Freedom Line Blog

Yesterday I was attacked in cyberprint, bizarrely and scurrilously,  by liberal professional race-baiter Jonathan Chait. Somehow, apparently, calling Barack Obama “haughty” makes me at least somewhat an “heir” to vicious slave overseers. I responded at NRO today, at length, but not in kind, instead trying to keep the debate on a constructive plane — with this being one of the key passages:

Chait gives far too little credit to conservatives under 50, to so many of us who grew up as admirers of the famously minority-friendly Jack Kemp, for being perfectly well aware of, and greatly saddened by, what he calls the “still-extant residue” of the more virulently racist society that once existed. If he would only look, he would find plenty of examples of conservative thinkers and writers expounding thoughtfully and sympathetically on problems still faced by black Americans and on the Right’s own failures to address them.

It’s hard to make progress in good faith when the other side refuses to assume you possess good faith to start with.

But in trying to stay on the topic of constructive race relations, I deliberately avoided a few other highly legitimate rebuttals or explanations that need saying but that didn’t serve my main points. Let me address them here.

First, consider the source. It is truly bizarre to be told by Fulminator X that it is off limits, supposedly because it is latently and effectively racist, to use somewhat harsh language to criticize a president who happens to be black, even if such language is less harsh than that used by Fulminator X to criticize a white president. How is it a sign of racial equality to treat a black president as a creature too fragile to be subject to mean, hateful words such as … er… “haughty”?

Consider my supposedly off-limits paragraph:

Every time decent people think the scandals and embarrassments circling Barack Obama will sink this presidency, we look up and see Obama still there — chin jutting out, countenance haughty, voice dripping with disdain for conservatives — utterly unembarrassed, utterly undeterred from any assertion of power he thinks he can get away with, tradition and propriety and the Constitution be damned. The man has no shame, no self-doubt, not a shred of humility, no sense that anybody else has legitimate reason to question him or hold any other point of view.

Now compare that to the breathtaking treatment, in Jonathan Chait’s most (in)famous essay ever, that Chait afforded George W. Bush:

I hate President George W. Bush…. I hate the way he walks–shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks–blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudopopulist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. I hate his lame nickname-bestowing– a way to establish one’s social superiority beneath a veneer of chumminess (does anybody give their boss a nickname without his consent?). And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more…. … Conservatives believe liberals resent Bush in part because he is a rough-hewn Texan. In fact, they hate him because they believe he is not a rough-hewn Texan but rather a pampered frat boy masquerading as one, with his pickup truck and blue jeans serving as the perfect props to disguise his plutocratic nature…. …Bush is a dullard lacking any moral constraints in his pursuit of partisan gain, loyal to no principle save the comfort of the very rich, unburdened by any thoughtful consideration of the national interest, and a man who, on those occasions when he actually does make a correct decision, does so almost by accident.

But isn’t it such a shame that I called Obama “haughty?”

MOVING RIGHT ALONG….

The truly outlandish thing Chait writes is that it is “factually bizarre” — not even a strange opinion, but “factually” bizarre — to accuse Obama of being haughty and unembarrassed. (Somebody needs to explain to Chait that a “fact” is something inarguable, provable, not subject to disagreement.) Why? Because in a recent press conference Obama supposedly was (get THIS!) “profusely and even flamboyantly contrite.” Huh? Flamboyantly? I just re-read the press conference transcript, and it is full of mild acknowledgments that the ObamaCare web site isn’t working perfectly while all bracketed in an insistence that everything still is better than it seems and will get better still. While he mouthed several pro forma acceptances of responsibility — “it’s on me” — there were plenty of observers who noted that he didn’t always seem to really mean it.

To quote the ever-left Dana Milbank on the president’s attitude:

Even as he accepted responsibility for the debacle, he couldn’t resist transferring some blame to the assembled press (“the things that go right, you guys aren’t going to write about”) and to Republicans (“repeal, repeal, let’s get rid of this thing”).

But Obama seemed genuinely puzzled by the notion that his leadership may have been the cause.

Yet it is supposedly “factually bizarre” for me to fail to appreciate this president’s supposedly self-evident humility. Right. Look, if I were the only one who finds Obama generally haughty and self-referential, that would be one thing. But a Google search would quickly produce hundreds and hundreds of similar judgments.

I could go on.  But the takeout should be this: Just as Obama’s skin color should play no role in any criticism of him, nor should it shield him from criticism, much less to accuse his critics of the ultimate political sin of some version of racism.

Maybe somebody should tell Chait that, to stoop to such unfair insults rather than to engage in legitimate debate, one might be charged with being a “dullard lacking any moral constraint.”

Well, this will come as unwelcome news in the Obama White House.  Their “Blame Bush” raison detre never held merit intellectually.  Even if it did, however, someone willing to blame Bush for Obama’s failures at this point would by logic have to blame Clinton for Bush’s failures.  Now, a new poll from The Washington Post and ABC News suggests that it’s no longer a workable political strategy regardless of logic.  Specifically, almost as many people now approve of Bush’s performance as disapprove, and he now equals Obama:

The new poll found 47 percent saying they approve and 50 percent saying they disapprove. Among registered voters, his approval rating today is equal to President Obama’s, at 47 percent, according to the latest Post-ABC surveys.”

So “Blame Bush” is running on fumes, and exploiting the Newtown victims’ parents as political props failed him.  To which ploy will Obama stoop next?

According to a new Gallup poll, a majority of Americans now blame President Obama for the current state of the U.S. economy.  By a 53% to 47% margin, surveyed adults say that Obama shares a “great deal/moderate amount” of blame, while they also believe that George W. Bush continues to share blame by a 69% to 30% margin.  But notice something interesting.  For all the talk of hyper-partisanship from Republicans, the primary reason Bush’s numbers look worse is that Republican survey respondents split 50% to 50% on whether Bush shares some blame.  Democrats, in contrast, were far less willing to admit that their guy Obama shares blame, disagreeing by a 75% to 25% margin.  Independents by a 60% to 40% margin say that Obama shares some blame.

Here’s another noteworthy fact.  For all of Obama’s talk that he and his wasteful trillions of “stimulus” spending saved our economy from “the next Great Depression,” government economic figures show that we actually began our cyclical recovery before Bush had left office.  That’s a point that must be highlighted to voters as we approach a pivotal 2012 election in which Americans must choose between two governmental philosophies.  But in the meantime, at least most of us now recognize Obama’s role in our continuing economic struggles.

For everyone astonished or disgusted at the ease by which the political left either defends Obama vis-a-vis Libya or stifles the hysteria it unleashed against George W. Bush, there’s now a must-see video for you.  From “Obama is awesome” to Fox News slurs to citing “Saturday Night Live” or “The Colbert Report” as authority, the rationalizations offered by the female avatar defending Obama will sound familiar and elicit laughter.  Watch as the Obama defender’s male counterpart explains that Bush’s Iraq coalition was actually broader than Obama’s “multilateral” effort, that Bush actually obtained Congressional approval while Obama did not and that Saddam Hussein’s record of slaughter dwarfs Colonel Gadhafi’s:

We have illustrated the dramatic difference between the pro-growth Reagan Recovery and the ongoing Obama Malaise, which a side-by-side comparison of economic data makes clear.  In addition to the lopsided data differential, the uninspiring and self-pitying rhetoric to which Obama treats us provides another sad contrast.  Consider the following exchange from Obama’s “60 Minutes” interview this week:

STEVE KROFT: Do you get discouraged? Are you discouraged now?

OBAMA: I do get discouraged. I mean, there are times where I thought the economy would’ve gotten better by now. One of the things I think you understand as president is, you’re held responsible for everything. But you don’t always have control of everything, especially an economy this big. There are limited tools to encourage the kind of job growth that we need.

Such “woe is me” dejection can be self-fulfilling (see, e.g., Jimmy Carter’s “Malaise Speech”), and would have been unimaginable coming from Reagan, who faced even higher unemployment rates, interest rates and inflation than Obama.  But here’s a tip, Mr. President:  nobody wants or expects you to “have control of everything.”  You do, and that is the problem.  As shown by your more optimistic predecessors, getting yourself out of the way would be the best first step toward “the kind of job growth that we need.”

Miss him yet?  President George W. Bush, that is?

Well, t-shirts with the image of Bush above the words “Miss Me Yet?” are outselling Obama gear even in Massachusetts these days.  Now, an opinion poll reveals that Ohio voters would prefer Bush over Obama in the White House right now by a 50% to 42% margin.

Calling Rahm Emanuel:  you’ve got a crisis here to not let go to waste.

At some point, Americans’ outrage over the nonsense spewed upon us by desperate Washington, D.C. liberals becomes twisted amusement.  Today, Representative Maxine Waters (D – California) managed to pull the “race card” and “blame Bush” card in one preposterous swoop.

Representative Waters now finds herself the defendant against Congressional ethics charges that she improperly offered special assistance to OneUnited, a bank on whose board her husband had served.  At the time, her husband owned $350,000 in OneUnited stock, which was threatened by the financial downturn and would stand to benefit from federal dollars.  Speaking to reporters to rationalize her behavior, Waters claimed that she was compelled to do what she did because the Bush Treasury Department wasn’t responding to her satisfaction:

The question at this point should not be why I called Secretary [Henry] Paulson, but why I had to.  The question at this point should be why a trade association representing over one hundred minority banks could not get a meeting at the height of the crisis.”

Waters apparently hasn’t received the memo that “the race card is maxed out.”

In January 2007, President Bush announced a surge of approximately 20,000 troops to win the war in Iraq.  In this convenient and brief video clip, then-Senators Joe Biden and Barack Obama insisted that the surge was a terrible idea destined to failure.  Biden even slurred General David Petraeus as the only person who believed the surge would work, and Obama actually predicted that the surge would make things worse, not better.

Fast forward to last week.  In one of the most distasteful and brazen illustrations of chutzpah in modern politics, Vice President Biden now claims in this video clip that success in Iraq, following the surge that both he and Obama opposed so unequivocally, may stand as “one of the great achievements of the Obama Administration.”

On second thought, however, perhaps Biden is correct.  In light of the utter catastrophes inflicted to date by the Obama Administration, perhaps not managing to bungle the successful Iraq surge that the Bush Administration ordered is indeed its greatest success.  Either way, former Vice President Cheney is also correct that Obama and Biden owe Bush a belated “thank you” on Iraq.

As President Obama mulls over General McChrystal’s request for more troops in Afghanistan — and former Vice President Cheney hits the current administration hard for what he calls “dithering” — the White House has hit back with some heavy accusations.

Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, has claimed that the Bush Administration ignored the strategic planning process for the war in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs alleges that the Bush White House let a request for more troops in Afghanistan fall stillborn for nearly a year.

You can debate the merits of various approaches and the trade-offs that are always necessary in national security policy. But as someone who was in the Bush White House during the time in question, I can testify to the fact that Afghan planning was very high on the agenda in the waning days of the administration. Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard has done the legwork to bear this out and his new piece pushes back against the Obama Administration’s claims with great clarity. Among the best passages:

One Bush veteran asks, “If it’s true that the Bush administration sat on these troop requests for eight months, is the White House suggesting that the Pentagon was incompetent or negligent or both? That would be a good question to put to the defense secretary–and President Obama is in a position to make him talk.”

I couldn’t reach Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, but I did talk to a senior defense official who serves with him. This person stressed that Gates has gone to great lengths to avoid being dragged into political fights between administrations. Nonetheless, he offered a strong rebuke to the present White House political team.

“There was no request on anyone’s desk for eight months,” said the defense official. “There was not a request that went to the White House because we didn’t have forces to commit. So on the facts, they’re wrong.”

In reality, the Bush Administration stayed quiet on the options going forward into Afghanistan so that Obama wouldn’t have his choices muddied by having them labeled as recycled goods from the previous president.  That they are now using that fact as a cudgel speaks very poorly of the current denizens of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Read Hayes’ entire piece here.

There has been a lot of talk in the media (here, here and here) about how Herbert Hoover was a great miser and should have spent his way out of the economic downturn like Obama is attempting to do.  The myth might be as old as Hoover’s administration: Hoover was a free-market Republican who let Americans suffer instead of attempting government intervention.

False.  It’s hard to believe that a quick search through our own budget data proves that Hoover was more of Keynesian, someone who spent plenty and raised taxes in his vain attempt to “prime” the U.S. economy toward a resurgence.

Reviewing budget numbers from the White House’s own budget, we see that Hoover drastically increased the size and scope of government.  When Hoover arrived in the White House in 1929, he inherited a surplus of $734 million (back when that was real money).  After he left in 1933, the surplus turned into a $2.6 billion deficit.

Of course, some of this decline was due to lower revenues as a result of the depression, but looking at the outlays during his tenure and you’ll see a massive increase in the size of the federal budget, partly with the help of a Republican Congress as well.  From 1929 to 1933, Hoover increased federal outlays from $3.1 billion to approximately $4.6 billion, a 48% increase. From 1931 to 1932, outlays surged 30%.  Yes, Hoover was a real miser, a free-market fiend who hated spending the money of hard-working taxpayers.

To put Hoover’s 48% increase in perspective, progressives often assailed President Bush as a free-market disciple who refused to spend money on levies, the poor, or the uninsured.  During Bush’s tenure, estimated federal outlays surged 57%, even more than Hoover and LBJ’s Great Society (approximately 50%).

So, the next time you hear someone say that a runaway free-market caused the Great Depression and our current crisis, just remind them that Bush made LBJ look like Uncle Scrooge and Hoover drove federal expenditures faster than President Clinton.  Old rumors die slowly but this is one that needs to end now before we continue to perpetuate even more big-spending government boondoggles.