Freedom Line Blog

In the aftermath of the Obama Justice Department’s (and, let’s be clear, the President’s) decision to bring a group of terrorist figures — including professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — to trial in American courtrooms, liberals in Congress are bending over backwards to tout the administration’s moral superiority.

What’s notable about their talking points is how thin the gruel they’re serving up is.  Consider this gem from Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Michigan):

The argument by some that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should be treated as a warrior and not as a common criminal misses the point. He wants us to treat him as a warrior. But he should, and will, be treated as the common terrorist criminal that he is.

As Charles Krauthammer noted on last night’s “Special Report,” the phrase “terrorist criminal” is, in and of itself, an oxymoron. But there’s also a bit of a stolen base in Levin’s argument.  Because KSM wants to be treated as a warrior, he shouldn’t be? How about a justice system that operates according to the facts rather than the feelings of those involved? Sure, KSM might want the glories of martyrdom — give it to him.  For every died in the wool jihadi who bids him well as he’s ferried across the River Styx to the land of subjugated virgins, they’ll be another potential Al-Qaeda recruit who learns that terrorism is a short road that ends in the embrace of an American noose.

Also weighing in was Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont):

By trying them in our federal courts, we demonstrate to the world that the most powerful nation on earth also trusts its judicial system — a system respected around the world.

That Leahy seems to think that whether or not America has any faith in the judicial process hinges on whether or not we empty out the population of Guantanamo Bay into New York City courtrooms doesn’t speak well of his standing as judiciary chairman.  But are the military tribunals that these men would have otherwise faced not part of our judicial system? Or does he not remember being on the losing end of the vote on the Military Commissions Act of 2006?

Politics is supposed to stop at the water’s edge. Unfortunately, these days that water is in the Potomac River.

As health care reform sprints towards the finish line, one can’t help but wonder what repercussions the triumph of Obamacare might have for the White House staff.

I speak specifically of Nancy-Ann DeParle, the President’s “health reform” czar. One hopes that, in fidelity to his promise of good government, Obama would demand Deparle’s letter of resignation immediately upon signing health care reform into law.  After all, what’s left for the reform czar once the sole objective of her employment is achieved? Unfortunately, the answer to that question is probably “a taxpayer-financed salary and all the perks of White House employment until President Obama heads back to Chicago.”

On most days, the New York Times’ opinion page is a gallery of liberal stereotypes. There’s Maureen Dowd, whose “liberating” neo-feminism somehow renders her as joyless as a puritan schoolmarm; Frank Rich, the kind of “tolerant” liberal whose Cliff’s Notes understanding of history leaves with him only three totalitarian regimes to compare Republicans to; and then there’s Thomas Friedman…

Friedman is inarguably the Times’ greatest success story. His books are consistent best-sellers and he’s a regular fixture on television and the lecture circuit. This mostly owes to the fact that Friedman substitutes enthusiasm for erudition. He’s an emotive presenter, but his ideas usually center around haute couture social engineering (his affection for “the green economy”) or aging conventional wisdom (how “The World is Flat” became a hit over a decade after globalization was a household concept is beyond me).

I introduce these criticisms as penance for what I’m about to say: Thomas Friedman has gotten something completely and commendably right.

In his new column, “Call White House, Ask for Barack” (a title that owes to a wonderfully direct James Baker quote featured in the piece), Friedman argues that it’s time to throw up our hands and leave the Israeli-Palestinian peace process behind … at least until an outside factor motivates the parties towards substantive work.  It’s a rare tour de force and an enticing look into what a significant public intellectual Friedman could be if he spent less time on fashionable shibboleths. Among the best passages:

It is obvious that this Israeli government believes it can have peace with the Palestinians and keep the West Bank, this Palestinian Authority still can’t decide whether to reconcile with the Jewish state or criminalize it and this Hamas leadership would rather let Palestinians live forever in the hellish squalor that is Gaza than give up its crazy fantasy of an Islamic Republic in Palestine.

A rare — but decisive — win.  Here’s hoping to more like this from Friedman.

Back before he took his oath of office, there were moments when Barack Obama seemed to have an intellectual clarity that occasionally allowed him to transcend partisanship. One such moment came in an interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal’s editorial board during the 2008 presidential primaries, when he made the (utterly true) claim that Ronald Reagan had been a transformative president in a way that figures such as Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton had not.

Of course, the fact that Obama wasn’t praising the content of Reagan’s legacy was obvious at the time.  Long before he was praising the virtues of Whole Foods arugula to Iowa caucus-goers (denizens of a state without a single Whole Foods location), The One was a Columbia undergraduate sympathetic to the nuclear freeze movement that thought Reagan was Dr. Strangelove with Pomade.  So this is a man who has never been a fellow-traveler with us Reaganites.

That being said, there are certain times when presidential grace requires biting history’s bullet (especially when it’s in service of a noble cause).  Thus, President Obama’s decision to snub Germany’s invitation to help commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s demise is as petty as it is revealing.

Two decades ago, the world witnessed the parting shots of perhaps the most protracted struggle between liberty and tyranny in human history. That this victory was achieved without any actual shots owes to the man that Obama once rightly recognized as transformational.  Yet while Obama was able to take time out of his presidential campaign to visit a Germany eager to enshrine him as a golden calf, he can’t find room in his day-planner for a return trip to celebrate the greatest human liberation of the 20th century.

Being wrong about the Cold War in the 1980s can be chalked up to an honest mistake fueled by a lack of intellectual sophistication. Being wrong about it 20 years later ought to disqualify you from any public office … let alone the highest in the land.

By any measure, tonight is not going to be a good one for Democrats. Republican Bob McDonnell has won a commanding victory in the Virginia gubernatorial race, Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffmann looks well-positioned to win the special election in New York’s 23rd Congressional District, and Republican Chris Christie is at the very least going to keep the New Jersey gubernatorial race much closer than anyone would expect in a deep-blue state.

It’s against this backdrop that HBO is debuting “By the People: the Election of Barack Obama” a behind-the-scenes documentary of the presidential campaign that cruised to victory almost exactly a year ago. This also coincides with the release of “The Audacity to Win”, the insider book by Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe.

By the time tonight is over, the public may understand what some of us have been saying for a year: that the 2008 election was a personality-driven anomaly, not an enduring realignment. Not the best time for the Obama camp to be in the hagiography business.

It’s nice to see a piece in Time Magazine worthy of linking to. Over the last few years, Time has led the charge of weekly news magazines becoming equal parts liberal opinion journals and People Magazine derivatives. Newsweek isn’t much better (only George Will and Robert Samuelson redeem it). And U.S. News and World Report has become entirely virtual, while simultaneously losing its only compelling columnist (Michael Barone, who’s now with the D.C. Examiner).

But Time’s new issue features a piece called “What’s Still Wrong With Wall Street” by financial journalist Allan Sloan. If you can get past the purple prose of his first few paragraphs (including a breathless passage about the “green shoots” appearing in the cracked driveways of the newly impoverished) and the occasional populist nonsequitur (Mr. Sloan apparently thinks the financial crisis should relieve him of the need to pay overdraft fees), it’s worth your time.

With great analytical clarity, Sloan explains how TARP wasn’t the real bailout (new federal lending standards were); how the bonuses that the public is crowing about aren’t really bonuses; and how it was incompetence much more than greed that drove the financial collapse.  One exemplary passage:

The two divisions at AIG that brought down the firm — financial products and stock-lending — didn’t understand what they were doing. Financial products wrote credit-default swaps — sorry I’m not pausing to explain them, but most eyes would glaze over if I did — that they thought were riskless but turned out to be ultra-risky.

The stock-loan department, AIG’s other disaster, took the cash it got for lending out stock owned by AIG and invested the money in esoteric securities rather than in risk-free Treasuries, the standard practice. The idea was — I’m not kidding — to make an extra one-fifth of 1% in interest. When the esoterica, which the stock-loan folks thought was riskless, crumbled, so did the firm.

It’s an admittedly uneven piece, but the good outweighs the bad.  Read the whole thing here.

An AP story today shows that the Obama Administration overcounted the number of jobs “created or saved” thus far by the stimulus package by about 5,000. That may sound like small change, but not when you realize that the Administration’s entire claim was only 30,000. In other words, one in every six of those jobs is make-believe.

Here’s an intellectual exercise to lay the stimulus bare. It came into effect on February 17 — 254 days ago. Based on the newest estimates that means it’s created about 100 jobs a day (or 2 per day per state). Leaving aside the opportunity cost of pulling the stimulus money out of the private sector, does anybody think that 14 jobs a week is going to pull California out of the morass?

One of the loneliest titles in American life is “education reformer”. You spend your entire career trying to disrupt entrenched interests, upset a stubborn status quo, and come to grips with an issue that everyone proclaims to care about but no one really acts on.

In recent years, a handful of reformers have started proving themselves at the local level — From Michelle Rhee in Washington D.C. to Joel Klein in New York City and — prior to becoming Secretary of Education (easily the best pick in the Obama Cabinet) — Arne Duncan in Chicago.

Any serious accounting of these figures should also include Dr. Benjamin Chavis, the principal of a series of minority-heavy charter schools in Oakland, California. With a regimen of discipline, back-to-basics academics, and political incorrectness (how many other public schools could get away with extolling the virtues of the free market in their charter?), Dr. Chavis turned one of the lowest performing middle schools in California into one of the top schools in the state in less than a decade.

I’ll be profiling Chavis and other education reformers in a column later this week, but for a taste of his principled irreverence, take a look at this video, where he argues that cutting education budgets is the best thing that could happen to public schools:

Dr. Ben Chavis on Education Budgets

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.

One of the eternal irritations about mainstream media coverage of conservatives is how often unabashedly liberal journalists are tasked to write “objective” pieces about the political dynamics within the GOP. The results tend to be about as unpredictable as a Horatio Alger story.

The narrative usually goes something like this: Ideological zealots (read: conservatives), abandoning all pretense of pragmatism (apparently it isn’t practical to have principles) are threatening to drive the party of a cliff. Yet one enlightened moderate, free of all that ideological ballast, holds the potential to lead the party boldly into the future if only the flat-earthers would get out of his way.  The moderate is sensible, temperate, and judicious.  The conservative is either mentally unhinged or has sold his soul to Karl Rove.

That’s basically the tact that Time’s Joe Klein (whose consistent ability to be wrong in print deserves a Pulitzer) takes in his profile of the GOP primary contest for the open U.S. Senate seat in Florida.  Klein portrays Florida’s moderate governor, Charlie Crist, as a good-natured centrist being driven to the wall by wild-eyed right-wing activists.  Meanwhile, conservative former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio is shot down on the grounds that (a) the Florida GOP chairman doesn’t like purists (since all of us recognize the unalloyed majesty and power of state chairmen) and (b) Jeb Bush’s decision to create public hurricane insurance half a decade ago proves that limited government won’t work in the Sunshine State.

Of all the candidates aiming to leap onto the national stage in gubernatorial or senate races next year, Rubio is far and away the most impressive addition to the conservative movement.  An enterprising conservative or moderate journalist (or even an intellectually honest liberal) would have seen that the real story here is how a relatively unknown, underfunded conservative has started destroying the lead of a popular moderate govenor in one of the nation’s largest states. That’s not the story that Joe Klein wrote. Unfortunately, it’s probably not one he’s capable of writing.

Jonah Goldberg has a great op-ed today about the populist mood currently gripping the nation’s electorate. The money passage:

The tea-party protesters are in large part the heirs of Perotism, and they are being subjected to the same insults. Liberal commentators are deaf to the tea partiers’ disdain for both political parties, preferring to cast the protesters as a deranged band of birthers and racists or hired guns of a Republican “AstroTurf” campaign.

If the media had any interest in listening to the Tea Party crowd rather than just mocking them, this would be obvious. Look at the New Jersey governor’s race and the special election for the House seat in New York’s 23rd district and you’ll see that Republicans are underperforming not because of Democrats but because of perceptions that they’re insufficiently conservative (NY-23) or insufficiently reformist (New Jersey). The new zeitgeist is libertarian, populist, and reform-minded. It’s also extremely angry (there’s a reason that the Boston Tea Party is the symbol of choice).

Republicans (many of whom deeply disappointed the tea party crowd during the Bush years) can’t win back this disaffected crowd just by being the second-ugliest girl in the room. Until there’s a party that’s legitimately committed to smaller government and more freedom, the ranks of unaffiliated and irascible voters will only swell.

Regardless of how you feel about its policy aspects, the legal components of the Obama Administration’s decision to essentially halt prosecution for users of medical marijuana in states where it is legal is curious.

The problem is that the Controlled Substances Act has prohibited marijuana as a matter of federal law since the 1970s.  And in 2005, the Supreme Court’s decision in Gonzales v. Raich clarified that this federal power supercedes the states’ ability to legalize pot for medicinal purposes.  Yet despite the fact that there has been no change in federal law, the Justice Department is now essentially allowing the states to nullify the statute by telegraphing that DOJ won’t bring prosecutions.

In fairness, you can make a good case that the medical marijuana laws really are an instance of federal excess (Clarence Thomas does it very well in his Gonzales dissent).  But that’s an argument about what should be, not what is.  And in a nation of laws, that’s not enough.

I didn’t think I’d spend so much of this week blogging about the economics of professional football, but such is the gift bestowed this morning by my home state of California.

The Los Angeles Times carries a story today about the California State Senate’s vote to exempt a new football stadium in a Los Angeles suburb (intended to bring in a new NFL squad) from the state’s onerous environmental regulations.

On balance, this is probably a good thing. Most of California’s environmental regulations are designed to satisfy a radical environmental fringe and enrich attorneys. Obviously, there is a need for some measure of regulation, but California has probably exceeded that threshold by a factor of 10.

What’s troubling about this is how much it reveals about the politics of dysfunctional regulation. The Golden State went through a similar process 15 years ago, when it waived the regulatory process to rebuild Southern California’s devastated freeway system in the aftermath of the Northridge Earthquake. The result? A repair effort that was supposed to take 26 months was completed in 66 days.

In California, as in the rest of the country, we tolerate government incompetence as long as we don’t see it. The freeway system and the effort to end L.A.’s continued pro football drought have practical and emotional resonance. In the case of the NFL, there are also a lot of well-heeled interests backing the cause. But in a state with double-digit unemployment and massive budget deficits, wouldn’t it make just as much sense to relieve the regulatory burden on the millions of everyday Californians who — through the aggregation of their enterprise — provide the backbone of the state’s economy? If this scale of regulation is intolerable for huge corporations, why is it an acceptable burden on small business?

The kerfuffle over Rush Limbaugh’s expulsion from the group attempting to buy the Saint Louis Rams has garnered a lot of press coverage today — most of it from those embracing the politics of partisan indignation.

As a man of the right, I take no small umbrage at politics intruding where it doesn’t belong, and professional sports is one of those areas. As a matter of principle, Rush’s bid for the Rams shouldn’t matter any more than it would if Al Franken was trying to get a share of the Vikings or if Maureen Dowd wanted a piece of the Jets (which I would really, really like to see).

What’s getting lost in the shuffle, however, is how much the Limbaugh expulsion reflects that professional sports in general — and the NFL in particular — operates in an unfree market.

Remember that professional sports leagues are essentially cartels, restricting membership and raising bars to entry. Heck, Major League Baseball is even exempt from federal antitrust laws.

In the NFL, this empowers as few as nine of the 32 teams to block the sale of another. To have an atmosphere of such limited competition and to have your competitors empowered to veto your ownership wreaks of an inefficient and dysfunctional market.

Rush got the boot for essentially political reasons, but maybe it’s a blessing in disguise. Otherwise, that champion of capitalism would end up with equity in a system that essentially looks like a medieval guild.

The New York Times carries a very interesting piece this morning on the influence that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates have had on the Obama Administration’s foreign policy. In a nutshell, they’ve kept it from total insanity.

According to the Times’ Mark Landler and Thom Shanker, the dynamic duo were responsible for preventing the public release of further prisoner abuse photos, as well as for shepherding the decision to pursue a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. While the two are woefully behind the curve on Iran (as I noted of Gates here), they still represent the toughest line in the administration.

What’s troubling about all this, however, is the piece’s (unsourced) prognostication of where Clinton and Gates will end up on the current debate over Afghanistan:

Now, as President Obama leads yet another debate on whether to deploy tens of thousands of additional troops there, the secretary of state and the secretary of defense will once again constitute a critical voting bloc, the likely leaders of an argument for a middle ground between a huge influx of soldiers and a narrow focus aimed at killing terrorists from Al Qaeda, according to several administration officials.”

“That swing vote would put them at odds with the bare-bones approach still being pushed by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., as well as the most aggressive military buildup recommended by the American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal.”

On this one, Clinton and Gates are taking a dangerous turn. Playing for a tie in Afghanistan is the worst of all possible worlds. While the so-called “Biden Plan” mistakenly applies a counterterrorism strategy to a counterinsurgency problem, at least it doesn’t escalate without the resources necessary for victory. Clinton and Gates are looking for a middle way … but in Afghanistan the options are go big or go home.

There’s already been plenty of criticism leveled at this morning’s announcement that the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize is going to President Obama — despite the fact that the nominating window closed 11 days into his presidency and he did not then (or for that matter now) have a single major foreign policy achievement under his belt.

What hasn’t received enough attention yet is the false humility of Obama’s Rose Garden remarks this morning on the prize.

To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize — men and women who’ve inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.

“But I also know that this prize reflects the kind of world that those men and women, and all Americans, want to build — a world that gives life to the promise of our founding documents. And I know that throughout history, the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it’s also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes. And that is why I will accept this award as a call to action — a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century.”

Good grief. So here we have the President essentially admitting that the award is a preemptive endorsement of the transformative nature of his time in office. This would be less bothersome if it were untrue. Unfortunately, the Nobel Committee (which has doled out prizes to the likes of Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, and Paul Krugman in recent years) has lost all trace of being a non-partisan organization.

A column in the Kansas City Star reports that former Senate Majority Leader and presidential candidate Bob Dole is urging Republican members of Congress to vote for President Obama’s healthcare reform plan. The piece quotes Dole as saying “I want this to pass. I don’t agree with everything Obama is presenting, but we’ve got to do something.”

The last five words of that sentence should be anathema to any red-blooded conservative. Is there any other serious situation in life where you could justifiably invoke a similar rationale? Is that the sort of thing you’d like to hear your surgeon say?

How about “doing something” effective? How about “doing something” that solves rather than compounds a problem? Caring about actions makes you a politician. But caring about outcomes makes you a statesmen. That puts Bob Dole’s record at 1-1.

There’s a fair bit of schadenfreude going around the conservative blogosphere over the International Olympic Committee’s decision to deny the 2016 summer games to Chicago despite a personal trip by President Obama and the First Lady to Copenhagen to lobby for the Windy City’s cause.

I’m not quite as triumphant as many on the right. The reality is that an American city still missed out on the games. That in and of itself shouldn’t be a cause of celebration for anyone who wants to see their country honored.

That being said, the moment is an instructive metaphor for the Administration’s broader foreign policy. As late as last night, the speculation was that there was no way the First Family would make the trip without knowing for certain that Chicago would emerge the victor. Now we know that obviously wasn’t true.

So what we have is proof that the Administration believed that the force of Obama’s personality alone would be enough to woo the IOC members. In light of the outcome, I wonder how anyone can still take seriously the notion that the same strategy will somehow work in situations where there are legitimate national security interests at stake.

Esquire carries a piece by nationally-recognized strategist Thomas P.M. Barnett entitled “10 Reasons Why Sanctions on Iran Won’t Work”.  After my column earlier this week, it probably goes without saying that I agree with Barnett’s conclusion.

On top of being morally problematic (almost always doing more damage to a nation’s population as a whole than to the government), sanctions rarely achieve anything. The one exception I can think of in recent history was South Africa under apartheid, but that was essentially a western democracy with some illiberal policies — an atmosphere that is going to be more sensitive to economic downturns. Countries like North Korea and Iran don’t have the sense of economic entitlement that makes sanctions so painful in the West, and their undemocratic governments mean that there are only meaningful consequences to the government if the population is roused to revolt.

That being said, however, Barnett misses some key points. He compares Iran to 1970s China and notes that Obama doesn’t have Nixon’s ability to forge a diplomatic breakthrough (Michael Tomasky also entertains this notion in the UK Guardian today). But China was (and is) a conventional great power playing realpolitik games. Their interest was primarily strengthening their place in the international balance of power. But as I mentioned in my piece earlier this week, you can’t understand the regime in Iran without understanding their ideological motivations — something Barnett and Tomasky don’t factor in. That makes the regime in Tehran both more dangerous and less likely to soften than Mao’s China was.

That’s the headline President Obama will have to live with if he doesn’t wise up to the unintended consequences of health care reform.

A Pennsylvania physician called into Mark Levin’s radio show this afternoon to share with the nation that the Amish — who oppose any form of insurance as a matter of theology — will not comply with any individual mandate that is part of healthcare reform.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave when we stop caring about individual rights.