, who had already noted Congress' "mandate" that the Fed "achieve maximum employment and price stability," answered that the Fed "can assist keeping employment close to its maximum level through adroit policies."

That mandate was, however, improvidently given. Congress created the Fed and can control it, and eventually will do so if the Fed eagerly embraces the role of the economy's comprehensive manager. America's complex, dynamic economy cannot be both "managed" and efficient. Attempting to manage it is an inherently political undertaking and if the Fed undertakes it, the Fed will eventually bring upon itself minute supervision by Congress.

Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., has, as usual, a better idea: Repeal the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1978 that, he says, "dangerously diverted the Fed from its most important job: price stability." For 65 years after its creation in 1913, the Fed's principal duty was to preserve the currency as a store of value by preventing inflation from undermining price stability. Humphrey-Hawkins gave it the second duty of superintending economic growth.

There's just one little problem with this line of reasoning from George Will. It is that the Federal Reserve didn't do its principal duty from 1913 to 1978, either, during which time the purchasing power of the dollar fell to fifteen cents.

For the complete article, go here.