Showing posts with label Pete Wehner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pete Wehner. Show all posts

Thursday, February 20, 2020

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Commentary Magazine Defends Reagan's Liberalism

Peter Wehner, here:

"[I]magine the Norquist and Shirley standard being applied to Reagan in the 1970s. If Jeb Bush’s comments unleashed heated attacks, even given his sterling anti-tax record, think about what Reagan’s support for unprecedented tax increases–including higher taxes on top rates, sales taxes, bank and corporate taxes, and the inheritance tax–would have elicited. The Gipper would have been accused of being a RINO, a pseudo-conservative, unprincipled, and a member of the loathsome Establishment. Fortunately for Reagan (and for America) the temptation to turn conservatism into a rigid ideology was not as strong then than it is now."

Let's face it.

Reagan was a Democrat in recovery who brought a substantial number of Democrats in recovery to the Republican Party, where they met fellow liberals with whom they could forge an alliance around the liberalism bequeathed to them by Wilson and FDR, without the communist fellow traveling. Conservatives got pushed to the side, or taken for a ride.

Reagan defended the welfare state but on a scaled back basis with emphasis on less reliance on government and lower income taxes. The New Deal was not scaled back, nor was The Great Society. Even the ramped up Cold War to defeat the Soviets was interventionist and therefore arguably anti-conservative in its basic impulse. The resulting glorification of the US military would horrify the founders who feared them as instruments of tyranny in the hands of an American Caesar.

And now here we are with an enlarged welfare state in OBAMACARE, and actually having a public kerfuffle about an administration which resisted abjuring the use of said military on American soil to snuff out people it and it alone decides are a threat. You know, like gun owners. Are we really supposed to be charmed by the likes of the Krauthammers of the world who insist what Obama has been doing is entirely consistent with the model of Abraham Lincoln who put fellow Americans Confederates to death based on a private interpretation of the constitution?

Nothing's changed, except for the worse. His truth keeps marching on.

Monday, January 30, 2012

Conservatism Has Never Meant So Little, Especially to the Likes of Pete Wehner

Or, to put it another way, today's neo-conservative idea of fundamental change means a return only to the spending trend line assumed by Rep. Paul Ryan's budget, established in the 1970s.

As if such a reaction against the nearly vertical spending trend, first of George W. Bush in the 2000s and then the even worse one of Barack Obama after him, would represent an achievement.

(See the discussion illustrating the differences, here.)

I refer, of course, to Peter Wehner's post at Commentary, here:

The single most important [!] idea, when it comes to fundamentally changing Washington, is the budget plan put forward by Representative Paul Ryan last April. When most massive-scale-of-change [!] conservatives were defending Ryan’s plan against scorching criticisms from the left, Gingrich described the plan as an example of “right-wing social engineering.” It was Gingrich, not the rest of us, who was counseling caution, timidity, and an unwillingness to shape (rather than follow) public opinion. (The Medicare reform plan Gingrich eventually put out wasn’t nearly as bold and far-reaching as the one put out by Governor Romney.)

So much for Mr. Fundamental Change.

This is the problem with a conservatism which has no imagination, although its implicit repudiation of the dramatic spending under George W. Bush is rather refreshing considering where it comes from.

Be that as it may, after a leftist Obama lurches the country dramatically toward oblivion, any pull-back from that instantly becomes fundamental change, when all it is, once achieved, is really just a pale reflection of what real conservatism might actually have looked like.

Newt's formulation has been interpreted with the emphasis all on the "right-wing" idea of the formulation, when it's the "social" which I think was his real target.

Speaker Gingrich was mocking today's right wing for its lack of imagination, as if codifying social welfare spending at a somewhat reduced level represented an achievement. When his taunt was misunderstood and quickly became toxic to him, he realized he had no political recourse but to recant and change the subject. The truth had become the enemy of the political, which is why professors have so little impact. Believe me, it frustrates the hell out of them.

Regrettably, most of us on first blush assumed Speaker Gingrich meant his criticism from the left, and, horror of horrors, that he now supposedly lived there. No one wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt and believe his was a criticism from the right.

I know I didn't.

On further reflection I suggest Speaker Gingrich meant to criticize Ryan's plan because it represented a conservative codification of big government (albeit on a smaller scale than Obama was implementing at the time). He meant thereby to criticize it as an (unacceptable) truce with the post-war consensus for Social Security, Medicare and their iterative expansions under Republican and Democrat administrations.

Consider that the trend line of spending of the status quo ante Obama was itself a radical departure from the post-war period, and even from that established in the 1960s. The new and truly radical trend began after the recession of 1974. Real conservatism, if it could exist at all, would seek to recapture the post-war trend lines of spending before 1974, but Paul Ryan's plan is nothing more than a return to that untenable trend.

A Newt Gingrich presidency might make such episodes of misunderstanding a more frequent occurrence, but from the look of things Americans appear instead to be hoping for the bell to ring so they can get to the next class, which will be, thankfully, lunch, study hall, or possibly human health and hygiene.

I, for one, hope Newt sticks around to keep entertaining the thinkers in the class.

But we're most probably going to end up with a very boring president instead of him, not unlike the one we have now.

Probably the same one. 

Monday, August 8, 2011

Obama is Engineering the Decline of the American Republic

Rush Limbaugh said it, right?

No, Pete Wehner, here.

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Democrats For Bush's Iraq War 110, For Obama's Libya War 0

That constitution thingy, well, it just doesn't apply here according to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, because an international agreement trumps it, which will come as quite a surprise to the Americans who have to fight it, and the rest of us who have to pay for it. But hey, who cares, they're all volunteers, right?

Peter Wehner for Commentary reminds Hillary Clinton that when it comes to unilateral wars, she at least got to vote for the last one:

On October 10-11, 2002, the House voted 296-133 in favor of the Use of Force Resolution, while the vote in the Senate was 77-23. All told, 110 Democrats in the House and Senate voted in favor of going to war – including then-Senator Hillary Clinton . . ..

The rest is also instructive, here.




Friday, March 18, 2011

Mark Levin Defends Reagan's Conservatism Against W's and Pete Wehner

In an extended but very worthwhile comparison of the Reagan and GW Bush records for Human Events, Mark Levin begins at the end of the Bush record:

Who said? "I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system." Well, those words would never have passed Reagan's lips.  It was infamously said by Bush, in defense of his massive spending spree in the last weeks of his presidency.  There's nothing conservative about it.  But it sums up Bush's lack of confidence in the free market system, and his repeated and excessive use of government intervention in American society.  

Bush never claimed to be the conservative Reagan was, nor did he spend his early political career challenging GOP orthodoxy, which, until Reagan won in 1980, was mostly incoherent mush of the Rockefeller-Scranton-Nixon-Ford-Bush/41 kind. George H. W. Bush and other mainstream Republican primary challengers sought to thwart Reagan because, they insisted, his conservatism would be rejected by the voters.  Now, Pete insists that as president, Reagan's record, in virtually all respects, is inferior to George W. Bush's, in advancing conservative principles.  This is not only counter-intuitive, it is factually defective.  As I proceed with this discussion, I believe it will become evident.

And it does.

But I missed in the discussion of taxes how the top rate eventually came down to 28% for a brief shining moment in 1988, 1989, and 1990 because of Reagan's sometimes maligned 1986 tax legislation.

Nor does Levin really discuss what W was doing in his early political career, like getting sober and glad-handing Texas Democrats.

And how about how Bush thought of himself as the person who would redefine the right: "That conservative movement stuff is over. I've redefined the Republican party"?

The office went to his head, because loyalty was his lodestar, not conservative principles.

Ronald Reagan Wasn't Really Conservative, Either

(Well, how could he be? He was a Democrat in recovery).

So says Peter Wehner in Commentary here, without really intending to do so.

Some people will do anything to defend George W. Bush (who was a Bush in recovery).

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Judge Objects to Obamacare Bait and Switch: The Mandate Became a Tax

From Peter Wehner at Commentary Magazine:

Judge Hudson writes, “Despite pre-enactment representations to the contrary by the Executive and Legislative branches, the Secretary now argues that the Minimum Essential Coverage Provision is, in essence, a ‘tax penalty.’”

That’s a polite way of saying that the Obama administration willfully misled the public during the health-care debate. In fact, President Obama repeatedly denied that the mandate was a tax — but now, in order to pass constitutional muster, his administration is insisting it is. I urge you to watch ... [w]hen ... Obama scolds Stephanopoulos. “That’s not true, George,” the president says. “[It] is absolutely not a tax increase.”

Now the president and his administration are arguing exactly the opposite.

This is a deeply cynical maneuver on the part of the man who promised to put an end to cynical political acts. Like so much of what Obama said, this promise was fraudulent.

The complete entry is here, with links.