A man in the arena

Proof positive that dissent from the left wing orthodoxy is alive in Boston.

There has been some speculation about how a loss on Nov 2 will affect the parties. Here are my 2 cents on the Republicans.

If we lose the party goes nutty. No one is happy with Bush, except the social conservatives/religious right. And no one in the rest of the party likes those guys. A Bush loss will discredit their power without leaving anything to fill in the gap.

Look at it this way: McCain, Buchanan, Schwarzenegger, Hagel, Romney at al. are in this party because they are not Democrats. On policy issues their commonalities are slowly disappearing. A Bush loss will mean an end of the Reagan coalition, which is now held together only by political necessity. But with the entrenched power of incumbents, Republicans will hold Congress for a few more years of directionless meandering.

Either a new leader will put together a new coalition, or this conservative cycle in American politics is coming to an end.

Katha Pollitt has a Nation column that whitewashes Kerry’s comments about Mary Cheney. For the moment let us disregard whether it is appropriate to sight your opponent’s children as a debating point. Pollitt discusses the disingenuous Conservative action of comparing Kerry to McCarthy, and then drops this line.

“Let's see: McCarthy destroyed lives with dubious accusations of secret Communist affiliations, something he regarded as evil.”

Communism was evil. Secret Communist organizations funded and directed by the Kremlin were also evil. How is that possibly a controversial statement? The fact that McCarthy was a nut does not change Communism into a good thing. Communism was an extraordinary combination of bad economics and tyrannical politics that left 100,000,000 dead.

Do you wonder why the Left is not a serious force in American politics?

Bush

Pro
Aggressive Anti-Terrorism policies.
Lower taxes.

Con
Has no international credibility.
No plan to fix Iraq mess.
Expands Gov't like a liberal.
Has not tried to reform Medicare, Social Security, Tax Code, etc.
Betrayed Free Trade with steel tariffs.

Kerry

Pro
Will immediately have international credibility.

Con
Weak Anti-Terrorism policies.
No plan to fix Iraq mess.
Expands Gov't like a liberal (He is a liberal!)
Will not try to reform Medicare, Social Security, Tax code, etc.
Against Free Trade, for Fair Trade (i.e. tariffs that benefit my political supporters.)

So with Bush we will get strong anti-terrorism policies and lower taxes. And with Kerry we get credibility at the UN that he won’t use for strong anti-terrorism policies. And besides this they are both Big Government politicians. How is this election the “most important election of our lifetimes?” There is more of a tweedledee/tweedledum aspect to this election than most of us are willing to admit.

With more than a few reservations, Bush gets my vote.

Red Sox v. Yankees

Game 7

Wed., October 20 @ 8:00 p.m. ET

A simple but true premise has been obscured in this nation’s debates about the economy. If you tax something, you get less of it. The price goes up and the quantity demanded goes down. There are many other factors that can affect this, and in the rare occurrence the numbers do not change. But the premise is still true.

The simple words “supply side economics” have a dangerous ability to obscure this truth. Visions of obscene deficits, absurd prophecies, and the disdain of the intellectuals trail behind these words. The questions about the facts of tax cuts: do they encourage work, how do they affect deficits, and how do they affect growth, are couched in political slogans. And this impoverishes our political discourse.

This poverty is particularly dangerous because there are very good reasons for a serious reform of our tax laws. High tax rates limit labor and capital formation rates. This idea is debatable but it is not crack pot. Nobel Prize winners such as Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, and Robert Lucas have made these points for years. And one of the two current Nobel Prize winners, Edward Prescott, has said the same thing this week.

But we have not heard about this in the New York Times, CNN, or in any of the mainstream media. In truth, that is probably too much to expect. But why has the Bush Campaign not loudly and repeatedly proclaimed the support of Professor Prescott and the other Nobel winners? Bush is fighting to repair our destructive tax system. To win this fight, he needs to battle in a public forum with all his resources in play. Let us hope that in the (potential) second term the President realizes this.

I have been meaning to blog about the impact of cell phones on the polling process for weeks. I haven’t had a “home” phone number in years. But Kaus, and many others have beaten me to the punch. Laziness will get you nowhere.

Polling is based on the science of statistics. The increase in cell phones and high numbers of refusals will destroy the randomness that the statistics depend on. There could be a huge surprise on Election Day. Although I suspect the phenomenon needs another few years to really have an effect.

In the debate tonight, John Kerry quoted the Bible. He was speaking about his Catholic faith and he quoted the Book of James. The passage is a discussion about faith and works. It famously states, “So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” (James 2:17)

The interesting point is that this idea of faith is very different than Martin Luther’s idea of faith that underlies modern Protestantism. Luther saw faith alone as the key to salvation. And he went so far as to relegate the Book of James to an appendix in his translation of the Bible.

This distinction may actually give us a glimpse between the differing worldviews of Kerry and Bush. At the very least it points towards the Catholic faith that drives the social activism of certain liberals such as Sargent Shriver, George McGovern and John Kerry.

The French Philosopher Derrida has died. Without speaking ill of him personally his ideas should be seen as a dangerous waste of energy. He is famous, or infamous, for his philosophy of Deconstructionism. More or less Deconstructionism is an excuse to read a book, ignore the author’s intent, and spin it into a left-wing critique of modern society. But it must be spun in a completely unintelligible way, so that any criticism of it can be deflected by the words “You don’t understand my point.”

If this seems harsh, then you haven’t read what his contemporaries thought. In this interview philosopher John R. Searle slaps Deconstructionism and quotes the famous French Philosopher Michel Foucalt calling this method of philosophy a “terrorism of obscurantism.”

There is real value in clear thinking.

It is easier to sleep well when you are on the Right side of the political spectrum. Or at least it should be.

ABCNEWS Political Director Mark Halperin has written a memo that states that ABC has a responsibility to not hold “both sides ‘equally’ accountable” in this Presidential election. This is because the Bush campaign is based purely upon deceit. Well. Has anyone noticed that Senator Kerry is a liberal? He is a real honest to goodness liberal, who used to be proud of his liberalism. Now he is running a campaign where he will not even use the word and will not talk about his 20 year voting record in the Senate.

All politicians are slippery, but in this election Kerry is running as an Eisenhower Republican. And a mainstream media outlet, ABC, has decided that this is acceptable and that the other guy needs to be scrutinized. My head hurts.

On another note, the syndicated political cartoonist Danziger has published an explicitly racist cartoon equating Condi Rice to a “Gone With The Wind” character. Danziger is published in major newspapers including the Boston Globe and the Christian Monitor. But I guess he could not be a racist. After all he is a liberal.

Remember this: Danziger and Halperin are mainstream media people. And both the examples above are acceptable to their colleagues. What would happen if Bill O’Reilly compared a liberal black women to a stereotype character from a 1920s movie or if FoxNews got caught with a memo demanding that they hit Kerry harder than Bush? The Mainstream media would go berserk. Because they are so very fair and balanced.

Hat tip: Michelle Malkin, Jay Nordlinger

Professors Finn E. Kydland at Carnegie Mellon University and Edward C. Prescott at Arizona State University have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. These two have been on the short list for the prize since I was a student of economics back in the 1990s. While neither economist is known as a political activist, their ideas are unfortunately relevant to U.S. politics.

Both econonmists are students of Robert Lucas, the Father of Rational Expectations. They published multiple articles in the 1970s and 1980s that challenged the idea that the government can manage the economy and described the business cycles as caused by technology changes not ignorant consumers. Prescott has even created controversy recently by writing that lower marginal tax rates are why U.S. workers work longer than European workers.

When Republicans and Democrats state that they are going to “create jobs” they are just mouthing the words that people want to hear. The government can affect the economy in the long run, but the President cannot get you a job. The work of Prescott and Kydland illuminates this fact.

Thomas Oliphant has a column in the Boston Globe about the VP debate that is ripe for a fisking. (Comments in italics.)

Here we go:

Today, however, he is explaining all the occasions in and out of the Senate when the two were in fact together - many of them recited with great glee to a cheering crowd by Elizabeth Edwards at a post-debate rally.

OK, they have met before. Cheney was wrong and he'll get slapped for it. But could Oliphant explain why Edwards didn't point this out? If he did not remember the meetings, why would we expect Cheney to remember them? The point was that Edwards has a weak voting record. From my knowledge pre-debate, he does have a weak record.

If you want to talk records, he obliged by listing some of Cheney's most bizarre decisions as a member of the House of Representatives: one of 10 members (out of 435) to vote against Head Start, one of four to oppose banning plastic weapons designed to fool metal detectors, against money for the Meals on Wheels program for senior citizens, against a federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King, and against a resolution calling for the release of then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela.

So Cheney is a Conservative. Shocking. This is not new. But it is a fair debating point.

The reason behind Cheney's dramatic misstatement of an easily verifiable fact is revealing.

Really? Then what was it? Oliphant never gives us a reason.

In the preceding exchange Edwards had the temerity to raise the issue that drives Cheney nuts - Halliburton, the continuously in-trouble conglomerate Cheney used to run and still gets lucrative deferred compensation from.

True. But Oliphant could have mentioned that the compensation is fixed and therefore uneffected by Haliburton’s current government contracts.

Edwards cited more specific, and verifiable concerns. One of them happened to be the fact that nearly half the $20 billion portion of the bill targeted for ''reconstruction'' was a $7.5 billion, no-bid contract for Halliburton.

Halliburton is just about the only company that does this work. “No-bid” is a meaningless word if there is no one else that can do the work. In Bosnia they had one competitor for the contract, and the Clinton administration chose Halliburton. There just isn’t any other company that can do this kind of work. And until we invade a few more countries and create a market for nation building there won’t be any new companies to do this work. If elected Kerry/Edwards will make some show about sticking it to Halliburton. And then they will quietly call them back. They won’t have any better options.

The second mention came in response to a fudged Cheney answer to a question from moderator Gwen Ifill noting his opposition while he was Halliburton CEO to US sanctions against terrorism-supporting, nuclear weapons-developing Iran.
Cheney fudged the issue by ''explaining'' that his opposition was to unilateral sanctions, not the current, international penalties Iran faces that may even be increased.

This is the same reasoning Cheney used to defend his votes against sanctions on South Africa in the 1980s. You may not agree with the reasoning but it doesn’t seem to be a lie or part of a sinister plot to increase Halliburton profits. Unless of course, he had the Halliburton job secured in a secret deal made in 1975 between President Ford, the fat cats at Halliburton, Donald Rumsfeld, and the disembodied spirit of Howard Hughes. I bet Nixon was in on it.

The rest of the article consists of a series of shots at Halliburton. Why are these relevant? The administration has had four years of history to screw up. So Edwards decides to attack the Vice-President’s business career. Good call. He should have gone after the mess in Iraq. Oh except Edwards voted for it, and supported it in his early primary campaign.

If you don’t believe that Kerry will get a ton of favorable press as the election nears its end, then read this Washington Post column. It concedes that this is true. According to the Post, this will happen because of the Polls swinging in Kerry’s favor and journalist’s need to write The Story of the campaign. Their version gives little attention to liberal leanings in the press. Consider that the polls have been wildly swinging in a narrow band and that the most recent Pew Poll still has Bush with a 5% lead, and you may think that the liberal lean is pushing the stories Kerry’s way.

Call me crazy. Kerry wins in November.

Retired Canadian General Romeo Dallaire has an interesting opinion piece in the New York Times this morning. Dallaire was the Commanding Officer of the UN contingent in Rwanda. UN bureaucracy and disinterested Western governments forced him to do nothing while the genocide happened before him. His New York Times piece is about the genocide in Darfur and the parallels to the Rwandan genocide.

He makes good points. But the unwritten point is this: the U.S. cannot save everyone. Our actions may be driven by idealism, but they need to be tempered by reality. While in the middle of the occupation of Iraq, how much blood and money can we spend on Darfur?

How much will anyone spend? For all their carping about the U.S. hyper-power, the continental Europeans depend on our action. In the mid-1990’s the continent of “never again” could not even begin to act against the Balkan genocide without U.S. leadership. They will not save the Sudanese. And while in this decade the Australians sent troops to stabilize East Timor, they cannot be expected to do everything. If the European Union is honest in their idealism it is time for them to take the lead.

I have predicted that Kerry would win this election. He is a great campaigner and he will make a mad dash for the finish line in the last few weeks. It is also very important to realize that the media is both left-leaning and always looking for a story. I wrote earlier that The Story would be about Kerry’s comeback.

In their current issues The Economist and The New Republic have stories about the “Kerry Comeback.” Add that to a Washington Post article on the subject earlier this week, and I am starting to feel vindicated. Or sick to my stomach. Whatever.

Note: All the articles referenced above were found in print. I have not found them on-line.

Last night I found myself sitting at a bar with two friends. One was a Bush skeptic and the other was anti-Bush. Amidst much scotch, whiskey, and noise, we saw a chunk of the debate. Ergo we had to read the words as opposed to hearing it.

We all agreed that Kerry was flopping. Every answer seemed contrived and negative. Much to my chagrin, everyone else seems to have seen Kerry as the winner. This includes The Corner, Mickey Kaus, and Daniel Drezner. The Post seems to have called it a draw. What is going on?

Assuming I am not delusional, I think we had a Kennedy-Nixon moment. In the famous debate of the 1960 election the television viewers thought Kennedy had won and the radio listeners thought Nixon had won. By focusing on the words on the screen, my friends and I missed the tone of each speaker, their body language, and their reactions to each other. We became the radio listeners. By limiting our impression of the debate, we limited our analysis.

I am going to confirm this by re-watching the debate on CSPAN tonight.