Freedom Line Blog

Well, I guess Tim Pawlenty really didn’t mean it when he took shots at “Obamneycare.” Now the former Minnesota governor has endorsed the author of that plan, Mitt Romney, for president.

Methinks what Pawlenty is really saying is: “Please, please, please Mr. Romney, if you get the nomination, choose me for vice president! I promise I’m your man. Oh pleaseohpleaseohpleaseohplease! I really didn’t mean that bit about Obamneycare. It wasn’t even an intentional slight, and I wasn’t trying to be funny. I just had a slip of the tongue. That’s why I didn’t repeat it in that debate: I really didn’t mean it in the first place. PLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASE!!!! I promise I’ll be good.”

Rich Lowry and Charles Krauthammer both hit home runs. Four years ago, I had a column (containing within it my 9/11 immediate-react editorial from the day itself) that I’d also like to share with y’all. For what it’s worth.

Tim had a great post explaining why the 4th Circuit’s dismissal of the two Obamacare lawsuits is not all that big a deal. He’s absolutely right, in terms of ultimate effects. At the American Spectator (in the first of my three unrelated, half-formed thoughts), I explain why on legal grounds the rulings are an absolute outrage anyway, even though, as Tim said, they don’t really harm the overall argument against the individual mandate as the issue moves inexorably toward the Supreme Court.

As I explained:

The grounds on which the judges made the decision are so ludicrous as to be intellectually bankrupt.

Against all reasonable evidence and against the rulings of every other court, both liberal- and conservative-dominated, that has considered the issue, this Fourth Circuit panel concluded that the mandate actually operates as a “tax.” Congress has broader powers to tax than it does merely to regulate; thus, legal challenges to a tax face a higher bar. Because these obstreperous judges say it is a tax that hasn’t actually been imposed yet (it has been passed by Congress but not yet implemented), they say the university has suffered no harm yet and thus can’t sue. The absurdity is that the mandate is in no way a tax. By both definition and implementation, it imposed no tax but instead a penalty for non-compliance. President Obama himself repeatedly argued in public that it wasn’t a tax. Congress didn’t call it a tax. And every other court — at least four district courts and two appeals courts — that has analyzed this claim has made mincemeat of the administration’s contention that it is a tax. Most of those courts haven’t just rejected the claim; they have eviscerated it.

As I said on my radio show last night (in the introductory 15 minutes, before I interviewed Rick Santorum), this is why the fights over judges are so important.  Bad judges are an affront to constitutional republicanism. And this ruling by three bad, liberal judges is an abomination.

You can listen in here, from 9-10 Eastern time. Other presidential candidates coming soon.

No, not Joe McCarthy. Andrew McCarthy. In an absolute tour de force at the New Criterion magazine, McCarthy — the prosecutor who put the parking lot bombers of the World Trade Center (1993) in jail — outlines the manifold abuses of law of Barack Obama and his Justice Department consiglieres, especially Attorney General Eric Holder. In doing so, he broadens and deepens and updates a piece I did last fall for The American Spectator — but with an extra dose of authoritativeness I could not match.

Writes McCarthy:

In flagrant violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, the Department of Justice now practices racial discrimination in enforcing, and in choosing not to enforce, the federal civil rights statutes. These laws, enacted to safeguard our basic liberties, are not invoked when the victims are white and the lawbreakers are black. The most brazen example of this noxious policy—but far from the only one—is the Department of Justice’s astounding decision to drop a voter intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party even though Justice had already won the case.

As McCarthy explains, for Obama and his Alinskyite allies,

Lawfulness and lawlessness, thuggishness and regular politics—we’re not to divine any moral or ethical differences. They are just different “approaches” to empowerment. They only “seem” to be “divergent.” It may be important to maintain the veneer of respect for legal processes, but it is just as legitimate to stretch or break the rules whenever necessary to achieve the desired outcome—social justice being a higher form of legitimacy than society’s rule of law. Separatism, menacing, and civil disobedience: none of these is beyond the pale; they are simply choices on the hard power menu Obama “bridges” with soft power (i.e., the system’s mundane legal and political processes).

Again, read the whole thing.  Great stuff. Scary, but oh-so-important for us to understand what we’re facing in the Oval Office.

Yes, I have a weekly radio show, and it can be listened to nationally. I’ll have the first in a series of presidential candidates as guests this Thursday night, with Rick Santorum being welcomed to Hillyer Time. Details here.

At the American Spectator, I provide a small, informed-third-party view of Dick Cheney’s persona, while clearly taking his side vs. Colin Powell. What I didn’t write there, because I handed it in before last night, was that all of the remembrances of 9/11 are bringing into stark relief just how fortunate we were to have Cheney around on that day. I watched a Smithsonian TV special on 9/11 last night, featuring extensive interviews with Cheney (among dozens of others, of course), and it was striking just how essential it was to have Cheney’s good judgment and steady hand in the White House while President Bush was airborne for so many hours. A good man and a true statesman, Dick Cheney served his country well. I’m glad his book is receiving so much attention.

MSNBC’s Richard Wolffe, a pasty white pale-skinned nothingburger if there ever were one, just doesn’t get it.  Like eleventy-umpteen squadrillion feeble-minded liberals before him, he seems to be so focused on President Barack Obama’s skin color that he thinks nobody else could possibly be motivated by anything other than a reaction to said skin color. The criticism of Obama’s nakedly transparent effort to upstage the Republican debate, said Wolffe, is nothing other than yet another example of how conservatives disrespect Obama just because he happens to be a shade darker — on some days — than John Boehner. Frankly, methinks Wolffe suffers from pigmentation envy. But no matter. As one who has repeatedly fought the good fight against white racists (oh, PLEASE, Mr. Wolffe, pretty please with sugar on top, challenge me on that one), I think I can safely say that the criticism of Obama would be the same even if Obama were a whiter shade of pale than the Procul Harum-inspired Mr. Wolffe himself.

Or has Mr. Wolffe not noticed that conservatives were equally critical of Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, Dingy Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Frank Church, George McGovern, and Tom Hayden? Actually, he’s on to us: We know their secrets: Kennedy, Pelosi, Reid, Schumer, Church, McGovern and Hayden all are secret bearers of Negroid blood, which is why we oppose their politics. How did Wolffe figure out that we had figured out the Kennedy-Pelosi gang’s dark secret?!?

For the record, we are rather less than enamored of Mr. Obama not because he has African blood, but because he is arrogant, rude, self-absorbed, self-referential, condescending, leftist, Alinskyite, dishonest, incompetent, petty, peevish, unaccomplished, demagogic, and radical. He is the single worst president we’ve ever had, including Jimmy Carter and James Buchanan.

Let’s see Mr. Wolffe skip the light fandango and turn cartwheels across the floor about that list of Obama’s non-skin-related defects.

So the acting head of the ATF has been given a parachute. As night follows day, he’ll now take ALL the blame for unspecified “mistakes in implementation” of the Fast/Furious gun-running scandal, after which the administration will announce that all has now been taken care of, nothing more to see here, keep on walking, keep on walking, nothing to look at, everything is peachy-keen and the problem (what problem?) has been fixed……

As she has done several times in the past, Jennifer Rubin got to a story before me, to say exactly what I wanted to say, with meticulously documented and explained research backing up her conclusions. In this case, she eviscerates Colin Powell for continuing his cowardly, pass-the-buck, point-the-fingers-elsewhere behavior with regard to the infamous “leak” of the CIA status of Valerie Plame, wife of former Ambassador and loudmouth Joe Wilson. The upshot of his cowardice, and that of his top aide Richard Armitage, was a years-long investigation that wrongly ensnared the honest and loyal Scooter Libby for perjury he did not even commit, along with a deeply dishonest movie that further besmirched Libby’s name.  It also wrongly blamed our entry into the Gulf War on supposed reliance on bad intelligence — intelligence that wasn’t bad and that wasn’t actually the basis of our entry into the war. The truth is that Libby should have been pardoned.

Anyway, Rubin explains:

Recall how all of this played out. Armitage and Powell allowed the entire country and troops in the field to believe a lie, namely that the White House had “outed” Plame. This, aside from the galling display of moral cowardice, also put the president’s reelection in jeopardy since Democrats were all too intent on making this into a huge scandal.

The extent of the dishonesty is quite stunning. In a Cabinet meeting on October 7, 2003, the White House press corps bombarded President George W. Bush with questions about who the leaker was. Bush said he didn’t know, but there would be an investigation to get to the bottom of it. Powell, who had been told by Armitage just days earlier that Armitage was the leaker, sat there next to the president, stone silent. Not very loyal or honest, was it?

Finally, it is worth noting that Libby voluntarily testified and cooperated in every way, sometimes without an attorney even parsing his words. Libby never once acted like a man with anything to hide. Powell and Armitage, however, hid what they knew, and what Armitage did, for two years. Now THAT’s shameful.

Okay, I’m sorry, but comparing those who don’t believe in the utterly unproved, disputed, theoretical idea of major man-caused global warming to Bull Connor-type racists is going way beyond the pale. Oh, wait, can we say “pale” without being accused of being racists? It might be a dark day when we can’t even use wor…. oh, no, did I say “dark”? Is that racist?

This whole, sick, twisted habit of raising the specter of racism at every opportunity is a cheap, tawdry strategem for those who can’t actually argue the facts.

Methinks people who falsely cry “racism” should be put in a “lockbox.”

Oh — and by the way, there is no such thing as major man-caused global warming. So there.

Conservatives have a serious problem today. They tend to circle the wagons around people for the wrong reasons, namely because candidates seem “one of us,” culturally speaking, even if the candidates aren’t very impressive or very accomplished. I could name a few Senate candidates from recent years, but won’t. But it really is absurd to think that just because the “establishment” attacks somebody, that the person is therefore worth going to the mat for. It is just not true that the adversary of my adversary is my friend. In truth, the adversary of my adversary can be friend, foe, or something on a wide spectrum in between. An attack by the known adversary on somebody who merely seems to share one’s cultural characteristics is not a good reason to make the attacked person into a hero. It’s illogical to do so.

Hence, I really like Jonah Goldberg’s column today — not because I have any idea yet whether Rick Perry is a great choice for president, but because the attacks against him do not define him, or at least should not. What matters is record, character, philosophy, and competence. Anyway, read Jonah’s piece by clicking this link. Good stuff.

A man shot a grizzly bear in self-defense. A real grizzly, not Mama Grizzly Sarah Palin. If it had been the latter, I have no doubt Eric Holder wouldn’t be too concerned. As it is, though, the Justice Department is prosecuting the man to the full extent of the law (or, one could argue, far beyond what the law can reasonably be interpreted to mean).  This is, in a word, sick. Demented. Twisted beyond all recognition. The DoJ’s Wendy Olson should be the one on trial for prosecutorial abuse, not the one putting the Idaho rancher on trial for protecting his own children. She also should be permanently ostracized from polite society. Sneered at, scorned, ignored, isolated, publicly disdained. And, when she no longer has Holder and President Obama around to give her a job, she should be professionally scorned as well. Maybe even asked to go live with the grizzlies — as long as she might last.

Peter Kirsanow catches Barack Obama calling himself irresponsible and unpatriotic.  Heh, heh.

Of course, it really galls me when the left yells and screams about conservatives accusing them of being unpatriotic, even when we’ve done no such thing, while they actually use that very word to describe us again and again. Oh, well…. Let them be hoist by their own petard.

Well, Paul Ryan is out of the presidential race without having entered it.  For those of us who value limited government and want to see fiscal discipline in Washington, and who desperately want a candidate who can articulate the need for and details of reforms, it is a disappointment that Rep. Ryan will not enter the race.

It does occur to me that of the candidates who are in the race, the one whose record and platform both match most closely with Ryan’s is former Sen. Rick Santorum. Far be it from me to issue any endorsement, especially considering that candidate selection involves political considerations in addition to mere analysis of records and platforms, but my prediction — as an analyst — is that Santorum will at least attempt to make a big move to attract activists who had been waiting on the sidelines to see what Ryan would do. Santorum remains a long shot, but he’s steadily creeping up in terms of public consciousness and support.

Of course, both Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann also would claim the mantle of Ryan-esque conservative reformers (although, frankly, Bachmann doesn’t fit because Ryan is an institutionalist and legislator whereas she is consciously an outsider and back-bencher), and the immediate benefit may flow to Perry as the most Ryan-like front-runner (the bandwagon effect is alive and well).  But in terms of persona, geography, personal backgrounds, style, and mastery of the substance of national issues, Santorum and Ryan are indeed a close fit.

It will be interesting to see if any other boomlet starts to try to recruit yet another candidate into the race (other than Sarah Palin, who has always been a possibility) — or, if, finally, the field (other than Palin) starts to settle down and the attention at last turns to those actually in the race rather than to those on the outside that some people wish would get in.

At 106.5 FM in Mobile, my weekly show tonight will feature guest Hans Von Spakovsky, Senior Legal Fellow, Heritage Foundation, and former head of the FEC. We’ll flay the Obama Justice Department. Should be fun.

I just about spewed my cookies when I saw this post regarding Eric Cantor. Cantor, very wisely, advises fellow Republicans to “avoid unnecessary conflict.” Well, yes. I frequently get blasted by conservative ideologues for insisting that there are occasions when it makes no sense to push issues to an all-or-nothing, edge-of-cliff face-off. As a general matter of strategy and tactics, conservatives recently have, quite arguably, tended to err a little too much in that direction for our own long-term good.

But then Cantor got specific, and he is as wrong as wrong can be (I’m quoting NRO’s Andrew Stiles here):

He [Cantor] simply suggests that House Republicans stick to the spending levels called for in the recent debt-ceiling deal, as opposed to trying to push for deeper cuts.“While all of us would like to have seen a lower discretionary appropriations ceiling for the upcoming fiscal year, the debt limit agreement did set a level of spending that is a real cut from the current year level,” Cantor writes. “I believe it is in our interest to enact into law full-year appropriations bills at this new lower level.”

This is nonsense. It’s sickening. The recent agreement’s limits were just that: limits, not mandates. They are part and parcel of the same agreement that calls for another $1.5 trillion in savings. There is no reason, not on God’s green Earth, that some of that $1.5 trillion can’t come from domestic discretionary appropriations, even in advance of any deal reached by the “supercommittee.” Any additional savings achieved through the appropriations process this fall will only make the supercommittee’s job easier. And, of course, there remains so much incredible, unfathomable, indefensible waste in domestic discretionary spending that it makes no sense to put further savings from that area out of bounds. As a matter of fact, I have long argued that it is on individual Approps bills, where individual extravagances can be focused on and highlighted, that the best, least politically dangerous, most politically advantageous case can be made for cutting spending. The fight over the omnibus bill in the spring, halfway through the year, was not the best time to fight. Nor was the debt ceiling the best place to draw a line in the sand, although (thanks to John Boehner, whose achieved far more than conservatives give him credit for) that fight worked out better than I had feared.

But if Congress actually does its job and passes Approps bills one by one, in plenty of time, rather than throwing everything into a massive omnibus bill, then it becomes far easier to make the case for individual cuts.

Cantor’s advice here is the advice of a capitulator. It is disgusting. I am not advocating another “to-the-cliff” battle, but rather a series of carefully chosen skirmishes, all on behalf of the taxpayer.

Shame on Cantor.

I wish to associate myself with just about every word of today’s Wall Street Journal editorial on Rick Perry’s comments on the Fed.  It tracks what I have been writing here for some time. As the WSJ wrote, “[N]ow, even as the recovery is supposedly underway, their meager salary increases are being washed away with another burst of commodity inflation caused by near-zero interest rates and quantitative easing. This is what happens when politicians and central bankers try to use monetary policy to compensate for the slow growth caused by bad fiscal and regulatory policies.”

About the only thing I would take issue with is that I think the WSJ went too far to excuse Perry’s outrageous language about Bernanke being “treacherous, or treasonous.” Not only was it way out of line in substance, but it actually detracted from his message by making his central point, which was so worthwhile, seem part and parcel of extremist political rhetoric and thus much more easily dismissable rather than taken seriously. Shame on Perry for such language. The WSJ should have done far more to condemn it.

That said, again, the WSJ is right to have gone beyond Perry’s unfortunate language to the real import of his remarks. By all accounts, Bernanke is a good man. But I think his policy judgments have been disastrous. Perry is right to say so, and I applaud his stance even as I denounce the way he chose to say it.

Barack Obama says that bad luck, not his own godawful policies, are responsible for the renewed slowdown of the economy. The recession, he said, was ending before the bad luck hit.  Oh, woe is he. Poor Eeyore. “Obama listed three events overseas — the Arab Spring uprisings, the tsunami in Japan, and the European debt crises — which set the economy back,” according to Byron York.

Well, the Arab Spring began on Dec. 18 of last year. Earlier that month, the U.S. unemployment rate was reported at 9.4 percent. When Barack Obama took over as president in January 2009, that rate was at 7.6 percent, and his advisors said that passing his vaunted “stimulus” package would keep it below 8 percent.

Some recovery he had going, now wasn’t it?

At NRO, Andy McCarthy  writes (bolded parts are my own emphases):

Pawlenty’s attack on Bachmann didn’t work for the same reason the conventional wisdom about Bachmann’s candidacy doesn’t work: You are not going to impress ordinary Americans, who think the system is broken, by bragging about how much experience you have in the system. I’m not saying Pawlenty was a bad governor — from everything I’ve read, he seems to have done a very good job under difficult blue-state constraints. But a case built on governing experience, which tells voters: “I know how to make this system work and get better results” is not going to bowl over people who think the system needs dramatic overhaul. They don’t want to hear about the results you’re going to get in Washington; they want to hear how you’re going to transfer money and power out of Washington. They want to know how you’re going to stop Washington from destroying our present and stealing their kids’ future.

I think McCarthy is correct about this being the overwhelming attitude among the public. I also think the public is dangerously wrong on this.

This attitude of “throw all the bums out” is emotionally satisfying, but profoundly misguided. If you are the general manager of a horrible football team — for instance, the Bengals for most of the past 20 years — you would be really, really, really, really dumb to throw all the bums out, especially if they are to be replaced only with people with almost no NFL experience. I’m sorry, but there really is a skill set that can be developed only through experience. A team full of rookies won’t win, can’t win, no matter what.

All the right sentiments in the world, and all the right issue “positions,” won’t do any good if those who hold the positions and sentiments have no mastery of the system. Why is it that in politics, but nowhere else but politics, does the public think that experience isn’t valuable? It’s an utterly illogical idea.

I’ve seen it again and again: “Reformers” get into office with all the best motivations but no idea about how things work. They remain reformers for two or three years — but then they either succumb to corruption, or to power trips, or to conventional wisdom that subverts their principles. The public can’t really know if the elected officials can be trusted to be true statesmen until those officials have been in office long enough to remain reformers even after the bad-old-boys have time to regroup, re-strategize, and counter-attack against the would-be reformers — and until all the other snares of office have been not just rejected but overcome, repeatedly, all while polishing the toughness and canniness necessary not just to say the right things but actually get the right things done.

Conservatives, of all people, should understand this. But these days, we don’t. We’re looking for the latest greatest American Idol; our attention span is about as long as a text message; we swoon over the newest savior while ignoring those who have maintained their integrity and actually improved their effectiveness over the years, all because we actually denigrate effective experience. This American Idolatry and denigration of experience is a terrible flaw on the right these days; indeed, it’s a pathology.

To take examples of people who are NOT running for president (and thus to avid a specific political stand; i.e., these are for example, not to pick on any actual would-be candidates), this is why it is absurd for conservatives to think, this cycle, of the likes of Chris Christie or Marco Rubio to be president. They just haven’t been at the highest levels of positions that require the right skill sets for a long enough time. They have huge potential; but potential isn’t the same as qualifications.

While I’m at it, the other flaw in conservative public perception is the denigration of legislative experience. Again, this is absurd. Knowing how to get things actually passed into law, through the legislative process, is a virtue, not a vice. Many voters may say they want “executive experience,” but the truth is that a major committee chairman or a party’s conference/caucus chairman or Leader in a legislative chamber is indeed a position that requires significant executive skills. Staffs are large. Power is utilized in an executive fashion. And the right combination of personal assumption of authority with the ability to delegate some responsibilities is essential.

Most of the worst presidents have been those with the least relevant experience. Obama. Carter. Harding. And, lest we forget, John F. Kennedy in his first two years, as George Will reminded us the other day.

And yes, I know that Kennedy had been in Congress for 12 years already. But he was almost a nonentity once there. He missed huge swaths of time while hospitalized, sometimes near death, with his Addison’s Disease. He was mostly a dilettante, with little actual legislative accomplishment. He was, in short, a lightweight in the House and Senate.

Anyway, in the spirit of Russell Kirk and Edmund Burke (although I tend otherwise to the Jeffersonian/Madisonian realm), I urge conservatives to remember that prudence and experience are usually prerequisites for wisdom and statesmanship. Stop looking for the new new thing. Stop looking for an Idol. Start demanding real accomplishment, not just splashy, ineffective PR stances.