KERRY AND HAGEL WOULD MEAN A MILITARILY WEAKER AMERICA

!!!!

• REVIEW & OUTLOOK
• December 21, 2012, 6:48 p.m. ET

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

A Flock of Doves

With Kerry at State, Hagel at Defense would be dangerous.

President Obama began to unveil his second-term national security team on Friday, choosing John Kerry as the next Secretary of State. The Massachusetts Senator shares the President's view of diminished American power and influence, which should only compound skepticism about the mooted selection of Chuck Hagel to lead the Pentagon.


Mr. Obama has found his mirror-image in Mr. Kerry, who for 30 years has been one of the Democratic Party's leading doves. The Senator's antiwar activism after Vietnam is well known and may have cost him the Presidency in 2004. But that shouldn't bar him from State, where his job will be diplomacy at the behest of the President.

Enlarge Image

AFP/Getty Images

Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.) and President Obama on Friday

The bigger question is how much fortitude Mr. Kerry will show in pursuing U.S. interests. His instincts have typically been to oppose the use of American force abroad and to engage adversaries as if they share our own peaceful goals. Like Joe Biden, he resisted Ronald Reagan's policies that ended the Cold War, opposed the Gulf War in 1990, supported the Iraq war but then changed his mind, and opposed the 2007 surge that salvaged Iraq.


In his remarks Friday, Mr. Obama said Mr. Kerry's "entire life has prepared him for this role," which is true, if not always reassuring. He has traveled widely and knows many world leaders personally. In the 1990s, he helped open diplomatic relations with Hanoi and more recently has worked difficult portfolios in Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria.


But the case of Syria reveals the limitations of his worldview. In 2008 when anti-Bush antipathy was at its height, he called for "engagement" with dictator Bashar Assad. A year later he and his wife dined out in Damascus with the Assads. In April 2010, he called Syria "an essential player in bringing peace and stability to the region." He has since changed his mind and denounced Mr. Assad, but he'll have to be tougher-minded to succeed at State.

 

Which brings us to Mr. Hagel, whom the White House has leaked as a possible Defense Secretary. The idea seems to be that the former GOP Senator from Nebraska would bring a bipartisan note to foreign policy, but that logic usually applies when the choice shares the other party's views. Though he fought admirably in Vietnam (and has two Purple Hearts), Mr. Hagel's security views have more closely resembled a George McGovern strain of Republicanism.

In the Senate, Mr. Hagel steered more to foreign policy than defense issues, and on those he steered left. "Politically, who among us is going to stand up and defend Iran or Libya?" he told the Senate in June 2001. He proceeded to defend both, calling sanctions against the Tehran and Gadhafi regimes "an absolute charade," "ill-considered" and "breaching the spirit of multilateralism so necessary to achieve success."


The biggest question for the next Defense chief may be what to do about Iran, but Mr. Hagel has never worried much about its nuclear ambitions. In a 2008 speech, he said the U.S. needs to offer Iran "some kind of security guarantee" to get its help in striking an Israel-Palestinian peace deal. His ideas for "some easy to do breakthroughs" with Tehran included opening a diplomatic post or restoring commercial flights—without preconditions. He opposed sanctions on Tehran in 2004, 2007 and 2008.


These views might be acceptable in a Secretary of State, but they are troubling at the Pentagon in an Administration that lacks hawkish voices in general. In the first term, Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and David Petraeus provided a counterweight to Mr. Obama's natural instincts to avoid U.S. leadership. Mr. Hagel is to the left of Mr. Kerry.


In the months after 9/11, he warned of "a dangerous arrogance and a sort of 'Pax Americana' vision, which holds that we are more powerful, richer, and smarter than the rest of the world."


His neo-isolationism became more urgent in the last decade, noting that the U.S. could do little good in Egypt or the Middle East in general. "I think we've got to be very wise and careful on this and continue to work with the multilateral institutions in the lead in Syria," he told Foreign Policy in May. He wanted the U.S. to engage Mr. Assad in 2008, but not to intervene to stop the Syrian dictator from killing his own people.


On military issues, the former Senator has been a notable critic of missile defenses and he wanted to halt their development as long as Russia is opposed. This is no small matter because Vladimir Putin wants to use arms-control talks to curtail U.S. missile defenses in the next four years.


Mr. Hagel supported the decision to oust Saddam Hussein but later became a critic and in 2007 he opposed the troop surge that saved the U.S. from defeat. Mr. Hagel called the surge proposal "the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam, if it's carried out." The surge stopped the sectarian bloodletting and enabled the U.S. drawdown.


By far the biggest risk is the role Mr. Hagel might play on military spending. Gutting the Pentagon has been a liberal goal since the 1960s, and Mr. Obama will have a new opening given the budget crisis. Mr. Gates and current Pentagon chief Leon Panetta have followed the President's orders but have resisted when the White House wanted to go too far. Mr. Gates made a special point of warning Americans not to repeat our frequent mistake of winding down the military when wars end. We regret it as new threats emerge.


Now is an especially dangerous moment, after a decade of wearing out ships and planes built as part of the Reagan buildup. A legitimate fear is that Mr. Obama wants Mr. Hagel, with his military record and GOP pedigree, to provide the political cover to shrink the Pentagon so he can finance ObamaCare and other entitlements.


Mr. Obama can do better than Mr. Hagel—for example, by choosing former Defense Under Secretary Michele Flournoy, or perhaps Colin Powell. If he does nominate Mr. Hagel, the Senate will have to prevent the Administration's senior security ranks from being dominated by a flock of doves who think the world is better off with a militarily weaker America.

A version of this article appeared December 22, 2012, on page A16 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Flock of Doves.

LIBERALS WILL NOT BE ABLE TO MAKE AMERICA GIVE UP ITS GUNS

!!!!


 


COMMENTARY MAGAZINE

Demonizing NRA Won’t Transform America

by Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary 12.20.2012 - 6:55 PM
   


Turn on virtually any talk show heard or viewed in the mainstream media this past week and it’s clear that most of the chattering classes are convinced that the Newtown massacre marks a turning point in the history of American culture. According to this narrative, the country’s understandable shock and horror over the slaughter of innocents at the Sandy Hook Elementary School is the equivalent of Pearl Harbor or 9/11 in that it has fundamentally altered the political correlation of forces that has prevented gun control. More to the point, they believe this sea change is so profound that it will effectively silence advocates of gun rights so as to render them incapable of stopping whatever it is that Vice President Biden’s task force comes up with.


The principal target of this effort is, of course, the National Rifle Association that sensibly stayed silent for several days after Newtown and has only just started to make its voice heard. Most liberals are assuming that the low profile the group has had since then is just the start of a new era in which its influence will be curtailed. The assumption is that anger about Newtown is so great and the impulse to try to do something to prevent another mass shooting is so widely supported that the NRA will no longer dictate to Congress. But, as the Pew poll cited earlier by Alana shows, support for gun rights may yet survive Newtown.


More than any other lobby or cause, the NRA is the boogeyman of the American liberal imagination. To listen to liberals talking about it is to hear a portrait of an organization that treats errant members of Congress the way heretics and Jews were handled by the Spanish Inquisition. More than that, many liberals speak as if it is primarily a profit-making entity funded by gun manufacturers that has imposed a bizarre reign of terror on an unwilling populace.


Yet even though the NRA is assuming a much lower profile these days, the idea that it and its 4 million members will simply go away or be drowned out by the chorus of outrage over the murder of 1st graders is based more on liberal ideology than hardheaded political analysis.


It is true that the chances of a reinstatement of the assault weapons ban that expired several years ago has just gone from nonexistent to quite possible. Indeed, it is more than likely that Biden will propose something that will have far wider scope than the previous bill since the rifle used by the murderer in Newtown was legal even under Connecticut’s assault weapons law.


It is entirely possible that Americans are ready for a ban on military-style weapons, especially those that fire large amounts of ammunition in a short time. Many are also ready for a stronger background check system for gun purchasers.


That these ideas are things that the NRA has previously successfully opposed is, as I have written before, evidence that the group regards any regulation, no matter how reasonable, as merely the thin edge of the wedge of a larger agenda whose goal is the effective repeal of the Second Amendment. In this sense they are like pro-abortion groups that fight furiously against even the most reasonable restrictions on the procedure such as parental consent because they also not unreasonably believe that such bills are merely a prelude to an attempt to repeal Roe v. Wade.


The effect of Newtown will be to point out to the NRA those areas where they have overreached. But the expectation that supporters of gun control can do more than that is highly unrealistic.
After all even Joe Manchin, the senator who has become the poster child for NRA members who have had second thoughts about the issue in the aftermath of Newtown, has yet to say what gun control measure he will actually support in any of his seemingly innumerable press interviews.


What liberals who think Newtown means that gun rights can be rolled back will re-learn in the coming weeks is that the NRA’s influence is not so much a matter of money as it is of votes. For all of its bad press, the NRA is the living illustration of democracy, not influence peddling. Its voice has carried weight in Congress because it speaks for 4 million members who share its concerns about the threat to gun rights. That concern is currently overshadowed by anger about Newtown and the widespread though largely mistaken conviction that there is a way to legislate such tragedies out of existence. But it won’t take long for the liberal war on guns to wake up the NRA and its members and far more numerous sympathizers.


As Pete wrote earlier today, the demonization of gun supporters by media figures such as Piers Morgan illustrates the politics of a moment of outrage, not the sort of fundamental shift in American culture that would be required for liberals to do more than enact measures on the margins of the issue, such as assault weapons. Indeed, the comparisons to Pearl Harbor and 9/11 should prove instructive to those who think the NRA is on its last legs. Though both those events did transform American politics in the short term, in the long run the effects were minimal.


Try as they might, those seeking to capitalize on Newtown can’t make America a country that no longer thinks that gun rights are the guarantee of democracy. That is a belief that is not shared by any other modern democracy, even a country like Israel, where gun ownership is widespread. But like other stubborn elements of American exceptionalism, it is not the sort of thing that will be erased even by an event as horrific as Newtown.



Topics: gun control, National Rifle Association, Newtown, Second Amendment

HERE IS THE OFFICIAL NRA RESPONSE TO THE NEWTOWN, CONNECTICUT SCHOOL TRAGEDY

!!!!


 

 

This is the full NRA text.

Wayne Lapierre, CEO & Ex. V.P:

Out of respect for those grieving families, and until the facts are known, the NRA has refrained from comment. While some have tried to exploit tragedy for political gain, we have remained respectfully silent.

Now, we must speak … for the safety of our nation's children. Because for all the noise and anger directed at us over the past week, no one — nobody — has addressed the most important, pressing and immediate question we face: How do we protect our children right now, starting today, in a way that we know works?

The only way to answer that question is to face up to the truth.

Politicians pass laws for Gun-Free School Zones. They issue press releases bragging about them. They post signs advertising them.

And in so doing, they tell every insane killer in America that schools are their safest place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk.

How have our nation's priorities gotten so far out of order? Think about it. We care about our money, so we protect our banks with armed guards. American airports, office buildings, power plants, courthouses — even sports stadiums — are all protected by armed security.

We care about the President, so we protect him with armed Secret Service agents. Members of Congress work in offices surrounded by armed Capitol Police officers.

Yet when it comes to the most beloved, innocent and vulnerable members of the American family — our children — we as a society leave them utterly defenseless, and the monsters and predators of this world know it and exploit it. That must change now!

The truth is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters — people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them. They walk among us every day. And does anybody really believe that the next Adam Lanza isn't planning his attack on a school he's already identified at this very moment?

How many more copycats are waiting in the wings for their moment of fame — from a national media machine that rewards them with the wall-to-wall attention and sense of identity that they crave — while provoking others to try to make their mark?

A dozen more killers? A hundred? More? How can we possibly even guess how many, given our nation's refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill?

And the fact is, that wouldn't even begin to address the much larger and more lethal criminal class: Killers, robbers, rapists and drug gang members who have spread like cancer in every community in this country. Meanwhile, federal gun prosecutions have decreased by 40 percent — to the lowest levels in a decade.

So now, due to a declining willingness to prosecute dangerous criminals, violent crime is increasing again for the first time in 19 years! Add another hurricane, terrorist attack or some other natural or man-made disaster, and you've got a recipe for a national nightmare of violence and victimization.

And here's another dirty little truth that the media try their best to conceal: There exists in this country a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people.

Through vicious, violent video games with names like Bulletstorm, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat and Splatterhouse. And here’s one: it’s called Kindergarten Killers. It’s been online for 10 years. How come my research department could find it and all of yours either couldn’t or didn’t want anyone to know you had found it?

Then there’s the blood-soaked slasher films like "American Psycho" and "Natural Born Killers" that are aired like propaganda loops on "Splatterdays" and every day, and a thousand music videos that portray life as a joke and murder as a way of life. And then they have the nerve to call it "entertainment."

But is that what it really is? Isn't fantasizing about killing people as a way to get your kicks really the filthiest form of pornography?

In a race to the bottom, media conglomerates compete with one another to shock, violate and offend every standard of civilized society by bringing an ever-more-toxic mix of reckless behavior and criminal cruelty into our homes — every minute of every day of every month of every year.

A child growing up in America witnesses 16,000 murders and 200,000 acts of violence by the time he or she reaches the ripe old age of 18.

And throughout it all, too many in our national media … their corporate owners … and their stockholders … act as silent enablers, if not complicit co-conspirators. Rather than face their own moral failings, the media demonize lawful gun owners, amplify their cries for more laws and fill the national debate with misinformation and dishonest thinking that only delay meaningful action and all but guarantee that the next atrocity is only a news cycle away.

The media call semi-automatic firearms "machine guns" — they claim these civilian semi-automatic firearms are used by the military, and they tell us that the .223 round is one of the most powerful rifle calibers ... when all of these claims are factually untrue. They don't know what they're talking about!

Worse, they perpetuate the dangerous notion that one more gun ban — or one more law imposed on peaceful, lawful people — will protect us where 20,000 others have failed!

As brave, heroic and self-sacrificing as those teachers were in those classrooms, and as prompt, professional and well-trained as those police were when they responded, they were unable — through no fault of their own — to stop it.

As parents, we do everything we can to keep our children safe. It is now time for us to assume responsibility for their safety at school.

The only way to stop a monster from killing our kids is to be personally involved and invested in a plan of absolute protection. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Would you rather have your 911 call bring a good guy with a gun from a mile away ... or a minute away?

Now, I can imagine the shocking headlines you'll print tomorrow morning: "More guns," you'll claim, "are the NRA's answer to everything!" Your implication will be that guns are evil and have no place in society, much less in our schools. But since when did the word "gun" automatically become a bad word?

A gun in the hands of a Secret Service agent protecting the President isn't a bad word. A gun in the hands of a soldier protecting the United States isn't a bad word. And when you hear the glass breaking in your living room at 3 a.m. and call 911, you won't be able to pray hard enough for a gun in the hands of a good guy to get there fast enough

to protect you.

So why is the idea of a gun good when it's used to protect our President or our country or our police, but bad when it's used to protect our children in their schools?

They're our kids. They're our responsibility. And it's not just our duty to protect them — it's our right to protect them.

You know, five years ago, after the Virginia Tech tragedy, when I said we should put armed security in every school, the media called me crazy. But what if, when Adam Lanza started shooting his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School last Friday, he had been confronted by qualified, armed security?

Will you at least admit it's possible that 26 innocent lives might have been spared? Is that so abhorrent to you that you would rather continue to risk the alternative?

Is the press and political class here in Washington so consumed by fear and hatred of the NRA and America’s gun owners that you're willing to accept a world where real resistance to evil monsters is a lone, unarmed school principal left to surrender her life to shield the children in her care? No one — regardless of personal political prejudice — has the right to impose that sacrifice.

Ladies and gentlemen, there is no national, one-size-fits-all solution to protecting our children. But do know this President zeroed out school emergency planning grants in last year's budget, and scrapped "Secure Our Schools" policing grants in next year's budget.

With all the foreign aid, with all the money in the federal budget, we can’t afford to put a police officer in every school? Even if they did that, politicians have no business — and no authority — denying us the right, the ability, or the moral imperative to protect ourselves and our loved ones from harm.

Now, the National Rifle Association knows that there are millions of qualified active and retired police; active, reserve and retired military; security professionals; certified firefighters and rescue personnel; and an extraordinary corps of patriotic, trained qualified citizens to join with local school officials and police in devising a protection plan for every school. We can deploy them to protect our kids now. We can immediately make America's schools safer — relying on the brave men and women of America’s police force.

The budget of our local police departments are strained and resources are limited, but their dedication and courage are second to none and they can be deployed right now.

I call on Congress today to act immediately, to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every school — and to do it now, to make sure that blanket of safety is in place when our children return to school in January.

Before Congress reconvenes, before we engage in any lengthy debate over legislation, regulation or anything else, as soon as our kids return to school after the holiday break, we need to have every single school in America immediately deploy a protection program proven to work — and by that I mean armed security.

Right now, today, every school in the United States should plan meetings with parents, school administrators, teachers and local authorities — and draw upon every resource available — to erect a cordon of protection around our kids right now. Every school will have a different solution based on its own unique situation.

Every school in America needs to immediately identify, dedicate and deploy the resources necessary to put these security forces in place right now. And the National Rifle Association, as America's preeminent trainer of law enforcement and security personnel for the past 50 years, is ready, willing and uniquely qualified to help.

Our training programs are the most advanced in the world. That expertise must be brought to bear to protect our schools and our children now. We did it for the nation's defense industries and military installations during World War II, and we'll do it for our schools today.

The NRA is going to bring all of its knowledge, dedication and resources to develop a model National School Shield Emergency Response Program for every school that wants it. From armed security to building design and access control to information technology to student and teacher training, this multi-faceted program will be developed by the very best experts in their fields.

Former Congressman Asa Hutchinson will lead this effort as National Director of the National School Shield Program, with a budget provided by the NRA of whatever scope the task requires. His experience as a U.S. Attorney, Director of the Drug Enforcement Agency and Undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security will give him the knowledge and expertise to hire the most knowledgeable and credentialed experts available anywhere, to get this program up and running from the first day forward.

If we truly cherish our kids more than our money or our celebrities, we must give them the greatest level of protection possible and the security that is only available with a properly trained — armed — good guy.

Under Asa’s leadership, our team of security experts will make this the best program in the world for protecting our children at school, and we will make that program available to every school in America free of charge.

That's a plan of action that can, and will, make a real, positive and indisputable difference in the safety of our children —starting right now.

There'll be time for talk and debate later. This is the time, this is the day for decisive action.

We can't wait for the next unspeakable crime to happen before we act. We can't lose precious time debating legislation that won’t work. We mustn't allow politics or personal prejudice to divide us.

We must act now.

For the sake of the safety of every child in America, I call on every parent, every teacher, every school administrator and every law enforcement officer in this country to join us in the National School Shield Program and protect our children with the only line of positive defense that's tested and proven to work.

And now, to tell you more about the program, I'd like to introduce the head of that effort — a former U.S. congressman, former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Arkansas and former administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the Honorable Asa Hutchinson.

ASA HUTCHINSON:

Thank you, Wayne. One of the first responsibilities I learned at Homeland Security was the importance of protecting our nation’s critical infrastructure, and there is nothing more critical to our nation’s well being than our children’s safety. They are this country’s future and her most

precious resource.

We all understand that our children should be safe in school, but it is also essential that the parents have confidence in that safety. As a result of the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, that confidence has been shattered. Assurance of school safety must be restored with a sense of urgency.

That is why I am grateful that the NRA has asked me to lead a team of security experts to assist our schools, parents and communities. I took this assignment on one condition: That my team of experts will be independent and will be guided solely by what are the best security solutions for the safety of our children while at school.

Even though we are just starting this process, I envision this initiative will have two key elements: First, it would be based on a model security plan — a comprehensive strategy for school security based on the latest, most up-to-date technical information from the foremost experts in their fields.

This model security plan will serve as a template — a set of best practices, principles and guidelines that every school in America can tweak, if needed, and tailor to their own set of circumstances.

Every school and community is different, but this model security plan will allow every school to choose among its various components to develop a school safety strategy that fits their own unique situation, whether it's a large urban school, a small rural school or anything in between.

Armed, trained, qualified school security personnel will be one element of that plan, but by no means the only element. If a school decides for whatever reason that it doesn't want or need armed security personnel, that of course is a decision to be made by parents at the local level.

The second point I want to make is that this will be a program that doesn't depend on massive funding from local authorities or the federal government. Instead, it'll make use of local volunteers serving in their own communities.

In my home state of Arkansas, my son was a volunteer with a local group called "Watchdog Dads," who volunteer their time at schools to patrol playgrounds and provide a measure of added security.

Whether they're retired police, retired military or rescue personnel, I think there are people in every community in this country, who would be happy to serve, if only someone asked them and gave them the training and certification to do so.

The National Rifle Association is the natural, obvious choice to sponsor this program. Their gun safety, marksmanship and hunter education programs have set the standard for well over a century. Over the past 25 years, their Eddie Eagle Gunsafe Program has taught over 26 million kids that real guns aren't toys and, today, child gun accidents are at the lowest levels ever recorded.

School safety is a complex issue with no simple, single solution.

But I believe trained, qualified, armed security is one key component among many that can provide the first line of deterrence as well as the last line of defense. And I welcome the opportunity to serve in this vital, potentially lifesaving effort.

Thank you very much.

SOURCE: NRA

ROBERT BORK, R.I.P.

!!!!

• OPINION
• December 19, 2012, 7:28 p.m. ET
• THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The Wisdom of Robert Bork

Without the Constitution's original intent as their guide, wrote the great jurist who died Wednesday at 85, justices are left with merely their own 'moral philosophy.'

Editor's note: The former federal judge, legal scholar and solicitor general Robert H. Bork, who died Wednesday at age 85, was a frequent contributor to the Journal's opinion pages. An editorial appears nearby, and below are some selections from his work:

"The Unpersuasive Bakke Decision," July 21, 1978

The decisive opinion [in Bakke] was Mr. Justice [Lewis] Powell's, because the remainder of the court split evenly for and against the racial quota used by the Davis medical school for admissions. Justice Powell's middle position—universities may not use raw racial quotas but may consider race, among other factors, in the interest of diversity among the student body—has been praised as a statesmanlike solution to an agonizing problem. It may be. Unfortunately, in constitutional terms, his argument is not ultimately persuasive.

Enlarge Image

Ken Fallin

Justice Powell attempted to find a position . . . tempering a colorblind version of the 14th Amendment with the First Amendment. The 14th, he said, is strict about any use of race. "The guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to an individual and something else when applied to a person of another color." . . .
The trouble is, it is hard to take seriously the idea that the First Amendment permits university freedom from the strictures of the 14th so long as they pursue an education policy held in good faith. Were that true, a university could believe that education is more effective under conditions of genuine homogeneity and so count against applicants, among other factors, the fact of being black. . . .
Justice Powell's use of the First Amendment fails; it is not a real factor, and we have at bottom a statement that the 14th Amendment allows some, but not too much, reverse discrimination. Yet that vision of the Constitution remains unexplained.

The Bookshelf review, Nov. 21, 1980, of William O. Douglas's "The Court Years, 1939-1975"

[Supreme Court Justice] William O. Douglas's . . . urge, which became the dominant theme of the Warren Court, was the redistribution of society's wealth, prestige and political power. He, as part of a court majority, accomplished: school desegregation; legislative reapportionment on a rigid one-man, one-vote formula; the destruction of laws controlling obscenity, birth control, abortion and residency requirements for voting and welfare benefits; an end even to racially non-discriminatory poll taxes; and limitations on the death penalty. He routinely voted against business litigants whatever the legal context.
Mr. Douglas himself was often in dissent because he wished to do more and go further. Most observers, even those who approve, found it difficult not to conclude that Justice Douglas's politics were also his law.

"Tobacco Suit Is Latest Abuse of the Rule of Law," Sept. 23, 1999

At least when the nation decided to end the "scourge" of alcohol, it had the political courage to ratify the 18th Amendment making Prohibition the law of the land.
Not so in these pusillanimous days. Now, as then, we are in the throes of a reform campaign waged with the vigor and self-righteousness of the bluenoses of old. This time their target is cigarettes, not whiskey. But our politicians no longer have the courage to legislate the end of what they condemn. Instead, they resort to lawsuits in an effort to end smoking by destroying the tobacco companies. The end, apparently, justifies any means, no matter how fraudulent. . . .
The real damage done by this noxious mixture of governmental greed and moralism is not to the tobacco companies' shareholders (they should have seen it coming and got out a long time ago) but to what we still, with increasing irony, call the rule of law.

"Blue Slip Blackmail," May 10, 2001

[President George W.] Bush yesterday announced his first 11 selections for new appellate and trial-court judges, and the all-too-familiar liberal assault, powered by misrepresentations and scare tactics, began. . . .
Because a number of the nominees are members of the Federalist Society that organization has come in for slander, and has been described as a "tightly organized right-wing lawyers' group." As a member, I can testify that the Federalist Society is barely organized at all. Unlike the American Bar Association, it does not vet judges and takes no position on public affairs. Its main activity is organizing debates at which liberals are well-represented. Yet the head of People for the American Way, itself on the outer fringes of the left, describes the society as a "bastion of far-right legal thought."
The truth is that there is no far-right legal thought in the U.S. There are liberal activists and originalists, the latter not even remotely resembling the conservative activists on the court in the first third of the 20th century. But the theory of the left is that if you shout "far right" and "extremists" long enough, some people will believe it.

"Activist Judges Strike Again," Dec. 22, 1999

There was a time when judicial activism was thought to be a disease of the federal courts, and the Warren Court in particular. What we see . . . is that activism is now raging in the state courts. That activism prevails in those courts, even though many of them are manned by elected judges, suggests either that the public is ill-informed about the shift in power from democratic institutions to authoritarian bodies or that there is a general weariness with democracy and the endless struggles it entails.

"The Most Misunderstood Antitrust Case," May 22, 1998

Microsoft's MSFT +0.57% defenders and [Bill] Gates himself frequently voice the complaint that federal judges should not design computers or software. Closely related concerns are that the Sherman Act, which was written in the days of the oil and tobacco trusts, [is] outdated in a digital economy and that regulation of the industry would hamper innovation.
In truth, the government does not propose to design software but only to enjoin monopolizing practices. Competition and monopoly, which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes called "conditions . . . as permanent as anything human," have not changed since 1890, though our understanding of them has.
The government's suit would in no way hamper innovation, though that is Mr. Gates's favorite mantra. It would allow innovation from many sources rather than just one. Should the government succeed, consumers will benefit from additional innovation and choice as well as from lower software prices.

"Their Will Be Done," July 5, 2005

Once the justices depart, as most of them have, from the original understanding of the principles of the Constitution, they lack any guidance other than their own attempts at moral philosophy, a task for which they have not even minimal skills. Yet when it rules in the name of the Constitution, whether it rules truly or not, the Court is the most powerful branch of government in domestic policy. The combination of absolute power, disdain for the historic Constitution, and philosophical incompetence is lethal.
The Court's philosophy reflects, or rather embodies and advances, the liberationist spirit of our times. In moral matters, each man is a separate sovereignty. In its insistence on radical personal autonomy, the Court assaults what remains of our stock of common moral beliefs. That is all the more insidious because the public and the media take these spurious constitutional rulings as not merely legal conclusions but moral teachings supposedly incarnate in our most sacred civic document.

A version of this article appeared December 20, 2012, on page A19 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline:



********************************************************************************

• REVIEW & OUTLOOK
• December 19, 2012, 7:18 p.m. ET
• THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The Great Robert Bork

The jurist had more impact than most Supreme Court Justices.

The U.S. Senate has had many low, retrograde moments, but easily among the worst was its 1987 rejection of Robert Bork to sit on the Supreme Court. Bob Bork died Wednesday at age 85, having contributed far more to American law than the 58 Senators who voted against him and more than most Supreme Court Justices.


It's hard to remember the passions unleashed by Ronald Reagan's nomination of Judge Bork, who was among the most famous jurists of the era. He had been Solicitor General of the U.S. and Acting Attorney General when his superiors resigned during the Watergate trauma.


As a Yale law professor, he was hugely popular as a teacher and hugely influential as a scholar. His 1978 book, "The Antitrust Paradox," helped to revolutionize antitrust law by focusing less on business market share and more on whether corporate mergers benefit consumers.


Reagan nominated him to the D.C. Circuit in 1981, awaiting what everyone knew would be the eventual Supreme Court selection. The Gipper overlooked him initially to select the first woman, Sandra Day O'Connor. That was his first big mistake.


Then expecting two more openings in his second term, Reagan first nominated Antonin Scalia in 1986 on grounds that Bork was so distinguished he would have an easier confirmation if Democrats took over the Senate later that year. It was an historic miscalculation.


Led by Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden at his slimiest in charge of the Judiciary Committee, Democrats and the left ran a smear campaign for the ages. Bork wasn't helped by a Reagan White House—in particular by his supposed "sherpa" Ken Duberstein—that underestimated the ferocity of opponents and left him politically undefended until it was too late.


So nasty was the campaign against Bork that his name became a verb—to bork, as in to utterly trash someone's personal and professional reputation. For younger readers who wonder when U.S. politics took on their current poisonous character, the Bork fight was the turning point. Democrats cast the first smear.


Despite his nomination's defeat, Judge Bork has continued to influence current law and political debate. He was a champion of originalism, which to oversimplify means interpreting the Constitution based on the text and its original meaning.


He believed in judicial restraint in the tradition of Felix Frankfurter, among others, but by the time he was nominated the judicial left had decided the law was whatever liberals say it is. This intellectual divide lives on in our law and at the current Supreme Court, with Justice Scalia perhaps closest in his views to Bork's jurisprudence.


We are delighted to say Judge Bork was also a frequent contributor to these pages, and we offer a flavor of his work nearby. His legacy is the enduring Constitution and those who protect it against the legal inventions of the moment.

CHICKEN LITTLE OF SKYFALL SAYS THE SKY IS NOT FALLING

!!!!

Bond in Bankruptcy

National Review's Happy Warrior
December 12, 2012

For some reason, the quadrennial humiliation of the Republican presidential candidate now coincides with the release of the new Bond movie. Don't ask me why; probably a constitutional amendment I missed along the way. Last time round, Kevin Sessums interviewed Daniel Craig and, as a final question, asked which presidential nominee would make the better 007:

Craig doesn't hesitate. "Obama would be the better Bond because — if he's true to his word — he'd be willing to quite literally look the enemy in the eye and go toe to toe with them. McCain, because of his long service and experience, would probably be a better M," he adds, mentioning Bond's boss, played by Dame Judi Dench. "There is, come to think of it, a kind of Judi Dench quality to McCain."

A few readers may recall my response in this very space four years ago:

Oh, great. John McCain has survived plane crashes, just like Roger Moore in Octopussy. He has escaped death in shipboard infernos, just like Sean Connery in Thunderball. He has endured torture day after day, month after month, without end, just like Pierce Brosnan in the title sequence of Die Another Day. He has done everything 007 has done except get lowered into a shark tank and (as far as we know) bed Britt Ekland and Jill St. John.

And yet Daniel Craig gives him the desk job.
McCain is what an action hero looks like — unkempt, scarred, maimed, unable (thanks to the Vietnamese) to raise his hands above his head to brush his hair. But Obama is what an action hero looks like to a movie producer — cool, fashionable, neither shaken nor stirred, a man who looks as if he's never broken a sweat in his life. In Daniel Craig's world, Obama's glamour trumped McCain's scar tissue — as it did for the electorate.


I thought it might go differently this time. In 2008, Craig was promoting Quantum of Solace, which seemed about right: Yeah, it was a grim night for Republicans, but Bush was unpopular and Americans were war-weary and the global economy had nosedived off the cliff. Four years on, Craig's back promoting Skyfall, and, alas, that seems about right, too. There's no solace: The sky fell in. Mitt did bad, and the Republican party did worse. And worse is to come, if the reactions of the "experts" are any indication: On the one hand, the GOP needs to junk all that uptight social-conservative stuff. On the other, they need to reach out to demographically surging Hispanics because they're natural social conservatives. Whatever. Meanwhile, Barack Obama gets another four years to "quite literally look the enemy in the eye and go toe to toe with them," which is not how surviving consulate staff in Benghazi would recall it.


To state the obvious: The whole Republican election campaign — the primaries, the debates, the genius consultants, the billion dollars on robocalls and attack ads — was a complete waste of time. I doubt the final tally in the Electoral College would have been any different had the entire GOP gone to the Bahamas for the last 18 months and sent a billion-dollar check to some favored Third World charity. And in the long run they might have done rather better had they used the dough to start a movie studio or buy a TV network.


Republican "strategists" remind me of those scientists and detectives who stand around looking baffled in the mysterious indentation of ground at the start of a Godzilla movie. Then the camera pulls back and you realize the shallow trench is really a giant footprint. The GOP slogged out the election in the little toe of politics unaware that they were about to be stomped by the Democrat monster of the broader culture. For much of the electorate, politics is now tribal. I don't just mean the 93 percent of blacks and 71 percent of Hispanics who voted for Obama, but various other demographic niches, from impoverished single women to upscale gays. If you know whether someone's black or lesbian or a college professor, you can guess how they vote and be right nine times out of ten. They are beyond questions of economic or foreign policy: Their self-identification trumps politics. Sociocultural identifiers count for more than the failure of the stimulus or a cover-up in Benghazi. Just as Obama fits Daniel Craig's idea of an action hero, so he fits these voters' idea of a president, and Mitt Romney doesn't.


Are you so sure it'll go differently next time with Ryan or Rubio? Republicans have spent the last half-century surrendering all the cultural space in which Americans actually live in the 729 days between elections. Yes, yes, I know; I said exactly the same thing here four years ago:

If Hollywood's liberal, if the newspapers are liberal, if the pop stars are liberal, if the grade schools are liberal, if the very language is liberal to the point where all the nice words have been co-opted as a painless liberal sedative, a Republican legislature isn't going to be a shining city on a hill so much as one of those atolls in the Maldives being incrementally swallowed by Al Gore's rising sea levels.

Which is why the 2010 GOP House made so little difference. "We have to get back in the game in all the arenas we've ceded to liberalism," I wrote in 2008. "Otherwise, as in Daniel Craig's improvised casting call, we'll be lucky to wind up with a cameo in the national narrative."
Contemplating the enacting of Obamacare, the next two or three Supreme Court appointments, the "flexibility" promised to Putin re the post-American order, the remorseless expansion of debt and dependency, that's kind of the way it feels, doesn't it? Like I said, get back in the game — or 2016 will just be the umpteenth GOP remake of Die Another Day.

AMERICA, LEARN FROM AUSTRALIA'S MISTAKE

!!!!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8RDWltHxRc&feature=youtube_gdata_player

WHAT? ME WORRY?

!!!!

December 11, 2012 SHARE The game plan at the lip of the cliff By Wes Pruden Barack Obama ain’t afraid of no stinkin’ fiscal cliff. Why should he be? When the rest of us go over the cliff, doomed to pain and oblivion among the soup cans, plastic bags and empty soda-pop bottles at the bottom of the abyss, he’ll be soaring over the rooftops as only a tin-pot messiah can. When the George W. Bush tax cuts expire at midnight on New Year’s Eve, with the rest of us singing a tearful adieu to Auld Lang Syne, the president will be popping corks. He’ll have his higher taxes. The joke will be on us, but nobody at the bottom of the cliff will be laughing. Barack Obama’s goal is to raise taxes, and how he does that is of small consequence. He is determined not to cut spending. This has become clear enough to all. He will have redeemed FDR’s famous mantra – “Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect” – in a way that Mr. Roosevelt could never have imagined. Mitt Romney’s infamous “47 percent,” the Americans who get a monthly government check, will balloon toward a hundred percent. Cuts, reforms, restraints, disciplines of any kind will be silly notions of the past. Dependency will be enthroned. Once this is understood, there’s no mystery about why the “negotiations” between the Democrats and the Republicans have never amounted to very much. Mr. Obama reads the November 6 election result as a landslide, though 51 to 49 is far from a landslide. Nevertheless he is bold, and acting as if it were. He, and even a lot of timid and fearful Republicans, never absorbed the home truth that nothing recedes like success. For now, everything is going his way. Mr. Obama’s vision of America is one he learned in his community-organizing days. Americans have to give up the idea that America is, in Lincoln’s memorable formulation, the exceptional nation, and learn to be miserable in solidarity with both Upper and Lower Slobbovia. The president’s intelligence chiefs have given him the “good news” that by the year 2030, only 18 years from now, the United States will no longer be the world’s great superpower. “In terms of the indices of overall power – Gross Domestic Product (GDP), population size, military spending and technological investment – Asia will surpass North America and Europe combined,” reports the National Intelligence Council of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. That mouthful of titles and capital letters comprise the president’s own intelligence gurus. With rapid rise of other countries,” the report goes on, “the ‘unipolar moment’ is over and no country – whether the U.S., China or any other country – will be a hegemonic power. The United States’ relative economic decline vis-à-vis the rising states is inevitable . . . ” These are only opinions, of course, but the intelligence agencies are occasionally correct in their estimates and appraisals. But there is in the assessment a noticeable whiff of barely suppressed glee, and a suggestion that this could be the good news the president has been waiting for. Mr. Obama, a happy native of Hawaii, is nevertheless a man of the third-world attitudes and sensibilities inherited by birth, nurtured when he grew up in Indonesia, and it’s just these sensibilities that endear him to sordid allies on the left who dream of a world liberated from American example and influence. Preaching the angry exploitation of the “rich,” as he defines “rich,” comes naturally to him and the Democratic left. Envy and covetousness are powerful emotions, easily manipulated, and Mr. Obama is a master of manipulation. Demonizing a neighbor in a bigger house who drives a new car is easy work. A new Battleground Poll finds that 60 percent of Americans polled now think raising taxes on households – not individuals but households – making more than $250,000 a year is a good idea. The president has done a splendid job of portraying these taxpayers as big-bellied plutocrats who summer in France, winter in St. Moritz, and dine on roast swan. But nearly 70 percent in the Battleground Poll think raising taxes on small-businesses earning more than $250,000 is a bad idea. Republicans have done a lousy job of explaining that many, perhaps most, of the “rich” Americans and these small businesses are one and the same. That’s why abusing small businesses is likely to send the country reeling into another recession at the bottom of the cliff. This one won’t be George W.’s fault. Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

IT IS ALL ABOUT PINNING THE TAIL ON THE ELEPHANT

!!!!

December 7, 2012 SHARE Over the cliff in a barrel By Wes Pruden The Republicans are looking for the best way to fall off Fiscal Cliff, which has become a place fixed in the geography of public opinion, like Sioux Falls and Grand Canyon. If a man can survive going over Niagara Falls (another famous fixed place) in a barrel, maybe the Republicans can survive falling off Fiscal Cliff in a barrel with John Boehner. The latest Republican gimmick is to split the difference on income-tax rates between the current rate of 35 percent and the Clinton-era rate of 39.6 – and with substantial cuts in government spending. This is the solution the pilots of an earlier generation might call “coming home on a wing and a prayer.” There’s no indication that President Obama will bite, nor is there any reason why, from his point of view, he should. He has read the fear in Republican eyes and he’s willing – maybe eager – to jump off the cliff in the sure and certain confidence that with the compliant mainstream media at his back, he can successfully pin the blame on the Republicans for the consequences. He can even promise spending cuts, secure in the knowledge that he won’t have to actually make them. Promises are a sucker’s game, and there’s no shortage of suckers. Mr. Obama clearly wants to humiliate the Republicans – re-election was not enough – and he and his Democratic allies think his victory on Nov. 6 arms him with a mandate to do as he pleases. There’s no longer an argument over whether to raise taxes, only by how much. Some of the Republicans eager to cave now and get the details of surrender out of the way talk bravely of demanding spending cuts as the price of higher taxes to finance the president’s big-spending schemes, but they know in their hearts that actual spending cuts are a pipe dream. Raising taxes first, cut spending later, is a scheme that has never worked. Republican presidents played that shell game, too. But Rep. David Camp of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, tells Politico, the political daily, that he is “reserving judgment” on such a scheme. “It depends on the entire package,” he says. “What are the spending [cuts] going to be? You can’t consider that on its own without looking at all the other factors that might go into it.” We can take that as a probable yes, as soon as everybody indulges in a little more big talk. Rep. Nan Hayworth of New York sounds ready to quit now, with a few goodbye clichés. “There’s certainly a movement among us to accept that we indeed may have to not let perfect be the enemy of the good. If we can truly get a visionary plan, then I think we will certainly be happy to give that the most thoughtful consideration.” The Republicans, including the speaker, are negotiating as if they actually believe that President Obama is negotiating in good faith. The speaker’s offer of $800 billion in new taxes sank without a salute. The president insists on soaking “the rich,” even though the most thorough soaking wouldn’t yield enough to make a sizable dent in either debt or deficit. But it satisfies Mr. Obama’s cult of covetousness, cupidity and spite, which dreams of a scorched-earth class war, and would redeem all his speeches from the president’s community-organizing days. Mr. Obama called in the Business Roundtable this week for a little charm offensive. He told them that he’s rooting for the success of big business because when big business does well, “then small businesses and medium-sized businesses up and down the chain are doing well.” Someone should explain to the president that a strong economy is based on the jobs generated by small business, not big. He repeated his mantra that only he holds the key to recovery. “What’s holding us back right now,” he told the assembled CEOs, “is a lot of stuff that is going on in this town. And I know that many of you have come here to try to see, is there any way we can break through this logjam. Nobody wants to get this done more than me.” Just do it his way. Rep. Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, seems unimpressed. “An obsession to raise taxes isn’t going to solve the problem. We can’t just keep borrowing money and raising taxes and expecting the problem to go away. That is our point to the president.” Eric Cantor. Photo by Gage Skidmore. That’s precisely beside the president’s point. He has bigger plans at Fiscal Cliff. Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

MEET DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE

!!!!

Published: Nov. 30, 2012 

America not paying its fair share

by Mark Steyn

syndicated columnist

You cannot simultaneously enjoy American-sized taxes and European-sized government. One or the other has got to go.

 

• 
  

Previously on "The Perils of Pauline":
Last year, our plucky heroine, the wholesome apple-cheeked American republic, was trapped in an express elevator hurtling out of control toward the debt ceiling. Would she crash into it? Or would she make some miraculous escape?

                                                              Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde

 

 

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., right, and Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., finish a news conference after Senate Democratic leaders met with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on the fiscal cliff negotiations, at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 29, 2012. "We're still waiting for a serious offer from Republicans," said Reid. The “fiscal cliff” is a combination of tax increases and spending cuts worth about $670 billion that will take effect at the start of next year unless Congress and the White House agree to postpone or replace them.

Yes! At the very last minute of her white-knuckle thrill ride to her rendezvous with destiny, she was rescued by Congress' decision to set up... a Super Committee! Those who can, do. Those who can't, form a committee. Those who really can't, form a Super Committee – and then put John Kerry on it for good measure. The bipartisan Super Committee of Super Friends was supposed to find $1.2 trillion of deficit reduction by last Thanksgiving, or plucky little America would wind up trussed like a turkey and carved up by "automatic sequestration."


Sequestration sounds like castration, only more so: it would chop off everything in sight. It would be so savage in its dismemberment of poor helpless America that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that, over the course of a decade, the sequestration cuts would reduce the federal debt by $153 billion. Sorry, I meant to put on my Dr. Evil voice for that: ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THREE BILLION DOLLARS!!! Which is about what the United States government currently borrows every month. No sane person could willingly countenance brutally saving a month's worth of debt over the course of a decade.


So now we have the latest cliffhanger: the Fiscal Cliff, below which lies a bottomless abyss of sequestration, tax-cut extension expiries, Alternative Minimum Tax adjustments, new Obamacare taxes, the expiry of the deferment of the Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate, as well as the expiry of the deferment of the implementation of the adjustment of the correction of the extension of the reduction to the proposed increase of the Alternative Minimum Growth Sustainability Reduction Rate. They don't call it a yawning chasm for nothing.


As America hangs by its fingernails, wiggling its toesies over the vertiginous plummet to oblivion, what can save her now? An Even More Super Committee? A bipartisan agreement in which Republicans agree to cave, and Democrats agree not to laugh at them too much? That could be just the kind of farsighted reach-across-the-aisle compromise that rescues the nation until next week's thrill-packed episode when America's strapped into the driver's seat of a runaway Chevy Volt careering round the hairpin bends on full charge, or trapped in an abandoned subdivision overrun by foreclosure zombies.


I suppose it's possible to take this recurring melodrama seriously, but there's no reason to. The problem facing the United States government is that it spends over a trillion dollars a year that it doesn't have. If you want to make that number go away, you need either to reduce spending or increase revenue. With the best will in the world, you can't interpret the election result as a spectacular victory for less spending. Indeed, if nothing else, the unfortunate events of Nov. 6 should have performed the useful task of disabusing us poor conservatives that America is any kind of "center-right nation." A few months ago, I dined with a (pardon my English) French intellectual who, apropos Mitt Romney's stump-speech warnings that we were on a one-way ticket to Continental-sized dependency, chortled to me, "Americans love Big Government as much as Europeans. The only difference is that Americans refuse to admit it."


My Gallic charmer is on to something. According to the most recent (2009) OECD statistics: Government expenditures per person in France, $18,866.00; in the United States, $19,266.00. That's adjusted for purchasing-power parity, and, yes, no comparison is perfect, but did you ever think the difference between America and the cheese-eating surrender monkeys would come down to quibbling over the fine print? In that sense, the federal debt might be better understood as an American Self-Delusion Index, measuring the ever-widening gap between the national mythology (a republic of limited government and self-reliant citizens) and the reality (a 21st century cradle-to-grave nanny state in which, as the Democrats' Convention boasted, "government is the only thing we do together.").


 Generally speaking, functioning societies make good-faith efforts to raise what they spend, subject to fluctuations in economic fortune: Government spending in Australia is 33.1 percent of GDP, and tax revenues are 27.1 percent. Likewise, government spending in Norway is 46.4 percent, and revenues are 41 percent – a shortfall but in the ballpark. Government spending in the United States is 42.2 percent, but revenues are 24 percent – the widest spending/taxing gulf in any major economy.
So all the agonizing over our annual trillion-plus deficits overlooks the obvious solution: Given that we're spending like Norwegians, why don't we just pay Norwegian tax rates?


No danger of that. If (in Milton Himmelfarb's famous formulation) Jews earn like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans, Americans are taxed like Puerto Ricans but vote like Scandinavians. We already have a more severely redistributive taxation system than Europe, in which the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans pay 70 percent of income tax while the poorest 20 percent shoulder just three-fifths of 1 percent. By comparison, the Norwegian tax burden is relatively equitably distributed. Yet Obama now wishes "the rich" to pay their "fair share" – presumably 80 percent or 90 percent. After all, as Warren Buffett pointed out in The New York Times this week, the Forbes 400 richest Americans have a combined wealth of $1.7 trillion. That sounds like a lot, and once upon a time it was. But today, if you confiscated every penny the Forbes 400 have, it would be enough to cover just over one year's federal deficit. And after that you're back to square one. It's not that "the rich" aren't paying their "fair share," it's that America isn't. A majority of the electorate has voted itself a size of government it's not willing to pay for.


A couple of years back, Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute calculated that, if Washington were to increase every single tax by 30 percent, it would be enough to balance the books – in 25 years. If you were to raise taxes by 50 percent, it would be enough to fund our entitlement liabilities – just our current ones, not our future liabilities, which would require further increases. This is the scale of course correction needed.


If you don't want that, you need to cut spending – like Harry Reid's been doing. "Now remember, we've already done more than a billion dollars' worth of cuts," he bragged the other day. "So we need to get some credit for that."
Wow! A billion dollars' worth of cuts! Washington borrows $188 million every hour. So, if Reid took over five hours to negotiate those "cuts," it was a complete waste of time. So are most of the "plans." In fact, any "debt reduction plan" that doesn't address at least $1.3 trillion a year is, in fact, a debt-increase plan.


So, given that the ruling party will not permit spending cuts, what should Republicans do? If I were John Boehner, I'd say: "Clearly there's no mandate for small government in the election results. So, if you milquetoast pantywaist sad-sack excuses for the sorriest bunch of so-called Americans who ever lived want to vote for Swede-sized statism, it's time to pony up."
OK, he might want to focus-group it first. But that fundamental dishonesty is the heart of the crisis. You cannot simultaneously enjoy American-sized taxes and European-sized government. One or the other has to go.


©MARK STEYN